Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire 9780231558358

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Perilous Intimacies

Religion, Culture, and Public Life

FRONTISPIECE Map identifying key places mentioned in the book.

PERILOUS INTIMACIES Debating Hindu-­Muslim Friendship After Empire

SHERALI TAREEN FOREWORD BY FAISAL DEVJI

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Publication of this book was made possible in part by funding from the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup​.­columbia​.e­ du Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Tareen, SherAli K., author. Title: Perilous intimacies : debating Hindu-­Muslim friendship after empire / SherAli Tareen. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2023. | Series: Religion, culture, and public life | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023003125 (print) | LCCN 2023003126 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231210300 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231210317 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231558358 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Islam—­Relations—­Hinduism. | Hinduism— ­Relations—­Islam. | India—­Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC BP173.H5 T37 2023 (print) | LCC BP173.H5 (ebook) | DDC 294.5/157—­dc23/eng/20230210 LC record available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2023003125 LC ebook record available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2023003126

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Contents

Foreword xi Faisal Devji

Acknowledgments xvii Note on Transliteration xxi Introduction: The Promise and Peril of Hindu-­Muslim Friendship 1 one Translating the “Other”: Early Modern Muslim Understandings of Hinduism 35 two Deciding the “True” God: Miracle Wars and Interreligious Polemics 79 three Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies 115 four The Cow and the Caliphate 153 five The Contagion of Imitation: A Select Genealogy 189 [ ix ]

Contents six The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide: Competing Rationalities of Reform in Muslim South Asia 220 Epilogue 253 Appendix: Suggestions and Discussion Questions for Teaching This Book 273 Glossary 277 Notes 281 Select Bibliography 311 Index 323

[x]

Foreword FAISAL DEVJI

This book represents an extraordinary achievement in concluding SherAli Tareen’s highly original project exploring the everyday life of sovereignty in colonial India. It is framed by the argument that the diminution or outright destruction of Muslim political authority in the British Empire led to its fragmentary dissemination within social life instead. The loss of political power, in other words, was compensated by the increase in social distinction. Tareen is particularly interested in the ways in which religious authorities, now among the only legitimate spokesmen for colonized Muslim populations, in effect partnered with their European overlords to dismiss the political language of the past. At the same time, however, they sought to Islamize Western ideas of sovereignty by appropriating them for God. In his first book, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, Tareen showed how the occasionally tempestuous Muslim debates and controversies about Muhammad’s status entailed grappling with the task of claiming a kind of sovereignty for the Prophet. Yet they also paradoxically refused it in acknowledging his ordinary humanity as a model Muslim, leaving Muhammad stranded between the political and the social. In this book, Tareen shifts from individual to collective ideas of sovereignty by considering how social relations between Hindus and Muslims were increasingly defined in terms of protecting the frontiers of one community’s integrity against any [ xi ]

Foreword dependence on another. It was a rendering social of independence as a political logic not yet available in its own name. The sophistication of this argument is evident, especially when compared with accounts for which the question of sovereignty in colonial histories is understood in terms of Carl Schmitt’s thesis about its presence within, but transcendence of, the law as a primary figure of what he called “political theology.” In Tareen’s narrative, by contrast, sovereignty does not move from theology to politics but the reverse. Yet this was no merely temporary phenomenon dictated by the exigencies of empire. To this day, sovereignty in South Asia is debated and often decided within society and with the state’s connivance. These are not, after all, Weberian states dedicated to the monopolization of violence; they deliberately outsource it from strength rather than weakness. Rather than describe the case that Tareen makes in either book, however, I would like to reflect more broadly upon the theme of interreligious friendship that comprises his subject in the second. And I shall do so with reference to traditions of thought outside the juridical one he examines. One of the great themes of precolonial political thought, friendship had often been approached through the figure of the prince in advice literature and through that of the beloved in poetry. These two genres were linked not only because one could be found in the other but also because the prince could be seen as a beloved and vice versa. The paradox being addressed in both cases was how to reconcile the political as much as erotic necessity of intimacy with the inequality of power or passion that made it impossible. It was not just that the prince possessed more political power than the boon companions he required for trusted and honest advice. Even outside the world of politics, relations of amity and love by their very nature deprived one or both parties of their judgment and, so, independence. But this loss of control could also be enjoyed as the most intense form of self-­realization, bringing wisdom and pleasure in equal measure. The connection between the political and the erotic here was typical of courtly culture, and Tareen tells us how it was broken in colonial times by translating the problem of independence into theology as a collective obligation to maintain the sovereignty of the Muslim community in purely social terms. And yet something from these earlier discourses seems to have survived into the apparently practical and pragmatic discussions about protecting the supremacy of Muslim communal identity that Tareen so nicely describes. For [ xii ]

Foreword there is something excessive about the anxieties that inform the theological disquisitions on Hindu-­Muslim friendship, which presume the possibility not simply of everyday prejudice clouding the believer’s judgment but something akin to an erotic dependency. It was the love that dare not speak its name. This is why so much of what Tareen describes in the attempt to distinguish Hindu from Muslim sartorially, ritually, and in other ways bears such a strong similarity to debates occurring at the same time about the importance of distinguishing men and women within Muslim society. The loss of political power blurred if it did not redefine the relations between Hindus and Muslims as well as men and women. To avoid Muslims being subordinated to Hindus or men to women by ties of love as much as power, it was necessary to separate them into distinct and marked categories whose relationship should be one of civility if no longer some kind of old-­fashioned mastery either amorous or political. The mission was to regulate social relations that seemed to have lost their political context. But this link between religious and sexual relations goes even further, for we are dealing here not only with Schmitt’s definition of the political relationship as one between friend and enemy but also a kind of triangle between the lover, beloved, and rival as in the tradition of courtly poetry. This triangle was not simply a literary inheritance, but it was important because, in the nineteenth century, there could be no relationship between Hindu and Muslim without the British constituting a third party to it. While Indian nationalists struggled to join the first two groups in friendship against the last as their common enemy—­a nd, in this way, reanimate Schmitt’s definition—­the triadic relation between them meant that any one party could befriend another against the remaining third, or two of the parties might vie for the third’s friendship, with the problem then being of deciding which was the genuine lover. As with the courtly literature of old, in other words, at issue was not a binary relationship but a triangular one. The celebrated liberal reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for instance, could respond to the emergence of the Indian National Congress in the 1880s by seeing in its demands for majority rule little more than an effort to subordinate Muslims to Hindus and thus undo the very possibility of their friendship. He advised the former to turn toward the British for true friendship by pointing out that they had a religious tradition in common and could share each other’s food and society much more freely than with upper-­caste Hindus. But, as one of his critics, the satirical poet and Congress supporter [ xiii ]

Foreword Akbar Illahabadi pointed out, for Muslims to desire friendship with the British was an absurdity, given their vastly unequal relationship as masters and subjects. This, of course, was also a question the British asked themselves, and in many ways E. M. Forster’s famous novel A Passage to India is all about the possibility of friendship as much as love between Indian and English. In trying to befriend Indians who were by definition and law unequal to them, Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore end up inadvertently reinforcing racial and gender distinctions in their most violent forms, while at the close of the novel the possibility of friendship between Fielding and Dr. Aziz is explicitly posed and, despite their own desires, answered with a “No, not yet” and “No, not there” from something like the voice of history itself. No relationship of dominance, Forster appears to suggest, could allow for either friendship or love between those defined by it. Only the longing remained. The love triangle, however, was essentially a nineteenth-­century theme, and in the twentieth it was invoked only polemically to accuse one’s enemy of betrayal. The emergence of mass politics with Indian nationalism suddenly made the British seem irrelevant to India’s future—­or, rather, their importance became purely instrumental, residing in the ability to help one or another side in the struggle to define this future. From possible partners or rivals in love and friendship, the British came to be seen as betraying their own claim to remain the neutral third party in India mediating between its various parties understood in liberal and capitalist terms as interests. Having become partisan in this sense, without at the same time entering into any relationship of friendship with Hindus or Muslims, the colonial state’s legitimacy collapsed together with its ideology of disinterested governance. With the return of politics to Indian hands, in other words, the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship was posed differently. It was now understood as the choice between an affective relationship and a contractual one. And if I use the word affective here, it is to describe both friendship and fraternity as types of intimacy set against the calculations of contract. The latter relationship was linked to the colonial state, which as we have seen, had claimed to mediate between Indians construed as interests. With the collapse of its hegemony, this kind of contractual relationship guaranteed by the British increasingly came to be seen by nationalists as little more than a divide-­and-­rule strategy because it was premised upon the multiplication of interests that could be protected by the colonial state. [ xiv ]

Foreword Brotherhood, of course, was the defining relationship for national as much as religious solidarity. But the Islamic authorities Tareen analyzes reserved it for the latter, which is why it is the possibility of friendship alone that comes to define the former. Yet friendship is arguably the more intense relationship, not least because its voluntary character allows for the possibility of love as much as enmity. Having been given in advance through collective ideas of kinship, fraternity can be betrayed but never renounced, thus producing its own kind of intimate violence. While friendship is never given and must constantly be reaffirmed if it is not to break apart into indifference or enmity, it also holds the potential of turning into love and so remains the only place where the old erotic relationship can survive. Like all categories of kinship, fraternity is hierarchical more than it is egalitarian. This is why Muslims are often described as younger brothers in Hindu nationalism, with Gandhi accused of favoring them over his rightful heirs. Friendship, however, demands equality and is therefore the more difficult—­if also liberating—­relationship. The Mahatma himself used both “brotherhood” and “friendship” to describe Hindu-­Muslim relations, suggesting that the shared inheritance given by the former had to be worked into the equality of the latter. Like many of his contemporaries, he realized that the increasing violence between Hindus and Muslims was a product of their intimacy, as each was accused of treachery when turned into an interest group first by colonial law and then by electoral politics. If Gandhi wanted to reanimate brotherhood into friendship by forgoing both the inequality of kinship and the calculations of contract, Jinnah sought to build friendship precisely on the ground of contract. Recognizing the unequal and so oppressive intimacies of fraternity, he wanted to push the capitalist as well as democratic logic of contract that was ripping them apart to its conclusion by separating Hindus and Muslims. To describe this situation, he often used the metaphor of brothers turned into enemies when quarreling over the house they had inherited. Having become irreconcilable because they were so close, the only way to reconcile these brothers was to partition the property between them by replacing kinship with contract as the basis of their relationship. But, rather than envisioning a future for Hindu-­Muslim relations based on calculations of interest alone, Jinnah thought of such a partition in terms of a social contract that bound together feuding communities in an explicit agreement instead of by the implicit sentiments of a common inheritance. [ xv ]

Foreword Brothers, he said, had to become friends through the mediation of law, with contract merely creating a new basis for such friendship. What worked in the case of actual brothers fighting over a house would also work for communities competing for rights over a country. Neither Gandhi nor Jinnah saw their visions of Hindu-­Muslim friendship realized, but each in his own way tried to overcome the violent intimacy of brotherhood as much as the contractual relationship of interests they thought the colonial state had used to divide Indians. The Muslim thinkers with whom Tareen deals in this book also line up on the side of friendship or contract, if for rather different reasons, and in order to maintain what they see as the sovereignty of Islam in India’s social rather than political life. Looking back on this history, it is difficult to say which side won. Contract has been turned inward in Pakistan to exclude more and more Muslims from fraternity as much as friendship on the same basis as Hindus had been. And as the arena of contract has widened, the circle of friendship has shrunk. Contract has no limits, of course, while friendship is selective by definition. But, though the former is meant to create civil relations, it seems not to have escaped the violent intimacies of brotherhood. The latter remains an open question, despite holding forth the possibility of enmity as part of its promise.

[ xvi ]

Acknowledgments

The central conceptual theme of this book—­exploring the question of religious difference and interreligious friendship in Muslim intellectual thought in a political context marked by the loss and absence of Muslim political sovereignty—­is inspired in large measure by my conversations over the years with Ebrahim Moosa. I especially owe to his thought the “after empire” bit that forms an important part of the title and conceptual constitution of the book. He also remains a trusted and vital source of support in myriad ways who read and commented on large chunks of this book. In 2019, he invited me to participate as faculty in an intellectual venture that emerged as among the highlights of my career so far and also provided great impetus to this book: the two-­year Madrasa Discourses program that in conversation with around fifty madrasa graduates from India and Pakistan engaged varied strands of the Western and Muslim humanities. Many of the arguments presented in this book were tested during the Madrasa Discourses sessions I was fortunate to lead, and I learned a lot by way of ideas and resources from the scholars who were a part of this program. I should especially mention here Drs./Mawlanas Ammar Khan Nasir and Waris Mazhari, two outstanding and courageous traditionalist scholars of this generation, who were always very generous with their time and help. The pioneering work of Bruce Lawrence and Carl Ernst on the theme of Hindu-­Muslim encounters is this book’s condition of possibility. I am also in debt to both [ xvii ]

Acknowledgments of them for their steadfast support and encouragement since graduate school years. Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s collegiality, mentorship, and scholarship are all key ingredients to the texture and composition of this book. Zunaira Komal read large parts of the book, provided incisive comments, and suggested some very helpful theoretical references; I am most thankful for her time. Other people who read and commented on parts of this book or provided critical help include (in no order) Anna Bigelow, Sohaira Siddiqui, Hafsa Kanjwal, Sana Haroon, Fuad Naeem, Faisal Devji, Peter Gottschalk, Sudipta Kaviraj, Ali Altaf Mian, Barton Scott, Jonathan Brown, Matthew Cook, Yasmin Saikia, Rais Rahman, Margrit Pernau, Gregory Maxwell Bruce, Brannon Ingram, Radhika Govindrajan, Ovamir Anjum, Teena Purohit, Farina Mir, Naushad Noori, Altaf Qadir, Talha Nemat, Zulqarnain Haider, Khurram Hussain, and Saif al-­Hadi. I must especially thank Faisal Devji for taking time out of his hectic schedule to write a very thoughtful, productive, and thought-­provoking foreword to this book. Venkat Dhulipala is a trusted friend who always answered questions rapidly and provided sagely counsel. I remain indebted to the work of five scholars who are most influential in how I think about the question of religion: Ananda Abeysekara, Talal Asad, Arvind Mandair, Saba Mahmood, and David Scott. Rizwan Zamir’s critical (in different senses of the word) friendship has helped me view the scholarly enterprise from a broader lens and purview. Tehseen Thaver, my wife and partner, makes the practice of everyday life worth doing; not a chapter of this book would be written were it not for her patience, support, and endurance. Our May 2020 son Ajab Khan Tareen, true to his name, has brought massive doses of wonder to our lives (mostly though not always in joyous sensibilities of that category). Every moment with him has been a precious gift that has enlivened my life in ways I cannot describe but only thank the Almighty for. On August 9, 2020, suddenly and unexpectedly, I lost my father, Dr. Sideequllah Tareen. No half-­hour has since passed in which I have not thought of him or missed him intensely, with copious and thankfully often very meaningful dream visits as well. His absence has been the most dominating presence that has corresponded with the writing of this book, as I have carried and nursed this strange wound that heals and festers together. I am not sure what he would have made of this book, but despite being a doctor of a different kind (ENT specialist), he would have read it in earnest and would [ xviii ]

Acknowledgments be glad that his passing did not hamper its completion, a sentiment most likely to be expressed with his signature one-­liner “Take it very cool.” I am also very thankful to my mother Fauzia Deeba (Foi) for everything, especially during these rather interesting and trying last few years. My colleagues and friends at Franklin and Marshall College—­Stephen Cooper, John Modern, David McMahan, Annette Aronowicz, Rachel Feldman, Tami Lantz, Sylvia Alajaji, Bridget Guarasci, and Adeem Suhail, among others—­make the workplace a very comfortable site that allows me to focus on research with peace and solace. The folks at Columbia Univerity Press have been excellent to work with. Wendy Lochner, whose professionalism and keen editorial insight are in fierce competition, is a dream editor for any author; Matthew Engelke was highly supportive of this project from the outset, and I am extremely thankful to him for including it in the prestigious Religion, Culture, and Public Life Series. Lowell Frye has provided consistently wise counsel and assistance. Emily Shelton is an expert copyeditor who made this book more readable. Many thanks also to Susan Pensak for seeing this book through to production, and to Erika Zabinski for curating an excellent index. I am also grateful to Sean Archer, my trainer, for those precious exercise sessions. I presented different parts of this book at the following venues: Columbia University South Asian Studies Center, the Ummatics Colloquim, the University of Pennsylvania Pakistan Studies Conference, the University of Michigan–­Ann Arbor Pakistan Studies Conference, International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) Al-­Faruqi Lecture, Dar ul-­Qasim Chicago, University of Cambridge Center of Islamic Studies, Oxford University Political Thought Seminar, Lehigh University, the University of Notre Dame, Habib University-­University of Exeter Islam After Colonialism Series, the Institute of Business Administration (Karachi), and the Peshawar Literary Festival. I profoundly thank the organizers, discussants, and audience members at all these venues for their constructive comments and critiques. Research for this book was supported by an American Institute of Pakistan Studies Fellowship and a Franklin and Marshall Sabbatical leave, for both of which I am very grateful. I am also very thankful to the staff at the Shadeck-­ Fackenthal Library at Franklin and Marshall College, the Firestone Library at Princeton University, the British Library, the Library at the University of Punjab in Lahore, and the Ganj Baksh Library in Islamabad for helping me assemble the texts and manuscripts that made this book possible. Tsering [ xix ]

Acknowledgments Wangyal Shawa at the Peter B. Lewis Library at Princeton University helped me curate the map that appears at the beginning of this book; I am very thankful for his time and labor. Portions of this book have appeared in previous publications. Shorter segments of chapters 1 and 3, respectively, appeared in the Journal of Royal Asiatic Society and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. I thank the original publishers for permission to use that material here. The beginnings of this book lie in my undergraduate years at Macalester College almost twenty years ago while serving as a teaching assistant for the first iteration of Jim Laine’s seminar (one he still teaches) called Hindus and Muslims. Jim got me into the business of studying religion and especially ignited my interest in South Asia and the question of Hindu-­Muslim relations. This book is dedicated to him. This book is also dedicated to someone I have never met but with whose thought I end the epilogue and, despite maintaining critical intellectual distance, whose courage and brilliance in the face of extensive state and nonstate violence I greatly admire: Sharjeel Imam.

[ xx ]

Note on Transliteration

For ease of access, diacritical marks have not been added except the customary ’ for hamza and ‘ for ayn. However, I have included a detailed glossary at the end of the book that includes diacritics for readers interested in the pronunciation of specific non-­English terms. All translations from the Qur’an are mine unless otherwise stated.

[ xxi ]

Perilous Intimacies

Introduction The Promise and Peril of Hindu-­Muslim Friendship

THIS BOOK EXPLORES the question of how South Asian Muslim scholars, especially traditionally educated Muslim scholars known as the ulama, imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It examines critical intra-­Muslim debates over the limits of Hindu-­Muslim relations and friendship, during the transition from late Mughal to the colonial and late colonial periods. More specifically, I interrogate the multiplicity of ways in which certain towering Indian Muslim scholars understood Islam’s relationship with Hindu thought, life, and practice in early modern and modern South Asia. I do so by exploring such varied themes as Muslim scholarly expositions on Hindu thought (chapter 1); Hindu-­Muslim doctrinal polemics (chapter 2); intra-­Muslim debates on the boundaries of friendship with Hindus (chapter 3); intra-­Muslim debates on cow sacrifice and protection (chapter 4); and Muslim scholarly discourses and debates on imitating the habits, ritual practices, and customs of non-­ Muslims (chapters 5 and 6). Through this exercise, I highlight the fractures and tensions pervading the fraught labor of delineating the borders and boundaries of an intellectual and lived tradition: in this case, that of South Asian Islam. Before further explaining the specificities and central arguments of this project, let me briefly describe the sort of problem space, or the question-­and-­answer space, in which it seeks to intervene. In the study of South Asia and South Asian religions, the question of interreligious encounters, especially Hindu-­Muslim, has usually been pursued [1]

Introduction through an analytical lens occupied by three major problems: communalism in colonial India,1 the violence and violent consequences of the Partition,2 and the concomitant tragedies and travails of religious minorities in postcolonial India and in Pakistan.3 While invested in disparate themes and conceptual registers, the historiographic frame that anchors such interrogations is often tethered to what one might call the continuity/rupture “problem space.” This problem space is animated by the question of whether the event of British colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constituted a major rupture or an underlying continuity in the religious and political imaginaries of indigenous society. This question has generated a spectrum of views and answers and attracted a cascade of debates over the last few decades.4 But while the continuity/rupture question remains important and continues to harness intellectual fodder for productive conversations, it has also assumed a certain staleness and air of predictability, no longer yielding the same purchase it may have a few decades ago. The anthropologist David Scott memorably asked “whether the moment of normalization of a paradigm is not also the moment when it is necessary to reconstruct and reinterrogate the ground of questions themselves through which it was brought into being in the first place; to ask whether the critical yield of the normal problem space continues to be what it was when it first emerged.”5 Thinking with Scott, one might wager that in the context of examining interreligious encounters in early modern and modern South Asia, although exploring the workings and transformations of colonial power remains important, it is nonetheless critical to look for new problem spaces that might bring into view less traversed archives, questions, contexts, and actors. What if one shifted the camera of analysis from the colonial production or appropriation of religion to the discourses and debates among indigenous scholars—­for instance, South Asian Muslim scholars—­on the boundaries of religion and religious identity? Moreover, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, during South Asia’s transition to colonial modernity and the consequent consolidation of British colonial power, how did Muslim scholarly discourses and debates on the boundaries of Islam and difference wrestle with a political context marked by the gradual yet decisive loss of political sovereignty? In simpler terms, how did the loss of Muslim political sovereignty, as South Asian Muslims were increasingly marked as a colonized minority, generate urgent, intensified debates over the boundaries [2]

Introduction of Islam as a religious tradition? These are the sort of questions that frame and anchor this book, and I will address them by presenting and detailing critical and previously unexamined illustrations of intra-­Muslim debates—­ especially those centered on the boundaries of Hindu-­Muslim relations and friendship—­in varied discursive and political arenas. I do so through a close reading of a range of texts and corresponding contexts as refracted through varied print and manuscript sources including legal and theological treatises, reformist literature, letters, journals, translation projects, legal opinions, narrative histories, biographies, exegetical writings, and a novella, in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Taking the theme of debates over Hindu-­Muslim friendship as its primary case study, the ultimate objective of this book is to showcase and detail the depth and complexity as well as the fissures and contestations of Muslim scholarly traditions in South Asia.

What Is Friendship? Before describing the set of actors whose intellectual strivings and debates populate this book, let me offer a few words on the theme of friendship that forms an important element of its conceptual constitution. Contemporary philosopher Alexander Nehamas, in a probing survey of the idea of “friendship” in Western philosophical thought, argued that, from Aristotle onward, friendship has presented a “double face” that promises the highest bonds of virtue while also threatening to morally corrupt someone blindingly bound to a harmful friend.6 Friendship, in other words, is both a promise and a peril. On a somewhat similar note, friendship, as Jacques Derrida in his classic The Politics of Friendship has elaborated, is intimately entwined with enmity.7 While describing German theorist and lawyer Carl Schmitt’s thought, Derrida offers a set of brief but brilliant comments that capture a key conceptual node of the present book. “Once the enemy had disappeared,” Derrida writes, “the friend would disappear at once. . . . ​The possibility, the meaning and the phenomenon of friendship would never appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called upon them up in advance, had indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend, a wounding question, a question of wound.”8 Derrida famously continued with this pithily evocative sentence: “No friend without the possible wound.”9 Friendship, in Derrida’s words, is only possible alongside the wound of enmity. [3]

Introduction Friendship requires enmity and its wound as a condition of its possibility: no friendship without enmity, “no friend without the possible wound.” In another essay cryptically but productively titled “Hostipitality,” Derrida shows that the ideas of hospitality and hostility share a troubling common origin between “hostis as host and hostis as enemy.”10 Hospitality, the linchpin of friendship, is always vulnerable “to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest which it harbors as the self-­contradiction in its own body.”11 The double face of interreligious friendship, “the possible wound” of friendship and enmity, and the cohabitation of hospitality and hostility toward the religious Other were also matters of immense investment and contestation for South Asian Muslim scholars during critical conjunctures of the region’s transition from late Mughal to the colonial and late colonial periods. These intra-­Muslim contestations are at the center of this book, which explores and examines important discursive and political moments when the promise and peril of Hindu-­Muslim friendship was authoritatively debated through competing readings of the Muslim scholarly tradition. These debates, in turn, continue to hold massive implications for how one imagines the boundaries and entanglement of Muslim identity and difference in the postcolonial present. In the epilogue, I will have more to say on some of the implications of this project for the current moment. Back to friendship, though: What, then, do I mean by the category of “friendship”? In this book, I approach friendship as a relationship or encounter of intimacy, collaboration, cooperation, or hospitality with the other that, while affording particular benefits, opportunities, and forms of power and pleasure, also renders untenable exclusive claims to the purity and sovereign ownership of the self. Friendship is an invitation that cannot be embraced without forgoing the claim to sovereign mastery. Friendship frustrates sovereignty and is a reminder of its impossibility. Friendship, especially interreligious friendship, while holding the promise of engaging and accessing the other also invites peril by signaling the inextricable entanglement of the self with the contingencies of the other. Friendship offers the possibility of enrichment and expansion but also carries the threat of influence, corruption, or even erasure. It is this underlying tension and friction between friendship and sovereignty that sutures different moments in this book. How does the moment of encounter between religious identity and difference present itself as both a promise and a threat, and what sorts of intrareligious negotiations does [4]

Introduction that encounter foster and foment? This is a foundational question underlying all chapters of this book. I explore this problem in the specific arena of Muslim intellectual discourses and debates in early modern and modern South Asia on the normative status and limits of interreligious (especially Hindu-­Muslim) friendship, with frequent sojourns to premodern Muslim scholarly traditions outside South Asia as well. Persian and Urdu categories for friendship like dosti do appear, but less frequently in the textual archive that fodders this book. The Muslim discursive category corresponding to the idea of friendship most frequently invoked in this book is that of muwalat (especially in chapters 3 and 4): an Arabic term that carries the dual meaning of a relationship of friendship, intimacy, and loyalty or that of clientage and patronage, as between the state and its subjects. It etymologically shares the roots (wa​.­li.ya.) of mystically infused terms like the friend of God or wali (usually meaning a Sufi master) and wilaya (sainthood). Curiously, Wilaya and its Siamese twin Walaya can also mean sovereignty, sovereign power, and sovereign authority, reinforcing the conceptual and linguistic intimacy between friendship and the promise of sovereignty.12 For instance, the eleventh-­century Qur’an exegete/theologian and author of the famous dictionary of Qur’anic terms Al-­Mufradat fi Gharib al-­Qur’an, al-­Raghib al-­Isfahani (d. 1108) defined al-­Walaya as “the authority of command” (tawwalli al-­‘amr) while capturing the semantic frame of the roots wa-­li-­ya through the following description: “Intimacy of space, lineage, religion, friendship, loyalty, and belief.”13 A Wali (pl. Awliya’) carries the meaning of a friend and intimate (as in friend of God or Sufi saint) as well as that of a protector, master, or person with power and authority who can lay claim to the guardianship (Walaya/Wilaya) of a community.14 For instance, God describes Himself as a Wali or guardian of the faithful in verse 2:257 of the Qur’an that partly reads, “God is the guardian of those who [established] faith.”15 Michel Chodkiewicz has succinctly described the etymological duality of this category: “The primary meaning of w.l.y. is proximity or contiguity, and this in turn gives rise to two further meanings. One of these is ‘to be a friend,’ and the other is ‘to direct, to govern, to take in charge.’ Thus, the wali, properly speaking, is the ‘friend,’ he who is close; but as [the famous thirteenth century lexicographer] Ibn Manzur (d. 1311) emphasizes in the Lisan al-­‘arab [The Speech of Arabs], he is also the nasir, ‘he who assists,’ and the mudabbir, he who disposes.”16 [5]

Introduction In this formulation, friendship is fraught with power. If cultivated in a salutary fashion, friendship promises the gift of sovereign power and authority—­pastoral or territorial—­extended by the most absolute of all sovereigns, the divine sovereign. But friendship with an undesirable other that portends perilous and harmful consequences eviscerates the integrity of the self and, by extension, that of the community, unleashing spiritual and political ruin. Friendship is thus a prized promise as well as a potentially dire peril. Moreover, the idea of friendship or muwalat (and connected categories like al-­Wala,’ Wilaya, and Walaya) in Muslim intellectual thought include but go far beyond the commonplace notion of congeniality or good relations that one associates with the English word friendship today. Rather, muwalat encompasses and brings together theological, political, and everyday intimacies. It is a category that connects a political theology eager to guard Muslim sovereign power with a desired choreography of the everyday anxiously invested in preserving Muslim distinction over its various others. How is this normative mandate and architecture of interreligious friendship negotiated and debated in a context marked by the aftermath of Muslim political sovereignty? In other words, how is the promise and peril of interreligious friendship and intimacy—­especially Hindu-­Muslim friendship and intimacy— debated after empire? One more clarifying note on friendship that is closely related to what has just preceded. Certainly, the modality of interreligious friendship involved in everyday encounters between members of different religious communities—­the dominant popular understanding of friendship—­forms an important part of the discussion in this book. But, sensitive to the capacious emic sensibility of this category in Islamic intellectual history, I approach friendship through a much wider and more expansive purview to also include political collaboration, projects of interreligious translation, and imitation in doctrine and ritual practice. Over the course of this book, the category of friendship operates in connected yet distinct registers encompassing the perceived promise and perils of theological, political, and everyday interreligious intimacies. How did these mutually enveloping registers and manifestations of interreligious friendship attract opposing and often contentious readings by major doyens among the Indian Muslim intellectual elite, from roughly the mid-­eighteenth to the mid-­t wentieth centuries, during the transition and consolidation of [6]

Introduction colonial modernity? This key question strings together the six chapters of this book.

The Primary Protagonists While engaging the thought of a range of actors including Sufi masters and Muslim modernists (meaning scholars who desire to reconfigure Islam so as to establish its compatibility with the conditions and expectations of modernity), I will reserve the focus of my attention on the seminary-­ educated Muslim scholars known as the ulama (sing. ‘alim), or as Muslim traditionalists in the Western academy. Though prolific and influential actors in the landscape of South Asian Islam who, as experts in the Muslim Humanities attract immense religious authority, ulama discourses on the question of Hindu-­Muslim encounters have rarely received any adequate inquiry, a topic that has mostly been approached either ethnographically,17 through the study of Sufism and Yoga,18 in the realm of material culture,19 or in the context of premodern encounters between Sanskrit and Persianate literary cultures.20 Of course, there is no stark binary between modernist and traditionalist stripes of Islam in South Asia, or elsewhere. After all, figures like Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898; a key figure in chapter 6) and the twentieth-­century thinker Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1958; discussed extensively in chapter 3), who are often categorized as modernist, were steeped in and intimately familiar with ulama traditions of knowledge.21 Even beyond South Asia, for that matter, foremost Muslim modernists like the Egyptian scholars Muhammad ‘Abduh (d.1905) and Rashid Rida (d. 1935) were thoroughly grounded in traditionalist knowledge regimes.22 On the other hand, as I will show at numerous points and as has been shown by other scholars, ulama actors in South Asia and elsewhere have also shown remarkable agility and adeptness in negotiating and appropriating the conditions and categories of colonial modernity for advancing their particular ideological agendas.23 The point being: the fault lines of traditionalism and modernism are often ambiguous and indecisive. However, that said, Muslim traditionalist discourses do index a distinct hermeneutical register and aesthetic of engaging the tradition that, while multivalent and unpredictable, is yet adamantly invested in [7]

Introduction curating authoritative normative arguments through the resources and protocols of the legal canon.24 For the Muslim modernists, in contrast, while the legal canon is sacrosanct, the hermeneutical fidelity it demands is not as imperative and nonnegotiable as it is for the traditionalists. Interrogating the implications of this subtle yet profoundly consequential fault line between Muslim traditionalism and modernism on the question of interreligious friendship is a key task and motif of this book. But what is Muslim traditionalism and who is a traditionalist? A clear and succinct answer to this question will be helpful for the reader here. The category of traditionalism in Euro-­American Islamic studies usually denotes a distinct thought style and discursive sensibility grounded in normative attachment to at least one of the authoritative legal schools and theological traditions that developed and flourished in early and classical Islam. The tradition of traditionalism, so to say, is neither uniform nor marked by the stagnant intergenerational inheritance of knowledge, normativity, and interpretive styles. Even when—­in fact, especially when—­Muslim traditionalist actors present their intellectual labor as a work of seamless inheritance from authorities of the past, they often rework and reorient the tradition according to their own context, contingencies, and temperament.25 Thus, Muslim traditionalism of any variety, including that committed to the Hanafi legal school and the Ash‘ari/Maturidi theological traditions that dominate South Asia, is best imagined as a dynamic intellectual palimpsest with ever-­ unfurling normative registers and moral arguments, bound by circumscribed yet continually expanding parameters of interpretive ingenuity.26 However, for all its hermeneutical flexibility and internal diversity, a signature feature of Muslim traditionalism that lends this category its identity and coherence centers on its fidelity to certain key epistemological principles, hierarchies, and priorities that, though open to interpretive elasticity, are never available for irreversible reordering. Critical to my concerns throughout this book is another underlying characteristic of Muslim traditionalism: its founding context of and commitment to an imperial Muslim political theology. The political context of Muslim empire, as I will elaborate further, serves as a pivotal backdrop to Muslim traditionalist discussions and conceptions of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations. In the early modern and modern South Asian context, centering ulama discourses on the encounter of Muslim identity and difference therefore [8]

Introduction opens a potentially profitable avenue of inquiry pivoting on the following question: How are the resources and legacy of a premodern normative tradition engaged and navigated in the massively transformed conditions of colonial modernity when the very political context of Muslim imperial sovereignty that had informed that premodern tradition was no longer available? This question presented a particularly vexing conundrum for the South Asian Muslim scholarly elite leading up to and in the post-­1857 era, not just because they found themselves shepherding a dramatically minoritized community, grappling with the aftermath of Muslim imperial power. More crucially, this question highlights a deeper tension at the heart of any discussion on the question of interreligious difference in early modern and modern Islam: the incongruence between the premodern context of Muslim empire that anchored foundational normative texts and attitudes toward non-­Muslims, and the setting of colonial modernity that saw Muslims in South Asia rendered a numerical as well as a political minority.

The Arguments This tension is at the heart of the three central arguments pursued in this book. First, while the loss of Muslim political sovereignty and the emergence and eventual consolidation of British colonial power and conditions in South Asia served as the immediate backdrop of intensified intra-­Muslim conflict on the boundaries of Hindu-­Muslim friendship, at stake and work in these contestations were precisely the logics and promise of an imperial Muslim political theology. In each chapter, I will show ways in which the intellectual and political projects invested in competing visions of Hindu-­Muslim friendship and interreligious hospitality, charitable and otherwise, were informed and animated by particular notions of Muslim sovereign power in a world increasingly marked by the juggernaut of colonial modernity. In the aftermath of Muslim political sovereignty, it is in the performance of everyday ritual life that sovereign power was increasingly located and exercised. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the loss of political sovereignty made possible an expanded notion and sphere of politics and sovereign power that was not  territorial or bound to the state, but was situated in the domain of everyday ritual practice and premised on the imperial logic of maintaining [9]

Introduction superiority over religious “others” through the preservation of embodied difference and distinction. This is a major argument of the last four chapters in particular. Before describing the other central arguments of this book, let me first clarify and elaborate my use of the categories of sovereignty and sovereign power, both because of their importance to my concerns and in view of the consternation they often generate. Sovereignty is a concept at once capacious and confusing, elastic and elusive, ambitious and ambiguous, seemingly universal and yet precariously unstable. It is also a category that has been subject to considerable contest and transformation in Western/Christian political theology. Political theorist and philosopher Jean Elshtain, in her magisterial intellectual history of sovereignty in Christian thought, sums up this transformation with the useful phrase “from logos to will.” By this she means the profound shift in Christian theology from a view of God as representing “the fullness of reason and goodness,” as seen in the thought of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) and the Thomistic school that it inspired, to a vision of God as primarily a “site of sovereign will,” as articulated and cemented by influential nominalist philosophers and theologians like the famous William of Ockham (d. 1347).27 According to Elshtain, “This latter vision [that premised God’s sovereignty on the will to enact the exception] came to dominate sovereignty talk and helped to lay the basis for the juristic conception of the state when man decided that he, too, could be sovereign in this way.”28 Sovereignty thus today has come to be associated mainly with the exercise of the sovereign will to enact an exception to the norm, which equates to the suspension of laws by a state in modern politics, and to the miracle in theology. This notion of sovereignty was best popularized and formalized by the German lawyer and theorist Carl Schmitt in his pithy but profoundly influential 1922 text Political Theology, the title of which indexes a domain of inquiry invested in interrogating the mutual entanglement of theology and politics. Theological and political sovereignty are conceptually symmetrical, both hinging on the capacity to announce the exception, Schmitt had argued. Moreover, he had famously claimed, all modern political categories, especially that of political sovereignty, are secularized theological categories. By so arguing, he sought to complicate and interrupt the alleged rupture between theologically inspired premodern monarchies and modern secular polities.29 [ 10 ]

Introduction While the capacity for exception does figure into my discussions of sovereignty, especially in the context of discussing interreligious debates on prophetic miracles in chapter 2, I approach sovereignty through a broader, though also more precisely calibrated, analytical framework. I am less interested in the institutional exercise of sovereign power and decision, such as by the modern state. What interests me, rather, is a notion of sovereignty and sovereign power that animates and is animated by the desire for and attachment to supremacy over the religious other through the maintenance of embodied distinction in everyday life. Such a conception of sovereignty is focused less on the expenditure of power for the governance of citizens than on governing those hierarchies of difference that nourish the often-­urgent fantasy of distinction and supremacy over the other. It seeks to manifest an Imperial political theology, meaning an assumption of theological superiority informed by a context of political power, through the regulation of everyday ritual life and practice. Power and politics in this scheme are invested not in the machineries and machinations of the state, but in the embodied discipline and rhythm of everyday ritual life, individually as well as communally. While operating under the shadows of the modern state, such a vision of sovereignty is never reducible to the political calculus of the state. It showcases instead an alternate conception of the political that, even when modern, is not always modernist, and, even while absorbing and negotiating the power and pressure of liberal secular conceptuality, is never fully assimilable into that politico-­conceptual order. Over the course of this book, some of the varied yet overlapping categories referring to such a notion of sovereign power that the reader will encounter include isti‘la (superiority), satwa (authority), ghalba (supremacy), shawka (majesty), iqtidar (might) hayba (venerability), ru‘b (power of intimidation), and khilafa (sovereign vicegerency). My invocation of sovereignty and sovereign power thus does not correspond to any one particular concept in Arabic, Persian, or Urdu. Rather, it gestures toward a family of concepts mobilized or debated by the scholars who populate this book that individually and collectively articulate the desire for dominance through distinction and that interlock the assumption of theological superiority with the promise of ontological purity in everyday life. The second key argument of this book is closely connected to the first. I contend that Muslim scholarly discourses and debates on the normative limits of Hindu-­Muslim relations cannot be approached through the binary prism of tolerance/intolerance or through connected binaries like inclusive/ [ 11 ]

Introduction exclusive, secular/religious, traditionalist/modernist, and liberal/fundamentalist. South Asian ulama writings and conversations on the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship are too complex, nonlinear, unpredictable, and layered to be available for such binary framings. Moreover, while offering authoritative readings of the premodern legal and theological tradition, the scholars whose thought and debates populate this book added to that tradition their distinctive hermeneutical styles, strategies, and operations that were hardly amenable to neat predetermined categorization. And, third, I argue that the fraught labor of delineating the limits of Hindu-­Muslim friendship was ineluctably bound with intra-­Muslim differences, fissures, and narrative framings over how one ought to imagine and guard the “self” in conditions of moral and political precarity. These traditions of intra-­Muslim contest on interreligious friendship and encounter, in turn, brought into view opposing conceptions of religion as an epistemic and embodied category in conditions of colonial modernity. In other words, the question of how one ought to imagine the limits of Hindu-­Muslim friendship are often reflective of unresolved intra-­Muslim debates on the limits of Islam as an intellectual and lived tradition.

