Contours of Relationship: India and the Middle East 9780367344078, 9780429325700

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CONTOURS OF RELATIONSHIP India and the Middle East India’s relationship with the Middle East is a very good example of ties between people that are genuinely of historical. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East have down the ages been interacting with each other – travelling to each other’s lands, engaging in trade and commerce, settling down, intermarrying and contributing in every way possible in each other’s lives long before the political frontiers of the present emerged. It is difficult to readily comprehend that what appears today as the distinct regions of South Asia, Middle East and Central Asia were not readily comprehensible as distinct regions even a hundred years back. While the natural frontiers of the Hindu Kush, Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea divided the peoples into linguistic and cultural zones that were Indic, Arab, Persian and Turkic, (and a host of others) such cultural frontiers, despite being thick, were never quite hard. Thus while linguistic spaces were easily discernible (i.e. thick), people were always able to move (i.e. not hard) from one zone to the other, were at liberty to settle down and – according to the dynamics of immigration and settlement – be subsumed within the host population with a fair degree of ease. It is no wonder, therefore that Armenian, Iranian, Baghdadi Jewish, Sunni and Shi‘i Arab, Kabuli, Multani, Shikarpuri, Parsi, Ismaili, Surti, Sikh/ Punjabi, Peshawari and many other such communities moved back and forth across the overland trading routes that connected what is today South Asia with the Middle East. Essays in this volume come principally out of a conference held in March 2016 at the University of Calcutta, organized by the Centre for Pakistan and West Asian Studies and Institute of Foreign Policy Studies and fully funded by the Netaji Institute of Asian Studies. The primary objective of the volume is to examine the contours of relationship between the peoples of the two regions, before the political frontiers of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East were fashioned in the middle of the twentieth century. Except for one, all the contributors have chosen to highlight the role played by individuals in the subcontinent or in the Middle East with supra-regional connections or interests, engaging with their own immediate settings, influenced by forces, ideas or people from emanating from outside the region – the underlying argument being relationships between the people of the subcontinent and the Middle East are not confined simply to commercial or cultural exchanges alone. The fact that all the protagonists dealt with here happened to operate in the colonial era serves to indicate the vitality of the relationship, which stood independent of the nature and impact of the political system that obtained then. Kingshuk Chatterjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Calcutta University and is an adjunct at the Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, Calcutta University. He is also the Deputy Director of the Centre for Pakistan and West Asian Studies, Calcutta University.

CONTOURS OF RELATIONSHIP India and the Middle East

Edited by KINGSHUK CHATTERJEE

Centre for Pakistan and West Asian Studies (CPWAS) Institute of Foreign Policy Studies (IFPS) in association with

KNOWLEDGE WORLD

KW Publishers Pvt Ltd New Delhi

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Kingshuk Chatterjee; individual chapters, the contributors; and KW Publishers Pvt Ltd. The right of Kingshuk Chatterjee to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-34407-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32570-0 (ebk) Typeset in ITC Galliard by KW Publishers, New Delhi 110002

CONTENTS

Introductionvii 1. The Baghdadi Jews an Economic Force Across Asia (1790-1950s)1 Jael Silliman 2. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Jesus and the Rediscovery of ‘Lost Tribes’: Towards a Manifesto for Connected and Fantastic Histories Soumen Mukherjee 3. Imdadullah Makki and Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the 19th Century Seema Alavi 4. Sayyid Jalal Al-Din Kashani and Habl Al-Matin of Calcutta: Expatriate Press in the Political Discourse of Qajar Iran  Kingshuk Chatterjee

13

45

81

5. Ties in Troubled Times: Travel and Transregionalism in India – Ottoman Relations  Kashshaf Ghani

115

6. The Trans-National Ties of an Indian Nationalist: Maulana Azad Safoora Razeq

137

Contributors157

INTRODUCTION

It is virtually a routine in diplomatic events and official gatherings to refer to “long historical” or “deep cultural” ties between countries and peoples. Very often such “ties” do not stretch beyond a small trade mission or two in the hoary past. The Indian establishment is no exception to this tendency, claiming as it does “long historical” ties with nearly every part of the globe that it happens to have any interest in. Beyond the level of homilies, though, such ties actually do exist – not necessarily between official establishments (which are often quite new), but between the peoples of various regions who, for one reason or another, happened to have travelled to, and even settled down in, distant lands. India’s relationship with the Middle East is a very good example of ties that are genuinely of “long historical” nature. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East have down the ages been interacting with each other – travelling to each other’s lands, engaging in trade and commerce, settling down, intermarrying and contributing in every way possible in each other’s lives long before the political frontiers of the present emerged. It is on account of such connections, brought about by people moving between regions, that it is possible to find a street in the Iranian capital city of Tehran to be colloquially called “Khiaban-e Hind”(India Avenue), or find a centuries old Jewish synagogue on the Konkan coast, or to see the use of blue tiles from the Esfahan region of Iran on the fortress walls of Gwalior, or to attend a musical festival in New Delhi funded by the Iranian Ministry of Culture celebrating the works of a poet writing in Persian in the court of a Turkic ruler who lies buried in India.

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The kind of inter-regional connections that have historically existed between the peoples of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East have occasionally been explained away in terms of political conquest – especially of parts of the Indian subcontinent by invading armies from outside the region. It is argued that many of the exchanges and movements between regions were made possible and were accelerated because of the political factor of domination and subjugation of the Indian subcontinent by people of Turkic and Mongol origin. However, quite apart from the technical point that none of the Turko-Mongol rulers came from the Middle East (they all came from Central Asia and its larger hinterland), it needs be emphasized that India’s connections with the region had little or nothing to do with the Turko-Mongol rulers, except that the empires built by them created conditions for a large number of people to move into the Indian subcontinent, from the Middle East as much as Central Asia. In fact, any close study of this issue would probably bring out that the conquests happened in the wake of exchanges that were taking place for much longer, rather than the other way round. It is difficult to readily comprehend that what appears today as the distinct regions of South Asia, Middle East and Central Asia were not readily comprehensible as distinct regions even a hundred years back. While the natural frontiers of the Hindu Kush, Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea divided the peoples into linguistic and cultural zones that were Indic, Arab, Persian and Turkic, (and a host of others) such cultural frontiers, despite being thick, were never quite hard. Thus while linguistic spaces were easily discernible (i.e. thick), people were always able to move (i.e. not hard) from one zone to the other, were at liberty to settle down and – according to the dynamics of immigration and settlement – be subsumed within the host population with a fair degree of ease. It is no wonder, therefore that Armenian, Iranian, Baghdadi Jewish, Sunni and Shi‘i Arab, Kabuli, Multani, Shikarpuri, Parsi, Ismaili, Surti, Sikh/ Punjabi, Peshawari and many other such

INTRODUCTION | ix

communities moved back and forth across the overland trading routes that connected what is today South Asia with the Middle East. Nor is it a wonder that descendants of Zoroastrian families in India speak Gujarati (language of their domicile) rather than Farsi (language of their place of origin), that a separatist Kashmiri leader in India bears the name Gilani, (indicating that his family was at some point of time coming from northern Iran), or that the Bene-Israeli community from Bombay had to take recourse to the courts in Israel in order to be recognized as a Jewish community, having adopted so many of local Konkani traits as to not be accepted as Jewish at all. Given the linguistic, cultural and other attributes of the people of the different regions, it is not altogether difficult any more to signify the differences with greater emphasis. However, for a historian, the various identities that a person might be tagged with do not all necessarily speak of a definitive regional connection that cuts across the barriers of time. A Jewish merchant from Yazd may have married into a Baghdadi family, and then happened to move out to Calcutta in the 19th century, whence its next generation left for, and settled down in, Rangoon on the one hand and Ceylone on the other – would such a family be a Middle Eastern family settled in South Asia, or a South Asian family with Middle Eastern roots? Such a family might be one thing in the nineteenth century, and quite another in the twentieth. Identity, after all, is fixed only within a definite context of space and time. That of a region is not different. Essays in this volume come principally out of a conference held in March 2016 at the University of Calcutta, organized by the Centre for Pakistan and West Asian Studies and Institute of Foreign Policy Studies and fully funded by the Netaji Institute of Asian Studies. The primary objective of the volume is to examine the contours of relationship between the peoples of the two regions, before the political frontiers of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East were fashioned in the middle of the twentieth century. The essays cover a time span stretching

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from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, which comes after the period of the Turko-Mongol (i.e. “Muslim”) domination of the subcontinent. And except for one, all the contributors have chosen to highlight the role played by individuals in the subcontinent or in the Middle East with supra-regional connections or interests, engaging with their own immediate settings, influenced by forces, ideas or people from emanating from outside the region – the underlying argument being relationships between the people of the subcontinent and the Middle East are not confined simply to commercial or cultural exchanges alone. The fact that all the protagonists dealt with here happened to operate in the colonial era serves to indicate the vitality of the relationship, which stood independent of the nature and impact of the political system that obtained then. The short essay by Jael Silliman – the only one that is not centred on any individual protagonist – plots the story of the Baghdadi Jewish community in India, who came to the region from all over the Middle East much later than their fellow religionists did elsewhere in the subcontinent. Responding to economic impulses generated by the western colonial powers, this particular community of the Asiatic Jewry developed a vast commercial network stretching between Singapore to the East and London to the West, developing major presence in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Karachi and Rangoon. It begins by plotting the settlement of the early Baghdadi families in different parts of India. It then goes on to discuss how they flourished in various trades, developing fortunes and giving birth to the idea of “Jewish Asia.” Soumen Mukherjee’s essay deals with a figure from the Indian subcontinent who has remained an important focus on the religious map of Pakistan – Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani, the point of origin of the Ahmadiyya sect, which has been under attack from mainstream Sunni Islam as a deviant tendency. Instead of the usual approaches to Ghulam Ahmed however, Mukherjee tells us of a different dimension involving

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his protagonist altogether. From around the late nineteenth century there emerged a line of interventions that claimed to have uncovered a ‘Buddhist’ narrative of Jesus the Christ’s sojourns in India. While the narrative gained some niche adherence, it also attracted criticism. It was soon labelled as spurious, and the ‘Buddhist’ text a forgery. By the early twentieth century, however, this account developed a number of variations, some of which tended to suggest an Indian origin of Christianity. While discredited in the academia, the larger cluster of Jesus-in-India narratives― despite fluctuations in its constituent accounts― has come to have some enduring contemporary relevance especially for the wave of ‘new religions’. Mukherjee dwells on the question of ‘historical veracity’ of such claims, or the lack of it. He seeks to understand this on the basis of a case study of one particular line of the Jesus-in-India account— viz. the variant propagated by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian. Seema Alavi’s paper looks at the career of Imdadullah Makki, a rebel who left India after 1857 and operated in the interstices of the British and the Ottoman empires, establishing his base at Mecca. Alavi gives an account of a kind of “engineered cosmopolitanism exemplified as virtuous public conduct.” He used his new location and tapped its long history of connections with South Asia to exploit the circumstances in fashioning his cosmopolitanism as an urbane civility based on universalist Muslim conduct. His cosmopolitanism derived from the Islamic scriptural tradition and was informed by the tradition of consensus. It was a form of trans-nationalism that nurtured global aspirations and aimed to tightly weld the Muslim community (umma). Imdadullah’s career offers a new perspective on the histories of cosmopolitanism, trans-nationalism and movement of Muslims of the subcontinent to multiple imperial centers across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean world. His networks between empires, Alavi contends, offer fresh insights into Indian Muslim politics as it evolved outside the confines of the British political ambit.

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Kingshuk Chatterjee’s essay deals with the role the Calcutta-based weekly Habl al-Matin played in the shaping of the Constitutionalist cause in the run up to the Constitutional Revolution of Iran in 1906. While its significance was duly recognised by contemporaries as much as scholars, there is, ironically, very little that has been written of the venture of Habl al-Matin and even less about its elusive prime mover, Jalal al-din Kashani. The essay purports to be an exploratory foray, looking at the life of Jalal al-din Kashani and the role his Habl alMatin played in shaping the political discourse of Persia during its heyday in the run-up to the Mashruteh revolution from the capital of British India. It tries to make the case that the Calcutta-based press and its progenitor contributed substantially in undermining the political legitimacy of the ruling dynasty in Iran. The essay by Kashshaf Ghani by contrast looks at the role an event in the distant Ottoman Empire plays in the formulation and interrogation of the identity of an “Indian” “Muslim.” The essay basically investigates the elements of either, and toys with the question at which point of time is one a “Muslim”, and even when one is an “Indian” Muslim; whether the category of “India” is susceptible of breaking up further. In order to do this, Ghani compares the accounts of two members of the Indian Medical Mission to Ottoman Turkey – its leader Dr. Ansari and a Bengali Muslim delegate in the same mission, Ismail Hussain Siraji. He identifies the elements of, and reasons behind, the differences between the two accounts. In the final essay of the volume, Safoora Razeq sets about the task of exploring the Middle Eastern roots of one of the most ardent Indian nationalists, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Born in Hejaz of an Arab mother, Azad returned to India at a very young age, but continued to be educated by his father whose own training was of Hejazi vintage. His family connections allowed him to keep open a window towards the Middle East all the time through his early years, including (it would seem) a visit to the region, and a regular supply of political

INTRODUCTION | xiii

and journalistic literature from the region. Azad’s young mind was further heavily influenced by political personalities such as Jamal aldin al-Afghani, who served to galvanise political opinion of Muslims in a large number of countries. At an early age therefore he came to develop a fairly clear idea of the nature of colonial rule and its impact on the social and cultural life of Muslims, as much as other Asiatic peoples. It was largely on account of this predisposition of Azad that he was thrilled to learn of two of the most momentous developments in the region – the Young Turk revolution in Turkey and the Mashruteh revolution of Persia – and found in these, as much as other political developments in the rest of the Arab world, resonance of a political discourse that he found suited to the situation of Muslims in India, living under British yoke. This political flavour seeped into the publication – and the virtually instant popularity of – al-Hilal, and established for Azad his foothold in Indian politics. Razeq tries within the small compass of her essay the story of these fascinating and complicated influences on Maulana Azad’s politics emanating from the Middle East.

THE BAGHDADI JEWS An Economic Force Across Asia (1790-1950s) JAEL S ILL I MAN

I An ancient trading connection between Western Asia and the Indian sub-continent can be traced back to the Biblical times of King Solomon.1 As a function of these trading links, two communities of Jews came to settle in India – the Cochin and the Bene Israel Jews. Both communities have lived in India for many centuries, though the dates of their arrival are shrouded in myth.2 This paper examines the most recent arrival of a Jewish community to the Indian subcontinent, that of the Baghdadi Jews in the late 18th century. In the late 18th century Jews from the Middle East responded to new economic impulses generated by colonialism. Originally from Syria and Iraq, they extended and elaborated the ancient and medieval mercantile routes of which they were an integral part.3 From the 18th to the mid-twentieth century they set up business enterprises across a vast geographic space – from Bagdad to Shanghai in the East and to London in the West. Their trading networks connected ports on different continents and oceans, producing distinct cultures along the routes that interacted and related to one another. “Jewish Asia”, which these traders navigated and welded together, became culturally much like the “Black Atlantic” and the “medieval Jewish Mediterranean.” During this period, small communities of Middle Eastern Jews carried out their business ventures and community life in the port cities of Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

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While this group of Jews is called Baghdadi, the community includes Jews from Baghdad, Damascus, Alleppo, Yemen, Persia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Bukhara, and Tunisia. These seasoned traders took advantage of the British presence to establish themselves in Calcutta - then the second City of Empire - and in Bombay. Having pre-capitalist networks already in place, they were poised to succeed in the mercantile phase of capitalism. British imperialism provided the conditions for the expansion of their trading networks to new areas of the world, particularly the Far East. Thomas Tinberg has noted that these networks operated as ancillary to British trading networks from at least the mid-19th century onward and played an important role in India’s economy.4 Calcutta and Bombay were the key points from which they extended their training links across port cities from Baghdad to Shanghai in the East.5 These traders played a critical role in the mercantile development of both Imperial cities and were also very influential in the other port cities of South and South East Asia. The departure of the British from India was a turning point for the Baghdadi Jews, whose fortunes were tied to British colonialism. Uncertain of their economic future, they looked elsewhere for economic opportunities. Yet, their sojourn in Calcutta and Bombay from 1790 to the late 1950s, when they were still an economic force to be reckoned with, marks another important chapter in the regular movement of people and trade between West Asia and South Asia. Whereas the older Bene Israel and Cochin Jewish communities illustrate the substantial trading ties that existed between West Asia and the Western coast of India (Maharashtra and Kerala), the Baghdadi Jews underline the role that traditional networks of commerce played during the Raj era, bringing Western Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia into dynamic trading relationships.

THE BAGHDADI JEWS | 3

II The first of the Baghdadi Jews to come to Surat in search of economic opportunities was Shalome Obadiah Ha Cohen, a trader from Aleppo, Syria who traded in many precious commodities, including gemstones.6 A seasoned businessman, he made his way to Calcutta to take advantage of the trading opportunities he thought British rule afforded. He traveled to other princely states for his business in precious stones. Cohen also traded in rosewater, the import of Arabian horses, spices, silks, and indigo. He sent for his son-in-law, Moses Duek Cohen, to join him to extend his economic enterprises. The family quickly became very prosperous and others from the Middle East joined them over the next century. The economic and bureaucratic structures established by the British facilitated trade and their military provided political protection and security in their business ventures. The majority of those Jews who came to India were from Baghdad where they were an influential community in business, trade, professions, and the arts. Jews made up a third of Baghdad’s population. Baghdad was the center of Jewish learning across the world and was most noted for its great religious scholars. The Middle Eastern Jews in India followed its religious liturgy. It was to Baghdad that they looked to for spiritual guidance and for clarification of Jewish law. The Jews coming to India from Baghdad soon outnumbered others of their faith in the Calcutta community. This was especially so as the Jews in Baghdad faced pogroms under Daud Pasha who ruled from 1817 to1831, making India a safe refuge. Jews in Baghdad were being accused of blasphemy and apostasy and there were numerous anti-Christian and anti-Jewish riots. Among those who fled to India was the Sassoon family. From around this time, presumably, owing to Baghdad’s spiritual authority and the large number of Jews coming from Baghdad that the Jews from the Middle East in India and the rest of Asia called themselves Baghdadi Jews.

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While Obadiah Ha Cohen’s family paved the way for other Middle Eastern Jews to come to Calcutta over the 18th and 19th centuries, it was the Ezra family of Calcutta and the Sassoon family of Bombay that became major industrialists and played significant roles in shaping the fortunes of these cities. These two families dominated the Baghdadi Jewish community not only in India, but across Jewish Asia. However there were many others, including those of Belilios, the Gubbays, the Kadoories, and the Meyers who played substantial roles in the mercantile development of Jewish Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews made incredible wealth in the opium trade and later in indigo. Baghdadi Jewish merchants were responsible for shipping the bulk of opium, vying with Parsees in this aspect of the business. Rabbi Ezekiel Musleah notes: “The opium trade was dominated by Jews. The Indian farmer sold all his produce to the British Government of India, which auctioned it to the highest bidder, to the value of five or six million rupees annually. Then it was exported privately to Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore mainly in Chinese boats. Even the shipping of opium was almost entirely in Jewish hands. In January 1888, for example, 4536 chests were exported, 2870 being through Jewish merchants.”7

The Baghdadi Jews played a pivotal role in this infamous and unfair triangular trade that impoverished China and India.8 Opium greatly enriched Jewish traders and directly supported Great Britain’s economic hegemony and imperial rule.9 When the opium trade was banned in the early twentieth century, Jewish traders invested in the export of cotton, jute, and other cash crops as well as in real estate.

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III Jewish traders operated by having members of a family settle in different port cities to anchor and expand their trade and reach to other parts of Western Asia. Goods circulated through these port cities via the Baghdadi Jewish trading networks; the communities were also linked by custom, marriage, and shared religious heritage. This wide network of Baghdadi Jews was apprised of business and trading matters through such Jewish periodicals as the Pairah that was first issued in 1878 – 1889,10 which was printed in Calcutta. E M D Cohen of Calcutta, a prosperous landlord and community leader, started the Jewish Gazette. The Jewish Gazette was known the world over and quoted in the Jewish Press in Europe. The paper contained a calendar for the week, announcements of births, circumcisions and marriages, trade advertisements of Jewish merchants and arrival and departure dates between Calcutta and other cities in India and beyond. The editorials dealt with topics of interest to the Jewish community such as evaluations and comments on the Jewish schools or synagogues or other items relating to world Jewry. Papers such as these welded the Baghdadis into a powerful economic and political force. The most illustrious family of the Bagdadi Jewish community was undoubtedly that of the Sassoons, who were also known as the Rothschilds of the East. David Sassoon (1792 – 1864) was the founder of the Sassoon dynasty in India. He arrived in Bombay in 1832, some 40 years after Shalome Cohen came to Surat and made Calcutta his base, and Jacob Semah left Surat to make Bombay his base. Sassoon, though from an important family, was fleeing persecution from Daud Pasha. He came to India with extensive family connections and networks and much trading expertise. As noted by Shaul Sapir in his book Bombay, Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage,

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….in 1832 David Sassoon transferred his fortune, at considerable sacrifice of course, to Bombay where he amassed enormous wealth, extending his operation to China and Japan, as well as India, Africa and Eastern Asia. Generous with his vast riches, he commenced what might be also called the career of benevolence…11

Sapir goes on to rightly state that Bombay owes some of its commercial, industrial, trade, and cultural prosperity to this enterprising family that also established many charities in Bombay and across the whole of Jewish Asia. Trading in opium as well as the building of the Sassoon docks and the Sassoon textile mills were among his many successful business ventures. His eight sons took the Sassoon family businesses to Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Molucca, Baghdad, Amsterdam, London, and New York, eventually establishing the formidable Sassoon empire. David Sassoon’s son Abdullah (also known as Albert,) invested their opium profits in textile mills, but also built Bombay’s shipping docks. While the Sassoon family dominated the trading diaspora from their seat in Bombay, the Ezras were the wealthiest Jewish family in Calcutta.12 David Joseph Ezra was a trader in indigo and silk. He also exported opium, and was an agent for Arab ships arriving in Calcutta from Muscat and Zanzibar laden with dates and other produce in exchange for rice, sugar, and other food items. Ezra invested his profits in Calcutta’s prime real estate. His buildings included Esplanade, Ezra, and Chowringhee Mansions, and Ezra Terrace.13 Ezra Street is named after him. He died in 1882 as the city’s largest property owner and left his estate to his eldest son Elias David Ezra, who also invested in real estate. He put in a large sum of money to build the Maghen David synagogue in his father’s memory. Like David Sassoon, Elias David Ezra was a philanthropist and community leader.  His wife, Mozelle, was the daughter of the great philanthropist Sir David Sassoon of Bombay and the sister of Edward

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Sassoon, MP. Her marriage united these two families. She established the Ezra Hospital in the Medical College Complex for the community in 1887, and was known for the numerous charities she supported. Her husband, like Sassoon, was knighted, and in addition to being appointed Sheriff of the City was made Director of the Reserve Bank, among other industrial organizations.14 While these two families were by far the most prominent among the Baghdadis, many families did exceedingly well not just in trade but in all avenues of life. At their peak, there were only about 4000 or so Baghdadis in Bombay and maybe about 4500 in Calcutta. There were also a few such families in Poona, Gorakhpur, Bhagalpur, Dinapur, Guntur, and Ghaziabad involved in indigo and tobacco trading. There were also many poor and middle-class Jewish families who benefited from the patronage and charities established by the wealthy in the community who took care of their own community members. Many Baghdadi Jews, for example, worked in the key Jewish business houses and in the homes of the wealthy and in community institutions. IV The Baghdadi Jews were adept at trade because they had brought these skills and business acumen with them from the Middle Eastern countries they had left. They also flourished in India because of their cultural affinity with the country. As they were of Middle Eastern origin and Judeo-Arabic in their orientation, they spoke Arabic/JudeoArabic and were “Eastern” in their worldview. They were religiously and culturally conservative, and while they were expansive in their economic worldview, they blended well in India where each group preferred marriage among its own kind. The British welcomed them, as they had the Parsees and the Armenians, because they knew that they could benefit from the trading skills, network, and knowledge the latter were possessed of.

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The Baghdadis proved to be excellent business intermediaries between the British and their Indian counterparts.15 By the midnineteenth century, in order to ascend the rigid colonial hierarchy in colonial India, they became more British in their ways shifting from a Judaeo-Arabic to a Judaeo-British identity. They retained their deep faith in their religion and its traditions. By the late 19th century, they had adopted British clothing and the English language and set up English medium schools for their children. Many Jews also attended other non-Jewish schools but learned their faith and Hebrew, their language of prayer, at home. The Baghdadi Jews, who played an important role in British India, were not just business-minded, but also quick to adapt to Western ways. They were active in Indian colonial politics and served in legislative councils as sheriffs and judgesand there were Jews who served in the Indian Civil Service and the British Army. Furthermore, they were actively involved in various chambers of commerce and were instrumental in setting up the Calcutta Stock Exchange.16 The Baghdadi built schools and hospitals that were for Jews and non-Jews alike and endeared themselves to India and the other lands in which they lived across Jewish Asia.17 Baghdadi women who benefited from receiving Western education were pioneers who blazed a trail for themselves in medicine as well as in the media and the arts. Baghdadi women from Calcutta, for instance, were attending medical and dental schools in the late 1890s and opening their own practices. Similarly, in the field of law, Regina Guha, a Baghdadi woman whose mother had married a distinguished Hindu lawyer who had converted to Judaism, was the first woman to appeal for women to be pleaders in the Court (1916). While her plea was dismissed, she opened the way for other such appeals; a few years later, Cornelia Sorabji won her case to be a pleader in the Allahabad High Court. Men and women from the Baghdadi community were also pioneers in the media – from newspapers to documentary films and popular Indian cinema – both in Hindi and Bengali.18

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V Though India’s Baghdadi Jewish community never numbered more than 10,000 people, community members had a considerable impact on the nation’s development. This was also true of the Baghdadi communities across Jewish Asia. Whereas the other Jewish communities that had lived and prospered in India for centuries and adapted indigenous languages, clothing and cultures, the Baghdadis came to India and succeeded under colonial rule. It was the only India they knew, and they shaped and were shaped by colonialism. They identified with the British, and when India gained its independence they were unsure of what the future held for them. When Independence was declared and there was talk of the nationalization of banks and the imposition ofsocialism, the community’s wealthier members thought they could secure their wealth by moving to Great Britain. Once this source of jobs had dried up, other members of the small community began to emigrate in response to numerous global phenomena, including the opening up of Australia to non-white populations, the formation of Israel, and the marriage of some Baghdadi Jewish girls to Jewish American servicemen stationed in Calcutta and Bombay. As a sizable number of Jews emigrated for these various reasons the community quickly unraveled. As they were a small community to start with, it became difficult to sustain community life, leading others from the community to emigrate to join their families abroad. Those who chose to stay on in India continued to prosper and remained active in several non-business related spheres of life. By the 1970s, there were only about 700 Baghdadi Jews left in Calcutta, with a similar number remaining in Bombay and Poona. By the end of the 20th century, only a handful of Baghdadi Jews remained in India. Most of them are now too old and are either unwilling or unable to leave. The Baghdadi Jews who emigrated took with them the same skill sets they had brought to India, plus the Western orientation they had

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acquired under colonial rule, to the UK, the US, Australia, Canada and Israel. They have continued to adapt to their new homelands and remained economically successful. Once more, they have garnered positions for themselves in commerce, business, professions and the arts.19 The advent of communism in China, the invasion of Burma by the Japanese led to the flight of Baghdadi Jews from Shanghai and Rangoon. The Jews from Rangoon who trekked through Burma found a home in Calcutta for a while but later many emigrated to the USA as they were granted refugee status there. The Baghdadi Jews of the other Asian port cities also looked for new economic opportunities in the UK, Australia and the Americas. Some, such as the Kadoorie family of Hong Kong, have stayed and continue to be economically successful. Sir Michael Kadoorie is a business executive and philanthropist; in 2011, he was listed as the 6th wealthiest person in Hong Kong with 30% stake in CLP Holdings Ltd, which his family had founded in 1890 and in which they still hold a 35% stake. This utility company provides electricity to 75% of Hong Kong, and is the sole operator in Kowloon and the New Territories. Kadoorie also has equity interests in power plants in China, Southeast Asia, Australia, and India in addition to other businesses. The Reuben brothers who emigrated to London from Bombay in 1948 have also built a formidable business empire. They established a family company for holding assets in the Russian metals markets in the 1980s and 1990s and accumulated substantial wealth. Today, their business activities are in real estate in the UK and elsewhere, with venture capital and private equity making them among the wealthiest people in the US. Thus the Baghdadi diaspora, with key footholds in Bombay and Calcutta, developed trading networks across Asia and greatly benefitted themselves, the British Empire, and –through their public works, industries, and philanthropy – the port cities in which they lived. They held positions of authority across the Diaspora serving

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in government and in key institutions. They exemplified the ways in which a small community, with economic expertise and business acumen developed over centuries in trade, can flourish under new and burgeoning economic systems to drive trade and develop industry and business. Not burdened with the Anti Semitism that was rife in Europe and the Middle East they were able to excel and contribute in all walks of life. They proved themselves to be highly adaptable to different economic and political systems. The charting of family and community business networks was a key element of their success as was their willingness to contribute to all aspects of life in the Cities where they settled. Notes

1. The Jews of Cochin believe that there was trade between King Solomon’s Palestine (992 – 952 BC) and the Malabar coast. “Odhu” (Hodu) was the Biblical name for India from where teak, ivory, spices, and peacocks were exported to Palestine. These Jews fled when the Second Temple was destroyed (70 AD), and their ship set sail to Shingly, landing on the Malabar coast where they were hospitably received. For more about the mythology of the Jews of the Malabar coast See, Nathan Katz, Who are the Jews of India? (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2000.,) In particular Chapter One A Balanced Identity: The Jews of Cochin. Would be of interest. One can also see Pius Malekandhatil “The Jews of Kerala and the wheels of Indian Ocean Commerce, 800 – 1800 CE” in the Journal of Indo Judaic Studies, Vol 9, p 7 -32, and Brian Weinstein “Jewish Pepper Traders of the Malabar Coast: The Rahabis”, in the Journal of Indo Judaic Studies, Vol 5, 2002, p 40 - 54. 2. The Bene Israel believe that their forefathers were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast at Navgaon around 175 BCE, during the reign of the Greek ruler, Antiochus 1V Epiphanes. They believe they were one of the tribes from Northern Israel. They settled on the Konkan coast and became oil pressers who held on to the rudiments of their Jewish faith. It was in the 12th century that David Rahabi, a Rabbi from Egypt who was also shipwrecked, found them and brought them back to mainstream Judaism. 3. Between the 10th and 13thcenturies, Jews and Muslims traders participated in the opening of the Red Sea to Yemen and eastwards to Malabar and the Gujarat coast. For more on this topic, see Brian Weinstein, “Jewish Traders in the Indian Ocean - Tenth to Thirteen Centuries: A Review of Published documents from the Cairo Geniza”, in Journal of Indo Judaic Studies, Number 4, 2001. p 79 – 94. 4. Thomas A. Tinberg, “Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Jews” in Nathan Katz (ed), Studies of Indian Jewish Identity. (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1995.), p 137

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5. For more on the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora, especially its cultural aspects, see, Jael Silliman, Jewish Portraits Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope, (Calcutta, Seagull, , 2001.) 6. By the mid-18thcentury, a few Arabic and Persian-speaking Jews from the Middle East had established themselves in Surat. 7. Ezekiel N Musleah, On the Banks of the Ganga: The Sojourn of the Jews of Calcutta. (North Quincy, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1975).”, p 46 8. For a sense of this, see Goldstein, Jonathan, “The Trade, Memory, and Transnational Identity of Singapore’s Baghdadi Jews, 1795 – 2013”, in Journal of Indo Judaic Studies, Number 13, Fall 2013, p 97 – 118. 9. Silliman, “Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames”, p 17 10. See Ezra, Esmond David, Turning Back the Pages: A Chronicle of Calcutta Jewry, Vols 1 and II, (London: Broadside Press, 1986). p 362 11. The Times of India, 22ndJanuary, 1885, p 6 cited in Shaul Sapir, Bombay: Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage, (Mumbai, Bene Israel Heritage Museum and Genealogical Research Center, India, 2013, ) p 21. 12. Manasseh Meyer (1843 – 1930) was among the most illustrious entrepreneurs in Singapore. He was born in Baghdad, raised in Calcutta, and educated in Singapore. He stayed on there to become the community benefactor. For more on Meyer, see Jonathan Goldstein: “The Trade, Memory, and Transnational Identity of Singapore’s Baghdadi Jews, 1795 – 2013”, in The Journal of Indo Judaic Studies, Number 13, Fall 2013, p 97 – 118. 13. For more on Jewish businesses in Calcutta see “Recalling Jewish Calcutta” at www. jewishcalcutta.in. It is an extensive digital archive that provides information on all aspects of Jewish life in Calcutta. 14. For more information on the Ezra businesses and those of the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta, see www.jewishcalcutta.in . 15. For a detailed treatment of this, see Mavis Hyman, Jews of the Raj, Hyman Publishers, 1995. 16. Aaron Obadiah Cohen was one of the founders of the Calcutta Stock Exchange, Siliman Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames, p 23. 17. For more information on Jewish community institutions and buildings in Calcutta, see Recalling Jewish Calcutta at www.jewishcalcutta.in 18. For more on women pioneers in the Calcutta Jewish community, see Recalling Jewish Calcutta, www.jewishcalcutta.in 19. For more information on the Calcutta Baghdadis who have excelled overseas see “Notable Members of the Community” in Recalling Jewish Calcutta at www. jewishcalcutta.in

MIRZA GHULAM AHMAD’S JESUS AND THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘LOST TRIBES’ Towards a Manifesto for Connected and Fantastic Histories 1 SOUMEN MUKHERJEE

Prolegomena This article is an enquiry into the role of what scholars tend to situate within the rubric of the ‘fantastic’, and the ‘fringe areas’ in the genealogical tree of ‘world religions’. More generally scholars have, especially in recent years, come to lay premium on the ‘forgotten’, the ‘fabulous’, and the esoteric and the occult in the complex pathways of ‘modernity’ across the world. Beyond the remits of non-academic freelance scholarship as well as high-browed disciplinary traditions clinging on to the ubiquitous rationalistic claims of the sciences, and indeed the human sciences, recent interventions have thus highlighted how the project of ‘high modernity has not been merely preoccupied with progress and advance, but also with loss and disappearance’,2 ruminating on the marvels of disappeared peoples and homelands, lost cultures, civilisations, and continents. Informed by this larger position, the present paper reflects on one particular variant of narratives revolving around Jesus’s India connection, viz. that by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1835-1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, who advanced in his 1899 work Masih Hindustan Mein (later translated as Jesus in India: Jesus’ escape from death on the cross and journey to India) an argument of both Jesus the Christ’s

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survival after his crucifixion and subsequent travels to India. This was premised on a view that the ‘lost tribes’ were dispersed in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and in parts of northern India and before whom, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad added, Jesus wanted to preach the message that was lost on his fellow Jews in his homeland. While scholars have underscored the relevance of the conceptual framework of ‘geosophy’, understood as a form of knowledge that transcends ‘scientific geographical knowledge’ and thus leaving the door open to ‘thinking creatively about geography and theology or religion’,3 I am concerned in particular with what such openended creativity could mean for specific cultural projects. If, more generally speaking, finding the ‘lost tribes’ entailed a soteriological promise, and could be seen as ‘at once one of the signs of and the preconditions for redemption’,4 what exactly did it mean for a selfproclaimed Muslim messiah to invoke a variant of that narrative in his own interpretations of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism? With reference in particular to our case study of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Jesus-in-India account, I suggest, one is confronted with a persisting irony of history: the invocation of idioms of capaciousness, often bordering on universality, only to shore up projects with very specific agendas. The discourse of transregional mobilities across a loosely defined cultural space sans restrictive boundaries thus becomes the simulacrum of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s new religious movement,5 which too hinged on establishing the affinity of, and conversely an effacement of neat epistemic boundaries between, his own brand of Islam and his own reinterpreted Christianity. (Yet, as we shall see, the idea of an eastern origin of Christianity, with variations, had had a long history.) The idea of ‘regions’ can be distinguished, à la Prasenjit Duara, from the idea of ‘regionalisation’, although given our present case study I hasten to add a caveat by way of positing that they need not be necessarily seen in mutually exclusive terms. Drawing upon

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scholarship in historical sociology, Duara has thus suggested how regions signify ‘relatively unplanned or evolutionary emergence of an area of interaction and interdependence’, while regionalisation indicates ‘more active, often ideologically driven political process of creating a region’.6 Duara shows the diversities of politicallypropelled regionalisation: for instance, regionalisation of essentially imperial as well as anti-imperialist nature. From what follows below it will be clear that while Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s was no project to actively participate in an exclusive process of what one can call regionalisation with specific religio-cultural underpinnings that since the early twentieth century was often characteristically associated studies of geographical ‘areas’, frequently conditioned by the imperatives of shifting geopolitics as well as civilizational discourses, it nevertheless drew extensively upon narratives of transregional flows— that arguably shaped early Christianity— and that in the process also ended up contesting the idea of compact regions. In so doing he not only sought to retrieve the geosophic lineaments of the region around Palestine and Syria with particular reference to the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but also strove to foreground a discourse of such transregional flows connecting the Indian subcontinent to this wider web. In other words, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad ends up marshalling contentious narratives of circulations and mobilities along an axis connecting two distinct cultural regions of Asia, whose meanings of distinctiveness however became more and more apparent especially with the passage of the twentieth century. In part, this is also a history of how regions emanating from unwitting and unplanned historical processes of interactions and interdependence, can in their afterlives both provide backdrop to as well as critically define crucial identityrelated issues and religio-cultural processes. Before we proceed further, a brief commentary on possible approaches to contentious epistemes, at once non-mainstream and yet seductively open to diverse forms of (mis-) appropriations, will

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be in order. Never really a component of mainstream Christian thought, the thesis of an Indian-origin of Christianity, for instance, has characteristically— albeit not exclusively— based itself on a cluster of variegated accounts claiming Jesus’s travel(s) to India.7 However, such accounts have been systematically discredited as fanciful myth at best or calculated forgery at the worst even in contemporaneous scholarly circles, not to speak of later as well as recent academic interventions. The marginalised nature of such wider cluster of narratives in their own times and the present exercise to re-read them can be seen in part as, to borrow Michel Foucault’s powerful words, ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (italics in original).8 By ‘subjugated knowledges’ Foucault refers to two aspects: on the one hand, a corpus of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematising theory’, revealed only through scholarly criticism, and on the other— and which is what he says we need to understand— ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate’, those that are ‘unqualified’, and ‘lowranking’ in nature.9 A particular paradoxical situation emerges when both ‘products of meticulous, erudite, exact historical knowledge’ as well as ‘local and specific knowledges’ bereft of any ‘common meaning’, to the point that they are ‘allowed to fall into disuse’, feed into the ‘category of subjugated knowledges’.10 Common to both these trajectories is a ‘memory of hostile encounters’, out of which emerges what Foucault calls ‘genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of genealogical researches’, signifying a ‘union of erudite knowledge and local memories’, and hence no ‘positivistic returns to a more careful or exact form of science’, but ‘precisely anti-sciences’.11 In evoking the nomenclatures of genealogies and lineages in the present article, I take a cue from this Foucauldian emphasis on the fluidity and amorphous nature of epistemic practices that arguably defined the nature of the ‘modern’. It is only through tracing crucial aspects of interactions— and I would like to add to Foucault’s stress on persisting struggles, the

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importance of strategic collusions— between the religious/ the falsereligious and the sciences/ the non-sciences would we be able to trace the lineaments of such epistemic genealogies. This article is divided into three major sections. In the first of these I trace the complexities of world religions and the counter-currents labelled as new religions, and seek to situate Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s project within the conceptual framework of the latter. I also chart out cognate Jesus-in-India accounts to provide a larger backdrop. In the second segment I elaborate on the early histories as well as afterlives of narratives of interconnectedness through the lens of Orientalist and Indological scholarship, and indeed scholarship on, as well as debatable histories of, shared origins of religions. In the third section, and before we proceed towards the concluding part, I explore aspects of metaphors and the morphology of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s treatise while also striving to situate his project within a geosophic space that he sought to relate to. World Religions, New Religions, and Shared Predicaments The narrative of Jesus’s India connection was arguably most forcefully brought to light by the Russian traveller Nicolas A. Notovitch (18581916) who claimed to have discovered in the Hemis monastery in Ladakh a priceless text testifying to Jesus’s India connection.12 The thesis met with immediate critiques, from scholars such as Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) through explorers like Sven Hedin (18651952), and Notovitch’s account was labelled as forgery.13 However, the fin de siècle account found ready acceptance among a host of ascetics and thinkers, including Swami Abhedananda (1866-1939) of the Ramakrishna Order in the early decades of the twentieth century,14 and with some modifications went on to provide the staple for the Jesus-asyogi thesis.15 Recent scholarship has juxtaposed this warm reception of the account among the Swamis and the gurus with the lukewarm and critical response from scholars such as Friedrich Max Müller et al.16 It has been argued that much of the Swamis’ endeavour to stitch

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together this spurious account with the neo-Vedantist Indic tradition was part and parcel of their missionary ambitions. Furthermore, parallels between such narratives on the one hand and Buddhism, the yoga traditions, and Christianity on the other have been underlined in the process. A fundamental question, though, is one of justifiability of such comparisons which, as has been aptly argued, must be approached with due caution and with attention to both analogy and genealogy of the cultural contexts.17 Indeed, such recent scholarship thus also underscores the need to redefine the remits of the ‘Mediterranean context’ (italics in original)— argued by the so-called ‘Context Group’ of New Testament scholars to be the crucible of Christianity— and, in the process, accommodate the diverse religio-cultural forces that arguably swept across large parts of the Mediterranean world, West as well as South Asia, and conditioned early Christianity.18 At the same time, one might add, the fact of Buddhism predating Christianity or for that matter the coeval development of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (which scholars tentatively tend to situate somewhere around first century CE), could potentially propel an implicit stress on an Indocentrism. Besides, variations of the Jesus-in-India accounts have emerged as the core of certain new age religiosity and/ or spirituality. James R. Lewis thus discusses the legend with reference to the ‘occultmetaphysical-New Age subculture’.19 In the pages that follow I explore a particular version of the narrative, viz. the one propagated by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, and in the process seek to unravel the morphology of ‘legitimation’ characteristic of the new religious movement of the Ahmadiyyas. Closely related to this, and taking forward the argument of amorphousness of epistemic structures and especially the problem of tracing genealogies as anticipated above, I strive to sensitise my readers to a crucial aspect of the very conceptualisation of ‘world religions’. Even though an exhaustive treatment of the formative phase of ‘world religions’ is beyond the scope of the present study, it

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should be pointed out that for all the quest for the ‘authentic’ and the ‘universal’, the very development of idea of ‘world religions’ was also coeval with a reinvigorated interest in the esoteric, and the mystical vis-à-vis which it defined its position. Indeed, the very emergence since especially the late nineteenth century of structured ‘world religions’ with universalistic claims was also accompanied by critical counter-currents with alternative idioms of charismatic authority, millenarianism, and esoteric symbolism bordering on the occult, i.e. forces that would feed into what scholars loosely identify as ‘new religions’. Rather than invoking the argument of missionary activism that the likes of Swami Abhedananda and Paramhamsa Yogananda are associated with in recent scholarship,20 or for that matter Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in contemporaneous literature,21 I suggest that a far more meaningful exercise will be to see these narratives as part of far wider simultaneous processes that conditioned the development of the world religions as well as alternative religious orders or the socalled new religious movements seeking to legitimate their position. I argue that we have here instances that betray the complex dialectics of race, nation, religion and culture, of processes that defined the contours of both the so-called world religion as well as the new religious orders. Neither did they, or their underlying theses, emerge in a vacuous intellectual space, nor did they ever fail to stoke wild imagined histories that often went on to condition the burgeoning phenomenon of new religions. Clearly, the argument of missionary activism— a somewhat reductionist view that tends to smack of narrow proselytizing ventures— as the prime if not the sole mover in this historical process scarcely does any justice to the complexities of the religio-cultural spheres of the times, some of which came in the form of serious scholarly engagements and debates in the very nucleus of nineteenth-twentieth century Europe about the origins of Christianity. Indeed, these intellectual counter-currents in the very heartland of Europe also problematizes any simplistic understanding

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of a unified Christian Europe vis-à-vis a non-Christian other, and there is a longer history— traceable to scholarship predating the emergence of the so-called cogently defined ‘Context Group’ of relatively more recent times— to be understood. While the ruminations about ‘sociopolitical, theological, and historical implications’,22 albeit being truism, does bear some salience, assessing the complex histories of the Jesus-in-India theories within the confines of missionary activism sounds over-simplistic at best. Much of the particular set of narratives that we discuss illustrates the complexities that the evolving world religions as well as alternative religions/ new religious movements entailed. The emergence of a Buddhist modernity since especially the latter part of the nineteenth century, and indeed a Hinduism gravitating around a core of universal ethics and norms, vis-à-vis the Judeo-Christian telos meant at one level a marginalisation of the myriad cultural particularities. A celebration of a pristine Buddhism rediscovered in the textual corpus as opposed to the much frowned upon Tibetan Lamaism, or for that matter Swami Vivekananda’s reconceptualization of Hinduism with reference to the universalist claims of Vedanta as opposed to the ritualistic polytheistic Hinduism, thus both signify attempts to adhere to the very process of universalising key normative categories crucial to their claims to world religions.23 For one, while Swami Abhedananda and Paramhamsa Yogananda both carried forward the message of neo-Vedanta to the ‘West’, they did so, I would add in the passing, by activating a rhetoric of intercession in cross-confessional and/ or inter-religious exchanges that conditioned this sweeping historical process.24 Conversely, with the Ahmadiyya movement we have a quintessential case of alternative experiment in Islam, an effort to reconceptualise the very bases of Islam that led to its marginalisation in Islamic telos as heretic. From the Ahmadiyya perspective though, we see an endeavour to marshal legitimating tools and strategies that elicit its categorisation as a new religious movement. Moreover, and following Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s

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version of the narrative, one encounters not one but two different sets of legends: that of Jesus’s escape from the Cross, and his travel to India in search of the ‘lost tribes’ which he says Jesus discovered in en route to India in Afghanistan, and thereafter in Kashmir among other places beyond his homeland in Nazareth/ Galilee. At one level this account leaves us with a case study to better understand some critical moments in inter-cultural/ inter-religious exercises against the backdrop of (putative, at times) histories of shared origins of religions, as well as lineaments of production and consumption of knowledge involving the categories of mythos (myths/ legends/ the symbolic) and logos (the rational discursive). At another level it also illustrates the role legends and myths played in connecting a region one now understands as South Asia, through an interplay of mythos and logos, to a larger West Asian world. And yet, one also sees Mirza Ghulam Ahmad operating with an idea of a capacious cultural space sans neatly demarcated territories divided by clearly defined boundaries, so sacrosanct to modern area studies framework. This then is also a history of fictitious inter-Asian mobilities and of interconnectedness, one that defies the idea of reified boundaries and clearly delimited regions with idioms of cultural embeddedness, invoked however to legitimate an essentially specific religio-cultural enterprise: Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s own new religious project that coalesced into the Ahmadiyya movement. In other words, one finds here an intriguing case of re-inscribed histories— fantastic histories, if you like— being conscripted to further a new religious movement. Moreover, while as our immediate project illustrates, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad stokes an idiom of affinity between Jesus the Christ and himself to legitimate his own version of Islam— indeed, a burgeoning new religion— we also find him proceeding from the premise of a much longer history of transregional mobility, one that lends itself to the controversial thesis of the ten ‘lost tribes’ of Israel spreading eastwards towards Persia, Afghanistan, India, and beyond.25 Furthermore, his project to establishing affinity with Jesus needs to

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be juxtaposed with his even wider and more ambitious endeavour to relate Jesus with the Buddha, a masterstroke whereby he sought to etch out a narrative of shared histories, of which his own brand of Islam stands at the apex of civilizational pyramid.26 Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s discourse of long-distance flows, invoked to buttress his own new religious movement, sought to obliterate boundaries of both physical as well as epistemic nature. Paradoxically, in the critically important early decades of the twentieth century, accounts of transregional flows and cultural diffusion also came to be invoked at once in scholarly, quasi-scholarly, and amateurish circles often to facilitate specific identitarian programmes. Unravelling such identitarian projects thus necessitates adequate sensitisation to the implications, indeed to the very question, of the effacement of boundaries, physical as well as epistemic as alluded to above. As indicated, I see Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Jesus-in-India account at the intersection of internal polemics within Islam, as well as a Christian/ Ahmadiyya diatribe.27 In the process, however, one also finds Mirza Ghulam Ahmad reconceptualising the figure of Jesus the Christ with a particular reference to his brand of Islam and fleshing out a narrative of circulation— of both people (read Jesus) and ideas (read Christianity with the Ahmadiyya version of Islam as the ultimate stage in an evolutionary cycle)— arguably connecting the diverse religious traditions in a cultural space stretching from the Mediterranean world through West to South Asia. Yet, what were the specific analytical tools that were recruited in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s project? In studying this I take a cue from an academic position that argues that far from being eclipsed for good, the category of myth came to be recuperated and enlisted to service varied politico-cultural agendas in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.28 However, the politico-cultural agendas gravitating around myths alluded to are almost necessarily associated with the ‘Aryans’, while the Semitic ‘other’, as has been argued, has been characteristically

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seen in the better part of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as ‘less creative and more rigid… little disposed to seductions of myth’; furthermore, the ‘genius of the Semites was for ritual; that of the Aryans for myth’.29 However, my present study of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s intervention in the Jesus-in-India narrative complicates this otherwise decently neat classification of the Aryan (= myth) and Semitic (= ritual-centric) worlds. As must be clear from the present discussion, with Mirza Ghulam Ahmad we have an instance to illustrate within the framework of new religious movements the complexities of imagined and/ or putative histories and myths, and not least the diverse sociocultural possibilities of geosophic imagination. Allow me to call attention at this juncture to a rather crucial statement by a leading theorist from the twentieth century, one that informs the present study. Mircea Eliade thus noted: … our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a “living thing”, where it constitutes the very ground of religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction, is considered to reveal the truth par excellence.30 (italics in original)

I would like to underscore that this emphasis on a centrality of myth to understand a lived experience, a lived ‘reality’ if you like, also constitutes a key component of certain Weberian legitimation, as well as a variation of the idea on the basis of which recent scholarship on new religious movements have surged ahead. I have in mind, in particular, James R. Lewis’s inflection of the classical Weberian framework. Lewis draws upon as well as advances Max Weber’s triadic schema of traditional, rational, and charismatic legitimations of authority.31 Lewis does so by problematizing the notion of ‘legitimation strategies’ activated by new religious movements in their quest to carve out their

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own niche. Indeed, the appeal to traditions and reinterpretations of the past by new religions, as opposed to merely charismatic authority of leaders, has been thus highlighted,32 even as legitimacy is seen as ‘societal legitimacy’ aimed at ‘social acceptance’ in public arenas rather than the quintessential Weberian idea of using it for exercising power over other people, typically potential followers.33 Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s intervention in the Jesus-in-India narratives, we shall see, is much more than a narrowly confined missionary statement. It is, I argue, a tool with which Mirza Ghulam Ahmad sought to carve out a space for his Ahmadiyya Muslim jamaat (Ahmadiyya Muslim community) stitching together legends and myths of the Jewish ecumene, while at the same time responding to a largely Christian polemics. The crux of this legitimating strategy lay in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s construction of an affinity between himself and Jesus, vis-à-vis the other prophetic chain connecting Moses and Muhammad, and drawing upon a rich corpus of classical and medieval Islamic literature. Yohanan Friedmann has illustrated that establishing this affinity was instrumental to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s ‘struggle against Christianity and against Islamic beliefs that appeared to be consistent with some of the Christian teachings’; moreover, in this newly minted prophetology, Moses and Muhammad ‘initiated the two prophetic chains’ while Jesus and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad ‘complete the divine scheme of things’.34 In effect, this also filled in the specifics of a much more general trend that we have noted above as characteristic of new religions, viz. a frequent participation in public debates and polemics and constant reworking of legitimating strategies aimed at securing public acceptance.35 When Jesus Sojourned in India: Scholarship, Pseudo-Histories, and the Question of Afterlives Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was not filling in a tabula rasa. Nor did the theory of an eastern (or specifically Indian) origin of Christianity emanate exclusively from the initiatives of the few individuals alluded

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to above. Theories of shared origins of religions were, in effect, part and parcel of the same historical process that set one religion apart from another. Such developments were, furthermore, the very defining traits of the disciplinary constellations that characterised nineteenth century European intellectual traditions. In other words, discourses of shared origins— and by this I do not necessarily mean the comparative frameworks of Indo-European genealogies which finally ended up becoming a handmaid of Aryan triumphalism in a rather disturbing phase of modern history— were also products of a Europe that lent themselves to the complexities and disparateness of some of that continent’s understated intellectual traditions. Thus, in the wake of this quest for universalisation, this process went on to place a particular premium on the issue of inter-religious exchanges, ranging from mere cross-confessional dialogue through a search for the roots of these systems, or indeed dovetailed with this, the nature of ‘influence’, putative or real, that some of these systems were thought to have borne on others. Within this larger family of what I call the ‘exchange’ and/ or ‘influence’ theses we see an interesting mix of monks, missionaries, and other practitioners of religion, and scholars hailing from the different backgrounds of Oriental Studies, Buddhist Studies, Hebraic Studies, Indology, among others. The career of many scholars thus rested squarely on this thesis of intersections, albeit not necessarily subscribing to the Jesus-in-India theory. Richard Garbe the Indologist thus had some impact with his scholarship on Buddhist traces in Christianity, and the other way round, or indeed Christian elements in what he called ‘Krishnaism’ and later Hindu ‘sects’, and culminating in the 1914 anthology Indien und das Christentum: Eine Untersuchung der religionsgeschichtlichen Zusammenhänge. If I am alluding to this one scholar, and there were many others albeit with variations in ideas and agendas, I am doing so to emphasise in particular a conceptual and methodological aspect, viz. that associated with the expression religionsgeschichtlichen Zusammenhänge (interconnectedness in the

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studies/ histories of religions). But if Garbe was a point of reference for contemporaneous scholars such as Albert J. Edmunds, who had been also around the same time working towards conceptualising both ‘Buddhist Loans to Christianity’ as well as ‘Buddhist Influence on Christianity’,36 there had also been earlier anticipations of such ideas of exchanges and influences. Consider for instance one of the betterknown statements, coming from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), on the contrastive nature of the Old and the New Testament that constituted a critical aspect of his view of an Indian origin of what he called the ‘Christian System’: The New Testament, on the other hand, must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism, its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian. It is its morality which places it in a position of such emphatic and essential antagonism to the Old Testament, so that the story of the Fall is the only possible point of connection between the two.37

Suzanne Marchand has pointed to both the limited resources that constrained Schopenhauer’s genealogical excursus as well as the lukewarm reception of his ideas, which were not revisited until the fin de siècle years, but that too only within the remits of a counterculture represented by a small section of anti-clerical intellectuals without much bearing on the academic discipline of Indology or even on Buddhist sympathisers.38 Paul Jacob Deussen (1845-1919), the towering figure in the Indological cosmos of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century with an unflinching loyalty to Schopenhauerian ideas, however, was an exception. But also already in the nineteenth century, one notices European voices seeking to rewrite the lineage of Christianity with reference in particular to India. Such voices, one need to iterate, were not necessarily particularly scholarly, and were often vulnerable to wild imagined histories bordering on the esoteric

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and/ or occult. These include the French colonial officer-judge based near Calcutta Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890), whose numerous works range from several travelogues to misadventures in the fields of the dharmashastras (especially Manu, which unfortunately became a point of reference for Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]), ‘occult science’, and not least Christianity in India.39 Jacolliot reflects a larger intellectual concern in his contemporaneous Europe that sought to dissociate Europe from the Semitic Judeo-Christian telos, while looking instead towards India as the cradle of civilisations. This has to be then seen as part of what Annemarie Etter, and following her Dorothy M. Figueira, refer to as the ‘fantastic’ school with India as an idealised place of origins.40 Given our present study, I would hasten to add that this then is not always a connected history of clinically reasoned epistemological systems. The passage from the ‘early modern’ to the ‘modern’, for all the tall Enlightenment-propelled claims, also entailed histories of comparative and/ or connected set of myths of origin, and not least of forces that cannot be necessarily restricted within the remits of ‘religion’. Here I have in mind the wider, or even global, narratives of the mystical, the esoteric, and the occult.41 As must be clear from the present discussion, it is this concern to critically engage with the dialectics between the mythos and the logos that underwrites my present study of one particular strand of the ‘Jesus-in-India’ thesis. Allow me to point out in the passing that what concerns Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is what happened to Jesus after crucifixion, not his ‘unknown years’ from his early teens through the age of about thirty when he surfaces preaching in and around his homeland.42 Mirza Ghulam Ahmad talks about Jesus’s travel to India only after he escapes from the Cross to stay there, in Kashmir to be more specific, to die a natural death. In effect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad thus stitches together what scholars in search for a structured and reasoned logos would see as myths, not one in this particular case, but at least two, viz. that of Jesus’s India sojourn

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and that of the contentious theory of ‘lost tribes’, or the ‘lost sheep of Israel’ to invoke Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s emphatic metaphor.43 Rather than the idea of missionarism that is often ascribed to the Ahmadiyyas, I argue that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s intervention here marks a crucial endeavour to make amends to its marginalised status in the Islamic world, and in the process carve out a version of Islam both vis-à-vis as well as within a larger family of religions, especially Christianity. The wider universalist claims articulated strategically through the invocation of an idiom of affinities, then, have to be seen in this light. While establishing a particular understanding of continuous prophethood entailed the charge of heresy for the Ahmadiyyas, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s efforts to bring that particular variant of Islam in dialogue with Christianity defined by an equally provocative thesis of the life of Jesus the Christ form part of a much larger and complex process. It meant, on the one hand, stitching together of two sets of provocative theses from two religious systems. But in the process, on the other hand, the universalising ambitions— harping on a loving messiah preaching in a timeless language of peace and bringing different religious communities together— characteristic of the world religions also came to be invoked. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed to have discovered the tomb of Jesus in Srinagar, and indeed that of Mary’s not very far either. This narrative too has also been seen as part of a new-found fad for this legend that surfaced after Notovitch passed through Srinagar in Kashmir in 1887, but without ever mentioning Jesus’s sepulchre.44 I am, however, interested at this juncture in a somewhat different set of academic problem: viz., in the very nature of the narrative, and in the architecture of the myths and legends that were invoked, ironically though, only after they were carefully shorn of the mystic/ esoteric elements to emulate a structure of clinically systematised logos. This I have so far sought to problematize with reference to the lineages— both cultural and geographical— of the myths and legends that were invoked, and

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their ramifications they bore on the so-called world religions and new religions within which they navigated. In the remainder of the article, I strive to understand the structure of argumentation, and the processes and implications of their reception within the folds of an Ahmadiyya prophetology. A careful assessment will show that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s endeavour, and subsequent elaborations on his model by his Ahmadiyya followers, was buttressed by no exclusively theological rhetoric, but idioms and methods gleaned from a wide array of ethnographical and textual traditions. This methodological aspect I find to be of particular interest, especially in view of the narrative of interconnectedness that he underscored. This effort at galvanising a narrative of interconnectedness thus still merits an examination for a somewhat different reason, viz. as a case study that promises to help us understand the variations of connected histories in general, and as a window into fantastic histories in particular, re-inscribing in effect the histories of the cultures of the regions it concerns. ‘The Good Shepherd’, the ‘Lost Sheep’, and the Geosphy of ‘Balad-i Sham’: The Architecture of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Project The distinctiveness of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s background narrative can be read at three different levels, and each of them leading to significant ramifications. To rehearse what we have so far iterated, first of all, and this is the larger agenda that one would imagine he has in mind, he strives to relocate a Jesus— who he says did not die on the Cross— in a line of prophets that does not end with the Prophet Muhammad. In arguing so, he in effect connects his own claim to prophethood to the line.45 Second, and subsumed within the first, is his theory that not only Jesus not die on the Cross, he also went to live a full life succeeding in his lifelong project to trace the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel— which he found in Afghanistan and Kashmir— and before whom he preached his message.46 As Mirza Ghulam Ahmad notes: ‘Jesus intended to come to Afghanistan through Persia, and

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to invite to the Truth the lost Jews who had come to be known as Afghans’.47 At one stroke, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad thus engages with at least two different sets of narratives rooted in the different cultural traditions that had, however, not always passed the litmus test of historical veracity. Third, there is furthermore a conscious endeavour on his part to locate Jesus within the Buddhist framework, with Jesus carrying forward the Buddha’s message. Suffice it to say though that the question of historical veracity is hardly a central problem here as, it may be recalled, we have underscored the muddled nature of epistemes and historical genealogies. In short, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s project has significant implications for his engagement within the conceptual rubric of ‘new religion’ with the ‘lost tribes’ thesis, and repositioning of Jesus visà-vis Buddhist, Islamic (in particular, the Ahmadiyya), and other traditions. Besides, in the process of retracing the branches of the ‘lost tribes’ to Afghanistan and Kashmir, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad virtually foregrounds a narrative of shared history of Semitic origins of the bulk of the Afghans and Kashmiris, which one might be tempted to see vis-à-vis an evolving discourse of the triumphalist Aryan myth. The concatenation of these forces enabled Mirza Ghulam Ahmad to galvanise a shared account for the monotheistic religions. Islam (and especially his particular brand of Ahmadiyya Islam), Christianity, and Judaism— with the only exception of the major non-monotheistic religion of Buddhism, in preference to idolatrous Hinduism, and drawing upon substantive scholarship on the Buddhist-Christian interface— were thus all brought together, even as their internal dynamics were reworked, and a cross-temporal narrative of a ‘shared history’ forged in an essentially transregional space. It is against this carefully constructed epistemic backdrop that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad situates himself in the line of continuous prophethood. This redefined prophetology that characterised his new religious order, in other words, can only become intelligible once the complexities of the epistemic

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tools that he marshalled and the historical genealogies that it produced are adequately addressed. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Jesus in India is divided into four chapters drawing upon an analysis of: a) the Gospels and related Christian traditions (mostly Chapter I); b) the Quranic and other ‘authentic traditions in proof of Jesus’ survival’ (Chapter II); c) ‘evidence derived from books of medicine’ (Chapter III); and d) ‘evidence’ from what he calls ‘books of history’ (Chapter IV).48 Note that the structure of his thesis is not restricted to any narrow theological argument and/ or method. Note how, instead, he in the Chapter IV draws upon what he calls ‘Islamic books’, ‘books on Buddhism’, and finally ‘books of history which show that the coming of Jesus to the Punjab and neighbouring territories was inevitable’.49 In an appendix he gives copious excerpts from T.W. Rhys Davids, through H.T. Prinsep, Sir M. Monier Williams, Hermann Oldenberg, François Bernier, George Forster, H.W. Bellews, George Moore, to James Bryce (who in turn draws upon Alexander Burnes) to adduce his theory that major Afghan tribes as well as Kashmiris are descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel.50 The sequence of the authors mentioned is Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s own. What his intervention does amount to, in the process, is in effect a careful exercise in ethnographic practices, in semantics and cultural histories (e.g. tracing the very word ‘Afghan’ to Hebrew roots; through Afghan tribal views on Bani Israel identity to levirate marriages prevalent among Afghans comparable to the old Hebrew custom etc.).51 Note that Davids, Williams, Oldenberg were all important commentators on early Buddhism interested in Buddhism-Christianity interface, while the rest provide a rich profile of bureaucrats, diplomats, travellers, and writers, or perhaps all of these roles combined, suggesting narratives of the dispersed ‘lost tribes’ in parts of southern Asia. Allow me to elaborate on some of these representative ‘books of history’ from the inventory that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad provides.

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One way of analysing, and indeed classifying, the above authors could be by way of identifying their thematic concerns, while one could also seek to situate them in their temporal, and by extension contextual, matrices. The two sets of desiderata, naturally, are not mutually exclusive either. Bearing this in mind I would venture to take up the case of François Bernier (1620-1688) if only to illustrate Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s engagement with not merely the colonial ethnographic literature in his immediate context, but also with somewhat distant narratives from the early modern period that in turn indicates a longue durée history of such narratives. Bernier’s discussion about Jews in Kashmir forms a part of his response to a series of questions posed to him by the French traveller, cartographer, writer Melchisédech Thévenot (1620-1692) who requested Bernier to assess the veracity of the information, i.e. whether there had been Jews in Kashmir, whether they possess the ‘Holy Scriptures’, and if so whether there was ‘any discrepancy between their Old Testament’ and the version known to Thévenot et al.52 Bernier responds by pointing to ‘many signs of Judaism’, for instance the commonalities in ‘countenance and manner’, ‘Jewish appearance of these villagers’ referred to by Jesuit missionaries and other Europeans long before Bernier himself travelled to the region, to the prevalence of names such as ‘Mousa’ (=Moses), and traditions that ‘Solomon visited this country’, built ‘a small and extremely ancient edifice seen on one of the high hills’, and that ‘Moses died in the city of Kachemire, and that his tomb in within a league of it’ (italics in original).53 In short, Bernier was ‘not disposed to deny that Jews may have taken up their residence in Kachemire’, as in southern parts of India, in Persia and Ethiopia.54 Bernier’s response to the other set of questions, i.e. whether the ‘Jews’ in Kashmir have the ‘Holy Scriptures’ and if they were same as the version known in Europe is somewhat tangential, is even more telling. Bernier writes: ‘The purity of their law, after a lapse of ages, may have been corrupted, until, having

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long degenerated into idolatry, they were induced, like many other pagans, to adopt the creed of Mahomet’.55 Note the ethnographic streak in Bernier to flesh out an account of possible Jewish migrations, settlement, and eventual embracing of Islam. I would like to stress that the reference to Islam as a redeeming faith that led to the conversion of the diasporic Jews to Islam, and in the process salvaged their pristine monotheism, could have a particular appeal to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Note also that while the legends of Solomon had in fact had an enduring life among different sections of commentators, the legend of Moses the patriarch dying in Kashmir had far less purchase. Indeed, note that in the context of Kashmir Bernier in fact never once mentions Jesus the Christ.56 Bernier’s then could be seen as a project that correlated the two monotheistic traditions of Judaism and Islam in one single arc, without even invoking Christianity. This elision also accounts for the total lack of any reference to the myriad cultural ramifications that the triadic entanglement of Judaism-Christianity-Islam entails. Indeed, this triadic entanglement, I would suggest, is in fact a history traceable to no later than the second half of the nineteenth century, a trend that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad symptomizes and uses to propel his own new religious agenda vis-à-vis hegemonic understandings of Islam as well as Christianity. One line of scholarship thus sees Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s venture as a tool to ‘counter as effectively as possible the activities of the Christian missionaries in nineteenth-century India’.57 The relevance of the argument can be hardly gainsaid. John Nicol Farquhar (18611929), Scottish missionary and author of several books including Modern Religious Movements in India originally published in 1915 as a compilation of his Hartford-Lamson Lectures on ‘The Religions of the World’, was thus unequivocal in tracing Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s endeavour to a ‘reaction from the striking success of a Christian mission in the Central Panjab and from the fierce onslaught of

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Dayānanda and his Samāj’.58 Farquhar does note that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a heterodox Muslim, since unlike the hegemonic Islamic understanding of the Christ’s ascension he posited a theory of a human Jesus who died a natural death and who, furthermore, sought to connect himself to the line of Messiahs by foregrounding parallels between the lives of Jesus and his own.59 Farquhar surveys the movement and its founder with an underpinning polemical defence of Christianity, waging a trenchant critique of the man he studies (‘… probably self-deceived in the matter of his Messiahship rather than a conscious imposter, but one can scarcely believe him to have been honest in all his pretensions and assertions’), and commenting on a certain ‘likeness of the movement to Persian Babism’, outside the pale of ‘orthodox Islam’.60 The latter aspect, in particular, deserves some attention in so far as Ahmad’s search for a Messiah in his own person, and connecting himself to Jesus is also an effort to undermine the whole theory of a ‘bloody Messiah’ or ‘bloody Mahdi’ sent to the world to kill the anti-Christ and chastise the kafirs, an idea that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad accuses certain strands of the Ahl-i Hadith of perpetuating through their apocalyptic accounts.61 At one level, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s then could be seen as a venture situated at the intersection of this inter-religious, and indeed inter-denominational, polemics. As must be clear from the ongoing exercise though, my point is not merely to stress on this inter-religious/ inter-denominational dynamics, but also to foreground the larger implications of the analytical tools he marshals and the narratives he draws upon. In addition to repeated references to the canonical gospels and especially that of Matthew, Ahmad also draws upon the gospel of Barnabas,62 widely alleged to be a sixteenth century ‘forgery’ ascribed to the biblical Barnabas (the biblical Barnabas is credited with having spread Christianity in Anatolia and Antioch, and as the founder of the Cypriot Orthodox Church). The larger implications that I am alluding to, thus, relate to the narratives of overlaps and interconnectedness

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in a geosophic imagination along networks— putative or real— that connected West, Central, and South Asia. Here is what Mirza Ghulam Ahmad draws upon in particular: And then the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will beat themselves in lamentation, and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. (Matthew, 24:30)

The verse describes Jesus’s prophecy about the tribulations, the impending end, and the coming of the Messiah. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad draws upon this verse to argue that the reference to the ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’ points to the Christians (their ‘hue and cry’ over ‘the divinity of Jesus changes into sighs of grief’); the Muslims (whose belief ‘that Jesus has gone up to the skies alive, changes into weeping and wailing’); and the Jews (who ‘lose everything’), while the only exception remains his jamaat, i.e. the Ahmadiyya denomination which has rediscovered the true message of Jesus the Christ,63 although the charge of false prophecy, already anticipated in the gospels, also often were brought against him: ‘Then if anyone says to you, “Look! Here is the Christ”, or, “There!” do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will give great signs and wonders so as to mislead, if possible, even the chosen ones’. (Matthew, 24: 23-24; cf. Mark, 13:22-23)

The crux in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s treatise lay in his appeal to idioms of peace and love as opposed overdrawn imageries of the ‘Bloody Messiah’. While the Ahmadiyya project is writ large, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad has another cognate design, viz., to chart out a shared

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narrative actualised through the invocation of a shared space for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims: Here it is necessary to state that in the statement contained in the said verse, namely, that at that time all the nations of the earth would beat their breasts, ‘earth’ means Balad-i-Sham [Palestine and Syria] with which these three peoples are connected — Jews, because that is their place of origin and their place of worship; Christians, because Jesus appeared in that place, and the first community of the Christian religion rose from that country; Muslims, because they are to be heirs to this land to the Last Day.64

The narrative of mobility and interconnectedness thus acquires a new meaning, redefining a physical space on the map in terms of the contours of a geosophic space. In the process it also spawns a range of malleable epistemic possibilities in the domain of the religio-cultural in general, and feeding into Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s new religious venture in particular. Conclusions I would suggest that it is this notion of shared origins, connecting three monotheistic religions— with a distillate Buddhist intervention that arguably conditioned early Christianity— in a shared geosophic space that characterised Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s endeavour. In his drawing upon an eclectic inventory of sources, from Bernier through an impressive corpus of colonial ethnographic records (none of which specifically discusses the Jesus-in-India thesis or its variations, but all of which discuss the possibility of the Afghan tribes as well as the Kashmiris descending from the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel), he was in effect striving to gather support for what turned out to be a contentious theory for both the Christian, as well as the larger Muslim world. In the process though, we see him brokering a line of scholarship on

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the ‘lost tribes’ which would, through the twentieth century, receive heightened attention and reinvigorated support through the state-of art scientific stream of genetics, while in fields of historical and discursive analyses the mythical nature of the ‘lost tribes’ theory came to be ever so forcefully underscored. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s flirting with two different sets of legends, and indeed wedding one to the other— viz. the Jesus-in-India theory and that of the ‘lost tribes’ dispersed in South Asia— thus drew upon contemporaneous or historical accounts no less than engagements with and critical appropriations of select theological arguments and tropes. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s theory came to define the core of Ahmadiyya prophetology and later interventions, such as Where did Jesus Die? by J.D. Shams (1945) or Jesus in Heaven and Earth: Journey of Jesus to Kashmir, his Preaching to the Lost tribes of Israel, and death and burial in Srinagar by Khwaja Nazir Ahmad (1952), came to further develop the narrative, with some minor variations. Overall, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s intervention can be thus seen as project that exemplifies the enduring nature of complicity of legends, myths (mythos) and reasoned epistemological systems or rational discourse (logos) in the creation of modern religious identities. Notes *

1.