Imperial Muslim Political Theology Let me further elucidate a key category invoked frequently in this book and already gestured at a few times in this introduction: an imperial Muslim political theology. By this category, I mean the conjoining of the aspiration for Muslim sovereign power over other faith communities with the assumption of theological superiority over them. The Islamic legal tradition developed in a premodern context of Islamdom that presumed the establishment and maintenance of Muslims’ political dominance over non-­Muslims as an underlying purpose of law. Crucially, as Yohanan Friedmann in his encyclopedic survey of premodern Muslim intellectual attitudes toward non-­Muslims called Tolerance and Coercion in Islam sums up: “The idea of Muslim superiority is central to the [premodern] Islamic worldview, and figures prominently in numerous chapters of Islamic law and tradition.” This sentiment is best captured in the Prophet’s well-­k nown statement: “Islam is exalted and nothing is exalted over it” (al-­Islam yaʿlu wa la yuʿla).30 This principle of Islam’s exaltedness, Friedmann argues, continued to exert decisive [ 12 ]

Introduction normative pressure on the discursive landscape of pivotal Muslim intellectual traditions, especially Islamic law, in the centuries following the Prophet’s life, with the Abbasid period holding particular significance as the immediate context of the beginnings of the Muslim jurisprudential tradition (eighth and ninth centuries CE). It also served as a crucial underpinning in the formulation of Muslim legal and normative positions concerning the application of a range of questions involving non-­Muslims, including admissibility of testimony, participation in jihad, laws of retribution, and the public display and performance of devotional rituals.31 Friedmann’s analysis can be fruitfully folded with Islamic law scholar Anver Emon’s perceptive push to view legal rulings on religious minorities and their application in premodern Muslim imperial contexts beyond the binary prism of tolerance/intolerance to reflect the exigencies of “the mutually constitutive relationship between the law and the enterprise of governance.”32 Emon succinctly explains: “The dhimmī rules [rulings on non-­Muslims in a Muslim polity] represent a premodern juristic vision of an imperial Islamic polity in which governance through conquest and empire necessarily implied the existence of non-­Muslims who came under Muslim rule. Whether or not jurists operated outside of or separate from the realm of government, they nonetheless imagined and developed a jurisprudence that was itself influenced and informed by the demands of an enterprise of governance that faced the challenge of governing amidst diversity.”33 Let me further elaborate the concept of an imperial Muslim political theology with some examples from the premodern period. Among the earliest and most fascinating, though less studied, articulation of an imperial Muslim political theology in the context of Islam’s relationship with other religions is found in the curious tenth-­century Muslim philosopher Abu l-­Hasan al-­‘Amiri’s (d. 992) Arabic text The Proclamation of the Virtues of Islam (Al-­Iʿlam bi Manaqib al-­Islam; henceforth The Proclamation).34 This text comes close to the modern genre of “comparative religion,” though it bears an explicit interest in establishing Islam’s superiority over other religious traditions, specifically Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Sabaeanism, and polytheism (Al-­‘Amiri calls it al-­wathaniyya).35 A native of Nishapur, then an intellectual hub of Muslim scholarship (especially philosophy) under the Sunni Iranian Samanid empire (r. 819–­999), Al-­‘Amiri, like many other scholars of his time, led a peripatetic life that included extended stints of learning and teaching in prominent intellectual citadels like [ 13 ]

Introduction Baghdad, Rayy, and Bukhara. He was a student of the famous philosopher and geographer Abu Zayd al-­Balkhi (d. 934), who in turn studied with the even more famous doyen of Muslim philosophy, the ninth-­century scholar Abu Yusuf al-­Kindi (d. 873), best known as “the philosopher of the Arabs.” A signature feature of al-­Kindi’s philosophical temperament that Al-­‘Amiri also adopted and aired in his work centered on its attempted coalescence of the revealed and nonrevealed sources of knowledge. The first few chapters of The Proclamation, a text of ten chapters and four appendices of varied length,36 are devoted to this task of establishing a mutually reinforcing relationship between religious knowledge as found in disciplines like Hadith, law, and theology, and nonreligious knowledge traditions like logic, the natural sciences, medicine, mathematics, minerology, and astrology, in addition to some others.37 Al-­‘Amiri categorizes these two strands of knowledge as religious (al-­‘ulum al-­milliyya) and philosophical (al-­ ‘ulum al-­hikmiyya), showing his capacious understanding of philosophy that included the physical and life sciences. For all his attempts at harmonization, however, he is explicit about the priority of religious knowledges that were prophetically imbued over philosophical knowledges that belonged to the sages (hukamaʾ). Al-­‘Amiri captures this sentiment in a pithy and powerful statement: “Every prophet is a sage but not every sage a prophet” (kul nabi hakim wa laysa kullu hakim nabiyyan).38 The bulk of the text formulates a method of interreligious comparison and then applies that method to establish Islam’s superiority over the other five religions. In a gesture eerily reminiscent of modern or even contemporary “world religions” textbooks, Al-­‘Amiri posits four defining features held in common by all religious traditions: doctrines of faith (iʿtiqadat), rituals of worship (ʿibadat), societal relations (muʿamalat), and punishments against transgressions (mazajir). Each of these domains are in turn divided into five constituent parts (e.g., “rituals of worship” included prayers, fasting, charity, pilgrimage, and, curiously, jihad). The comparative method, he declares, must compare and evaluate equivalent and corresponding elements of these five major domains across religious traditions, with careful attention that defective or less important aspects of a given religion are not brought under the ambit of evaluation.39 Most critically, al-­‘Amiri punctuates, establishing the superiority of Islam (al-­‘Amiri referred to Islam as “al-­milla al-­Hanifiyya”) over other religions must entail a process and outcome that are rationally persuasive and logically coherent. In each category, he presents Islam as the [ 14 ]

Introduction balanced middle path that avoids the excessive harshness or leniency found in other religions. So, for instance, on the question of prayers, in terms of quantity and the quality of bodily choreography, Islam presented a model far more balanced and complete than that found in other religions. Non-­Muslim religious traditions either lacked the repetition of critical physical gestures, like kneeling and prostration, or contained overly taxing ritual regimes as in (some branches of) Christianity. Similarly, rather than too short (as among Zoroastrians) or too extended (as practiced by Christian monks), Muslim fasts were just the right length. They also followed an orderly schedule—­unlike Jews, whose fasts were scattered throughout the year, with only their scholars knowing the precise days of prescribed fasting—­a nd did not leave people emaciated as was the case with fasting among (several) Christians and polytheists who forbade meat during fasting.40 These are just a few among a plethora of instructive and fascinating examples on themes including warfare, doctrinal tenets, societal meritocracy, treatment of the underprivileged and differently abled, cultural and intellectual achievements, and political administration in which al-­‘Amiri strives to establish Islam as the most balanced tradition and hence its superiority (afdaliyya) over other religions. But the part of this text and of al-­ ‘Amiri’s intellectual imaginary that most interests me in the context of describing the lineaments of an imperial Muslim political theology involves his interlocking of religious knowledge (and the doctrines and rituals that derive from that knowledge) and political power and sovereignty. Among the central qualities that distinguish Islam from other religions, in his view, is its emphasis on combining prophetic knowledge and wisdom (al-­‘ ilm wa’l hikma) with political power and gravitas (al-­iqtidar wa’l hayba). He categorizes these elements with the intriguing descriptors of “the prophetic state” (riyasat al-­nubuwwa) and “the sovereign state” (riyasat al-­mulk). Al-­ ‘Amiri sums up his conception of the intimate relationship between religion and political sovereignty in these vivid words: “Religion to political sovereignty is what the foundation is to a structure, and political sovereignty to religion is what the base of [a structure’s] support is to its pillars (mahall al-­din min al-­mulk mahall al-­‘uss min al-­bunyan wa mahall al-­mulk min al-­din mahall al-­mutaʿahhid min al-­‘arkan).”41 In other words, the mutual reinforcement of religion and political sovereignty represented a mirror image. For Al-­‘Amiri, then, superiority over other religions in faith and ritual practice requires the presence and maintenance of imperial political sovereignty. Moreover, [ 15 ]

Introduction for him, the entanglement of knowledge, practice, and imperial sovereignty that undergirds his project of establishing Muslim theological superiority over other religions depends on and articulates a conception of religion that is both rationally instituted and that prizes rationality as an index of authenticity. In a telling moment, al-­‘Amiri opines that, while the “People of the Book” (al-­kitabi) such as Christians corrupted their faith primarily through wishful and misguided interpretations of scripture like the Bible, “the most foolish” (askhaf) category of non-­Muslims who were also the hardest to spiritually “cure” were the polytheists (al-­wathaniyya). Why? “Not because of their grasp over [rational argument] or their capacity for debate,” he elaborates, “but because of their attachment to the sensoria [in their devotional and ritual lives.]”42 Moreover, he adds a cautionary note: an established religion [like Islam] begins to crack in weakness when it imitates and adopts such affectively charged modes of embodied religion—­through, for instance, the veneration of saints and visitation of their shrines. So, although the most foolish, the polytheists were also the most dangerous, on account of their capacity to attract debilitating imitation. Thus, in al-­‘Amiri’s thought, an imperial Muslim political theology not only established Islam’s theological superiority over other religions; it also set into motion a distinct hierarchy of religions premised on a distinctly rationalist conception of what counted as normative religion, with Islam occupying the apogee of this hierarchy.43 A similar hierarchy of religious difference animated by an imperial logic of maintaining Muslim power and distinction over non-­Muslims, primarily Christians and Jews, sustained the famous fourteenth-­century legal compendium Legal Rulings on Non-­Muslims Under Muslim Rule (Ahkam ahl al-­dhimma) by the Hanbali jurist Ibn al-­Qayyim al-­Jawziyya (d. 1350). In a fascinating and probing recent study of Ahkam ahl al-­dhimma called Minding Their Place, Antonia Bosanquet convincingly argues that, though this hugely influential text of Ibn al-­Qayyim’s is certainly a legal compendium, it is much more than a compendium. Further, it presents a meticulous and detailed blueprint of the spatial, political, and affective geographies that must distinguish Muslims and non-­Muslims under Islamdom in arenas of life ranging from places of worship and burial, employment and services, business and commercial exchange, gestures of greeting, marriage and familial relations, and sites of everyday encounter such as public festivals. Bosanquet shows that akin to (though not identical to) his luminary teacher Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328, whose [ 16 ]

Introduction thought will be discussed in some detail in chapter 6), it is precisely through the calibrated and careful regulation of Muslim/non-­Muslim spaces and choreographies of interaction in everyday life that Ibn al-­Qayyim sought to establish and preserve Islam’s politico-­t heological superiority. In other words, a political theology of Muslim imperial power was expressed and reinforced through a spatial cartography of religious hierarchy and distinction.44 Historian Milka Levy-­Rubin has shown that the entrenched entwinement of Muslim political sovereignty and the regulation of outward manifestations of everyday life among non-­Muslims as seen in Ibn al-­Qayyim’s Ahkam ahl al-­dhimma represents the culmination of a much longer discursive and political process with discernible beginnings in the eighth century. In her shining study of the evolving relationship between Muslim conquerors and conquered non-­Muslim communities in early and medieval Islam, Levy-­ Ruben argues “that the principle of ghiyār, i.e. the differentiating signs between Muslims and non-­Muslims via dress, appearance, and public behavior . . . ​was part and parcel of the ideology of the exaltation of Islam.”45 The notion of tying Muslim distinction in the public sphere with Muslim sovereign authority over non-­Muslims, she helpfully adds, “stuck deep roots as early as the second [Islamic]/eighth century and by the end of the eighth century CE had become an accepted concept which, although not always rigorously enforced, was nevertheless considered an official code of dress and appearance to which non-­Muslims were required to adhere.”46 The eighth-­ century Umayyad caliph ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-­‘Aziz or Umar II (d. 720), especially through his promulgation of the canonical Pact of ‘Umar or Shurut ‘Umar that stipulated specific rules (pertaining to outward appearance and devotional practices) governing the everyday conduct of non-­Muslims, played a critical part in the narrative of Muslim/non-­Muslim encounter sketched by Levy-­ Rubin.47 I will return to the Pact of ‘Umar and its mobilization by prominent South Asian Muslim scholars while discussing the thorny issue of imitating the customs and practices of non-­Muslims in chapter 6. A warning: from these examples, it would be perilous to assume seamless correspondence between the normative ideal and principle of establishing Muslim superiority over non-­Muslims, and the everyday unfolding of relations among and between different religious communities. Fissures between scripted ideals and unscripted rhythms of intercommunal encounters are inevitable in any religious tradition and in any time period. [ 17 ]

Introduction Moreover, the logics, textures, and operations of Muslim caliphal authority and political sovereignty certainly varied across time and space in the premodern period. Similarly, Muslim normative attitudes toward non-­Muslims were never stagnant, even within the same legal school. For instance, as Samy Ayoub has shown, early pioneers of the Hanafi school like Muhammad al-­Shaybani (d. 805) had insisted that the conversion of Jews and Christians into Islam required not only the conventional dual testimony affirming God’s oneness and Muhammad’s prophethood but also the explicit denunciation of their previous religion. On the other hand, later Hanafi luminaries like the sixteenth-­century Cairene scholar Zayn al-­Din Ibn Nujaym (d. 1563) drew on the Egyptian custom whereby non-­Muslims would convert to Islam in a formal and public manner, in a court, to argue that renunciation of previous faith was not necessary, and that the two testimonies (shahadatayn) sufficed to effect legal conversion into Islam.48 This is just one among many possible examples that make clear that there is no premodern monolith on the question of Muslim sovereignty or of Muslim normative discourses and attitudes toward non-­Muslims. By positing the category of an “imperial Muslim political theology,” therefore, I do not wish to argue for any unitary political or normative vision of premodern Islam. And, yes, since sometimes it is better to state the obvious than leave matters ambiguous, let me also state explicitly that I do not mean to impute onto the premodern Muslim intellectual tradition the liberal sin of intolerance. Apart from the sheer anachronism of such a gesture, it would erase the often far more violent and exclusionary politics of modern and contemporary regimes of liberal secular tolerance (as I will elaborate further in the epilogue). My point here is that an imperial political theology, anchored on the assumption of Muslim political and theological supremacy over non-­Muslims, served as a critical backdrop to the formation of canonical normative sources of knowledge, such as the Hanafi legal canon that dominates South Asia.49

Translating Imperial Hermeneutics After Empire From the late eighteenth century onward, though increasingly a colonized minority, the interpretive canvas that often informed South Asian Muslim scholarly engagements with the question of Islam and difference remained [ 18 ]

Introduction deeply anchored in this premodern context of Muslim imperial sovereignty. This did not mean, of course, that South Asian Muslim scholars were somehow stuck in the premodern world. To the exact contrary, the persistence of an imperial Muslim political theology was intimately bound to the conditions, expectations, and pressures of colonial modernity. For a deracinated colonized minority, this moment was saturated with the anxiety of recovering the distant yet urgently attractive fantasy of sovereign power. With the impossibility of political sovereignty, this desire was increasingly exercised in the realm of ritual practice and the everyday, reflected most often in the drive to preserve and maintain “markers of Muslim distinction” (sha‘air-­i Islam; sing. shi‘ar-­i Islam)—­meaning ritual and embodied markers of distinction that distinguish religious identity and difference in the public sphere. Thus, intra-­Muslim discourses and disagreement on Hindu-­Muslim relations and friendship mapped onto competing imaginaries of Muslim sovereign power in the emerging and consolidating conditions of colonial modernity. Again, that is among the central arguments of this book. But what is the political, conceptual, and hermeneutical problem at work and stake in the translation and transportation of an imperial Muslim political theology in the radically transformed conditions of modern colonial power? In the context of South Asian Muslim intellectual thought, this question is entangled with, and can be productively interrogated by, briefly engaging three further questions: 1. the normative status of colonial India as a political and territorial entity; 2. the normative designation of non-­ Muslims during the colonial moment; and, concomitantly, 3. the theological, political, and everyday boundaries governing Muslim/non-­Muslim relations. The varied and often conflicting ways in which South Asian Muslim scholars addressed these questions while contending and negotiating the political and institutional conditions of colonial modernity represents a fascinating though less explored site of inquiry. The normative rulings on Muslim/non-­Muslim relations and on living as a minority community under non-­Muslim rule that populate the Islamic legal tradition, while varied and diverse, are nonetheless informed by certain common historical and political assumptions. Most importantly, these assumptions include the desirability of maintaining Muslim political sovereignty and dominance over non-­Muslims, and that of aspiring to resuscitate sovereign power in otherwise adverse conditions. Obviously, the degree to which such assumptions of Muslim imperial power were embraced, or the [ 19 ]

Introduction modalities through which they were incorporated into strategies of statecraft, varied significantly in different contexts. Moreover, as Khaled Abou El Fadl has argued in a remarkably encyclopedic and much cited article, premodern Muslim legal opinions on the question of Muslims residing in territories operative under non-­Muslim laws and sovereignty (dar al-­harb) evince considerable variation. While some jurists, especially from the Maliki school, espoused maximalist positions that made living in non-­Muslim lands forbidden, others, especially Hanafis and Shafi‘is, adopted more lenient attitudes that permitted, encouraged, or at times even obligated staying in non-­Muslim territories—­the last option for the benefit of missionizing Islam to non-­Muslims.50 The larger point of Abou El Fadl’s analysis is that there is no uniform outlook in the Islamic legal tradition on the interaction of Muslim sovereign power, territory, and engagement with non-­Muslim political orders. And historical exigencies and disturbances (like the Crusades and the Mongol invasion) often drove Muslim jurists to accommodate the idealized promise of interlocking salvation and sovereignty with the pragmatic limits posed by less favorable political realities and conditions. Despite this variation and flexibility, the ideal of Muslim imperial sovereignty remained central to the legal imaginary of Muslim jurists across a spectrum of normative views and opinions. So, for instance, the fifteenth-­ century Andalusian Maliki jurist Ahmad al-­Wansharisi (d. 1508), in the aftermath of the Christian conquest of Muslim Spain, had adjudicated that Muslims must leave the now Christian occupied territory, arguing that “anyone who resides in non-­Muslim territory, even for lofty purposes, exposes himself to subjugation and degradation.”51 On the other end of the spectrum, the famous eleventh-­century Shafi‘i jurist al-­Juwayni (d. 1085), teacher of the even more famous Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali (d. 1111), not only permitted Muslims to reside in non-­Muslim territories (with the proviso that they migrate to Muslim lands if and when able to). In situations of necessity, he also allowed them to engage in financial dealings that otherwise violate Islamic law (such as through the application of usury) to purchase a house or other property. Why? “Because”—­and his reasoning is crucial to my analysis—­“the refusal of Muslims to compromise eventually will lead to their weakening and destruction.”52 Al-­Wansharisi and al-­Juwayni, separated by three centuries, positioned in contrasting geographies and political contexts, and members of distinct legal guilds, proffered very different views and attitudes on the question of Muslim residence in non-­Muslim territories. However, in [ 20 ]

Introduction spite of their seemingly radical difference of views, notice that the reasoning that went into their legal opinions was informed by the shared normative ideal of maintaining as best as possible Muslim political and theological supremacy over non-­Muslims. Here, al-­Juwayni’s position of compromise, mirrored in the outlook of some of the South Asian Muslim actors in the British colonial context whom we will meet over the course of this book, is particularly instructive, as it shows that an imperial Muslim political theology encompasses but is not reducible to the acquisition of political sovereignty. In fact, often it is precisely in the absence of political sovereignty that the desire of an imperial political theology is most urgent and immediate.

Negotiating Religious Difference After Empire In early modern and modern South Asia, the normative force and weight of Muslim empire as the historical context and formative assumption of Islamic law carried massive implications for how the question of engaging non-­ Muslims was approached and contested in the radically transformed context of British colonialism, when the acquisition of political sovereignty no longer presented a viable possibility. This apparent contextual incongruence generated some curious and creative juridical responses. For instance, according to classical Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh), if unbelievers attack a Muslim country and succeed in colonizing it by establishing their military and political control, then that country is normatively designated as an “abode of war” (Dar al-­Harb), which means less a territory marked by war or unrest than one in which non-­Muslim laws and sovereignty are dominant. In the view of the esteemed eighteenth-­century Syrian Sunni Hanafi jurist Ibn ‘Abidin, popularly referred to as “ ‘Allama Shami” (d. 1836), Muslims can engage this new condition of having come under the control of a non-­Muslim entity in a couple of different ways. If the occupying non-­Muslim entity accords Muslims sovereignty over their internal affairs, then, in that situation, it will be incumbent on Muslims to benefit from this provision and keep current Islamic laws and obligatory rituals by striving to ensure that the Friday and Eid/‘Id prayers are maintained and by establishing an unofficial court system to arbitrate disputes.53 But if a situation of non-­Muslim domination injures the capacity of Muslims to fulfill their religious obligations, then they will be obligated to migrate to a Muslim polity. [ 21 ]

Introduction The establishment of British colonial rule in South Asia, especially the brutal defeat of Muslims in the 1857 rebellion, brought the question of the status of India, according to this jurisprudential framework, into sharp focus. The dominant Muslim opinion that emerged in this context was that, since Indian Muslims had come to accept their status as subjects of a new political order, India could not be considered Dar al-­Harb. Rather, it represented a form of Dar al-­Sulh, or domain of conciliation, whereby allegiance to the government and its laws was incumbent on Muslims; moreover, they were not permitted to support any foreign entity that might wish to remove the British from power.54 In this regard, among the most famous and consequential legal opinions was penned by Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (d. 1906), one of the founders of arguably the most influential Muslim seminary in modern South Asia: the Deoband madrasa, established in 1866. In the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion and the consolidation of British colonial rule in India, Gangohi was asked about the normative status of the colonial state according to Islamic law and about the position and attitude that Indian Muslims must adopt toward the state. Should they act as obedient subjects or otherwise? Gangohi’s response was remarkable. It was premised on the curious and enormously interesting—­even if historically wanting—­move of framing the British colonial promise of tolerance toward other religious communities (including Muslims) as the reflection of a general Christian proclivity for interreligious hospitality. In his own words: “From the earliest times the religion and law of the Christians dictate that [while in power] they don’t oppose or harbor enmity towards other religious communities and also don’t infringe on their religious freedoms. They provide their minority subjects every possible safety and protection. Thus, in India, which is under the sovereign control and occupation of Christians, it is correct for Muslims to stay here and live as their subjects.”55 In cementing his argument, Gangohi lobbied a fascinating moment from the Prophet’s life. When the persecution of the earliest Muslims at the hands of Meccan polytheists became unbearable, he analogized, the Prophet had directed his followers to seek asylum in Abyssinia, under the protection of a Christian kingdom. The British were the modern Abyssinians who promised religious minorities protection of life and wealth and the freedom to profess and practice their faith. So long as that promise was not trampled, Indian Muslims, too, were obligated to not oppose or abjure their pact of subjecthood with [ 22 ]

Introduction the colonial state, Gangohi argued.56 Obviously, Gangohi’s discourse was riddled with the glaring ambiguity that the logic of sovereignty or that of interreligious tolerance at work in British colonialism and in seventh-­ century Abyssinian kingship were markedly distinct. Even so, it is precisely the absence of the modern state and notions of modern state sovereignty in the premodern Muslim legal imaginary that afforded South Asian Muslim jurists like Gangohi the hermeneutical wiggle room to theorize colonial conquest and occupation through a traditionalist conceptual framework. To elaborate, the political context in which classical Muslim jurisprudence, or fiqh, emerged did not lend much importance to respecting the right of state sovereignty; according to the political norms of that time, it was considered within the rights of a powerful nation to overpower another nation and occupy it. Muslim imperial expansion was informed by precisely this political logic. In the aftermath of 1857, when the monstrosity of British colonial power emerged as an irreversible political reality, many among prominent South Asian ulama applied this premodern theoretical frame to the colonial situation in India, by positing the British occupation of South Asia as yet another episode of global imperial political conquest. Thus, legally, they considered the British state a legitimate entity, categorizing colonial South Asia as an abode of peace or conciliation (Dar al-­Sulh).57 Such pragmatic normative posturing was consistent with a general aversion in traditionalist Sunni political thought to political instability and chaos.58 This process of normatively legitimizing British colonial rule, of course, was far from seamless. In fact, the pioneers of the Deoband seminary, including Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, had, according to many accounts, participated avidly in the 1857 war, reportedly even having taken up arms.59 Moreover, earlier doyens of the tradition, such as the luminary Shah Wali Ullah’s (d. 1762) son Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz (d. 1824), had famously declared India Dar al-­Harb in the aftermath of the British capture of Delhi in 1803. To be sure—­and to avert any misreading—­‘Aziz’s designation of his environs as Dar al-­Harb was not meant as a call for warfare against the British or to endorse Muslim exodus from India. Rather, his judgment reflected and articulated a politics of mourning the absence of Muslim political sovereignty and the deleterious effects of such absence on the performance of Muslim devotional life in the public sphere. This sensibility of mourning is well captured in ‘Aziz’s own words, ably translated by Yohanan Friedmann: “In this city [Delhi] the rule of the Muslim Imam is not in force at all and the Christians rule [ 23 ]

Introduction without fear. What is meant by the implementation of the infidel laws is that the infidels are acting as rulers in the affairs of state, in the management of the affairs of the subjects. . . . ​If some of them do not oppose (the implementation of) Muslim laws such as the prayers on Friday and on the two festivals (‘id al-­f itr and ‘id al-­adha), the call to prayer and the sacrifice of the cow-­the basis of this is that these things have no value in their eyes (in chiz­ha nazd-­i ishan haba’ o hadar ast) because they destroy mosques without hesitation.”60 As exemplified in this statement, for ‘Aziz, as for the next generation of South Asian ulama on whose thought this book focuses, the linchpin of political sovereignty lay in its effects on the texture and rhythms of everyday devotional life. The realization of the impossibility of Muslim political sovereignty in the post-­1857 landscape only further intensified the focus on the realm of ritual life and the everyday as the site holding the promise of sovereign power. The everyday performance of Muslim identity in the public sphere emerged as a synecdoche for sovereignty. Henceforth, in ulama discourses and imaginaries, the political was associated less with the desire for a Muslim state than with the regulation and choreography of piety and religious practice in the public sphere. In other words, politics was invested in the embodied life of the community. This is not to say that all South Asian Muslim scholars abided by such a view of the political; for instance, those associated with the early twentieth-­century Khilafat Movement (discussed at length in chapters  3 and 4), especially the modernist leaning, strove instead for the resuscitation of the Ottoman caliphate that had come under British onslaught, with lesser concern for the purity of Muslim ritual life. To them (as I will elaborate in chapter 3), preserving the authenticity of everyday rituals meant little in the absence of the primary fulcrum of Muslim politico-­theological sovereignty: the caliphate. I am thus not proposing a grand theoretical model applicable to the thought and social imaginary of every modern South Asian Muslim scholar. The argument I develop over the course of this book is more specific, and it can be broken into three connected statements: 1. the valorization of ritual markers of Muslim distinction in the public sphere as the touchstone of sovereign power among several major ulama precipitated a massively consequential intra-­Muslim debate on what constitutes power, politics, and sovereignty in conditions of colonial modernity; 2. the question of interreligious friendship and its limits constituted among the foremost arenas in which this debate unfolded; [ 24 ]

Introduction and 3. though this debate and the scholars it occupied was far more complex than what the binary of traditionalist/modernist would allow, its varied instantiations do reveal some critical and signature fault lines between Muslim traditionalism and modernism. I will elaborate this last point in depth through most of this book, especially the final two chapters. For now, it will suffice to highlight that the ambiguity over the meaning and location of politics and sovereignty is precisely why the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a period of unprecedented volume and intensity of both intra-­Muslim and interreligious debates and polemics in South Asia, many of which continue to shape and haunt religious identities in the postcolonial present. In my previous book, Defending Muḥammad in Modernity, I had argued that the Barelvi-­Deobandi polemic—­which pitted against each other the pioneers of the two most prolific and influential groups of traditionalist Muslim scholars in colonial South Asia—­centered on “competing political theologies,” or understandings of how divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the ritual life of the community should interact following the loss of political sovereignty.61 In the current book, I will show and argue that the search and desire for sovereignty in the ruins of empire also animated intra-­Muslim and interreligious contestations on the boundaries of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations, especially Hindu-­Muslim relations. Political theorist Saul Newman has eloquently described the intimacy between the desire for sovereign certainty in moments of crisis and the urgency to circumscribe boundaries distinguishing the self from the other. He writes, “Sovereignty represents an imaginary point of identity that fixes meaning and delineates borders and boundaries. It differentiates inside from outside, friend from enemy.”62 Newman’s comments can be gainfully folded with the astute observations on this theme as it connects with the career of colonial modernity in South Asia by another prominent political theorist, Sudipta Kaviraj. Kaviraj has famously argued that South Asia’s transition from precolonial to the colonial context, as the distance between the state and the people narrowed, saw a corresponding shift in the religious identities of indigenous communities from what he terms “fuzzy” to “enumerated” identities. Enumerated identities are not only more countable and amenable to state mechanisms of governmentality such as the census; perhaps even more crucially, they are also a lot more ideologically aware of and interested in carving distinct histories and practices that distinguish the self from its competing “others.” 63 [ 25 ]

Introduction What sorts of debates and moments of moral argument did this transformation in the horizon of indigenous religious identities generate and galvanize? And what negotiations between precolonial archives of tradition and modern colonial conditions and assumptions did such debates and arguments bring into view? These are the central questions and themes that anchor this book.

Book Itinerary I will take up these themes over the course of six chapters that, while glued together by a common concern with Muslim discourses and debates on Hindu-­Muslim friendship, operate in varied discursive arenas and engage disparate conceptual registers and theaters of contest. Although the book moves in chronological order from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, it is not a chronological intellectual history; rather, it is organized through a montage of intensive microhistories centered on particular moments and problems of encountering the “other.” Chapter  1, “Translating the ‘Other’: Early Modern Muslim Understandings of Hinduism,” examines the theme of interreligious translation in the context of early modern India by undertaking two tasks. First, it conducts a broad survey of key examples and moments of Muslim intellectual engagements with Hinduism in medieval and early modern South Asia. Then it examines in some detail the fascinating and instructive case of prominent eighteenth-­ century Sufi master and scholar Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan’s (d. 1781) translation of Hindu thought and practice as reflected in his Persian treatise (composed in the form of a letter) on this subject. Through a close reading of the content and context of his translation project, I show that, while according the Hindu Other remarkable doctrinal hospitality, Jan-­i Janan’s view of translation was firmly tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology committed to upholding the exceptionality of Muslim normative authority. Interrogating his negotiation of hospitality and exceptionality and the notions of time that undergirded that negotiation occupies much of this chapter. I also explore ways in which Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism might engage ongoing scholarly conversations regarding the rupture of colonial modernity in the discursive career of religion in South Asia. In the Euro-­American study of religion, many scholars [ 26 ]

Introduction have shown the intimacy of modern secular power and the reconfiguration of religion as a universally translatable category. But what conceptual and historiographical gains might one derive by shifting one’s analytical frame from the colonial reification of religion to the interreligious translation efforts of a late eighteenth-­century thinker like Jan-­i Janan who wrote at the cusp of colonial modernity? This question hovers over the problem space of this chapter, as it also engages important fragments of the burgeoning field of translation studies in the specific context of interreligious translation. Chapter 2, “Deciding the “True” God: Religion, Miracles, History,” moves to the late nineteenth-­century British colonial context and analyzes the content and context of a major interreligious “polemical festival” held in the North Indian district of Shahjahanpur in 1875 and 1876. Called the Festival of Deciding the (True) God (mailah-­i khuda shinasi), this event brought together leading Hindu, Muslim, and Christian missionary scholars in India to debate and contest the authenticity of their respective religious traditions and doctrinal systems. It was organized through the patronage of the British magistrate’s office in Shahjahanpur. The renowned though complex and less studied Muslim scholar and founder of the prestigious Deoband seminary Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1877) and the acclaimed Hindu reformer and founder of the Arya Samaj Dayananda Sarasvati (d. 1883) were among the star scholars who attended this polemical spectacle.64 In this chapter, I examine the Shahjahanpur polemic from the perspective of Deobandi historiography while including a brief analysis of the Arya Samaj’s account of this event. In addition to sketching a narrative history of this episode, I focus on the discourses of Qasim Nanautvi, especially on the question of prophetic miracles, as he strove to establish Islam’s moral and epistemic superiority over Hinduism and Christianity. In contesting the question of “whose miracle was most miraculous,” the religious scholars gathered at Shahjahanpur, including Nanautvi and Sarasvati, turned to the discursive arsenal of modern science and historicism. Primarily through a close reading of Nanautvi’s arguments for the superiority of Prophet Muhammad’s miracles over those of other Prophets, I raise and address larger questions about the relationship between indigenous religious polemics and the epistemic and institutional conditions of colonial secular modernity in late nineteenth-­century India. I ask and answer the question of what notion of “religion” as a category of life informed and inspired the Polemic of Shahjahanpur, and in what ways was [ 27 ]

Introduction that understanding of religion indebted to the secularizing conditions of colonial modernity. Drawing on the work of late anthropologist Saba Mahmood, this chapter also explores the normative assumptions of secularity regarding the interaction of history and religious argument that infused modern Muslim reformist thought, such as Qasim Nanautvi’s discourse during this rather incredible interreligious polemical festival. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the theme of interreligious friendship and intimacy. Both chapters share a common context: the anticolonial Khilafat Movement in the second decade of the twentieth century that allied with Mohandas Gandhi (d. 1948) and the Indian National Congress in its bid to pressure the British government to restore the Ottoman Caliphate. This alliance, forged by prominent members of the Muslim scholarly and political elite including modernist scholars and traditionalist ulama, precipitated heated and vexing debates and polemics regarding the normative boundaries of Hindu-­Muslim relations and friendship. These two chapters examine some of these moments of contention that pitted against each other some of the most formidable rival Muslim scholars of this era. Chapter 3, “Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies,” sets its gaze on a heated and hugely consequential debate that occupied two rival stalwarts of modern South Asian Muslim thought: Abu’l Kalam Azad and the founder of the famous Barelvi orientation Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1921). Their debate centered on the boundaries of friendship between Hindus and Muslims in the context of the Khilafat Movement. More specifically, they sparred over the import of the category of muwalat, which, in its varied modalities, can mean friendship or intimacy between different individuals and communities or relationship of clientage and alliance, such as between two political entities or the state and its people. Azad and Khan proffered competing understandings of interreligious friendship premised on opposing readings of the Qur’an and the sharia. For Azad, collaboration with Gandhi and the Hindu community was necessary to confront and undermine British designs to eradicate the coveted institution of the caliphate—­a task for which he even advocated jihad against the colonial state as every Indian Muslim’s individual obligation. In contrast, Khan found such gestures of Hindu-­Muslim intimacy a grave threat to markers of Muslim distinction in the public sphere, and entirely in contravention to the normative principles and purposes of the political theology that ensconced the sharia: a political theology the foundational goal of which was the maintenance of Muslim power and superiority over [ 28 ]

Introduction non-­Muslims. But I also show that, for all of Khan’s grounding in an ideal imperial Muslim political theology, he was eminently capable of switching to more pragmatic engagement with the pressures and conditions of British colonial power. Not only did he chastise the likes of Azad for advocating jihad against the monstrosity of the colonial state, calling it self-­destruction that Gandhi had prodded and trapped the Khilafat Movement leaders into pursuing it; Khan also advocated the continuity of transactional relations with the colonial state (rather than substantive friendship or intimacy), thus rejecting the call of Gandhi’s non-­cooperation movement to sever all ties with the British. Through a close reading of Azad’s and Khan’s polemical encounter, I present two rival narratives of power, politics, and political theology knotted to the question of interreligious hospitality. Chapter 4, “The Cow and the Caliphate,” remains tied to the Khilafat Movement context but turns its attention to the issue of cow sacrifice and its entanglement with Hindu-­Muslim friendship. Should Indian Muslims abandon or refrain from cow sacrifice and the consumption of beef as a gesture of hospitality for the Hindu community in their bid to salvage the Ottoman Caliphate by forging a unified front against the British? Or would such abstention precipitate the erasure of a ritual marker of Muslim distinction and hence amount to their shame and humiliation? These questions, which connected bovine politics with the negotiation of religious difference and interreligious hospitality, assumed unprecedented prominence and urgency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This chapter examines the contrasting views on the question of cow sacrifice and Hindu-­ Muslim relations of two preeminent South Asian Muslim traditionalist scholars: Ahmad Raza Khan (whom we meet again here) and Qiyamuddin ‘Abdul Bari, or ‘Abdul Bari, as he is commonly known (d. 1926), of the rationalist Farangi Mahal school.65 I argue that Khan’s and Bari’s discourse and disagreement on the cow was informed by competing imaginaries of Muslim sovereign power and its nature and sources in the modern world. For Khan, sovereignty was enshrined in the flourishing of ritual practices like cow sacrifice that were publicly recognized as markers of Muslim distinction in South Asia; halting cow sacrifice under the pressure or coercion of the Hindus was thus anathema. While agreeing with Khan about the normative prohibition against acting under the pressure of a non-­Muslim community, Bari privileged the institution of the caliphate as the location of sovereignty; the cow [ 29 ]

Introduction to him paled in significance when put next to it. Both, however, for all their differences and contrast, were, I contend, committed to an imperial traditionalist political theology that saw the maintenance of Muslim dominance over non-­Muslims a nonnegotiable imperative of the sharia. But their readings of the sharia and their conceptions of how the normativity of its political theology ought to be preserved and protected diverged significantly. This chapter thus offers a rare window into intra-­ulama contestations in modern South Asia on the problem of cow sacrifice and Hindu-­ Muslim friendship that were anchored in and powered by traditionalist logics and protocols of moral argument. I have also tried in this chapter to put into conversation Muslim traditionalist anxieties over the cow with perspectives from recent scholarship in the exciting emerging field of critical animal studies, especially in relation to South Asia. The last two chapters of this book present the first detailed examination of South Asian Muslim scholarly discourses and debates on the doctrine and application of reprehensible imitation (tashabbuh) in Islam, a matter of tremendous contest and consequence. The origins of this concept derive from the Prophet’s saying: “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” While clearly emerging from a context in which early Muslims were anxious to establish their independent religious and cultural identity, this concept assumes a particularly charged and difficult problem in the modern moment. In the context of colonial India, the debate over the limits of imitating the religious practices as well as habits and customs of non-­Muslim communities is inevitably connected to broader conversations around the meaning and boundaries of Islam and religion. In other words, the threat of imitation constituted the discursive ground on which the boundaries of Islam as a discursive and lived tradition were debated, contested, and fought out. Chapter 5, “The Contagion of Imitation: A Select Genealogy,” presents a broad overview of key modern South Asian Muslim works on the problem of imitating the “other,” combining legal, theological, and even literary texts, in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. I also highlight and describe major and varied premodern Muslim intellectual discourses on the doctrine of tashabbuh as a way to contextualize its modern South Asian career. Chapter 6, “The Aligarh-­ Deoband Divide: Competing Rationalities of Reform,” makes its focus two contrasting and arguably the two most influential genealogies of reformist thought in modern South Asian Islam: the modernist Aligarh school founded and best represented by Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the famous Deoband [ 30 ]

Introduction seminary. More specifically, this chapter conducts a close reading of and comparison between Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s largely permissive views on adopting the customs and traditions of non-­Muslims, as reflected in his journal Polishing Ethics (Tahzib al-­Akhlaq) and the influential Deoband scholar Qari Muhammad Tayyib’s (d. 1983) more prohibitive stance in his work Reprehensible Imitation in Islam (al-­Tashabbuh fi’l Islam), the most comprehensive text on this topic in the South Asian context. I argue that the Aligarh-­Deoband disagreement over Hindu-­Muslim friendship and intimacy is irreducible to the binaries of liberal/conservative or modernist/ traditionalist modalities of Islam, but is, rather, informed by two contrasting yet at times overlapping visions of Muslim sovereign power in a context bereft of Muslim political sovereignty. This chapter also conducts a close reading of a dense but fascinating exchange of letters between Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Tayyib’s grandfather Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (among the founders of Deoband, who centrally features in chapter 2) that reveal the nuanced yet substantive hermeneutical and theological divergences between the likely two most formidable bastions of modernism and traditionalism in South Asia: the Aligarh and Deoband schools. Finally, in the epilogue, I revisit and tie together the key arguments of the book, describe the significance of its analysis to the vexed politics of religious minorities in contemporary South Asia, and suggest that imagining new horizons of interreligious encounters in South Asia demands uninheriting both premodern imperial political theologies and the far more pernicious majoritarian political theology of the modern nation state. Though this book is intended primarily for scholars of religion, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, and the humanities more broadly, I have tried to write it in a way that will hopefully be conducive for classroom use as well. I thus end the book with an appendix with detailed teaching suggestions for various undergraduate and graduate courses. While bound by the common theme of “intra-­Muslim conversation and contest on Hindu-­Muslim friendship,” the specific discursive and political arenas in which I explore this overarching theme are quite distinct. I have thus drawn on a rather varied yet hopefully coherent theoretical tool kit that engages conversations in translation studies, critical secularism studies, critical animal studies, political theology, and theories of intimacy and friendship. I have tried to combine depth of textual analysis (with close readings of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu texts) that brings out the layers and [ 31 ]

Introduction tensions of South Asian ulama thought with hitherto less traversed theoretical registers in the study of South Asian Islam, especially the study of Hindu-­Muslim relations. In a certain sense, I have imagined this project as itself an encounter between specific aspects of the Muslim humanities, as refracted from ulama worldviews and discourses, with emerging discourses and conversations animating the North American Humanities. In so doing, this book examines and presents less studied aspects of some otherwise well-­k nown South Asian Muslim scholars while also introducing crucial and fascinating figures whose religious thought remains largely unexplored in the Euro-­American academy. In each chapter, I have provided brief biographical as well as contextual notes and background that will help readers situate the discussion conducted in it, as well as its primary actors. For purposes of accessibility and flow of reading, I have refrained from writing a separate detailed chapter on “context” or one that provides a general overview of, say, “religion and Islam in colonial India.” Such surveys already exist, including in my own previous work, to which I would refer readers interested in such a panoramic overview.66 Why these actors and these particular themes? For a few different reasons. The scholars who populate Perilous Intimacies belong to a range of ideological persuasions that dominated the intellectual landscape of Islam in early modern and colonial India. These include, among others, Muslim traditionalists (ulama) from such diverse and disparate movements and groups as Deoband (Qasim Nanautvi and Qari Tayyib), the Barelvi school (Ahmad Raza Khan), and the Farangi Mahal school (‘Abdul Bari). They also include Sufi masters (Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan), Muslim modernists of varied stripes (Abu’l Kalam Azad and Sayyid Ahmad Khan), and Muslim litterateurs (like Nazir Ahmad Dihlavi) who were intimately familiar with and embedded in a traditionalist scholarly milieu, even if at times agonistically related to it. Focusing on the overlapping as well as conflicting views of these figures on a normative question of far-­reaching consequence—­that of interreligious friendship—­thus enables a bird’s-­eye view of major varieties of modern South Asian Islam, and of their creativity, depth, conflicts, and ambiguities. Perilous Intimacies represents, in this sense, an account of the complexities and internal disagreements of a highly sophisticated and influential yet less studied intellectual tradition: the discourses and debates of South Asian ulama and their interlocutors-­cum-­competitors on Hindu-­Muslim friendship and its boundaries. My aim in considering a range of conflicting voices [ 32 ]

Introduction on this question, in turn, is to punctuate what is among the central arguments of this book: Muslim scholarly investments in delineating the limits of Hindu-­Muslim friendship are often inextricable from intra-­Muslim disagreement on Islam and its limits. The particular themes that form the focus of the individual chapters in this book—­those of interreligious translation, doctrinal polemics, political solidarity and everyday intimacies, animal sacrifice, and the imitation of non-­Muslims—­showcase the breadth and elasticity of friendship both as a category of analysis and as an idea that espouses tremendous normative interest within the tradition. Collectively, these themes therefore allow for a capacious understanding of interreligious friendship that includes and brings together problems of theology, history, politics, ritual practice, and the performance of religious identity in the public sphere. Ultimately, the case studies examined in this book highlight an important and rarely examined dimension of the problem of religious difference in South Asia—­namely, the intraminority debates and tensions generated through the encounter between the legacy of precolonial discursive traditions and norms and the conditions and institutions of colonial modernity. This encounter, I try to show, has represented a site of considerable aspiration, anxiety, and intellectual fermentation, as it has represented a central site of avid politics in the absence of political sovereignty. As Salman Sayyid, in his piercingly brilliant book Recalling the Caliphate, describes the political: “The political erupts when a distinction between friend and enemy takes hold. . . . ​The intensity of the distinction, in other words the intensity of enmity and amity, determines the depth and range of the political.”67 Sayyid’s observation can be productively folded with the following statement by Carl Schmitt in his lesser-­read text Theory of the Partisan: “The core of the political is not enmity per se but the distinction of friend and enemy: it presupposes both friend and enemy”(emphasis mine).68 In a certain sense, the chapters in this book present an account of different moments of the eruption of the political, when the question of “the intensity of enmity and amity” between Hindus and Muslims was authoritatively debated. I have argued that engaging the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship requires close attention to intra-­Muslim encounters over the boundaries of Islam and difference, especially during South Asia’s transition to colonial modernity. And the ulama and their discourses present a vital site for the exploration of the varied and conflicting ways in which intraminority [ 33 ]

Introduction relations and the limits of interreligious friendship and hospitality were imagined and contested in colonial South Asia. To put it differently: the negotiation of power and hermeneutics accompanying the interaction of Muslim imperial political theology and the conditions of colonial modernity is critical to thinking through the question of interreligious encounters in South Asia, especially Hindu-­Muslim encounters, in its colonial and postcolonial apparitions. In what follows, I plan to highlight and explore some fragments of the problem space occupying such a thought exercise. I begin with the site of early modern Muslim scholarly translations of Hindu thought and practice. A cautionary note before launching: over the course of this book, I employ phrases like Hindu-­Muslim friendship and Hindu-­Muslim relations primarily for heuristic purposes. I do not mean to authorize “Hindus” and “Muslims” as bounded, primordial, or naturally opposed identities defined primarily by religion and theology. Rather, the very point of examining the ambiguities and complexities shadowing traditions of intra-­Muslim debate on interreligious friendship is to help unbind any stagnant or congealed notion of religious difference.