A slightly modified version of this paper was presented at the conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Asia, held at Doshisha University, Kyoto (June 2016). A financial support from my employer, Presidency University, Kolkata facilitated my participation in the conference in Japan. I am thankful to my employer, to my hosts, the audience, and especially to Navras Jaat Aafreedi, Toshio Akai, Bhaskar Chakraborty, Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty, Kingshuk Chatterjee, Suranjana Gangopadhyay, Rajarshi Ghose, Shireen Maswood, Claudia Richter, Sajjad A. Rizvi, Francis Robinson, Shukla Sanyal, Hari Shankar Vasudevan, and Shin’ichi Yoshinaga for their insights and support. All translations from Bengali and German are mine, unless otherwise stated. As might be surmised from the title of this article, I am playfully transposing the key feature of interconnectedness— characteristic of the analytical model of ‘connected histories’ originally used in the context of the ‘early modern’ world— to understand an essentially ‘modern’ predicament of inter-cultural/ inter-religious interactions within the matrices of ‘world religions’ and ‘new religious movements’ involving,

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

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in our contemporary terminologies, at least two geographical-cum-cultural spaces. While proceeding with the prevalent idea that the geographical units of West and South Asia are essentially modern constructions, this article fleshes out one particular strand of a family of counter-narratives— in the early twentieth century but with enduring afterlives— of inter-Asian flows of ideas, and putative histories, between these regions. In doing so this article takes a cue from a line of scholarship that underlines the pliability of geographical knowledge— produced at the intersection of scientific knowledge and the religious— and underscores the capacious nature of such ventures, and the possible religio-culturally inflected spatial/ cartographic and arguably pseudo-historical imagination that they entail. The underlying concern here is to understand the transregional lives of legends and myths, and the possible fantastic histories that can be churned out of such exercise. This exercise resonates, in the process, a larger academic project to thrash out the multifaceted nature of possible ‘connected histories’, neither led by exclusively Eurocentric tropes, nor essentially confined to an unadulterated linear history of rational historical progress propelled by Enlightenment. For the original programmatic argument of ‘connected histories’, see for instance (the first among a series of scholarly works along this line) Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3 (1997), pp. 735-762. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2004), p. 1. Drawing upon the possibilities latent in the indeterminate and the imaginative outlined in John K. Wright, ‘Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 37, 1 (1947), pp. 1-15, Zvi BenDor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 25 seeks to problematize the lineaments of geosophy while also drawing attention to Kantian idea of theological geography. At the same time, however, he also points out how geosphic imagination almost necessarily opens up the question of salvation. Ibid., p. 25. And in classifying the Ahmadiyya movement thus, I take a cue from James R. Lewis, The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 32 ff. See below for elaborations on this point. Prasenjit Duara, ‘Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 69, 4 (2010), pp. 963-983, at p. 963. Nor is this theory of an alternative genealogy of Christianity one of its kind. Similar ideas have in more recent times come to constitute the core of new religious movements elsewhere in Asia, in Japan for instance, informing at times ‘fundamentalist’ politico-cultural tendencies. I am grateful to Toshio Akai and Shin’ichi Yoshinaga for drawing my attention to this aspect. For a succinct overview in particular of Ryuho Okawa’s (b. 1956-; the founder of Kōfuku-no-Kagaku) views on the subject see, e.g. Franz Winter, Hermes und Buddha: die neureligiöse Bewegung Kōfuku no kagaku in Japan (Vienna & Berlin, LIT, 2012), esp. Chapter 3. Winter also points to

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Okawa’s engagement with the Jesus-in-India theories. Ibid., 283 ff. Winter, Hermes und Buddha, 288 ff. also studies the legend of Jesus’s grave in northern part of the Honshu, in a village called Shingo. Variations of the Jesus-in-Japan legends were also appropriated by other new religious movements such as the Mahikari tradition. Thus Catherine Cornille, ‘The Phoenix Flies West: The Dynamics of Inculturation of Mahikari in Western Europe’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 18, 2-3 (1991), pp. 265-285, esp. at p. 279 outlines Mahikari accounts of Jesus’s escape from the Cross, his relocation to Japan, his starting a family by marrying a Japanese, and indeed his debt to Shinto sages, and finally the soteriological mission of the Mahikari tradition which fulfils what was anticipated by the likes of Jesus. Peter Knecht, ‘The Crux of the Cross: Mahikari’s Core Symbol’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 22, 3-4 (1995), pp. 321-341, esp. at p. 337 points to the enduring role of the controversial Takenouchi Documents (named after Kiyomaro Takenouchi [18801965], who is said to have ‘discovered’ the tomb of Jesus in Shingo) in the Mahikari traditions, and the emphasis laid by the founder of the Mahikari tradition, Yoshikazu Okada (1901-1974) on the Japan’s leadership in a project of ultimate salvation in a futuristic spiritual age, a schema in which the coming of Moses and Jesus to Japan for spiritual training form crucial sub-texts. Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980 edn), Ed. Colin Gordon; Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper, p. 81. This Foucauldian argument also defines Ramaswamy’s general position, defined as a project of ‘recognition’ rather than ‘recuperation or rehabilitation’. See Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria, p. 4. Foucault, Power/ Knowledge, p. 82. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. Nicolas A. Notovitch, La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ (1894), translated into English as The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (1907). Friedrich Max Müller, ‘The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India’, The Nineteenth Century, 36 (1894), pp. 515-522, provides a trenchant critique of not only Notovitch’s theory in particular but also generally Madame Helena Blavatsky’s (1831-1891) claims of ‘Mahatma letters’ containing the core of Theosophist wisdom arriving from Tibet. Cf. Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet: Towards the Holy City of Lhasa, Volume 2 (New Delhi: LPP, 1997 reprint edn [1903]), pp. 627-628. Swami Abhedanandaer Kashmir o Tibbot Bhraman, penned by Swami Abhedananda’s disciple Brahmachari Bhairab Chaitanya as per the Swami’s diary-entries as well as dictations given by the Swami, was originally published first in instalments in the mouthpiece of Ramakrishna Vedanta Samiti, Vishwa-Bani since 1927, and thereafter in the form of book in 1929 under the title Kashmir o Tibbatey. See Swami Abhedananda, Swami Abhedanandaer Kashmir o Tibbot Bhraman (Kolkata: Sri Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, 1995 reprint edn), the prefatory chapter by Swami Prajnanananda, esp. pp. 6-7 for early lives of this text. Sri Sri Paramhamsa Yogananda, The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You- A revelatory commentary on the original teachings of Jesus, Volume

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16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

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I (Kolkata: Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, 2007 edn), p. 57, 80 ff. traces Jesus’s supposed journeys to India during the ‘unknown years’ of his life when he is argued to have come in contact with, and sought guidance from, the wise yogis of India. Simon J. Joseph, ‘Jesus in India? Transgressing Social and Religious Boundaries’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80, 1 (2012), pp. 161-199, esp. 162 ff. Joseph, ‘Jesus in India?’, 173 ff., esp. 176 ff. Ibid., esp. at p. 177. And here Joseph takes a cue from scholars such as A.F.J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction-Text-Commentary (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2003 edn) as well as a range of quasi-scholarly works. Reflecting on the salience of recent scholarship on early Christianity’s India-leg, marking in effect a conceptual reorientation, Klijn thus notes in the Preface to the second edition of The Acts of Thomas: ‘It appears that the relationship between Thomas and India is much more part of the study of Church History than of apocryphal literature’. Ibid., p. viii. James R. Lewis, Legitimating New Religions (New Brunswick, New Jersey & London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 74. Cf. his Chapter 3: ‘Jesus in India and the Forging of a Tradition’. Cf. Levi Dowling’s 1908 work, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, the fulcrum of the Aquarian Christine Church Universal. See Levi Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2008 edn [1908]), esp. Sections VI and VII entitled ‘Life and Works of Jesus in India’ and ‘Life and Works of Jesus in Tibet and Western India’ respectively, before Dowling moves on to trace Jesus’s ‘life and works’ elsewhere such as Persia, Assyria, Greece, Egypt etc. Cf. the legend of Miriam Mazar, ‘the so-called tomb of the Holy Virgin, Mother of Christ’ near Kashgar— where Mary, mother of Jesus the Christ is argued to have fled after Jesus’s persecution— in Nicholas Roerich, The Heart of Asia: Memoirs from the Himalayas (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1990 edn [1929]), p. 31. While Roerich’s (1874-1947) report reflects contemporaneous legends revolving around the family of Jesus in currency, more recent freelance works such as, Holger Kersten, Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life Before and After the Crucifixion (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001 edn) et al, betray the enduring nature of the Jesus-in-India narratives in our times. Joseph, ‘Jesus in India?’, pp. 169-170, points to the ‘missionary journeys’ of Swami Vivekananda and Swami Abhedananda to ‘the West’ and adds that ‘it is in their attempt to make Vedanta and Yoga accessible and amenable to modern Christians that we can find a possible motive for their support of the “Jesus in India” theory’. Again, ‘Like Abhedananda and Yogananda, Sivananda’s interests in affirming the legend involve the unification of East and West’. Ibid., p. 173. For a trenchant critique by a contemporaneous educational missionary see, J.N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998 edn [1915]), pp. 137-148. We shall have the opportunity to revisit this point. Joseph, ‘Jesus in India?’, p. 173. See, for instance, Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago & London: the University of Chicago Press, 2005), Chapter 4, and 263 ff.

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24. Joseph, ‘Jesus in India?’, at p. 180, suggests that the ‘New Age’ fad for yogic traditions are traceable to developments well before the Beatles’ engagement with Indic spirituality in the middle of the twentieth century: i.e. to ‘the earlier missions of Paramahansa Yogananda in the 1930s and the missionary work of Swami Vivekananda’. The endeavour of Paramhamsa Yogananda to carve out a ‘science of religion’ and ‘self-realization’ by ways of extensive lecturing, teaching in classes, and both reaching out as well as inducting a largely non-Hindu ‘Western’ audience (read potential converts) through institutionalisation of the Self-Realization Fellowship may be seen to constitute significant attempts along missionary lines. However, to borrow the Paramhamsa’s own words, it meant him, first and foremost, ‘widening understanding between West and East’. Paramhamsa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Kolkata: Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, 2012 edn [1946]), p. 351. Arvind Sharma suggests, the ‘neo-Hinduism, as represented by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, clearly looked upon Hinduism as a non-missionary religion’, but the Swami in effect also paradoxically made several converts out of Western audiences and, furthermore, remained open to the idea of reconversion of the non-Hindus in India to Hinduism’. See Idem, Hinduism as a Missionary Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 48, 119. As distinct from the debates about the nature of missionary activism, and the nature of their putative or real active engagement in conversion strategies, I would like to underline the way these Swamis developed their rhetoric as part of wider inter-religious communications, and indeed polemics, since the late nineteenth century. By way of further random example, Swami Abhedananda’s Thoughts on Sankhya, Buddhism and Vedanta— comprised of his lectures in the United States and published for the first time in 1967 by Sri Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, and eventually translated among other languages into Bengali as Samkhya, Bauddha o Vedanta Darshan— may be cited as an illustration of this inter-religious conversation, if also being polemical at times. The polemical streak, critical of Christian perspectives of contemporaneous Hinduism, comes to the forefront in several of his lectures in the 1890s. For a representative reporting of his lectures in the American press, see Swami Abhedananda’s memoirs, Amar Jeebonkatha, Part II (Kolkata: Sri Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, 2008 [1984]), Chapter II, ‘Amerikay Prothom Panch Botsor’ (‘The First Five Years in America’), esp. 76 ff. As discussed below, the polemical character also defined the project of our key protagonist on which this case study is based. 25. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, Jesus in India: Jesus’ escape from death on the cross and journey to India (London: The London Mosque/ Ahmadiyya Muslim Foreign Missions Department, 1978 edn.), 22 f., p. 52, 66, 83 ff. The ‘beyond’ could literally mean the farthest corner of Asia, in Japan in particular. Thus, subsequently during the World War II, the Japanese dispensation came to issue visas to Lithuanian Jews in a move that would save thousands of lives. The propelling idea in influential circles in Japan had been that the Jews represented an ancient sect of Shintoism and that the Japanese had descended from one of the ‘lost tribes’. See Stanford M. Lyman, ‘The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology’, International

42

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 12, 1 (1998), p. 34. Cf. Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War II (Jerusalmen & New York: Gefen Publishing House, 2004 edn [1979]), a work that traces a rather under-researched side of Japanese policy in the war years: i.e. a careful and deft attempt to make use of the Jewish by encouraging them to settle and invest in places such as Manchuria, and facilitate Japan’s imperial interests in the process. I am thankful to Navras Jaat Aafreedi for drawing my attention to this aspect. I would like to underline though that the metaphor latent in the usage of the name of one the most poisonous fish known to man, ‘Fugu’, with reference to the Jewish also indicates the ambivalence of Japanese policy: if cooked well, purged of the poison, the same fish also becomes a delicacy. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, pp. 67-83 for crucial comments on commonalities in names and epithets as well as in teachings of the Buddha and Jesus. Indeed, he stretches his search for commonalities to the point that involved a virtual re-interpretation of Nazarene and Kashmir toponyms. Thus, we are told that while Jesus was crucified in ‘Golgotha, i.e. at the place of sri, so has his tomb been found at the place of sri, i.e. Srinagar’, even as the origin of the name Gilgit is also reported to be Hebrew. Ibid., p. 53. See, e.g., Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Aḥmadī Religious Thought and its Medieval Background (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 117-118. Also, ibid., Chapter 1, ‘Aḥmadiyya Movement: A Historical Survey’. This is the core argument in Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ibid., p. 67. Mircea Eliade, ‘Cosmogonic Myth and “Sacred History”’ in Idem, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 72-87, at p. 73. His pro-fascist leanings, however, need not blind us to the relevance of this statement. Indeed, if anything the Nazi dispensation illustrates a classic case in which myths and pseudo-histories drawing, among other forces, upon the occult reached through state-support a point like never before. See Lewis, Legitimating New Religions, 12 ff. It may be noted in the passing that while Weber does place a premium on each of these founts of authority, he still adds a caveat saying that none of these three ‘ideal types’ can be found in ‘historical cases in “pure form”’. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1978 edn.), Eds Guenther Roth & Claus Wittich, p. 216. Lewis, Legitimating New Religions, p. 12. Ibid., p. 15. Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous, p. 121; also see Chapters 5 and 6. For insights on Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s public career, see, ibid., 4 ff. The former came out in The Monist, 22, 1 (1912), pp. 129-138 and the latter in The Monist, 23, 4 (1913), pp. 600-603. The former makes a particular reference to

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37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

the works of Richard Garbe while the latter is a critical review of Carl Clemen’s Primitive Christianity and its Non-Jewish Sources (1909). Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘The Christian System’ in Idem, Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer (New York: A.L. Burt, 1902 edn [?]), trans. T. Bailey Saunders, pp. 268-276, at p. 275. Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 edn), pp. 301-302. Joseph, ‘Jesus in India?’, p. 163 (misspelt as ‘Jacollist’). The 1883 English translation of Jacolliot’s work on the Bible was published by Carleton Publishers in New York, the same house which also produced English translations of works of contemporaneous leading scholars of religion such as Ernest Renan (1823-1892). See the advertisements of several of Renan’s works in the page opposite to the title page of Louis Jacolliot, The Bible in India: Hindoo Origin of Hebrew and Christian Revelation (Translated from ‘La Bible Dans L’Inde’) (New York: Carleton, Publisher: 1883 edn). Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 53. Cf. Annemarie Etter, ‘Nietzsche und das Gesetzbuch des Manu’, Nietzsche Studien, 16 (1987), pp. 340-352. For a useful recent programmatic intervention, see Nile Green, ‘The Global Occult: An Introduction’, History of Religions, 54, 4 (2015), pp. 383-393. Indeed, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, p. 70 argues that Jesus had ‘no need’ to undertake a journey to India during the so-called ‘unknown years’. He travelled to Kashmir and the northern parts of India, and thence Tibet only when the ‘Jews of Judea’ came to ‘reject’ his teachings. Ibid., p. 23. Lewis, Legitimating New Religions, pp. 78-79. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, at p. 39 thus states: ‘… it is I, the writer; [sic] a servant of humanity, who has come as the Promised Messiah, in the name of Jesus (on whom be peace)’. The view of Israelite origin of the Afghan tribes in the subcontinent, for instance, had had a long history and in more recent times has been further spearheaded by important Israeli organisations by way of fact-finding ventures and ethnographic explorations. See, e.g., Navras Jaat Aafreedi, ‘Traditions of Israelite Descent among Certain Muslim Groups in South Asia’, Shofar, 28, 1 (2009), pp. 1-14, esp. 4 ff. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, p. 65. The quotes are excerpts from the titles of the chapters referred to. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, 63 ff., 67 ff., 83 ff. respectively. Ibid. 94 ff. Ibid., p. 65, 84, 86, for instance. François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire: AD 1656-1688 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1992 edn [1934]), trans. on the basis of Irving Brock’s version by Archibald Constable, & 2nd edition revised by Vincent A. Smith, p. 428. Ibid., p. 430.

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54. Ibid., pp. 430-431. 55. Ibid., p. 431. 56. However, Bernier does refer to German Jesuit from Peking who discovered Jews in northern China who had no idea about the death of Jesus. Ibid., p. 429-430. 57. Aafreedi, ‘Traditions of Israelite Descent’, p. 8. 58. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements, p. 137. 59. Ibid., pp. 142-143. 60. Ibid., pp. 146-147. 61. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, p. 16. 62. Ibid., p. 26. 63. Ibid., p. 41. 64. Ibid., p. 42.

IMDADULLAH MAKKI AND MUSLIM COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE 19 TH CENTURY SEEMA ALAVI

The Argument This essay looks at the career of Imdadullah Makki, a 1857 Muslim rebel, as he journeyed out of India and paused at the Asian intersection of the British and the Ottoman empires-Mecca. His journey across empires made him transform his experience of coercion to one of an engineered cosmopolitanism exemplified as virtuous public conduct. He used his location, tapped its long history of connections with South Asia and exploited the late 19th century ‘imperial moment’ to fashion his cosmopolitanism as an urbane civility based on universalist Muslim conduct. His cosmopolitanism derived from the Islamic scriptural tradition and was informed by the tradition of consensus. It was a form of trans-nationalism that nurtured global aspirations and aimed to tightly weld the Muslim community (umma). Imdadullah’s career offers a new perspective on the histories of Muslim cosmopolitanism, trans-nationalism and global history as it developed at multiple imperial centers across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean world. His networks between empires offer fresh insights into Indian Muslim politics as it evolved outside the confines of the British political ambit. This has important implications for trans-national studies that are invariably mapped on the political and cultural world of the British controlled territories.1

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Haji Imdadullah Makki (1817–1899): A Profile Imdadullah was born in Muzaffarnagar in North India, and had his family and educational links with the Muslim Naqshbandi reformists associated with the Deoband seminary. Like them he too had multiple initiations in the Naqshbandi, Qadari and Chishti Sufi orders. Like most members of the Indo-Persianate gentry he had a traditional education in Delhi. This meant that he was well versed in the Koran and the Hadith, and was fluent in Persian, Arabic and Urdu. And like many in his peer group he too had his own madrasa and mosque in his native town of Bhuwan in Muzaffarnagar near Deoband. He left India in 1859 after an arrest warrant was issued against him for being identified as an 1857 rebel2. He reached Mecca via Karachi3. In Mecca he stayed initially at the Rabat Daoudia- in the rabat (guest house) of one Seth Ismael. Later the Hyderabad state offered him accommodation. He finally settled in a house in Harta Albab that was bought for him by one of his disciples.4 It was in Mecca that he met with Rahmatullah Kairanwi, the fugitive scholar (alim) from Kairana close to his home district of Bhuwan in Muzaffarnagar5. Imdadullah soon created an intellectual and social niche for himself using the influential contacts of Kairanwi, in the Hijaz area6. Kairanwi helped him establish links with the salafi reformists in the Ottoman world and he was soon plugged into the intellectual currents of the Middle Eastern world. In Mecca, Imdadullah lectured in Kairanwi’s madrasa Saulatiya that had an inter-national clientele and also interacted with scholars from the Middle East. He dispatched his books to the Ottoman world and networked with publishers and notables for their wide circulation. His intellectual contribution was the articulation of the idea of an inclusive cosmopolitanism that hinged on trust and faith (i’temad) and consensus (ijma). He improvised the intellectual legacy of the exclusivist Muslim reformers- the Naqshbandi mujadids of Delhi and the scholars of Deoband seminary in North India- who relied more on individuated scripture driven religion.

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His relatively inclusive outlook resulted in the publication of several books from Mecca that were written in consultation with scholars in India. These found wide circulation in the connected worlds of the British and Ottoman empires and were predictably multilingual: penned in Persian, Urdu and Arabic. These included the Ziaul-Qulub in Persian with an Arabic and Urdu translation; the Faislah hafte maslah in Arabic with a later Urdu translation; commentaries on the Masnavi Maulana Rum in Persian; the Ghiza-i-Ruh in Urdu; and the Jihad-i Akbar in Urdu. Fugitive Mullahs and Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Hijaz The role of 19th century Cairo as a cosmopolitan center where Muslim nationalists and reformists forged trans-imperial networks to destabilize the British and Dutch imperiums has been well documented by Michael Laffant and Juan Cole7. Imdadullah’s life shows that Cairo was not the only center from where we can begin to re-think the definition of ‘global’ in a way that de-centers the British Empire in the writing of trans-national histories8. Mecca compared well, if not outshined, Cairo as a center of intellectual energy generated by Muslim exiles from the British colonies. By the end of the 19th century the city was certainly more than simply the center of a political economy triggered by haj9. Nor was it merely the seat of Naqshbandi mujadid kind of inclusive scriptural reform that connected with the Salafi purist reformists of the Middle East.10 Neither was it solely the seat of sedition, anti-Western politics and the cradle of a virulent and divisive Islam, as projected by both the Dutch ethnologist S. Hurgonje as well as the British Assistant Consul in the city Abdur Razaq.11 Instead, Mecca, alongside Delhi, Cairo and Istanbul, emerged as one of the many centers that challenged London as it connected Muslims intellectually and socially across the imperial assemblages: the British, the Ottoman and the Dutch. It became the cradle of a kind

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of Muslim cosmopolitanism produced by individuals like Imdadullah who invoked the Islamic principle of consensus to unite the Muslim community. Imdadullah forged his own silsila (Sufi brotherhood) in Mecca that derived its authority by drawing a middle ground with the 4 different Sufi families of the Naqshbandi, Qadari, Chishti and Suhrawardi. He tried to end dissensions between them over ritual practices like zikr (devotion to God), mouloud (celebration of the Prophet’s birth), urrs (commemoration of the birth and death of saints at their at shrines) and qawwali (collective singing in praise of God) by arriving at a consensual position and adopting these practices selectively. But he stamped this localized eclectic mix with the universalism of tauhid-belief in one Allah and the last Prophet- and the texts identified with them-the Koran and the Hadith. These universal templates exemplified his continuation of both the Delhi Naqshbandi legacy of Shahwaliullah as well as that of his Deoband peers. Both of who abhorred the Sufi rituals, even if in a consensual form, that he had adopted. The improvised intellectual legacy produced a standardized public conduct as a form of cosmopolitanism that was inclusive and embracive. The Delhi and Deoband legacy proved strategically handy. It gave him legitimacy at a time when the Prophet and the scriptures became more than ever central to Indian society via the emergent print culture and the reformist initiatives. The Prophet was de-mystified by reformists as an ideal individual and exemplar whose life offered a model that could be emulated to negotiate better the European challenge.12 By the late 19th century, as the contact between the British and Ottoman worlds increased, the tales of the Prophet and his miraculous powers filtered into India from Ottoman Hijaz. He emerged as a model to be emulated. And as regional flavors of his appropriation gathered momentum so did the awareness of his universal appeal as a connector that could link the Muslims to the world outside. Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli used this moment to launch his universalist

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Tariqa-i Muhammadiya (the way of the Prophet) as a trans-national therapy to combat European intrusions13. Imadadullah and Kairanwi took this idea of global unity of Muslims forward using the same templates associated with the Prophet: the Koran and Hadith. But they grounded them locally via a public conduct that leveled dissension by creating trust (i’temad) between conflicting sects and striking a middle ground over mooted forms of local devotions. This was a step ahead of the Naqshbandi mujadids or Deobandis who rejected such localized devotions as heresy or biddat. Imdadullah’s location at the heart of the Prophet’s homeland – Mecca- gave him a unique advantage. Mecca was the bridgehead to the Ottoman world where similar ideas of unity were being toyed by Salafi reformists in the cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo. It also offered a ready audience of Muslim subjects with the shared experience of living in the shadow of Western imperialism. He benefitted also from the temporal ‘moment of the late 19th century’. The period 1850s to 1880s until the fall of Egypt to Britain in 1882 constituted a unique moment that at one level hardened borders between Empires and at the same time allowed for greater connectivity via new technologies of print, telegraph and steam ships. If the imposition of ‘official nationalisms’ (being British Indian or Ottoman) created new tensions for merchants and business communities who had traditionally crossed borders to earn their livelihood, European intrusions in South Asian and African political economies challenged the livelihood of peasants and urban workers alike14. Paradoxically, print capitalism, the telegraph, and new kinds of industrial technology that fuelled resentment by upsetting the traditional social order, also became the grid across which news, political experiences and people from British India could move to the Hijaz, Arab and African territories of the Ottoman Empire and vice versa. And thus it was no co-incidence that 1857 in India coincided with the 1856-1858 anti-Christian riots in Jeddah, the 1860 riots between Druz and Christians in Damascus and

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the 1870s riots in Egypt that culminated in the 1882 Alexandria riots. There was a connectedness to these riots that rested on and reinforced the connected histories of the British and Ottoman Empires. And this connectedness has made Juan Cole call this imperial moment, ‘the age of secondary revolts’. People with 1857 experience were active in the riots in Cairo15, and in Jeddah the wealthy Indian merchant Faraj Yusr who was pro-British was attacked. The role of the Indian migrants in leading the riots was always under the scanner. In the Arab peninsula more than 10,000 Indians had returned to Mecca in the decade that followed 1857 and they instigated protests16. In the context of this ‘imperial moment’ it is not surprising that Imdadullah found an easy niche for himself in Mecca as an 1857 fugitive. Imdadullah’s temporal and spatial positioning in Mecca made him particularly sensitive to the idea of forging an alternate Islamic imperium as a spiritual and civilizational space between Empires. This became strategically critical to combat the British imperium from which he had escaped. And his location at Mecca-the intersection of the Ottoman and European rivalries- made it possible for him to burrow through fast hardening imperial borders and make them porous so as to realize his dream. The movement of people from the Ottoman and the British territories to Mecca offered him the rare opportunity to connect with like minded religious scholars and intellectuals across the British and Ottoman cities of Delhi, Deoband, Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul and Cairo respectively. The madrasa Saulatiya where he taught had visitors and scholars from all these cities. And via Rahmatullah Kairanwi his links with Istanbul remained intact17. His writing career, as we saw above, flowered in Mecca as he sought to further his agenda of uniting the umma via arriving at a consensus and middle ground over contentious issues that divided the community. His books articulated an inclusive cosmopolitanism as a form of trans-nationalism that had global aspirations. That this alternate imperium was constructed at the cusp of the British and

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Ottoman Empires lends it special historiographical significance. It becomes an effective window via which one can write trans-national indeed global histories outside the British imperial frame. The text, Zia ul-Qulub, in Persian with an Arabic and Urdu translation, which we discuss below, exemplifies best this brand of cosmopolitanism. Literature written in Mecca: The Zia ul-Qulub Imdadullah authored the Zia ul-Qulub (Light of the Heart) in 1862. Originally titled Marghob Dil, it was written in Mecca. It is a 64 pages long text. It articulates a form of Muslim public conduct as an urbane civility based on virtuous disposition. The guide (murshid) played a pivotal role in fashioning this conduct as a form of inclusive cosmopolitanism. Imdadullah projects the murshid as the exemplar of Islamic virtuous conduct as a form of urbane civility that is universal in its reach. According to him Islamic public conduct as modeled on that of the guide should be embracive and inclusive within the theological frame. The Zia ul-Qulub breaks new ground in Muslim intellectual history as it begins with the idea of diluting the late 19th century trend towards individuation of prescriptive religion: individual interpretation of the Koran and Hadith and self moderation in forms of devotion. And yet does not discard it entirely. Indeed, the text reaches a middle ground in bringing different Sufi silsilas and sects of Muslims together18. According to Imdadullah he was persuaded to write such an inclusive text by Hafiz Muhammad Yusuf who was of the Chishti sect19. However, Imdadullah extended his brief. He not only struck a middle ground between Sufi sects but also improvised on both his Shahwaliullah Naqshbandi as well as his Deobandi legacy. The Delhi Naqshbandi silsila of Shahwaliullah with its Arabicist worldview had encouraged individuation of religion, even as it borrowed from the Sufi organizational format of the hospice (khanqah) and adopted the practice of the oath of allegiance to its leader (bait). Its notable legatees,

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like the reformist Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, continued with the Sufi emphasis on initiation to the silsila with the oath of allegiance to the leader (khalifa/murshid). At the same time the individual’s reliance on moderators in matters of devotion was discouraged. Instead, devotees were encouraged to model their lives in accordance to the Koran, Hadith and the life of the Prophet alone (Tariqa-i Muhammadiya). And this emulation was to be a very private individual affair. They shunned as biddat (heresy) any public form of devotion centered on leaders: pir, murshid or khalifa. In contrast, Imdadullah argues that when God wishes to give someone direction the blessed one shuns all his sinful acts and turns towards Him. But a guide should mediate this relationship with God, as the individual himself is incapable of forging a direct relationship with Him. And thus he should hand himself over to some murshid kamil (perfect guide). Very much like the medieval Indo-Persianate political theorists, who invoked the analogy of the ideal physician to define the perfect King, Imdadullah too compared the perfect guide to the best of the physicians. Thus he defined individual forms of devotion (saluk) also as prescribed by the guide (shaikh) who he describes as the physician of the soul (dil kaa tabib).20 According to him the perfect guide should take care of the batini (internal) well being of the individual very much like the physician who cures the physical ailments of his patients. Imdadullah projects the murshid as the exemplar of Islamic virtuous conduct as a form of urbane civility that is universalist in its reach. Thus he argues that the murshid should be an epitome of good conduct. He should uphold the shariat and tradition. (shariat an tariqat ka jamaih ho), and follow the Koran and the Sunnat in his handling of individuals. (batini amraz kei ilaj kei liyei Quran va Sunnat kei irshadat va hidayat ka paband ho). According to Imdadullah the guide, like the physician, has to first cure the inner diseases of jealousy (hasad), pride (kibr), cheating (riya) and envy (kina). Only once these

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are substituted by good conduct (akhlaq-i hasina) that the blessings of God will arrive. (wasul ali Allah)21. Imdadullah enhances the role of the murshid making him the mediator not just between God and the individual but also between the local and the global. The text projects him as the agent who makes localized renditions of devotion connect to universal standardized norms of conduct without entirely making them loose their particularistic veneer. For instance, the role of the murshid in arriving at a consensual format on culturally and regionally diverse forms of zikr (devotion to God) to unite the umma brings out his role as a moderator very well. The murshid and the Islamic notion of consensus (ijma) and mutual trust (i’temad) become key in forging the unity of the umma around a standard form of virtuous public conduct. Imdadullah describes the varied prescriptive formats for devotion (zikrs) offered by different Sufi silsilas: akhyar ka tariqa, ashab mujahidat va riyazat ka tariqa, Shatariya tariqa. In each of these the murshid plays a critical role in shaping proper decorum and ensuring appropriate body comportment. But Imdadullah makes the role of the murshid central in synthesizing the forms of devotions of the 4 main Sufi tariqas around a consensual form of devotion: a prescriptive conduct. He aims to create a common meeting ground in their forms of devotion to God-zikr. And via this search for consensual unity on Muslim virtuous conduct as a universal template he aims to carve out an united umma based on tolerance and recognition of internal difference. He was able to pursue this as he like many others of his peer group had multiple initiations in Sufi silsilas. He had been initiated into the Naqsbandi mujadid silsila by his pir Nasiruddun Dehlavi, and into the other three by his pir Mian Nur Muhmammad Jhanjhanwi. And thus the book has chapters on all 4 Sufi tariqas albeit with the aim of generating trust and bringing them on a common meeting point.