[ 34 ]

ONE

Translating the “Other” Early Modern Muslim Understandings of Hinduism

WHAT POLITICS OF translation are involved when non-­Christian traditions are translated as “religion”? Is religion a universally translatable category? Can religion be translated as a distinct category of life? Such questions have dominated Euro-­American reflections on religion in the last few decades. Following Talal Asad’s influential study Genealogies of Religion published in 1993, several scholars of religion have variously argued that the translatability of non-­Christian traditions as religion is intimately connected to the events and conditions of colonial modernity.1 According to this view, through a complex yet powerful regime of colonial knowledge production and translation, previously flexible and loosely connected discursive traditions and practices came to be translated as modern “religions,” essentially reducible to certain texts and doctrinal truth claims. Thus, today, we imagine world religions as competing clubs with clearly defined texts, beliefs, and practices, each possessing its own distinct history. Moreover, so the argument goes, this colonial discourse of “world religions” was far from politically neutral. Rather, it was fundamental to authorizing the political project of colonialism and the ideological underpinnings of the secular. Put more simply, it is precisely by translating the non-­West in its image that the West authorized its own political and normative hegemony. Therefore, the colonial translation of religion as a universal category is central to the modern secular premise of constantly regulating and defining religion as a distinct category of life.2 [ 35 ]

Translating the “Other” While one may quarrel with specific ways in which this argument has sometimes been constructed, it is difficult to ignore or deny the power of the colonial discursive economy in the construction of religion as a modern category. But what if one were to shift the camera of analysis from modern colonial translations of indigenous religious discourses and thought to indigenous projects of interreligious translation? What are some of the practices and modes of translating religion found during the precolonial period? In what ways were precolonial understandings of religion and religious difference distinct from or similar to colonial approaches to the question of religion? These are among the larger conceptual questions that animate this chapter. More specifically, this chapter centers on the major eighteenth-­ century Indian Muslim scholar Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan’s (1699–­1781) translation of Hinduism for his Muslim audience. Through a close reading of the hermeneutical strategies and conceptual idioms that Jan-­i Janan used to translate Hindu thought and practice, I will shed light on precolonial, early modern Muslim understandings of Hinduism as a discursive and lived tradition. The chapter’s central theme is the relationship between interreligious friendship and translation. Taking Jacques Derrida’s cue that translation is “the condition of all hospitality,” this chapter explores the aspirations and ambiguities of friendship and hospitality generated by an important instance of interreligious translation.3 As I will explain, Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism was at once sympathetic and doctrinally hospitable toward the religious Other and yet firmly committed to an imperial and exceptional view of Islam. Describing and analyzing this tension and its implications for the interaction of translation, friendship, and hospitality is a major motif of this chapter. A brief but necessary word on terminology before proceeding: when describing Jan-­i Janan’s views, I use the term Hinduism, cautiously and primarily for purposes of heuristic and phraseological felicity. As I will discuss, positing in the eighteenth century a clearly demarcated world religion called Hinduism is not free of ambiguities. However, even though Jan-­i Janan’s understanding of Hindu categories of knowledge did not seamlessly map onto the notion of a modern world religion, it did nonetheless involve the assumption of a unitary and distinct religious tradition with a specific set of theological doctrines, legal precepts, and ritual practices. So, while keeping in view the slight anachronism of the category of Hinduism in this context, an alternate category stripped of any Hindu religious valences like “Indian/ [ 36 ]

Translating the “Other” Indic Religion” or “Indian/Indic Thought” [as if Islam is not Indian or Indic] would also be rather misplaced and unsatisfying. Other alternatives such as “Hindu knowledge traditions” or “Hindu religious traditions,” though more accurate and conceptually sound, would feel clunky on repetitive usage. Thus, I have decided to persist with the category of Hinduism for heuristic and aesthetic reasons while putting in place necessary caveats and analysis that will clarify for the reader its purchase and pitfalls. In the latter part of this chapter, once readers are more familiar with the texture of Jan-­i Janan’s translation project, I will analyze in more detail the comparison and contrast between Jan-­i Janan’s and British colonial conceptions of religion. To orient us to the problem space and intellectual context of the inquiry conducted in this chapter: in the mid-­to-­late twentieth century, the study of Hindu–­Muslim interactions in colonial or precolonial India occupied a space fraught with the claims and desires of competing nationalist historiographies. Writing some two decades ago, religion scholar James Laine aptly captured the broad outlines of such a nationalist problem space: In examining Hinduism and Islam in India, scholars have tended to fall into two competing camps. On the one hand there are the two-­nation theorists for whom Islam represents an alien religion in South Asia, brought by invading Turkish armies that always remained incompatible with both Hindus and Hinduism. For this group of scholars, the formation in 1947 of two separate nations India and Pakistan was inevitable.4 On the other end of the spectrum are the one-­nation theorists who have typically read cross-­religious encounters in India from the perspective of assimilation rather than that of divergence. For this group of scholars,5 the period of Muslim rule from 1200 to 1800 saw a series of cultural encounters in the arts, politics, popular religion and mystical experimentation. Taken together, these encounters led to an India in which Muslims and Hindus shared a common culture and created a new Indo-­Muslim civilization ruptured only by European colonial intrusions. As a corollary to this conception, this class of scholars6 has typically placed the blame for the emergence and propagation of communalism and religious conflict in contemporary India on colonial rule from 1857–­1947.7

While imprints of nationalist historiographies have not disappeared, lately various scholars have challenged this binary attitude toward the study of South Asian religions by adopting a historiographic perspective that presumes [ 37 ]

Translating the “Other” neither enmity nor harmony but is based on a more nuanced reading of a diversity of Hindu-­Muslim encounters.8 Important recent scholarship has also thoroughly complicated and unraveled popular stereotypical depictions of major premodern Mughal political actors like Jalaludin Akbar (1605), Dara Shukoh (1659), and Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir (1707), who, depending on one’s nationalist historiography of choice, are invariably cast as diehard pluralists or staunch exclusivists, villainous purveyors of interreligious promiscuity or heroic defenders of orthodoxy. In their own distinct ways, scholars like Munis Faruqi, Supriya Gandhi, Rajeev Kinra, and Audrey Truschke have shown that such neat contemporary projections, propelled by nationalist desires, distort and undermine complex understandings of religious difference and operations of statecraft unavailable for binary framings like pluralist/exclusivist.9 In this chapter, I contribute to the ongoing and burgeoning field of Hindu-­ Muslim encounters in South Asia by exploring the specific theme of early modern Muslim understandings of Hinduism. I do so by considering in some depth the ideas on Hinduism of Mirza Maẓhar Jan-­i Janan, a leading and influential Muslim Sufi reformer in eighteenth-­century India.10 Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hindu thought and practice represents a fascinating and hugely instructive case of interreligious translation that, while according the Hindu Other remarkable theological and doctrinal hospitality, was nonetheless tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology committed to upholding the exceptionality of Islam’s normative authority. His translation project thus interrupts any neat division between inclusivist openness and exclusivist exceptionalism. Interrogating Jan-­i Janan’s negotiation of hospitality and exceptionality, and the notions of time that undergirded that negotiation, occupies much of this chapter. While other scholars—­most notably Yohanan Friedmann, Warren Fusfeld and Thomas Dahnhardt11—­have previously written on this aspect of Jan-­i Janan’s thought, I build on their work by raising and addressing a different set of questions. My primary concern in this chapter is threefold: 1) to highlight and interrogate the problematic of translation in early modern Muslim studies of Hinduism by examining a specific and conceptually illumining instance of such a translation project; 2) to explore some of the ways in which interreligious translation indexes a discursive site inhabiting the promise and ambiguities of interreligious friendship and hospitality; and 3) to compare and contrast dominant modern colonial conceptions of religion as a category of life and [ 38 ]

Translating the “Other” understandings of religion that emerge in indigenous moments of interreligious translation like the one undertaken by Jan-­i Janan. In turn, the central questions I take up are as follows: Which Islamic categories and idioms did Jan-­i Janan employ in translating Hindu ideas and concepts? What taxonomies of knowledge did he mobilize in translating one mode of religious categories and discourses into another? What are some of the key hermeneutical choices and strategies through which he tried to overcome potential doctrinal and theological challenges in translating Hinduism for a Muslim audience? What notion of temporality informed the way Jan-­i Janan imagined the relationship between Islam and Hinduism? And, finally, what are some of the major overlaps and differences between Jan-­i Janan’s attempted representations of Hinduism and nineteenth-­century British colonial projects of translating religion? I argue that even though Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism was remarkably sympathetic and charitable, he nonetheless represented Hindu thought and practice in a noticeably reified and unitary fashion. I will show that Jan-­i Janan’s reading of Hinduism can best be described as “juridico-­ theological” in character, in that it posited a direct equivalence between what he called Islamic and Hindu law and theology. His “theologization” of Hinduism was pivotal to his attempt at framing Hinduism as a normatively coherent monotheistic tradition. I contend that even as Jan-­i Janan adopted an ecumenically hospitable stance towards Hinduism, he nonetheless advanced a triumphalist Muslim narrative by maintaining Islam’s superiority over Hinduism. Critical to his understanding of the relationship between Islam and Hinduism was the question of time: while upholding the normative legitimacy of Hindu knowledge traditions prior to Islam, Jan-­i Janan maintained that the arrival of Islam abrogated all previous religions and thus rendering Hindus as unbelievers. Jan-­i Janan’s grounding in an Islamic legal framework that was anchored in the normative privileging of an imperial Muslim political theology, and his recourse to legal categories as part of his translation of Hinduism, show the conceptual problem and poverty of the often-­assumed opposition between Islamic law and Sufism or the legal and mystical epistemologies in Islam.12 One of the foremost Sufi masters of his era, Jan-­i Janan was not a jurist or faqih, yet he was well versed in traversing the discursive landscape of Islamic law while assembling his arguments. This should come as no surprise to any mildly serious student of the Muslim intellectual tradition; Sufi [ 39 ]

Translating the “Other” masters adept at the language and operations of Islamic law and those who are also accomplished jurists in their own right are, of course, commonplace in Islamic history. I make this point, though, to underscore both the problematic nature of the Islamic law/Sufism binary and the permeation of an imperial Muslim political theology across different Muslim knowledge traditions, including Sufism. The arc of this chapter moves through four distinct segments. First, I discuss Jan-­i Janan’s intellectual biography, and the political context in which he wrote, to foreground my analysis of his views of the Hindu tradition. Then I present a select genealogy of Indian Muslim engagements with Hinduism in medieval and early modern India. Here, I rely on both important secondary Western scholarship on this topic and my own reading of previously unconsidered primary Persian sources. Next, I conduct a close analysis of Jan-­i Janan’s project of interreligious translation and highlight its key features. In the penultimate section, I explore possible overlaps and departures between Jan-­i Janan’s and British colonial translations of Hinduism. Finally, in the concluding section, I briefly reflect on the question of how we might theorize and categorize the labor of translation involved in Jan-­i Janan’s engagement with Hinduism and bind the themes of interreligious translation and interreligious friendship.

Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan: A Sufi Reformer in a Moment of Crisis Born in 1699, Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan was a major Sufi master who served as the leader of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in India, and lived for most of the eighteenth century, dying in 1781. He was the most prominent figure on the spiritual chain (silsila) of the Naqshbandi order after the preeminent late sixteenth-­/early seventeenth-­century Sufi Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). He was also a contemporary of the towering eighteenth–­century scholar—­also based in Delhi—­Shah Wali Ullah. In addition to being a Sufi master, Jan-­i Janan was a renowned Persian and Urdu poet. His scholarly corpus includes extensive writings, preserved in treatises and letters, on various aspects of Sufi practice, psychology, and metaphysics. Boasting a Sayyid lineage (i.e., descendants of the Prophet) of Afghan nobility, Jan-­i Janan’s family enjoyed intimate ties with the Mughal imperial elite. His father, Mirza Jan, served as both revenue collector (mansabdar) [ 40 ]

Translating the “Other” and judge (qazi) under the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Upon resigning from these posts, Mirza Jan was traveling back to Agra from the Deccan when Mirza Mazhar was born in Kalabagh, in the district of Malwa. According to hagiographic sources, it was none other than Aurangzeb who had suggested the name “Jan-­i Jan” (the life of the beloved) for his prized officer’s son. The name eventually morphed into the pluralized form Jan-­i Janan, by which he is best known today. Jan-­i Janan received his initial education under the tutelage of his father while living in Agra. Later, he was educated in Sufi thought and practice and received extensive training in other religious disciplines, such as the Qur’an and Hadith, from among the most prominent scholars of his time. Most notably, these included Nur Muhammad Badayuni (d. 1722), who initiated Jan-­i Janan into the Naqshbandi order and trained him on the Naqshbandi path from 1717 to 1721; and the prominent Meccan scholar of Hadith ‘Abdallah ibn Salim al-­Basri (d. 1722), who had also taught Shah Wali Ullah, Shah Hafiz Sa‘d Allah (d. 1739) and Muhammad Ahmad Sunami Gulshan (d. 1747). Though trained primarily as a specialist Sufi master, Jan-­i Janan was comfortably familiar with Hanafi law and identified as a Naqshbandi-­Hanafi scholar with Maturidi theological leanings. As we will see over the course of this chapter, his multivalent intellectual constitution was amply reflected in his translation of Hindu thought that nimbly moves between legal, theological, and Sufi categories and concepts. After completing his basic and higher education, at the age of thirty Jan-­i Janan shifted to Delhi where he established his own center of learning, aptly named Khanqah-­yi Mazhariya (Mazhari Lodge). He stayed in Delhi until he died in 1781.13 A feature of Jan-­i Janan’s personality that is repeated so often in biographical literature as to make its mention inevitable here relates to his extreme sensitivity to matters of cleanliness, comfort, order, and hygiene. An entire cottage industry exists of narratives, many of them humorous, connected with Jan-­i Janan’s ultrasensitive nature (nazuk mizaji). For instance, once, an unnamed dinner host, cognizant of Jan-­i Janan’s abhorrence for dirt or anything out of place, went out of his way to get his house sparkling clean. However, when the food was served, Jan-­i Janan could be seen clasping his head in discomfort, as he exclaimed, “Sir, why is that pebble lying on on the ground? Until it’s cleared away, I will not be able to eat.” He only took a bite once the pebble was removed.14 To give a more drastic example, when Jan-­i Janan was severly wounded by the gunshot that eventually took his life a few days later, the Mughal king Shah ‘Alam came to check up on him. “Mirza [ 41 ]

Translating the “Other” Sahib, how are you doing?” Shah ‘Alam asked. Jan-­i Janan’s reply was legendary: “The bullets have wounded me, about which I have no worries as this heart was already torn into pieces. But, yes, since the bullets were fired from a close distance, the gunpowder has entered the body, and its odor is causing my mind tremendous anxiety.”15 While headquartered in Delhi, Jan-­i Janan maintained an extensive network of disciples throughout India. Curiously, a steady stream of non-­ Muslims also visited his Sufi lodge and benefited from his spiritual services, though it is difficult to ascertain their proximity to him. His chief disciple was the prominent though less studied late eighteenth-­/early nineteenth-­ century Sufi, Hanafi jurist, and Qur’an commentator from the North Indian town of Panipat, Qazi Sanaʾullah Panipati (d. 1839), with whom Jan-­i Janan maintained regular correspondence throughout his life. Among other major texts, Panipati authored an extensive and widely read and translated Arabic Qur’an commentary that he named after his Sufi master, Tafsir al-­ Mazhari.16 Contrary to modern Protestant stereotypes that cast “mystics” as entirely detached from the larger society of which they are a part, Jan-­i Janan was closely attuned to the political and social contexts and events in eighteenth-­century India.17 Moreover, from his correspondence with his various disciples all over India, Jan-­i Janan comes across as a very active and adept administrator who maintained a firm grip on the affairs of the Naqshbandi order and the activities of his disciples and vicegerents. These letters and correspondences also reveal him as someone acutely sensitive to the task of cultivating a positive image of the order in the eyes of the public—­for instance, in this excerpt from a letter in which he berated Panipati for being rude to some followers of the order in Panipat: My brother, it is quite startling that whoever comes to see me from Panipat tends to be fuming with complaints about you. I have no idea what you do to them. If your forthrightness and honesty is what causes other people to go through pain, then avoid such candor. Treat people with kindness and respect because your current behavior brings a bad name to the order (tariqa) and to its forbearers. Despite attaining all bodily and inner perfections, to alienate the public and to defame oneself in the process is not wise.18

As this shows, in Jan-­i Janan’s view, the pastoral responsibilities of a Sufi master were not limited to developing the spiritual and affective capacities of [ 42 ]

Translating the “Other” the disciple. Just as critical was the imperative of harnessing the public brand of the order. Jan-­i Janan lived through a time of tremendous political tumult and fragmentation; as many as twelve Mughal emperors ruled over India during the course of his life from 1699 to 1781. In the decades following the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal Empire gradually yet dramatically disintegrated, as several rival claimants to political sovereignty emerged and gained strength. In addition to the growing presence of the British, the Sikhs and Marathas became major threats to the political standing of the Mughals.19 But perhaps the most traumatic memories of this period for the Muslims of North India were not associated with any domestic non-­Muslim entity but rather with the invasion of India by the Afghan ruler-­cum-­warrior Nadir Shah in 1739. Nadir Shah’s invasion caused catastrophic human, ecological and material disaster in North India. The horror of this event was indelibly etched on to the cultural memory of the South Asian Muslim intellectual elite. A particularly vivid description of the devastation can be found in these haunting words of Jan-­i Janan’s contemporary polymath Shah Wali Ullah: “They [Nadir Shah’s army] would kill every living being, human or animal, and did not even spare dogs and cats, generating a palimpsest of corpses. They also put shops and houses in Delhi on fire. They turned the Royal Market (Suq-­i Sultani) which is better known as Chandni Chowk into a cesspool of blood.”20 In fact, in a letter in Persian addressed to certain unnamed Muslim kings, Wali Ullah attributed the fall of Muslim political fortunes and sovereignty in India as a direct outcome of Nadir Shah’s invasion. He wrote: “I take refuge in God from the possibility of a repetition of what happened during Nadir Shah’s invasion; he left Indian Muslims in tatters which in turn bolstered Marathas and Jats. It is henceforth that the political power of unbelievers was reenergized and the armies of Islam were left scattered. And the [seat of the] Mughal Empire in Delhi was rendered as if it were a sport for kids” (bi-­khuda mi panaham az an-­keh bi dustur-­i Nadir Shah bi ‘amal ayad keh musalmanan ra zir wa zabar sakht wa maratha wa jat ra salim wa ghanim guzashteh raft. Az an baz dawlat-­i kuffar quwat yaft wa junud-­i Islam az ham pashid. Wa saltanat-­i Dilhi bi manzala-­yi lu‘b-­i subyan guzasht).21 The political vacuum and tumult in India during the eighteenth century intensified intra-­Muslim contestations over political authority and capital. Among the most important of these pitted Sunni Afghan Rohillas against Shi‘i Iranians as they both strove to expand their political clout over the royal [ 43 ]

Translating the “Other” court in Delhi. Muslim religious scholars were not unaffected by this political tussle; in fact, they were often directly entangled in this conflict, as was the case with Jan-­i Janan. From biographical accounts, it appears that Jan-­i Janan maintained close relations with Rohilla political leaders such as the influential Najib al-­Dawla (d. 1770), who enjoyed a large following in North India.22 A product of the Mughal bureaucracy, Najib al-­Dawla was among the most influential political personalities in Delhi during the 1760s. A number of Jan-­i Janan’s disciples were closely associated with him; he had also employed many of them. In turn, Rohilla Afghans constituted a major part of Jan-­i Janan’s pool of disciples, who would come from all over North India to frequent his Sufi lodge in Delhi. Jan-­i Janan’s intimacy with Rohilla Afghans made him vulnerable to the animosity of their chief rivals, Shi‘i Iranian migrants to India. During the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah ‘Alam the second (d. 1806), several Iranian migrant aristocrats assumed a position of tremendous political dominance in the Mughal court at Delhi. This was especially true in the aftermath of Najib al-­Dawla’s death in 1770, which saw a steady fall in the political fortunes of the Rohilla Afghans.23 Najib al-­Dawla’s son, Zabita Khan, refused to pay homage to the Shah ‘Alam and adopted a rebellious attitude toward him. In response, Shah ‘Alam, in collaboration with the Marathas, launched a military offensive against Zabita Khan and his followers, forcing him into early retirement. The political ascendancy of Iranian Shi‘a in Delhi generated great anxiety for Sunni religious leaders, including Jan-­i Janan. They were particularly disturbed by the activities of the Shi‘i political leader Mirza Najaf Khan (d. 1782), a vizier of Shah ‘Alam to whom he had deputed the governance of Delhi. Born in Isfahan, Iran, Najaf Khan came from a family of Safavid aristocrats who had migrated to India during the eighteenth century. After successful stints as a government servant and military officer in Bengal and Bundhelkhand in North India, he established himself as among Shah ‘Alam’s most powerful viziers. Najaf Khan’s rule over Delhi caused much consternation for Sunni scholars of the city. For instance, in a letter to a disciple, Jan-­i Janan expressed his disdain toward Najaf Khan in stark terms: “From the day Najaf Khan has come to this city, every person, from a mendicant to the king, is in a bad condition.”24 In biographies of Jan-­i Janan, Najaf Khan is presented as viscerally hostile to Sunnis. He is also held responsible for Jan-­i Janan’s assassination in 1781. [ 44 ]

Translating the “Other” The rather dramatic story of his assassination goes like this: in the last few days of 1780, during the month of Muharram, a Shi‘i procession commemorating Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn’s martyrdom passed by Jan-­i Janan’s lodge (khanqah) in Delhi. On seeing the procession, Jan-­i Janan made some mocking remarks and called the ritual a needless heretical innovation. Someone attached to the procession overheard him and promptly informed Najaf Khan of Jan-­i Janan’s abrasive intemperance. A few days later, Jan-­i Janan heard a knock on the door of his house. When he opened it, three men forced their way in. One of them took out a pistol and shot two bullets into his chest. The eighty-­t wo-­year-­old battled his injuries for three days before succumbing to them on 2 January 1781 (7th Muharram 1195 ah). While gravely injured, he was offered treatment by an English physician in Delhi, but Jan-­i Janan emphatically refused it and declared that he would rather die than be treated by an “infidel.”25 Notwithstanding his expression of antipathy for the internal as well as the external other, as demonstrated by the events surrounding his death, the world Jan-­i Janan inhabited was hardly divided along predictably religious lines. My point is not that eighteenth-­century India was a laboratory of interfaith harmony and peace later supplanted by the intensified communalism of the colonial moment in the nineteenth century. Rather, the shifting alliances and power dynamics governing the encounters of such groups as Mughals, Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, Iranian Shi‘a and Rohillas during the eighteenth century that spanned Jan-­i Janan’s life, as I have described, cannot be captured through the prism of religious difference alone. In fact, what we find here is a situation in which political and indeed military expedience often trumped religious identity. So, for instance, Shah ‘Alam the second, the emperor of a supposedly “Muslim” empire, found no qualms in aligning with the Marathas—­a supposedly “Hindu’”community—­in launching a war against the Rohillas, another Muslim group. While the distinction of “Hindu” and “Muslim’”certainly existed, the manner in which that distinction was imagined did not map onto a modern logic of world religions as neatly defined, mutually exclusive and inescapably competitive clubs. But a question that emerges here is this: what then, were some of the ways in which the religious Other was imagined and translated at the cusp of colonialism in India? What operations of translation do we find in projects of interreligious exploration meant to render the doctrines and practices of another religious community understandable and palatable to [ 45 ]

Translating the “Other” members of one’s own? And, perhaps most importantly, what can moments of indigenous interreligious translation like Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hindu thought and practice in the late eighteenth century teach us about early modern conceptions of religion and religious difference? To further contextualize his translation effort, I first present a select but substantive genealogy of certain important moments of Muslim engagements with Hinduism that preceded Jan-­i Janan, in medieval and early-­modern India.

Indian Muslim Translations of Hinduism: A Select Genealogy In writing about Hinduism, Jan-­i Janan was participating in a long-­standing tradition of South Asian Muslim reflections on Hindu traditions of knowledge and practice. The pioneer of this trend was the eleventh-­century thinker Abu al-Rayhan al-­Biruni (d. 1048), whose monumental work The Book Investigating What Pertains to India, Whether Rationally Acceptable or Despicable, known more popularly as The Book of India (Kitab al-­Hind), still represents one of the most informative and detailed accounts of medieval India. Completed circa 1030, in this text al-­Biruni wrestled with a staggering array of topics including doctrine, law, devotional practice, astrology, astronomy, metrical literature, and oceanography. In addition to its remarkable scope and breadth, al-­Biruni’s work is also noteworthy on account of its treatment of Indian religion as a unitary and monolithic entity. As Carl Ernst has argued, “al-­Biruni’s perception of the ‘otherness’ of Indian thought was not just hermeneutical clarity with regard to a pre-­existing division; it was effectively the invention of the concept of a unitary Hindu religion and philosophy.”26 Indeed, al-­Biruni’s conception of a unified Indian religion is obvious from the very first paragraph of his text. As he stated, rather trenchantly: Before entering on our exposition, we must form an adequate idea of that which renders it so particularly difficult to penetrate the essential [emphasis mine] nature of any Indian subject. For the reader must always bear in mind that the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect, many a subject appearing intricate and obscure when would be perfectly clear if there were more connections between us. . . . ​They totally differ from us in religion, as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa.27

[ 46 ]

Translating the “Other” Al-­Biruni’s essentialist treatment of the Hindu Other seems remarkably similar to the colonial mentality toward Indian religions that came to the forefront some eight centuries later (to be discussed further). Al-­Biruni’s study of the structure of Hindu thought was divided into six topical rubrics:

1. God (chapter 2) 2. the interaction of intelligible with sensible objects (chapter 3) 3. the connection of soul with matter (chapter 4) 4. transmigration (chapter 5) 5. cosmology (chapter 6) 6. salvation (chapter 7)

He combined an appetite for encyclopedic presentation with a refreshingly blunt appraisal of his intent and objectives in composing this work. Refusing to engage in polemical refutations, he described his labor as one of faithfully reproducing the “facts” of Indian thought and religion as found in the original Sanskrit sources. He saw himself primarily as a serious historian commissioned (by Mahmud of Ghazni, d. 1030) to write an encyclopedic account of a foreign region and people—­a task he found immensely difficult yet hugely rewarding, and one for which he regarded himself uniquely suitable and situated. As he declared, oozing with the confidence of a scholar who has just landed the fellowship of a lifetime, “What scholar . . . ​ has the same favorable opportunities of studying this subject as I have?”28 For all his disclaimers about neither endorsing nor refuting his object of study, al-­Biruni was more than forthcoming in passing his evaluation on the soundness of Hindu thought. In their doctrinal orientation, he saw the Hindus as closest to the Greeks. As Ainsle Embree pointed out some years ago, in among the most remarkable moments in his text al-­Biruni called Hinduism “not the truth” (which, for him, meant not monotheistic) but “only a deviation from the truth.” In al-­Biruni’s own words: “All heathenism, whether Greek or Indian, is in its pith and marrow one and the same belief, because it is only a deviation from the truth.”29 Other than drawing parallels between Hindu and Greek thought, another feature that characterizes al-­Biruni’s exposition is his bifurcation between the elite Hindu scholarly class and the commoners, a division pervasive among Muslim translators of Hindu thought that we also find in Jan-­i Janan’s views on Hindus (which I [ 47 ]

Translating the “Other” will soon discuss). While showing considerable respect and, at times, even admiration for the Hindu scholarly elite, al-­Biruni harbored much less patience for the nonscholarly populace, often lampooning their practices outright. He summed up his views in this regard rather explicitly: “The belief of educated and uneducated people differs in every community; for the former strive to conceive abstract ideas and to define general principles, whilst the latter do not pass beyond the apprehension of the senses, and are content with derived rules.”30 For al-­Biruni, in the Indian context, nowhere was this popular attachment to the senses more visible and pronounced than in the practice of idol worship. Writing disparagingly of idol veneration, he made the problematic but nonetheless keen observation that practices like revering idols or images achieve popularity among the masses because of the effect of material objects on the senses, echoing Abu’l Hasan al-­‘Amiri’s analysis of the recalcitrance of the polytheists or the wathaniyya discussed in the Introduction. Curiously, al-­Biruni made this point by drawing on an example not from Hinduism but from the relationship of Muslims with illustrations of the Prophet: “Their joy in looking at the thing [an illustration of the Prophet] would bring them to kiss the picture, to rub their cheeks against it, and to roll themselves in the dust before it.”31 Indeed, his disdain for the significance of the sensoria and materiality in the performance of religion cut across traditions. Anticipating modern binaries of thought and practice, mind and body, abstract and concrete knowledge, al-­Biruni revealingly wrote: “It is well known that the popular mind leans towards the sensible world, and has an aversion to the world of abstract thought which is only understood by highly educated people, of whom in every time and every place there are only few.”32 More recently, in an illumining study, Mario Kozah has argued that, for al-­Biruni, the distinguishing emblem (al-­‘alam) of the Hindu tradition was the doctrine of metempsychosis (tanasukh). As Kozah cites from al-­Biruni, “Just as the declaration of the Article of Faith is the emblem of Muslim belief, Trinitarianism the sign of Christianity and the institution of the Sabbath that of Judaism, so is metempsychosis the banner of the Indian religion [al-­nihla al-­hindiyya], such that he who does not profess it does not belong to it and is not considered to be a member.”33 But, apart from this essentialist treatment, which mirrors the modern world-­religions discourse of defining individual religions based on their supposedly signature traits, al-­Biruni’s translation [ 48 ]

Translating the “Other” of the Hindu religious tradition was animated by and responsive to certain prominent philosophical debates within the Muslim scholarly tradition. Al-­Biruni saw in The Yoga-­Sutras of Patanjali, a text he translated from Sanskrit to Arabic in the late 1020s before the composition of The Book of India, a harmony and unison between the soul (purusa) and matter (prakrti). This feature of Patanjali’s yoga allowed al-­Biruni to present a cosmological alternative to the dualistic psychology of his contemporary and philosophical adversary Ibn Sina (d. 1037), who, in his famous text The Cure (Al-­Shifa’), had argued that “the soul and the body are not one essence.”34 In effect, al-­Biruni’s work in the sphere of interreligious inquiry and translation was intimately connected to and informed by an intra-­Muslim philosophical debate over the relationship between the soul (nafs) and the body (badan). In other words, The Yoga-­Sutras of Patanjali, with its focus on the balance of soul and matter, provided al-­Biruni with the philosophical ammunition to critique Ibn Sina’s Shifa,‘ a task that could be conducted with fewer doctrinal constraints in a non-­Islamic domain of knowledge less tied to confessional questions of personal faith. Moreover, according to Kozah, it is precisely al-­Biruni’s translation of The Yoga-­Sutras of Patanjali called Kitab Batanjal, and its focus on metempsychosis and the balance of soul and matter, that provided the intellectual fodder and orientation for the first ten chapters of The Book of India, composed a decade later. The upshot of Kozah’s study is concentrated in the very productive point that al-­Biruni was not simply a scrupulous documentarian of Hindu religious traditions; rather, his selective reliance on sources of the Hindu tradition such as the teaching of Patanjali “over those of Samkhya and the Bhagavadgita on the nature of the soul” worked to carve an Islamic reading and synthesis of Hindu traditions that were inextricably tied to the intra-­Muslim philosophical debates of his time.35 Thus, as much as al-­Biruni’s translation and interrogation of Hindu knowledge traditions might mirror later modern colonial models of discrete world religions, viewing him primarily as a protomedieval modernist ignores this critical intellectual aspiration and context situated firmly within the textures of the Islamic discursive tradition. Dara Shukoh, the older brother of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (d. 1707), is another Muslim intellectual who undertook noteworthy translations of Hindu ideas and thought. In popular discourses and nationalist South Asian historiographies, Dara Shukoh is often presented as a tolerant, inclusive, and universalist mystical thinker, positioned in stark [ 49 ]

Translating the “Other” contrast to his harsh, exclusivist, and sharia-­m inded brother Aurangzeb. However, important recent scholarship—­most notably by Supriya Gandhi and Munis Faruqui—­has challenged and added considerable nuance to this binary sibling caricature and popular projection of Dara Shukoh as a banner bearer of “Hindu-­Muslim amity.”36 Dara’s engagement with Indic thought represents a key discursive arena to complicate his views on interreligious relations and friendship. One of his central texts, a comparative study in Persian of Islamic and Hindu esotericism that he composed in 1655 at the age of forty-­t wo is titled The Meeting Place of the Two Seas (Majma‘ al-­Bahrayn). In several ways, this text is analogous to a medieval encyclopedia entry on the vocabularies of Hindu and Islamic mysticism. Written in a highly descriptive and enumerative fashion, The Meeting Place consists of twenty-­t wo sections, each dealing with a separate topic relating to Sufi thought, metaphysics, and general topics of cosmology. Among others these include the spirit, the soul, the afterworld, prophecy and sainthood, and the realms of empirical existence. The thrust of Dara Shukoh’s intellectual endeavor pivots on an attempt to establish a system of equivalence between Sufi metaphysics and the belief-­systems of the Indian jogis (sages), while cementing those equivalances by citing specific verses from the Qur’an. For instance, in his discussion of the concept of salvation, Dara Shukoh quite boldly proclaimed that the Hindu idea of mukti is identical to the Sufi notion of nijat or salvation, as both involve the attainment of annihilation in the essence of the divine truth. As he wrote, “The meaning of mukti is that all beings will become annihilated [literally consumed and erased] into the essence of the divine, as substantiated by the Qur’anic verse [9:72] “Contentment from God [the reward of salvation] is greater; it is the majestic victory” (mukt ‘ibarat az istihlak wa mahw shudan-­i ta‘ayyunat bashad dar hazrat-­i zat keh az aya-­yi karima “wa ridwan min Allah akbar dhalika huwa al-­fawz al-­‘azim” zahir mi shawad).37 Also, with regard to the subject of the afterworld, he asserted that “the afterworld according to the Indian monotheists refers to ultimate afterworld (qiyamat-­i kubra) which they call Maha Parli (mahapralaya) that will emerge after [individuals] will have spent ages in hell-­f ire and heaven. This belief is shown in the Qur’anic verse [79:34]: “And so when the great resurrection comes to pass” (qiyamat beh tawr-­i muwahhidan-­i Hind in ast keh ba‘d az budan dar dozakh wa bahshat chun mudat-­hayi tawil bi-­guzarad maha [ 50 ]

Translating the “Other” parli shawad keh ‘ibarat az qiyamat-­i kubra ast keh az aya “fa idha ja’at al-­tama al-­kubra” mafhum mi shawad).38 As these brief examples indicate, Dara Shukoh’s central strategy in this text revolved around familiarizing Hindu taxonomies of religion within the framework of a predominantly Sufi lexicon. Supriya Gandhi, who has summed up and provided useful commentary on the texture and posture of The Meeting Place, writes: “It is precisely this arena of knowledge with which Dara Shukoh is concerned-­the esoteric, inner learning of both Hindus and Muslims..but these are not the crystallized, rigidly-­bounded Islam and Hinduism that we know in modern times. His project does not seek to synthesize two separate streams of Islam and Hindu religion [emphasis mine]. Instead, he aims to uncover and document a common font of truth shared by Muslim and non-­Muslim, Indian ‘monotheists.’ ”39 Through a fascinating reading of Dara Shukoh’s Persian translation of the Upanisads, The Greatest Secret (Sirr-­i Akbar), composed in 1657, Munis Faruqui has shown that the view that situates Dara Shukoh at the fringes of Islamic normativity is hardly how the Mughal prince imagined his position as a scholar and intellectual.40 In presenting the Upanisads as a monotheistic textual archive, Dara Shukoh saw himself as operating squarely within the Islamic tradition. Moreover, the central objective of his translation was to validate the universality of a monotheistic Qur’anic worldview by documenting earlier expressions of monotheism in the Indian context. And, although deeply critical of the Indian Muslim ulama, he was at pains to establish the credibility of his arguments in accordance with traditional sources of Islamic normativity—­most notably, the Qur’an. The cultivation of Hindu-­Muslim camaraderie was hardly at the top of Dara Shukoh’s intellectual agenda, and the notion that it was has less to do with him and more with contemporary South Asian nationalist anxieties and desires, both of the reactionary and the liberal secular varieties, to stipulate carefully divided rosters of tolerant mystics and orthodox exclusivists from a past that hardly allows for such neat divisions.41 Apart from al-­Biruni and Dara Shukoh, other notable medieval and early modern Indian Muslim writers who engaged in the problematic of translating Hindu religious thought for their Muslim audiences include the Persian historian Abu Sa‘id al-­Gardizi (d. 1061), who was a contemporary of al-­Biruni; and perhaps also his pupil, the famous twelfth-­century scholar Taj al-­Din [ 51 ]

Translating the “Other” al-­Shahrastani (d. 1153); and the fourteenth-­century court poet in Delhi Amir Khusraw (d. 1325). Though distinct in scope, style, ideological stance, and points of emphasis, the common feature in the works of these three scholars lies in their acknowledgment of various strands of Hindu thought and groups that they in turn mapped onto an evaluative hierarchy of religious authenticity. None of these thinkers entertained a generalized notion of Hinduism nor subjected their object of inquiry to generalized approval or condemnation. Al-­Gardizi, in his encyclopedia of different religions, Zayn al-­Akhbar, divided Indian religions into ninety-­n ine communities, which he further classified as either monotheists (of different varieties) or nonmonotheists.42 Similarly, while describing the religious landscape of India in unflattering terms as a site where “the intellect is helpless and the intelligent confused,” Amir Khusraw affirmed the monotheistic credentials of Hindus as people with faith in the “oneness, existence, and eternity (of God)” and who were thus superior to the eternalists (dahriyya) and the dualists (thanawiyya), as well as to those Christians who attributed to God spirit and progeny.43 Khusraw also explicitly exculpated at least Brahmans from any uncouth associations with idol worship by elaborating that they don’t consider objects like the sun, stones, and various animals as reflections of God but only as God’s creation. As Yohannan Friedmann translates Khusraw’s thought in this regard: “They [Brahmans] worship them [idols] only because this is a part of the tradition transmitted to them from their ancestors.” 44 Similarly, Shahrastani, in a chapter of his magnum opus, The Book of Sects and Creeds (Kitab al-­Milal wa’l-­nihal), devoted to India, while categorizing almost all [non-­Muslim] Indians as idol worshippers, condemned “only some as idolaters.”45 In fact, as Bruce Lawrence has perceptively shown, Shahrastani posited a clear distinction between what one might call good and bad pagans. While according “the highest theological ranking” to Vaishnavas and Saivas, who, in his view, adhered to “moral principles and law-­giving structures,” Shahrastani also recognized the capacity of Indian star worshippers to distinguish divinity from human made statues—­a capacity not found among the theologically lowest-­rung “outright idolaters,” who were “hopelessly deluded by the forms of chiseled wood which they themselves created.”46 Lawrence’s analysis of this text yields the remarkable conclusion that “Shahrastani’s gradation of Indian idol worship permits a flexibility in [ 52 ]

Translating the “Other” interpreting the Hindu tradition, with the result that . . . ​[his] profile of Vishnu and Shiva, together with their followers, can and does display an appreciation of their law-­giving, almost prophetic character.”47 As we will soon see in Jan-­i Janan’s commentary on Hinduism, the question of prophets sent to India and their normative status loomed large over his translation work as well. In addition to such works that are broad in scope and primarily invested in evaluative assessments, we find Muslim studies of Hindu thought specifically focused on a given topic of intellectual interest. For instance, there exists a rich and copiously documented tradition of Muslim scholarly engagements with yoga throughout the medieval and early modern period. Imprints of this tradition frequently appeared in Mughal art and illustrated histories. Muslim interest in the field of yoga ranged from philosophical curiosity to fascination with Hindu meditative practices to the desire to access the occult powers of Indian ascetics. “By far the most important work on yoga by a Muslim author” is the anonymously authored thirteenth-­century Arabic text The Pool of the Water of Life (Hawd Ma’a al-­Hayat), which was widely translated and often lavishly illustrated with paintings of yogic postures.48 Moreover, as Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst has shown, early modern Muslim scholars, such as prominent Chishti Sufi masters, took an abiding interest in translating the Bhagavadgita in ways that not only “fit Islamic conceptions of the divine” but also presented it “as a source of proper religious behavior for Muslims.” 49 Recently, in a dense and dazzling study, Shankar Nair has examined and brought attention to the conglomeration of multiple Muslim knowledge traditions including Sufism, philosophy, and theology that have gone into projects of interreligious translation such as the sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­century Persian translation of the Sanskrit philosophical tale Laghu-­Yoga-­Vāsiṣṭha that forms the focus of his book. According to Nair, the arena of Muslim translations of Hindu thought in precolonial South Asia should not be viewed primarily from the perspective of statecraft and the imperial political management of a religiously diverse population; moments of interreligious translation like the one he explores articulate and rely on distinct conceptions of religion and of religious intellectual traditions like Sufism, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic theology. Nair’s broader point is that, in the quest to dismantle contemporary religious nationalist abuses of premodern histories of interreligious encounters, one must not venture to the [ 53 ]

Translating the “Other” other extreme of undermining religious discourses or jettisoning the category of religion altogether.50 I find myself in profound agreement with Nair on this crucial point. A cautionary note is in order. From this survey one should not assume that interreligious translations in India were a one-­way street of Muslim intellectuals meditating on Hindu thought and practice. Rather, Mughal rulers actively and avidly sponsored Sanskrit and Sanskrit intellectuals in their courts. Furthermore, they curated an intellectual landscape marked by tremendous interreligious as well as interlinguistic exchange, a landscape in which both Hindu and Muslim scholars not only participated but also actively collaborated. Indeed, as Audrey Truschke has argued, this intellectual “culture of encounter” was pivotal to the organizing logic and maintenance of Mughal power and political sovereignty.51 In her more recent work, Truschke has documented the vibrant and voluminous tradition of Sanskrit intellectuals writing historical treatises on Muslim governance and Indo-­ Muslim rule from the late twelfth to the eighteenth centuries.52 To this one should add Carl Ernst’s useful reminder that, often, processes of intercommunal translation in South Asia did not follow predictable patterns of religious and linguistic identity. It is not as if only Muslim scholars wrote in Arabic and Persian or that only they translated Indic Sanskrit texts commonly associated with Hinduism into Islamic languages; we also find ample instances of Hindu scholars and secretaries (munshis), who were well versed in Persian and Islamic knowledge traditions, being employed by Mughal authorities and later by the British, to write treatises on Indian religions in Persian.53 Among the most fascinating examples of such a Hindu secretary who was deeply learned in Islamicate knowledges and served both the late Mughal and British bureaucracy was the late eighteenth-­/nineteenth-­century figure Sital Singh (d. unknown). In 1800, while serving the raja of Benaras, Singh was commissioned by the “British magistrate named John Deane to write a treatise describing the different Indian religious groups found in the city.”54 The resultant Persian text was called Silsila-­i Jogiyan (The Order of Yogis). It was divided into three parts that “described 47 different types of ascetic groups,” advanced a “philosophical defense of Vedanta,” and presented a “census of the different religious and professional groups to be found in Benaras.”55 What was remarkable was that, even though Sital Singh identified as and remained a Hindu—­indeed, this text was in large measure a Persian [ 54 ]

Translating the “Other” philosophical defense of Vedanta—­his discourse was “subsumed under a theological framework expressed entirely through Islamic references” and owed “practically nothing to the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit philosophy.”56 Singh equated Vedanta, for instance, to Ilahiyyat or theology, in a move reminiscent of Janan-­i Janan’s translation of Hindu thought (which I will get to in a moment).57 Carl Ernst has described and summed up the texture of Sital Singh’s The Order of Yogis with wry lucidity as “an explicitly Hindu appropriation of the argumentation of Islamic philosophical theology, spiced with adroitly chosen lines of Sufi poetry to soften the blow.”58 Also, not withstanding modern transformations in the arena of Hindu-­ Muslim relations and the concomitant hardening of religious identities more generally, precolonial Muslim expositions on Hinduism were hardly always doctrinally charitable or communally porous. Perhaps the most remarkable example one may cite and consider in this regard is the early seventeenth-­ century Persian text Proof of India (Hujjat al-­Hind) by a certain Ibn ‘Umar Mihrabi, about whom not much is known, though from the discursive range and style of the text one can discern that he was a well versed member of the Muslim intellegentsia particularly well trained in Sufi texts.59 There is some debate and uncertainty regarding the year or century of this text’s composition. While its earliest manuscripts date from the early seventeenth century and suggest 1618 as the year of composition, in an unpublished paper, historian Muzaffar Alam has indicated the possibility that this text belongs to Tughluq period of the early fifteenth century. He bases this possibility on the mention of certain place names, Hindu castes, and Tughluq era notables in this text.60 Hujjat al-­Hind, currently available only as an unpublished manuscript, stages an extensive conversation between a parrot and a crane that lasts for several days and nights. The primary spectator of this dialogue, often narrated in a fashion both theatrical and earnestly purposeful, is a Hindu princess called Dimishti, the daughter of a leading notable of Gujarat (or possibly Mahrashtra) Rai Nil Karan. Dimishti, though a Hindu, who, along with her father, partakes in practices like visiting places of idol worship, is dissatisfied with her current state of knowledge and yearns for intellectual armory that might help her distinguish truth from falsehood. After setting this context, the remainder of the text presents a series of questions and answers whereby the crane asks broad theological and philosophical questions, and the parrot addresses them through detailed and invariably [ 55 ]

Translating the “Other” “convincing” replies. Dimishti, the sole audience member, periodically announces her presence by registering her mostly solemn and at times enthusiastic concurrence with the explanations provided by the learned parrot, as readers are kept assured that her conversion process was proceeding steadily.61 Hujjat al-­Hind combines philosophical density with polemical abrasiveness. Its first quarter or so proffers a lengthy exposition on Adam’s and the universe’s creation.62 Mihrabi’s primary reference for this account (from which he borrows liberally) is the thirteenth-­century Kubrawi Sufi scholar Najm al-­Din Razi’s (d. 1247) Persian exposition on the subtleties and temporality of the Sufi (and human) path Mirsad al-­‘Ibad min al-­Mabda’ ila al-­Ma‘ad that Hamid Algar translates as The Path of God’s Bondmen from Origin to Return.63 Mihrabi folds this creation narrative into the central argument of Hujjat al-­Hind: the Hindus could not possibly be the recipients of genuine prophets because they were in fact the recipients of the laws and texts of the devil or Iblis. Therefore, rather than divine knowledge and rationality (‘ilm o aql-­i rahmani), the Hindus and, more specifically, Brahmins were saturated with satanic knowledge and rationality (‘ilm o aql-­i shaytani; the Persian plural Brahmanan is the referent he used most often, and Hinduyan or Hindus much less so). It is the complete absence of divine wisdom and rationality among them—­a category that Mihrabi through his parrot defined as “the capacity to concentrate thought on the truth and refrain from falsehood” (‘aql-­i rahmani an ast keh jumlah andayshiha bar haqq kunad wa az batil ijtinab namayad)—­ that disqualified Hindus from the possibility of being sent (from God) true prophets or religion. The preponderance of satanic knowledge and rationality among the Brahmans was confirmed in their acceptance and even celebration of gods, goddesses, and protagonists of Hindu epics found mired in such “sins” as adultery and murder.64 To cite one among a plethora of examples mined and mobilized by Mihrabi, he expended copious ink expounding on the Mahabharata’s protagonist Draupadi’s marriage to the five Pandava brothers (Yudishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nikula, Sahadeva), and what he termed as the “Brahmans’ belief” that fire could only purify and not harm her. Alternately describing Brahmans as the accursed (mal‘unan), as buffoons (ahmaqan), and as deviants (gumrahan), Mihrabi’s parrot repeatedly wonders aloud how a people who find nothing problematic in such sins as adultery and who harbor such “irrational” beliefs as fire not harming the body “be worthy of [receiving] prophecy” (chi guneh shayan-­i payghambari bashad).65 [ 56 ]

Translating the “Other” Another key motif and argument running through this text is that rituals of “idol worship” (but parasti) among Hindus, especially those centered on shiva lingam, which Mihrabi unflatteringly termed “phallus worship” (zakar parasti), symbolized and epitomized their moral decline (kayfiyyat-­i zawal-­i ishan) and was further reason for their disqualification for prophecy.66 It is worth noting here that even some of the staunchest of traditionalists in the modern period, such the founder of the Deoband Madrasa Qasim Nanautvi (the main protagonist of chapter 2), held positions on the question of prophets and prophecy among Hindus considerably more flexible and charitable than Mihrabi’s in the early seventeenth century (or possibly early fifteenth century). One can gainfully conclude this survey with Tony Stewart’s astute reminder in his important work on premodern Bengali Muslim writers’ texts that address Hindu concepts and categories that the arena of Muslim translations of Hindu thought is not limited to expositions in Arabic, Persian and

FIGURE 1.1 Sample page from Mihrabi’s Hujjat al-­Islam. [ 57 ]

Translating the “Other” Urdu. Stewart makes the instructive point that such works are best approached as “extended acts of translation,” whereby translation “defines a way that religious practitioners seek ‘equivalence’ among their counterparts.”67 Through a close reading of Bengali texts that strive to achieve such equivalence, Stewart demonstrates ways in which moments of interreligious translation in the Bengali context generated discursive concepts that resist modern religious and sectarian boundaries. An excellent example of such a concept is that of Satya Pir (or the True Master) that cuts across religious traditions by combining the Sanskrit term Satya (true) with the Persian Pir (master) from the Sufi lexicon. Stewart’s work is significant not only because it urges us to take languages like Bengali seriously as important sites of cross-­ religious encounters but also in its insistence that it was precisely in the arena of translation that the intellectual as well as the lived tradition of Bengali Islam came to take shape. The process of Muslim translations of, and engagements with, Hindu “ideational constructs,” Stewart argues, was critical to the formation of Bengali Islam.68

Reifying Religion While Translating the “Other”: Jan-­i Janan on the Hindus Although the genealogy just presented is by no means comprehensive, I hope it conveys some sense of the varied and long-­running character of traditions of Indian Muslim meditations on Hinduism.69 Building on this tradition, Jan-­i Janan’s investigation of Hinduism was less expansive in scope yet significant in its themes and outcomes. In a tradition of interreligious translation primarily occupied by political actors and historians, Jan-­i Janan adds a significant early modern voice steeped at once in Sufism and in Islamic law and theology, even though he was not formally trained as a scholar of law. His translation work was pithy but potent in its themes and ramifications. He was primarily occupied with establishing the validity and coherence of Hindu systems of knowledge and doctrinal apparatuses, as well as with determining the nature of salvation awaiting Hindus.70 For him, translation and evaluation went together. More specifically, one can identify four distinct challenges or doubts about Hindu thought and practice that Jan-­i Janan deemed as most important to address for a Muslim audience. [ 58 ]

Translating the “Other” The first and the most obvious challenge was that of casting Hinduism as a monotheistic tradition that might be palatable to his Muslim readers. Second was the problem posed by the question of whether Prophets were ever sent to India, and by the connected question of what status these Prophets held in the Islamic tradition. Third was the problem of reconciling the phenomenon of transmigration or metempsychosis (the transference of one soul to another) in Hindu thought with the disallowance of such a possibility in Islamic theology. And fourth—­and perhaps the trickiest task—­was that of explaining the practice of idol worship among Hindus within the bounds of Muslim norms of discursivity. Jan-­i Janan tackled these challenges in a very positive, albeit selective, description of Hindu thought and practice. One can conjecture that he based his understanding of Hinduism on oral sources and through his interactions with Hindu scholars in Delhi. It does not seem that he read or was proficient in Sanskrit. Curiously, as Thomas Dahnhardt informs us, several lay Hindus regularly frequented Jan-­i Janan’s lodge in Delhi and received spiritual guidance from him, without having converted to Islam. In fact, his tomb remains a site of veneration and visitation for many Hindus to this day.71 Jan-­i Janan’s ideas on Hinduism primarily come to us through a letter (in Persian and later translated into Urdu) that he wrote to an unidentified disciple in 1750 while answering the latter’s queries on the subject. For the analysis that follows, I have relied on Jan-­i Janan’s original letter in Persian, which appears in Qamar ul-­Din Muradabadi’s 1891 collection of Jan-­i Janan’s discourses, Kalimat-­i Tayyibat.72 I have also provided extensive transliterations when appropriate so that readers conversant in Persian might be able to follow the precise translation operations at work, both mine and Jan-­i Janan’s. In the style of seeking a juridical opinion, this disciple of Jan-­i Janan’s had asked: “Did the unbelievers of ancient India (kuffar-­i hind) also hold a false religion like the pre-­Islamic pagans of Arabia or was it a true religion that was later abrogated, and what opinion must one hold about the contemporary followers of the religion?” (kuffar-­i hind misl-­i mushrikan-­i ‘arab din-­i be-­asal darand ya an-­ra asli budah ast wa mansukh shud wa dar haq-­i pishnayan-­i an-­ha cheh i‘tiqad bayad kard).73 In his response, Jan-­i Janan presented a series of equivalences between Islam and Hinduism, as he sought to familiarize the latter to his Muslim audience. He began by positing a scriptural foundation for Hinduism, casting [ 59 ]

Translating the “Other” it as a revealed religion possessing all the features one would expect from a monotheistic tradition. He declared that, from investigation and research, what one finds out from the ancient books of the people of India (ahl-­i hind) is that at the birth of the human species (nu‘-­i insani), God had sent a holy book by the name of (bed; Vedas) for the correction (islah) of their world (dunya) through an angel called Brahma, who is an instrument of the creation of the world.74 This book is comprised of four sections and it contains injunctions on the differentiation of right from wrong (‘amr wa nahy) and information about the past and the future.75

He continued, “they have divided the ancient history of the world into four parts and each part has been given the name ‘jug,’ and for every jug the correct method of practice (tawr-­i ‘amali) has been derived from each of the four branches of their holy scripture.76 By casting Brahma as God, Jan-­i Janan immediately sought to represent Hinduism as a monotheistic tradition. He went on to declare unreservedly that all Hindu groups believe in the unity of God as the transcendent creator who creates out of nothing (tawhid-­i bariy­ i ta‘ala). Moreover, according to Jan-­i Janan, not only do the Hindus believe in the creation of the world but they also affirm its annihilation (fana). Further, similar to Muslims, Hindus assent to rewards and punishments for good and bad deeds, and to resurrection (hashar) and accountability (hisab) in the hereafter (iqrar ba fana-­yi ‘alam wa hashar-­i jismani wa jaza-­yi ‘amal-­i nayk o bad mi namayand).77 In perhaps his most generous moment, Jan-­i Janan rendered a sweeping approval of Hindu systems of knowledge by declaring: “These people have a commanding grasp (yad-­i tula) over the nonrevealed and revealed knowledges (‘ulum-­i ‘aqli wa naqli), ascetic practices (riyaziyyat), pietistic exertions (mujahadat) and mystical unveilings (mukashafat).”78 Jan-­i Janan’s imposition of Muslim categories on Hinduism was most apparent when he described what he called the Hindu “schools of law,” a frame of reference obviously informed by the schools of law (madhdhahib/ sing. madhdhab) in Islam. According to Jan-­i Janan, the Hindu master-­jurists (mujtahidan-­i inha) derived from the Vedas six different schools of law (mazahib) and on them based their principles of faith (usul-­i ‘aqa’id). This, Jan-­i Janan argued, is what the Hindus called dharma-­shastra, meaning the “discipline of theological discourses” (fann-­i imaniyyat). He further claimed that dharma shastra was equivalent to dialectical theology (‘ilm-­i kalam) in Islam, [ 60 ]

Translating the “Other” explaining that the Hindus divided the human species into four different castes (chahar firqa muqarrar namud), and that they derived four distinct orders of practice (maslak) from this system. Moreover, “each caste has been assigned a particular order, and the foundation for applied duties (furu‘-­yi a‘mal) is based on this system. To this system they have given the name Karma-­Shastra, meaning ‘the discipline of practices’ (fann-­i ‘amaliyyat), which is the same as what we [Muslims] call knowledge of jurisprudence (‘ilm-­i fiqh).”79 In a textbook-­like description of Manu’s Varnasramadharma system or The Laws of Manu, Jan-­i-­Janan went on to describe the caste system. He explained that Hindu sages divided human life into four different stages: the first for the acquisition of knowledge and etiquette, the second for the attainment of wealth and children, the third for the correction of conduct and reform of the self, and the fourth for complete renunciation and withdrawal (from the world). He likened the final stage of renunciation to the attainment of the highest human perfection (ghayat-­i kamal-­i insani) in Sufism. In an interesting choice of translation, he described the Hindu concept of Maha Mukti as Nijat-­i Kubra (ultimate salvation), quite similar to Dara Shukoh a couple of centuries previously.80 Jan-­i Janan summed up his evaluation of Hindu intellectual traditions with an endorsement bordering on admiration: “The rules and principles of their religion,” he declared, “possess absolute harmony and coherence” (qawa’id wa zawabit-­i din-­i inha nazm o nasq-­i tamam darad).81 Next, Jan-­i Janan confronted the contentious issue of whether Prophets were ever sent to India. This is where things get particularly interesting, and where the notion of temporality underpinning his translation becomes more explicit. Jan-­i Janan adopted a noticeably bold stance by unequivocally declaring that, “prior to the birth of Islam, God had indeed sent Prophets to India and that their activities have been recorded in the holy books of the Indians. And from their traditions (asar), it also seems that they had attained the stages of perfection and completion and that the general mercy of God (rahmat-­i ‘ama) did not forget the humanity of this vast landmass.”82 He supported his argument by citing the Qur’anic verses (35:24 and 10:47) that read: “There never was any community in which a warner has [not lived] and passed away in its midst,”83 and “every community has had an apostle; and only after their apostle has appeared [and delivered his message] is judgement passed on them, in all equity; and never are they wronged.”84 Jan-­i Janan’s charitable [ 61 ]

Translating the “Other” description of Hinduism raised an obvious question: If Hinduism was so normatively acceptable and akin to Islam, then what made the latter superior? In other words, what difference did it make if one were a Muslim or a Hindu if the two traditions were so alike and interchangeable? Jan-­i Janan tackled this question through a curious interpretive move that was intimately connected to the way he imagined temporality and its relationship to religious normativity. He argued that Hinduism was a religion that had pleased God but that has now been abrogated. According to Jan-­i Janan, before Muhammad’s arrival, all nations in the world were sent Prophets, and each nation was only obliged to follow the message of its particular Prophet and not that of any other nation. However, after the arrival of Prophet Muhammad in the sixth century, the situation changed fundamentally. Since Prophet Muhammad’s emergence, Jan-­i Janan explained, all Eastern and Western religions have been abrogated, and, as long as the world exists, everyone is obligated to embrace Islam.85 In an attempt to historicize his argument, Jan-­i Janan asserted that although the Muslim tradition made no mention of the abrogation of any religion except those of Judaism and Christianity, there were many religions other than these that were abrogated, or that were born and then later died out. As Jan-­i Janan put it, “Since the arrival of the Prophet until now 1180 years [570 to 1750] have elapsed. In this time period, whoever did not accept the message of the Prophet is an infidel, but the people who pre-­date the arrival of Islam are not so.”86 On the difficult question of the identity of the Prophets who were sent to India, Jan-­i Janan quite deftly argued that since the Muslim tradition was silent about the existence of most Prophets, with respect to the Prophets of India, it was also best to remain silent. In authorizing his argument, he pointed out that God had plainly stated that he had not revealed all Prophets sent to humanity when he said in the Qur’an (40:78), “Some of them [messengers] we have mentioned to you and some of them we have not mentioned to you” (min-­hum man qasasna ‘alayka wa min-­hum man lam naqsus ‘alayka).87 This verse clearly showed that, before Muhammad’s prophecy, prophets whose identity God did not reveal may well have been sent to India, Jan-­i Janan argued. Concomitantly, he advised his disciples to refrain from harboring extreme views on Hindus on either end of the spectrum of unreserved acceptance and avid rejection: “We need not adhere to the conviction that their followers were infidels or that they were punishable by death [ 62 ]

Translating the “Other” and neither is it necessary for us to believe that they had attained salvation (nah ma ra jazm bi-­kufr wa halak-­i atba‘-­i an-­ha lazim ast wa nah yaqin bi nijat-­i an-­ha). In these matters, it is best to maintain a ‘positive outlook’ (husn-­i zann) so that no hostility is generated” (ba sharti keh ta‘assub dar mayan nah bashad).88 In one of his most bold moves, Jan-­i Janan extended this argument to include regions other than India. He posited that, even in the case of the natives of Persia—­or, for that matter, with regard to every community that pre-­dated the arrival of Prophet Muhammad and that received no mention in the normative sources of Islam (lisan-­i shar‘ dar ahwal-­i an-­ha sakit ast)—­it was best to adopt the same practice of refraining from charging them with unbelief. In Jan-­i Janan’s view, carelessly anathematizing people of other religious communities was contrary to Islam. As he put it, with a plea that combined purpose with brevity: “In the absence of a definitive proof, one must never take lightly the business of calling someone else an unbeliever” (kafir guftan kasi ra be dalil-­i qat‘i asan nah bayad danast).89 Next, Jan-­i Janan took on the arduous task of clarifying and defending the practice of “idol worship” among the Hindus that, he argued, above all represented a form of meditation. He explained that this process of meditation was directed toward 1. certain angels that exist in this world of corruption because of God’s command; 2. the spirits of certain perfect individuals who exist in this world even after having abandoned their bodily forms; or 3. certain living men whom the Hindus perceive as immortal, like the figure of Khidhr or the “green prophet” in the Qur’an, whose mystical encounter with Moses represents a crucial moment and motif in the Sufi tradition.90 According to Jan-­i Janan, by concentrating their thoughts on these representations, Hindus create a spiritual connection with the entities represented by them and thus attain their material and spiritual needs. Again, Jan-­i Janan translated idol worship into a Muslim idiom by arguing that this practice was reminiscent of the practice common among Muslim Sufis (keh ma‘mul-­i sufiyya-­i Islamiyya ast) of meditating on the image of their masters (pir) to benefit from their spiritual emanation. The only difference, Jan-­i Janan clarified, was that Muslims do not make a concrete representation of the face of their masters. However, in a crucial ecumenical move, Jan-­i Janan was at pains to distinguish idol worship among Hindus from the worship of idols found among polytheists in pre-­Islamic Arabia. He categorically argued that the idol worship of the Hindus bore no resemblance to the practice of pre-­Islamic pagans. [ 63 ]

Translating the “Other” Why? Because, Jan-­i Janan claimed, the pagans of pre-­Islamic Arabia used to regard their idols as independent agents, effective in their essence (mu’assir bil-­zat), and not as instruments of divine power (an-­ha butan ra mutasarrif wa mu’assir bil-­zat miguftand nah alah-­yi tasarruf-­i ilahi). Thus, they failed to comprehend the absoluteness of God’s sovereignty by believing that these idols are the gods of earth, and that Allah is the God of heaven. According to the rules of divinity (uluhiyyat), Jan-­i Janan argued, this constituted polytheism.91 Why was this not the case with the idol worship of Hindus? Because they considered their idols manifestations of the divine, not as divine in themselves. But what should one make of the Hindu practice of prostrating before idols? Did that not count as polytheism? According to Jan-­i Janan: no, it did not. He defended this popular Hindu practice by a drawing a distinction between a customary prostration meant as a form of greeting (sajdah-­yi tahayyat) and a prostration that demonstrated one’s servitude to another entity (sajdah-­yi ta‘abbudi). While the latter counted as polytheism, the former did not. Jan-­i Janan claimed that the Hindu prostration before idols was of the first variety: a customary prostration meant to show reverence to elders and people of authority. As he put it, “Their prostration is one of reverence and not that of idolatry. In their culture, instead of saying ‘Salam,’ it is common and customary to greet parents, masters and teachers with a prostration that they call dandvat” (sajda-­yi in-­ha sajda-­yi tahayyat nah sajda­yi ‘ubudiyyat keh dar a’yyin-­i in-­ha bi madar o padar o pir o ustad be jayi salam hamin sajdah marsum o ma‘mul ast).92 Notice that Jan-­i Janan’s defense of the practice of prostration among Hindus is almost identical to the line of defense that Sufis themselves have often adopted in justifying their practice of prostrating before the graves of saints, especially, in the modern context, in the face of Muslim fundamentalist, Muslim modernist, and Orientalist attacks—­namely, and identically, that the prostration at Sufi shrines represents a prostration of reverence and not that of idolatry. In his quest to validate a non-­Muslim practice, Jan-­i Janan anticipated a logic of defense that was to assume widespread and urgent currency a century or so later.93 In both contexts, a common anxiety propelled the need for a defense in the first place: overcoming doubts about a tradition’s commitment to divine sovereignty. Finally, on the question of transmigration or metempsychosis, Jan-­i Janan proffered the pithy yet significant declaration that “having faith in [the doctrine of] transmigration (tanasukh) is not a necessary condition for one to [ 64 ]

Translating the “Other” be charged with unbelief” (i‘tiqad-­i tanasukh mustalzim-­i kuft nist).94 With this brief masterstroke, he at once disengaged the specter of unbelief from the doctrine of transmigration while leaving open the possibility of levying the charge of unbelief at someone who harbored faith in transmigration. It was not necessary for a person with faith in transmigration to be called an unbeliever, but neither was that designation impossible. Through this play in ambiguity, Jan-­i Janan took extensive hermeneutical license in accommodating the “other’”while also staying clear of potentially fatal theological landmines. He extended the Hindu Other considerable normative hospitality on what is seemingly among the starkest theological differences between Islam and Hinduism, the doctrine of transmigration, while maintaining his fidelity to the normative parameters of Muslim traditionalism.

Translation, Temporality, and Hospitality As I have detailed, several aspects of Jan-­i Janan’s exposition of Indian religious thought are worthy of notice and attention. First, while studying such ventures of interreligious translation, it is always useful to consider the descriptors or units of difference a thinker like Jan-­i Janan mobilized in categorizing and describing the “other.” In other words, how did he refer to what he sought to describe and translate? In scanning his exposition, one finds that in the two instances that Jan-­i Janan called the object of his study by name, he called them “the people of India/the inhabitants of India” (ahl-­i hind) and “the communities of India” (mumalik-­i hind). On other occasions he simply referred to them as “them” (in-­ha), or, if describing a particular aspect of their thought or practice, as “of theirs” (az ishan). One does not find any references to descriptors such as “the Hindus” that might suggest membership in an explicit religious “club.” Similarly, the word din, often translated as “religion” (as did I in the preceding section), appears only once, when Jan-­i Janan praised the coherence and harmony of “their din.” But it seems as though with din Jan-­i Janan primarily had in mind Hindu scholarly traditions and discourses rather than a distinct world religion called Hinduism. This becomes especially obvious in his separate use of the term a’yin, or “customs/tradition,” while describing customary practices like prostration as a form of greeting. The distinction of din and a’yin correspond to the difference between what one might call the intellectual and the [ 65 ]

Translating the “Other” popular tradition (noting, of course, the conceptual problems of this distinction by now familiar to scholars of religion). In general, in describing a unit of people, Jan-­i Janan most frequently employed geographic-­cum-­ ethnic categories as with “the polytheists of India” (mushrikan-­i hind), the Arab unbelievers (kuffar-­i ‘Arab), and the “people of Persia” (qawm-­i faris). Even though he attached specific prognoses for salvation to each of these categories, it is nonetheless worthwhile to note the absence of a “world religions” paradigm in the way they were presented and classified. Nevertheless, the absence of a defined linguistic equivalent to Hinduism in Jan-­i Janan’s discourse should not lead one to jump to the conclusion that his understanding of his object of translation was entirely amorphous. To the contrary: as I also mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is obvious that he set out to translate and describe what he considered as an elaborate and systematic tradition with a defined theology, doctrinal apparatus, and set of normative practices. Despite the etymological absence of a Persian equivalent of Hinduism in his writing, and despite his concerted attempts to establish epistemic neighborliness between Islam and Hinduism, Jan-­i Janan clearly conceived his translation effort as an exercise in familiarizing his audience of Sufi disciples and lay Muslims with the key signature features of a distinct and fully formulated religious tradition. Second, the most distinctive aspect of his account is his emphasis on deploying legal (fiqh) and theological (kalam) categories while explaining Hindu knowledge traditions and practices. In contrast to earlier scholars like al-­Biruni and Dara Shukoh, Jan-­i Janan did not even mention the less legally oriented Hindu texts such as the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Upanisads. Instead, in forming his sketch of the Hindu “other,” he most heavily relied on the Laws of Manu, a text saturated with legal injunctions and moral commands. Therefore, we can perhaps most accurately describe Jan-­i Janan’s model of translation as juridico-­theological in character. This typology is consistent with the emphasis on the sharia-­m inded piety most commonly found among members of the Naqshbandi Sufi order.95 This is not to say that the sharia is any less important for other Sufi orders; the point is, rather, that Jan-­i Janan chose to highlight those aspects of Hindu thought that he considered as most definitive of his own faith as well—­ law and theology. His translation of the Hindu tradition also articulated a distinct representation and model of what he regarded as the linchpin of Islam and religion more broadly. To him, law and theology constituted the [ 66 ]

Translating the “Other” most characteristic elements of religion. Accordingly, his translation apparatus was founded on a hermeneutic of essentialism that valorized the apparently legal and theological aspects of Hinduism as constituting the essence of the religion. At the heart of his translation project was the desire to “monotheize” Hinduism as much as possible and to erase any doubts regarding its monotheistic credentials. This desire reflects a more fundamental conceptual assumption that the authenticity of a religious tradition hinges on its commitment to divine sovereignty. Indeed, it is perhaps this underlying anxiety to establish the primacy of the divine sovereign in Hindu thought that explains his mobilization of theology and law as the primary units of equivalence between Islam and Hinduism. By showing that, much like Islam, Hinduism possessed a full-­ fledged theology, Jan-­i Janan sought to present the latter as a coherent and complete monotheistic tradition. Curiously, it is precisely this equation of divine sovereignty and religious authenticity that in the nineteenth century informed British colonial production of such knowledge categories as “Sikh theology” or “Hindu theology” that were, over time, adopted by indigenous scholars “within” the tradition.96 Third, it is important to take note of the generally sympathetic attitude that Jan-­i Janan adopted toward Hinduism. While not without its share of ambiguities—­some of which I will shortly discuss—­the primary emphasis of his reading of Hinduism was nonetheless on exonerating it from possible objections and critiques. From the thorny issue of revering idols to the question of whether had God sent prophets to India, to the intellectual prowess and coherence of Hindu knowledge traditions, Jan-­i Janan’s analysis and evaluation were overwhelmingly charitable. However, in an astute move, he packaged his hospitality for the Other in a manner that would not compromise his attachment to the dominant normative limits of his own tradition. The key move that allowed him to tread the line of hospitality and heresy was the crucial distinction he made between the Hindus who lived before the mission of Prophet Muhammad and those of the Islamic era. This distinction cautions us against exaggerating the religious inclusiveness found in Jan-­i Janan’s discourse. As Yohanan Friedmann has argued: “Mirza Maẓhar’s views cannot be considered as a breakthrough in the historical relationship between Islam and Hinduism. Certainly, it cannot be stated without qualification that he considered the Hindus as monotheists or that he refused to declare them infidels, if this is meant to imply that their [ 67 ]

Translating the “Other” religion may legitimately co-­exist with Islam and that they are therefore exempt from the obligation to embrace the only true faith.”97 Moreover, “Jan-­i-­ Janan’s admission that India, like any other country, had its Prophets in times of old does not extenuate the guilt of those Indians who have not followed the Prophet Muhammad during the centuries that came after his call.”98 Regardless of whether Jan-­i Janan’s views represented a “breakthrough” in the relationship between Islam and Hinduism, more interesting to note is the way in which his understanding of that relationship was based on a particular notion of temporality. Jan-­i Janan’s theological position on the status of Hindus after Muhammad’s revelation was intimately connected to how he imagined time and the unfolding of history. For Jan-­i Janan, the emergence of Islam in the seventh century inaugurated a radical rupture in time. This moment served as the sovereign determinant of the limits of normativity: it represented the borderline separating religion and unbelief, identity and difference. While, before this moment, the Other was accorded ecumenical hospitality, that license expired as soon as it crossed over that temporal line. Time, therefore, not only represented a linear passage of moment or the vehicle in which history traveled but was also the ultimate decider of what counted as acceptable religion; it was the underlying fault line distinguishing the self and the other, religion and unbelief. Jan-­i Janan’s bifurcated notion of time as neatly divided between pre-­Islam and post-­Islam was more than a mechanism for the construction of difference between Islam and its various others. More significantly, his understanding of time was also pivotal to the narration of a triumphalist narrative of Islam whereby the introduction of Islam into history overcame and repaired the inadequacies and deficiencies of its past. In Jan-­i Janan’s normative imaginary, by entering history, Islam completed history, rendering all previous moral programs of salvation invalid and incomplete and, thus, normatively unacceptable. Time at once authorized the radical exceptionality of Islam and abrogated the normative validity of its competing others. The tense interplay in Jan-­i Janan’s discourse between hospitality toward the Hindu Other circumscribed by a vision of time that privileges the normative priorities of the self can be gainfully theorized by turning to Jacques Derrida’s constant refrain in his writings about the law of self-­contradiction that shadows the idea of hospitality. Derrida described that contradiction [ 68 ]

Translating the “Other” as follows: “Hospitality is certainly, necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation, the greeting of the foreign other (l’autre étranger) as a friend but on the condition that the host, the Wirt, the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum remains the patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he maintains his own authority in his own home.”99 Thus, “the law of hospitality violently imposes a contradiction on the very concept of hospitality in fixing a limit to it, in de-­termining it.”100 Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism (remember, Derrida described translation as “the condition of all hospitality”) was embroiled in a similar contradiction of hospitality.101 The friendship accorded to the Hindu Other through a sympathetic translation was preconditioned on the assumption that the sovereign authority and privilege of Islam above Hinduism was kept in place. The imperative of safeguarding sovereign power and privilege held priority over, and was determinative of, the extension of friendship and hospitality through the work of interreligious translation. Fourth, Jan-­i Janan’s sympathetic attitude and endorsement of Hinduism was not only temporally limited to those Hindus who came before Islam but also epistemologically limited to elite Hindu scholarly traditions. His charitable evaluation and assessment did not extend to popular Hindu devotional practices of which he was deeply critical, much like Muslim scholars before him who had evaluated Hindu thought and practice, such as al-­Biruni. Jan-­i Janan was especially scornful toward Muslims who openly participated in Hindu rituals and festivals such as Diwali and Holi. Here, his language was often highly gendered; women, whom he regarded as especially vulnerable to the allure of such festivals, represented the primary target of his repudiation. For instance, notice Jan-­i Janan’s disdain for Muslim participation in Hindu rituals when he wrote in a different context than the letter/treatise already analyzed: “During Diwali the ignorant Muslim masses, especially women, enthusiastically participate in this ritual, as if it was their own festival. Simulating the unbelievers, they send gifts to their daughters and sisters. . . . ​Venerating the holy days of the Hindus and participating in common rituals connected to those days necessitate both polytheism and unbelief” (dar ayyam-­i diwali-­yi kuffar juhula-­yi ahl-­i Islam ‘ala al-­khusus zanan-­i ishan rusum-­i ahl-­i kufr ra baja mi awarand wa ‘id-­i khud mi sazand. Wa hadaya shabih beh hadaya-­i ahl-­i kufr beh khanaha-­yi dukhtaran wa khwaharan dar rang-­i ahl-­i shirk mi farastand . . . ​ta‘zim namudan-­i ayyam-­i mu‘azzama-­yi hunud wa baja awardan dar an ayyam rusum-­i muta‘rrafa niz mustalzim-­i shirk mustawjib-­i kufr [ 69 ]

Translating the “Other” ast).102 This was a much different tone indeed from his largely accommodative and generous appraisal of Hindu knowledge traditions and discourses. Moreover, Jan-­i Janan’s emphatic resistance to assimilating Hindu devotional rituals into everyday life presages the explicit focus on the everyday as a site of Muslim distinction and sovereign power found in the thought of late nineteenth-­/early twentieth-­century scholars discussed in the last four chapters of this book. Thus, in his understanding of Hinduism, Jan-­i Janan posited a clear distinction between scholastic knowledge traditions of the elite and the rituals and practices of the masses. While elite Hindu knowledge traditions were normatively acceptable, their festivals and rituals carried the danger of corrupting the religion of the Muslim masses, especially women. Therefore, in Jan-­i Janan’s social imaginary, it was his pastoral responsibility to protect the masses from such corruption by preventing them from simulating the customs and practices of the Other—­in this case, the Hindus. Jan-­i Janan’s circumspect attitude toward the masses was consistent with Muslim tradition and, more specifically, with the Muslim traditionalist saying “The masses are like cattle” (al-­‘awwam ka-­l-­an‘am). Moreover, his anxiety over Muslims simulating the Hindus in their customs and rituals hearkens back to the iconic yet fiercely contested saying of Prophet Muhammad (Hadith): “He who imitates a community becomes one of them” (man tashabbaha bi qaumin fa huwa min-­hum), the main subject of chapters  5 and 6 in this book. Therefore, in registering his condemnation of Hindu–­Muslim interaction at the popular level, Jan-­i Janan was following precedents and normative proof texts squarely within Muslim scholarly traditions. This is an important point because it cautions us against reading the charitable views of an early modern religious figure such as Jan-­i Janan about another religious tradition as an example of modern religious “tolerance” or “pluralism.” The attachment of such categories to Jan-­i Janan would be highly anachronistic and inaccurate. As I have tried to show, his hospitality toward Hinduism, while remarkable at times, was also selective and carefully crafted in accordance with the normative parameters, precedents, and possibilities offered by the Islamic tradition. Modern notions of tolerance and interfaith harmony, invariably connected to the governance calculus of the modern secular state, were by no means the centerpiece of Jan-­i Janan’s hermeneutical horizons or strategies. His was not a secular project of [ 70 ]

Translating the “Other” mobilizing the discourse of tolerance to overcome the threat of difference to liberal secular governance.103 Instead, what we find in his work is an innovative elite project of interreligious translation aimed at making normative space for the Other while working within the protocols and vocabulary of an imperial Muslim political theology. The purpose of his translation project, moreover, was not the maintenance of liberal secular governance through the regulation of religious difference but to cultivate a communal ethos marked by considered understanding and acknowledgment of the religious “other.” The texture of Jan-­i Janan’s doctrinal friendship with Hindus and Hinduism was too complicated for accommodation into framings like tolerant/intolerant, inclusivist/exclusivist, imperial/ subservient—­a point I will argue throughout this book. For each of the actors discussed, their views on and attitudes toward non-­Muslims were marked by varied modes of complexity that render binary framings of their thought thoroughly untenable.