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The text begins with discussions on the Chishti prescriptions on ideal public conduct. It describes the bodily comportment in taking the oath of allegiance (bait), and in the performance of different forms of devotion :ashghal, azkar and maraqabat. It elaborates the varied forms of zikr via expressing devotion to Chishti saints: zikr ism zat, zikr nafi va asbat, shaghal Sultana nasir,etc22. It also has discussions on miracles (marqabat aur anwarat) associated with the members of the silsila, and the comportment identified with these revered men. The second section concentrates on comparable prescriptions on forms of devotion (ashghal) prescribed by the Qadari silsilas. This also includes prescriptions on zikr- like ism zat, and miraculous feats (maraqabat) of the Qadari Sufi order. Different forms of revelations (kashf) like those announced after the call for prayer (azaan) are also described23. The third section describes the prescriptive norms of the Naqshbandi silsila. It ignores their reformist doctrines and instead focuses on prescriptions that overlap with the other Sufi silsilas: meditation (muraqbat), augury or reliance on omens (istikharah), forms of zikr, like the zikr jarub, the rituals for concluding the devotion to revered elders (khatm Khwajagan), and the rituals to be observed at the Prophet’s tomb (ziyarat Nabi)24 . The fourth chapter lays out universal norms and etiquette on the recitation (tilawat) of the Quran and the bodily comportment to be followed during prayer (namaz). These forms of appropriate bodily etiquettes are projected as a type of Muslim virtuous public conduct that unites the culturally diverse umma25. The prescriptive etiquette to be followed on a visit to the Prophet’s tomb (ziyarat) constitutes another set of standardized norms of conduct that unite the sects. He projects this standard form of public conduct as an exemplar of the community’s ability to arrive at a consensus on such matters26. Through out the text he picks up many other mooted rituals and forms of conduct that traditionally divide the Muslims and attempts to build a consensus. For instance, he suggests a common format

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for devotion (saluk) and suggests 3 forms around which a standard conduct for devotion can be arrived. The first way of saluk includes public conduct centered on the Muslim fasting (roza), prayers (namaz), recitation of the Koran (tilawat), pilgrimage (haj )and jihad. The second form of saluk standardizes etiquette (akhlaq) by urging the individual to give up undesirable actions (aadat-i zamima) and adopt a good conduct and etiquette (akhlaq-i mamida). The last form of saluk is one where he reaches out to his reformist colleagues by emphasizing the individual self-driven way to reach God. According to him here one avoids the company of good people (khalaiq) and shuns their prescribed austerity and abstinence (riyazat) and gets into individuated forms of devotion that are self-driven:like zikr.27 In the conclusion Imdadullah encases this consensual public conduct with the universal appeal and reach of the scriptures. He reaches out to the scriptures as the universal connectors of the umma and invokes the legacy of Deoband as the upholder of such scripture driven reformist Islam. He prescribes some select Koranic recitation (kalmas) that he recommends and wishes to portray as his lasting intellectual legacy (nasihat). The book ends with praises and discussion on his 2 Deoband associates and relatives Maulana Rashid Ahmed Gangoi and Qasim Nanautawi. He praises them and prays that their good work ‘lights up the world’. (dono kei nur hidayat sei duniya ko roshan karei)28. The text is significant because here the focus shifts from the self and the individual to the murshid as a moderator of virtuous conduct. More importantly, the moderator mediates not only between the individual and God but between the local and the universal by setting standardized universal formats of devotion. These offer both a middle ground between diverse silsilas and sects of Muslims and also aspire to a global reach by virtue of being encased in the scriptures. And thus the book reaches out to both the regional flavors of Sufi silsilas as well as to the Koran and Hadith that have a global appeal. This mixed bag of the local and the global constitutes the formula of ideal public

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conduct as a standard norm that would connect Muslims globally and unite them internally. This model of standardized Muslim virtuous conduct is a form of cosmopolitanism that is a theologically framed form of urbane civility. The Making of the Zia ul-Qulub Even though written in Mecca the language of the original text is Persian. An indicator perhaps of the caution Imdadullah was exercising in initially limiting the text to only a select audience. And restrain was the need of the hour in writing an eclectic text from the Arab heartland of Mecca. This was a city where even after the fall of the wahabi control (1819) and the establishment of Ottoman rule the climate of religious scholarship was heavily stamped by reformist Sufi doctrines either of the Salafi Middle Eastern kind, or of the mujadid Naqshbandi kind from South Asia. Both of which relied heavily on individual interpretation of doctrinaire texts to reach out to the word outside, and diluted the reliance on mediator guides and public devotions to them. The individual they argued could use universal templates like the sacred texts and the Prophet to connect to the world outside overriding the local magnetic pulls of diverse forms of Sufi devotions and rituals centered on the murshid/pir. In contrast, in the Zia ul-Qulub Muslim trans-nationalism was a kind of cosmopolitanism that was exemplified in a universalist public conduct that was moderated by the murshid/guide. It was as we saw interactive, inclusive and based on consensus within the theological frame. Imdadullah’s temporal and spatial location gave him access to both older repertoires of connectivity constituted by itinerant traders, litterateurs and pilgrims, as well as new forms of connections offered via the imperial networks of steamships, telegraph, and print capitalism. He re-configured both these networks to write the Zia ulQulub that would disseminate Muslim virtuous conduct as a universal referent and weld the ummah around it.

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His letters to Hindustan indicate how visiting scholars, publishers, traders and pilgrims played the intermediaries in carrying the manuscript of the book back and forth from Mecca to Hindustan for intellectual inputs and how it was finally published in a private printing press in Meerut. Imdadullah sent the manuscript to Maulvi Rashid of Deoband for a thorough review before he finalized it. In several letters to Rashid he expressed concern about its safe receipt in Deoband. He sent the manuscript via Haji Ismael Saharanpuri, a private press owner, who had visited him in Mecca. In several letters to Maulvi Rashid he expressed concern about its safe receipt in Deoband. He explains to Rashid that the manuscript is a compilation of forms of devotion (azkar va ashghal) of the Chishti and other Sufi silsilas that came to his notice via the elderly wise men (buzurg) of the Qadari and Chishti silsila. He wanted him to read it and edit it if necessary. He gave him a free license to change words and inappropriate phrases and bring the corrected version to his use29. (isk awwal sei akhit tak baghor malakhat kar kei jo kutch kam va zyada karna manzur ho yaa alfaz va abarat ghair muhawara ho durust kar kei kaam mein layein). In another letter to Rashid he expresses relief on the news that the Risala Zia-ul Qulub reached Hindustan safely. He wants it to be read by him and others carefully and prays that ‘God makes it acceptable and beneficial’30. (Allah tala isko maqbul aur hadi karoi). The book was published in Meerut by the notable maulvi Abdul al Hakim, who was the brother of Abdul Karim Rais and Shaikh Ilahi Baksh thekedar of Meerut. This wealthy publisher family had offered to publish it free of cost. Imdadullah, took their offer and requested maulvi Qasim to personally take the manuscript to Meerut and hand it over to Munshi Mumtaz Ali who would oversee its publication in their press (Chapakhanah).31 Imdadullah also wanted people in the Arab-o-phone world to read his book. And thus an Arabic translation was urgently required. He organized this via his well-known reformist friend Ashraf Ali Thanawi,

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who got it translated and printed in Hindustan. He was also given the additional task of exporting the printed copies to Mecca. This indicated Imdadullah’s continued dependence on Hindustani support networks that enabled him to survive as a refugee in Mecca. It was because of such contacts that he was able to publish and disseminate in multiple languages various edition of the Zia ul-Qulub in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire which were heavily impacted by the reformist religious atmosphere of the earlier Wahabi regime. Urging Thanawi to get the Zia ul-Qulub immediately translated and published in the private press of his acquaintance Abdul Rahman Khan he informs him that the manuscript has been dispatched via Maulvi Muhammad Husain Allahabadi. He reminds him that the latter too has promised all assistance to get it published. He underlines the urgency of the Arabic version reaching the Ottoman world of Arabia, Egypt and Daghistan as the people there do not know Persian and Hindustani. He writes: ‘Aapp kei pir bhai ahl-i-Arab jo ji yahan makkah mukarramah aur madineh munawwarah aur Misr va danistan vaghaira Arab kei mulk mein hain bo jah nawafiq honei zaban farsi aur hindi kei go naa seekhnei aur au tariq saluk vaghaira …..tarjumah arbi risalah Zia ul-Qulub musannifah faquir azizum maulvi Muhammad Husain sahib Allahabadi tabah karnie ko lei gaye hain. Filhal tarjumah Arabi risala arsha murshid ka Abdul Rahman Khan sahib kei matbai mein Khan sahib sie tabah karra lein32’.

He asks him to get at least 100-200 copies published, and promises payment at the earliest. He asks him to take particular care of the paper and the quality of binding. He wants that he should be consulted incase any clarification is required33. In subsequent letters he continues to enquire about the status of the publication and the urgency of sending the Arabic version quickly to the Hijaz : (Maulvi Muhammad Husain

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sahib Allhabadi ko tehrir karein keh agar Zia ul-Qulub Arabi tabah ho gayi ho to bahut jald matlah karein’). He stresses on the urgency of obtaining the copies because ‘people of Arab, Syria and Istanbul will be able to access it and that will make him happy. (aksar masanih Arab va sham va istanbol…..faqir bhee dekh kar khush hoga.).34 Imdadullah the Deobandi Sufi with a Difference Imdadullah’s literature transferred to Mecca the Indian brand of Sufi meditation (tassawuf). In the tradition of the Delhi Naqshbandi Sufi Shahwaliullah this combined the reformist emphasis on tauhid and the holy scriptures with the Sufi salience on the spiritual leader (murshid/ pir) as the moderator of individual practice. And this was, as we mentioned earlier, to a large extent possible because the Naqshbandi mujadids had from the late 18th century established their niche in Meccan society35. However, both the Zia ul-Qulub and his book in Arabic FaisalahHaft-i Maslah exude an extraordinary spirit of accommodation that went far beyond Shahwaliullah’s gentle blend of tauhid and the Sufi organisational format. These texts were also a step ahead of the Deobandi tradition that carried forward Shahwaliullah’s combination of tauhid with its stress on the scriptures, and the Sufi emphasis on the allegiance to the shaikh or leader as the mediator between God and the individual. Imdadullah’s invocation of the Islamic tradition of mutual faith and trust (i’temad) and consensus (ijma) to strike a middle ground on which virtuous Muslim conduct could be standardised reflects the improvisation of both his Delhi and Deoband intellectual legacy. His location in Mecca was critical to his ability to improvise. Here, his interaction with Ottoman officers posted in the Hijaz, and his shared religious and political experiences with Muslims from all over the world, offered him a wider intellectual and cultural arena to construct a far more embracive Muslim cosmopolitanism than Shahwaliullah or the Deobandis. Indeed, Ottoman Mecca had emerged

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as a critical centre outside British territories from where fugitives like Imdadullah could nurture global aspirations to de-centre the hold of British imperial hubs like London. Imdadullah used Mecca’s critical location at the interstice of the British and Ottoman imperial space to maintain a steady contact with his intellectual peers in British India. As we saw above he wrote the Zia ul-Qulub in interaction with colleagues in Hindustan. He also relied on books from India via which he hoped to impact the Hijaz with the Indian Naqshbandi mujadidi form of Islam. Like many reformists in Hindustan he too delivered lectures in Maulana Kairanwi’s madrasa Saulatiya on texts, like the Masnavi-i Rum and the scriptures, using 19th century concepts of professionalism and scientific reason. This offered him a forum to interact with an international Muslim audience as the madrasa had students and visitors form all over the world. But he moved ahead of his Indian colleagues in his bid to end intra-tradition conflict. This mission required him to obtain knowledge about all forms of Islamic customs and beliefs. And thus he displayed a unique obsessive drive to know about the intellectual productions in Hindustan. This enabled him to identify the mooted issues that divided the community. He sought to iron out intra-tradition differences in his own books. Predictably, he expressed also a keen desire to get a feedback from Hindustan for his own works, and at the same time ensure their easy availability in Hindustan. His aim was to use his literary productions to unite the umma, across the imperial assemblages. His books both crafted and popularised a consensual Muslim public conduct. He hoped to weld the South Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim worlds together via this conduct. The thriving networks of traders, pilgrims, visitors, litterateurs and scholars that constituted the bridgehead between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds has a history that predates the history of 19th century imperialisms36. In an age of steamships, print and consular webs, the imperial borders hardened via the introduction

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of more rigorous official documentation. But that did not mean the automatic plugging of the porous zones of the past. Paradoxically, the imperial networks made the enigmatic underbelly of Empires even more vibrant. And thus Imdadullah cashed on the movement of men and books between the British and Ottoman worlds to further his own agenda of constructing a united umma around a universally agreeable public conduct. His book supply from India included the Koran with commentaries on its margin (hashiya) by Abdullah bin Abbas. These commentaries explained and gave the context of Koranic verses using reason and rationality. This reformist strand of Hindustan was the need of the hour in the Hijaz so as to iron out differences within the tradition. He introduced them in the Hijaz and soon they were in popular demand. In several letters that he wrote to Maulvis Qasim and Yaqub of Deoband he indicates the demand of this particular edition of the Koran. He said that people were willing to pay him the money for such copies. However, he agreed to accept payment only after the receipt of the copies37. (kei Koran sharif mutarjam kee paanch cheh jild kei uskei hashiyeh par Abduall bin Abbas kee tafsir matbau huyee munshi sahib sei kah kar zaroor bheinje,Inkee qimat jo kutch matbai mein hai likhein kee iss jagah chand ashkhas bahut shaaiq hain aur unkee qeemat rakhtei hain.Magar mai nei naheen lee aur kah diya hai keh Koran sharif kee jidein aanei parr bheinje.). In addition books like the Tafsir-i-Arwah-i Salasa of hafiz Ilahi Baksh Saharanpuri also reached him. His letters indicate that visitors to the Hijaz carried these books back and forth from Hindustan, and also acted as conduits for the money that he paid for the purchases. And that some of these books like the Tafsir that was carried by one hafiz Abdullah were written in Hindustan in consultation with Imdadullah himself. In a letter to maulvi Rashid Ahmad of Deoband he confirms that the Tafsir has in it what ever was told to by him to its author Ilahi Baksh38. (jo kutch bhee hafiz mazkur ko likha gaya thaa usko kaha

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gaya jiska jawab uskee tahrir sei wazeh hoga’). His other letters, for instance to hakim Ziauddin, reveals his interest in several magazines and booklets (risalas) from Hindustan that he is always desirous of obtaining39. He also received risala Qaul Faisal an Aziz and read it from beginning to end and commented on it.40 The flow of literature from Hindustan was matched by his efforts to siphon his own books there for the widest possible readership. The production, circulation and translation into Urdu and Arabic of the Zia ul-Qulub, as we saw above, was one such case in point. In the Zia as well as in his other books like the Faisalah Haft-i Maslah the balance between scripture and Sufi practices, and the middle ground that he struck on the issue of forms of public devotion like zikr, mouloud urrs and qawwali41 stood out as his unique Meccan signature. Indeed, it is via such literature that he continued to influence his peers in Hindustan about the benefits of this Muslim cosmopolitanism. And this made him distinct from his peers and contemporaries in Deoband. Barbara Metcalf has shown how Deoband underlined its basic commitment to the idea of tauhid and focussed more on the study of scriptures - the manqulat (Koran and Hadith). Alongside, there was an adoption of the Sufi format in forging social relationships between Deobandis. Thus teachers claimed multiple initiation to Sufi orders like the Chishti, Naqshbandi and Qadari and adopted select rituals from each of them. They appropriated some of their rituals of allegiance like bait or taking oath on the leader, and zikr. But abhorred those forms of Sufi rituals that involved public devotion to leaders, consumption of Sufi literature, and ritual observances at graves and Sufi hospices (khanqahs). According to them such forms of devotion were reserved only for God who had such exceptional powers of ghaib (unknown) that even the Prophet did not possess. In the process of this selective appropriation of the Sufi way they ended up forming an exclusive club –their own Sufi silisila with the 19th century stress on a single spiritual

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guide-the leader. The Deobandi brand of Sufism was exclusive as it eliminated difference within the community of Muslims by narrowly tailoring local custom and ritual to scriptural legitimacy42. In this sense Imdadullah emerged as a very important Sufi guide to the Deobandis most of whom took bait on him.43 Yet, given his location at the imperial crossroad of Mecca, and his global aspiration for a trans-nationalism forged as an embracive Muslim cosmopolitanism, the differences between his eclectic inclusivity and the Deobandi exclusivity were all too apparent. But that did not deter his devotees in Deoband to regard him as their shaikh. Metcalf explains this narrowly in terms of the concept of sheikh in the19th century that was different from the Sufi shaikh of earlier times. According to her it was more an attachment to the individual per se not to the values of his entire silsila. It was the affinity of the heart that was the link (qalbi munasabat). And thus Rashid Ahmad trusted Imdadullah immensely and took bait on him despite the latter upholding customs and practices abhorred by the Deobandis44. Perhaps there is a wider history of imperialism and its negotiation by individuals at the cusp of Empires that needs to be fore-grounded to explain this un-seeming compatibility between Deobandis and Imdadullah. The connected worlds of the British and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century that gave a new twist to the earlier networks of traders, scribes and pilgrims that had connected the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean societies offered an arena of possibilities which could be used by individuals at the cusp of Empires. Thus Naqshbandi mujadids from Delhi and people of the Deobandi intellectual lineage, like Imdadullah, could evolve, connect with and influence in new ways their intellectual peers in Hindustan. As we saw above Imdadullah’s Zia-ul Qulub and other books like the Faislah Haft-i Maslah struck a conciliatory chord in mooted matters like forms of devotion and public rituals: zikr, urrs, mouloud, and fatiha . In contrast, the dictums (fatwas) of the Deobandis on these issues tailored them

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strictly to scriptural legitimacy and produced a rigid code of conduct that underlined their exclusivity45. And yet Imdadullah never lost his stature in the Deobandi circuits. Indeed his colleagues there helped in the publication and circulation of his books. This was a measure of his success in projecting his cosmopolitanism with its global aspirations as a counter which could de-centre British imperial hold over Indian Muslim subjects. This made him popular across Empires as he crafted a civilizational and spiritual space for Muslims that straddled imperial borders. And his ability to carve out this space as a political and cultural alternative to the British imperium made him an attractive individual in Hindustani circuits his differences with other sects notwithstanding. In one of his many letters to maulvi Yaqub of Deoband he urges him to incite his students to the idea of continuous struggle to achieve their aims. This he says is the true definition of jihad. He calls it the Jihad -i Akbari. (koshish va jahad sei farigh na hona chahiyei khususan ayam qabz mein keo jihad akbari hai)46. And such an aim he argued can be attained through unity of the umma. This meant an inclusivity that embraced the warring sects via the accommodation of both the scriptures as well as the diverse range of Sufi devotions. He argues that this formula is offered in the Zia ul-Qulub. And thus he promotes the book in Hindustan as an advisory guide that has a solution to all problems. Indeed, he recommends that its contents, rather than the verses (ayats) from the Koran, be used as talismans (taviz) that are distributed by the Sufis47. Again shifting the focus away from the Koran and derivative texts like the Tibb-i Nabawi, that were being showcased as guidance literature in the 19th century reformist climate, Imdadullah promotes his book Zia ul-Qulub as the perfect guide (mushir-i kamil). He recommends its ayats for the cure of all kinds of physical ailments and spiritual problems for which people seek his help. He says that on the request of his devotees he sent the Zia ul-Qulub, which was an

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excellent compilation of different forms of devotions (azkar, ashghal and maraqabat), to Hindustan (ba-khidamt moloween mousofeen). He wants maulvi Yaqub to copy it (uski naqal lein) and keep it safely with him .He advises him to use it as his ‘guide and adviser’ (usko apnaa Peshwa banayein). He wants him to give it an exalted status and keep it away from infidels (munkirs). He reiterates that in the book he has laid out the norms of proper conduct and behaviour (tariqa saluk). He wants Yaqub to spread its message and assures him of good results (mufid hoga). Thus for instance he suggests to a young man, who gets distracted on seeing a beautiful woman, to concentrate instead on the love of God48. In letters to Abdul Wahid Khan he reveals further that the discussions on saluk (conduct) that are included in the Zia ul-Qulub also include ‘proper’ rituals and decorum that are to be followed during homage to the Prophet’s mausoleum (tarkib ziyarat). He claims that it has advise and solutions for appropriate conduct to be followed on a range of other pious occasions as well. He reiterates that his book is the perfect guide (kamil murshid). Indeed he wants him to regard it as murshid kamil and use it as the trademark talisman (taviz) of his khanqah (iss ko murshid kamil jankar apnee khanqah taweez-banayein). He urges him to seek clarifications from him, if required, via letters.49 And in another letter to him he reiterates his wish that the book be regarded as the guide to the right path (murshid wa hadi raah). Its sacrosanct nature was underlined by the dictat to keep it away from the undeserving people (na ahal). And in response to Wahid Khan’s query about the cure for a particular kind of ailment he once again reverts him to the Zia. He says, ‘keep following the Sultan-i Nasir devotion that is listed along with its procedures in the Zia ul-Qulub’. (Azalah kei liye Sultan al-Nasir ka shaghal jo kitab Zia al Qulub mein main uskee tarkib marqum hai kartei rahein’)50. And the best example of his concern that his brand of cosmopolitanism reach Hindustan was reflected in his continuous

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anxiety about the safe transit of his eclectic texts like the Zia-ul Qulub and the Masnavi to his homeland. Indeed, he had these books published in Hindustan and monitored their wide circulation with keen interest. He used his networks both familial and social with traders, publishers, merchants and the literate service gentry of North India to ensure the widest possible circulation of his Meccan productions. In a letter to Maulvi Qasim and Yaqub he expresses concern about the safe delivery of his manuscripts to Hindustan. He writes, ‘inkee [manuscripts] raseedon sei itlass bakshein.51 He also urges them to send a copy of the manuscript (nuskha) to Maulvi Shaikh Ilahi Baksh thekedar Meerut for the purpose of its publication and wider distribution52. And in another letter he expresses concern on the report to him from maulvi Abdul Hakim, resident of Meerut, that the risala Zia ul-Qulub had not reached him. He wants Qasim and Yaqub to deliver the risala to him personally. He states that if Abdul Hakim is unable to publish it then he recommends the name of Maulvi Muhammad Ahsan as he too has shown willingness to publish it. But he insists that not less than 100 copies of it be published and that it would cost Rs. 100 to do so53. The Zia was not the only text he exported and the reception of which he followed in Hindustan. This was true of most of the books that he wrote while in Mecca. In a letter to hakim Ziauddin he wants to know if the Manajat that he wrote and sent to him reached safely. Always keen that his books be circulated far and wide he requests his friends to ensure that they are copied and circulated widely. He wants ladies like Hamshirah Bi sahibah and a relative (azizah) Umat al Jaib, as well as lady (musamat) Bi Khairan to be contacted as possible copiers of the text. He urges Ziauddin to ask other people as well to copy it and make it their regular companion (wazifa banayein)54.

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Imdadullah: The bridge between Darul-ulum Deoband & the Madrasa Saulatiya in Mecca It is significant that Imdadullah who was in touch with his peers in Deoband and corresponded with them regularly (compiled as Marqumat-i Imdadiyah) not only inspired the foundation of Deoband from Mecca and contributed to its finances, but also tried to impact it with his Meccan brand of cosmopolitanism. Imdadullah always referred to himself as fakir in all his correspondence with Deoband. Despite his difference of approach with Deoband vis-à-vis the extent of his orientation towards the rituals of Sufi devotion, he continued to work with the seminary and never gave up his efforts to influence it. In letters to Deoband stalwarts like Maulvi Rashid, Ahmad Hasan, maulvi Qasim Naunatawi and others he tried to draw their attention to the merits of his prescriptive book on Sufi devotions (zikr and ashghal) Zia ul-Qulub. Deobandis were also initiated in Sufi silsilas but maintained restrain: they adopted the organisational format of khanqahs and silsilas but kept away from ritual practices centred around the murshid. Indeed, they sheared Sufism off its many ritualistic frills and tailored it narrowly to the Koran and Hadith. In contrast, Imdadullah drew his Deobandis peers towards certain forms of devotion that were murshid centric. For instance, he insisted that maulvi Rashid carry on with the zikr and shaghal regime that he recommends as that will benefit him. (aur jo kutch zaruri zikr va shaghal fakir sei pahuncha hai kartei rahenin insha-allah fayada hoga). Indeed he also recommends specific forms of meditation (muraqbah) to him. But in all these the murshid was the pivot. He says that for peace of mind after the morning or the dusk prayers (maghreib) he should go into muraqbah and imagine that he is sitting in front of his murshid. He should visualise as if something from the murshid’s heart is being transmitted into his heart. He promises that he too will follow the same format of meditation55.(iss taraf bhee uss taraf ka khyal kareinge).

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And much of his prescriptions, derived from Sufi forms of devotion, are listed in the Zia ul-Qulub that he recommends to his peer group in Deoband as a book for regular consultation. In various letters to maulvi Abid Hasan he reiterates the significance of the Zia ul-Qulub as the prescriptive guide for devotions to be consulted regularly at Deoband. He urges people there to consult it, seek clarifications on it from maulana Rashid and if in doubt write to him directly56. In letters to the Deobandi teacher Wahid Khan he reiterates the significance of the right path (mustaqim) and the critical role of the murshid and pir as the guide to lead one on that path57. Once again, he urges maulvis Rashid and Qasim to relent on the rigid stand they had taken against the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday (mouloud) . He encourages them to create a consensus or agreement (itifaq) on the issue between different sects, rather than fan dissent (ikhtilaf) and differences (nafsaniyat) because of their rigidity. He urges maulvi Rashid to deliberate on this issue and as per his advise adopt a middle path58. He demonstrated the benefits of introducing unity of the umma via propagating a middle path by his own example. Thus, alongside, his commitment to Sufi devotions and public rituals like the mouloud he encouraged equally the dissemination of the scholarly disciplines of Hadith, Koran and jurisprudence (manqulat) that the Deoband seminary was famous for. He writes to maulvi Sayyid Ahmed of Deoband that he is very pleased to learn of the syllabus and academic update of the students who learn Hadith, (ilm-i Hadith), commentaries (ilm-tafsir), and jurisprudence (fiqh). But once again he wishes that they combine theological studies (ilm-i dini) with an involvement in understanding their own inner self. (mashghul-i batin). Indeed he calls this a permanent duty (farz-i dayni ) and absolutely essential59. And in another letter to maulvi Rashid he reiterates his satisfaction for the lectures (dars) that he gives on ilm-i dini at the seminary60. Indeed in a letter to Sayyid Muhammad Abid Hasan, (later principal of Deoband) he suggests that its better that he stay put in Deoband to teach the

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students rather than come to Mecca. The dars on ilm-i dini are clearly of extreme importance to Imdadullah to make this suggestion61. But apart from his correspondence with Deoband and meetings with hajis from Hindustan62 Imdadullah had another important source from where to disseminate his cosmopolitanism, and connect this unique strand to Deoband. This was the madrasa Saulatiya at Mecca that had been established near the Kaba by the Naqshbandi mujadid and 1857 fugitive Rahmatullah Kairanwi. This madrasa had made an impact in the region by exporting the Shahwaliullah kind of eclectic Islam. It had carried its accretive spirit forward by introducing in its curriculum 19th century texts like the Izhar ul-Haq that interpreted the Koran and showcased its knowledge as per the ‘modern’ notions of reason, science and rationality. Rahmatullah was not as much into public rituals and the adoption of the wide canvas of Sufi devotions as Imdadullah. Nor was he personally oriented towards the Chishti and Suhrawardi silsilas like him. And he had his differences with him also on the ways in which to connect with peers in Hindustan. Yet, his madrasa shared Imdadullah’s broad vision of a Muslim cosmopolitanism that straddled Empires, created a civilizational and spiritual space between them and united the umma globally. This cosmopolitanism, in harmony with its internal differences, was their alternate to the British imperium from which both these men had escaped. Thus, unlike Rahmatullah, Imdadullah considered money collected for him in Hindustan unacceptable and even offensive (khilaf marzi), and preferred to call himself a fakir (ascetic) who united the umma through a spiritual consensus on mooted issues63. Yet, he was happy to deliver lectures at Madrasa Saulatiya to the students of Rahmatullah. Indeed, Imdadullah encouraged a healthy traffic of students from Deoband to the madrasa Saulatiya. He hoped that they would become the conduit by which the Meccan ‘modernism’ of the Rahmatullah brand and his cosmopolitanism based on standardised forms of public conduct would reach Hindustan and transform the reformist seminaries there. In a letter

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to hakim Muhammad Ziauddin he writes that he had received some students from Hindustan (talib-i haq) who had come to stay with him and study in Mecca. These also included maulvi Muhammad Muhiuddin Moradabadi, maulvi Allahadad Punjabi, Maulvi Rahim Baksh and mulla Murad sahib (sarf waste talb-i haq kei ek sal faqir kei paas qayam kareinge)64. And in another letter indicating the regular flow of people form Hindustan he writes that hafiz Ahmad Hasan desires to visit Mecca this year. Imdadullah wanted most of these Hindustani students and visitors to study at the madrasa Saulatiya. He writes to Ziauddin that if possible he should send also as their fellow traveller (ham rah) the son (farzand) of Maqsud Ahmad to Mecca. He wanted the boy to study at the madrasa Saulatiya and recommended that Rs. 50/ -from the account of mualana Rashid Ahmad or Ahmad Hasan be given to him as travel expense65. And in many letters he advised him how to pass on to his students what he had learnt form his elders (buzurg). In other words he stressed the significance of not just manqulat and scriptural knowledge for students, but also put a premium on devotional aspects that were passed on from the older to the younger generation orally66. Imdadullah who was already in Mecca when Rahmatullah Kairanwi arrived there warmly welcomed him on his first meeting. They performed the tawwaf (circum-ambulation of the kaba) and sai (ritual of travelling between the hills of Safa and Marwah) together. Later, they met at Imdadullah’s house to discuss their circumstances and future course of action67. Kairanwi was always part of his jalsa (gatherings) that strategized on how to bring the umma together spiritually and make them politically aware of the Hindustan story. Indeed, Imdadullah became so close to Kairanwi that he missed his long absences from Mecca during the latter’s visits to Istanbul. In a letter to Rashid Ahmad Gangoi of Deoband he expressed his wish that Kairanwi who was in Istanbul return to Mecca at the earliest. He said, ‘Aur maulvi Rahmatullah sahib bhee Istanbul mein tashrif rakhtei hain. Khuda tala maulvi sahib ko jald layei’68.

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The gentle blending of Sufi devotion that borrowed from all the 4 silsilas and the Shahwaliullah brand of Naqshbandi reformism became the signature of Imdadullah’s dars and tadris (lectures and discussions) at the madrasa Saulatiya. According to Imdadullah this formula was the best way to cope with the new circumstances of the time. The presence of the sheikh as the moderator was significant as he would be the human agency of interpretation that would enable Muslims to cope with the changing times without abandoning their religious beliefs and practices. The endemic potential of resilience in the Muslim tradition that was tapped not just via the interpretative Self but also through the leadership of a guide became his political advice for the umma. And this was a far cry from the reformist doctrines of the early 19th century Urdu texts written by followers of Shahwaliullah like Inayat Ali and Khurram Ali who privileged the holy text and the individual readings of them and rejected the leader centric Sufi devotion. Indeed, the inclusive interpretative formula of Imdadullah Makki that combined ashghal, azkar (repeatedly praising God) with the act of the leader offering hidayat (right path) and irshad (showing the right way) became the trans-imperial political formula for Muslims living under European influence. This produced a system - nizam - that offered a way out to Muslims living under foreign occupation. They needed to lean on the correct interpretation of tradition for guidance rather than shunning religion all together. Imdadullah co-opted the Sufi way of seeking guidance from a sheikh in matters of interpreting normative religion, rather than reliance on self-judgement alone. He emphasised that without the murshid one should not follow the tariqas of azkar (repeatedly praising God) or that of ashghal. He equated the role of the murshid to that of the physician. Just like medicines should not be taken without the guidance of the physician so spiritual matters also should first be consulted with the leader (murshid) 69. As he further underlined, ‘Sufiyah kei azkar aur asghal ka faida jab hee hota hai jab isse makhsus tariqe sei muqarrar tadaad mein parrha jayei.’(the Sufi way is useful

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only when it is applied in a certain way in a certain amount)70.Thus the company of the spiritual guide –sohbat sheikh became the signature of what came to be regarded as the Imdaduddin brotherhood- silsila Imdadiyah71. And the political stance of this argument borrowed heavily from his Indo-Persianate legacy where political theorists, like Abul Fazl, had defined kingship using the analogy of the physician. The adoption of leader centric Sufi devotional rituals like the urrs and the qawwali only underlined the salience of individual leadership in the trans-imperial civilizational imperium that he had in mind. And this larger agenda explains Deoband’s bonhomie with him despite their difference on the finer aspects of custom and practice. Conclusion Cosmopolitanism has been viewed as a melting pot ideology that is incompatible with religions like Islam that hinge on one God and a singular path to him72. More recently historians have argued that there is no necessary incompatibility between it and religious traditions.73 Nile Green has shown how colonial Bombay emerged as a cosmopolitan hub that knitted Indian Islam’s sacred geographies with those of the Hijaz.74 And E. Simpson and K. Kresse have questioned the dichotomies of reformist ‘high’ Islam and popular ‘little’ Islam to show how both often converged to produce an Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism as a form of standardized Muslim virtuous public conduct. This offered the conceptual space in the Indian Ocean littoral in which the community could weld together75. Mark Frost has argued that the use of imperial networks rereoriented older repertoires of wisdom as new forms of ‘intellectual sociability’ and discursive activity76. Tim Harper has highlighted the construction of a more cosmopolitan Malay diaspora in Singapore that was similarly constructed.77 And Isabel Hofmeyr has indicated the many different political and social regimes that the ‘modern’ printing press was harnessed to, so as to fashion a trans-national world.78

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This essay has shown that Indian Muslim cosmopolitanism, as it evolved between Empires, was unique. Its protagonists were not conditioned by the British raj in the manner of their anglicized port city brethren. Instead, they were products of the Indo-Persianate world: Urdu literate, Persophone and Arabophone. They wrote simultaneously in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world combined with a religious education that made them gentlemen. Many of them were men of religion trained in the Delhi Naqshbandi sufi Shahwaliullah’s tradition with its emphasis on unity and inclusivity based on scriptures. Their differences with port city anglicized intellectuals notwithstanding, they too were impacted by the 19th century economic, cultural and intellectual challenges posed by the politically ascendant Europe. They saw Europe more as a civilizational and spiritual challenge, rather than a territorial bound political one. And they conceptualised the Muslim space that they carved out between Empires also as an intellectual and civilizational zone that transcended Empires and territory. It is here that they hoped to weld Muslim unity around virtuous conduct and meet the Western challenge. Ottomanists have tried to understand Muslim trans-Empire connections as a form of pan-Islam that was driven by the domestic and foreign compulsions of the late 19th century Ottoman Empire in crisis. Selim Deringil focused on the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in the Hamidian era that triggered a Caliph centric pan-Islam to reach out to the larger world for legitimacy79. Cemil Aydin shows how this panIslam was tanzimat inspired and driven by its principles of equality and justice to all80. It was eager to tie up with pan-Asian aspirants from Japan81. In the context of India, Muslim reform in the late 1819th centuries is seen to have triggered connectivity across the globe.82 Barbara Metcalf and Ulrike Stark show how the new print culture of the 19th century was quickly used by reformist Muslims to forge transnational connections.83. And from the 1920s these connections got a

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new spin that reached out to the illiterate in the form of the Tablighi Jamat or preaching society84.Ayesha Jalal has discussed the issue of Muslim global aspirations via her analysis of intellectual thought that balanced Muslim particularism with universalism. This enabled the individual to carve out identities in innovative ways. And for a later period Selcuk Esenbel has shown pan-Islamism across the board as the ‘history of international relations of nationalism’ that fitted with the Asiatic political ambitions of imperial Japan85. This essay has shown that Muslim cosmopolitanism was produced by harnessing both the Indo-Persianate gentleman training as well as the long tradition of commercial and intellectual contacts between Hindustan and the Middle East to the new opportunities offered by the imperial highways of communication and print capitalism. This embracive cosmopolitanism aimed to weld the umma together via a standardized public conduct and nurtured global aspirations. It was produced at the cusp of empires and owed its existence to individuals who exploited certain ‘moments’ of 19th century imperial politics to their advantage. Imdadullah’s career shows that Muslim cosmopolitanism benefitted from the ‘imperial moment’ when the post 1857 British Empire tightened its noose on Muslims, and the post Crimean War (1856) Ottoman Empire hurt by its marginalization from the European imperial club began to project a pro-Muslim image to garner internal sympathy and external support. Sultan Abd al- Hamid ( 1876-1909) projected himself as a just and benevolent Muslim sovereign with an eye to a place in the Western league on the strength of his influence in the Muslim world.86. This political moment created the ideal context in which Muslim cosmopolitanism as an inclusive trans-nationalism could be produced at the cusp of Empires and exported globally from an imperial cross-section like Mecca. The foregrounding of the larger histories of 19th century imperialisms thus provides the ideal context to understand the remarkable career of Imdadullah.