Colonial and Precolonial Projects of Translation: Continuities and Ruptures The question of whether Hinduism represents a colonial invention, and of how and to what degree did colonial rule in India transform the conceptual and political spaces of Hinduism, are intensely debated in modern scholarship. Some scholars have argued that the category of Hinduism signals a radical departure from India’s precolonial past, and that the term represents a British invention imposed on disparate intellectual traditions and practices otherwise unsuited to such coherent categorization. According to this argument, the British invented a tradition of Hinduism that best fit a post-­ Enlightenment view of what an authentic world religion looks like, one that mirrored Christianity in its basic outlines but was less mature in its development. This was achieved through measures such as the valorization of particular texts like the Vedas and the Upanisads as most authentically Hindu, the codification of Hindu law through the co-­option of Hindu pandits for that task, and the framing of Hinduism as a unified composite of texts, beliefs, and doctrines.104 One might add here that this narrative of colonial rupture is often unfairly caricatured as an argument for robbing the natives of their [ 71 ]

Translating the “Other” agency by assigning all agentive power to colonialism; such a view participates in a rather conceptually impoverished understanding of agency and power.105 Other scholars have sought to temper the power accorded to colonialism in the construction of Hinduism by showing ways in which the movement toward a “unified Hinduism” was already underway before the British.106 The latter group of scholars does not deny the significance of colonial power in the reconfiguration of Indian religions; they are just less sure about the colonial invention of Hinduism narrative. As Andrew Nicholson, among the most formidable exponents of this position, sums up his argument: “The idea of Hindu unity is neither a timeless truth nor a fiction wholly invented by the British to regulate and control their colonial subjects. . . . ​Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries CE, certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upanisads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the ‘six systems’ (saddarsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy. The Indian and European thinkers in the nineteenth century who developed the term ‘Hinduism’ under the pressure of the new explanatory category of ‘world religions’ were influenced by these earlier philosophers and doxographers, primarily Vedāntins.”107 As fascinating and important as this debate is, it is curious to note that its parameters have yet to be stretched in any sustained fashion by including the role and importance of Muslim scholars in the construction of what later came to be defined as modern Hinduism. How does the translation project of an eighteenth-­century Muslim scholar like Jan-­i Janan, as described in this chapter, fit into the narrative of translating Hinduism as a world religion essentially reducible to certain texts, laws, and doctrines? On the subject of medieval and early modern Muslim understandings of Hinduism, Carl Ernst has asserted that “there is a significant difference between medieval Islamicate and modern European approaches to Indian religion and culture. . . . ​Although many Muslims over the centuries engaged in detailed study of particular aspects of Indian culture, which may appear in a modern perspective as religious, there was for the most part no compelling interest among Muslims in constructing a concept of a single Indian religion, which would correspond to the modern concept of Hinduism.”108 For Ernst, the major exception to this rule is contained in the work of al-­ Biruni, about whom he argues: “Al-­Biruni ‘s concept of a unified Indian religion, as a polar opposite to Islam, lay forgotten until it was resurrected in [ 72 ]

Translating the “Other” an even more radical form by European scholarship a century ago; the growth of the Muslim concept of Hindu religion took place largely without reference to al-­Biruni. Al-­Biruni’s rationalistic and reifying approach to religion, which had practically no impact on medieval Islamic thought, is much more palatable to the modern taste, and this explains his popularity today.”109 This dual set of arguments put forth by Ernst opens some important new avenues of inquiry into the nature of Hindu–­Muslim encounters in premodern India. In this context, a central issue at stake is that of determining the relationship between the taxonomies of knowledge that governed colonial understandings of Indian religion and those that were already prevalent among both Hindu and Muslim thinkers during the eighteenth century. What is the relationship, if any, between the structures of knowledge that informed colonial conceptions of India’s religious topography and eighteenth-­century projects of intra-­and cross-­religious interpretation? To what degree was the process of reification that led to the development of a unified notion of “Hinduism” in the modern sense of the term already underway in the works of eighteenth-­century figures such as Jan-­i Janan? Can we theorize the translation labor of a Muslim scholar like Jan-­i Janan as the harbinger or preparatory moment for nineteenth-­century British colonial translations of religion as a discursive category? These are big questions that can only be adequately addressed through a careful study of a larger sample of Muslim scholarly discourses on Hinduism at varied moments in time. However, Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism provides us with an inviting opportunity for some preliminary observations concerning possible overlaps and differences between precolonial and colonial discourses on religion. On the one hand, one can certainly identify important points of convergence between Jan-­i Janan’s views on Hindu thought and practice and colonial constructions of religion and Hinduism. Arguably the most striking resemblance between these translation projects is the reduction of religion to a series of descriptive essences. Both these moments held in common a movement toward a unified and monolithic understanding of Hinduism that did not account for the internal arguments and contestations over normative authority that characterize any religious tradition. This process of reduction is authorized through the privileging of certain discursive resources within a tradition as its most “authentic” and authoritative [ 73 ]

Translating the “Other” expressions. In turn, the foundational assumption that enables such a process of valorization is that the authenticity or the essence of a religious tradition is readily available for description, representation, and translation. For instance, in Jan-­i Janan’s view, it was the dharmashastra and The laws of Manu—­what he called “Hindu law”—­that represented the essence or the most characteristic feature of Hinduism, a feature he found closest to Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh. Therefore, epistemic proximity to Islam constituted for Jan-­i Janan the primary guiding principle for the location of Hinduism’s essence. Remarkably, British colonial efforts to locate and canonize the most authentic form of Hinduism were informed by a very similar conception of religious authenticity as enshrined in law and theology. The colonial impulse to elevate law and theology as the defining features of religion is most clearly seen in British orientalist William Jones’s translation of The Laws of Manu into English in 1794. As Gauri Viswanathan has aptly put it, “It was in the arena of law that Hinduism received its most definitive colonial reworking.”110 In large measure, this reworking was meant to render accessible the essential truth claims (the legal manual, if you will) of a fully translatable religion called “Hinduism.” Also, as seen in their desire to seek a Vedic monotheistic Hinduism, Jan-­i Janan and, later, British orientalists shared the tendency to equate religious authenticity with the figure of a transcendent God. Could one argue, then, that the reification of religion as a category of life that took full steam during the colonial moment was already underway in indigenous projects of interreligious translation, such as the one conducted by Jan-­i Janan? I think not, despite the apparent overlaps I have highlighted. It would be conceptually problematic to posit a relationship of equivalence between Jan-­i Janan’s and British colonial understandings of religion and difference. This is so for a few reasons. With regard to these two situations, not only the politics underlying the translation but also the immediate historical context differed considerably. Most importantly, as reifying as Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism was, it was not directly connected to the political calculus of the modern state. As I stated earlier, his investment and engagement with Hinduism was primarily inspired by questions of community: How should members of his community understand and approach the normative traditions of another community as a way to thwart extreme or unjust readings of the Other? Colonial translations of indigenous knowledge traditions, in contrast, were inseparable from a larger secular politics of [ 74 ]

Translating the “Other” statecraft. By defining and regulating the boundaries of what counted as “religion,” colonial authorities sought to authorize the role of the secular state as the caretaker of religious identity and difference. Moreover, the very colonial regime of assembling, cataloging, and translating indigenous knowledge traditions, enabled by such mechanisms as the census, colonial ethnographies, and missionary activity, was inextricable from the political governance of the British over India. This point becomes especially clear if we consider the simultaneous emergence of unitary notions of religion, nationalist politics, and the ossification of linguistic identities. Arvind Mandair brilliantly captures this coemergence of monistic imaginaries of religious identity, language, and politics in colonial South Asia through his mobilization of Jacques Derrida’s neologism “monotheolingualism.”111 The juxtaposition of claims to distinct monotheisms and monolingualisms was best encapsulated, Mandair argued, in the thoroughly modern proclamations “I am Hindu; my language is Hindi” or “I am Muslim; my language is Urdu.”112 Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism could hardly be judged to have contributed to conditions driving such monotheolingualism. Furthermore, whereas European notions of Indian religion were informed by a particular tradition of Protestant post-­Enlightenment thinking, Jan-­i Janan’s construction of the Hindu Other was a product of Islamic thought and categories. While these intellectual streams may coincide on certain matters like the desire for monotheism and an aversion to popular practices, crucial differences nonetheless persist. Most importantly, unlike colonial Orientalist fantasies that oscillated between projecting Hinduism as either the font of exotic mysticism or as the paragon of philosophical sophistication, Jan-­i Janan was less enraptured by such fantasies; he was more concerned with establishing the doctrinal coherence of Hindu thought than with its fantastical qualities or origins. Also, the impulse to rationalize or moderate Hinduism so as to render it more amenable to modern rationalism or natural reason was less pronounced—­if at all present—­in Jan-­i Janan’s exposition. To put it succinctly, Jan-­i Janan’s engagement with Hinduism was not animated by a liberal secular politics of “religion-­making” (to use Arvind Mandair’s enormously profitable term) tethered to the concerns and anxieties of the colonial state.113 Thus, despite some points of commonality between Jan-­i Janan’s and colonial translations of Hinduism, they cannot be conflated, or read as a continuation of one another. While one might [ 75 ]

Translating the “Other” find some affinity and similitude in the reifying tendencies of Jan-­i Janan’s and British colonial representations of Hinduism, the ideological goals and political projects invested in those representations diverged significantly. *

*

*

The primary theme that has glued this chapter together is that of the relationship between interreligious friendship and interreligious translation. What possibilities and tensions of friendship are articulated and invested in moments of translating the religious Other? I have pursued this question by examining a specific but significant and substantive episode of interreligious translation in eighteenth-­century India: Mirza Maẓhar Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hindu thought, practice, and traditions of knowledge. I have argued that the thrust of his translation project centered on approaching Hinduism through the lens of juridical and theological Islamic categories. In this sense, Jan-­i Janan propounded forms of equivalence between Islam and Hinduism that were most consistent with a predominantly juridico-­ theological mode of translation. Thus, his translation is emblematic of what prominent translation theorist Lawrence Venuti has famously described as the “domesticating” approach to translation: a mode that brings the foreign text as close to the reader, or the original as close to the target language as possible, rather than the other way around.114 This is also what the nineteenth-­century German theologian and Bible scholar Fredrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834) called a “naturalizing” translation, meaning a translation that “leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader.”115 Seen this way, Jan-­i Janan seems to have faithfully followed through on the famous translator of the Bible into Latin Saint Jerome’s (d. 420) description of translation, as articulated by the latter during the early Christian period: “The translator considers thought content a prisoner (quasi captivos sensus) which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror (iure victoris).”116 But, with all its shades of imperial conquest and domestication, Jan-­i Janan’s translation was also explicitly ecumenical in its intent, designed to establish a sympathetic and more importantly, a normatively hospitable view of the “other.” This juxtaposition of conquest and hospitality places his translation project in illuminating contrast to the history of translation practices in the West. In his brief but excellent genealogy of translation in [ 76 ]

Translating the “Other” Western thought and politics, the literary theorist Hugo Friedrich argues that, “beginning with the second half of the eighteenth century [about when Jan-­i Janan was also writing], a totally new type of translation theory emerged that ran parallel to the increasing tolerance of cultural differences.”117 This tolerance, mainly for other European languages and cultures, transplanted an earlier imperial vision of translation that, to quote Nietzsche in The Gay Science, “was meant to conquer.”118 The case of Jan-­i Janan’s translation of Hinduism presents a useful contrast to the view that marks a clear and unambiguous rupture or shift from conquest to tolerance; his translation inhered both these qualities simultaneously. While according the Other remarkable doctrinal hospitality, Jan-­i Janan’s view of translation was nonetheless grounded in an imperial Muslim political theology that did not merely see Islam as the finalizer of time. According to his view of translation, the Other was only legible once recoded in the language and grammar of the self. Jan-­i Janan not only tolerated but in large measure also validated and celebrated the Hindu Other. But, while doing so, he was careful to fold all such gestures and hermeneutics of hospitality into a narrative of power committed to upholding the exceptionality of Muslim normative authority and place in history. Notice as well that, by attempting the Islamization of Hindu categories of knowledge, Jan-­i Janan simultaneously made the Other look very familiar and yet very foreign, reminding and confirming Walter Benjamin’s memorable assertion in his canonical essay “The Task of the Translator” that “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.”119 Thus, Jan-­i Janan’s translation was also a moment of the impossibility of translation. Like many projects of interreligious translation, so, too, was Jan-­i Janan’s encircled by the paradoxical decision of “where the truth of the other resides.”120 Anthropologist Cristiana Giordano has described the paradox of this decision with evocative ebullience: “If translation produces transparency, then the truth lies in that which can be translated in language; if translation shows the opacity of languages, otherness lies in that which remains untranslatable. The paradox of the latter position is that the relationship with the other is figured as a relationship of separation. How can we think about difference as a distance that creates a relation, which binds by way of separation?”121 Giordano’s theorization of translation and its impossibility as a producer of difference and distance that [ 77 ]

Translating the “Other” “binds by way of separation” provides an effective path to tie the discussion on interreligious translation conducted in this chapter to this book’s central theme of interreligious friendship. What Jan-­i Janan’s engagement with Hindu thought, practice, and history shows is that much like friendship, translation also presages and intimates the vulnerability of the self, the absence of self-­sovereignty, pushing for and demanding the transportation and translation of the Other toward the self. Translation, like friendship, undoes the promise of sovereignty and soils the possibility of a “pure self” uncontaminated by the traces of the Other. Translation, like friendship, is a messy affair that imperils exclusive claims to authenticity and sovereign ownership; like friendship, it is an invitation to recognize and inhabit what Gil Anidjar helpfully and eloquently calls “the unsettling disruption of localization,” a form of unsettling displacement that renders impossible the return of the self as purely itself.122 To make things more concrete, notice that, for all his attempts to secure the sovereign primacy and superiority of Islam, the very gesture of seeking equivalences between Islam and Hinduism was already a negation of such a possibility. While translating the Hindu Other, Jan-­i Janan articulated and presented a picture of Islam inflected by and indexically entangled to its desired image. The desire to translate, much like the desire to befriend, casts an irresolvable doubt over the possibility of sovereign purity and supremacy. Translation, in this sense, from one language to another, or from one religious episteme to another, is less a process of triumph and triumphalism than of loss and unsettlement. Around a century after Jan-­i Janan’s passing in 1781, the traces of British colonial presence that percolated in his midst had metastasized into an entrenched and inescapable structure of power enveloping the political, institutional, and religious topography of South Asia. This transformation in turn transformed the dynamics of interreligious encounters and relations. The next chapter is situated in that late nineteenth-­century context and explores the new imaginaries of religion it generated. It does so by focusing on a peculiar and fascinating site and spectacle: a prominent and fiercely contested interreligious “polemical festival” that consumed some heavy weight Muslim and Hindu scholars, as well as Christian missionaries.

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TWO

Deciding the “True” God Miracle Wars and Interreligious Polemics

ON THE EARLY morning of March 17, 1876, Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1877), one of the founders of the prestigious South Asian Islamic seminary Deoband Madrasa (est. 1866), boarded a train from his native village of Nanautah in what is now Uttar Pradesh, Northern India. Traveling via Delhi, his eventual destination was the small village of Chandapur in the Shahjahanpur district of British India (also in today’s Uttar Pradesh). The objective of Nanautvi’s visit was to participate in a polemical festival known as the Festival of Deciding the (True) God (Mailah-­i Khuda Shinasi).1 In the historiography of Deoband, this event is also remembered as the “Shahjahanpur Polemic” (Mubahasa-­i Shahjahanpur).2 The discourses and events of this debate—­which, in many instances, took the form of a polemic—­are preserved in an Urdu text by the same name, based on the eyewitness account of one of Nanautvi’s associates who had joined him at this festival during its second iteration: a certain Mawlana Husayn Ahmad Najib (d. unknown). The festival was held for two consecutive years, in early May 1875 and in March 1876, at the same location. This chapter centers on certain key fragments of the Shahjahanpur polemic, as narrated from a Deobandi perspective, to examine the conceptions of religion and interreligious difference that it brought into view. For his recent book Making a Muslim, historian Akbar Zaidi has done impressive detective work to excavate the multiple narrations of the Shahjahanpur polemic in print (at least eight by his count]) to show the [ 79 ]

Deciding the “True” God relationship between oral debates, their lives and circulation in print, and the making of an Urdu reading Muslim public in colonial India.3 Though, in places, slightly overlapping with Zaidi’s interests, my focus in this chapter is quite different, centered on conducting a deeper reading of the discursive content of the Shahjahanpur polemic and connecting the moral arguments made visible during the polemic with the epistemic, institutional, and technological conditions of colonial modernity that made them possible. The major questions that animate this chapter continue from chapter 1, dealing with notions of time, history, and the assumption of imperial Muslim political theology driving Muslim intellectual encounters with the religious “other.” While this chapter also continues the theme of doctrinal and theological hospitality as a key site of interreligious friendship and intimacy, the theater and context that surrounds it are considerably different. The world inhabited by the participants of the polemical encounter at Shahjahanpur was not the same as that in which Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan had lived a century earlier. Enveloped and defined by the creeping shadows of British colonial power, the late nineteenth century‚ especially the era following the 1857 mutiny that dealt a fatal blow to any possibility of resurrecting Muslim political sovereignty—­was marked by unprecedented intra­and interreligious conflict and controversy.4 In the British proclamation of sovereignty over Indian subjects as recorded in the Government of India Act of August 2, 1858, all Indian subjects “were to enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law . . . ​and they were to be secure in the practice of their religions.”5 The colonial state’s seeming munificence in according indigenous religious communities protection under the law was inextricable from the liberal secular operation of evacuating the domain of religious beliefs, practices, and debates as separable from and yet subservient to the protection of the state and its laws. But the colonial evacuation of religion as a distinct and particular domain of life so that it could be managed and protected by the state had the paradoxical effect of rendering that domain ever more conflictual, polemical, and competitive. Conceptually, this is not surprising. The more one seeks to define and limit a category—­in this case, religion—­the more avidly its definition and limits will be contested.6 Thus, it is no coincidence that the nineteenth century was a moment of unprecedented intra-­and interreligious adversarial activity in South Asia. Further, the polemical warfare of the nineteenth [ 80 ]

Deciding the “True” God century was facilitated not only by the political and epistemological reordering of religion as an increasingly reified and competitive category but also by technologies such as print, railways, and the postal system. In what ways did these new political, institutional, and epistemological conditions inform the discursive field of interreligious encounters in colonial South Asia, such as the one displayed at the polemical festival of Shahjahanpur? I will address this question through a close reading of certain instructive and important moments that unfolded during the Shahjahanpur polemic, with a focus on the thought and contributions of Qasim Nanautvi. I will argue that while Nanautvi’s quest to establish Islam’s superiority over other religions often hinged on assumptions about time and history grounded in an imperial Muslim political theology, his tactics and strategies of argument were indelibly shaped by the discursive and material conditions of British colonial modernity. I base a major part of this argument on my analysis of Nanautvi’s discussion of miracles and his attempt to establish the supremacy of Prophet Muhammad’s miracles over those of other prophets. First, let me first sketch for the reader a hopefully vivid portrait of the arena and major actors that constituted this interreligious encounter.

The Polemical Arena and Actors The polemical festival of Shahjahanpur brought together leading Christian missionaries and Hindu and Muslim scholars in India, charged with the task of debating and defending the authenticity of their respective religions. At this event, Qasim Nanautvi led the contingent of Muslim scholars. Hailing from the village of Nanautah in Uttar Pradesh, Nanautvi is a towering figure in the intellectual history of Islam in South Asia. An illustrious jurist, theologian, and notable Sufi master, Nanautvi’s intellectual lineage included such notable stalwarts as Mamluk ‘Ali (d. 1851), the long-­standing professor of Arabic at Delhi College, Shah ‘Abdul Ghani (not to be confused with one of Shah Wali Ullah’s sons by the same name) with whom Nanautvi studied Hadith, and Hajji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki (d. 1899) who served as the Sufi master of all major Deoband pioneers, including Nanautvi’s.7 Nanautvi also trained students who emerged as among the most prominent stars in the galaxy of modern South Asian Islam, most notably Mahmud Hasan (d. 1920), popularly remembered by the honorific “the Master Scholar of India” (Shaykh [ 81 ]

Deciding the “True” God ul-­Hind).8 Nanautvi’s scholarly oeuvre was at once vast and multilayered. Though he died at the relatively young age of forty-­four, he wrote prolifically on a broad range of subjects including law, theology, philosophy, and Sufism, in addition to his polemical texts. Most of his intellectual labor, however, remains thoroughly unexplored in the Western academy.9 This is so, I would contend, largely because of his often challenging and inscrutable style of writing and mode of argumentation, which combines in rather unpredictable ways varied nodes from Islamic theology, philosophy, law, and mysticism. Even within the historiography of Deoband, Nanautvi is remembered as an extremely difficult writer whose deeply philosophical and esoteric orientation often made his thought opaque, even to his own peers. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), arguably the most prolific and preeminent Deoband scholar belonging to the generation immediately following Nanautvi’s, once opined that if Nanautvi’s texts were translated into Arabic and its readers were unaware of the author’s name, they would certainly surmise that they were reading the works of premodern giants of the tradition like Imam Razi (Fakhr al-­Din al-­Razi d. 1210) or Imam Ghazali (Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali).10 By this Thanvi meant that Nanautvi’s works exuded the specialist sensibility of an author from a bygone era. In a similar vein, Hajji Imdadullah, Nanautvi’s influential and eclectic Sufi master, had once commented about his star pupil that “such people used to exist in a bygone era but have not appeared [again] for a long time.”11 Flattering praise indeed—­coming from one’s own teacher no less! But, setting aside the evaluative merits of an obviously hagiographic statement, Imdadullah’s description does highlight an important aspect of Nanautvi’s intellectual persona. The texture as well as the multidisciplinarity of Nanautvi’s discourse, often combining in the same work varied fragments from Ash‘ari/ Maturidi theology, Hanafi jurisprudence, philosophical concepts, and Sufi categories, did mark him as distinctly resistant to a modern intellectual age that thrived on the division and neat separation of different knowledge traditions. At the same time, however, as a major beneficiary of modern technologies like print that he deftly employed and mobilized throughout his career, and as among the most effective and prolific polemicists of his era who took part in a series of interreligious and intra-­Muslim debates, Nanautvi was a thoroughly modern subject. In many ways, he exemplified the persona of what Islam scholar Jonathan Brown has called a “late Sunni traditionalist,” meaning a Sunni scholar at once steeped in the palimpsest of traditionalist [ 82 ]

Deciding the “True” God knowledge formations and yet enveloped by modern conditions, categories, and expectations.12 In addition to the dizzying multivalence of his scholarship, Nanautvi is also remembered as an avowedly reclusive and ascetic personality who shunned worldly attention as much as possible, despite his position as a leading Muslim scholar-­cum-­reformer of his era. Refraining from stamping his authority by signing his name at the end of legal opinions (fatawa) and often shuddering at the thought of leading prayers for a congregation, Nanautvi’s preferred attire signaled his commitment to an ethic of self-­effacement. Once, while traveling from Deoband to Nanautah, Nanautvi’s simple-­to-­the-­ point-­of-­being-­tattered clothing led a lower-­caste weaver ( julaha) to mistake him as a member of his community. “How much is yarn selling for today?” the weaver unwittingly inquired. Uninterested in correcting his interlocutor’s mistake, Nanautvi replied, “Not sure, Brother, have not had a chance to visit the market today.”13 This well-­k nown hagiographic vignette reveals at once narrative interest in assembling religious authority through the erasure of the worldly desire for social recognition and a thoroughly worldly and socially embedded class-­and caste-­driven imaginary. In addition to arguably his best-­k nown theologically oriented texts such as Qibla Like (Qibla Numa),14 Heart Soothing Discourse (Taqrir-­i Dilpazir),15 and Glistening Faith (Tasfiyat al-­‘Aqa’id; examined in chapter 6), Nanautvi is also famously known as an arch polemicist who engaged in a series of debates, oral and written, with Shi‘a and leading Hindu reformers as well as Christian missionaries of his era.16 The Festival of Deciding the (True) God was perhaps the most memorable. Nanautvi participated in the polemical festival of Shahjahanpur during the twilight of his career; he died in 1877, only a year after the second iteration of this event. Apart from Qasim Nanautvi, the most prominent religious figure who attended this festival was the arch-­polemicist and founder of the Hindu reformist group the Arya Samaj, Dayananda Sarasvati (d. 1883). Sarasvati, and the Arya Samaj that he founded, sparred not only with scholars of other religious traditions; like most religious reform movements that catapulted in late nineteenth-­century India, the Arya Samaj also launched a scathing internal critique of dominant Hindu rituals and traditions deemed dangerously superstitious or in violation of the Vedas, which were regarded as the “original” font of a pure” and authentic Hinduism. As the scholar Kenneth Jones has memorably written, “Dayananda preach[ed] a ‘purified’ Hinduism, [ 83 ]

Deciding the “True” God one that rejected the popular Puranas, polytheism, idolatry, the role of Brahman priests, pilgrimages, nearly all rituals, and the ban on widow marriage—­in short, almost all of contemporary Hinduism.”17 Sarasvati had very recently, in 1875, published his scandalous polemic against different religious traditions The Light of Truth (Satyarth Prakash). In a chapter devoted exclusively to Islam, Sarasvati had scathingly mocked the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad, causing a fury among Muslim scholars. He had also questioned Islam’s monotheistic credentials by making the provocative argument that when Muslims pray and prostrate in the direction of the Ka‘bah (the qiblah) during the five daily prayers, they commit idolatry.18 In a Protestant colonial environment in which the authenticity of religion hinged on a religion’s commitment to divine sovereignty, such a charge was bound to be particularly abrasive. Sarasvati’s provocation was met by a fierce and extensive rebuttal by Qasim Nanautvi in a text entitled Qiblah Numa. In it, Nanautvi chastised Sarasvati for failing to understand that when Muslims pray towards the Ka‘bah, it is not the physical structure of the Ka‘bah but God whom they venerate and to whom they prostrate. The Ka‘bah was not God, but the house of God. Nanautvi further explained that, unlike God, who was beyond all forms of directionality, humans were bound to direction (muqayyad fi’l-­jihah). Therefore, if God gave humans free rein to pray in whichever direction they wished, chaos would ensue.19 The institution of the qiblah as a common direction of prayer was meant to ensure cohesion, order, and communal unity. Praying in the direction of the Ka‘bah was not a matter of faith or belief; it only represented the fulfillment of a divine command, Nanautvi argued. Moreover, Nanautvi pointed out that the valid completion of daily prayers was not contingent on the physical existence of the Ka‘bah. For instance, during the reign of the Caliph ‘Abd Allah b. Zubayr (d. 692 AD) in the late seventh century, parts of the Ka‘bah were destroyed to be constructed anew. However, that destruction did not interrupt the performance of the five-­ daily prayers. This clearly showed, Nanautvi claimed, that it was not the walls of the Ka‘bah but God whom Muslims worshipped during prayers. Otherwise, the daily prayers would have been canceled when the Ka‘bah was partially destroyed for reconstruction. That Muslims did not consider the physical structure of the Ka‘bah as an object of worship was further substantiated by the fact that all liturgical supplications and bodily movements during the five daily prayers solely [ 84 ]

Deciding the “True” God affirmed divine sovereignty, not the authority of any other entity. Even Prophet Muhammad, Nanautvi punctuated, despite his status as the highest paragon of spiritual excellence, was not considered worthy of worship. Nanautvi combatively contended that such an unyielding affirmation of monotheism stood in stark contrast to the worship of “Hindu” deities like Ganesh and Mahadev whose physical idols were understood as objects of worship. Therefore, Nanautvi concluded, it was not Muslims but, rather, Hindus who were arrested in the habit of idol worship.20 As Sarasvati and Nanautvi battled out the monotheistic prowess of their respective traditions, their very entanglement in this debate was a product of a modern colonial episteme that equated religious authenticity with divine sovereignty. While the specific arguments they presented were their own, the underlying normative desires and anxieties that compelled them to advance their arguments in the first place were not of their choosing (a point I return to later in this chapter). When Sarasvati and Nanautvi resumed their ongoing rivalry at the polemical festival of Shahjahanpur, they had to contend with another formidable opponent: Father Knowles, the leading protagonist representing Christianity at this event. Knowles was a British missionary in Shahjahanpur from the Methodist Episcopal mission who had served as the headmaster of a local missionary school for four years and only recently shifted to Kanpur. He had rapidly grown in prominence, thanks to his remarkably effective proselytizing campaigns in the region. A charismatic and aggressive debater, Knowles had participated in a series of such polemics in North India, though none of this scale.21 Knowles and Nanautvi had sparred intensely and extensively in the previous iteration of the event the year before, especially on the question of the Trinity. To give the gist of a complex argument, Nanautvi had asserted that true unity (wahdat-­i haqiqi) and true multiplicity (kasrat-­i haqiqi) coalescing in one entity is as impossible as sunshine and shade or heat and cold coexisting at the same time and place—­this according to the rule of logic that opposites cannot coalesce (ijtima‘ bayn al-­didayn). In the Deobandi narrative of that year’s proceedings called Religious Conversation (Guftugu-­yi Mazhabi) published as early as 1876, Knowles and his contingent of Christian scholars could only respond to Nanautvi with the resigned protest that the latter was too reliant on logic (mantiq) and the rational disciplines (ma‘qulat) for crafting his arguments.22 The polemic of Shahjahanpur was organized through the patronage of the British magistrate of the district Robert George Gray. In addition to Gray, the [ 85 ]

Deciding the “True” God primary sponsor of the event who also handled all the logistical arrangements was a certain Munshi Pyare Lal, a wealthy Hindu landowner of Shahjahanpur who identified as a Kabir Panthi, or follower of the eclectic and hugely influential fifteenth-­century North Indian poet and mystic Kabir Das (d. 1518). It was Pyare Lal who had originally devised the idea of a public showdown between religious scholars from competing traditions and then supervised its execution. Thus, one can think of the Shahjahanpur polemic as a shared venture between the machineries of the colonial state and the indigenous landed elite. Why would the colonial state be interested in patronizing such spectacles of interreligious encounter? While the question of motives is never conclusively apparent, what is clearly at work here is the expression of a modern colonial logic of secularism whereby the domain of religious passions and contest is protected and even celebrated and yet also quarantined from the spheres of politics and governance. The physical and discursive site of the Shahjahanpur polemic reinforced the dual colonial promise of advancing the mission of “civilizing the native” through missionary activity and separating the field of indigenous religious quarrels and debate from that of politics and state governance. Of course, these boundaries are always ambiguous and never fully enforceable, but the power exerted and impressed by the secular state regulation of the “religious” holds profound consequences for how the supposedly circumscribed arena of religious debate and conflict operates and unfolds. Most importantly, as I suggested earlier, the more that a discursive field—­in this case, that of interreligious argument—­is regulated and enchained, the more competitive and fiercer it will turn, always threatening to transgress its assigned limits and boundaries. The attempted bifurcation of “religious passion” and “secular politics and reason,” while designed to enforce and maintain modern state sovereignty, is always a sign of the conceptual and political fragility of that sovereignty. Back to Shahjahanpur: preparations for this event had been underway for many months in advance. It was heavily advertised in local newspapers, and through the distribution of pamphlets in local schools, shops, and other public venues. By scheduling the second iteration of the event in mid-­March, the organizers seem to have learned a lesson from the experience of the previous year. Then, the scorching heat of May had left many in the audience competing for the solace of shade extending from tall mango trees.23 Just like at that time, however, this megainterreligious polemical showdown [ 86 ]

Deciding the “True” God attracted a large and animated audience. In addition to the polemic participants, hundreds of people from neighboring towns and villages—­especially Deoband, Meerut, Delhi, Muradabad, Rampur, Khurja, Sambhal, and Bareilli—­ attended and served as its spectators. The participating scholars made their way to Shahjahanpur from various parts of North India on the train. For instance, Qasim Nanautvi, accompanied by a retinue of around twenty disciples and associates, some professional debaters, and others driven by the anticipation of entertainment, traveled more than four hundred miles by train from Deoband to Shahjahanpur via Delhi. Nanautvi had been invited to this festival by the local Muslims of Shahjahanpur, who had desired a prominent Muslim scholar to defend Islam at the event. Nanautvi willingly obliged their request and took on the mantle of leadership. In Deobandi narrations of this event, Nanautvi is projected as a self-­effacing personality who made sure that his identity was not revealed during his journey from Deoband to Chandapur. For instance, while checking in at a guest house in Shahjahanpur, Nanautvi registered under the pseudonym “Khurshid Husayn,” lest his identity be revealed to the local residents.24 According to this narrative, Nanautvi was driven by the imperative of defending Islam against its antagonists, uninterested in the theatrics and pomposity that accompanies public polemics. During the journey, he would be frequently seen praying solemnly by himself for “Islam’s victory” at the festival. The actual event was held under large tents that had been put up on a tract of barren land in Chandapur. Each contingent representing Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism were camped in their own respective tents, retiring to their lodges after each day’s proceedings. The British magistrate’s office provided more than two hundred chairs, food, and other necessary items; they also arranged for the local police to monitor the venue and to prevent the eruption of communal violence. The festival lasted for four days.25 The first day was consumed by furious debate over the format for the polemic. Father Knowles suggested that a representative from each religion should be allotted five minutes to expound the virtues of his religion, followed by another five-­minute period for rebuttals and questions from the opposing parties. Nanautvi vigorously opposed Knowles’s suggestion and dismissed it, saying, “Even worldly matters and disputes are resolved after weeks of deliberation by local tribunals (panchayat); how can the virtues of a religion be explained in five minutes?”26 He continued, brimming with sarcasm, “Perhaps five minutes are enough for religions with only one [ 87 ]

Deciding the “True” God or two virtues, but impossible for a religion like Islam that has thousands of virtues.”27 Knowles rejected Nanautvi’s plea for additional time and insisted that his proposal be followed. Nanautvi was incensed. More so than Knowles, the object of Nanautvi’s agitation was Munshi Pyare Lal, the organizer of the festival. According to Nanautvi, while showing unreserved subservience to the demands put forward by Knowles and the British missionaries, Pyare Lal completely ignored Muslim scholars and their requests. According to the Deobandi narrative, this was just one example of the inherent bias against Muslims during the festival, on the part of both British missionaries and Hindu scholars. After protracted negotiations between the contending groups, a resolution on the format of the polemic was reached: it was decided that, in addition to shorter sessions of speeches and rebuttals, one representative from each religion would also be given the opportunity to deliver a longer hour-­long speech, followed by questions and rebuttals. During the course of the four-­day polemic, representative scholars from each religion took turns delivering speeches and responding to rebuttals and objections, as they battled for the assent and attention of the assembled public. Each speaker representing his religion would take charge of the designated dais erected in the middle of the debate area, encircled by a ring of chairs and tables put in place for the use of other polemic participants. Behind these chairs and tables, crowds of people constituting the gathered public sat on the ground in rows, offering their engaged and often partisan spectatorship. The “public” for this event comprised members of all three religious traditions, with Hindus and Muslims far outnumbering Christians. In addition to doctrinal competition and contestation, proselytizing represented another crucial component of this polemic. For instance, while he was not occupied with debating responsibilities, Qasim Nanautvi would often devote his energies to maximizing the proselytizing opportunities available at the festival. At one point, among the event’s most arresting moments, Nanautvi invited one of his chief antagonists, Father Knowles, the Christian missionary scholar, to become Muslim. While they were alone in a tent, Nanautvi praised Knowles’s sincerity and passion for God’s servitude and urged him to embrace the “most complete” and “current” religion—­Islam. After listening patiently to Nanautvi’s invitation, Knowles replied: “I thank you for thinking so much about my welfare. And I will keep your advice in mind.”28 [ 88 ]

Deciding the “True” God

Points of Debate and Contest The polemic itself focused on a range of theological and philosophical problems including monotheism, divine will, human agency, the problem of evil, rebirth and transmigration, miracles, and the authenticity of scriptures, as each side strove to establish the exclusive authenticity of its doctrinal system. While the range of questions discussed was expansive, the primary focus of the polemic did seem to center on theological issues and conundrums. For instance, what is salvation and how is it achieved? How could God be both just and merciful at the same time? With what matter did God create the world, and when, and how? How can one prove that the Vedas, the Bible, or the Qur’an represent the word of God? Where are heaven and hell?29 The text of Mubahasa-­i Shahjahanpur, through which we get our account of this event, is obviously laced with normative interest in establishing Nanautvi’s (and, by extension, Islam’s) superiority and triumph over his rivals; he often leaves his opponents flummoxed with his brilliance and clarity of argument. Moreover, his decisive victory and display of unusual erudition at the festival assume legendary popularity, even among the Hindus of Shahjahanpur. In the days following the polemic, many Hindu vendors on the streets of Shahjahanpur were heard commenting about Nanautvi: “He is not a Maulvi [Muslim religious scholar]; he’s an avatar.”30 Despite its pervasive hagiographic sensibility, this narrative history is also suffused with moments that venture beyond heroic celebration and reveal curious details about the actors and encounters that populated the polemical field of Shahjahanpur. For instance, we learn of the moment when Dayananda Sarasvati’s speech on the creation of the world (to be discussed at the end of this chapter), though in Hindi, was so saturated with Sanskrit words and terminology that Qasim Nanautvi could hardly follow any of its content, compelling him to respond to whatever little he could gather.31 He captured Sarasvati’s gist, though: that the matter with which the world was created is eternal—­a claim Nanautvi rebutted by arguing that it was in fact God’s creation (makhluq). On another occasion, Nanautvi revealed the place of caste in his social imaginary when he mobilized the charged category of the chamar (low-­caste leather worker) to critique the idea of Christ’s divinity. While locked in debate with another prominent Christian missionary who participated in this polemic, Father Scott, Nanautvi [ 89 ]

Deciding the “True” God argued that Scott was certain to feel incredibly agitated if compared with “an undesirable entity” like the chamars, even though they held much in common with regards to their bodily instincts, needs, desires, and composition. One can then imagine, Nanautvi continued, how unseemly of a comparison was that between God and a human like Christ, when God was so radically different from humanity, with whom he shared no attributes.32 “I wonder what’s happened to these Frank scholars (aqilan-­i farang),” he chuckled with feigned puzzlement. “Combining two opposites (ijtimaʿ al-­ naqidayn awr ijtimaʿ al-­didayn) is not some obscure folly that can pass unnoticed, and that too the folly of combining humanity with divinity.”33 Nanautvi went a step further by boldly and provocatively claiming: “Today’s Christians are not really true Christians; Muslims are the true Christians of today. Jesus’s beliefs are the beliefs of Muslims. Jesus believed in God’s oneness and called himself human, just as Muslims believe. The Christians of today on the other hand operate on two extremes: they either elevate Jesus to the point of equating him with God or degrade him to the point of turning him into an object of divine torment” (kabhi yeh taraqqi keh khuda bana diya, kabhi yeh tanazzul keh ‘azab puhancha diya).34 Interestingly, on this particular point, Nanautvi found unexpected company, as Dayananda Sarasvati also lambasted Christianity for its divinization of Christ and compromise of divine sovereignty. Thus, a Hindu and Muslim scholar came together in their embrace of monotheism while critiquing Christian missionaries for their allegedly compromised position on this issue.35 Among the most cutting moments of the polemic involved Nanautvi’s rebuttal to Father Scott’s claim that the improvement of peace and security in India and the decline in incidents of theft and pirate robberies thanks to the civilizing effects of British colonial rule proved the superiority of Christianity. Nanautvi rebuffed this contention by schooling Scott on the rules of logic. As he put it, dripping with sarcasm: I had thought he [Scott] was an accomplished scholar who recently received an award of 500 rupees from the British government for his debating prowess, but he seems to not know the basics of logic. One cannot establish causation and connect a cause to an effect just on the basis of the effect. If you find a hot stone, you cannot conclude that it must be fire that caused that stone to be hot. Similarly, if peace and stability were the yardstick for a religion’s superiority, then

[ 90 ]

Deciding the “True” God Islam is certainty the most superior of all religions as the reign of [various] Muslim Caliphs have been among the most peaceful and stable.36

He closed with a stinging decolonial indictment: “It is obvious that the peace and stability witnessed in India today is motivated by the imperative of colonial governance and protection of trading interests. . . . ​And why limit the list of sins supposedly cleansed through Christianity to theft and pirate robberies? Perhaps the British missionaries here do not have access to the newspapers of London populated everyday with stories of children born out of wedlock left on the roadside. Inebriation is prohibited in the Bible but hardly any British is free of that sin; the same goes for adultery. So why is it that the ‘civilizing effects’ of Christianity only affect India and not Britain herself?”37

Miracle Wars: Love, Pain, and the Body For the remainder of this chapter, I turn my focus to a specific discursive moment that was among the most heated and illumining points of disagreement during this polemical festival: the question of prophetic miracles. Specifically, I will focus on Qasim Nanautvi’s discussion of the superiority of Prophet Muhammad’s miracles over the miracles of other Prophets. Through a close examination of Nanautvi’s contribution to and combat over these interreligious miracle wars, centered on the question of “whose miracle was most miraculous,” I hope to raise and address larger questions connected to the conceptual and epistemic position of religion in the discursive economy of late nineteenth-­century India. More specifically, the questions that will concern me include: What notion of “religion” animated Nanautvi’s polemics? What conception of time and history informed the way he imagined religion? In what ways was his understanding of religion as a category indebted to the secularizing conditions of British colonial modernity? And, finally, what are some of the problems attached to theorizing the polemical efforts of an indigenous religious thinker like Nanautvi to establish the scientific impossibility of Prophet Muhammad’s miracles as a secular push for the “disenchantment” of religion and religious identity? [ 91 ]

Deciding the “True” God Miracles provide a potentially productive site through which to ask such questions. On the one hand, by definition, miracles exceed and are beyond human comprehension; on the other hand, it is in the authenticity and efficaciousness of miracles that the authority and legitimacy of religious traditions and actors often hinge. The question “Whose miracle is most miraculous?” participates in a thoroughly modern and ironic logic of seeking to rationalize the miraculous—­to historicize what is supposedly beyond history and temporal presence. In his excellent and ambitious book Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India, Peter Gottschalk convincingly argues that a dominant logic and discourse of scientism was central to the political and epistemic infrastructure of British colonial rule in India. According to this logic, the allegedly rational and scientific worldview and knowledge production of British colonizers were set in sharp contrast to the inherently religious nature of indigenous populations neatly and irreconcilably divided into Hindus and Muslims.38 The contest over miracles during the polemic of Shahjahanpur offers an illustrative example of the indigenous appropriation of such a colonial logic of scientism whereby the assumed primacy of historicism and scientific rationality was deployed to establish the authority and superiority of one set of miracles over another. This process, in turn, revealed a decisively modern understanding of religion defined by competition and competing truth claims. Indeed, situated at the interstices of the intelligible and the uncanny, the knowable and the unknowable, miracles highlight the ambiguities involved in approaching religion as a set of propositional truth claims readily available for comparison, contestation, and evaluation. In the discussion that follows, by closely navigating the logic of Nanautvi’s arguments on the question of miracles, I hope to bring some of these ambiguities into view.39 In Satyarth Prakash, Dayananda Sarasvati had impugned Prophet Muhammad in devastating fashion, often calling him an impostor. He had especially attacked the credibility of miracles attached to Muhammad and of miracles found in the Qur’an more generally.40 During the polemical festival of Shahjahanpur, Qasim Nanautvi responded to Sarasvati’s provocations. Nanautvi sought to restore Muhammad’s vatic authority by showing the superiority of Muhammad’s miracles over the miracles of all other prophets. According to Nanautvi, in comparison to miracles found in other religious traditions, Muhammad’s miracles were the most incredible and hence the most authoritative. [ 92 ]

Deciding the “True” God As a case in point, he narrated the well-­k nown story about the miraculous gushing of water from Muhammad’s fingers in Madina: “At a market in Medina, some 300 of Muhammad’s Companions needed water to perform their ablutions for prayer. Muhammad called for a bucket of water and placed his hand in it. Suddenly, water began to flow [copiously] from between his fingers, enough for his followers to use.”41 Nanautvi argued that the flow of water from Muhammad’s fingers was much more miraculous than Moses’s miracle of causing water to burst out from a stone after hitting it with a stick. According to Nanautvi, there was nothing particularly incredible about causing water to flow from a stone; after all, he reasoned, when one strikes the ground with a stick, one would expect the water below the surface to rise above the surface. In contrast, it is certainly incredible for water to flow from human limbs.42 More importantly, for Nanautvi, the gushing of water from Muhammad’s fingers demonstrated the effect of the charisma of the Prophet’s body. It was the embodied character of Muhammad’s miracle that made it overwhelmingly superior to Moses’s miracle. While Moses’s miracle was perfectly legitimate, it lacked the bodily charisma (barkat-­i jismani) found in Muhammad’s miracle.43 Nanautvi continued his argument by narrating the remarkable story of the moment when the pain of separation from the Prophet had caused a dying date palm tree to cry and moan in anguish. During his first few months in Madina after migrating there from Mecca in 622, Muhammad used to deliver his Friday sermons leaning against a shriveled date palm tree, as a mosque had not yet been built in Madina. Later, when al-­Masjid al-­Nabawi (the Prophet’s Mosque) was built and a pulpit installed, Muhammad began delivering his sermons from the newly constructed pulpit, which was situated nearby the date palm tree. One Friday, when several people had gathered for the weekly congregational prayers, they heard the date palm tree moan hysterically. It was crying from the pain of separation from the touch of Prophet Muhammad’s back. After seeing the tree in this state of shock and anguish, Muhammad hugged and consoled it, just as a father would pacify his son. Nanautvi explained that, when the tree moaned from the pain of longing for Muhammad, it did so because of its love for Muhammad’s charisma: its agony was generated and animated by love. But, according to Nanautvi, this was no ordinary love, but passional love, which only the most spiritually talented people can realize. It is not available for every ordinary person. In order to love the Prophet, Nanautvi punctuated, one must physically experience the certainty of [ 93 ]

Deciding the “True” God Muhammad’s perfection. In Nanautvi’s view, the charisma of the Prophet’s touch had inspired a lifeless tree to achieve such impeccable certainty. In making his argument, Nanautvi drew on the Sufi distinction between three progressive levels of certainty: certainty derived from knowledge or what one might call discursive certainty (‘ilm al-­yaqin), certainty derived from observation (‘ayn al-­yaqin), and certainty derived from physical experience or embodiment (Haqq al-­yaqin). Love for Muhammad, Nanautvi argued, can only mature in someone who has attained the highest form of certainty: that which is derived from experience or embodiment (Haqq al-­yaqin). According to Nanautvi, certainty derived from knowledge cannot generate love. If it could have, he reasoned, then millions of people living today would have been in love with Joseph and with all figures from the past known to have been beautiful; just knowing about their beauty does not make one love them. Similarly, Nanautvi continued, certainty derived from observation (‘ayn al-­yaqin) cannot produce love. For instance, one cannot begin to desire confectionary sweets (mitha’i) simply by observing them. In order to desire those sweets, one must also consume them and physically experience their taste. The cultivation of love, Nanautvi argued, depends on precisely this kind of consumption or embodied experience. Embodied certainty (Haqq al-­yaqin) is a necessary condition for love. This is the highest stage of certainty, which only the most accomplished mystics and scholars can attain; it was available exclusively to the most talented and spiritually gifted of God’s creation. According to Nanautvi, the date palm tree that cried because of its separation from the Prophet had attained embodied certainty. The tree’s agony was inspired by its love for Muhammad, a love that, in turn, was generated by the physical experience—­the embodied certainty of Muhammad’s perfection. In Nanautvi’s thought, love was not an intellectual condition that could be understood through empirical knowledge or observation. Rather, the cultivation of love depended on attuning the body to the task of physically realizing the certainty of Muhammad’s perfection. Muhammad’s miracle was extraordinary because it transformed a lifeless tree into a being who had attained a level of spiritual excellence that was unthinkable without years of education, training, and discipleship. The tree’s love for the Prophet distinguished it not only from other trees, plants, or animals but also from almost all of humanity. Muhammad’s miracle of causing a withering tree to cry from the pain of separation, Nanautvi continued, was also far superior to Jesus’s miracle of [ 94 ]

Deciding the “True” God making the dead come alive. Jesus’s miracle, he argued, was not nearly as miraculous as Muhammad’s. This was so because a dead body had a relationship with the soul prior to its death, but the date palm tree that was brought to life by Muhammad had no relationship whatsoever with the soul or with life. Moreover, Nanautvi reasoned, the relationship between the body and the soul is much like the relationship between a magnet and iron.44 The soul and the body have a magnetic relationship; therefore, the soul would be expected to return to the body if an externally applied force ( jabr-­i khariji) that kept them separated was removed. Moreover, Nanautvi argued, there is a clear uninterrupted path connecting the earthly body and the celestial spirit, making the return of the soul and life into a dead body not entirely incredible. However, the date palm tree that Muhammad brought back to life had no such organic relationship with life. It is for the same reason, Nanautvi claimed, that Muhammad’s miracle was also far superior to Moses’s miracle of transforming a stick into a snake. His reasoning was that when Moses gave life to a stick by turning it into a snake, that stick only came to life in a form (that of a snake) with which life is intimately connected. Moses had made a stick act like a snake only when that stick had taken the form of a snake. And, once that stick became a snake, it acted in ways that one expects from snakes. For instance, it began running around, biting, poisoning—­actions that are all associated with the physical form of a snake. In other words, in Moses’s miracle, there was a perfect similitude between the postmiracle form of the object on which the miracle was performed and the actions that are usually associated with that form.45 In contrast, in Muhammad’s miracle, one found complete dissonance between the original form of the object on which the miracle was enacted and the actions that emanated from that form. The superiority of Muhammad’s miracle over Moses’s miracle lay precisely in the radicality of the transformation it had brought about. Muhammad had transformed a dying tree into a paragon of spiritual excellence, into a being who was radically different from and completely unrelated to its original form. That is, it was far more incredible for a withered tree to achieve a spiritual status unachievable even for most humans than for a stick-­turned-­snake to act like a snake. Most importantly, Nanautvi emphasized, Muhammad’s miracle was generated by the charisma of his body. The embodied character of Muhammad’s miracle was the main reason for its superiority over Moses’s and Jesus’s miracles. Their miracles—­bringing [ 95 ]

Deciding the “True” God the dead to life and turning a stick into a snake—­were performed on objects external to themselves. In contrast, Muhammad’s body was the site and the generating force of his miracle. The unimaginable transformation of the date palm tree was enabled by the emotive bond it had developed with Muhammad’s body. The touch of Muhammad’s body (or, more precisely, the agony over the absence of that touch) gave life to a dying tree and instilled within it the capacity to love.

The Splitting of the Moon (Inshiqaq al-­Qamar) According to Qasim Nanautvi, prophetic miracles (mu‘ jizat) were of two kinds: generative (ijad) or degenerative (ifsad). The miracles discussed thus far represent examples of generative miracles. Muhammad’s fingers generated copious amounts of water or his touch generated the capacity for love in a withering tree. Like generative miracles, Nanautvi argued, Muhammad’s degenerative miracles were far superior to those of other prophets. The most notable of such degenerative miracles was the moment when God split the moon in half (inshiqaq al-­qamar) at Muhammad’s request. This event was recorded in the Qur’an in the first verse of chapter 54 titled “The Moon” (surat al-­Qamar): “The last hour draws near and the moon is split asunder.” 46 In splitting the moon in half, the Prophet answered the recalcitrant unbelievers of Mecca who had demanded a miracle from him. By responding to their demand in such dramatic fashion, the Prophet had both silenced them and demonstrated the veracity of his prophecy. This incident is also narrated in the Hadith tradition, with competing interpretations regarding its meaning and significance. Husein Abdulsater, in an excellent study of the transmission and competing configurations of the moon splitting narrative in early Islam, has shown that not all Muslim theologians agreed that this Qur’anic verse refers to a prophetic miracle and understood it primarily as a sign of the impending apocalypse. But, over time, as the claim of the Prophet’s veracity and, in turn, the anchorage of Muslim identity in that claim became increasingly dependent on a memory of the Prophet as a performer of miracles, the interpretation that saw this episode as undoubtedly a miracle emerged as the dominant one.47 By the modern moment, as we will see in Nanautvi’s discourse, the miraculous nature of the moon-­splitting event was almost fully naturalized among the traditionalist class, with little room [ 96 ]

Deciding the “True” God for skeptical or alternate readings. More specifically, for Nanautvi, Muhammad’s splitting of the moon was a much more incredible miracle than other prophetic miracles dealing with such natural phenomena. For instance, he explained, the Prophet Joshua [Yusha‘] had made the sun stay stationary for a long time. Similarly, some other prophets had made the sun reappear after sunset. For Nanautvi, neither of these two miracles was as miraculous as the splitting of the moon. Why? Because, after all, he argued, all forms of movement eventually lead to rest; every journey culminates in rest. Moreover, movement in and of itself is never the objective. For instance, when one travels to meet friends or relatives, the objective of traveling is only arrival at one’s destination; traveling in and of itself is never the objective, which is why traveling often feels burdensome.48According to Nanautvi, there was nothing particularly incredible about the sun’s remaining stationary for a long time, because that was only a manifestation of the natural transformation of movement into rest. Therefore, in performing his miracle of keeping the sun stationary, Joshua simply confirmed the natural laws of movement. More importantly, unlike splitting the moon, Joshua caused no transformation in the original form (hayyat-­i asliyyah) of the sun. However, by splitting the moon in half, Muhammad had uncoupled the original form of the moon—­a feat that most scholars and sages have declared as impossible. In contrast, no scholar has made the claim that bringing movement to a halt was impossible. Therefore, destroying the original form of the moon by splitting it in half was a much more miraculous miracle than halting the movement of the sun by keeping it stationary.49 Brandishing his familiarity with Western science and knowledge traditions, Nanautvi added the punch line: “This was especially so considering that the sun is stationary and the earth revolves around it, as the Greek thinker Pythagoras and his followers have contended, and as is held by all Europeans today.”50

Historicizing the Miraculous: Time, History, and Political Theology Having established the superiority of Muhammad’s miracles over the miracles of Jewish and Christian prophets, Nanautvi offered a curious explanation for why he had omitted any mention of “Hindu miracles” in his [ 97 ]

Deciding the “True” God discussion. The logic of his explanation was quite revealing of the way he imagined the interaction of history, sovereignty, and religious authenticity. According to Nanautvi, the main reason for the omission of Hindu miracles from his exposition was the poor standards of historical writing that marked the Hindu tradition. As he put it, “No historian would consider histories of the Hindus as reliable” (tavarikh-­i hunud kisi mu’arrikh ke nazdik qabil-­i i‘tibar nahin).51 For instance, Nanautvi explained that the splitting of the moon was also mentioned in the Mahabharata as an event that took place during the reign of the celebrated Hindu sage Vishvamitra. He bemoaned, however, that one finds no reliable chain of transmission (sanad) connecting the author of the Mahabharata with a narrator from the era of Vishvamitra. He proceeded to speculate “that in all probability the Hindus have stolen the moon splitting incident from Muslim historiography.”52 According to Nanautvi, this kind of historical ineptitude stood in stark contrast with the Muslim tradition that was universally recognized for its historicist prowess. As Nanautvi triumphantly put it: No religion can rival Islam in the department of establishing the soundness of religious discourses and oral traditions. Especially the narrative of the Prophet’s splitting of the moon is beyond any doubt. This event was documented in prophetic reports (ahadith) that were massively transmitted (mutawatir) with uninterrupted chains of transmission. It was also mentioned in the Qur’an, a text that was memorized by millions of people from the beginnings of Islam until today. Both the content and the pronunciation of the Qur’an have been minutely preserved over time through the application of the most rigorous historical methods.53

Crucial to Nanautvi’s argument for the superiority of Muslim miracles over Hindu miracles was the claim that Islam had more superior standards of historicism. For Nanautvi, history represented the discursive battleground on which the authenticity of a religious tradition was to be contested and determined. But if Muslim standards of historical empiricism were so unrivaled, then why was this event—­the Prophet’s splitting of the moon—­not recorded in world histories? This was a question that Dayananda Sarasvati, the founder of the Arya Samaj had raised in his attempt to undermine the authenticity of this story. [ 98 ]

Deciding the “True” God Sarasvati had argued that the absence of the splitting-­of-­the-­moon narrative in world histories clearly showed that Muslims had fabricated this story and attached it to Prophet Muhammad. But Nanautvi was not to be so easily outshone in the department of empiricist chauvinism. He responded to Sarasvati’s charge of fabrication on the part of Muslims by first reminding his archrival that even Hindu miracles were not found in any histories of the world. Nanautvi sarcastically asked: “In which history of the world was the Mahabharata’s narrative of the splitting of the moon in Vishwamitra’s reign recorded?”54 Nanautvi went on to explain the absence of the Muslim moon-­splitting incident in world histories through arguments that combined a desire for scientific certitude with a purposeful penchant for theatrical apologetics. People in India and in Western countries, Nanautvi claimed, did not observe the splitting of the moon because of the time of the day when that incident took place. As he put it: “At the time when the moon split in half, the moon had just risen above the horizon. This is suggested by the fact that the mountain of Hira’ [outside Mecca], which is not very high, could be seen between the two pieces of the split moon.”55 Nanautvi continued: At that time, it must have been approaching midnight in India and dawn had not yet struck in Western countries. Add to this the fact that it was the middle of the winter. People in India were buried under their blankets. They were intoxicated in their dreams, unaware of even their own existence. In this condition, it was impossible for them to take notice of an event like the splitting of the moon that took place for only a few fleeting seconds. And even if someone were awake at that time, why on earth would he be staring at the sky in anticipation of the moon to split. Moreover, the pollution and the dust in the air must have also made it very difficult to see the sky clearly.56

Note the intimacy of historicism and religious authenticity in Nanautvi’s thought. Islam’s miracles, like the famous episode of the moon’s splitting during the Prophet’s life, were most superior because of their historical reliability and the historicist rigor of Muslim intellectual disciplines such as Hadith transmission. Also, a memory of the Prophet nestled in the sovereign fortress of historicist vigor compensated for the sovereign lack of a moment that marked the absence of Muslim political sovereignty. Ironically, [ 99 ]

Deciding the “True” God however, Nanautvi’s entanglement of historicism and religious authenticity also entangled him into the awkward position of having to explain the absence of Muhammad’s famous miracles like the moon-­splitting incident in world histories. Moreover, Nanautvi’s triumphalist reading of Islam in relation to other religious traditions was animated by a particular understanding of time and history. According to his narrative, the authenticity of a religion depended on its capacity to be precisely historicized; a religion could only be counted as such if its history could be empirically accounted for. In this scheme, Hinduism was not even part of history proper, as its traditions and miracles were too unreliable to be worthy of historical consideration. Only the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were part of time and history. And, much like it was for Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan (as discussed in the previous chapter), so, too, for Nanautvi Islam represented the culmination and completion of history. While Christian and Jewish miracles were legitimate, they had been superseded by Muhammad’s miracles. Islam was the most historically current of all religious traditions. Nanautvi made this argument about the historical inevitability of Islam’s superiority over other religions with an arresting analogy from the world of colonial politics. He reasoned: Say someone in India refused to follow the injunctions of the current Governor General Lord Lytton [viceroy of India, 1876–­1880] and insisted that he will only follow the laws set by the previous Governor General Lord Northbrook [viceroy of India, 1872–­1876]. The same government appointed both of them. However, the refusal to follow the laws of the most current Governor General will constitute treason and an open challenge to the sovereignty of the government. Similarly, refusing to follow the most current of all religions, Islam, and insisting on following previous religions that have now become outdated represents an affront to God’s sovereignty.57

In Nanautvi’s thought, each historical moment corresponded to an updated version of authentic religion, vacated by the sovereign authority of religions that had come before. In other words, history served as an abrogating force that determined the relative authenticity and currency of competing religions. Moreover, because history was dynamic, the sovereignty of religious truth claims and laws evolved and changed from one historical moment to another. But, paradoxically, the dynamicity of history was only available [ 100 ]

Deciding the “True” God until the appearance of Islam. To use Nanautvi’s own example, once Lord Lytton had replaced Lord Northbrook as the governor-­general of India, Indian citizens were obliged to follow the laws set by Lord Lytton. However, to extend the analogy, there were no more governor-­generals after Lytton; the successive transfer of sovereignty ended with him. Nanautvi’s analogy is also illustrative of the syncopation between his religious thought and the powerful symbolism of modern state sovereignty. As this analogy shows, Nanautvi’s conception of historical movement was ensconced in a political theology animated by a neat correspondence between divine and state sovereignty. The covenant of servitude binding a human to God was symmetrical to a citizen’s loyalty to the state. Much like challenging the sovereignty of the state constituted treason, refusing to comply with the dictates of the divine sovereign represented heresy. Just as treason against the colonial state constituted grounds for the loss of citizenship, treason against God made one vulnerable to the charge of unbelief. Nanautvi’s conception of the relationship between religion and history was leavened by a thoroughly modern political theology in which the sovereignty of the state mirrored the sovereignty of the divine. The symbolism of modern state sovereignty permeated his theological imaginary: in Nanautvi’s intellectual apparatus, theology and politics were intimately attached, interwoven in the fabric of history.

History, Secularity, and Interreligious Conflict In the final chapter of her now-­classic Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, anthropologist Saba Mahmood astutely argues that modern appeals to history as a supposedly neutral ground for the resolution of competing normative claims about the past further intensifies rather than resolves interreligious conflict. Mahmood proffers this argument in the context of analyzing a heated controversy in contemporary Egypt over the publication of the Arabic novel Azazeel that offended prominent leaders of the Coptic Christian community because of its avowedly secular reading of the nature of Christ and clerical authority. This controversy, Mahmood shows, while seemingly a dispute between secular literary freedom and religious intransigence, made visible how the competing positions, despite their noticeable differences, held in common “the secular assumption that [ 101 ]

Deciding the “True” God for revelation to be persuasive it must be commensurate with historical truth.”58 Both sides—­the author of the novel, Youssef Ziedan, and the Coptic Christian leaders who charged him with offending their religious sensitivities—­ anchored their arguments on what they considered a historically accurate account of early church history. This shared faith in history as a sovereign arbiter of conflict, Mahmood contends, represents a hallmark of secularity. As she eloquently puts it: “The modern conception of history-­as an autonomous mode of inquiry into the positivity of events as they occur in linear time-­is a key feature of secularity that has had an enormous influence on how religious truth is interpreted and justified in the modern world.”59 Thus, while ostensibly a neutral playing field, the pressure of history (or, more accurately, the pressure of fortifying a moral argument through the empirical force of historical certainty) exacerbates rather than ameliorates interreligious conflict. Mahmood sums it up thus: “Secularity flattens religious incommensurability, forcing religious traditions to confront one another in the uniform space of history, all equally vulnerable to the questioning power of the secular.”60 While Mahmood’s argument belongs to a context quite different from the Shahjahanpur polemic—­temporally, thematically, and geographically—­its underlying thrust is still remarkably useful for theorizing Nanautvi’s invocation of history in his bid to establish Islam’s superiority over other religions. Nanautvi and Sarasvati’s tug-­of-­war over whose miracle is more historically verifiable and prominently recorded highlights their shared assumption regarding the sovereign role of history as a neutral decider of competing moral claims. But it is precisely this faith in a linear vision of history that rendered their disagreement so contentious and irresolvable. Although their professed goal was establishing religious superiority, an unacknowledged yet deeply pervasive embrace of the assumptions and operations of secularity and secular historicism was central to how they went about pursuing it.

Islamizing Hindu “Prophets” Despite Nanautvi’s triumphalist reading of history that saw Islam as its culminating act, he also displayed some remarkable interreligious charity on [ 102 ]

Deciding the “True” God the question of the authenticity of religions other than Islam. As part of his discussion on miracles, he was careful to clarify that he did not mean to argue or imply that other Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Judaism were inauthentic religions; they were indeed revealed traditions. But what about non-­Abrahamic traditions like Hinduism? Nanautvi’s answer was at once curious and revealing. In his own words: “As for the religion of the Hindus (din-­i hunud), one cannot say with certainty that it is a revealed religion, but one can also not say with certainty that it is an illegitimate religion.”61 In a clear departure from his otherwise antagonistic and competitive posture throughout the Shahjahanpur polemic, Nanautvi went on to postulate that the avatars in the Hindu tradition might well have been pre-­Islamic prophets. In assembling his case, Nanautvi drew on two verses from the Qur’an. The first was verse 35:25, which reads: “There has been no community to which a warner has not been sent” (wa inna min ummatin illa khala fi-­ha nazir).62 To this verse Nanautvi added a question: “How can one be certain that in a massive and expansive region like India, an agent of guidance (hadi) would not have been sent?” Next, Nanautvi cited 40:78—­the exact same Qur’anic verse that Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan had mobilized a century ago to make the same point about the presence of prophets in India prior to Islam (see chapter 1): “Some of them [messengers] we have mentioned to you and some of them we have not mentioned to you” (min-­hum man qasasna ‘alayka wa min-­hum man lam naqsus ‘alayka).63 “What if the prophets of India were among the ones ‘not mentioned’ in the Qur’an?” Nanautvi tantalizingly inquired. But Nanautvi went a step—­or, perhaps, quite a few steps—­f urther than Jan-­i Janan had. Recall from the last chapter that Jan-­i Janan had only sought to establish the presence of prophets in India before Islam. Nanautvi, on the other hand, not only identified those prophets as the avatars of the Hindu tradition; he also framed them in a manner that would render them palatable to Islamic sensibilities. And he did so while addressing the doubt or objection that if Hindu avatars were indeed prophets, then how could they have committed sins like claiming divinity (in the case of Ram), stealing (Krishna’s stealing of butter), or adultery (with reference to Radha’s relationship to Krishna). In response, Nanautvi offered the explanation that these accusatory instances are the product of the false attribution of later Hindus: “Just as Christians falsely attributed divinity to Jesus, even though rational and textual proofs suggest the contrary, what if these [reprehensible] [ 103 ]

Deciding the “True” God qualities have been falsely attached to figures like Sri Krishan and Sri Ramchandra ji by later Hindus?”64 “Similarly,” he continued, “despite considering them prophets, Jews and Christians attribute to Lot and David sins like adultery and alcohol consumption while we [Muslims] consider them free of all sins. So, what if Sri Krishan and Sri Ramchandra are also innocent of such sins that have been falsely attached to them by others?” 65 Thus, in a manner reminiscent of Jan-­i Janan, even while affording the Hindu Other theological magnanimity, Nanautvi was careful to package that hospitality in an idiom that catered to and upheld the normative sensibilities of his Muslim audience. Moreover, this packaging represented an act of translation based on explicitly normative claims about how one should understand Hinduism and the authoritative actors who populated the Hindu tradition. The attribution of any act or belief that might compromise the monotheism of Hinduism, or that might potentially tarnish the “purity” of figures like Ram and Krishna, was outside the fold of “authentic Hinduism.” Ironically, however, in his quest to purify Hinduism of any ambiguities or details that might collide with a moral worldview anchored in a closely regulated model of monotheism, Nanautvi held much in common with his archrival at Shahjahanpur, Dayananda Sarasvati, and his Arya Samaj movement.

The Arya Narrative In this penultimate section of this chapter, I want to briefly discuss the narrative around the Shahjahanpur polemic found in the Arya Samaj historiography. The Arya narrative reaches us via a short (twenty-­five-­page) Hindi text titled Satya Dharma Vichar (True Religious Discourse) published by the Vedic Yantraliya in Ajmer. Its year of publication is a bit of a mystery; the title page lists it according to the Vikrama Samvat calendar as 1666, which, according to the Gregorian Calendar, is around 1609 and cannot be accurate, as Sarasvati was only born in 1824. The book does seem to have been published rather immediately following the Shahjahanpur polemic in the late 1870s, since its English translation, conducted by Bawa Arjan Singh (d. unknown) the editor of the journal Arya Patrika, and further edited by a certain Bawa Chhajju Singh (d. unknown), was published in 1900 by the Aryan Printing, Publishing, [ 104 ]

Deciding the “True” God and Trading Company in Lahore (in a print run of one thousand copies). For the analysis that follows, I have relied on the original Hindi text Satya Dharma Vichar, transcribed in Urdu script; all translations are mine as well.66 As one might expect, the Arya Samaj’s memory and rendering of this event differs considerably from that of Deoband’s historiography examined thus far both in terms of outcome and details—­though, remarkably, we find striking overlap as well. For instance, while both historiographies converge on March 19 as the date for the beginning of the festival, in the Arya narrative (in Arjan Singh’s English translation) the year of the two editions are listed as 1877 and 1878, as opposed to 1875 and 1876 (the latter is more plausible, as Nanautvi died in 1877). And, just as in the Deoband rendering, the Arya narrative recounts extensive negotiations at the beginning of the festival over the format of the debate, though, here, the roles of poise and petulance are reversed: it is the Muslims and the British missionaries who pettily bicker over the rules of the game, while Dayananda Sarasvati maintains sagely calm and composure, interjecting only to call for a long duration of at least five days for the debate. In the first sentence of Satya Dharma Vichar, the event is described as “a festival of religious discourse that brought together leading Arya, Christian, and Muslim scholars to decide on the truth” (dharm charcha mela jiss mayn barhay vidvan aryon, isayon, awr musalmanon ke or se aik satyay ke niranay ke liyay ikhathay huway thay).67 In the Arya Samaj’s recounting of the Shahjahanpur episode, Sarasvati is quite earnestly presented as a figure above the fray of interreligious conflict and polemic, interested primarily in contributing to a festival aimed at presenting and determining religious “truth.” For instance, while sternly rejecting a proposal to collude with Muslims to set up a united front against the British missionaries, Sarasvati solemnly declares that “the purpose of this festival is to decide on the [distinction of] truth and falsity; therefore all three of us must shun partisan bickering and decide on the truth with kindness and affection” (yeh mela satya awr asatya keh nir-­nai ke liyay kiya gaya hay. Iss liyay ham tinon ko uchat hay keh pakshya pat chodh kar priti purvak satya ka nir-­nai karayn).68 Sarasvati’s opening speech, into which he launches on the second day of the festival, after the first day was consumed by a rather fruitless back and forth between Father Scott and Nanautvi, also begins with a note of mature conciliation. “First of all,” he says, warming up, [ 105 ]

Deciding the “True” God I plead with Muslims, Christians, and whoever is listening to me that the sole reason this festival has been organized is to decide on the truth (yeh mela keval satyay ke nir-­nay ke liyay kiya gaya hay); this is the intent of the festival organizers. . . . ​No one should concern himself about winning or losing here, and resort to acts like the Maulvi accusing the missionary Father of lying or visa versa. Such behavior is not appropriate for scholars. Scholars should enter into a pact that we will all according to our knowledge and expertise adorn the truth and annihilate falsity with kindness so that everyone can collectively light the truth” (vidvanon ke bich yeh niyam hona chahiyay keh apnay apnay gyan awr vidhya ke anusar satyay ka mandan awr asatyay ka khandan komal-­vani ke saath karayn keh jiss se sab log priti se mil-­kar satyay ka prakash karayn).69

But, despite this narrative drive to portray Sarasvati and, by extension, the Arya Samaj as uninterested in competition and contest, there are plenty of occasions when precisely such competitive triumphalism bursts through. For example, while the British missionaries and the Muslim scholars each nominate five representatives for the festival proceedings, the Arya Samaj shows contentment with just two: Sarasvati and his close associate and seasoned debater Munshi Indramani of Muradabad, the latter said to have been proficient in Arabic and Persian. When the Muslim participants insist that they, too, choose five, the Arya Samaj contingent replies that just two of them are strong enough. On this, a Muslim cleric (maulvi) demands that these two representative scholars must have the consensus of all Hindus gathered at the site of the festival. Sarasvati responds fiercely: “Your representatives have not been chosen with the opinion or consensus of Shi‘a Muslims and nor have the missionary representatives been appointed by Roman Catholic Christians . . . ​so you have no right to draw a wedge between the Arya Samaj and the other Hindus (paruntu ap logon ko hamaray bich garh-­barh machanay ka kuch adhikar nahin).”70 Curiously—­though not surprisingly—­ Sarasvati’s triumphalism as part of his discourse during the polemic in many ways mirrored that of Nanautvi, also pivoting on the crucial place of historicism and empiricist certainty as modes and criteria of argument. As a point of illustration, let us focus on Sarasvati’s discussion on the primary theological problem addressed in the Arya Samaj telling of this narrative in Satya Dharma Vichar: When and out of what did God create the universe? [ 106 ]

Deciding the “True” God In his answer to this question, Sarasvati argues that God created the world from Prakrti (matter) and vigorously refutes what he considered the Islamic and Christian positions on this question—­namely, that God could create the universe out of nothing, or that the universe represented the effect of certain divine words.71 Moreover, Sarasvati reasons, if God was understood as the material cause of the world, as was the case in the monotheistic traditions he was debating, then God would be rendered identical with the phenomenal world. In turn, all debased qualities and entities of the temporal world (e.g., thievery, profligacy, dogs, cats) would also come to represent God’s material manifestations.72 But the part of Sarasvati’s argument that interests me most lies in his claim that the precision of the Aryas’ knowledge about the time since the world was created, and the long-­r unning nature of that knowledge, far surpasses that of any other religious group. His empiricist self-­adulation is best captured in his own words; addressing his Christian and Muslim compatriots at the Shahjahanpur polemic, Sarasvati thunders, “How long ago was the world created? Brothers! Only we can give an answer to this question, you cannot. Since you claim that your faiths have existed for [only] 1,800, 1,300, or 500 years, how could you then shed any light on the number of years constituting the age of the universe? The Aryas [in contrast] have possessed this knowledge since creation. And this knowledge [about the history of the world’s creation] traveled from the land of the Aryas to other countries; the histories of those countries affirm [emphasis mine] that the route through which this knowledge was disseminated [around the world] was as follows: the land of Aryas [India] to Egypt to the Greeks and from there onwards to Europe” (iss desh se awr sab deshon mein vidhya gaey hay; iss bat mein sab desh walon ke itihason ka praman hay keh arya wart desh se misr desh mein awr wahan se yunan awr yunan se yorup [Europe] adi vidhya phayli).73 Sarasvati further asserts that, though they were the original possessors of knowledge of the world’s creation, the Aryas were compelled to preserve this knowledge by committing their chronological formula to memory “when their historical works were destroyed by the Jains and the Muslims” ( jain mat walay awr musalman iss desh ke itihason ko nasht karnay lagay).74 “That chronological forumula,” Sarasvati further reports, “went as follows, Om! Tat Sat [Om is the absolute reality].”75 The systems of calculation and chronology furnished by this devotional chant or formula, for Sarasvati, was as [ 107 ]

Deciding the “True” God empirically precise as it was historically indisputable. Again, his own expression captures this sentiment best; note how Sarasvati here juxtaposes a keen interest in showcasing mesmerizing mathematical accuracy with the normative authority of an alternate system and view of time: The Aryas have known for ages from the vedic shastras that a thousand Chaturyugas constitute one day of Brahma, and as many Yugas one night of Brahma. A Brahma-­d ay covers the time from the universe’s creation to its end, and a Brahma-­ratri from world’s end to its next creation, after a thousand Chaturyugas. There are fourteen Manvantras in one Kalpa [creation-­c ycle], and one Manvantra comprises of 91 Chaturyugas. So at the present moment the seventh Manvantra is proceeding. . . . ​[Hence], 1,960,852,976  years of the world’s age have elapsed, and 2,333,227,024 years are still to come.76

But Sarasvati’s imperial confidence in his conception and calculation of time was folded into an equally concerted effort to establish its alignment with and affirmation from modern science. Other than “astronomical treatises ( jyotish shastron),” he boasts in a gesture with equal doses of defensiveness and triumph, “the discipine of Geology (bhugharb vidhya) [also] confirms our conclusion [namely, that the world is 1,960,852, 976 years old.]”77 Sarasvati’s insistence on interlocking Hindu scriptural traditions with the logic and evidence of modern science was a signature feature of the Arya Samaj’s reform agenda and practice. As historian Gyan Prakash, in his book Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, puts it: “Denying that science was alien to India, they argued with remarkable ingenuity and deep cultural learning that the ancient Hindus had originated scientific knowledge, and that this justified the modern existence of Indians as a people.”78 Prakash helpfully adds: “The rationality and authenticity of traditions had to be proven under the shadow of Western power. It was this compulsion that also drove Hindu intellectuals to reinterpret the rationality of classical texts in light of modern science’s authority, describing Hinduism as a body of scientific knowledge and practice, and as the defining heritage of all Indians. The present claims of Indians as a people rested, they argued, on their past as Hindus with scientific knowledge of their own.”79 Much like Nanautvi, who had scampered to explain the absence of Prophet Muhammad’s moon splitting miracle in world histories, Sarasvati, too, felt compelled to bolster the credence of his claims regarding the age of the world [ 108 ]

Deciding the “True” God by drawing on the normative authority of the modern scientific discourses of astronomy and geology. Though both of these scholars drew heavily on the artillery of their respective traditions, the firepower and efficacy of that artillery depended on being housed in the arsenal of colonial modernity and on being coupled with the modern discursive weaponry of empiricist science and historicism.

Debating Religion in the Shadow of Colonial Power In many ways, the polemical festival of Shahjahanpur was authorized by the secularizing conditions of British colonial modernity. It was made possible by a confluence of the comprehensive sociopolitical alterations brought about by British colonialism in India: the emergence of a new public sphere in which the state at once managed and patronized public religious debates, the availability of a new conceptual object called religion that was known through its propositional doctrines, and the emergence of a new kind of subject whose job it was to decide on the truth and untruth of competing religious claims.80 In addition, the technologies of a capitalist economy such as print, railways, and an emerging postal system also played a pivotal part in catalyzing such public sites of contestation. Apart from a new social space, the public display of competing truth claims at Shahjahanpur also highlighted a new epistemic space in which the question of religion was now imagined. During this polemic, the indigenous religious elite responded to the colonial demand to retrieve the exclusive authenticity of a fully translatable body of knowledge called “religion.”81 Moreover, the affirmation of that authenticity depended on the negation of all rival religions. The authorization of the self demanded the unauthorization of difference. This inverse relationship between identity and difference was indebted to a modern secular politics of accountability. According to this logic of accountability, identity must account for itself in order to be counted. The moment of accounting for an identity is also the moment of constructing a memory of the self that differs from its various others.82 The dynamics of this relationship between indigenous religious communities fully conformed to a secular colonial politics of representation. To be absolutely clear, my argument here is not that the idea of interreligious polemics was a colonial invention of the nineteenth century, nor is it [ 109 ]

Deciding the “True” God that Qasim Nanautvi was either dislodged from Muslim traditionalist discursive practices or that he was serving as some unwitting pawn or agent of colonial power. My point is more complicated: it has to do with the relationship between shifting political conditions and entwined epistemological assumptions and the logics of religion and interreligious difference made visible during moments of contest like the Shahjahanpur polemic, a relationship that evinces continuities as well as ruptures. Certainly, there exists a long-­standing tradition of both written and oral polemics (munazarah) in the intellectual history of Islam, including intra-­Muslim and interreligious polemics. The discursive archive of premodern Muslim legal and theological traditions is populated by a fair number of polemical moments.83 Therefore, one may argue that Qasim Nanautvi’s participation at the festival of Shahjahanpur represented not only a continuity of premodern Muslim traditions of polemics but was also part of an enduring tradition in Muslim dialectical theology (‘ilm al-­kalam) meant to establish Islam’s authenticity and superiority over other faith traditions through rational argument. And there was nothing novel about a discussion on the subject of miracles (mu‘ jizat), which represent a major theme in the biographical (sirah) and Hadith literature relating to Prophet Muhammad as well as in Sufi texts and traditions.84 However, despite these seeming continuities, the expenditure of Nanautvi’s polemical energy at Shahjahanpur and his discourse on prophetic miracles signified a major rupture from the past. This is so for a few reasons. First is the notion of the “public” that made this polemic possible. There was something radically new about the idea of a religious polemic organized and fought out for the spectatorship and consumption of a defined public. While the impulse to morally educate the masses had always been an important part of Muslim thought, premodern polemical moments in Islam—­which usually focused on questions of law, language, and doxology—­were for the most part an elite enterprise. Involvement in polemics was largely contained to the religious scholarly and the political elite, often staged in the theater of the imperial court. Now the polemic of Shahjahanpur was also fought out by the scholarly elite. But pivotal to its logic was the spectatorship of a public readily available to be preached to, doctrinally persuaded, and reformed. The witnessing capacity of the public represented the polemic’s condition of possibility; in fact, this polemic was as much a competition for the public’s assent as it was about doctrinal contestation. [ 110 ]

Deciding the “True” God To be more exact, the public in the context of this polemic constituted both members of one’s own community and “others” who could potentially be drawn into the community. For instance, through his participation in the Shahjahanpur polemic, Qasim Nanautvi sought to fulfill two distinct purposes: reassuring Muslims in the region who had urged him to represent Islam at the event, and preaching to non-­Muslims at the festival who could potentially be attracted to Islam. The public for Nanautvi constituted both “internal” and “external” communities. Second, in addition to its publicity, the festival showcased a resoundingly modern conceptual apparatus through which competing arguments were contested. As mentioned, miracles have always represented an important part of Muslim intellectual and mystical traditions. However, one would be hard pressed to find instances of a premodern Muslim scholar striving to explain, justify, and defend the absence of a prophetic miracle in world histories. The idea that the authenticity of miracles hinges on their documentation in world histories would have been unthinkable prior to the nineteenth century; it signifies a remarkable shift in the conceptual status of history as the sovereign decider of authenticity, and arbiter of competing normative claims (as discussed earlier with reference to Saba Mahmood’s insights on history and secularity). Indeed, the very anxiety to record, historicize, rationalize, and authenticate the miraculous is fully compatible with the modern secular fantasy of canonizing, cataloging, counting, and accounting for life. Moreover, the desire to count and account for life and identity is intimately intertwined with the promise of historicizing life. As Ananda Abeysekara has so evocatively put it: “To account for oneself is to count oneself. One cannot really account for oneself, give an account of oneself, be accountable, responsible, answerable without (always running the risk of) counting oneself, distinguishing oneself, differentiating oneself, among others or as opposed to others. . . . ​Thus, if accountability is about counting oneself, then it is about fashioning a memory of oneself. One cannot count oneself without remembering oneself.”85 The desire for empiricist historicism at work during the Shahjahanpur polemic was inseparable from a modern secular politics of accountability whereby the possibility of identity depends on the capacity of that identity to differ from its various others. And, as Abeysekara instructs us, history represents the primary medium and the focal discursive site that authorizes and sustains such a secular politics of accountability. [ 111 ]

Deciding the “True” God Third, the Shahjahanpur polemic reflected a major shift in the epistemic position of religion as a category. The notion of religion that animated and sustained this polemical festival was perhaps its most peculiarly modern feature. This is best captured by the very name of this event: the Festival of Deciding the (True) God. As this name suggests, underlying this polemic was the assumption that religion constitutes a rationally accessible discursive space essentially reducible to the figure of a transcendent God. Moreover, the authenticity of such a theologically centered religion was readily available to be evaluated, historicized, and mobilized for doctrinal competition. Religion was perfectly translatable—­in other words, it was thoroughly religionized, entirely compatible with the ideological demands and desires of empire. The competitive imaginary of religion featured at Shahjahanpur was inextricable from the modern secular discourse of “world religions” that strives to define “religion” as essentially reducible to its doctrinal truth claims. This secular promise of defining religion is never fulfilled; it remains deferred to an unspecified future, much like the promise of “deciding the (true) God” at the Shahjahanpur polemic remained unfulfilled and undecided. To sum up, there was nothing new in Qasim Nanautvi’s engagement in polemics or discussion of the subject of prophetic miracles. However, the conceptual and institutional terrain in which he was obliged to operate at Shahjahanpur—­a terrain dominated by a colonial state that at once managed and patronized religious polemics in the public sphere—­was resoundingly new. Such a secularizing politico-­conceptual terrain would have been unimaginable prior to the colonial moment in India. Certainly, the moral arguments that occupied late nineteenth-­century religious reformers like Qasim Nanautvi or Dayananda Sarasvati represented a continuity of precolonial discursive traditions. However, the conceptual space in which the question of religion was now imagined had unmistakably transformed. As the anthropologist David Scott has argued in the context of religious polemics in nineteenth-­century Ceylon (present-­day Sri Lanka): “Secularization entailed . . . ​a process of objectification and reification such that the new concept of ‘religion’ mapped discourses and practices now available for consideration ‘from the outside’ as it were, now open to rational investigation. And in consequence, one could now speak not only of ‘religion’ but of ‘religions,’ that plurality or series of similarly objectified systems of doctrine each with its own distinctive claim to propositional truth.”86 [ 112 ]

Deciding the “True” God In Scott’s view, the secular cannot be approached as the inverse or the opposite of religion. Rather, secularization entails a fundamental alteration and reorientation in the conceptual economy of religion such that religion comes to signify an “objectified system of doctrine” fully available for comparison and rational investigation. The conceptual apparatus that anchored the polemical encounter at Shahjahanpur was indebted to the secularizing conditions of colonial modernity. In fact, the very thinkability of this polemic was indebted to those conditions. Here an important qualifier is in order. As shown by Qasim Nanautvi’s discourse on Muhammad’s miracles, it would also be conceptually problematic to read this moment of polemical activity as an instance of a secular disenchantment of religion and religious identity. Even while enfolded by the secularizing conditions of colonial modernity, Nanautvi was no secularist himself. Further, his polemical energies were not invested in the cultivation of a rational liberal public sphere that had no place for miracles, the uncanny, or the supernatural. Quite to the contrary, Nanautvi’s discourse on Muhammad’s miracles was driven by what one might call an “enchantment war.” Far from jettisoning the miraculous or the uncanny, Nanautvi strived to outperform his rivals on the question of whose miracle was most miraculous, incredible, and beyond rational comprehension. However, even though Nanautvi was no protagonist of Weberian disenchantment, underlying his argumentative apparatus was the desire to rationalize, historicize, and objectify the miraculous—­a desire that was thoroughly modern. After all, the very question “Whose miracle is most miraculous?” stands authorized by the assumption that miracles represent objects readily available for verification, evaluation, comparison, and rationalization. Nanautvi’s thought was arrested in the irresolvable contradiction of seeking to demonstrate the indemonstrable, historicize the incredible, and rationalize the uncanny. This was an impossible task. While Nanautvi’s arguments for the superiority of Islam over other religions were his own, the organizing logic of his arguments was indebted to and shaped by a political and conceptual terrain defined by the modern secular promise of constantly regulating religion as a category of life.87 Nanautvi played the polemical game at Shahjahanpur by choosing his own discursive strategies and tactics. However, he was obliged to play that game according to rules that were not of his choosing. Those rules were inspired by a modern secular conceptuality that thrived on approaching [ 113 ]

Deciding the “True” God religion as an ideological object whose limits were always available for comparison, contestation, and decision. During the polemical festival of Shahjahanpur, as Qasim Nanautvi defended his tradition from the threat of competing “others,” he was conscripted into the political rationality of secular colonial modernity. He was at once a defender of tradition and, as David Scott would put it, a “conscript of modernity.”88 Again, to be absolutely clear, I do not mean to suggest that a sophisticated thinker like Nanautvi was an unwittingly gullible pawn or agent of empire. Rather, I have tried to highlight the power asymmetry involved in the productive ways in which the new conditions of colonial modernity—­ epistemological, institutional, and technological—­inform new textures of religious thought as that found in Nanautvi’s discourse during the Shahjahanpur polemic. Ultimately, in what has preceded, I have offered a specific and significant illustration of the fractious yet fascinating encounter between the normative desires of an imperial Muslim political theology, premised on guarding the exceptional distinction of Islam over other religious traditions, and the conditions and terrain of a political context bereft of Muslim imperial sovereignty and captured by the encroaching juggernaut of colonial secular modernity. This encounter, and its implications for the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship, represents a major theme of this book. Some fifty years after the Shahjahanpur polemic, the problem of Hindu-­ Muslim friendship in conditions of colonial modernity again served as a lightning rod, though this time as a matter of intra-­Muslim scholarly dispute, in the context of what came to be known as the Khilafat Movement. Should Muslims ally with prominent leaders of the Hindu community to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate from the onslaught of British aggression? Or would such an alliance imperil the religious identity and political standing of the Indian Muslim community? These questions, situated at the intersection of friendship, identity, and difference, were debated and contested with much vigor as well as nuance by towering South Asian Muslim scholars. The next two chapters are devoted to examining some of these debates and contestations. While engaging a different set of actors—­f rom the Muslim scholarly elite—­and themes, the underlying conceptual thread running through the next two chapters is the same as the two previous to them: the negotiation of a premodern Muslim imperial political theology with the limits and conditions of colonial modernity in relation to the normative boundaries and texture of Hindu-­Muslim friendship. [ 114 ]

THREE

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies

ON OCTOBER  26, 1920, Maulvi Hakim ‘Ali, a teacher at Islamia College in Lahore in British India—­a mong the foremost institutions of higher learning in Northern India—­wrote a letter to the towering late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Indian Muslim thinker Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1921).1 Khan was terminally ill when he received this letter, and he died a year later. In his letter, Maulvi Hakim ‘Ali sought Khan’s guidance on a conundrum that had taken the Islamia College campus by storm. A few days earlier, another prominent Indian Muslim scholar and political leader, Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1958), had issued a juridical opinion that prohibited all Muslim schools and colleges in India from accepting any form of financial aid or support from the British colonial government. He had also declared that students at religious schools and colleges must annul their enrollments if their institutions did not decline all forms of financial support from the British, thus creating a good deal of confusion and consternation in colleges across the country, including at Islamia College.2 Azad’s exhortation was animated by the anticolonial noncooperation movement led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The leaders of this movement called on all Indians, including Indian Muslims, to abandon any relationship of friendship, cooperation, and service with the British. Azad was also a major protagonist of the Khilafat movement that was in full swing at this moment.3 The Khilafat movement combined the anticolonial fervor of the noncooperation movement with the political mission of [ 115 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies protecting the Ottoman caliphate from what its leaders saw as the colonizing designs and aggression of the British in the Arab Middle East following World War I. Azad and his compatriots’ call for abandoning relations with the British catalyzed a heated debate among Indian Muslims over the normative limits of friendship between Muslims and non-­Muslims, a debate that often took the form of outright polemic. At the heart of this polemic were certain pressing questions for Muslim scholars. For instance, what were the limits of friendship for a colonized Muslim community that found itself in a moment of political crisis? Which unbelievers were worthy of friendship, and which were not? In the context of colonial India, was there a distinction to be made between the British and the Hindus in terms of their normative allowance for friendship? And, perhaps most crucially, how was Indian Muslim identity to be imagined, performed, and protected in the colonial public sphere? This chapter describes the opposing views of two major scholars who were at the center of this polemic—­Abu’l Kalam Azad and Ahmad Raza Khan—­with the purpose of exploring the question of how competing imaginaries of friendship between Muslims and non-­Muslims translated into competing understandings of politics, sovereignty, and a moral public in modern South Asian Islam. Approaching the public as a site of moral contestation, this chapter shows that divergent readings of a discursive tradition generate varied imaginaries of a normative religious self and, by extension, of normative religious publics. To anticipate, Abu’l Kalam Azad argued that Indian Muslims must abandon all relations with the British and ally themselves squarely with Hindus and specifically with Gandhi, a gesture that was consistent with the larger anticolonial project of the noncooperation movement, of which he was a major protagonist. Ahmad Raza Khan, on the other hand, chastised Azad and the other leaders of the Khilafat and noncooperation movements for what he saw as their undue doctrinal promiscuity in encouraging Hindu-­Muslim intimacy and bringing destruction upon themselves by taking on a powerful imperial force. Through a close reading of their arguments, I will show that underlying the disagreement between Azad and Khan were two divergent understandings of the idea of friendship, or muwalat, in Muslim thought. While Azad understood this category primarily in terms of citizenship as a form of alliance or clientage with the state, the focus of Khan’s thought was on the civil dimension of friendship, as exhibited in how a community performed [ 116 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies its religion in the public sphere in relation to its rival “others.” These competing imaginaries of friendship, in turn, translated into opposing understandings of a moral public and of a normative Indian Muslim identity in colonial modernity. A central argument of this chapter is that, crucially, despite their varied and opposing understandings of interreligious friendship, both Azad and Khan subscribed to and articulated distinct imperial Muslim political theologies. For Azad, such an imperial political theology was ensconced in the institution of the caliphate. For Khan, in contrast, it was the preservation of markers of Muslim distinction in everyday ritual life that secured sovereign power in the absence of political sovereignty. Pivotal to Azad and Khan’s polemical encounter was the question of how one should understand two specific verses in the Qur’an, verses 8–­9 of chapter 60 (Surah Mumtahana): “God does not forbid you from showing kindness to those unbelievers who do not fight you on account of your faith and neither drive you forth from your homes. . . . ​God only forbids you to turn in friendship towards those [unbelievers] who do fight against you because of your faith and drive you forth from your homes or aid others in driving you forth.”4 This chapter was revealed circa 629 CE, when the early Muslim community had developed into a formidable political entity under the leadership of Prophet Muhammad in the city of Madina. The title of chapter 60, “The Woman Examined,” refers to the steady migration of women from Mecca to Madina who had the intention of joining the fold of Islam. The faith of such women, God stipulated in chapter 60, can only be examined and tested by God and not by any other entity; their declaration of having embraced Islam sufficed as evidence of the sincerity of their faith. It is from this moment in the Qur’an that we get the theological principle that the proclamation of embracing Islam serves as sufficient evidence for the validity of a Muslim’s faith, as God is the sole arbiter on that question. In addition to the issue of faith, a central theme of chapter 60 of the Qur’an is the demarcation of the boundaries of Muslim identity in relation to non-­ Muslims. Verses 8–­9 of Surah Mumtahana seem to authorize some degree of normative allowance and flexibility for engaging non-­Muslims in friendship. However, as we will soon see, the question of who specifically falls under the purview of the category “those who do not fight you on account of your faith” has been a subject of intense contestation. These two verses are closely connected to—­and are believed to have modified—­the Qur’anic verse 5:51 (in Surah Maʾidah) that presents a more explicit rebuke of befriending [ 117 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies non-­Muslims; its relevant parts read: “O people of faith, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are each other’s friends. Whoever takes them as friends (yatawwalahum) becomes one of them.”5 To what degree, if at all, verses 8–­9 of Sura Mumtahana modify and restrict this general condemnation of interreligious friendship is a subject of considerable debate and ambiguity.6 In this chapter, I will try to navigate and bring into view how Abu’l Kalam Azad and Ahmad Raza Khan mobilized the Qur’an and the Muslim canonical tradition in radically contrasting ways as they disputed the normative boundaries of friendship in Islam. The first half of the chapter is devoted to the thought of Abu’l Kalam Azad on the interaction of Muslim religious identity and secular citizenship in British India. In the second half I will turn to the rival views of Ahmad Raza Khan.