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Notes 1

For the British context as the frame for trans-national or global histories see D. Lambert & A. Lester Eds, Colonial lives across the British Empire: imperial careering in the long 19th century, 2006, p2, 27; D.Ghosh and D.Kennedy Eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the trans-colonial world, Delhi, 2006, p.1. 2. Hakim Maulana Muhammad Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq Ali Ashraf al Khalaq, Delhi, 1981,pp.27-30. This is an interesting account of his life and times. He went to Gango, Punjab, to meet Gangoi one last time. Rao Abdullah Khan who was a zamindar of Panjlasa, district Ambala, and his murid and close to the colonial government offered him refuge. His arrest warrant put Khan in trouble as he was giving him shelter in a room in his stables. This was seen as an act of rebellion from a loyal zamindar. A govt. officer snooped around and reached the stables. But when he entered the room he found that Imdadullah ‘s ablution vessels were there but there was no trace of him. Khan heaved a sigh for relief and the officer left. When Khan re-entered he found Imdadullah sitting there absorbed in his prayers. 3. B. Ahmed, Tazkira Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, Delhi, 2005p.49; Maulana A. Adravi, Mujahid Islam. Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Delhi, 2004, p.301. 4. Adravi, Mujahid Islam, p.301; Ahmed, Tazkira, pp. 49-50 5. Adravi, Mujahid Islam, p. 301 6. S.Alavi, ‘ “Fugitive Mullahs &outlawed fanatics”. Indian Muslims in 19th century trans-Asiatic imperial rivalries’, Modern Asian Studies (MAS), online May 2011. 7. M.F.Laffant, Islamic Nationhood and colonial Indonesia.The Umma below the winds, London, 2003, pp127-33; J.R.I Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East. Social and Cultural origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement, New Jersey, 1993, pp.1967. 8. A. Burton, ‘ Getting outside the global: re-positioning British imperialism in world history’, in C.Hall & K. McLelland Eds., Race, Nation & Empire: Making Histories 1750-to the present, Manchester, 2010, pp.199-216. 9. M. Harrison, ‘Quarantine, pilgrimage, and colonial trade, India 1866-1900’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 29 ,1994, pp.117-138; M.Miller, ‘Pilgrim’s progress: the business of the Hajj’, Past and Present, 191, May 2006, pp. 189-228. 10. W. Ochsenwald, Religion, society and the state in Arabia, the Hijaz under Ottoman control, 1840-1908,Ohio, 1984; W. Roff, ‘Sanitatation and security: The imperial powers and the nineteenth century Hajj’, Arabian Studies, 6, 1982, pp.143-60. 11. W-4087, Abdur Razzack, ‘Report on Mecca Pilgrims. Sanitation and Medical Report, 1879’, p. 121; Abdur Razzack, ‘ Report on educational facilities in the Hijaz in 1885’, A.L.P Burdett Ed., Records of the Hijaz 1798-1925, 10 vols., Slough, Archive Edition 1996, vol.4; S. Hurgronje, Mecca in the latter part of 19th century: daily life, customs and learning. Muslims of the East Indies Archipelago, 2nd edition, Brill, Leiden 2007.Fascinating details of political discussions that the pilgrims from India and Indonesia (jawahs) had about their European political masters and the strategies they worked out to come to terms with new circumstances. Indians always more critical of the British than the Malay and Jawah were about the Dutch. For a British

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report on the secret societies of all political hues in Mecca see FO 685/1, Consul Zohrab’s letter Book, 1879, ff. 381-386. 12. A.M.Schimmel, And Muhammad is His messenger. The veneration of the Prophet in Islamic piety, Berkeley, 1985; F. Robinson, ‘ Religious change and the Self in Muslim South Asia since 1800’, in F. Robinson Ed., Islam & Muslim history in South Asia, Delhi, 2000, pp105-21; S. Alavi , Islam & Healing. Loss and Recovery of an Indian Muslim medical tradition, 1600-1900, London, 2008. 13. Ali. H. Nadawi, Sirat Sayyid Ahmed Shahid, Lucknow, 7th edition, nd; Sayyid Muhammad Mian, Ulema-i Hind kaa Shandar maazi, vol.2, Delhi, 1957. 14. For urban poor and Egypt see J.R.I. Cole, ‘Of crowds & empires: Afro-Asian riots and European expansion, 1857-1882’, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Vol. 31, No. 1, Jan. 1989, pp.106-33. For Jeddah riots triggered by the slave trade controversy see Oshenwald, Religion, society and state in Saudi Arabia, pp.137-44. 15. Cole, Social & cultural origins of Egypt’s Urabi movement, pp.196-7. Militant Indian Sufi Ahmadullah Shah active in the 1857 riots in Lucknow lead the crowds in Cairo as well. 16. Cole, ‘Of crowds and empires’, p. 9. 17. Alavi, ‘Fugitive Mullahs’. 18. Imdadullah Makki, Tazqiat al-Qulub, Urdu Tr., Syed Abdul Mateen, Zia ul-Qulub, Matba-i Mujtaba, Delhi, 1346 Hijri, (1927), p3. 19. Ibid., pp.2-3. 20. Mateen, Zia, p.5. 21. Ahmed, Tazkira, pp.124-5 22. Ibid., p. 125; Mateen, Zia, pp. 8-50. 23. Mateen, Zia, pp.50-9. 24. Ibid., pp59- 75; Ahmed, Tazkira, p.126. 25. Mateen, Zia, pp.75-107. 26. Ibid., pp.83. Urges people to bathe, put perfume, imagine the Prophet sitting in front of you etc. 27. Ibid., pp.5. 28. Ahmed, Tazkira, p.127 29. Hazrat Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Marqumat-i Imdadiya (Writings of Imdadullah), Delhi, 1979, p. 55. Henceforth Marqumat. 30. Ibid., p. 65. 31. Ibid., p.130. It was translated in the lifetime of Imdadullah itself into Urdu as Tasfitah al-Qalub by Maulana Nizamuddin Ashaq Kairanwi and maulvi Muhammad Beg. The Urdu version was however published after his death in 1910 from Delhi. And since then has had several editions. 32. Maktubat-i Imdadiya, (letters written to Asharaf Ali Thanawi), Lucknow, 1915, letter no. 8, no page numbers. Henceforth Maktubat. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., letter No. 11. 35. F.Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahal &Islamic Culture in South Asia, London, pp.240-51.

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36. M. Cooke & B. Lawrence Eds., Muslim Networks. From Hajj to Hip Hop, North Carolina, 2005, pp.1-28. 37. Marqumat, p.47. 38. Ibid., p.55 39. Ibid., p. 61.Risal Hafiz sahib Raham allah. 40. Ibid., p.68. 41. Imdadullah Makki, Faislah Hafte Maslah.Tausihhat wa Tashreehat, Urdu Tr. By Mufti Muhammad Khalil Khan Barkati, Delhi, 1974. 42. B.D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India. Deoband, 1860-1900, Delhi, 2002, p.99-102, 156-9. 43. Ibid., pp.161-2. 44. Ibid., pp.161-2 45. Ibid., pp.149-52 46. Marqumat, p. 16. 47. Maktubat 48. Marqumat, pp.84-6 49. Ibid., p.87. 50. Ibid., p. 93. 51. Ibid., p.43 52. Ibid., p. 45 53. Ibid., p. 53 54. Ibid., p. 97 55. Ibid., p.51 56. Ibid, 115 57. Ibid., p.70. 58. Ibid., p. 113 59. Ibid., p.65 60. Ibid., p. 76 61. Ibid., p.77 62. Ibid., p. 111-2. In a letter to Ziauddin he says that he gets news from Hindustan via the hajis. And sends news of the Hijaz back to Hindustan also via them: ‘zabani hajaj kei malum hoga’. 63. Ibid., p. 119. In a letter to Hakim Muhammad Ziauddin he objects to the fact that relatives and associates had collected funds for him in Hindustan and sent them across to Mecca. He says this is the second time this has happened . He accepted the first time but this time again it was not proper to send money (achaa na kiya). He says that he only wants their well being (bahdudi ) and is not interested in their money/assets. (fakir aan azizon kee bahbudi chahta hai unkei mal par nazar nahin hai. Haq tala unhei khush aur khurram rakhei). He repeats that he is happy only if they are on the right path (rah-i-rast) and prays for their well being (khair). He says he is not interested in anything else. 64. Ibid., p.109 65. Ibid., p.108. 66. Ibid., p. 121.

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67. Adravi, Kairanwi, p.301. 68. Marqumat, p.37. 69. Ahmed, Tazkira, p. 76-77,101-2, 70. Ibid., p. 102. 71. Ibid., pp. 113-115 72. For the profane ideal of cosmopolitanism see K.A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a world of strangers ( London: W.W.Norton, 2006): 137-47 73. For the blend of the religious and the profane in the idea of the cosmopolitan see S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons. The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Imperialism (Cambridge Mass., 2005; Ho, The Graves of Tarim.; T.N.Harper, “Empire, Diaspora and Languages of Globalism, 1850-1914”. In A.G. Hopkins Ed. Globalization in World History, London, 2002; M. Frost, “Wider Opportunities’: religious revival, nationalist awakening and the global dimension in Colombo, 1870-1920”. Modern Asian Studies 26, 4 (2002): 937-967. 74. N.Green, “Saints, rebels and booksellers:Sufis in the cosmopolitanWestern Indian Ocean, ca.1780-1920”, in Simpson & Kresse Eds., Struggling with History: 125-166. 75. Ibid.: 24-26. 76. Frost, “Wider Opportunities”: 940-41. 77. Harper, “Globalism and the pursuit of authenticity”. 78. Isabel Hofmeyr, “Gandhi’s printing press: Indian ocean print Cultures and Cosmopolitanism”. In Kris Manjapra ed., forthcoming book. Title awaited. 79. Deringil, S, “Legitimacy structures in the Ottoman Empire: Abd al –Hamid II 18761909”. International Journal of Mid East Studies, 23:3 (1991):345-359. 80. C.Aydin, “The Muslim world as a site of global intellectual history, 1839-1924”, manuscript copy 2010. 81. C.Aydin, The politics of anti-Westernism in Asia: visions of world order in panIslamic and pan-Asian thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 82. F. Robinson, “The Islamic World: from world system to religious international”. In Religious Internationals in the Modern World, A. Green &V.Viaene ed. forthcoming. 83. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India; U. Stark, An Empire of Books. The Naval Kishore Press and the diffusion of the printed word in colonial India, Rani Khet, 2007, pp. 285-91 84. M.K.Masud, Ed. Travellers in Faith. Studies of Tablighi Jamat as a transnational Islamic movement for faith renewal, Leiden, 2000; Y.Sikand, Origins and Development of the Tablighi Jamat. 1920-2000.A Cross Country Comparative Study, Hyderabad, 2002. 85. S. Esenbel, “Japan’s global claim to Asia and the world of Islam: transnational nationalism and the World Power, 1900-1945”. American Historical Review, Oct. ( 2004): 1140-1170. 86. Aydin, ‘’The Modern world as a site of global intellectual history, 1839-1924’. Typescript. He argues that Abd al-Hamid’s desire for global status in the western league of Empires made the cosmopolitan sinews of the old Empire the template for Islamic unity: tanzimat driven ideas of equity, justice, rule of law and protection of minority rights became the key principles in the modernizing and centralizing

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agendas Sultan Abd al -Hamid (1876-1909). Later in the 1870 and 1880s however, domestic problems and international defeats would makes Sultans like Abd al Hamid turn this image to more traditional roles like being the Caliph of the Muslim world. See also S.Deringil, The well protected domains. Ideology and the legitimation of powers in the ottoman Empire 1876-1909, Oxford &New York,1998.

SAYYID JALAL AL-DIN KASHANI AND HABL AL-MATIN OF CALCUTTA Expatriate Press in the Political Discourse of Qajar Iran KINGSHUK CHATTERJEE 1

The Mashruteh (Constitutional) Revolution of 1906 was a major turning point in the gradual transformation of the Kingdom of Persia into the country that is modern Iran. The triumph of the Constitutionalist (Mashrutehkhwahi) cause was the moment when the principle of popular sovereignty came to be firmly lodged in the political lexicon of the Kingdom of Persia, and the discursive struggle over the identity of Iran and Iranians intensified in the public sphere. Much of this struggle was played out in the realm of the printed word from the second half of the 19th century, as both the literary world and the fledgling print media of Iran began to deliberate on such matters as who was an Iranian, and how was he to be governed. Given the repressive nature of the Qajar rulers of Iran, very often such deliberations could not be carried out freely and fairly within the territorial confines of the kingdom, hence protagonists of views that were out of favour with the Qajar court often had to seek refuge outside the country, and to try and mobilise public opinion behind their views. The weekly Habl al-Matin (“the firm cord”), published by the expatriate Iranian Sayyid Jalal al-din Kashani from Calcutta, was one of the two most important of such ventures, which undermined the authority of the Qajar Shahs and galvanised the Constitutionalist cause in Iran.

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In virtually every piece of the historical literature that has been generated on the Constitutional Revolution, there is a kind of general recognition of the cardinal role played by the Calcutta-based Habl al-Matin in the shaping of the Mashruteh cause. Indeed, coining the very phrase mashrutiyat is often attributed to the journal. The journal was respectfully referred to by contemporaries as the ruznameh-ye moqaddes (the sacred journal), and its publisher Sayyid Jalal al-din Kashani was given the honorific of Mu‘ayyid al-Islam (defender of Islam). During the post-1906 struggle between royalists and constitutionalists, Jalal’s brother Hassan took it upon himself to bring out a Tehran-based subsidiary daily edition of Habl al-Matin, and once it was cracked down upon he brought out yet another version from the town of Rasht. While its significance was duly recognised by contemporaries as much as scholars, there is, ironically, very little that has been written of the venture of Habl al-Matin and even less about its prime mover, Jalal al-din Kashani. This essay purports to be an exploratory foray in that very direction. It begins with a brief account of the rise of a public sphere in the 19th century Qajar kingdom of Persia, and the role played by print journalism in that process. It goes on then to look at the life of Jalal al-din Kashani and the role his Habl al-Matin played in shaping the political discourse of Persia during its heyday in the run-up to the Mashruteh revolution. In the third section, a brief account is provided of the gradual decline of its significance in the post-revolutionary period. Print Journalism and the Rise of Public Sphere in Qajar Persia Like many other Asian countries, the Qajar Kingdom of Persia went through a series of changes in the 19th century that fundamentally changed the character of the state. In the early 19th century the kingdom of Persia was notoriously weak, internally as much as externally. The ruling Qajar dynasty (which came to power in the 18th century

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during a period of political and social chaos) was plagued by financial hardships and hence never succeeded in consolidating its authority over the various tribal and non-tribal peoples of the land. Exercise of loose internal hegemony left it vulnerable to external threats – such as those that came from Tsarist Russia in the north and, to a lesser extent, British India in the south and the east.2 Faced with such formidable adversaries in the neighbourhood, the Kingdom of Persia intermittently tried to modernise the state and consolidate central authority – an agenda that came to be loosely called the Nizam-e jadid (lit. the new order). While some aspects of the reform agenda often came a cropper against powerful vested interests, other aspects somehow limped along and acquired a life of their own in a manner in which their original protagonists did not anticipate. The rise of the public sphere in Iran was one such outcome of the attempts at modernisation of the kingdom. Modernisation of the Qajar kingdom was attempted from a position of such great vulnerability that the rulers wielded little control over either the pace or direction of the change once they were undertaken. In the first half of the 19th century, Qajar Persia suffered two consecutive crushing defeats against Russia with its modern military, which were followed by humiliating treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkomanchai (1828) involving massive territorial losses and turning the Caspian Sea virtually into a Russian Lake. Alarmed by Russian penetration, bringing them closer to their Indian possessions, the British hastened into Persia to counterbalance Russian influence and create a buffer zone in Afghanistan. The British launched a campaign against southern Persia and extracted from the Shah the treaty of Paris (1857) whereby the Qajar rulers renounced all claims to Afghanistan. 3 Till the middle of the 19th century, the Qajar rulers officially maintained a policy of “equilibrium” [sic] – i.e. equal distance from both the powers. However, the increasing territorial contiguity with both British India and the Asiatic empire of Russia began a process

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of penetration of the Persian economy that the Qajars had neither the will nor the ability to prevent. Persia was made to grant a series of commercial capitulations to both Russia and Britain, which opened up Persia to their commerce after exempting them from high import duties and internal tariffs, local travel restrictions and jurisdiction of Shari‘ah law courts. Far more significant, though, were the series of economic concessions wrung out by both Russia and Britain from the 1860s.4 Dependent as the Qajar rulers were on badly trained and equipped tribal armies, both Britain and Russia proved far more advanced than Qajar Persia in terms of technology and military organisation. Hence, some people within and outside the Qajar state apparatus began to grow mindful of changes that the state required to be able to stand up to the foreign powers. Among the earliest of the proponents of such changes were the early 19th century Qajar Crown Prince Abbas Mirza5 and the Prime Minister Taqi Khan Farahani alias Amir Kabir 6 – both of whom emphasised on the creation of a centralised army of the European model, trained and equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry, and on bringing about wider changes in the country that would make such reorganisation both possible and sustainable. The money required for this purpose was meant to come from downsizing of court expenditures, commutation of tribal levy for military purposes and steep taxes on imported commodities. The reform programmes invoked stiff resistance from courtiers, tribal chieftains, provincial rulers and Britain and Russia –­ each for their own reasons.7 Thereafter, till 1905, piecemeal administrative reforms continued, but they never took the shape of a systematic programme to consolidate Qajar political authority in the Kingdom. Efforts at modernisation were launched as and when the Shahs could be persuaded of their existential necessity, and were carried out for such length time as the Shah was able to endure pressure from those opposed to the reforms. If the Shah was able to withstand

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resistance to his measures, they could be carried through to their logical conclusion – such as the introduction of the telegraph system in the 1860s, or the opening up of the Karun River to steamship navigation in the 1870s; if he failed to do so, they collapsed – such as streamlining expenditure. Occasionally, there came measures which the Shah introduced owing to a set of considerations, but his people embraced them for different reasons. One set of such measures happened to have been the introduction of newspapers in Persia, which played a pivotal role in the rise of public sphere in Iran. Although the earliest printing presses in Persia dated back to the seventeenth century Armenian press in Julfa near Esfahan, followed by other similar endeavours of the Christian communities in Persia, yet they had little ripple effect in the society around them (except by way of an occasional lithographic work).8 Printing technology began to spread only in the 19th century with a few lithographic presses set up in Tabriz and then Tehran in the 1820s as a part of Abbas Mirza’s agenda of modernising the kingdom, with machinery being brought in from Russia. Predictably the earliest books to be printed in these presses happened to be the Qur‘an (lest the ‘ulema resisted these as un-Islamic),9 but thereafter a good many literary, and historical texts were brought out, and even more importantly scientific and technical works were published in line with Abbas Mirza’s vision of modernising Persia.10 Partly as a spin-off from the rise of print culture in the kingdom, the first newspaper of Iran was published in January 1837. Mirza Saleh Shirazi, one of the five Iranians sent by Prince Abbas Mirza to study modern science and technology, persuaded the reigning monarch Muhammad Ali Shah to allow a monthly publication by the name of Akhbar-e Vaqayeh (News of Occurrences), carrying news both foreign and domestic (primarily to do with developments in the royal court where Shirazi was based) – the paper, however, was short-lived and is not known to have been existence after 1840 at the outermost.11

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Towards the middle of the century, the rise of print culture in Persia received a major boost. In 1851, the principal architect of the modernisation agenda in the Qajar kingdom during the 19th century, Amir Kabir set up the first major centre of western education in Iran, the Dar al-Fonun. Meant essentially to groom bureaucrats and technocrats alive to the needs of modernisation of the state, the college included in its curriculum subjects like military tactics, engineering, medicine, chemistry, and geology along with English, French and Russian.12 Given that most of the disciplines were completely novel to the kingdom, the Dar al-Fonun was provided with its own printing press, where it published its own text books. The press went on to churn out a huge volume of translated works across a wide variety of disciplines and vintages – introducing the people of Iran to a large medley of ideas to which they had little exposure, and facilitating the habit of reading printed material that were cheap and easier to access than the hand-made copies (which tended to be more expensive, and hence limited in their range). Amir Kabir was also instrumental in the publication of the Vaqayeh-ye Ittefaqiyeh (Current Affairs) [Renamed Roznameh-ye Dowlateh ‘Aliyeh-ye Iran in 1860], the most well-known among the initial publications from Persia. Beginning in February 1851 this weekly publication was purported to advance “education of the people, and to inform the citizens of this country of both internal and foreign affairs.”13 News of the royal court, of appointments of governmental officials and updates about the doings of the Shah dominated the news coverage in order to give the populace an “accurate” picture of government activities.14 The paper, however, did not have much of a readership, being confined mostly to government employees (for whom subscription was mandatory and deducted from their salaries), provincial and local authorities at various levels and the people at the court; a small number of copies were made available for distribution sale to the public from a shop in the Tehran bazaar.15 The paper did not

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seem to have gained much circulation outside the immediate circle of its original subscribers, because at 24 krans per annum (or 10 Shahis per copy) it was a quite expensive way to learn about life at the royal court. Bad roads and (therefore) slow postal service and high transport costs served to further limit circulation to those who considered it absolutely necessary to remain updated about what was going on in Tehran. Although journalism in particular did not emerge in a big way till well into the 1870s, a print culture was already beginning to emerge by the mid-19th century. There was a steady rise in literacy from the 1840s on account of entry of missionary schools and the rise of the Babi movement with a great emphasis on education on the one hand, and incipient Europeanisation of the upper echelons of society on the other – together, these contributed to the incremental growth in the demand for reading material. The rise of the Babi sect beginning in the late 1840s was also a development that caused great dislocation in the social and political landscape of Qajar Persia, and generated an extensive literature on its ‘heretical’ character.16 “The religious disputes, the literary movement, contact with Europe, and the changing social conditions were beginning to make the public more interested in events beyond the local sphere. And a literary black market in books and pamphlets was starting to supply forbidden information.”17 Situation had come to such a pass that in 1863 censorship was introduced by royal decree, saying “… publication of the books and pamphlets which are harmful and disastrous for the state and cause aversion and repulsion of tastes will not be allowed…”18 Over and above attempting to regulate the newly emergent public sphere, the reigning Qajar monarch Naser al-din Shah actively considered the flow of information to his people. To this end he brought into being three monthly publications apart from the Roznameh-ye Dowlateh – the Roznameh-ye ‘Ilmiyeh (the Scientific Journal, 1864, dealing with literary and scientific issues), Roznameh-ye Mellati

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(the National Journal, 1866, dealing with historical and biographical contents), and Roznameh-ye Daulati (the State Journal, dealing with court, national and foreign news. Their circulation, yet again, was essentially dominated by public officials who were mandated to subscribe to each of the three. A significant change in the contours of public space in Persia was discernible in the 1870s, in the wake of the introduction of telegraphic communication in the kingdom of Persia. Till as late as the 1860s news of the capital and the court travelled only intermittently to the provinces using official channels, and even more infrequently from the provinces back to the capital. A comparatively more regular source of information was to be found in the network of the bazaars, connecting the essentially regional economies revolving around regional entrepots and urban conurbations (viz. Tehran, Tabriz, Esfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, Zahedan, etc) within the kingdom of Persia – news and information moved along with commodities through the agency of the merchants who carried them from place to place. However, with the introduction of the telegraph system, news of and from the capital travelled much more swiftly to the provinces, and more importantly for the consolidation of Qajar central authority, back from the provinces to the centre – allowing Tehran to enjoy a degree of control over the regions unprecedented in the country’s history. Increase in the volume of information the telegraphs brought into the capital of what was happening in provinces was evident in the coverage of the official journals – by 1876, Roznameh-ye Daulati was running a full section on news from the provinces. The new official tri-weekly journal Iran (1871 onwards) was a good case in point of this changing face of journalism in Iran. Apart from containing court news, imperial decrees, appointments and dismissals, the assignment of posts and titles, the paper also included so-called “human interest stories” (news of disaster, weather, fire and local and city accidents) from all over the country, and increasingly from outside the kingdom as well. The

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pattern was followed up by the number of official publications from the provinces that began in the 1870s. The appetite for news of from the various regions and outside the country was growing principally on account of the incremental penetration of the economy of the kingdom by European powers, with Russia and Britain leading the pack. Introduction of telegraph, railways in a handful of sections of the country, steamship navigation shrunk the distances that had kept the kingdom divided into several isolated socio-economic and political spheres. Increase in the quantum of imported manufactured goods multiplied the total volume of internal trade, as hitherto untapped markets began to be prised open. Similarly, export of agricultural commodities – especially cotton, rice, tobacco, hides – eroded self-sufficiency of most of the local economies, began commercialisation of agriculture, and increased town-country links to a large extent. Consequently, instead of every regional and local bazaar dealing with the local economy around itself, the bazaaris began to deal with each other in an ever larger area that served to congeal several local economic units into one confederated unit. Since the process of integration was influenced by political decisions taken in Tehran, attention increasingly focussed on the capital – and even official newspapers began to gain a readership because they kept the people in the provinces posted about the concessions being granted in the capital. As Russian and British merchants were given special privileges, they began to affect the protagonists of all the various regional economies similarly. Needless to say, the opening up of Iran’s economy was not simply a tale of ruin and despair. There were many who took advantage of the European connection, emerging as a class of comprador capitalists, but these were either primarily small-time traders whose very existence was in jeopardy because of foreign competition, or people who wanted to make a fortune without having much of their own to invest.19 “Gradually, the merchants began to lose their hold on

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domestic markets, and by the end of the nineteenth century they were dominated by foreign companies. In the north the Russian merchants had about half of the foreign trade in hand, and in the south the British merchants handled the bulk of the transactions.”20 Here lay the roots of the emergence of a common antagonist for nearly every bazaari, the Khariji (foreigner) as a competitor for the victimised Iranian ‘self.’21 While Qajar documents reveal a sense of deep-seated grievance regarding the inability/unwillingness of the regime to safeguard its subjects from ‘external’ competition, no sense of that grievance was allowed to surface in the half dozen official periodical publications in the kingdom of Iran. The Ministry of the Press, set up in 1871, swiftly instituted a censorship board after a pamphlet issued by Sheikh Hashem Shirazi from Bombay, severely critical of the Shah, began to be circulated in the kingdom. The office of censorship effectively preempted anything even mildly critical of the regime being published, since no permission was ever to be granted.22 In this background a number of publications dealing with the condition of Iran began to appear outside the territorial limits of the kingdom, which – just like the pamphlet of Mirza Shirazi – began to be circulated among those segments of the Shah’s subjects who were not quite happy with the way things were. From around 1870s Iranian expatriates began to develop a periodical culture in Iran from their places like Egypt, Turkey, India, England and even France, secure from the reaches of censorship, that was harshly critical of the Qajar regime, and advocating the cause of reform through publications like Akhtar (Mirza Mehdi and Muhammad Taher Tabrezi), al-Urvat alWuthkha (Afghani), Qanun (Malkum Khan). Between 1870 and 1900, no less than 22 Iranian periodicals were published with a primarily Iranian audience in mind, advocating changes of the kind ranging from moderate reform to radical revolution. Of the 22, nearly threefourths came from India – Calcutta housed seven of these publications, Bombay four, Delhi, Karachi, Hyderabad and Aligarh one each.23 This

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was as much owing to the size of the Iranian community in different parts of India who retained strong links with their country of origin, as it did to dramatic improvements in connectivity between India and the Kingdom of Persia courtesy the telegraph and steamship navigation. But while most of these publications worked in short bursts and then disappeared after some time, the Habl al-Matin of Jalal al-din Kashani, published over a period of over three decades, probably exercised the greatest influence over the longest stretch of time. Jalal al-din Kashani: An Unlikely Journalist There is very little that is known for sure about Jalal al-din Kashani (1863-1926) before his Calcutta days, for there are no documents that have come to the notice of scholars. His family sources indicate that he came from a very ordinary traditional family in the central Iranian city of Kashan. He was probably trained as an akhund (one who reads the Quran), and even though he hardly ever made his living as an ‘alim, he never gave up the long flowing robe (the qaaba) and the white turban that identifies one. In what circumstances he left Iran is not known for certain. It would seem that like so many other ‘ulema of the lower echelons coming from small town and urban Iran, he engaged in trade to make ends meet. With opportunities opening up for long-distance commerce in the Persian Gulf region on account of steady British penetration in the second half of the 19th century, Jalal al-din left his homeland. He landed up in Calcutta sometime around 1888 when he was in his twenties after trying his hand in Turkey and Egypt, passing through Bombay, Madras, Penang, Java, Singapore and possibly Rangoon, dealing in carpets.24 Habl al-Matin was launched in December 1893 as a weekly Persian periodical, giving news of developments about the Kingdom of Persia and subsequently of those countries which had decent sized Persian communities – not in the sense of any Persian nation (which was yet to be formed) but first or second generation Persian immigrants. In its

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get up it resembled very much the Persian-language newspapers of its time in India, except that it was printed with movable type from 1897 – hence much more clear and legible in all its copies. It swiftly acquired a regular readership in Calcutta, Singapore, Rangoon and of course inside the Kingdom of Persia – furnishing as it did news from sarzameen-e Iran to those outside, and from outside Iran to those in the kingdom embracing technology of telegraphic communication (made available to private Persian clients from the late-1880s, and more widely in the 1890s). Jalal al-din was the motive force behind the publication. Initially, it would seem, he began the venture largely by himself, with crucial support being provided by his brother Sayyed Hassan Kashani. Subsequently the publication involved the support of quite a bit of professional help, including its managing editor from the sixth year, Muhammad Jawad Shirazi and Ali Asghar Rahimzada Safavi in the later years (hailing from other Iranian families settled in Calcutta, of whom absolutely nothing else seems to be known). Nevertheless, Jalal al-din remained the driving force behind the publication – to the point that despite having gone blind during the last decade of his life, he would still insist on writing all or most of the editorials himself. At that stage of his life, his daughter Fakr al-Sultan ‘Mo‘yedzadeh’ (Sakina) assumed charge of management of the publication as the Dabir-e Thani (Deputy Editor), and functioned as her blind father’s amanuensis, taking down his dictations of editorial pieces as he paced up and down the corridors of their McLeod street home.25 It can be said with some degree of certainty that Jalal al-din was able to bring out his journal with fairly detailed coverage of the kingdom of Persia as much as the lives of the widely dispersed community of the Persians on account of the improved connectivity provided by the colonial apparatus of the Raj. The range and depth of the coverage progressively expanded from around 1898, as the publication began to receive not only news but also contributions from inside the kingdom

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of Persia, availing of the telegraphic facility erected by British India, which was made available for public usage by then. The regularity of such contributions, along with the claim that the contribution was coming from “Mukhbir-e Ma” (Our Correspondent), makes one suspect that even though the journal may not have had correspondents on its payroll inside Iran, it may have brought in free-lance correspondents on a fairly regular basis. Contributions that were too large to be sent by telegraph (because of their size, or cost of sending, or both) would be carried by a network of merchants travelling in and between Persia and India, of which Jalal al-din remained an active member for a very long time. Since by the late 1890s, steam-ship navigation for passengers had already been opened up along the Persian Gulf, such contributions could be carried between any major town in Iran and Bombay or Calcutta within a very short period of time. It would seem that the published journal made it back into Iran through the same informal channels of the mercantile network. To start with, it appears that the journal aimed at the expatriate Persian communities every bit as much as the community back home in the kingdom, and a number of copies would be allocated for distribution in various such locales based upon a tentative demand. Subsequently, the journal began to offer subscription and the number of copies would be earmarked for distribution on the basis of these, and sent to their respective destinations through merchants who were willing to function as couriers between Calcutta and Persia (or any other country, where the publication was being sent). 26 Upon arrival at the port(s) of call, the lot would then be made over to other merchants who would then go on to distribute it to the respective regional bazaars. Copies were despatched in excess of those subscribed for, in order to meet any additional demand that might be generated. Very often, on account of the critical tone towards the Qajar monarchy assumed by the journal, influential bazaaris subscribed for a large number of copies, which would then be distributed for free among others in

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order to mobilise opinion against the royal court. Accordingly, even during the four years in the run up to the Mashruteh revolution of 1906, when circulation of Habl al-Matin was intermittently banned in the Kingdom of Persia, the journal made it into the country by and large uneventfully, smuggled by merchants along with their legitimate merchandise.27 For instance, during the initial stages of the Mashruteh revolution, Hajji Zain al-Abedin Taghioff subscribed to a yearly total of 500 copies of the Habl al-Matin, with the sole aim of distributing these among the ‘ulema and seminary students.28 It is estimated that in the first ten years of its existence, no less than 5000 copies were distributed among the seminarists of Iran and Najaf.29 Like most other journalistic adventures undertaken by the expatriate Iranian community, Habl al-Matin does not seem to have made much money, despite its wide circulation. Its initial lithographed version used to have 12 pages (15.5” x 9.5”), which could be subscribed to for 32 krans in Persia and Afghanistan, 10 rupees in India and 10 roubles in Russia, 5 Mejidiyehs in the Ottoman Empire and 25 francs in Europe and China. When the paper began to be printed in movable types, it came to have 16 pages (12.5” X 6.5”), with the subscription price being raised only slightly – 40 krans for Persia and 12 Rupees for India (other rates remaining unchanged). Single issues were priced at 1 kran in Persia and 4 annas in India. Any documents are yet to come to light regarding the costing behind publication of each of these numbers. Earlier issues even carried advertisements of business concerns across the Persianate world, hence at least for the first ten years of its operations there would seem to have been an attempt at least to break even if not actually make some profits. Jalal al-din’s wife is known frequently to have complained that the old man sunk his family’s entire wealth from trade (especially of carpets) into the venture. 30 Unusually for a Persian publication in India those days, for the better part of its existence the newspaper was being printed in Jalal al-din’s own press, and the press was known

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for some of its other printing ventures, including Urdu and English newspapers alongside Persian titles and periodicals indicates that at some stage the concern was making enough money to embark on such ventures. If the concern was not commercially viable, it would indeed have been quite a drag on the family. However, the fact that all five of Jalal’s children were educated at the prestigious La Martinere School in Calcutta, were later to marry into very well-established Muslim families, and became accomplished persons in their own right, can be taken to mean that the entire wealth could not have been sunk,31 even though a substantial section of the family’s wealth may indeed have been sucked up by Habl al-Matin. Habl al-Matin and the Political Discourse of Qajar Persia Legend goes that Jalal al-din was inspired by his meeting with Jamal al-din Asadabadi “al-Afghani,”32 and his correspondence with Afghani and Mirza Malkum Khan33 in the early 1890s to start his journalistic career.34 It is difficult to verify the meeting with Afghani (which may or may not have taken place), and if there was any correspondence with Afghani and Malkum Khan, there was little resonance of such ideas to start with – during the first five years, including the years of the fateful Tobacco Protests, Habl al-Matin barely let a squeak out that was against the Shah, even when it criticised some of the government’s policies (such as opening an Imperial Bank with British capital). Hence it was spared the axe of censorship, unlike Malkum Khan’s Qanun and Afghani’s Urwat al-Wuthkha. From 1898 onwards, the tone and content of Habl al-Matin became increasingly critical of the Qajar monarchy, making a strong pitch for reform and accountable government in a vein resonant more of the so-called “pan-Islamist” al-Afghani than the “secular” advocacy of Malkum Khan. By 1906, Habl al-Matin established itself as one of the most widely circulated publications dealing with the Persianate world, and increasingly preoccupied with the Kingdom of Persia itself.

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What prompted the shift in the publication’s editorial policy we do not know for sure. It could be, as most accounts try to suggest, that Jalal intended to run the weekly as a voice for reform all along, but there seems to be no convincing explanation as to why the periodical remained somewhat reticent about political issues for the first few years. It could also have to do with the policies of the new ruler on the throne, Muzaffar al-din Shah (1896-1906), which were immensely unpopular among the very social groups that provided Habl al-Matin its readership, and whose disgruntled voice the periodical began to articulate forcefully from 1898 at the very least. In the wake of increased tariffs on native merchants, withdrawal of tax farms (tuyul-ha) from their holders, and prospective increase in land taxes, decrease in court pensions (especially to the ‘ulema) and tightening state control over vaqf holdings, a broad swathe of the most deeply traditional components of the Iranian society were adversely affected. The reign of Muzaffar al-din Shah was also the period when the economy of the kingdom was opened up to European powers like in no other time, selling concessions in return for funds badly needed for stunted agenda of modernisation of the state.35 The bazaaris resented the privileges granted to the khariji-ha (outsiders), as against the hamwatani-ha (those who were subjects of the same land), and began to question the ruler who made such concessions.36 During 1896-1906, Habl al-Matin went about galvanising this very class, and its social allies – the ‘ulema (who depended on the bazaaris for patronage)37 – to close ranks with those who sought to rein in the Shah, and turn the kingdom into a modern state capable of resisting economic penetration by outsiders. To attain this end, Jalal al-din and contributors to his periodical solicited strongly the cause of making the authority of the monarchy limited by the institution of a constitution, fashioning in the process what could be loosely labelled as a sense of Muslim Iranian public opinion.