Abu’l Kalam Azad: A Modernist Grounded in Tradition Abu’l Kalam Husayni, best known through his pen name, “Azad,” or the “free one,” was a journalist, scholar, and politician whose erudition and literary abilities were legendary. The youngest person (at age thirty-­f ive) to have become the president of the Congress Party in 1923, he also served as the first minister of education in postindependence India. Azad was home schooled and received a traditional Muslim education—­including training in Arabic and Persian poetry—­by his father Khayrudin Husayni, a noted scholar in his own right, who, like many anticolonial activists of his generation, had fled to Mecca (then part of the Ottoman Empire) from India after the ill-­fated 1857 rebellion against the British. Azad was born in Mecca in 1888, and a couple of years later his family resettled in Calcutta, where he was raised. But his emotive and intellectual attachment to Arabia and Arab scholars only tightened over time, in equal part through travels in the region and through concomitantly forged transnational scholarly relations and collaborations. Azad was a close associate, for instance, of Rashid Rida, the eminent Egyptian modernist, who was more than three decades his senior. A genuine polyglot who fluently traversed varied disciplines like philosophy, poetry, law, and Qur’an exegesis, Azad was also the founder of the short-­ lived but hugely influential weekly newspaper Al-­Hilal (the Crescent, named after an Egyptian newspaper bearing the same name) that operated from 1912 to 1914 and served as an important and widely disseminated platform [ 118 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies of anticolonial thought and activism. It was banned by the British in 1914 under the 1910 Indian Press Act, which was promulgated specifically to regulate and censor inciteful images (connected with the Hindu reformist cow protection movement) but was put to use for much broader purposes of curbing a variety of anticolonial nationalist sentiments in the indigenous vernacular press.7 Categorizing Azad as a Muslim scholar is difficult. He was certainly a modernist in his desire to align Muslim knowledge traditions and normativity with modern expectations on questions of interreligious friendship and later constitutional democracy, yet he was also fiercely anticolonial and deeply attached to the sovereign promise of a Muslim caliphal state. He was well versed in and a beneficiary of modern Western knowledges, but, as I just mentioned, he was also well rounded in a rather expansive gambit of the Muslim humanities. For all the ambiguities and shades of gray that colors his scholarly persona, much like some of his more explicitly modernist and Western-­educated/Westernized colleagues in the Khilafat movement—­like, say, the highly influential siblings Shawkat ‘Ali (d. 1938) and Muhammad ‘Ali Jawhar (d. 1931)—­over the course of his career, Azad, too, became increasingly critical of what he perceived as the recalcitrant inability of traditionalist ulama to confront the political and moral challenges of colonial modernity. For this reason, he, in turn, was viewed with a measure of contempt and suspicion by many among the traditionalists, like the founder of the Barelvi school Ahmad Raza Khan, on whom the second half of this chapter focuses. In terms of intellectual output, today Azad is perhaps best known for his widely read topical Urdu commentary on the Qur’an, The Qur’an’s Translator (Tarjuman al-­Qur’an), first published in 1931.8 This chapter examines another immensely important and fascinating work of his (in Urdu peppered with Arabic references): The Caliphate and the Arabian Peninsula (Khilafat Awr Jazirat al-­‘Arab, most commonly referred to as simply Jazirat al-­‘Arab and also known with the title The Problem of the Caliphate (Mas’ala-­yi Khilafat).9 This text, which strives to establish the necessity of the caliphate according to the sharia, is based on a speech that Azad delivered to the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Committee in early 1920. This was a moment when the Ottoman Caliphate had considerably weakened politically, and six years after Britain and the allied forces had declared war against the Ottomans in World War I. As part of his larger project to establish the caliphate as a nonnegotiable doctrinal imperative, Azad also offered Indian Muslims [ 119 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies specific guidelines on how they must imagine the limits of their identity in relation to non-­Muslims, especially in connection with the Khilafat movement.10 The Khilafat movement was initiated in 1919 by a group of Muslim political leaders and intellectuals, several of whom were educated at Western institutions of learning, though it also included some prominent traditionalist ulama.11 Situated six decades after the trauma of the 1857 uprising and approximately three decades prior to the Partition of 1947, the Khilafat movement occupied and articulated a liminal political horizon that interlocked anticolonial resistance with an imperial Muslim political theology. But it did so in a manner that was not mappable onto a vision of nationalism reducible to religious difference. The specific objective of this movement was to pressure the British government to preserve the geographic boundaries and the spiritual and political authority of the Ottoman Caliphate. At the center of its platform was the Muslim imperial ideal of restoring the eroding symbolic capital and political power of the institution of the caliphate, an institution that the leaders of the Khilafat movement associated with the Ottoman state. Understood as God’s and the Prophet’s deputy on earth, the caliph has represented a figure pregnant with moral and symbolic significance throughout Muslim history. The scriptural basis of the institution of the caliphate comes from the well-­k nown Qur’anic verse that states: “O you who believe! Obey Allah, and Obey the Messenger and those charged with authority among you.”12 The Prophet also is said to have foretold the onset of a caliphal era after his departure from the world. Just as important as the textual foundations of the caliphate was its emotive status as the earthly representative of God.13 As the temporal mirror of divine sovereignty, the figure of the caliph was not only invested with immense political authority but also suffused with extraordinary charisma. Thus, the appropriation of this symbol was an attractive mechanism for Islamicate dynasties and imperial kingships to authorize their sovereign authority, a mechanism often employed by multiple rulers simultaneously across Islamdom.14 Therefore, in its vigorous defense of the Ottoman Caliphate, the Khilafat movement drew on a symbol of political mobilization with universal and transnational appeal. However, not all Muslims, in India or elsewhere, regarded the Ottoman state as a legitimate caliphate; indeed, the mantle of “caliph” was avidly contested, with competing claimants to the caliphate such as the sharif of Mecca, Husayn bin ‘Ali (d. 1931).15 But, despite [ 120 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies its contested status, the caliphate was a particularly poignant symbol for Indian Muslim elites, whose sovereignty and social standing had been badly fractured by their brutal defeat by the British in the mutiny of 1857. Historian Gail Minault has argued that the internationalist dimension of the Khilafat movement was intimately connected with the decisively nationalist project of forging political unity and cohesion among Indian Muslims within the subcontinent. As she puts it: “The Khilafat movement was primarily a campaign to unite the Indian Muslim community by means of religious and cultural symbols meaningful to all strata of society. . . . ​In the reasoning of the Khilafat leaders: Muslims in India, if united, could offset their minority status by their ability to bargain from a position of strength, whether with the British or with the Hindus in the Indian National Congress.”16 Moreover, by positioning themselves as the custodians and defenders of the foremost symbol of Muslim political unity, the caliphate, the movement’s leaders sought to legitimate their status as the most authoritative representatives of Indian Muslims. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, in turn, found these Muslim leaders useful allies in their own anticolonial project. Therefore, the alliance between the Khilafat and noncooperation movements brought together varied yet overlapping aspirations, glued together by a shared politics of anticolonial nationalism. Curiously, following the dissolution of the Ottoman state and the emergence of the Turkish Republic in 1924—­and, more specifically, even before that, following Gandhi’s closure of the noncooperation movement in the aftermath of the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922—­leading figures of the Khilafat movement such as Shawkat ‘Ali and Muhammad ‘Ali Jawhar parted ways with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.17 Further, they forged close relations with Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, who was eventually to spearhead the Pakistan movement. Unlike them, however, Azad remained staunchly allied with Gandhi as well as committed to the project of Hindu-­Muslim collaboration in the public and political spheres. Historian Faisal Devji has highlighted some intriguing paradoxes shadowing the Khilafat movement. As he points out, the movement was both anti-­imperialist, as it opposed the British empire, and, in a sense, also pro-­ imperialist, as it did, after all, seek to salvage the imperial political structure of the Ottoman empire. Also, as discussed, it was at once internationalist and nationalist in orientation. And, though it could be regarded [ 121 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies as having politicized religion by presenting the defense of the Ottoman state as a religious obligation, at the same time it depoliticized religion by categorizing Muslims as a purely religious group whose religious sensitivities were violated by the British attack on the Ottoman state.18 On the larger motif of the movement, Devji helpfully reminds us, that, most curiously: the Muslims interested in keeping at least the Islamic parts of the old Ottoman domains under Turkish rule had no intention of themselves becoming Ottoman subjects or even pledging loyalty to the Caliph. Instead, they saw themselves both as British subjects asking their government to take heed of public opinion, and as Indians who wished to give their country a role in the making of a new world following the war. If anything, the Khilafat Movement was an attempt not to sacrifice India’s interests to the larger Islamic world so much as to make her into the leader of this world.19

More recently, Devji has provocatively (and, for the most part convincingly) argued that the politics of Khilafat movement actors owed little to sentiments of devotion or sympathy for the Ottoman Sultan. Rather, through the radical reworking of key ideas in British constitutional thought, the pioneers of the Movement reminded empire of its responsibilities to its own principles of liberal political rule. Later in this chapter, we will see a clear example of such a gesture in Abu’l Kalam Azad’s framing of the British assault on the Ottoman Caliphate as an assault on the liberal principles of secular tolerance. Devji’s larger argument regarding the Khilafat movement is that it did not rely on statist notions of anticolonial politics or Muslim political sovereignty; instead, the caliphate, in the political imaginary of Khilafat movement pioneers like Azad, at once exceeded the institution of the state and called its violence—­especially in its British imperial form—­into question.20 In his work, Devji has perhaps overdramatized the diminished significance of the Ottomans for Khilafat movement leaders and at times detheologized the movement to show its indebtedness to British constitutional thought a bit too emphatically than would be my liking. However, his underlying push to view pan-­Islamic politics in the interwar period through a conceptual lens untethered to the dual polarity of the British colonial or caliphal Islamic state is a productive one, even if one continued to employ the category of the caliphate for heuristic purposes. [ 122 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies Devji’s analysis of the Khilafat movement is also useful in the way it brings into focus the political logics and formulations at work in Gandhi’s leading role in marrying the noncooperation and Khilafat movements—­a role that, as we will see in the second half of this chapter, was at the heart of the biting critique of the Khilafat movement by its antagonists, such as Ahmad Raza Khan. According to Devji, Gandhi conceptualized Hindu-­Muslim friendship and collaboration through a logic of everyday neighborliness that subverted the liberal discourse and project of contractual relations, whereby the British state were to act as a neutral arbiter and mediator between different clients bound by a common contract of interests. Gandhi redefined relations among the subjects of the British empire by replacing the liberal notion of contract with the illiberal idea of sacrifice, whereby mutual sacrifice made way for a mode of Hindu-­Muslim friendship “that was neither affection nor agreement, but perhaps a relationship of desires that diverged and were even opposed, and that yet desired one another.”21 As I will discuss more fully later in this chapter, it is exactly such a Gandhian understanding of friendship generated by and based on neighborly sacrifice that a thinker like Ahmad Raza Khan found a grave threat to everyday markers of Muslim ritual distinction (e.g., cow slaughter) and thus to Muslim sovereign power in the public sphere. As a response, Khan brought together a revitalized emphasis on the contractual relationship between Indian Muslims and the British state (as manifested in state funding for Muslim educational institutions like Islamia College) and the Muslim imperial imperative of maintaining interreligious superiority through preserving ritual distinction in everyday life. While I will have occasion to elaborate Khan’s argument in detail, I mention it here to signal the often less visible yet looming specter of Gandhi that percolated the intra-­Muslim disagreement over Hindu-­Muslim friendship discussed in this chapter. In addition to Faisal Devji’s analytically piercing work, the Khilafat movement has been the subject of some other excellent and extensive social and institutional histories that have detailed its key moments, players, and political unfolding in much depth.22 What is missing from the extant scholarship, however, is a close reading of the fascinating and thorny intra-­Muslim debates on questions of interreligious difference and friendship that the movement and its vigorous opposition brought into view. In other words, withstanding some scattered attempts, missing in the historiography is a [ 123 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies layered reading of the religious thought of key Muslim scholars who drove the Khilafat movement and its political and social agendas. Another shortcoming in the Western literature on the Khilafat movement concerns a detailed reading of the arguments that comprised the Muslim traditionalist response and opposition to it, as exemplified in the thought of Ahmad Raza Khan. This and the next chapter address some of these lacunas, specifically by examining the thought of three luminaries of Sunni Islam in modern South Asia who advanced contrasting yet hugely instructive hermeneutical models and normative prescriptions on the boundaries of Hindu-­Muslim friendship: Azad, Khan, and ‘Abdul Bari of the Farangi Mahal school (whom I will introduce in the next chapter).

The Necessity of the Caliphate In The Arabian Peninsula/The Caliphate Problem, Abu’l Kalam Azad sought to fashion a political theology that would authorize the ideological project of the Khilafat movement. In the course of this text, Azad wrote in multiple registers. He stitched together a detailed historical narrative of the caliphate in Islam (in an attempt to establish its long running indispensability), legal discussions on rules of warfare, and emotionally charged exhortations to Indian Muslims urging them to step up in protecting the caliphate from foreign (British) assault. Nimbly moving between the Qur’an, Hadith, the Hanafi legal canon, and historical inquiry, Azad sought to authorize his arguments in a manner and an idiom that might simultaneously satisfy traditionalist protocols of Muslim normativity and modern normative sensibilities and expectations. His central theological argument, though, was steeply grounded in an imperial Muslim imaginary: that the institution of the caliphate, currently represented by the Ottomans, constituted a foundational, necessary, and nonnegotiable tenet of Islam. Moreover, he argued, since the caliph was the deputy of God and the Prophet, whoever abetted the caliph’s enemy was like God’s and the Prophet’s enemy. Thus, any Muslim who did not submit to the sovereignty of the Ottoman caliph was outside the fold of Islam. Azad explained the caliphate’s centrality to Islam with an evocative agricultural analogy: the institution of the caliphate, he argued, is the root of [ 124 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies the sharia, while obligatory practices like praying and fasting are its branches. The normative foundations of the religion depended on the existence of the caliphate. Therefore, while not praying or fasting constituted a sin, not aiding a Muslim caliph, especially during a time of war, made one a non-­ Muslim. As Azad emphatically put it, “Protecting the caliphate is more important than a thousand prayers or a thousand days of fasting. Why? Because disobedience towards the caliph is such a grave sin that a person who disobeyed the caliph, no matter how much he prayed or fasted, his prayers and fasts will not help his salvational prospects.”23 In Azad’s view, the centrality of the caliphate to Islam was not merely a theological or political imperative. The criticality of a singular central locus of Muslim politico-­theological power and sovereignty represented a manifestation of a universal law of centrality (qanun-­i markaziyyat) that pervaded all aspects of life, nature, and cosmology. For instance, the movement and existence of stars hinges on the centrality of the sun as their source of energy. The body is composed of several organs, each with its specialized function, but their functioning depends on the central organ of the heart. Similarly, in the world of botany, a tree is composed of several elements, including leaves, branches, and flowers, but its sustenance is tethered to a singular center of gravity: the roots. And, finally, while there was more than one hallowed site and space in Islam, the central fulcrum of Muslim devotional life and piety was the Ka’ba in Mecca. All of these examples confirmed the universality of the law of centrality. Azad analogized that the institution of the caliphate was to Islam what the heart, sun, and roots were to the body, stars, and trees. Theologically and cosmologically, the caliphate was indispensable.24 Azad’s argument here was not without precedent. As Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds have contended, the religious character of the Muslim community in the medieval era intimately depended on the existence of the caliph.25 Note the remarkable correspondence between Azad’s views and the following declaration of a tenth-­century Abbasid poet: “He who does not hold fast to God’s trustee will not benefit from the five prayers.”26 The eleventh-­ century polymath Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali also had argued that “if the caliphate was deemed to have come to an end, all religious institutions would be in a state of suspension and all acts performed under Islamic law deprived of their validity.”27 Over time, however—­a nd especially after the Mongol [ 125 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258—­Muslim jurists seem to have preferred the more centrist position that while departing from the caliphate was not inherently permissible, it was allowed under attenuating or dire circumstances. But, even so, the normative urgency of the caliphate remained central to Muslim intellectual and political imaginaries. For instance, the illustrious fourteenth-­century historian, sociologist, and jurist Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) considered appointing a caliph obligatory. Indeed, in the view of Islam scholar Ovamir Anjum, “it is an understatement to note that Ibn Khaldun upheld the caliphate; he wrote his masterpiece [the Muqaddima] to explain its history and advocate its return. . . . ​This can be inferred from the way that his chapters are logically organized to culminate in the caliphate, where he then discusses elaborately the organization associated with it before going on to analyze the causes of the state’s decay and its final destruction.”28 But the question of the caliphate is not just a legal normative problem. As it did for Azad, the caliphate also represents a potent aspirational symbol of decolonial politics that offers, in the words of political theorist Salman Sayyid, “an alternative to Westphalian notions of political community.”29 “The caliphate,” Sayyid writes, in a particularly sharp and helpful description of the category, “is a concentration of meanings about how the venture of Islam fits into the world. The ability of Muslims as a ‘collective will’ to make their own history, to project themselves into the future, to elaborate and enrich their sense of who they are and who they wish to be rests upon the possibility of the caliphate. The caliphate is not,” he further writes, “merely an historical institution but rather an overdetermined ensemble around which questions of the governance of the ummah and the relationship between Muslim biographies and Islamicate histories are played out.”30 Sayyid’s insights can be nicely paired with Ovamir Anjum’s useful reminder that the idea of a Muslim caliphate has always represented an aspiration rather than a perfectly realized ideal. In Anjum’s words: “The caliphate did not always include all Muslim regions, and the idea of a total pan-­Islamic unity has been an aspiration only rarely attained.”31 In Azad’s discourse as well, the juridical dimensions of this issue were wedded with the profound emotive symbolism of the caliphate as not only the temporal representative of divine and prophetic authority but also the aspirational bulwark guarding Muslim political interests and futures. [ 126 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies

Friend, Enemy, and Political Authority: Ottomans as the Rightful Caliphs But why were the Ottomans to be considered the rightful and exclusive claimants to the caliphate, especially when they did not boast lineage of the Prophet’s Quraysh tribe, a condition (qurayshiyyat) widely considered a prerequisite for the mantle of the caliphate in Islamic law? This is precisely among the points on which Ahmad Raza Khan had pounced on Azad and the Khilafat movement leaders, as I will discuss in the second half of this chapter. Azad, though, presented a vigorous case for the impossibility of any other custodian of the caliphate but Ottoman Turks.32 Although his argument was more historical and political than theological, he did mobilize important fragments of the traditionalist canon to disentangle the caliphate from Quraysh lineage. Writing a dozen years after Azad, the famous, controversial, and recently much-­in-­vogue German theorist and lawyer Carl Schmitt, in his well-­known book The Concept of the Political, asserted: “The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. . . . ​Never in the thousand-­ year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love towards the Saracens or Turks.”33 Azad echoed an eerily similar sentiment as Schmitt, premised on the unceasing and eternal enmity between Christians and Muslims, Turks and Europeans. While Azad wrote from the Muslim perspective and Schmitt the viewpoint of Europe, they were remarkably aligned in their underlying political analysis. In fact, Azad’s argument for locating the caliphate with the Ottoman empire was premised precisely on what he saw as a long-­ running narrative of interreligious difference and discord, with the only caveat being that for him (unlike Ahmad Raza Khan) the existential enemy of Islam was not Hinduism or Hindus, but Christianity. Collapsing Christianity with Europe, much as Carl Schmitt had, Azad contended that no other global power, especially no other Muslim empire, had defended Muslim polities against the menacing threat of Christianity and Europe as had the Ottomans.34 Even the famous and much-­heralded twelfth-­century Muslim ruler Salah al-­Din Ayyubi (d. 1193), who led Muslims during the Crusades, did not match [ 127 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies the contribution of the Ottomans in defending Islam against Euro-­Christian aggression, Azad argued. While Ayyubi’s defense of Islam in the face of Christian aggression spanned a limited time period, the Ottomans had been tirelessly protecting the umma from European intrusion for almost four consecutive centuries. No other Muslim power, Azad punctuated, had rivaled Europe or as successfully staved off European imperial designs on Muslim countries as had the Ottoman empire. “This is the sin of the Turks that Europe shall never forgive,” he thundered, combining resentment with wistful bravado.35 It is for this reason, he claimed, that while European Orientalists feel no reservation praising the protagonists of other imperial bastions of Muslim history such as Umayyads and the Abbasids, and they might even find occasion to extol Salah al-­Din Ayyubi, they can never get themselves to appreciate or speak favorably of the Ottomans.36 Provocatively, Azad claimed that all Muslim populations and empires, including and especially Indian Muslims and the Mughal empire, owed their existence to the Ottomans.37 He further contended that, had the Turks not exclusively shouldered the burden of protecting Muslims worldwide from the wrath of Europe, the presence of Muslim populations on the world map would have become untenable. “The quandary [that of Western colonialism] that Muslims worldwide find themselves in now,” he asserted, “would have befallen them much earlier [were it not for the Ottoman empire].”38 In Azad’s view then, it is the formidability of Ottoman power that delayed the event of Western colonialism in Muslim majority or Muslim ruled polities and helped extend their imperial careers. In Azad’s dramatic description of the debt Muslims globally owed to the Ottomans: Muslims around the world owe such a profound and steep debt to the Turks that they cannot repay it even if they sacrificed everything they possess. If Muslims in any part of the world have enjoyed kingships, and after the dissolution of these kingships, if they still lay claim to any modicum of respect, it is thanks to the Ottomans. This is true for all Muslims, from China to the far-­ flung corners of Africa. . . . ​Therefore, Muslims worldwide are obligated to assist the Ottomans [in their moment of trial]. But the Ottomans in turn, owe no such obligation to other Muslims; they have been performing the duty of sacrificing their lives in service of Islam for the last four centuries. What could be a greater service?39

[ 128 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies Next, in a couple of statements both punchy and revealing, Azad tried to take head on the doubt and stereotype that Turkish Ottoman rulers were somehow sluggish or less steadfast in piety than, say, Arab or South Asian Muslims. He said: “It is wholly possible that Muslims in other parts of the world pray more often than do the Turks, but it is the expenditure of the latter’s blood that has ensured the possibility of holding prayers among Muslim populations in the first place. Perhaps Arab and Indian Muslims recite the Qur’an more frequently, but it is the wounded bodies of Turks that have preserved and protected the Qur’an for the last four hundred years.” 40 Azad climaxed this thought with a provocative theological pronouncement: “If God’s law is just and if the Qur’an and Sunna cannot enjoin falsehood, then we must believe that [even] a sinful Turk polluted with [the stain of] God’s disobedience is nonetheless much dearer and more virtuous in God’s eyes than a thousand ascetic and devout Muslims from elsewhere whose hearts never brush the danger of risking their lives on the path of jihad.”41 Even with allowance for rhetorical flourish, this was a bold claim, because, in essence, Azad was arguing that the defense of political sovereignty through warfare held priority over the exercise of moral discipline and piety. Power was a precondition for piety, not the other way around. The theological thorniness of this stance aside, it was nonetheless well aligned with his broader argument in this text that obligatory practices of Islam like the five daily prayers were secondary to the political institution of the caliphate. Moreover, what made the Ottoman Caliphate worthy of defending—­indeed, what made it obligatory to defend—­was the political service it had rendered for the global Muslim community, not any claims to pietistic excellence. But what about the problem posed by the fact that Ottoman rulers lacked the Prophet’s lineage—­an absence of pedigree that many Muslim scholars (including many, if not the majority, in South Asia) considered a disqualification for the mantle of the caliphate? Azad rebutted this doubt through a clever set of arguments. First, he pointed out that, with the exception of the first four caliphs in Sunni Islam, there has never been a perfect caliphate or a perfect caliph who has fulfilled in absolute terms all legal and moral requirements for the position. Why, then, must one single out the Ottomans or prophetic lineage as the most critical deal breaker, Azad wondered aloud.42 In fact, he ventured further to claim that the “political revolution” inaugurated by the Ottoman Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid II (d. 1918) had revived the [ 129 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies tradition of mutual consultation (shura) in decision-­making that had defined the ideal reign of the Prophet and the first four caliphs. Following the first few decades of Muslim history, Azad argued, regardless of the lineage of political rulers, Quraysh or otherwise, kingship and brute imperialism had come to dominate politics. ‘Abdul Hamid II, by cultivating the grounds for parliamentary politics, had reinvigorated prophetic politics premised on consultative decision-­making, and, in effect, he had interrupted the preponderance of autarchy and individual-­centered kingship in Islam. Thus, in Azad’s view, even if they might lack prophetic lineage, the Ottomans were the true inheritors and resuscitators of prophetic politics.43 Second, turning more philosophical and explicitly modernist, he argued that at the heart of the prophetic mission that anchors the venture of Islam is a stinging and revolutionary critique of nepotism, as exemplified in the Prophet’s revolt against his own powerful tribe (the Quraysh) for their attachment to ancestral customs and traditions. As Azad starkly asked: “How can Islam sanction lineage worship (nasab parasti) when breaking this idol was central to its foundational purpose.”44 To add normative weight to his line of reasoning, he cited the iconic and frequently mobilized Qur’anic verse 49:13 that reads: “We made you into tribes and communities so you may know [and distinguish] each other, but [otherwise] the closest to God is the one most pious.”45 This verse, Azad contended, clearly rebuked privileging considerations of lineage in evaluating the worth of a believer.46 Similarly, he reminded his readers, the Prophet, in his farewell sermon, had stressed the importance of undoing and refraining from valorizing distinctions of ethnicity and lineage in how Muslims engaged and treated each other. As the Prophet categorically declared: “An Arab has no privilege over a non-­ Arab. . . . ​All people are children of Adam.”47 In the process of legitimizing the Ottoman claim to the caliphate, Azad thus packaged Islam as a universalist religion that abjured racial and ethnic hierarchies and distinctions. Third, and perhaps most substantively, Azad argued that there existed no known consensus of the Prophet’s companions that a caliph must belong to the Quraysh. Why, then, was the assumption binding the caliphate with Quraysh lineage so commonplace and widespread in Muslim intellectual circles and social imaginaries? Because, he explained, Muslim history had unfolded in such a manner—­w ith successive occupants to the caliphate belonging to the Quraysh—­that the impression of a normative consensus on this issue had congealed when in fact there was none. To the contrary, one [ 130 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies finds important examples of Muslim rulers who did not trace their lineage to the Quraysh; for instance, Azad cited the example of the curious late eleventh-­/early twelfth-­Muslim Berber scholar and ruler Abu ‘Abd Allah ibn Tumart (d. 1130) who had ruled over the Almohad empire in Andalusia and North Africa, who was not of Quraysh lineage. Perhaps more significantly, he was also not some marginal figure who identified with an “aberrant” theological persuasion such as the Mu‘tazilites; rather, he was a “thoroughbred Ash‘ari (paka Ash‘ari) and student of the preeminent Sunni polymath ‘Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali.”48 Further, he contended, leading luminaries of the tradition had also dissociated the office of the caliph from prophetic lineage. As an example, Azad mobilized the following statement by the famous fourteenth-­century Muslim historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun about the leading late tenth-­/early eleventh-­century Maliki jurist and Ash‘ari theologian Abu Bakr al-­Baqillani (d. 1013): “Al-­Baqillani was among those who refuted the precondition of Quraysh lineage for office of the caliph” (wa min al-­qai’lin bi-­nafi ishtirat al-­qurshiyya al-­qadi Abu Bakr al-­Baqillani).49 Al-­Baqillani, as an authoritative luminary in early Islam, provided Azad with some formidable ammunition of normative legitimacy. But it was Ibn Khaldun’s own theorization of the interaction of lineage and caliphal authority that most closely aligned with Azad’s normative and social imaginary. He quoted Ibn Khaldun at length from the latter’s encyclopedic masterpiece The Prolegomena (Al-­Muqaddima). Consistent with his larger theory of sociopolitical ascendance and decline based on the strength of a community’s group solidarity (‘asabiyya), Ibn Khaldun had argued: When successive dynasties of Quraysh lineage became engrossed in worldly comforts and pleasures, and thus lost their group solidarity, they became incapable of carrying the burden of the caliphate (‘ajizu ‘an ‘haml al-­khilafa). That political vacuum in turn was filled by non-­Arabs, who increasingly came to occupy the caliphate; as a consequence, Muslim scholars also began to doubt the prerequisite of Quraysh lineage for caliphal authority, to the extent of negating this requirement altogether (fa-­ashtabaha dhalika ‘ala kathir min al-­muhaqiqqin hata dhahabu ila nafi ishtirat al-­qurshiyya).50

Lest one found these authorities too exclusively stacked in the premodern period, Azad was ready with a prominent modern citation as well: the [ 131 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies prominent late eighteenth-­/early nineteenth-­century Yemeni scholar of Hadith and law Muhammad al-­Shawkani (d. 1834). Al-­Shawkani had contended that though there existed prophetic reports that seemed to specify political leadership with the Quraysh tribe, of greater normative weight and consequence was the general prophetic injunction that one ought to obey a political leader regardless of lineage or tribal affiliation. The specificity of tribal affiliation with political leadership was not normative; rather, al-­Shawkani elaborated, this specification was in the same vein as the Prophet assigning the Black-­skinned (habashi) to deliver the call to prayer or the Azdis to serve as judges—­f unctional associations neither normative nor permanent. Similarly, yes, the Prophet associated political leadership with the Quraysh in some of his proclamations, but again, this was not a normative or permanent association. Thus, al-­Shawkani (as narrated by Azad) argued, there was no reason that someone of a different lineage could not assume the mantle of the Muslim community’s leadership.51 Azad’s opponents, like Ahmad Raza Khan, had their own arguments and citational ammunition for the contrary view that lineage of the Quraysh was indeed necessary for the office of caliphate (as I will outline later in this chapter).52 To Azad, though, the evidence and arguments he had marshaled conclusively established the Ottomans as the rightful and exclusive claimants to the caliphate.

Defending the Caliphate Having established the caliphate as a doctrinal and political imperative, Azad proceeded to propose that defending the caliph when his sovereignty was challenged was obligatory for all Muslims. More specifically, he argued that when a non-­Muslim force attacked, intended to attack, or injured the independence and sovereignty of a Muslim polity, it was incumbent on all Muslims to help their Muslim brothers. This was especially true in a situation where the aggressor was more powerful and the Muslim citizens or government that was attacked did not possess the capacity to fight back.53 Similarly, Azad argued, it was incumbent on all Muslims to protect the Arabian Peninsula (hence the title of his book) from all forms of non-­Muslim aggression. In Azad’s view, because the British had openly declared war against [ 132 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies the Ottoman caliphate, it was an individual obligation (fard al-­‘ayn ar. / farz­i ayn ur.) for all Indian Muslims to engage in jihad against the British. In making his case, he cited the canonical text of Hanafi law, al-­Hidaya (The Guidance) by the twelfth-­century scholar Burhan al-­Din al-­Marghinani (d. 1197). In this text, al-­Marghinani argued that jihad turns into an individual obligation in the case of a defensive war when a Muslim community is under attack. But more interesting than Azad’s point here was the reasoning that went into his preferred choice of citation. He was inclined to cite this text, he explained, because it was among the major Hanafi texts that had been translated into English, was familiar to the British, and was employed in the courts in colonial India as part of the Anglo-­Muhammadan law.54 This was a fascinating moment in which the norms of warfare articulated in a medieval legal text firmly situated in a context of Muslim empire was invoked to authorize war against the modern British colonial empire. Moreover, intriguingly, the citational authority and currency of this text was wedded precisely to the colonial regime of translation whereby specific indigenous texts (in this case, from the discursive economy of Islamic law) were valorized and canonized as the most authentic representation of the Islamic legal tradition. Now, this is not to suggest that al-­Hidaya was not a significant text of Hanafi law on its own prior to British colonialism; it definitely was. However, what is worth noticing here is the profound imprint of colonial power on the very discursive terrain on which anticolonial political and moral projects like Azad’s were henceforth staged. The translatability of al-­Hidaya—­ both literally in terms of the availability of its English translation and more broadly with respect to its recognition by the colonial state as authoritative—­is what made this text Azad’s citation of choice to legitimate war against that very state. To be clear, Muslim scholars certainly participated in the process through which particular Hanafi texts were identified and codified as authoritative voices of the tradition.55 But the terms of their participation were hardly egalitarian. Ultimately, the British were firmly in control of how the process of inventing a new juridical order unfolded. Much like the case of Ahmad Raza Khan, whom we’ll meet in the second half of this chapter, and that of other actors we already have or will encounter in the course of this book, in Azad’s thought one finds a curious conjuncture of premodern Muslim imperial desires and the thoroughly modern [ 133 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies discursive conditions and expectations of British colonial power. And, in all cases, including Azad’s discourse here, it is the latter that mediated and modulated the former.

Good Non-­Muslim, Bad Non-­Muslim In Azad’s view, Indian Muslims bore a particular responsibility to wage jihad against the British. Why? Because, in comparison to other Muslims, they were in a much better position, politically and economically, to execute this mission. But how were Indian Muslims supposed to negotiate their responsibilities as citizens of a colonial state with their religious obligation to wage war against that very state? Put more simply, how were Indian Muslims supposed to interact with the British state as part of their everyday lives while also considering it unacceptably hostile? Azad’s answers to these questions, to which I now turn, illustrate how he understood the intersection of religious identity, secularism, and modern citizenship. According to Azad, in the political conditions that existed in 1920, it was no longer possible for Indian Muslims to remain loyal citizens of the British Empire while also fulfilling their religious obligations in the public sphere. Since the British had adopted a policy of active aggression against the Ottomans, Indian Muslims were obligated to abandon virtually any relationship with them. In fact, also in 1920, he had even issued a juridical opinion (fatwa) explicitly declaring India an “abode of war,” or non-­Muslim ruled territory (Dar al-­Harb) and urged Indian Muslims to migrate out of India if they so desired and were able to. Azad’s claim about the normative status of India as an abode of war and his call for migration met not only denunciation from rival scholars like Ahmad Raza Khan (discussed later in this chapter) but also disagreement from scholars within the Khilafat movement, most prominently Maulvi ‘Abdul Bari (discussed in the next chapter). Even so, Azad’s and other such Khilafatist pronouncements of disengagement from the sovereignty of the British state and its geographies of influence had the effect that over forty thousand people left India to resettle in different parts of Afghanistan.56 A key term that Azad mobilized to normatively sanction his program of civic and political severance from the British state was what he called Tark-­i muwalat, meaning abandoning any relationship of friendship, service, [ 134 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies intimacy, or cooperation. The category of muwalat was critical to the larger debate over the boundaries of friendship between Muslims and non-­ Muslims. As I explained in the introduction, muwalat, derived from the Arabic roots wa-­li-­ya, refers to friendship and intimacy in an individual and civil sense, as well as indicating alliance or clientage in a more political sense. The terms for a “friend of God” (wali), or a Muslim mystic, and “sainthood” (walaya) derive from the same roots.57 For Azad, the civil and political meanings of the term were intertwined: the severing of political clientage mandated the abandonment of all public relations of service to and cooperation with the state. Azad argued for abandoning friendship and intimacy by drawing on verses 8–­9 in chapter 60 of the Qur’an. In his view, these two verses provided clear guidance on the boundaries of friendship in Islam. As can be seen in these verses, Azad explained, the Qur’an divides non-­Muslims into two distinct categories: 1. those non-­Muslims who did not fight against Muslims, were not aggressively hostile toward them, and who did not harbor any designs to colonize them; and 2. those non-­Muslims who displayed all of these antagonistic qualities.58 Muslims must treat the first category with every kind of friendship, love, kindness, and hospitality. In the context of colonial India, Azad specified, this category included Hindus, who had never attacked Muslim countries, fought them in religion, or been the cause of the expulsion of Muslims from their lands.59 In stark contrast, the British, with their designs to colonize Arabia and destroy the Ottoman caliphate, exemplified non-­Muslims of the second variety: those who fought Muslims in religion and expelled them from their homes. Therefore, Azad extrapolated, Indian Muslims were forbidden to show any form of love, friendship, or cooperation toward the British. He did not clarify whether by “the British” he meant only those attached to the colonial state, or also ordinary British citizens. However, he left no shade of ambiguity in his declaration that Muslims who did engage the British in a relationship of friendship would themselves be counted as among the enemies and, hence, as enemies of God and the sharia. Azad summed up with the proclamation that “in conditions of war between Muslims and non-­Muslims, Muslims cannot abandon their brothers and become friends with their enemies.”60 In this situation, Azad argued, Indian Muslims had only two mutually exclusive options: loyalty to the British state, or loyalty to their religion. In other words, it had become impossible for Indian Muslims to [ 135 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies remain loyal citizens of British India without compromising their religious duties and obligations. “Maintaining relations of affection and cooperation with antagonistic non-­Muslims [like the British] clearly, very clearly, invalidates [a Muslim’s] faith,” Azad cuttingly pronounced.61 “Such people,” he continued ominously, “wish to remain Muslim while also keeping current communal relations with Islam’s enemies.”62 This was impossible because Muslims were commanded by God to sever contact with even their own immediate family members—­let alone foreign aggressors—­who waged war against Islam. Azad furnished his argument with the oft-­cited and much debated Qur’anic verse 9:23: “O you who have believed, do not make allies of your fathers and brothers who have desired unbelief over faith. And whoever among you does so is among the unjust.”63 As Azad’s mobilization of this verse demonstrates, his intellectual and political project combined a politics of anticolonial activism with an imperial Muslim political theology that clearly identified and demarcated friends and enemies of Islam.

The Promise and Responsibility of Secularism Azad’s reliance on an imperial Muslim political theology did not in any way undermine his cognizance of the secularizing conditions and claims of British colonial power. In fact, at the centerpiece of his acerbic critique of the British colonial state was the contention that, by adopting a policy of aggression against the Ottoman Caliphate, the British had compromised their own official promise of secularism and freedom of religion for all communities in India. By intervening in a matter of religious importance for Indian Muslims, the British had contravened the secular principle of the separation of religion and politics. Moreover, Azad alleged, through a sustained and coordinated public relations effort, the British duped the Indian Muslim public into thinking that their war was only defensive and only targeted at elements in the Turkish state under German influence, and was not an offensive war against Islam or the caliphate. This was the essence of the first announcement regarding the war put out by the British government in November 1914, and, Azad claimed, the branding of this war as defensive and unrelated to Islam or the caliphate was hammered home village to village.64 This extensive and duplicitous advertising campaign bore fruit, as it not only made the Indian Muslim public less averse to the war, but, more [ 136 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies damagingly, it also led “gullible” Muslim scholars into believing that, since this was a defensive war waged in the face of aggression, Indian Muslims were normatively obligated to support the state. The Indian Muslim public, on the other hand, had been methodically deceived into the equanimity of assuming that the holiest sites and places in Islam (the Arabian Peninsula and the Al-­Aqsa Mosque/Bayt al-­Muqaddas) were safe, and that the British harbored no designs to harm the caliphate or capture Muslim territories. In a tone that combined an equal mixture of irritation and resignation, Azad declared: “In their thirteen-­hundred-­year history, trusting British promises and public messaging is perhaps the gravest religious and societal error Indian Muslims have ever committed.”65 But, he argued, apart from successful publicity stunts, there was another more insidious and more powerful reason that the British were able to conceal their attack on Islam from the public consciousness of Indian Muslims. Azad elaborated that, ostensibly, all religious communities in India, including Muslims, were granted complete freedom to fulfill their religious duties and obligations in the public sphere. That is why Muslims in India “had established mosques, the sound of the call to prayer could be heard throughout the country five times a day, and no ruler stopped them from saying their prayers.”66 However, while granting Muslims the freedom to perform everyday religious practices, the British had assaulted the most foundational doctrinal tenet and institutional structure in Islam: the caliphate. As Azad dramatically put it: “The British continue their assault on the Muslim caliphate, their naval ships march in the waters with the intention of destroying the caliphate to pieces, and their military continues to occupy Iraq. And despite all this they expect pitiful Muslims of India to remain loyal to them!”67 While Indian Muslims were free to carry out minor religious observances, they could not invoke the right to religious freedom when it came to the most essential of their religious tenets. In effect, the British had forced Indian Muslims into an irresolvable conundrum whereby their religious obligations directly clashed with their obligations as citizens of the colonial state. As Azad poignantly put it: “In order to demonstrate their loyalty to the state, the British want [Indian] Muslims to commit treason against Islam.”68 The British had to decide between two options, Azad warned. Either they should uphold the secular promise of separating religion from politics and not intervene in the religious lives of Indian Muslims, or they should openly announce that they had no regard for the religious obligations and [ 137 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies injunctions of Muslims and stop pretending to be the slogan-­bearers for secular ideals. He described the second option in vivid terms: “They should declare that all they care about is more land, more power, more oil from Mosul, and the end of the Muslim caliphate. Then it will be easy for the Muslims also to choose between their religion and their citizenship under the British government.”69 What must be observed here is not only the content of Azad’s arguments but also the way he framed his arguments. More specifically, notice his valorization of secularism as a normative ideal. For Azad, British aggression toward the Ottoman Caliphate was most repugnant because of the way in which it undermined the secular ideals of religious freedom and the separation of religion and state. Leaving aside Azad’s somewhat elementary conceptualization of the secular, I want to emphasize how the normative desire for the secular was central to the organizing logic of his argument. As Azad launched a scathing critique of the colonial state and of its policies and attitudes toward indigenous religious communities, the grammar of that critique was indebted to the political and conceptual terrain of secular colonial modernity.