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The most severe criticism that Jalal al-din and his contributors made of the Qajar monarchy was regarding its failure to discharge the responsibilities incumbent upon the ruler. An article in 1904, for instance, looking at the characteristics of the Islamic civilisation (“which is now in decline”) identifies its markers as wealth, knowledge, culture, industry and trade, good public order. It then discussed the nature of wealth across time in great detail, as to whether it flowed into the bourses of the people and the country or the ruler and the notables. It argued quite categorically that during the Khulafat-e Rashidun [reign of the (first four) “Rightly guided Caliphs”] wealth was equitably ordered among the people, and contributed to general prosperity of the land. But with the rise of sultanates, greed got the better of rulers, and political authority became an instrument for the seizure of wealth of the people by a few using all possible means. The implication was that all political authorities since then, that indulged in rapacity, have fallen short of the Islamic ideal on account of economic mismanagement.38 The “Islamic” terms of reference deployed in such criticism has generally won for Habl al-Matin the appreciation/opprobrium of being “Pan-Islamist” in its emphasis. Such categorisation was possibly misleading. The logic of the secular state – which by then had permeated into only a small segment of Persian bureaucrats and intellectuals – had very few peddlers and, indeed, takers. Drawing its contributors from, and addressing a constituency of, the deeply traditional Iranian bazaaris and the expatriate Iranian mercantile community, Habl al-Matin could not have spoken a political language that was shorn of Islamic terms of reference – both because most of its contributors would not have spoken such a language, and because its audience would not have understood, if such a language was indeed spoken. But it does not necessarily follow that the periodical stood for pan-Islamist views. Indeed, Habl al-Matin in general and Jalal al-din in particular referred to Ittihad-e Islam quite often, but

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as with many other commentators, it stood for a catch-all term that “gave meaning to the world by and through which social and political practices could be derived. European practices could be adopted, but they had to be filtered through something under­stood as Islam. Proponents of Ittihad-e Islam thus claimed a kind of universalism for Islam that could engender transregional affiliations and thus solidarity. This unity was not based in homogeneity and was acknowledged to contain specificities of language, polity, etc.”39 Inspired as it was by al-Afghani, Habl al-Matin was aware of the need for solidarity within the Muslim world, but that was not necessarily to be found either in the leadership of the Ottoman Sultan (as the quintessential form of Pan-Islamism required), or in any unwavering commitment to the creation of any single undivided ‘Islamic’ order. It solicited instead that all the various entities of the Muslim world should close their ranks to prevent the kind of economic penetration and general subjugation by the western countries (all of which happened to be nonMuslims, be it Russia, Britain, France or Germany) that Persia was witnessing, lest they too suffer the fate that had befallen India – and to that extent there was coverage of various parts of the “Muslim” world. Curiously, though (or, maybe not) the greatest interest was reserved about the places were the Persian communities were to be found, with Indian affairs attracting quite a lot of attention.40 This began to change once the struggle for the constitution was mounted and even more after it was won. It may be safely adduced, the periodical became progressively more concerned with developments in the kingdom of Persia itself, because an overwhelming majority of its readers related to it as their watan, and probably also had the bulk of their commercial connections with it. This is borne out by the main drift of the periodical’s criticisms of particular policies of the Qajar monarchy – that the Shah’s policies were prejudicial to the interests of his own subjects. 41 In the wake of the setting up of the Imperial Bank in Shiraz with the right of note

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issue in 1895, merchants of Shiraz resolved to form a bank of their own, exhorted by the Habl al-Matin to pool in their resources prevent the iqtisad-e mumalik (economy of the kingdom) from slipping into the hands of kharijis.42 It even lauded the formation of a Majlis-e Istintaq in Shiraz (Interrogating Council, with representation from the provincial government, the ‘ulema and the bazaar) as a body inspired by European practices to resolve people’s problems (despite having no precedent in Islam).43 Thereafter, the Habl al-Matin was consistent in its endorsement of the need for an adalatkhaneh (house of justice) where the grievances of the subjects of the Shah could be heard and redressed, not only at the level of provincial towns, but also in the capital, so that disputes concerning foreign merchants do not have to be settled at the political level. The Habl al-Matin was not simply voicing the disaffections of the merchants; over the years it proved instrumental in the development of a holistic critique of the traditional social order in the face of the western penetration. The line taken by al-Afghani, that the Muslim world required to adapt to the advances made by the western world in the natural sciences in order to effectively compete with, and thus thwart the penetrative advance of, the western powers virtually runs through the years of Habl al-Matin. However, the general position that was taken by the publication, reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, severely denounced the uncritical adaptation of western social and civilizational mores at the expense of those of Islam. Putting across what can be called the Muslim modernist line, several pieces were published over the years decrying votaries of westernisation in the Muslim world (Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of India being a favourite target [even though unfairly so]), and suggesting instead the adaptation of natural sciences into the Muslim educational system so that the material advances of the west could be replicated in the Muslim world without abandoning what were identified as Muslim values.

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In this connection, Habl al-Matin engaged with the thorny question whether western education necessarily results in dahriyat (secularism), which would by implication make it unsuitable for Muslims. In a series of articles published in 1901 about the challenges facing Muslims, (written clearly by someone who had either been to Europe or someone very familiar with the western educational institutions, such as those in Calcutta) a contributor argued against assuming such a necessary correlation.44 He made the case that that the spectacular advances made in science and learning in the west had indeed undermined belief in Christianity because it was unequipped to withstand searching questions once people were given the freedom to think on their own about their views on belief and religion.45 Hence, gospels were subjected to new interpretations, with some points being added to and some abandoned. This ended in corrupting Christian morals, ushering in worldliness and materialism and secularism. Once, however, religion is adapted to the purposes of the world, the attributes that come from religious righteousness decline. Secularism thus stood for irreligion, and its spread had to be resisted. The author went on to argue that as western education spreads in Asia (clearly indicating the Muslim world as a part of it), it would similarly open the doors to secularism and its evils, and this would have far more sinister consequences than it had in the West, because Asia had many more religions, and thus the collapse of the religio-moral order [presumably meaning something like the Shari‘ah] would affect a far greater diversity of people than it did in Europe. The collapse of the social order, manifests itself in terms of religious disputes, (‘which history shows is worst in terms of bloodletting’), and ‘brother would kill brother.’46 In order to create a barrier against such dahriyat, the author advocated strengthening Islam by following the example of Christianity, aligning itself with progress because its weakness was owing to its backwardness. He went on to say that since western learning was founded on the dogma of reason, Islam stood at an

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advantage in adapting to it.47 Islam was the religion that conformed to the order of reason, and the nature of the world and to the nature of all nations at all times – it was thus better equipped to handle the potential challenge that modern learning had posed before the Christian world. The author went on to contend there was widespread misunderstanding about Islam, within the Ummah as much as outside it, and many false impressions – which, if successfully dispelled would show that ideas contrary to logic and reason are ipso facto incompatible with Islam. The significance of the line pushed here cannot be exaggerated. At a time in Persia (and India, and elsewhere in the Muslim world) the protagonists of the traditional Islamic educational system came under attack from, (and were mounting a rearguard defence against), the votaries of western (‘modern’) education system, Habl al-Matin tried to bridge the gap between the two systems by highlighting the strengths of each. Given the social character of most of the contributors and most of the constituency the periodical was addressing, there was understandably an assumption that Islam is superior to Christianity. What was noticeable, however, was that this superiority was being claimed because Islam was fully compatible with logic and reason. What was no less significant was that adherence to Islamic value system was being solicited because to do otherwise would result in social disquiet and turmoil – in other words adherence to value systems suggested by Habl al-Matin is essentially instrumental in its purpose, rather than a natural way of living. Most importantly, in a vein strongly resonant of the influences of Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, Habl al-Matin earnestly solicited that western educational advances should be imbibed and assimilated in Muslim societies, in order to acquire the kind of strength and dynamism that would help preserve the Islamic value system by keeping western economic (and therefore cultural influence) at bay. The line of argument that began to be solicited by Habl al-Matin effectively reflected shifts in the public discourse that was taking

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place in the kingdom of Persia around that time. After initial years of repression, Muzaffar al-din Shah had suddenly relaxed controls from around 1902, permitting import of liberal publications, including those that were critical of him, like Habl al-Matin. The period coincided with the most severe economic penetration of the kingdom by foreign merchants, and thus reinforced the incipient current of disaffection running through the country. Several semi-clandestine organisations emerged – viz. Markaz-e Ghayebi, Hizb-e ‘Ijtemai‘yun ‘Amiyun, Jama‘i Adamiyat, Komiteh-ye Inqilabi, Anjuman-e Makhfi – that galvanised the opposition to the Shah particularly in Tehran and Tabriz, and elsewhere as well. Most of these organisations were dominated by middle class professionals educated in western educational institutions and the modernist intelligentsia, votaries of modernisation of the kingdom so that it could stand up in the face of the much stronger western powers. The Anjuman-e Makhfi, by contrast was dominated by the traditional middle class (the bazaari and his social ally, the ‘alim), who in their founding session in February 1905 formulated a list of demands including a national code of justice, ‘adalatkhaneh, a just tax structure (i.e. one which was not favourable to foreigners), military reforms, encouragement of internal trade, building of schools, reorganisation of customs, guidelines for appointment and removal of provincial governors, limitation of power of state officials, and implementation of the Shari‘ah – demands that were formulated over the years through the work of publications like Habl al-Matin.48 In the last five years of his life, accordingly, Muzaffar al-din Shah was faced with a barrage of criticism of the manner in which he compromised the health of his kingdom. The Shah retaliated with his standard response in the face of such criticism – repression. Habl al-Matin was banned yet again, which, if anything, made it even more critical of the monarchy, and hence even more popular. In public perception, the erosion of legitimacy of the Qajar dynasty owed in a big measure to the criticism of publications like the Habl

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al-Matin. The contribution of Habl al-Matin in shaping this discourse was later acknowledged by the ‘ulema subsequently lauding the publication roznameh-ye Muqaddas (the Sacred Journal). Papers such as Qanun, Akhtar and Habl al-Matin, played a part in developing a new political language, with the calls for unity and collaboration, and most significantly the reformulation of the term daulat va ru‘aya (the state and the subjects) to daulat va millat (the state and the people), or even millat va daulat (the people and the state), implying a greater role for the people in the political affairs of the country. The arguments relating law to territorial jurisdiction to defeat foreigners with their own arguments marked the beginnings of the creation of a new Iranian identity. The Afterlife of Habl al-Matin Muzaffar al-din Shah died in 1906, granting his people the constitutional government they sought so badly. A constituent and legislative assembly (Majlis) was formed to which the government led by the Prime Minister was made accountable. The constitutional regime that was thus put in place in the three years that followed not only introduced checks on the hitherto untrammelled authority of the Shah, but also showed a definite desire to turn the kingdom into a strong modern state, undermining the bases of traditional forces in the country, (which included the ‘ulema), who demanded instead Mashru‘eh (rule by the Shari‘ah). The traditionalist forces regrouped against the constitutional regime under the reigning Shah Muhammad Ali, and ushered in a short period of despotic rule (istibdad-e saghir) and a civil war-like situation before it ended with the final triumph of the constitutionalists in 1909. The votaries of modernisation of the Kingdom began to lay the foundations of a centralised modern state (daulat) founded on the territorial identity of the people (mellat) inhabiting it, rising above their confessional, ethnic and regional affiliations. Ranged against

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them, beside the monarchists, were the traditional rulers of the provinces threatened by the new centralising political dispensation of the constitutionalists, and a section of the ‘ulema (led by prominent figures like Ayatollah Na‘ini). The ‘ulema among this lot made the argument that sovereignty rests in Allah alone, so the people cannot be considered as sovereign, and thus laws of the Majlis would require to remain subjected to those of God. In course of this entire period, Habl al-Matin emerged as one of the greatest voices for mashrutiyat (constitutionalism). Its coverage of the developments inside the kingdom of Persia began to far overshadow news from elsewhere, as attention of the entire Persianate world seemed to be riveted upon sarzameen-e Iran. Ironically, though, this was also the period that the publication began to lose its significance in the public sphere. As the Mashruteh regime came into being, freedom of speech and press was proclaimed within a month of the Shah’s announcement of the Constitution. While previously newspaper articles published in Iran had to be cleared beforehand by the government, such restrictions were relaxed by the Supplementary Laws of October 1907. This allowed a large number of publications to surface from within the kingdom of Persia, primarily to comment on the momentous process of the work on the Constituent Assembly, which began to freely voice their expectations of and grievances towards the Majlis, and to keep the people updated so that different social groups could exert pressure and exercise influence on the process itself. Among a spate of such new publications in Tehran the more momentous contributions were those of dailies like Majlis (Parliament), Neda-ye Vatan (Call of the Motherland), Sobh-e Sadeq (the True Dawn), and weeklies like Sur-e Israfil, Ruh al-Quds, Mosavat.49 Because the provinces were also being consulted in the constitution-making process and in 1907 provincial governments with their own assemblies were introduced as well, the interest generated there resulted in the emergence of a free provincial press for the time as well, such as Anjuman, Nesim Shumal, Mojahed,

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Naghur, Nau Bahar, Neda-ye Islam, Ulfat, Faryad, Yadegar-e Inqilab, Mokafat, Marefat, etc.50 As the Mashruteh forces were making their ground in the face of great resistance from the traditionalists and developments were changing almost every day, Jalal al-din’s most trusted associate, his brother Hassan Kashani decided to move to Tehran and start a daily and a more radical version of the Habl al-Matin there, galvanising the Mashruteh cause. The daily was in its first edition unequivocally identified as being of the same vintage as the Calcutta edition, and began to draw on many of the correspondents of the former based in Persia. The daily Habl al-Matin had features that were then elaborated upon by the weekly version as well. While Jalal had confined himself however to attacking the inequities of the old order, Hassan began to espouse the cause of the more radical reformists of the Mashruteh banner, and was joined shortly after by Yahya Kashani, a prominent Iranian journalist.51 Together the two of them turned the paper into one far more openly supportive of the Mashruteh cause and opposed to the Shah than the weekly Habl al-Matin had ever been. Hassan began his opening salvo with the provocative title “Aya Iran mariz ast?” (Is Iran Sick?), and went on to conclude that the traditional dispensation of social and political forces had gone on to make the kingdom vulnerable to the outside world. He solicited that Iran must establish itself into a strong modern kingdom with a constitutional government in order to be of any significance in the community of nations.52 The daily Ḥabl al-Matin was published six days a week, initially in Tehran and for a while in Rasht, from 28 April 1907 until 31 July 1909. Jalal al-din was named general-manager and Sayyed Ḥasan styled himself as merely deputy-editor. It was specified (Year 1 number 3, Year 2 number 28) that the Tehran daily was an affiliate of Ḥabl alMatin of Calcutta.53 Sayyed Ḥasan, himself an active supporter of the Constitutional Movement, published the Persian version of an article

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by Sayyed Jamal al-Din Afghani, in which the active participation of ‘ulema in politics had been strongly advocated .54 The daily Ḥabl al-Matin was a liberal, reformist, and patriotic newspaper, publishing news and political commentaries. It was suspended four times in all by the authorities. Its first suspension was due to its attacks on Russian policies in Persia55 – in solidarity against its suspension, all newspaper and printing houses in Persia went on strike. The reason behind its second suspension is not known for sure, but there is reason to believe that this was on account of an editorial written by Jalal al-din in December 1907.56 Its third suspension was on account of its attack on two anti-mashruteh religious leaders, Shaikh Fazl al-Lah Nuri and Mullah Muhammad Amoli.57 As the struggle between the Constitutionalists and supporters of reactionary monarch Muhammad ʿAli Shah grew more intense, Sayyed Ḥassan was named as one of those whose banishment was demanded by Muhammad ʿAli Shah. After Muhammad ʿAli Shah’s coup d’état in June 1908, Sayyed Ḥassan took refuge in the British Embassy and eventually fled to the Caucasus.58 From the Caucasus, he went to Rasht, away from the traditionalist stronghold of Tehran, where he resumed the publication of Ḥabl al-Matin on 22 Ṣafar 1327/15 March 1909. Upon his arrival in Tehran in July 1909 along with the forces that removed the shah from his throne, he once again began the daily’s publication in Tehran, and reissued the daily Habl al-Matin, but the latter never gained the traction that his earlier efforts had. Its fourth and final suspension came, ironically, after the restoration of the Mashruteh government at the end of the civil war, for having published an article titled “Eda fasad al ‘alem fasad al ʿalam” which described Arabs in pejorative terms and, referring to the execution of Shaikh Fazl al-Lah Nuri, sharply criticized the religious establishment and some of the ‘ulema.59 A court sentenced Sayyed Ḥasan to twenty-three months of imprisonment and a fine of 250 tomans. He was not, however, jailed and his detention also proved to be short. Finally, the appeal court absolved him of all charges., after

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which he never tried to republish the daily.60 He died shortly thereafter.61 In the decade from the final victory of the Constitutionalists in July 1909, to the coup d’état of February 1921, Ḥabl al-Matin advocated the cause of reforms in the kingdom of Persia. During World War I, in contrast to public opinion in Persia, it tended to support the Allies and opposed the Central powers. From 1921 until its closure in 1930, Ḥabl al-Matin insisted on the necessity of rebuilding the country. It supported the post-coup d’état cabinets and the person of Reza Khan Sardar-e Sepah, (later Reza Shah Pahlavi), by whose order it received financial subsidies from the Persian government.62 In an article entitled “Lozum-e jamhuriyat wa tafkik-e qovva-ye ruḥāni dar Irān,” published in several issues from October 6 to November 3, 1924, the paper supported Sardār-e Sepah’s unsuccessful drive for the establishment of a republic in Persia. In this period, the reigning king, with the exception of Muḥammad ‘Ali Shah, the country’s premiers, and the high-ranking officials were always viewed positively by Ḥabl al-matin, for which it has been criticized by Aḥmad Kasrawi, who accused Moʾayyed al-Islām of indulging in flattery out of selfinterest.63 Others have criticised this phase of the publication on the basis of its implicit support of British policies in the East, and have even viewed it as being influenced by the British Indian authorities. A careful study of the Habl al-Matin would seem to indicate, however, that at this stage the prospect of fragmentation of the kingdom of Persia (that was shared by many in the Kingdom of Persia itself) proved too overpowering for the Habl al-Matin to disregard it. Hence, it began to be more sharply critical of Bolshevik Russia and its activities on Iran’s northern frontiers, (which threatened integrity of the country) than British attempts to redraw the map of the Middle East after Ottoman disintegration (which did not). While Habl al-Matin was critical of Franco-British reconfiguration of the Middle East, the paper was motivated more by the urge to keep united the sarzameen-e Iran. Thus, Jalal al-din Kashani – like so many other Iranians of that

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time – favoured a strong hand at the helm more than the gains made by the Mashruteh revolution. Hence, having previously faced British heavy hand after its criticism of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, and having once criticised the British authorities as “enemies of civilisation and justice,” and even having a long suspension slammed on its publication during 1916-17, Habl al-Matin chose to play down British involvement in the Middle East, and concentrate instead on what it saw as the more serious challenges facing the watan instead. In 1925, when Reza Khan, trying to overthrow and the Qajars and establish a republic, faced strong resistance from even among many of the people who were otherwise supportive of him, Jalal al-din was one of the mashrutehkhwahis who remained steadfast in support of republicanism. Explaining his stance he wrote: “The benevolent father of the people usually has a pompous son and a vicious grandson, who often bring misfortune upon the people – this is the truth from the tragic pages of our recent history.”64 When Reza Khan went on to set up a new dynasty thereafter, Jalal must have been quite a bit disturbed. Conclusion Jalal al-din Kashani went on publishing Habl al-Matin till his death in 1926, whereupon his daughter continued the venture for four more years before it was finally shut down. The Calcutta-based publication attained the height of its influence before the Mashruteh revolution, at an age when there were very few truly independent voices of criticism in the kingdom of Persia. It was a pivotal factor in the shaping of the political discourse of the Qajar era from the 1890s, undermining the political legitimacy that the Qajars claimed in their capacity of being “the pivot of the universe.” In a big way, this paved the way for the Mashruteh revolution of 1906. Thereafter, even though Habl al-Matin remained popular, and to an extent revered, among political protagonists in the Kingdom of Persia, it lost its previous influence as the world of print journalism opened up in the country.

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During and after the Mashruteh revolution the idea was broached before Jalal al-din that he should return to Persia, which he politely turned down. While Jalal returned at least once to receive official recognition for his contribution to the revolution (and maybe on other occasions as well), unlike his brother, he did not seem to have ever seriously contemplated a return to his country of origin. At a time when Persian nationals were required to claim their citizenship, he refrained from doing so, and opted instead to remain in his country of domicile. Coming from a traditional clerical family of small town Iran, the relative prosperity he and his family enjoyed in British India and the business connections he enjoyed operating out of Calcutta, clearly were persuasive arguments for him to stay back. His four daughters went on to be either persons of accomplishment in their own right, or ended up married to people distinguished in their own fields, and settled down in different parts of the Indian subcontinent, which used to be a part of a larger Persianate world that transcended vast geographical distances. Did Jalal al-din Kashani, over time, become an Indian friend with an Iranian self, or was he an Iranian friend with an Indian self?65 In an age when identities tended to be as fluid as frontiers for people living in, and moving between, South Asia and the Middle East the question would probably have been somewhat anachronistic. It is perhaps more correct to talk of the ‘firm cord’ that bound people living across the regions, and the manner in which the ideas flowed from one region to influence the lives of others elsewhere. Notes

1.

I owe a massive debt of gratitude to Feiruz Naziri and Simin Mehdi, the grand children of Jalal al-din Kashani’s second daughter Sakina, for the wealth of personal and other details about the man, without which this essay could not have been written. I would also like to acknowledge Habib Khaleeli Shirazi, who introduced me to the Naziri siblings, and has furnished me for nearly two decades with vignettes of life and society in Iran and impressed upon me the “firm cord” that ties the people of Iran with India, regardless of the nature of political ties between the two countries and of the ignorance about such ties among the people at large.

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

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See Firuz Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia: A Study in Imperialism 18641914, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968). Qajar claim over the region adjacent to the Caspian conflicted with Russian interest there; Qajar pretensions over western Afghanistan made it a threat to the secure buffer that the British sought to set up between India and the Asiatic empire of Russia. See E. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982) pp 36-49. For a detailed account of the Russo-British tussle for economic domination in Persia, see Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia, pp 3-100. E. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, p.55. Prince Abbas Mirza (1789-1833) was a Qajar crown-prince and the Governor of Azerbaijan. Defeated by the Russians in the war of 1804-13, Abbas Mirza solicited the task of recasting Persian army following the European model. Although the new army did not perform too better than the traditional ones in the war of 1826, the need for modernisation of the military had been firmly impressed upon the Qajar rulers and a large section of the elite. Subsequent protagonists of modernisation in the Kingdom of Persia lamented his premature death as a factor in delaying reforms by at least a generation. Mirza Muhammad Taqi Khan Farahani, alias Amir Kabir, launched the second drive for modernisation of the Kingdom. Growing up as the son of a cook in the household of Prince Abbas Mirza at Tabriz, he attracted the attention of the Prince who had him inducted into the New Army where Amir Kabir served as a secretary. As an envoy to the court of the reformist Ottomans, he took deep interest in the Tanzimat reforms and upon his return won the confidence of the future Naser al-din Shah. The new Shah made him Amir-i Nizam (Army Chief) and Sadr ‘Azam (Prime Minister) with a brief to carry out extensive reforms. Amir Kabir revived the military reforms programme of Abbas Mirza, set up factories for manufacture of cannons, light arms and introduced western technology in the realm of metallurgy. He further laid the foundations of a western educational apparatus in the kingdom, with heavy emphasis on natural sciences a and technology. However, he sought to manage the revenue required to finance such projects by streamlining court expenditure and instituting new taxes under the direct supervision of central authority. The reaction from the feudal elite and the court was powerful enough to dislodge him. He was eventually assassinated at the behest of the Shah himself. See, Fereidun Adamiyyat, Amir Kabir wa Iran, (Tehran: Shirkat Sahami Intesharat Khwarizmi, 1362/1983). Courtiers resented reduction in court expenditures and cuts in their salaries and pensions; tribal chieftains feared that a centralised standing army would reduce their military strength and room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the monarch; provincial overlords feared centralised authority would strengthen the monarch vis-àvis the provinces; Britain and Russia contested the increase in tariffs on their merchandise. Hamid Mowlana, Journalism in Iran: A History and Interpretation, (Ph.D. Thesis, submitted to the NorthWestern University, School of Journalism, 1968), pp. 168-70.

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9.

The Armenian Church in Julfa, and subsequently the various Christian missions that set up printing presses in the 1840s, similarly concentrated on producing Christian religious texts including the Bible, printed in Syriac. 10. Most of the technical and scientific works, both translated and compiled, were the endeavours of European teachers associated with the state college of Dar al-Fonun. 11. In Europe Shirazi studied the art of printing, and set up one the earliest printing presses in Iran. He later served at the royal court and was even the ambassador in London for a while. No copy exists of the Akhbar-e Vaqayeh beyond a true copy of one of its issues in the Journal of Royal Asiatic Society of 1839. See Mowlana, pp. 200-07. 12. For a short treatment of Dar al-Fonun in Amir Kabir’s scheme of things, see Adamiyyat, Amir Kabir wa Iran, 353-67. 13. Mowlana, op. cit. p. 218. 14. Ibid. p. 219. 15. Vaqayieh-ye Ittefaqiyeh, Rabi al-Awwal, 30, 1268 A.H., no. 51, cited in ibid p. 222. The paper continued to run till 1860 when it became an illustrated journal and had its name changed to Ruznameh-ye Dowlateh-ye Aliyeh Iran, which in turn continued to run till 1870. 16. The first book of this genre was the Kitab-i Nuqtata‘l Kaf which is earliest known history of the Baha‘is compiled by Hajji Mirza Jani of Kashan, between 1850-52, exploring in scintillating detail the enormities of the Babi behaviour. 17. Mowlana, op. cit. p. 230. 18. Roznameh Daulat-e Aliyeh Iran, Rajab 12, 1280, cited in Mowlana, op. cit. p. 231. 19. Abrahamian, “Causes of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, (August 1979), p. 394. 20. Mansoor Moaddel, “Shi’i Political Discourse and Class Mobilization in the Tobacco Movement of 1890-92”, in J. Foran (ed) A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 9. 21. For example, a European importer of cotton piece goods deposited at the border a duty of 5% only, as against an Iranian merchant who had to pay further 7-8% in additional duties, bazaar taxes, local levies and road tolls. 22. Mowlana, op. cit. 250. 23. Ibid p. 297. 24. Jamal Kashani, Iran’s Men of Destiny, (New York: Vantage Press), p. 138 25. Feiruz Naziri, in personal interview with the author, in Calcutta in November 2016. 26. Feiruz Naziri, in personal interview with the author, in Calcutta in November 2016. 27. Feiruz Naziri, in personal interview with the author, in Calcutta in November 2016. 28. Mowlana, p. 397. 29. Muhammad Sadr-i Hashmi, Tarikh-e Jara‘id va majallat-e Iran, (Isfahan : Intisharat-i Kamal, 1363 [1984],) v. 2, p. 201. 30. Feiruz Naziri, in personal interview with the author, in Calcutta in November 2016. 31. The eldest daughter, Begum Sultan Mo‘ayedzadeh became a Member of Legislative Council (MLC) in Madras, and was married to Madras High Court judge, Justice Amiruddin. The second daughter, Farrukh-Sultan Mo‘ayyedzadeh was a Principal of Sakhawat High School and went on to become an MLC in Calcutta), and was married

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to Nur al-Nabi Chowdhury, ICS. The third daughter, Khwahar-Sultan Mo‘ayedzadeh was married to Kamal Naziruddin, ICS. The fourth daughter Qamar Sultan was married to an IFS officer who later went to become the editor of the Dawn. The fifith daughter Humayun-Sultan was married off to Sahibzada Motiur Rahman, IFS (hailing from the family of Mir Jafar), who was later to become Pakistani ambassador to Holland and France. 32. After completing his education within traditional Shi’i institutions, Afghani (182697) travelled to India in 1857 in pursuit of modern sciences. The suppression of the great uprising of that year by the Raj impressed upon Afghani two things – that imperialism, having conquered India was threatening West Asia; and that the only effective means of stopping this imperialist onslaught was immediate adoption of western technology that gave the western powers the edge in any conflict. Afghani initially tried to motivate rulers of West Asia to take the lead in reforming society in the region. With this aim in mind, he visited the courts of Afghanistan, Egypt and the Ottomans apart from that of Persia. Receiving little response from ruling circles, he set about spreading awareness about imperialism and inefficient despotism. He attacked clerical dogmatism for the stagnation of Islam which had begun as a dynamic religion cum social order, and urged people to take initiative in revivifying Islamic society, freeing it of medievalist preoccupation with forms that were incongruous with the changed world. For a detailed account of the work of Afghani, see Nikkie Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-din ‘al-Afghani, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968). For a detailed biographical account, see Keddie, Sayyid Jamal al-din ‘al-Afghani’: A Political Biography, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). 33. Born of Armenian parentage in New Julfa, outside Esfahan, Malkum Khan was sent to Paris on a state scholarship to Paris. There he came into contact with Freemasonry, and developed a major interest in political philosophy – especially in Saint Simon’s theory of social engineering and Comte’s theory of religion of humanity. Returning to Iran, he joined the premier institution for western education in 19th century Iran, the Dar al-Funun, as faculty. It was there that he impressed Nasir al-din Shah. In that capacity Malkum Khan had drafted a Daftar-e Tanzimat (Book of Reform). He proposed a set of laws and regulations, which he called qanun to distinguish from the sharia’h and also the ‘urf (existing state laws). These new laws, Malkum Khan had emphasised, had to be premised on two fundamental principles – improvement of public welfare, and the equality of all citizens. The Shah was initially open to the idea of reform, but once the ‘ulema pronounced the notion of qanun as bi’da (heretical innovation), he shelved the idea and exiled Malkum Khan to the Ottoman Empire. He was brought back from exile in the 1870s as Nizam al-Mulk (Regulator of the Realm) when the Shah was once again contemplating reform, but no sooner was the government split into executive and legislative wings and court budgets were cut, aristocratic and clerical reaction had him despatched to London as an Ambassador, effectively in exile. Even from London Malkum Khan kept on urging his associates in the Shah’s court for thorough reform, but after he lost his ambassadorship because of a financial scandal in 1889, he became an open advocate of revolution. In 1890, he founded the famous newspaper

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called Qanun, which generated a lot of interest in Iran among the educated circles despite sporadic publication. In the 41 issues that were published over the next eight years, Malkum Khan began to make his case for the introduction of rule of law and constitutionalism in Iran. He also suggested that laws should safeguard free discussions of all topics pertaining to public welfare; close alliance with the ‘ulema; termination of sectarian conflicts among Shi’i and Sunni; ending of concessions to foreign exploiters, promotion of ‘unity, justice and progress’; and introduction of a majlis-e showra-ye melli (national consultative assembly). 34. See, for instance, Kashani, op. cit, p. 138. 35. Muzaffar al-din Shah sold the right for exploration of oil to an Englishman named D’Arcy and granted right of collecting road tolls to the British; he obtained a loan of £200,000 from France to buy arms, £3 million from Russia to service previous loans and another £300,000 to finance his own “medical visit” to Britain. The Shah also commissioned European companies to set up a brick factory and a modern textile mill, set up telephone system for Tehran and electrify the streets of Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad and Rasht. In order to guarantee the investments and loans so contracted, the Shah appointed a Belgian national, Monsieur Naus as the Inspector-General for the country’s Customs. 36. For a fairly detailed account of the grievances of the bazaar against, and their responses to, the Qajar monarchy, see Sahila Tarabi-Farsani, Tujjar, Mashrutiyyat wa Daulat-e Modern, (Tehran: Nashr Tarikh-e Iran, 1384), pp. 49-122. 37. The Shi’i ‘ulema in Iran were intricately connected with the communities they lived in. The ‘ulema dispensed justice and registered documents on behalf of the state, over and above their usual function of keeping the people mindful of their faith by recounting the foundational legends of Ithna ‘Ashari Shi’ism (viz. those of ‘Ali, battle of Karbala), and appraising them of the prescriptions and proscriptions of the faith. The people in return, over and above payment of judicial and administrative services, financially supported the ‘ulema establishment by providing the wherewithal for the payment of stipends for students aspiring to become ‘alim. The ‘ulema moreover – especially the higher clergy like the Ayatollahs – frequently married into landowning and great merchant families. Thus clergy-bazaar ties were not only functional but also relational. 38. Habl al-Matin, Year 11, no. 30, 15 Safar 1322/ 1May 1904, pp. 13-14. 39. Mana Kia, “Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 36, No. 3, 2016, p. 403. 40. There are, for instance, a number of major pieces written at the height of the UrduNagri controversy, defending the use of Urdu (and by extension, Persian) highlighting Urdu as a junior relative of Persian, which gives Indian Muslims access to the largest repository of Islamic learning that is not otherwise available to people who do not know Arabic. See for instance, Habl al-Matin, no. 1, Year 7 15 Jamadi al-Thani 1316/ October 31, 1898. 41. Habl al-Matin, Year 4, No. 9,13 Sha‘ban 1313/29 Jan 1896 42. Habl al-Matin, , Year 4, No. 11, 28 Sha‘ban 1313/13 Feb. 1896. 43. Habl al-Matin, Year 4, No. 13,, 12 Ramazan 1313/27 Feb. 1896, and Year 4, No. 23, 30 Zhi al-Qa‘da 1313/13 May 1896.

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44. This series, not being an editorial piece, cannot be claimed for sure to have been written by Jalal al-din Kashani. But given the nature of the argument put forward, it may well have been him, or even his brother Hassan. 45. Habl al-Matin, Year 8, No. 38, 28 Rabi al-Awaal, 1319/15 July 1901, pp 5-7, 46. Habl al-Matin, Year 8, No. 39, 12 Rabi al-Thani, 1319/29 July 1901, pp 14. 47. Habl al-Matin, Year 8, No. 41, 19 Rabi al-Thani, 1319/5 August 1901, p. 5. 48. The diary of one of Anjuman-e Makhfi’s founder members, Nazim al-Islam Kermani pays tribute to the role played by the publication in bidari (awakening) of Iran. See, Nazim al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh-e Bidari Iranian: Tarikh-e Mashrueh wa Haqiqi Mashrutiyat-e Iran (Tehran: Mosaseh-ye Intesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1384. 49. For a brief treatment of the newspapers and periodicals from this period, see Mowlana, op. cit. 344-50. 50. Ibid 351. 51. Yahya Kashani later went on to work as the editor of firebrand reformist dailies Majlis and Iran, and then later started his own reformist publication, Iran-e Imruz. 52. Habl al-Matin, Year 1, no. 1, 15 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 1325/28 April 1907. 53. Ibid. 54. Ḥabl al-matin Year I, no. 17, 3 Rabi’al-Thani, 1325/16 May 1907) 55. Habl al-Matin, Year I, no. 73, Jamada al-Thani 1325/June 1907. 56. The story goes that Hassan had exhorted Persia to go the path of free and democratic nations like England, France and Japan, and abjuring that of autocratic Russia, only recently humbled; he ended with a dire warning that the fate of the Shah might be similar to that pf Louis XVI. Reading this the Grand Vazir, ‘Ain al-Daulah summoned Hassan and ticked him off. A few weeks later Jalal al-din provided the reply: “Despotism is a form of conceit inspired by selfishness and arrogance. It destroys rights of the people, extinguishes the flame of civilization, strangles justice and compassion. It corrupts human nature. Despotism has filled abattoirs with blood of innocent men, … and violates the principles of truth and morality. It is a most shameful institution, devoid of all moral values.” Habl al-Matin, Year I, no. 188, 6 Zhi a’lqaʿda 1325/12 December 1907. 57. Habl al-Matin, Year I, no. 190, 20 Zhi a’lqaʿda 1325/26 December 1907. 58. Kermani, Tarikh-e Bidari, vol. II, p. 173. 59. Habl al-Matin, Year III, 13 Rajab 1327/31 July 1909. 60. Brown, Persian Revolution, pp. 244. 61. Little is known of the family of Sayyid Hassan Kashani, except that this particular branch of the family eventually relocated to London, where they are believed to stay as of date. My attempts to establish contact with them so far have not succeeded. 62. Ursula Sims-Williams, “Persian Newspaper Habl al-Matin,” India Office Library and Records: Oriental Manu­scripts and Printed Books Newsletter 32 (1983) , p. 2 63. Ahmed Kasravi, Tarikh-e Mashruteh-ye Iran (Tehran: Mawasaseh Intesharat-e Negah, 1384), p. 106. 64. Jamal Kashani, Iran’s Men of Destiny, p. 140. 65. For a very interesting discussion of these two categories, see Mana Kia, op. cit.

TIES IN TROUBLED TIMES Travel and Transregionalism in India – Ottoman Relations KASHSHAF GHAN I

Recent trends of violence and political instability in many countries of West Asia have attracted an enormous amount of media and public attention seeking to reaffirm the stereotype of a Middle Eastern centric discourse of the Muslim world, hinging on politics, power play, religious fundamentalism, and of course, oil. This leads to more erroneous assumptions, of Muslims as a homogenous, unified and collective identity bereft of social dynamism, cultural variety and linguistic diversity. The hardening of political frontiers, in these regions, over the twentieth century has led to a similar constriction of vision that refuses to look into relations between India and West Asia beyond unimaginative diplomatic maneuvers. Such an approach, quite unfortunately, refuses to take cognizance of a long tradition of movement and regular connections between regions constituting India and West Asia. Centuries of exchange and interaction came to be restricted, rather forcibly, with the drawing of political frontiers in the postcolonial era. This marks the beginning of nation–state diplomacy which hardly carries within itself the spontaneity of premodern linkages between these two regions. In the following pages we will look into how even during the rule of the British Raj political and social relations between India and Ottoman Turkey were worked out amidst political hostility, movement of people, and imaginations of a unified Islamic world – all taking shape against the larger background of European colonialism.

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I The last vestiges of Muslim political authority in India became memory with the Mutiny of 1857, when the titular Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who had become a symbol of the uprising, was exiled to Rangoon. While the English East India Company could control the uprising by unleashing a regime of violence and brutality, they had to make way for the British crown to take charge of their prized colony. With Queen Victoria proclaimed as the Empress of India, Muslims in India had to come into terms afresh with their new-found status as subjects of the British Raj, being unceremoniously severed from the echelons of power and authority. In the days thereafter, the community largely withdrew itself from anything British and hence ‘Western’, primarily Western education. As a result the community saw its representation dipping sharply in the employment sector which now came to be driven by Western education. Muslims in British educational and bureaucratic institutions became negligible, at times nil. However from the late nineteenth century this torpor came to be challenged by a sense of community awareness reflected in increasing political activities. Individuals like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan established the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College in Aligarh in 1875. This institution (which later in 1920 became the current-day Aligarh Muslim University) was responsible for introducing generations of Muslim youths to the benefits of Western education. Some of these youths were instrumental in organizing the Indian Medical Mission to Turkey which we will elaborate shortly. The institution also saw ideas of panIslamism being received and propagated by its students, and later the spread of nationalist sentiments among the Muslim community. Ideas of pan-Islamism started to gain ground among Indian Muslims at a time when European powers, primarily Britain, gradually turned hostile against Ottoman Turkey. Powerful mediums of expression and propagation, like prose and poetry, aided by the spread of print culture, were used to raise a voice in support of Turkey. Some Indian

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Muslim religious scholars even contemplated the option of allying with Turkey against the British.1 In the early decades of the twentieth century famous religious institutions like the Deoband and Firangi Mahal began to participate in the exercise of shaping Muslim public opinion against the colonial regime. The foundation of the Anjuman-i Islam2 in Bombay (1876) and the Anjuman-i Khuddam-i Kaaba3 by Maulana Muhammad Abdul Bari, a noted scholar from the Firangi Mahal along with Maulana Shaukat Ali and Mushir Hosain Kidwai in Lucknow (1913) were outcomes of an agenda to protect Muslim holy places from non-Muslim possession and control.4 Such developments were reflective of an emerging Muslim public space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But the underlying trends were far from being so simplistic. Ideas of panIslamism came to India with a distinct Ottoman stance. This meant that theorizations of pan-Islamism as ‘an ideology calling for sociopolitical solidarity among all Muslims’ cannot be applied indiscriminately without sufficient interrogation, which will help in bringing out the inherent multiplicity of ideas operating within this larger discourse.5 In a way therefore one needs to be cautious when applying a standard definition of pan-Islamism as a political means to voice dissent, and register solidarity among global Muslims against the British Raj. The specific geo-political contexts cannot be overlooked. With the positive reception of the ideology of pan-Islamism in India the pro-Ottoman movement which was gaining support from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century found a ready, global medium to express itself. Till then its manifestations were largely visible through religious institutions like the anjumans, mentioned above. Support for the Caliph, as the head of the Islamic world, who was also the Ottoman Sultan, and the institution of the Caliphate gave a distinct religious overtone to the idea of pan-Islamism in India, strengthened by the proposition of uniting with Turkey against a common foe, the British.

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II Italy’s attack on Ottoman Libya in 1911-12 followed by the combined attack of Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Serbia, except Romania, on Ottoman Turkey in 1912 came as a rude shock to Indian Muslims who chose to see it as another instance of European assault on Muslim territories and the Islamic world, whatever little remained of it. The Balkans being a region for Muslim-Christian rivalry turned the confrontation to global proportion.6 It all started with Italy’s sudden offensive against Ottoman Turkey in September 1911. This was sought to be justified by claims of insecurity faced by Italians in Tripoli, the North African province of the Ottoman Empire. In hindsight it may look like a dire attempt made by Italy to carve out sovereign territories for itself at the cost of the shrinking Ottoman Empire. Repeated efforts by the Ottomans to reach a negotiation with Rome, on grounds of economic concessions, proved futile, with Italy refusing to deter from its aggressive position. With the declaration of war, Ottomans had to deploy both naval and ground forces. Ottoman navy proved ineffective in defending the seas. Egypt, then under British control refused right of passage to the Ottoman army into Tripoli.7 As Ottoman units in Libya were getting fast depleted in the face of stiff offensive, a strategic plan was devised whereby Arab Sanussi tribesmen were trained to form army units. The latter proved successful in restricting the invading Italian army to the coastline. In an interesting attempt at improvisation, hand-held bombs were manually dropped from biplanes, leading to one of the earliest instances of aerial attack. Two names that stand out in this war from the Ottoman side were those of Mustafa Kemal and Enver Pasha, for daring to reach the battlefield in spite of the blockade, and being active participants in Ottoman state policies in the coming years of deeper crisis.8 The unprovoked hostility of Italy sent shockwaves across the Indian Muslim community. As a measure of sympathy towards war

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victims the ‘Committee for Aid to the Ottoman Red Crescent Society’ was formed in Calcutta on 2 October 1911. Its members consisted of the well-known activist Ghulam Husain Arif as President. Abdullah Suhrawardi the founder of the London Pan Islamic Society and Agha Mu‘ayyid al-Islam, editor of Habl al-Matin were involved as secretaries. The committee was shortly renamed the Indian Red Crescent Society whose primary aim was to collect funds for supporting Ottoman Turkey in the war. Later this Society also arranged the first Indian Medical Mission to Tripoli in May 1912.9 With the Balkan crisis escalating by the day, Ottoman Turkey had little room to continue resisting Italy. Pressing demand for remobilization of resources compelled the Turks to negotiate peace with Italy on 18 October 1912, which came at a cost of losing Tripoli to Europe. With less than a day to spare the Balkan War began on 19 October 1912, with Montenegro attacking the Ottoman Empire. Fatigued from the Italian attack, Ottoman soldiers failed to put up an effective resistance for the invading Balkan armies. As a prelude to the war Balkan states demanded a Christian governor general together with local legislatives and constabulary forces. They demanded reforms, and the involvement of the Great Powers in the supervision of the entire process. The Ottoman request for time till its Parliament reconvened was turned down on grounds of Ottoman apathy, thereby leading to the war.10 Right from the start the war proved dismal for the Ottomans. In a blunder of military strategy more than 70,000 Ottoman soldiers were demobilized. Large number of military personnel was still held up in Tripoli wrapping up the Italian war. Some were deployed in Yemen. With army reorganization still underway, trained soldiers were lacking, filled in by untrained recruits. This made mobilization of units to the Balkan fronts difficult. Naval movement was blocked by the Greek navy. In terms of resources not enough food was in store to support prolonged wars on multiple fronts. In a situation where food could have

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been transported from Anatolia to the warfront, insufficient means of transport, over a single-track railroad, in a rainy and cold season made matters worse. Therefore lack of food and edible resources made way for hunger to take its toll on Ottoman army which was already suffering from lack of strategy, internal discord, weak central command, and depleted war materials. As a last nail in the coffin, sanitary and health emergency set in with the break out of an epidemic of cholera, typhoid and dysentery. Lack of doctors and trained medical personnel ensured that thousands lost their lives, trying to survive a dysfunctional medical system on the Ottoman side.11 III When news of Turkey’s dismal condition in the Balkan War reached India it dismayed Indian Muslims who were patiently hoping for support and consideration from European powers towards a weak Ottoman Empire. But that was clearly not coming. Even individuals like Syed Ahmad Khan who advocated a pro-British and pro-Western policy for his community came to realize the futility of hoping for a respectable treatment for Turkey in the hands of European powers. Loud protests were heard from the western-educated young leaders of Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College. Graduates of the institution like Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali argued that agitation against British colonialism was the only effective way to safeguard Muslim interests across the globe. Their fiery speeches and strong articles nailed the British and other European powers for their inactivity in safeguarding the interest of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the position of Islam in this hour of great crisis in the form of the Balkan War. The Ali brothers did not limit their agitation only to speeches and articles. Rather they also contemplated tangible measures that could help the Ottoman Empire survive this crisis. One of the concrete plans that they came up with was to extend help by way of supporting the

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severely stretched medical situation in Turkey. The result was the formation of the All India Medical Mission which was formed to support the Turkish army with medical and paramedical facilities. The mission was led by a team of doctors, and assistants. The Ali brothers chose Dr. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, who later became a prominent figure in the Indian National Congress, to lead the Mission. It left Bombay on 15 December aboard the Italian vessel Sardegna, passed through Aden, Suez and Alexandria from where the SS Romania took them to Istanbul via Greece on 30 December 1912, and served the Ottoman army till late June 1913.12 Dr. Ansari was accompanied by four doctors (Dr. Ali Azhar H. Fyzee from Bombay, Dr. S. Muhammad Naim Ansari from Jaunpur, Dr. Mahmudullah and Dr. Shamsul Bari from Calcutta), seven paramedics (Ghulam Ahmed Khan, M. Nurul Hasan from Meerut, Mohammad Chiraguddin from Delhi, Syed Tawangar Hussain from Karnal district, Hamid Rasul from Chhapra, Bihar, Abdul Waheed Khan from Mirzapore and Husain Raza Beg from Ghaziabad), ten male nurses and ambulance bearers (Abdur Rahman Siddiqi from Surat, Qazi Bashiruddin Ahmed from Meerut, Shuaib Quraishi from Aligarh, Mohammad Abdul Aziz Ansari from Ghazipur district, Khaliquz Zaman from Lucknow, Mansur Ali Amethi from Lucknow district, Yusuf Ansari from Saharanpur district, Abdur Rahman from Peshawar, Syed Ismail Husain Siraji from Sirajganj in Pabna district of Bengal, and Tafazzul Husain from Delhi). After the Mission settled itself in the field hospital of Omerli they were joined by Dr. Abdur Rahman Bihari and Dr. Raza Haidar from London; Aale Imran and Hasan Abid Jafri from England, and Mirza Abdul Qayyum from India. Apart from the above mentioned Indian Muslims an Egyptian physician Dr. Fuad Bey was made part of the team, both as a doctor and interpreter, by Ansari to resolve the language problem.13 This medical mission during the War was one among the three that was sent from India, and many that landed in Turkey from European

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countries, Egypt and even the United States of America. Contemporary reports tried to bring out the uniqueness of the mission as a medical team composed entirely of ‘Muslim brothers’ from a faraway land like India. In one of his later letters Ansari would take pride in the diverse regional background of the team members, being composed of educated Indian Muslims from various professional fields, imparting the team with an ‘All India’ character14, A week after the news of the formation of the Medical Mission came out in Comrade on 19 October 1912, Ansari shared his views on the sorry condition of Ottoman Turkey in a piece published on 26 October 1912, It is perfectly obvious that the very existence of the Turkish nation depends upon the issue of this war. First, the medical service in the Turkish army has been recently organized and as such will be unable to cope with the requirements of such a deadly war. Secondly, the foes of Turkey are already receiving, on a very large scale…help from all parts of Europe, and the poor Turk is left entirely to his own limited resources. What we can do to lighten his burden is to provide an efficient field-hospital where a fair number of the sick and wounded can be accommodated.15

Three medical teams were sent from India of which the one led by Ansari came to be recorded and later celebrated across the nation, not to mention among the Indian Muslims who deeply appreciated the efforts ‘of the man and his lieutenants who had rendered good services to Islam.’16 Away from India Ansari ensured that activities of the Mission were shared with countrymen back home through letters that he regularly wrote from the battlefront. This came to be published in the Comrade, the weekly news journal edited by Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, and its Urdu counterpart Hamdard. Recent works on the Medical Mission have focused on the singular contribution of Ansari,

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not only through his leadership to the Mission, also by ensuring its place in immediate public memory and later in pages of history, through his regularly-written letters. His correspondences and records were considered the primary reason why this mission did not suffer the fate of the other two medical teams. 17 The remaining article would however argue that it was not only Ansari who was participating in an exercise of communicating the details of the Mission back home. Elaborating on the argument we look into another personality from the team, Syed Ismail Husain Siraji. The latter was a resident of eastern Bengal and participated in the Mission as a paramedic. Siraji’s letters and reports back home followed a similar agenda to Ansari, where he shared details of the Mission with his countrymen back in Bengal. These letters came to be published in several Bengali periodicals before its publication as a volume titled Turushka Bhraman (Travels in Turkey), the only Bengali account of the Medical Mission written through the lenses of Siraji’s experiences and activities in Turkey. It remains a work that is rarely cited with reference to the Medical Mission, and its reading provides us with an interesting narrative, different from Ansari’s, at once global but also reflective of Siraji’s local background and aspirations. It is towards this that we turn in the following sections. IV Ismail Hussain Siraji was born in 1879 in Sirajganj in the Pabna district of Eastern Bengal. Though we come to hear of Siraji as a member of the Medical Mission, his popularity in eastern Bengal as a fiery orator and prolific writer of prose and poetry precedes his visit to Turkey. Apart from this he was also a political activist who was later involved with the publication of a number of important periodicals in Bengali, namely, in the early twentieth century.18 Siraji’s desire to visit Turkey did not develop suddenly at the time of the medical mission. It had its antecedents.

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When Syed Jamaluddin Afghani was visiting India, he stayed in Calcutta for a brief period of time in 1882. His Pan-Islamic ideas and speeches in support of the Ottoman Caliphate, attracted many young Muslims towards him, who ‘professed something like worship’ for Jamaluddin. Newspapers regularly covered his speeches and books were written on his life and deeds, with a focus on his Indian experiences. One such prominent work in Bengali was titled Samaj o Samskarak (Society and Reformer) by Reazuddin Ahmad Mashhadi, a prominent scholarly figure in late nineteenth century Bengal. Published in 1889 this work gained much popularity among the Bengali Muslim society for introducing them to the ideas and doctrines of Afghani, and also to Pan-Islamic trends that was gaining popularity in the larger Islamic world, Turkey in particular. Siraji too came in contact with this book which left a deep impression on his young mind. Siraji later recalled that Mashhadi’s book inspired him greatly to visit Turkey, the seat of Islamic Caliphate to ‘serve Islam and his Muslim brothers’. He tried leaving for Turkey in 1895 but failed due to shortage of funds. But his desire to visit the land of Islam and its Caliphate never died, surviving the many tribulations that he had to face later in his life. When the mission was being planned Siraji was serving in prison on sedition charges for his publication Anal Prabaha (Stream of Fire) which was confiscated by the British government for fanning nationalist sentiments. Immediately after he was released from prison in May 1912, Siraji began making preparations to leave for Turkey. Few months later in October 1912 the All India Medical Mission was formed to help Turkey in the Balkan crisis. Siraji immediately made up his mind to join the mission as a representative from Bengal. He wrote numerous letters inviting people to join him for the ‘noble cause of serving Islam and the Caliphate.’ In return silence and disinterest from his community greatly pained him,

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Punjab, Madras, Bihar, United Provinces have all opened their arms in support in this day of distress for the Muslim community. But millions of my brothers in Bengal remain silent. Thousands of pirs, maulanas, maulvis, religious scholars, lawyers, doctors, graduates – but none are committed to the cause of Islam. Not a single person from the illustrious Nawab to the penniless wayfarer is willing to rise above the bonds of their family and near ones to face shahadat for their religion.19

However when the periodical The Bengalee carried news of Siraji’s travel to Turkey as part of the medical mission, titled Mr. Shirajee starting for Turkey – the Muslim community of Bengal responded by sending their contributions to support the travel. Siraji later fondly recalled how madrasah students sold prayer caps to contribute towards his travel to Turkey to help the army ‘who were fighting for the sake of their motherland and to keep the flag of Islam flying high.’20 The Medical Mission reached Turkey at a time when ceasefire had been proclaimed on the last day of December 1912. However even a cursory reading of Siraji’s reports dispel any notion that the team members were enjoying the pleasant spring weather on the banks of the Bosphorus. Instead a harsh picture can be retrieved from the words of Siraji, as the mission faced the difficulty of battling an unfriendly weather at the warfront, We are currently stationed in the field hospital at Omerli, south of Chatalza, near the warfront. It is extremely cold here with incessant rains. It is covered with snow everywhere. Inside the camp it is cold and damp. If water is stored in a vessel it turns to ice overnight. Life is very tough in this extreme cold and wet season.21

A similar description of the harsh weather comes out of Ansari’s account on setting up the field hospital in Omerli where rain and at

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times heavy sleet accompanied by bitterly cold wind disrupted the pace of work in which the tents needed to be set up. Tent pegs refused to hold on to the knee-deep mud and slush that resulted from the heavy rain. While the Omerli hospital continued to function, Siraji along with some of his team members were sent by Enver Pasha to staff a second field hospital at the town of Canakkale, near Gallipoli. Here too harsh weather welcomed the Mission with strong wind and heavy flakes of snow, exposed to which ‘hands, feet, nose and ears become numb and lifeless.’22 The fame of the medical mission spread far and wide because of its facilities and compassion. Siraji recalls in one of his reports, We attended to four or five hundred wounded patients at the Canakkale field hospital. All were restored to good health except for one severely injured Arab soldier who succumbed to his injuries before the team could operate his gangrenous foot. We applied medicines and also gave him brandy to keep up his strength, but before daybreak he recited the Kalima and died. I gave my Turkish subordinate Jalal some money to arrange for his burial. Jalal remarked that since this man died the death of a shaheed, he should be buried in his blood-stained uniform.23

To escape the unfriendly weather at the warfront the hospital was set up in the Canakkale town where soldiers were brought in great numbers who ‘were in extreme stage of exhaustion die to exposure to cold and disease, some of them dying a few minutes after their arrival in the hospital.’ In some discrepancy while Siraji reported only one death, Ansari’s account would fix the number at nine.24 All the pain, tribulation, hardship and suffering never seemed to overwhelm the spirits of the team members who rejoiced at the slightest news of Turkish advance in the battlefront,

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The Turkish army is gradually advancing towards Bulgaria through Chatalza and Gallipoli. The fall of Kamil Pasha has resulted in new hope and vigour burning bright among Turkish soldiers. By the will of God Turkey will surely register victory.25

At the same time news of defeat and setback severely depressed the team members, especially after the surrender of the great fortress of Edirne on 26 March 1913 following a siege lasting many weeks.26 The news had the entire team and the nation engulfed in deep sorrow, which was vividly portrayed in the words of Abdurrahman Peshawari, a member of the team, Oh my brothers! Adrianople (Edirne) has slipped out of our hands! God grant us safety. It is impossible to describe and express our feelings after this cursed turn of events. But who has got upper hand with fate. Name of Sukru Pasha will forever live in history for the valiant manner in which he held back the enemy…27

V Members of the medical mission regularly took turns to send reports of the mission’s progress to Muhammad Ali and his editorial staff in Delhi. These reports were then published in the English periodical Comrade and thereafter translated to Urdu for publication in the companion periodical Hamdard. Siraji’s accounts came to be published regularly in the Bengali periodical named Mohammadi. The reason for separate reports in Bengali can be gleaned from Siraji’s own words, I know many of my brothers in the team are regularly writing back to India to convey the news of the situation here. Go through these reports regularly as they are published in all the leading newspapers. However there are many among my fellow brothers in Bengal who

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are not equipped to read Urdu so well. For them it is my humble and pious duty to convey the details of the situation here. Especially the war conditions.28

While on the one hand Siraji was conveying regular updates from the warfront to his community people back in Bengal, he perhaps was also trying to ensure that they need not depend on Urdu newspapers/ periodicals from north India and Bengal for news from the Turkish warfront. Therefore as Siraji engaged himself in the pious duty of serving the cause of Islam and the Caliphate, he was perhaps also making a humble effort to reach out to his Muslim brothers in Bengal in their mother tongue of Bengali. These reports carried among other things details of expenses to be incurred by any individual interested to travel to Turkey on the footsteps of Siraji. Somewhere deep within his heart Siraji perhaps still hoped that some of his Muslim brothers from Bengal would come over to share responsibilities by supporting the Turkish army ‘who were fighting for the sake of their motherland and to keep the flag of Islam flying high’. It takes 300 rupees to travel. This is, of course, the second class fare. For 100 rupees a month one can live comfortably. Till now I have spent 800 rupees. Some I took from my savings. Rest I borrowed from my friends and relatives, and the Anjuman-i Sirajganj.29

It may not be completely out of context to situate Siraji’s efforts within the larger socio-political situation in early twentieth century north India and Bengal, his attempts at opening up an independent channel of communication through Bengali periodicals alongside those in Urdu and English. This was the time when the Urdu vs. Bengali debate was gaining momentum with wider political and intellectual implications. Many strongly voiced their support in favour of Urdu as the language of Muslims in Bengal, relegating Bengali as the language

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of the heathen. Siraji was among those who were equally strong in supporting the right of Bengal Muslims towards accepting Bengali as their mother tongue. Among many things this would then allow them to be in a position to interpret texts and traditions without the intercession of the Urdu-Arabic trained ulama. On another occasion, Siraji is supposed to have been honoured for his services in Turkey as part of the mission with a khilat and the title of ghazi. In return for this honour Siraji expressed his gratitude by delivering a thanksgiving speech in Turkish, rather than in English. Though one cannot help but be skeptical about Siraji’s competence over the Turkish language, within a period of six months, one can argue that the debate needs to be centered less on the issue of language – Turkish, and Siraji’s competence over it, and more on Siraji’s understanding of the politics of language, by emphasizing on respecting ones mother tongue. The latter comes forth explicitly through his words, It is our duty to respect the mother tongue of all cultures and nations. No community has been able to progress without imparting proper respect to their mother tongue. Reading only Arabic and Persian cannot ensure the development of the Muslim world. Rather there remain chances of inflicting harm upon oneself if a community is not careful about cultivating its mother tongue. I extol my brothers at home not to neglect Bengali as the language of the Hindus. O, the alims and talibs of madrasahs! Take care in gaining a complete knowledge in your mother tongue Bengali.30

Interestingly even while Siraji remained deeply invested in the idea of Muslim societies being united under a global umma, he was at the same time unconsciously feeding into the idea of pluriculture within Muslim societies across diverse socio-cultural and geographical spaces. In the above instance of his visit to Turkey, issues of language, culture and tradition, emerge as significant

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markers of the Islamic civilization. So that while Siraji respected the Turks for their deep attachment to their mother tongue – Turkish, he used certain circumstances to his own benefit, to further his message. High-class ashraf dominance in Bengal had ensured an extension, right into eastern India, of the hegemonic position of Urdu, the lingua franca of the north Indian Muslim community. Siraji could perhaps foresee his own community in Bengal being gradually subsumed under a linguistic, and a resultant cultural domination from its north Indian brothers. Though not a sole participant in the Medical Mission from Bengal he made every effort to make himself and his activities in Turkey accessible to the large mass of Bengali speaking/reading Muslims back home, attempting to relieve them from any dependency on Urdu print mediums. Siraji continued with his fiery speeches amidst his responsibilities in the field hospital near Omerli. He was particularly attached to the Young Turks and in a congregation in Bab-i Aalee espoused their importance in determining the future of Turkey. His ideas were reported in the leading dailies of Turkey like Young Turk, Tarjuman-i Haqiqat among else. In his speeches he repeatedly harped upon the unity of the Islamic world and the necessity to hold on to it in this hour of crisis, Muslims across the world should come together in each other’s support. They must revive their lost glory. Muslims across the globe are one, following one religion, one cause, one book and one ideal. The young generation must be incorporated and should immerse themselves in this spirit of Islamic unity.31

Such declarations leave no ambiguity regarding the agenda Siraji had in his mind when he left Bengal for Turkey. He took much care to state the same clearly in the beginning of Turushka Bhraman,

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I have come here to serve the Ottoman army and take care of the wounded soldiers, but I will make every possible attempt to ignite the flame of Tauhid in the heart and mind of the Turks.32

Siraji’s public speeches brought him closer to Hamid Pasha, the court poet, who greatly appreciated the formers’ poetic skills which reflected the desire for freedom from foreign bondage. He also had the opportunity to meet Talat Bey (later Pasha and Grand Vizier), and Ismail Enver Pasha (one of the main leaders of the Young Turk movement that displaced Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1908, and later the Grand Vizier Kamil Pasha during the war period) and was invited to a sumptuous repast by Omer Pasha who saluted the efforts of the entire medical mission to help Turkey and strengthen ties between Turkish and Indian Muslims. A great degree of cordiality developed between the members of the Medical Mission and the Turkish authorities, resulting from the dedication, patience, sense of duty and etiquette showed by the team members in course of their stay in Turkey. All hoped that this bond would continue to strengthen in the coming days. Conclusion Works on the All India Medical Mission, scanty as they are, choose to characterize it as an exercise inseparable with the personality of Dr. Ansari. Such a deduction results from the regular reports and letters Ansari sent back home to the Ali brothers, as regular updates on the experiences of the mission. Hence, though the members of the mission are popularly hailed as heroes representing their motherland while serving their faith and the land of the Caliphate, their histories are constructed through the lenses of Ansari’s observations in Turkey. In other words there remains a singularity of voice in recovering the Medical Mission from the pages of history. The paper precisely attempts to challenge such a historical reconstruction.

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Secondly, by bringing into closer examination a second account on the Medical Mission the article seeks to recover parallel voices that would lead us towards fresh perspectives while looking into the exercise. Turushka Bhraman has its origin through a similar medium of newspaper articles published on the basis of what its author Ismail Hussain Siraji reported from the battlefront. While Ansari was catering to the English and Urdu knowing classes of north India, Siraji’s audience was meant to be those with little or no competence in these two languages, which inspired Siraji to publish his reports in Bengali periodicals. Thirdly, while it is important to challenge the hegemony of particular sources in historical research one critical issue is not be neglectful of sources in regional vernacular. The article, therefore, has attempted to focus on the narratives that emerged from Bengal, through Bengali print mediums, on the Medical Mission. The multiplicity of accounts on the mission through different languages produced from separate regions of South Asia provides an opportunity to engage with the politics of linguistic hegemony across different socio-cultural and regional traditions, spread across northern and eastern India. Fourthly, India – West Asia relations need to be freed from the limitations of political developments on a regional and global scale, diplomatic negotiations, post-colonial nation state politics, issues of religious fundamentalism and violence. Rather than analyzing the dominance of one culture over the other, it is important to adopt a more inclusive approach towards studying Muslim societies beyond the limitations of national boundaries. Fifthly, in the period under discussion though both India and Turkey experienced European imperialism, their everyday experiences with colonialism and Islam remain markedly different. Even though the Medical Mission was seen as originating in the context of Indian Muslims seeking to support Turkey as the last seat of the Islamic Caliphate, the plurality of cultures and notions of Islam offer valuable insights towards understanding diverse Muslim societies.

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Sixthly, that the Medical Mission was not an isolated instance of support offered by Indian Muslims is evident from the fact that other missions with medical facilities were also sent to help Turkey during the war with Italy in 1911. However it may be interesting to observe that the exercise was undertaken not so much in support of an Asian country in war with European powers, as it was in support of the land of Islam and its Caliphate threatened with a shameful defeat and extermination at the hands of hostile Western powers. In course of his many speeches in Turkey, Siraji repeatedly emphasized upon the need to ensure the unity of the Islamic world, along with the fact that ‘Muslims across the world should come together in each other’s support. They must revive their lost glory. Muslims across the globe are one, following one religion, one cause, one book and one ideal. The young generation must be incorporated and should immerse themselves in this spirit of Islamic unity.’ In the context of such statements while one can read into Siraji’s idea of the Islamic world as one and Muslim societies as homogenous across geo-political spaces what also needs to be reflected upon critically is that in spite of following a single prophet, a revealed text and an oath of faith, the social and political reality of Muslim societies as homogenous, unified and unchanging becomes problematic in itself. Such a presumption ignores ideas of deep pluralism reflected in the enormous diversity, variety and exuberance that condition the life and activities of millions of Muslims across West and South Asia. The interpretation of Islam as a monotheistic faith often runs the risk of characterizing Muslim worlds as monolithic entities stripped of any notions of pluriculture. Rather Muslim societies are distinct in their customs, practices and ideas of existence. Siraji himself experienced two very different worlds of Islam that he straddled in course of his travel and habitation – Turkey and Bengal. It is no less an irony that Siraji himself introduces his readers to a Bengal centric

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Muslim society including its traditions, aspirations, practices and adaptations of the local juxtaposed against the seat of the Caliphate in Ottoman Turkey. Apparently unified under a common religious denominator, these worlds of Islam across geo-political boundaries demonstrate an inherent heterogeneity that goes on to distinguish an agrarian Muslim society in eastern India from the epitome of high culture, civilization and religious authority in Turkey. In spite of his idealized vision of a unified Muslim world Siraji himself stood at the point of intersection of different worlds of Islam – one characterized by the regional traditions of a Bengali agrarian society juxtaposed against the universal symbol of Islam in the institution of the Caliphate. Bengal being one of the earliest regions to experience colonial subjugation, individuals like Siraji perhaps realized the need for an increased degree of consciousness within his community across linguistic, cultural and social spheres, to avoid being completely subsumed under a heavily regressive attitude of non-reciprocation to any ideas of progress and development. Therefore by exploring such elements of extra-territoriality, regional and religious sentiments and bonds of community, it is necessary to contribute towards a long-term understanding of multicultural and multiethnic Muslim societies, in this case across South and West Asia, together with the long shadows they cast upon one another. Notes *

1. 2.

Research for this paper was undertaken as the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. The author remains grateful to the ZMO for supporting this research. The paper benefitted from the feedback received from the academic community there, and during the conference at the University of Calcutta. Burak Akcapar, People’s Mission to the Ottoman Empire: M.A. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission 1912-13, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 127. The Society of Islam did a commendable job towards social and educational uplift of the Muslim community through the establishment of schools for Muslim girls along with donating funds for the construction of the Hijaz Railway in 1900. See, Syed

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Tanvir Wasti, “The Political Aspirations of Indian Muslims and the Ottoman Nexus”, Middle Eastern Studies, 42, 5, 2006, pp. 710, 718. 3. The Society of the Servants of the Ka’ba was supposed to be a precursor of the Khilafat Movement. See, Wasti, “The Political Aspirations”, pp. 710, 718; Azmi Ozcan, Pan Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877-1924, (Leiden E.J. Brill, 1997), pp. 155-163 4. Wasti, “The Political Aspirations”, pp. 709-22. 5. John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, cited in Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 97. 6. Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 16. 7. Syed Tanvir Wasti, “The 1912-12 Balkan Wars and the Siege of Edirne”, Middle Eastern Studies, 40, 4, July 2004, pp. 59-78; Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 37. 8. Alan Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, (New Delhi, Barnes and Noble, 2005), pp. 214, in Akcapar, People’s Mission, pp. 37-38. 9. Ozcan, Pan Islamism, p. 139. 10. Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire, (New York, Perennial), , p. 585, cited in Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 38-39; Richard Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912-13: Prelude the First World War, Routledge, London, p. 15, in Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 38-39. 11. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912-13, p. 22-23, in Akcapar, People’s Mission, pp. 39-41. 12. Zuhal Ozaydin, “The Indian Muslims Red Crescent Society’s Aid to the Ottoman State During the Balkan War in 1912”, Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine, 2, October 2003, pp. 12-18; Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 175-78. 13. Syed Tanvir Wasti, “The Indian Red Crescent Mission to the Balkan Wars”, Middle Eastern Studies, 45, 3, May 2009, p. 397; Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 163. 14. Mushirul Hasan, A Nationalist Conscience: M.A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj, (Delhi, Manohar, 1987) pp. 42-43. 15. Ibid. 16. Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 17. 17. Ibid., p. 16. 18. Sufia Ahmed, “Tribute to Kamal Ataturk”, Daily Star, 5, 169, 10 November 2004, Dacca. 19. M. Serajul Haq, “Turushke Siraji”, in Hossain Mahmud (ed.), Syed Ismail Hossain Siraji, (Dhaka, Islamic Foundation Bangladesh, 2003), pp. 71-72. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 73. 22. Akcapar, People’s Mission, p. 188-89. 23. Abdul Qadir, Siraji Rachanabali, (Dhaka, Bangla Academy , 2003), pp. 381-86.. 24. Akcapar, People’s Mission, pp. 189, 204. 25. Haq, “Turushke Siraji”, p. 73. 26. Wasti, “The 1912-13 Balkan Wars.” 27. Wasti, “The Indian Red”, p. 397. 28. Qadir, Siraji Rachanabali, pp. 381-86.

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29. Haq, “Turushke Siraji”, p. 73. 30. Qadir, Siraji Rachanabali, p. 312. 31. M. Abdur Rahaman, “Desh, Samaj o Sahitya Sevak Syed Ismail Hossain Siraji”, in M. Abdur Rahaman (ed.), Liaqat-Rasul-Siraji, Muslim Freedom Fighters of India Series, Book 3, Bulbul Prakashani, Calcutta, 1377, p. 12-13. 32. Rahaman, “Desh, Samaj o Sahitya”, p. 11; A.K. Fazlul Haq, “Gourab er Mashal Haraiachi”, in Hossain Mahmud (ed.), Syed Ismail Hossain Siraji, Islamic Foundation Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2003, p. 3.

THE TRANS-NATIONAL TIES OF AN INDIAN NATIONALIST Maulana Azad SAFOORA RAZEQ

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), an Indian nationalist and one of the architects of the idea of India, had inherited and developed strong personal, intellectual and political ties with the Middle East. In his conceptualisation of nationalism and in his projection of India’s foreign cultural ties the Middle East remained an imperative factor. When in the early twentieth century he formulated his idea of nationalism and worked on the notion of liberty, he argued that he had before him the experiences of nationalists from various countries of the region. The constitutional movement in Iran and Turkey and the nationalist movement in the Arab world against imperialism and autocratic regime produced a new understanding of liberty, equality and democracy. Through a renewed reading of the Holy Qur’an, the Hadith and Sunnah the contemporary social and political categories were filtered to establish the ‘will of the people’ as the voice of God. It produced a new wave in the intellectual and political world of Middle East. Maulana Azad’s personal ties with the Arabs and his intellectual belonging to Ajam strengthened the bonds of Indian nationalism with West Asia. As we all know that nationalism is a modern political idea, which emerged in Europe. Nationalism in West Asia and Africa, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were struggles for liberty; the revolts were not only against the old order of men and societal divisions and inequality. They were also struggles for survival against the impending forces of western imperialism and

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colonialism. In South Asia, when Maulana was articulating his idea of ‘jihad’ against British colonialism he found the genre of nationalism produced in West Asia best suited for the purpose. The basic idea behind nationalism is universally the struggle for liberty, and involves a desire for progress and development. Nationalists in the greater part of Asia and Africa had been struggling against the colonial onslaught to achieve their liberty and the road to progress and development. The presence of the West as imperialist and colonial power in the Muslim world during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century made ‘Islam’ a referral point for the early revivalist, the reformist and the later nationalist. After all, for Muslims religion has been (and continues to remain) the main social and cultural fact of life. Nevertheless, religion also defines their politics as well, for Islam is capable of articulating political and economic aspirations too. Since colonialism effected not only the political sovereignty of the colonised nation but also robbed of them of their social and cultural life, the struggle against colonialism and the essence of nationalism therefore took the re-reading of the Holy Text in the context of the existing problem – colonialism. This was, in the ultimate analysis, the political language that early twentieth century Indian Muslim nationalists had to engage with. I Maulana Azad made his entry into the political discourse through his reading of al-Hilal, al-Maqtataf and al-Manar (published from Cairo), and was able to engage his readers with the new political discourse doing the rounds in West Asia. His journal al-Hilal, inspired his countrymen by reflecting on the sufferings of many Asian and African nations in their war of resistance against colonialism. His much quoted Qur’anic injunction ‘al-amr bin maa’ruf wa’n-nahy ‘an al- munkar’, i.e., establish the good and eradicate the evil, was his guiding philosophy throughout his life. In the pages of al-Hilal,

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Maulana proposed that the desire for development and progress and the struggle for independence from the tyrannical colonial government was the maa’ruf, the ‘greater good’, while colonialism at that juncture of time was the greatest evil for mankind. And for every Muslim as ‘abd’ or the servant of God, it was demanded of him to be a part of the struggle against colonialism anywhere and everywhere, because such a struggle was to establish liberty, equality and justice. Thus he wrote in al-Hilal: Remember that for the Hindus the struggle for freedom of the country is a demand of patriotism. But for you (Muslims) it is a religious obligation, a jihad in the cause of God.1

By promoting patriotism and nationalism as ‘jihad’ Maulana Azad was only developing an alternate reading of the nationalism itself, by arguing that every possible peaceful method sanctioned by the Qur’an and the Prophetic tradition is a jihad. He stretched the issues of jihad further for South Asian Muslims by promulgating that colonialism was not the only munkar or evil against which jihad was necessary but it was also communalism which demands a jihad because it stands in the way of establishing democracy. While arguing for democracy Azad claimed that the Prophet came at a time when human rulers were virtually worshipped and he introduced a new system of democracy. In other words, modern political writings dating from the French revolution in the eighteenth century did not offer any advancement over the teaching of Islam. He lists five basic principles of the French revolution and claimed that every one of them had already been present in Islam for centuries: Sovereignty is vested in the people and is not on personal or on the basis of heredity. Equality of mankind is axiomatic.

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The President of the country, in Islamic term the Imam or the Caliph, is to be appointed by the people. He has no essential superiority over other citizens. All decisions (of the President) must be made in consultation with able councillors. The treasury is the property of the people. The President cannot spend it without their authority2.

Partha Chatterjee argues ‘Eastern’ nationalism’ resulted in the reequipment of the nation culture to transform it. But, this transformation cannot be achieved by simply imitating the alien culture, because imitation would lead the nation to a loss of its distinctive identity. Therefore, retaining the distinctiveness of their own culture, tradition and religion became the part of the nationalist agenda in the Asiatic world.3 Maulana Azad, who was grappling with a theory of nationalism for the Muslims of South Asia, was consciously enforcing the cultural tradition of the Muslims by using Islam as the referral point. Here he was often building upon the political discourses of men like Sayyid Jamaluddin Afghani, his disciple Abduh and their student Rashid Rida who happened to be his senior contemporaries. Azad made a crucial intervention into these various formulations of the concept of nationalism prevalent in Asia. His concept of ‘composite nationalism’ or Ummah-e Wahida was well suited for the emerging multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic states of Asia and Africa for centuries to come. II The earliest and the greatest influence on Maulana Azad was exerted by his father, Maulana Khair al-din, a sufi Pir who had number of followers both in Hejaz and in India. He was brought up by his maternal grandfather, who was a high profile person at the Mughal court, so Maulana Khair al-din, at a young age had the advantage of receiving education from the reputed teachers of the period like Mufti

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Sadr al-din (1790-1868), Maulana Rashid al-din(d.1827) and Maulana Fazle Imam (d.1828). Later he studied Hadith under the tutelage of Shah Muhammad Ya’qub.4 It was after the mutiny, when a section of the Mughal aristocracy found that life under the colonial rule would be disgraceful so they moved to peaceful destinations. Maulana Khair al-din and his grandfather proceeded towards Mumbai though his grandfather passed away, Khair al-din was all set to go, so he went to Hejaz and settled there. He spent much of his life at Mecca in Hejaz. In Hejaz, he took the guidance of Shaikh Muhammad Watri and later he married his niece Aliya. In Hejaz, Maulana Khair al-din had established himself as a great scholar of Hadith.5 Maulana Khair al-din visited Turkey twice, won a Majidi Medal, in recognition of his learning and piety. He was a man who took social work seriously and won universal admiration for his efforts to repair the hitherto neglected Nahr Zubeida, the main source of supply of water to Mecca and the desert around it. For this magnanimous act he was rewarded with the Majidi Medel for the second time. Khair al-din had established a cordial relationship with the Sultan of Turkey, the Shaikh ul-Islam and other dignitaries of the Ottoman capital. Maulana Khair al-din had been successful in mediating between Sultan Abdul Majid of Turkey and Sharif Hussain of Mecca when tension brook out between them.6 When Arab nationalism challenged the domination of the Turkish Sultan, Maulana Khair al-din was not alive. Or probably he thought of ignoring the murmur which were appearing during his times. On the other hand Maulana Khair al-din was not on good terms with the Wahhabis of Arabia. In Malihabadi’s Azad ki Kahani khud Azad ki Zabani7 there is a sketch of this strained relationship with them both in India and Hejaz too. It was this uncomfortable relation between the Wahabbis and Maulana Khair al-din which aroused many questions in little Azad’s mind that marked the beginning of his serious thinking about religion during his boyhood. Nevertheless, his

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initiation to the study of Qur’an or bismillah ceremony was performed at the age of five in the sacred mosque of Bait ul-Harm of Mecca by the then Imam. Later, it was his aunty, that is, Begum Aliah’s sister who continued to guide him with his lessons of the Qur’an. The rest of his instruction was directly done by his father. Hence, Azad acknowledge the contribution of his maternal relative, who was an Arab in his understanding of Arabic and Qur’an. Azad was neither sent to any madrassah in Hejaz nor to al Azhar University, so he was not formally associated with the education system of West Asia, till they were living in Hejaz. As Maulana Khair al-din, had established his position as a sufi of standing and repute, with a large number of disciples and an established khanqah. He had established connections with other sufis in the region. His familiarity, with Sufi pir Alussey helped Azad, when he visited him in 1908. It was after the death of his father, when Azad was spiritually in doldrums, certain suggestions by Sufi Alussey was of great help to young Azad. Around 1896 or 1898 Maulana Khair al-din made his return journey to India and settled in Calcutta, as young Azad continued with his elementary studies of Qur’an, theology, jurisprudence and Kalam8. Mohi al-din and the rest of the four children were given education at home in Calcutta. Being a Sufi himself, Maulana Khair al-din preferred that his sons were groomed as future Pirs or spiritual guide. Azad wrote that his father was a man who believed in the old ways of life. He had no faith in Western education and never thought of giving his children an education of the modern type, believing that modern education would destroy religious faith. Maulana Khair al-din introduced in the educational curriculum for his children the lessons of the Qur’an, manqulat9 and ma’qulat.10 As soon as young Azad was able to read basic Urdu, he was taught texts such as Khulasa ul-Hind (principle of prayer and fasting) and Masder-e Faris (Rules of Persian) in Arabic the

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first book was Ajromia, then Meezan and Sha’ab Nahv Mir and Sarf Mir and kafia in Persian. After a study of Masdar, Shaikh Saadi’s‘Gulistan’ and ‘Bastan’ were started together. Lessons on Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), Kanz in logic, Sharah Tehzib were introduced. All of these works were personally taught by Khairaldin to his sons and daughters together. Young Azad and his siblings were taught logic with great emphasis. They were taught some sufi texts of Ibn Arabi and Suhrawardi. But the father took extra care to teach hadith, tafsir, and fiqh, with the usual stress was on memorization.11 Azad as a little boy was also given lessons in medicine by a Shi’i teacher as directed by his father. By 1903, when he was around fifteen and had completed his lesson on ‘Tibb’ (or medicine), in order to perfect his knowledge of the subject he started practising .12 III Around this time Azad launched his first editorial venture, the Lisan usSadiq. Prime objective of the Lisan us-Sidq was the promotion of Urdu language and literature, but it was also meant to promote education in general. In the pages of Lisan us-Sidq, the young editor Azad with his passion for educational reform referred to Shaikh Muhammad Abduh, Mufti of Egypt who was projected as a glowing example of liberal thinking in the Muslim world. His fame as a reformer, Azad argued, had spread through the length and breadth of the Islamic world. Implicit in Azad’s praise of Abduh was his condemnation for the ‘ulema of Egypt, who had turned against Shaikh Abduh for his liberal outlook. Azad frequently expressed his admiration for Abduh’s interpretation of the Qur’an in the light of the contemporary needs of Muslims. He informed his readers that those interpretations were serially published in the monthly journal of al-Manar.13 Thus from a very early days of his new career, Azad had been trying to inform the public in south Asia about the intellectual development in West Asia.

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His interest in Abduh’s refutation of Farah Antun (later published as Islam and Christianity) in al-Manar, kindled his interest in religion14. When Mohi al-din was still confined to the Khanqah of his father, he brought clandestinely a few books written by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.15 This made him acquainted with a major discourse on reform that was completely new for him. Sir Syed’s argument against ‘taqlid’ and his position on ‘ijtihad’ impressed young Azad. Azad’s acquaintance with Urdu literature at this time brought his attention to women question. Reformers like deputy Nazir Ahmed, Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali, Chiragh Ali and Mumtaz Ali were either writing tracts or books on women. Following the tradition of social reformers before him, Abul Kalam also published a book on women and Islam- named Mussalman aurat aur Islam, which was actually a translation of Farid Wajdi Afandi’s book written in Arabic language.16 Clearly Azad’s purpose in translating this book was to introduce his readers also to the debate on women in west Asia. IV Azad’s connection with west Asia was not totally snapped because his family had made a comeback to India. Since his mother was a Hejazi lady, after her death Maulana Khair al-din decided to continue the relationship by giving his second daughter Fatema in marriage to one of Begum Aliya’s nephew. It was probably because of this marriage that Maulana Azad got to go on a tour of west Asia in 1904, although we get very little information about this tour. But the one he made in 1908 was decisive for it changed his intellectual and political ideas, for this was a period of political turmoil in the region with the Young Turk experiment in the Ottoman Empire and the Constitutional Revolution in Persia. Heavily influenced by the struggle for constitutional government and popular sovereignty in Persia, Maulana Azad in the first edition of his journal al-Hilal inaugurated a new genre of nationalism, which

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transcended the geographical boundaries of the ‘imagined nation’ with his praise for Sayyid Jamalal-din Afghani(1838-1897). As Maulana emphasised in al Hilal, jihad was the call for freedom and democracy which was to unite not only Muslims but even non-Muslims. 17 Afghani was one of the greatest leaders of the Muslim world in the last century. Many have given birth to ideas and ideology in this world but few possess the zeal and enthusiasm to establish those ideas through tough resistance. Jamal al-din Afghani could achieve that toughest mission. His real credit was that he was put in the tight situation of a limited time but he was such an enthusiast that his determination and his zeal could not be deterred by time. Wherever he went he paved the way for revolution. In Iran , despite being constantly on the move outside the kingdom, the fire of rebellion which was kindled by him spread like wild fire for fifteen years and finally it took the shape of the evolution. In Egypt he stayed for a year and it was within this period that he had groomed Shaikh Mohammad Abduh, who was then a bright teacher at the University of Al-Azahar. Subsequently, Abduh became the pioneer in spread the idea of reform in the Arab world. When Muhammad Abduh joined Afghani’s camp it was a critical time for the Egyptian nationalists. 18 Nationalism in South Asia, Azad believed, could not be made into a mass movement by simply appealing to the borrowed ideas from western democracies. So Azad built upon the ideas which were prevalent among the Muslims elsewhere in the world. He found a fresh reading of the Quran was carried out in West Asia in the late nineteenth century by nationalists to rationalize their resistance to colonial and imperialism, where the concept of liberty and democracy were traced back to the Qur’an, the Sunnah and Islamic History. In the early twentieth century, the assertive nationalists in South Asia projected the success of Japan against Russia, to inspire the masses to rise in revolt against the British Empire, which was a European power like Russia. Maulana Azad tried to rebuild an affinity with West Asia in

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the twentieth century by asserting on the shared political experiences of western domination. The resistance against European penetration in West Asia had Islam as a referral point, accordingly Azad in his reinterpretation of nationalism had also harped on Islam and the Qur’an as the referral point. Western military and political ascendancy hastened the decline of the three great Muslim empires the Ottoman, the Safavids and the Mughal. As the high tide of western capitalism reached the shores of Africa and Asia, it also engulfed a host of smaller states in Africa, the Middle East, Central, South and South-East Asia. This ascent of the West also introduced new models for private life and amusement, economic transaction and social communication. And in the process such innovations challenged the socio-religious balance of the old societal structure.19 Thus the western impact in the Muslim world became as much a cultural and epistemological challenge as it was political. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire precipitated a crisis in the Muslim world. Europe ( in particular, Great Britain, France, and Holland) had penetrated and increasingly dominated much of the Muslim World from North Africa to Southeast Asia, the French in North Africa, the British and French in the Middle East and South Asia, and the Dutch and British in Southeast Asia).20 Muslim societies of the Middle East were not all subjected to direct colonial rule but all were affected by the emergence of a Europeandominated world system.21 Because western domination brought about revolutionary changes in the cultural as well as political-economic structure of a good number of Muslim societies.22 The advancement in science and technology brought about a revolution in the system of communications and transport, introduced by the West. What is interesting is the fact that such new innovations also benefitted the Muslim societies in some ways, although they might have robbed them of some of their distinctive characteristics. One cannot deny that railways and steamships facilitated a surge in the flow of pilgrims

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and immigrants to Arabia from India and the other colonies and in the process also accelerated the movement of people and ideas from that part of the world to the colonial cities of Cairo, Calcutta, Lahore, Bombay and Singapore.23 The introduction of the steamship and the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, thus made West Asia not only nearer to Europe but it set a closer link with the major British colony of British India. The ideas about religion, society and governance which were emerging in other parts of Asia or Africa were now rapidly transform through the new communication channels to India and other colonies. So colonialism not only undermined the independence of those societies but brought them closer to each other into a bond of unity as the embark upon the road of resistance to colonialism. Jamal al-dinAfghani appeared with a new understanding, questioning the rulers of the authoritarian regimes. He was the Rousseau of the late nineteenth century in the Muslim world, who facilitated the idea of ‘peoples power’, setting the road for constitutional and democratic governments. He became an outstanding figure of nineteenth century Islam and a major catalyst for Islamic reform; a tireless activist, as he was, he lived and preached his reformist message in Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, India, Russia, France, and England. Afghani attempted to bridge the gap between secular modernists and religious traditionalists. His ideas were initially shaped in Iranian seminaries and later they were received in Calcutta, Cairo, Istanbul and Paris, where they filtered through contemporary social and political categories, to shape the spirit of democratic and nationalist ideas. As each region had their own experience with autocratic, despotic or authoritarian governance, his ideas guided their struggle against such oppressive regimes. In this hour of crisis Afghani appealed to the ‘ulema with his assertion that Muslims needed to remember that Islam was the source of their strength and that the Muslims must return to a more faithful observance of its norms. Although he was not a revivalist at

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anytime, yet he articulated an idea of modernity, liberty, equality in favour of constitutionalism and parliamentary government with Islam as the referral point. Edward G. Brown points out that the awakening of the Muslim world took a lightning speed; as striking political or religious changes were initiated in the last 30 or 40 years of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which stood Afghani. In Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Morocco, the Caucasus, the Crimea and India his ideas greatly accelerated and accentuated the indigeneous movements which was precipitating there. During the dark days of the Russo-Turkish war when Turkey was badly weakened under the repressive rule of Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid, that the first spark of protest surfaced. And who else but Afghani was its initiator.24 As a political agitator Afghani also advocated an Islamic solidarity which would empower Muslims in their struggle against colonialism. Azad also acknowledged this in the first edition of his journal as it has been referred above. Ahmed S. Dallal argues that Afghani lived in a period of continued efforts to modernise the Muslim states and their institutions under the political and intellectual influence of Europe.25 As the European colonialism continued to undermine the political independence of the Muslim countries, Afghani’s reform was initiated at the intellectual and political levels to articulate responses at those very two levels. Afghani’s political ideas created great impact on the masses who were looking for an appropriate context to revolt against autocratic governments. And at the intellectual level he was an inspiration to the then future leaders of democratic movements. One cannot undermine the influence of Afghani’s ideas in Egypt, when the nationalist raised the banner of revolt around 1871, and finally it was the revolt of ‘Arabi Pasha. His political philosophy actually precipitated a successful agitation of popular discontent against the Tobacco Monopoly in 1891 in Iran too, which resulted in the Persian “Risorgimento”, and finally it culminated in the

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granting of the constitution by the late Muzaffar al-Din Shah in August, 1906. Inspired by Afghani, Maulana Azad wrote thus as early as 1912: The real power belongs to the people, and a genuine political policy is that which is born out of the minds of the people. The duty of the leader is to nurture the voice of the people and to give the same a direction. The Muslim leaders have never allowed the voice of the people(community) to emerge. Never had they left the problem to the people nor were the people given the opportunity to endeavour by the use of their own reasoning ...Our leaders taught us to have faith and trust in the Government since it alone had the real power to arrange our affairs.26

When Maulana Azad wrote that the real power belongs to the people and the duty of the leader is to nurture the voice of the people, he was also reflecting on the idea of constitutional government and democratic ideals, which came to be establish as political forces in the West Asia, due to the great intellectual and political movement inaugurated by men like Afghani. It was Azad’s sojourn to west Asia in 1908 which gave him a first-hand knowledge about the political realities there. Azad thus wrote: In Egypt I came in contact with followers of Mustapha Kamil, and also a group of Turks who had established a centre in Cairo and were publishing a weekly from there. When I went to Turkey I made friends with some of the leaders of the Young Turks movement. I kept up my correspondence with them for many years after I returned to India.27

The ideas of Mustafa Kamil were radically different from that of Shaikh Muhammad ‘Abduh. Kamil wanted to evacuate Egypt of the

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British presence, by putting up a strong resistance movement against them. Kamil’s Nationalist Party Hizb ul-Watan had become a strong force, When Azad reached Egypt, he did not meet Kamil Pasha but his death in 1907 enforced among the Egyptian a vigour and aspiration, which Azad had not seen anywhere in India. The Kamalites were hard core anti-colonialists and in their argument for wataniya (nationalism), they advocated the unity between Muslims and Coptic Christian as essential, to achieve their success against colonialism. Maulana Azad’s personal experience of this new political revolution in the larger Muslim world made him formulate a definite political ideology.. The nationalists in the Muslim world were surprised that the Muslims in India were still subservient to the British, and that they isolated themselves from the nationalist Hindus, who were waging a life and death struggle against the British. When Azad introduced Rashid Rida to his reader in the first edition of al-Hilal , he pointed out that Rida was not a conqueror to India who came to India, with a flag of his nation nor with a sword in his hand. He was the one who came to conquer the heart of the people, because he came to India to shed tears on the faith and decadence of India. The nationalist, in the Muslim world, interpreted their struggle for freedom from the colonial rule as a major ‘religious duty’ and this impressed upon Maulana Azad the most, thus in al Hilal he writes: If you have any course of political action in front of you there is no reason why the Qur’an should not provide you guidance on that. The Qur’an delivers man from the darkness of all errors and brings him under the light of guidance. We find that all our political errors are merely due to our failure to surrender ourselves to the guiding hands of the Qur’an. Otherwise there would be light all around instead of darkness.28

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An interesting fact which need to be highlighted here is that we find a similar argument put forward in the ‘Urwah-al Watqah’(the Firmbound) published by Afghani and Abduh from Paris, in 1884 when they were in exile. It points out that Allah rule in his creation and the order of human society and the reason for the rise and fall of nations as well as their strength and weakness. It clarified that Islam is a religion of the sovereignty and power of the people. It combines happiness of this world and that of the thereafter. V It is important to argue that neither the politics of West Asia, nor the political developments there, were fully determined by the factor of colonialism alone. In the Persian constitutional movement or in the nationalist movement in Egypt in 1906 in one hand and the Young Turk coup of Istanbul of July 1908 there was a clear indication of a emerging domestic politics. Schulze argues that the politics of this period was largely concerned with a major question of ‘who had the right to wield power in the modern state’ which was already in the process of its formation. The power of the people which Afghani had been inspiring for could be achieve through the efforts of the nationalists. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the question which were looming heavily was the question of sharing of the power achieved through the efforts of different classes and section of the people. When Maulana Azad was moving among the nationalists in the West Asia around 1908, he realized the dangerous consequences of the tension which might erupt jeopardizing the democratic essence in the face of any contestation for power. When he returned home, he found that the Muslim League and its elite leaders had been demanding separate electorates for the Muslims. Azad stood strong and bold in criticizing the policy of the league once he launched his journal al Hilal, in 1912. The ideas and perception on nationalism which Maulana Azad formulated as a nationalist political theorist of the Muslims in South

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Asia in the early decades of the twentieth century were radically different from those of the Muslim League. He worked on building a strong democratic independent state of India, where the Muslims would form an integrated part of the nation. He knew that democracy was the only political platform which would ensure the rights of the rich and the poor, the week and the strong, deprived and the powerful. In the demand for separate electorates by the Muslim League, Azad could trace the conspiracy of the elitist Muslims against the majority of the deprived one. Azad built a strong cause for democracy with Islam as the referral point of reference. Both Afghani and ‘Abduh were familiar with European modernity and progress but they were more sensitive to the negative momentous impact of European colonial policies and their impact on the Muslim society, economy and religion. Afghani attempted to mobilize masses against foreign occupation of Muslim lands was usually coupled with political intrigues and instigations against Muslim rulers too. For most of the 1870’s after he was expelled from Istanbul, Afghani lived in Egypt; where he cultivated a circle of associates and followers, including his later days closest associate Muhammad Abduh to promote the right of the people against the rule of all sorts of autocratic and despotic regimes. In this struggle Afghani made Islam the referral point. That he was not only working on a unity of Muslims against the western colonizers but made an ardent effort to bring about a unity of all the oppressed nations against the oppressors. Afghani came all the way to British India to build a bridge of alliance between the West Asia and south Asia in their struggle against colonialism. Maulana Azad’s personal ties with west Asia and his intellectual debt to the theory of nationalism and democracy formulated in West Asia made him an important personality in bridging the gulf between west Asia and South Asia. Azad in al Hilal argues that nationalism is an important stage in the evolution of mankind for his ultimate salvation as a universal man. He thus wrote:

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In the journey of human knowledge and cognition there is the stage of unity of the whole and of universality. Each of these journey begins with the part, with the individual and ends with the unity of the whole and the species. This is the point where all divisions based on distinctiveness and limited identity are removed, all the narrowness and selfishness imposed by affinity to transitional identities are absorbed; there emerge the wise man who could perceive that the universe is a place of multitudes but the reality is its unity.29

Thus Maulana Azad, a sufi by training and a nationalist by choice took upon him the Herculean task of developing the concept of universal man. The Asian unity remained perhaps as an integral part of this marvellous project. Notes

1. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Al Hilal, Vol.1, No.23,18th of December,1912 2. Al Hilal, Vol. 1, No. 9 of September 1912. 3. For detail see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist thought and the colonial world: A derivative Discourse?, (O.U.P., Delhi, 1985). 4. Abdur Razzaq Malihabadi, Azad ki kahani khud Azad ki Zabani, (Delhi: Hali Publishing House, 1958), pp.66-7 5. His Arabic work in ten volumes was published from Egypt. Azad, India Wins Freedom, (Delhi: Orient Longman, reprinted in 1989), p. 2. 6. Ibid,. 7. Malihabadi, op.cit., pp.102-09 and 164 -67. In his early life he admired Shah Ismail Shahidand Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly for their efforts to inspire the theory of resistance among the Muslims. Dismayed by Syed Ahmed’s policy of appeasement towards the British, (whom Azad by now had identified as the first cause of the evil that prevailed in the country)Azad could look up for inspiration from Shah Ismail Shahid and Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly as they were martyrs for the cause of freedom, not as Wahabbis. 8. The word Kalam itself did not come into use as the designation for a specific approach to the principles of faith until the fourth/tenth century; other words were also used. Abu Hanifa, for example, the founder of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence and an important theological thinker, called this Science al-fiqh al-akbar, which we can translate as “the greater understanding”. Here he used the word fiqh, which we have been translating as “jurisprudence”, in its Qur’anic sense, where it simply means understanding the teachings of the religion. But he distinguishes between the

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“lesser understanding”(jurisprudence) and the “greater understanding”(the principles of faith), Kalam has also been called usual al-din, “the principle” or “roots” of the religion. This name refers to the fact that the fundamental roots of Islam lie in faith, or in understanding the nature of things. Then jurisprudence becomes furu’al-din, the “ramifications” or “branches” of the religion, because the practical teachings represent an application of the principles of faith. The primary concern of the Kalam specialists was to defend the truth of the Qur’an against anyone who would presume to doubt it. 9. Manqulat consisted of the Qur’anic tafsir, hadith and the fiqh, through which students were expected to get a deeper understanding about the essence of Islam, and its philosophy but the way it was tailored in the syllabus of the dars-eNizami, it was bereft of its purpose. 10. Ma’qulat was meant to initiate in the students the thirst for an understanding of the Qur’an by way of reasoning. 11. Malihabadi, Azad ki Kahani, op.cit., pp.177-8,253-4. 12. Azad Ghubar-e Khatir . 12 October 1942, Letter no. 11 to Nawab SadarYar Jung Bahadur Maulana Habib al-Rahman Khan Sherwani. 13. Al-Manar was published by Rashid Rida, the follower of Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in the closing years of the nineteenth century. To Abduh, colonialism now became the symptom of intellectual decline of Muslim and not the cause of this decline. In fact towards the end of his life ‘Abduh published treatise on theology. ‘Abduh’s reform ideas can be found in his Qur’anic exegetical work, published serially in the journal al-Manar. 14. Ibid p.235. 15. Malihabadi, Azad Ki Kahani pp.229-30. 16. Azad joined the journalVakil of Amritsar after he left al Nadwa in April 1906. He worked forVakil from April to November 1906. His name does not appear in any article which was published during this period. His name appeared earlier inVakilas the translator of the Arabic treatise “al MiratulMuslima”(Image of a Muslim Women). Farid Wajdi Afandi was a social reformer associated with Egyptian nationalist party. He described the position of women in Egypt. 17. Al-Hilal, 12th of July 1912. 18. Al Hilal, vol.1, No.1, of 12th July 1912. 19. It has been argued by historians that the spread of European imperial interest in the Muslim world led to the introduction of various new technologies. The Tanzimat period of Ottoman history (1839-76) was characterised not only by a new openness to institutional and technological influences from the modernising West but also to the developments in other Muslim societies beyond their own political borders. Following the collapse of the Mughal and the Safavid dynasties(the other two major Muslim empires of the early modern period in the first half of the nineteenth century) some Muslims from a wide array of societies around the world began looking towards Istanbul for symbolic, if not necessarily political or religious, leadership. For details see R. M. Feener, ‘New Networks and new knowledge: migrations, communications and refiguration of the Muslim community in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’ in Robert W Hefner., (ed) The New Cambridge History of Islam Vol. 6 ,

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‘Islam and Modernity: Culture and society since1800’ (Cambridge University Press, U.K., 2010), pp.39-41. 20. John L Esposito, Islam: The straight path, expanded edition,(OUP, New York,1991) p. 125. 21. From the end of the eighteenth century Persia, situated on India’s western borders assumed in the eyes of those concerned with the affairs of the East India Company in London and Calcutta an importance which grew in relation to their concern about the threat from external enemies to their possession in India. This involved Britain to an ever increasing extent in Persia. Afghanistan, France and Russia, in turn, appeared to threaten India and the primary British interest in Persia was seen to be the maintenance of the independence and integrity of Persia as an element in the defense of their Indian empire. Britain had no territorial aims in Persia and in the 19th century her interest in Persia did not arise primarily out of her relations with Persia but rather out of her relations with those powers which had gained or might gain influence in Persia and might threaten India. Russia on the other hand, had expansionist designs in Persia and deprived her of all her provinces north of the Aras River in the early years of the century and of territory in the north-east in the middle of the century. This gave rise not only to the resentment but also to the fear. By the middle of the century, if not considerably before, both the realization, by Persians that Persian independence and territorial integrity depended upon the balance of power between Britain and Russia and the fear of foreign intervention limited political experiment and economic and social change. For the Persian the humiliation of military defeat in the Russian wars at the beginning of the century and the AngloPersian war of 1856-57 produced a desire to emulate the progress and technical advances of Western Europe in order to resist the encroachment of foreign powers. It also heightened the sense of distinctiveness and separation felt between Persia as an Islamic society and non-Islamic societies. For detail see Ann K. S. Lambton, ‘ Social changes in Persia in the nineteenth Century’ in Albert Hourani, Philips S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson, (eds) The Modern Middle East ((Tauris, London, 1993), p 145. 22. It was the reforms of the Tanzimat period in the Ottoman Empire and the similar reforms in Egypt(as also in Tunisia) that, had destroyed the independent power of the notables and the mode of political action it made possible. The aim of the reforms was to establish a uniform and centralized administration, linked directly with each citizen and working in accordance with its own rational principles of justice, applied equally to all. In Egypt the division of power between palace and civil service, the differing interest and intervention of the European powers and the very size and complexity of the civil service, all led to a certain political activity. The ulema lost much of their importance in Egypt as their official functions in the systems of law and education dwindled. The upper ‘ulema as Professor Heyd has explained, were to a great extent supporters of reform, for many different reasons they too in their way wished the empire to be strong again. Some of them understood the condition of its becoming strong out of conviction and interest. They were on the side of the established order and the bureaucratic ideal of rule from above in the light of a principle of justice which was not without its appeal to men brought up in the Sunni

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23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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tradition of politics. For detail see Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables’ in Hourani et al, ed The Modern Middle East , pp 101-108. See Hefner Robert W., ‘Muslims and Modernity: Culture and Society in an age of contest and plurality’, in The New Cambridge History of Islam Vol.6 Muslims and Modernity Culture and Society since 1800,(ed) Robert W. Hefner], (Cambridge University Press, U.K., 2010), pp. 5-20 Afghani was the father of modern Islamic ideas. Afghani’s apprehension of the external threat made him an ardent protagonist for reform. For Afghani reform was necessary because it was the only way for Muslim World, to internally rebuild itself. For him, the multi dimensional revitalization of the Muslim World demands their unity, the only chance for regaining their independence. But his greatest contribution was that he re-introduced a broad notion of rationalism to the interpretation of Islamic sources, including the Quran. He also emphasized the importance for striving. He called such activity Islam’s essence and asked Muslims to fight against the spirit of passivity and fatalism that had gained hold over their minds, soul and societies. Afghani was an inspiration for the later generation of intellectual and political thinkers, who took the thread of ‘Ijtihad’ (independent interpretation of the Quran) to argue the case for freedom of thought. For detail see Ahmad S Dallal, “The Origins and Early Development of Islamic reform”, in Hefner (ed) NCHI, vol.6.(Cambridge University Press, U.K. 2010). Al Hilal, Vol.1, No.11, of 22 September 1912. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom, op.cit., p. 7 Al Hilal. 8 Sep. 1912. Vol.1. No. 9. Al Hilal, New Series, Vol.1, No. 10 June 1927.

CONTRIBUTORS

Seema Alavi is a professor of history at Delhi University , New Delhi, India. She specializes in early modern and modern South Asia, with an interest in the transformation of the region’s legacy from Indo-Persian to one heavily affected by British colonial rule. She has written books on the military, religious and medical cultures of the region from the early modern to modern times. Her most recent book is Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the age of Empire published in March 2015 from Harvard University Press, USA. Alavi earned her PhD from Cambridge University, England. She has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge and was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard. In 2010 she was at the Radcliffe institute at Harvard as the William Bentinck-Smith Fellow. She wrote Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Oxford University Press, 1995) and co-authored with Muzzafar Alam, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I‘jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Oxford University Press, 2001). In 2009 she wrote Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600– 1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Modern Asian Studies, , Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and Biblio. Kingshuk Chatterjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Calcutta University and is an adjunct at the Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, Calcutta University. He holds the position

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of Deputy Director, Centre for Pakistan and West Asian Studies, Calcutta University, and Director, Centre for Studies in China and her Neighbourhood, Calcutta University. He has previously served as a Founding Professor in the Department of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University and as Fellow at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies. He has also served as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Chatterjee’s area of expertise is in Middle Eastern politics and he specialises in Political Islam in the Modern World. Chatterjee is the author of Ali Shariati and the Shaping of Islam in the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He has, further the editor of a nymber of titles on the politics of the contemporary Middle East. Kashshaf Ghani is Assistant Professor at School of Historical Studies, Nalanda University. His research focuses on pre-modern South Asia (1000-1800) where he looks into Sufi networks and practices, IndoIslamic cultures, Indo-Persian histories and traditions.Ghani has held positions at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, the University of SorbonneNouvelle, Paris, and the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin.  Soumen Mukherjee is Assistant Professor in History at Presidency University, Kolkata. He holds a Doctoral degree in the History of South Asia from the University of Heidelberg. He has formerly researched at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin and has taught at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universitaet, also in Berlin. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland. His research interests lie widely in the fields of socio-religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia with particular focus on questions of identity, religious networks, narratives of mobility, religious experience and the ‘psy disciplines’, and ‘new religious movements’.

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He has published on some of these themes in refereed journals and his first monograph titled Ismailism & Islam in Modern South Asia: Community & Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals’ was puiblished from Cambridge University Press (2017).

Safoora Razeq is at present with Aliah University as Assistant Professor. She was with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata as Research Fellow. Her specialization is on Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Her areas of interest are Muslim nationalism of the early twentieth century and the concept of composite nationalism. She has additionally a special interest in lives of Muslim Women. Jael Silliman was a tenured Associate Professor of Women Studies at the University of Iowa, (1996 – 2002) where she worked on issues of race, reproductive rights and health, and gender and the environment in the US and South Asia. Thereafter she served as Program Officer for Reproductive Rights and Women’s Rights at the Ford Foundation in New York ((2003 – 2009). She has been an activist in the transnational women’s movement for four decades. In 2014 she was a Nehru Fulbright Scholar. She is currently an independent scholar and writer documenting her community, the Bagdadi Jews of Calcutta and has curated www.jewishcalcutta.in. She has several books and articles to her name including Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope, (University Press of New England, 2001 and Seagull Press, India), lead author for Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organising for Reproductive Justice with (Marlene Fried, Loretta Ross, Elena Gutierrez, South End Press, Boston, 20014), and most recently she has written a novel, The Teak Almirah, Milestone Books, Calcutta, 2016. She has published widely in academic journals and now regularly writes for popular audiences.