Friendship and Its Perils Azad’s political and hermeneutical program did not go unchallenged. Indeed, his call for Indian Muslims to boycott the British and to ally with the Hindus and Gandhi precipitated a massive backlash from a number of Indian ulama. But perhaps none was as severe and comprehensive in his rebuke of Azad and his compatriots in the Khilafat and noncooperation movements as the prolific North Indian Muslim scholar Ahmad Raza Khan. A Hanafi jurist and Qadiri Sufi, Khan is among the most illustrious personalities in the intellectual history of modern South Asian Islam and is said to have composed over a thousand works on various subjects including law, theology, Hadith, philosophy, the Qur’an, and even the natural sciences. Most of his writings are today preserved in a thirty-­t wo-­volume collection of juridical opinions (fatawa) titled Fatawa Rizviyya. Khan was also the founder of what is known as the Barelvi school of thought in South Asia, named after the North Indian town of Bareilly, where he was from.70 Among the hallmarks of the Barelvi orientation, or maslak, is a nonnegotiable commitment to upholding the exceptional doctrinal and cosmological status of Prophet [ 138 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies Muhammad as the most beloved and unique of God’s creation. For Khan and his followers, divine sovereignty and prophetic charisma were ineluctably entangled. It is this position that animated their vigorous defense of rituals like the annual celebration of the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid) and of beliefs like the Prophet’s possession of knowledge of the unknown (ʿilm al-­ghayb). In my previous book, Defending Muḥammad in Modernity, I examined Ahmad Raza Khan’s views and writings on these and connected issues in detail.71 I showed that Khan’s vision of religious reform was premised on cultivating and preserving a moral landscape that sought to eagerly exalt the Prophet and his memory in a world otherwise beset by moral and political uncertainty. I demonstrated that his polemic in the late nineteenth century with pioneers of the archrival Deoband Madrasa centered on the figure of the Prophet in modernity was not, as it is popularly understood, the product of an inherent opposition between Sufism and the sharia, or between lax mystics and harsh legalists. Rather, I argued, this intra-­Muslim conflict, which consumed some of the most prolific and towering Muslim scholars in modern South Asia and continues to elicit formidable controversy in the region and among diaspora communities around the world, centered on rival political theologies, by which I meant competing understandings of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and everyday ritual practice.72 In this chapter and in the next two chapters, I focus on another key dimension of Ahmad Raza Khan’s thought that I had not had the chance to explore in my previous book: his views on Muslim/non-­Muslim relations and friendship. Here, again, my analysis will further puncture common stereotypes about the Barelvi school in South Asia as soft, mystically promiscuous, populist, or inclusivist.73 In what follows, I will show that Ahmad Raza Khan was anything but these things. I will also show that, like most versatile and sophisticated scholars, he was remarkably adept at combining and keeping together idealist positions doggedly critical of any hint of interreligious intimacy with more pragmatic stances when so required by circumstance or power dynamics. Interestingly, for all of Khan’s bitter polemics and disagreements with the Deoband pioneers, on the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship they held remarkably similar positions, animated by a common concern to protect markers of Muslim distinction in the public sphere against the threat of mixture with the “other.” A comparison of Khan’s views with those of Deoband scholar Qari Tayyib, which I will interrogate extensively [ 139 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies in chapter 6, will make this curious convergence between the otherwise existentially opposed Barelvi and Deobandi schools abundantly clear. With these contextual notes in place, I now turn to Khan’s refutation of Abu’l Kalam Azad’s discourse on the boundaries of interreligious friendship. Khan’s refutation is found in an exegetical 1920 work entitled The Convincing Proof on the Mumtahana Verse (al-­Mahajja al-­Mu’tamana fi Ayah Mumtahana). Khan is believed to have been on his deathbed when he wrote it; he died less than a year after its publication. Khan generated this text in response to a question by a teacher at Islamia College Lahore-­Maulvi Hakim ‘Ali, with whom I began this chapter. Hakim ‘Ali had inquired about the normative status of Azad’s legal opinion forbidding Muslim schools and colleges in India from accepting British financial aid. In his response, while authorizing the acceptance of such financial support from the colonial government, Khan launched a devastating attack on the religious and political project of Azad and other Muslim leaders of the Khilafat and noncooperation movements. In executing this task, Khan mobilized a panoply of traditional normative sources, including the Qur’an, Hadith, Qur’an commentaries, and Hanafi and even non-­Hanafi legal texts.74 Before seeking to undo Azad’s hermeneutical arguments, Khan tried to dismantle Azad’s credibility as a legitimate spokesperson for the Indian Muslim community. According to Khan, the ostensibly anticolonial agenda of Muslim scholars attached to the Khilafat and noncooperation movements was not only hermeneutically invalid—­it was also outright hypocritical. In the guise of opposing the British, he argued, these scholars were merely interested in advancing their own political aspirations. Their opposition to the British was superficial; culturally, they were the slogan-­bearers of a modernist worldview that was infested with Western values and normative ideals. To truly protect Islam in India from the threat of colonialism, mere financial noncooperation with the British was not enough: “If the objective is to abandon imitation of the British, then financial noncooperation will not suffice. The West should also be abandoned in fashion, culture, atheism (dahriyyat), and naturalism (nechari).”75 Khan claimed that, while pretending to act as the caretakers of Indian Muslims, Azad and scholars of his ilk had always looked with disdain at traditional norms, institutions, and custodians of Muslim education in the country. Now, during a moment when it was politically convenient for them, these same scholars had donned the moralizing garb of Islam’s defenders [ 140 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies against colonial power. As he fumed, “Are these not the same people who, when you would ask them why do you not educate your sons in the Qur’an, they would reply in condescension, ‘Why would we do that? Do we want our children to be eating chickpeas on the third day of someone’s death (siwam)?’ ”76 In Khan’s view, the so-­called defenders of Islam and tradition in the Khilafat and noncooperation movements were themselves products of “modern Western” education and values. Their rejection of financial aid from the British was only a ruse that masked their deep-­seated cultural and moral intimacy with the normative horizons and desires of Western modernity. Having perforated the religious authority and credibility of his rivals, Khan then turned to the task of undoing their interpretive program. Hermeneutically, Khan drew a distinction between friendship/intimacy (muwalat) and mere pragmatic relations (mujarrad-­i mu‘amalat). The acceptance of financial aid from the British for religious schools fell squarely into the second category. Moreover, this kind of pragmatic relationship with non-­ Muslims was completely permissible so long as it did not promote any sort of unbelief or bring any harm to Islam and the sharia.

Tampering with the Sharia Khan’s central charge against Azad and his compatriots was that they altered the logic of the sharia by obligating friendship with Hindus and forbidding mere pragmatic relations with the British. In effect, they had committed the minor sin of forbidding something permissible (pragmatic relations with British) and the major sin of obligating something forbidden (friendship with Hindus). What angered Khan the most, however, was the inclusion of Hindus in the category of “those who do not fight you in religion” (lam yuqatilukum fi din) by Gandhi’s Muslim allies, such as Azad. Khan emphatically declared that Hindus were without doubt active aggressors against Islam (muharib bil fi‘l) who could not be excluded from that category, according to verse 8 of Surah Mumtahana.77 In assembling his argument, Khan mobilized two varieties of evidence: historical and empirical. Historically, Khan sought to show that the Hindus of India did not match the characteristics of possible members of the category “those who do not fight you in religion.” Citing the noted Companion of the Prophet and early Qur’an scholar ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abbas (d. 687), Khan [ 141 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies argued that there were three possible groups of people who could have been referred to as “those unbelievers who do not fight you on account of your faith and neither drive you forth from your homes”: 1. those Muslims who had not yet left Mecca and migrated to Madina; 2. members of the Banu Khuza‘a tribe in Mecca, with whom Prophet Muhammad had entered into a treaty; and 3. the women and children among the unbelievers who did not possess the capacity to fight. Hindus, Khan stated, did not correspond or were analogous to any of these groups.78 Khan reasoned that, empirically, Hindus cannot be categorized among unbelievers who do not fight Muslims in religious war because they had indeed fought Muslims on numerous occasions, often in gruesomely violent ways. He reminded his readers that it was the same Hindus with whom Azad called for friendship who had massacred and incinerated innocent Muslims over the issue of the sacrifice of cows (the central topic of the next chapter). For anyone who was unpersuaded by the brutality of Hindus toward Muslims, he proposed an experiment: “Go to any city, district, or village and try sacrificing a cow; see, then, if these very dear brothers, elders, and leaders of yours do not become ready to break your bones into pieces.”79 Khan addressed the Muslim leaders of the Khilafat movement with a set of comments that deserve to be quoted at some length because they capture the intensity of his protest in particularly vivid ways: “O you leaders who sit on fancy stages and pretend to be Muslims and sympathizers of Islam. If you have any ounce of shame left, then go drown in the Ganges. Are not these Hindu polytheists whom you call your brothers, your confidantes, your well-­ wishers, is it not these same people who have time and again assaulted Islam, the Qur’an, and our mosques? And today it is for these same people that you sell yourselves and celebrate your slavery to them.”80 Khan crowned his disgust for Azad and the leaders of the Khilafat movement with a lament that is untranslatable. He gasped: “Uff Uff Uff, Tuff Tuff Tuff.”81 It is true that the Muslim leaders of the Khilafat and noncooperation movements had acknowledged episodes of Hindu violence against Muslims, but they had been quick to assert that such episodes were individual, scattered, and sporadic. Therefore, their argument went, the Hindu community as a whole did come under the category of “those who do not fight you in religion.” Khan counterargued that, for a community to be categorized as “active aggressors” (muharib bil fi‘l) against Islam, it was not necessary for every member of that community to physically fight or take [ 142 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies up arms against Muslims. Were that the case, it would also be unjustified for Azad to call for a boycott against the British; after all, not every British citizen had physically fought against Muslims. Similarly, during the time of the Prophet, not every unbeliever took to the battlefield or fought individually against the Muslim community.82 According to Khan, the category of active aggressor against Islam was applicable to any unbeliever who showed aggression toward Muslims through physical force, feeling, or speech. Under this expansive definition, the Hindu “polytheists” of India were clearly active aggressors against Islam. Even when they did not fight Muslims explicitly, their hearts were suffused with animosity toward them. “Which Hindu’s heart does not burn when it comes to the issue of the sacrifice of cows?” he asked, combining revulsion with rhetorical flourish.83

Duplicitous Stratagems In Khan’s view, the rhetoric of noncooperation was a ruse devised by Gandhi and the Hindu nationalist leadership to decimate Muslims socially, financially, and physically: Gandhi had incited Muslim leaders to wage jihad against the British so that the Muslim community would be crushed in an uneven battle. When that plan failed, he tried to convince Muslims to emigrate from India so that their houses and property could be auctioned off to Hindus for paltry sums or simply be occupied. When that also failed, he tried to rope Muslims into the noncooperation movement. Seemingly a movement for political freedom, its underlying purpose, in fact, was for Muslims to abandon their jobs, government posts, and membership in council committees so that Hindus could usurp important positions of wealth, power, and prestige. Ultimately, these measures were meant to rob Muslims of all socioeconomic and political strength and, as a result, to ensure the complete domination of Hindus in all domains of life.84 Showcasing a mindset according to which Muslim decline necessarily meant, and was inversely proportional to, Hindu progress, Khan wrote: “When Hindus usurp all Muslim jobs and property, the only work left for Muslims to do would be to work as baggage porters (kulli or coolie) at train stations.”85 According to Khan, the leaders of the Khilafat movement, either knowingly or unknowingly, had fallen right into Gandhi’s trap: they advocated positions that were at once logically untenable, self-­destructive, and [ 143 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies impossible. For instance, the idea of waging jihad against the British was only inviting catastrophe. But this raises an important question: Without waging war, how should Indian Muslims deal with a non-­Muslim colonizing force such as the British? In answering this question, Khan advocated the curious position that, while engaging the British, Muslims should simply adopt an attitude of superficial or masked friendship (muwalat-­i suwariyya), to be distinguished from substantive friendship based on affection and intimacy (muwalat-­i haqiqiyya). This way, they would both safeguard the normative boundaries of friendship in Islam while protecting their lives, property, and interests.86 But, Khan insisted, to mount war against a towering imperial force, as Azad and his colleagues suggested, was not only logically dumbfounding; it also contravened the Islamic legal doctrine that states “Do not throw yourselves in the path of destruction (la tulqu anfusakum ila al-­tahluka).” Suppose a few hundred Muslims did indeed leave their jobs, abandon their landholdings, and shut down their businesses. What harm would that do to the might of the British? What benefit would it bring to the already dwindling Ottoman state? All that Muslims would achieve would be to harm themselves by weakening their status and position.87 And it was wishful thinking, Khan warned, that the Hindus would follow suit; they were sure to leave Muslims in the lurch while reaping the benefits of their departure.88 Rehearsing a long-­running Hanafi legal opinion, Khan was also emphatic in declaring that British India represented an “abode of Islam” (dar al-­Islam) and not an abode of war or non-­Muslim territory (dar al-­harb), because foundational Muslim laws and devotional rituals (e.g., congregational prayers) remained current. A territory only becomes dar al-­harb if only non-­Muslim laws were operative in the public sphere, with not a single Muslim norm or law enforced.89 Therefore, there was no normative justification, rationally or legally, to call on Indian Muslims to leave their homes and migrate to a different territory, as Azad and some other Khilafat movement leaders had done. In Khan’s view, the Khilafat and noncooperation movements were not only ill conceived, but their leaders were insincere and dishonest. If the leaders of the Khilafat movement were truly serious about abandoning all relations with the British, they would also have abandoned the use of British technologies such as the postal system, the telegraph, and the railways.90 All [ 144 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies that such selective anti-­imperialism could achieve, he grimly concluded, would be the wasting of large sums of money and resources for a lost political cause, and an assault on the livelihood of Muslim farmers, agriculturalists, and laborers in the guise of noncooperation.

Imperial Hermeneutics Among the most fascinating aspects of Khan’s hermeneutics was the way he took for granted the imperial logic and context of medieval and early modern Islamic law, even at a moment when Muslims—­in India or elsewhere—­ were no longer possessors of empire, but were, rather, colonized subjects. This problem of politico-­conceptual translation, at the kernel of this book, is most visible in Khan’s discussion of the only kinds of relationships that Muslims could cultivate with Hindus. More specifically, he addressed the question of when it was permissible for Muslims to seek the help or assistance of non-­Muslims who were not among the People of the Book (Jews and Christians). According to him, there were three scenarios of relationships that might exist between the givers and receivers of assistance: imploration (iltija), reliance (i‘timad), and domination (istikhdam).91 Muslims, Khan argued, could only receive the help of Hindus in the case of domination, which he described as a situation in which “an unbeliever is completely under the control of Muslim rule and has no power to oppose Islam and Muslims in any way.”92 In this situation, when non-­Muslim helpers are entirely subservient to Muslims, assistance can only elevate and exalt Islam, such as through the assistance of a Muslim army during war. In this situation, even if the non-­ Muslim harbors hatred toward Muslims, he will not be able to express that hate because of his absolute subservience to and extreme fear of Muslims. Khan likened such a subservient subject to a dog: “The help of only those non-­Muslims is permitted who are like domesticated dogs for Muslims. This situation would be analogous to a hunter seeking the help of a dog for hunting. A hunter would only use a dog that has been completely domesticated and has no interest except to help the hunter however he wished. Similarly, only those non-­Muslims can be sought for help who are like hunting dogs, with no agency or interest of their own, and who are used as mere instruments by Muslims.”93 [ 145 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies The medieval and early modern Muslim legal texts that Khan cited to make his case clearly presumed the context of Muslim imperial rule. For instance, consider the reason presented as to why Muslims must not depend on the help of unbelievers (unless it was absolutely necessary) by the Hanafi jurist Ibn ‘Abidin in his famous commentary Radd al-­Muhtar on the canonical seventeenth-­century Hanafi legal text al-­Durr al-­Mukhtar by ‘Ala al-­Din al-­Haskafi (d. 1677). Ibn ‘Abidin argued that such dependence was prohibited because one could never erase the suspicion that unbelievers will commit treason against the state (la yu’min ghadrahu).94 Similarly, Ibn ‘Abidin recounted that when the second caliph in Sunni Islam, ‘Umar Ibn al-­Khattab (d. 646), learned that his associate Abu Musa al-­Ash‘ari (d. 672) had appointed an unbeliever as an official scribe, he repudiated this appointment with an arresting set of comments: “It is not appropriate for us to take unbelievers as confidantes when God has declared them untrustworthy; we cannot elevate them when God has accorded them a lowly status, and we cannot exalt them when God has mandated them to pay [us] the poll tax ( jizya) as a marker of their subservience.’ ”95 In both of these examples, the assumption of Muslim imperial sovereignty is crucial to the way the difference between Muslims and non-­Muslims is understood. But, in his mobilization of these premodern sources of authority, Khan did not account for the political shift from a Muslim to a non-­ Muslim empire. For him, the canonical tradition was immune to the mutability of historical conditions. The task of hermeneutics was not creative translation, but the faithful recreation and reenactment of the past in the present.

Preserving a Moral Public Finally, Khan argued that, even if one hypothetically assumed that no Hindu in India harbored any aggression toward Islam, Azad’s efforts to cultivate a relationship of intimate friendship between Hindus and Muslims still contravened the sharia. This was so because, although verse 8 of Surah Mumtahana permitted Muslims to show basic kindness to noncombative non-­Muslims, it did not sanction a relationship of unrestrained intimacy. However, Khan asserted, in their zeal to please Gandhi, Azad and his [ 146 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies compatriots had blatantly transgressed the limits of friendship sanctioned in Surah Mumtahana.96 They had done so by fostering a public sphere in which Muslim markers of distinction (shi‘ar-­i Islam) had all but been erased as Hindus were granted unbridled friendship, intimacy, and privilege. Khan was particularly incensed by an episode in which the Muslim leaders of the Khilafat movement had invited Gandhi to a mosque on a Friday to address the gathered congregants. For him, this moment epitomized the complete disregard of these leaders for Muslim norms and traditions. By extending to Gandhi the most elevated position of privilege in a Muslim mosque during Friday prayers, the pulpit, they had proven beyond doubt that they regarded him as their ultimate religious guide and leader (imam). Khan labeled Gandhi with the derogatory Qur’anic term taghut, or “evil idol,” declaring that Azad and his cohort of Muslim scholars had taken the taghut of the Hindus as their imam.97 If left unchecked, Khan warned, the day was not far off when the leaders of the Khilafat movement would make Indian Muslims worship Gandhi as part of their religious lives. Soon, he predicted, the canonical supplication in the five daily prayers “[O God] grant us the straight path” (ihdina al-­sirat al-­mustaqim) would be replaced with the statement “Grant us Gandhi’s path” (ihdina al-­sirat al-­Gandhi).98 The hyperbole of this suggestion aside, at the heart of Khan’s protest was a very palpable anxiety over what he saw as a looming threat to the distinguishing signs and markers of Islam in the public sphere. A key term that Khan repeatedly mobilized in his text—­and one that we will encounter repeatedly in the remainder of this book—­was the “distinctive markers of Islam” (shaʿaʾir-­i Islam, sing. shi‘ar-­i Islam). In Khan’s social imaginary, a moral economy in which the boundaries of religious identity were not carefully regulated was sure to extinguish the characteristic public markers and manifestations of that religion. Note the combination of alarm and anxiety in the way Khan described the threat posed to Indian Muslim identity by a libertine attitude toward the boundaries of friendship with Hindus: This verse [verse 8 of Surah Mumtahana] only permits showing basic kindness to non-­Muslims. It does not say make them your intimate friends, shower them with praise, make their taghut [Gandhi] your imam, invite them to your mosques to give sermons on Fridays, say prayers for the salvation of their deceased, perform funeral prayers for them, shut down the market on the day of their death,

[ 147 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies not eat cow’s meat for their happiness, ridicule those who do, treat cow’s meat as if it were pork, and take the Qur’an and the Ramayana side by side to their temples.99

As this comment makes clear, at stake for Khan in his tussle with Azad was the imperative of protecting the normative purity of Islam from what he saw as the threat of internal and external “others.” Most importantly, his position on the boundaries of friendship in the Qur’an was inextricably tied to the way he imagined a moral public and the public performance of Islam as a lived tradition. The promise of Muslim political power entailed not the protection or resurrection of a Muslim state but the preservation and cementing of Muslim distinction in everyday life and practice. *

*

*

There is thus a subtle but crucial difference in the conceptual space occupied by the category of muwalat in Azad’s and Khan’s projects. For Azad, the political meaning of muwalat, of alliance or clientage, was of crucial significance, as reflected in his call for Muslims to dissociate themselves from the British state. In contrast, for Khan, the desire to patrol the rhythms and patterns of everyday communal and public life was of central importance.100 One may put this differently by arguing that at the heart of Azad’s and Khan’s disagreement were varied and at times opposing imaginaries of a moral “Indian Muslim public” that in turn corresponded to competing visions of the political during a moment marked by the absence of Muslim political sovereignty. In Khan’s social imaginary, most crucial to the curation of a moral public was the practice of everyday life. Central to his discourse was the anxiety around guarding the normative purity of public markers of distinction that, in his view, symbolized Muslim identity, and that he found urgently threatened by corruption and extinction. With the erasure of the Muslim state following the rebellion of 1857, the focus of attention for religious reformers such as Khan shifted to regulating quotidian practices and the everyday performance of religion in the public sphere. The practice of everyday life was increasingly seen as the linchpin and locus of sovereign power. For Khan, preserving a distinct religious identity as manifested in the public choreography of religious practices trumped the importance of restoring political institutions such as the caliphate. In fact, he did not even consider the Ottomans legitimate occupants of the caliphate because they [ 148 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies did not trace their lineage to the Prophet’s tribe of the Quraysh.101 On this point, even one of Azad’s foremost mentors, the famous traditionalist scholar with modernist leanings Shibli Nu‘mani (d. 1914), who was among the pioneers of the internationally well-­k nown Nadwat al-­‘Ulama’ seminary, had taken the very position that Khan had. Nu‘mani died in 1914, well before the Khilafat movement took steam. However, it is useful to note that in direct contradiction to his eminent admirers and pupils in the movement like Azad and Sayyid Sulayman Nadvi (d. 1953), Nu‘mani had argued in unambiguous terms that lineage of the Quraysh represented a prerequisite for the caliphate. Thus, the Ottomans or any other non-­Quraysh Muslim rulers who had arrogated to themselves this category were in fact only kings and Sultans.102 Ahmad Raza Khan could not have agreed with Nu‘mani more, even though he had otherwise bitterly opposed the Nadwat al-­Ulama and its ideological foundations throughout his career. More fundamentally, for Khan, reenacting the memory of Muslim empire did not require preserving or erecting the caliphate. Rather, the fantasy of sovereignty and the desire to establish the supremacy of Islam and the Muslim subject hinged on protecting the purity of religious identity from the threatening contagion of the Other in everyday life and practice. It is not the acquisition of a state, caliphal or otherwise, but the cultivation of Muslim distinction in the public sphere that secured sovereign power in the ruins of empire. On the other hand, Abu’l Kalam Azad’s conception of a moral public and sovereign power brought together the national and the transnational. In his view, the integrity of Indian Muslim identity pivoted on restoring and safeguarding what he saw as the foremost symbol of the universal Muslim community and Muslim political sovereignty: the caliphate. It was not the purity of religious practices, but the symbolic capital of Muslim political unity, that he found most critical for the sustenance of a moral public. The normative legitimacy of even obligatory practices like praying and fasting depended on guarding the sovereignty of the caliph. In other words, political sovereignty—­or, more specifically, caliphal sovereignty—­represented a precondition for even the possibility of performing one’s religion in the public sphere. In turn, the way Azad mobilized the idea of muwalat or friendship with reference to Indian Muslims was also informed by the political objective of restoring the sovereignty of the universal Muslim public: the local and the universal were mutually entangled. In short, both Azad’s and Khan’s [ 149 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies understandings of Hindu-­Muslim friendship and its limits were inextricably tied to competing visions of Muslim sovereign power in conditions of colonial modernity, and those contrasting visions of sovereignty informed their conception of the idea and boundaries of the public they sought to address, persuade, and galvanize. Put differently, at stake in this intra-­ Muslim debate was the following question: In the absence and aftermath of Muslim imperial sovereignty, where does one locate sovereign power—­in aspirational bulwarks of universal Muslim solidarity like the caliphate, or in the choreography and spatiality of everyday ritual life? And, in turn, what promise and peril do interreligious friendship and hospitality pose to such sovereign fantasies? This is the underlying problem space that I have sought to interrogate in what has preceded. I want to end this chapter by highlighting two further conceptual arguments that also connect with the broader arguments of this book. First, notice that the disagreement between Azad and Khan described in this chapter is unavailable for canonization into such binaries as traditional/ modern, religious/secular, liberal/conservative, and so on. Consider, for instance, that despite all his anxiety over the preservation of an authentic Indian Muslim identity, it was the traditionalist Khan who adopted the more pragmatic position of engaging the British in a relationship of “apparent” friendship and of avoiding war against them. By contrast, it was the more modernist-­oriented Azad who called for jihad against the British as well as the preservation and restoration of the caliphate, a desire often imputed exclusively to conservative/fundamentalist Muslims. On the other hand, while enraged at the public exaltation of Gandhi in Muslim sacred spaces and at the cultivation of Hindu-­Muslim intimacy, Khan did not seem much perturbed by the absence of a Muslim caliphate. All of this is not to endorse or undermine any of these positions, but just to highlight the conceptual fragility of categories like traditional, modern, liberal, and conservative. While these categories might be useful for heuristic purposes, their limitations become all too obvious when set against the complicated discursive maneuvers and strategies through which the boundaries of a normative tradition are authoritatively contested. Both Azad and Khan presented what they saw as normatively coherent understandings of tradition as they strove to articulate and defend their specific ideological and political projects. Rather than rushing to categorize [ 150 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies their hermeneutical attitudes into readily available binaries, it would be more productive to approach such moments of intra-­Muslim contestation as “competing rationalities of tradition,” each with its own logic of how the memory of the prophetic past should inform the fashioning of a moral public in the present.103 Second, even as Khan and Azad mobilized competing interpretations of the Qur’an and Muslim tradition, their polemic was made possible in the first place by the secularizing conditions of colonial modernity, much like the polemic of Shahjahanpur discussed in the previous chapter. More specifically, Azad’s and Khan’s polemical encounter was informed and generated by a secular politico-­conceptual terrain marked by the emergence of modern citizenship as a political imperative, the epistemic valorization of secularism and its categories as desired ideals (as seen in Azad’s reminder to the British of their secular responsibility to ensure religious freedom and neutrality; a reminder we will also find Khan making in the next chapter), and the preponderance of an enumerated logic of identity, whereby identity can only be counted as such if it can distinguish itself from its competing “others” (as obvious in Khan’s thought). Even before they had entered the arena of this polemic, the conditions and rules that governed that arena had been put in place by the colonial state. Therefore, for instance, even while chastising the colonial state for its aggression against the Ottomans, Azad had fully internalized the modern secular premise that the state by its nature acts on “behalf” of society and its citizens so that it should be boycotted when it fails to do so.104 Similarly, Ahmad Raza Khan’s urgent concern over maintaining the purity of religious identity in the public sphere assumed the existence of a distinct, enumerated “Indian Muslim public” that cried out to be reformed, warned, and pastorally protected—­a public that was not only countable, but also accountable to its identity in relation to competing “others.”105 Such an accountable notion of identity was in complete harmony with the promise of securing and maintaining the authenticity of a fully defined religion that corresponded with an equally-­defined public that “belonged” to, and acted on behalf of that religion. Indeed, the reification of modern citizenship and that of religion went hand in hand. While Azad and Khan were products of different lineages of Muslim thought in South Asia, and though they premised their arguments on competing readings of a premodern tradition, their intellectual and political [ 151 ]

Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies programs were—­albeit in different ways—­haunted by the specter of modern secular power. Just as there was nothing new about a Muslim scholar like Qasim Nanautvi debating scholars of other religious traditions about Islam’s authenticity (see chapter 2), so, too, there was nothing new about the idea of two authoritative Muslim scholars contesting the import of Qur’anic verses and of the legal canon more broadly on the limits of Muslim identity in relation to non-­Muslims. But, again, just as in Nanautvi’s case, what was decisively new was the normative logic of what counted as authoritative as such, animated and inspired by the desires, aspirations, and anxieties brought to life by the enveloping shadow of the modern colonial moment. Another discursive and political site of intra-­Muslim contest on the boundaries of Hindu-­Muslim friendship that generated copious controversy as well as remarkable intellectual fermentation during the Khilafat Movement era centered on the question of cow sacrifice and interreligious hospitality. In the next chapter, I examine a critical fragment of this contest.

[ 152 ]

FOUR

The Cow and the Caliphate

ON THE NIGHT of September 28, 2015, a mob of villagers, armed with sticks and bricks, encircled the house of a fifty-­year-­old Muslim ironsmith, Mohammad Akhlaq, in the district of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, North India. The mob had been spurred to agitation after Akhlaq’s neighbor, Prem Singh, aired the allegation three days earlier that he saw Akhlaq, with help from the latter’s family members, slaughter a calf for beef. It is still unclear whether or not Akhlaq had indeed slaughtered a calf, but the mere allegation rendered him and his family vulnerable to the wrath of Hindu nationalists. As anthropologist Radhika Govindrajan has instructively argued in her path-­paving book Animal Intimacies, in Hindu nationalist imaginaries that drive the cow protection movement, the cow serves as an “undifferentiated and abstract metaphor of the cow mother [gau mata] of the Hindu nation” that does not “sit easily with the distinct and lively materiality of the actual cows” it seeks to represent.1 This “incommensurability” between the cow as an abstract metaphor of Hindu nationalism and its embodied everyday materiality proved fatal for Akhlaq, as it has for countless others like him. On that late September night, the suspicion that Akhlaq had slaughtered a cow was seen by the mob surrounding his house as equivalent to injuring the honor and dignity of the Hindu “people” and “nation.” Akhlaq was brutally murdered, and his twenty-­t wo-­year-­old son critically wounded. The 18 men accused of murdering Akhlaq were released on bail two years later; the trial has yet to begin. Meanwhile, rather than offering solace, the [ 153 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate local police lodged a First Information Report (FIR) against Akhlaq’s younger brother Muhammad Jan and his other family members, accusing them of cow slaughter. They continue to deny the charge, while negotiating the double burden of mourning their unspeakable loss with the constant threat of arrest and state brutality.2 The “Dadri lynching,” as it has come to be known, was not the first such incident. Nonetheless, it marked a watershed moment that presaged a series of gruesome beef lynchings that consumed mostly Muslim victims, primarily—­though not exclusively—­in Northern India, conducted by Hindu nationalist vigilante groups and private armies. According to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, between 2015 and 2018 over one hundred cow vigilante attacks left 36 Muslims dead and 280 wounded.3 The numbers multiply every week and month. As the anthropologist Parvis Ghassem-­Fachandi argues in his splendid and spellbinding ethnography of the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat, key to the organizing logic of Hindu nationalist violence against Muslims and other minorities in India is the naturalization of the assumption that renders an otherwise “internally divided minority simultaneously unified and external.”4 Meat eating and animal sacrifice occupy a pivotal place in the discursive and political arena of Hindu stereotyping of Muslims that authorizes horrific episodes of Hindu nationalist violence like the Gujarat pogrom or the cow lynchings.5 More recently, feminist anthropologist Naisargi Dave has eloquently argued that Hindu nationalist violence on religious minorities is not the only useful frame with which to approach human/nonhuman animal encounters in India. Affective attachments with the cow, which attune the sensoria in distinct ways and perpetuate varied modes of violence and injustices, also pervade the discourses and practices of self-­ascribed “progressive” animal rights activists.6 This chapter builds on the work of scholars like Dave, Ghassem-­ Fachandi, and Govindrajan by showing that investing political aspirations in the body of the cow as an index and marker of religious purity and superiority is not a solely Hindu phenomenon. As I seek to show by taking readers to a moment almost exactly a century ago, the cow represented a site of tremendous anxiety and opportunity for competing groups of prominent Indian Muslim scholars as well. If cow protection is the desire that has propelled varied stripes of Hindu reformist, anticolonial, and nationalist actors and movements over the years, in modern Muslim contestations over the cow, it is the question of the normative [ 154 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate status of cow sacrifice in Islam that has generated fulsome debate and intellectual fermentation. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, as the Khilafat movement rolled ahead full steam, the question of cow slaughter emerged as a subject of tremendous contestation and controversy among South Asian Muslim scholars, generating copious and passionate responses. While opinions on this matter varied considerably, for heuristic purposes we can posit two broad tendencies found among the Muslim scholarly elite. On the one hand, scholars attached to the Khilafat movement urged the Indian Muslim masses to refrain from cow slaughter and sacrifice so as not to offend the normative sensibilities of the Hindu community. Their exhortation that Indian Muslims keep away from cow sacrifice and instead sacrifice other animals like goats and sheep represented a key ingredient in their attempt to foster Hindu-­Muslim camaraderie, which in turn was central to their alliance with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. Recall from the last chapter that, by forging a political alliance with Gandhi through the promotion of Hindu-­Muslim friendship, leaders of the Khilafat movement had sought to pressure the British colonial state into preserving the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Caliphate. Crucially, their argument regarding abstention from cow sacrifice was based not on some abstract appeal to liberal pluralism, but on a specific reading of the Islamic legal tradition, premised on the observation that cow sacrifice is not an obligatory (wajib) but only a permissible (mubah) practice in Islamic law. Hence, refraining from it posed no normative pitfalls. One can name scholars like Qiyamudin ‘Abdul Bari (d. 1926) of the Farangi Mahal school, who is one of the major protagonists of this chapter, and, again, ‘Abu’l Kalam Azad, on whose thought the previous chapter focused, as prominent examples of scholars who held this position. Another group of Muslim scholars vigorously resisted this argument. They counterargued that cow sacrifice was a symbol of Muslim distinction in India, and that forsaking this practice amounted to the shame and humiliation of Muslims. While cow sacrifice and the consumption of beef were generally not obligatory, abandoning a distinctive symbol of Islam for the sake of appeasing and under the pressure and coercion of Hindus, they argued, was certainly forbidden. Therefore, by implication, for Indian Muslims, cow sacrifice was indeed obligatory. The founder of the traditionalist Barelvi orientation Ahmad Raza Khan, whom we met in the last chapter, was [ 155 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate one of the chief exponents of this argument; hence, he occupies a central place in this chapter as well. I argue that in this intra-­Muslim debate, which often took the form of an acerbic polemic, the cow served as the material and discursive battleground on which competing visions of the normative relationship between religious identity and difference, and boundaries of interreligious friendship, were articulated and contested. The cow, in other words, was normatively invested in opposing political aims and projects. However, while wrestling with complex legal and theological arguments about the normative status of abandoning cow sacrifice, ironically, these debates often ignored the materiality of the cow itself. For both the supporters and opponents of cow sacrifice, the body of the cow was invariably subsumed into the sledgehammer of law and legal hermeneutical gymnastics. As Jacques Derrida, in his widely read The Animal That Therefore I Am, has memorably written, “Men would be first and foremost those living creatures who have given themselves the word [animal] that enables them to speak of the animal with a single voice and to designate it as the single being that remains without a response, without a word with which to respond.”7 Nonetheless, despite the muted voice of the cow, the legal discourses and debates examined in this chapter are highly instructive for the way they present important insights into the interaction of religion and bovine politics in colonial South Asia. In her shining 2010 essay “Sacred Cows and Secular History: Cow Protection Debates in Colonial North India,” Cassie Adcock demonstrates the conceptual elisions and problems found in the translation of religion from the semantic frames of colonial discourse to vernacular writings on cow protection among indigenous elite such as the late nineteenth-­/early twentieth-­ century Arya Samaj scholars.8 This chapter tries to complement her work by tracking the discursive efforts of an influential segment of the Indian Muslim scholarly elite, writing around the same time period, to argue and debate not the protection but the sacrifice of cows. While we find some overlap in these parallel discursive registers, there exist important differences.

The Cow and the Colonial Discursive Economy The intra-­Muslim conflict over cow sacrifice that I will detail in this chapter unfolded in a colonial public sphere pulsating with competing voices and [ 156 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate normative claims, legal battles, and even violent contestations on the cow question. Interreligious tensions and violence over the consumption of beef and the sacrifice of cows were certainly not novel to the colonial period. However, as historian Rohit De nicely sums up, the nineteenth century saw a transformation in both the nature of the conflict and the way it was managed with the intrusion of the colonial state. . . . ​The reformulation of the cow question divided Hindus from Muslims (communities that had had a long experience with each other), upper-­caste Hindus from the lower castes, and Hindus from Britons (communities that were relative strangers). The colonial state came to be associated with beef consumption, and the British army became the largest buyers of beef. The colonial state had long been resistant to the idea of banning cow slaughter.9

As we will see, this resistance on the part of the colonial state converged and found common ground with the normative interests of Muslim scholars like Ahmad Raza Khan who were also invested in preventing any blanket ban on cow slaughter. And this less-­than-­enthusiastic attitude of the colonial state toward banning cow slaughter might also explain the increased litigation in colonial courts by Muslims “asserting their right to slaughter the cow” from the late nineteenth century onward.10 The heightened communal and political stakes of the cow intensified in particular in 1881, when the Arya Samaj, under the leadership of Dayananda Saraswati, established the hugely influential Cow Protection Society (Gorakshni Sabha) that sought to halt the slaughter of cattle in India and was especially active in Panjab and Northern India. From then on, “the cow emerged as a powerful anticolonial symbol and became the focus of both mobilization and violence through much of north India.”11 The ensuing violence was enormous and extensive. As De informs us, “In 1893 alone, a hundred people were killed in communal violence over cow slaughter in towns as far apart as Junagarh, Oudh, and Rangoon.”12 These episodes of violence tested as well as exposed the contradictory inconsistencies of the colonial state’s claims to religious neutrality. Moreover, despite its seemingly prohibitive stance toward banning cow slaughter, the state did indeed do so in places where cow slaughter, especially on the part of Muslims, threatened public order. To give a sense of how the colonial state recorded and addressed moments of interreligious violence [ 157 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate centered on cow slaughter, I want to present the contents of a particularly instructive telegram from the office of the viceroy Lord Lansdowne (d. 1927) in Shimla to London composed on June 27, 1893. Titled “Riot in Rangoon,” this telegram detailed the circumstances and consequences of a “communal riot” in Rangoon three days earlier, as relayed by the chief secretary of British Burma (name unknown). I am presenting the contents of the telegram exactly as they appear with no correctives: Serious riot occurred at Rangoon this morning in connection with Bakra Id festival. Considerable ill-­feeling between Mahomedans and Hindoos arose in consequence of declared intentions of former to kill cow in neighborhood of Hindu temple. Magistrate of the district issued order forbidding slaughter in this particular neighborhood, and a strong force of military police was sent to maintain order. At 8 this morning attack was made on police by the Mahomedans in considerable force. Street fighting continued about half an hour, during which police with difficulty held their own. Commissioner of the Division, who was present, was struck by several missiles. Magistrate of the district was wounded in the head by a brickbat. Many policemen wounded. One police pony killed. British troops were sent for but pending arrival it became necessary to open fire on rioters. Some 14 were killed, and others wounded before riot was suppressed. All quiet now, British troops are holding the streets. Chief Commissioner on tour: expected back tomorrow. Exact number of police on the ground was 180, of whom 107 more or less damaged. Six in hospital, of whom one wounded severely.13

This account of brute violence in the most mundane bureaucratic register starkly reveals the perniciously contradictory operations of colonial state power that seeks to curb the emotional excess of the riot prone native and establishes peace and “quiet” precisely through excessive inordinate violence. In addition to colonial state archives, controversies over the cow question populated the press and other popular culture venues. For instance, the November 1881 issue of the famous satirical Urdu weekly Awadh Punch (also Oudh Punch) published from Lucknow between 1877 and 1937 and modeled on the London-­based weekly magazine Punch ran an image (see fig. 4.1) of a cow with the head and ears of a donkey being pulled in opposite directions by a group of Muslim butchers on one side and Hindus of different castes on the other.14 Above the cow we see written the word taʿassub (bigotry, intolerance), thus framing cow slaughter through a modernist lens as [ 158 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate

FIGURE 4.1 Cow image from the November 1881 Issue of Awadh Punch.

a contentious issue that placed the body of the cow in the crossfire of competing varieties of religious obscurantism. These are some fragments of the contextual arena in which the intra-­Muslim disagreement over cow sacrifice that occupies the rest of this chapter unfolded. Historical and contemporary discussions on the cow have a tendency to view it primarily as a problem of Hindu-­Muslim relations and contest. In what follows, I plan to present a prominent example of an avid yet sophisticated intra-­Muslim debate on cow sacrifice and its implications for Hindu-­Muslim friendship. For purposes of focus, in this chapter I will center my attention on two illustrative and hugely influential examples of Muslim scholarly engagements with the cow question by considering the opposing views on this matter of Ahmad Raza Khan and the incredibly versatile, prolific, and yet less-­studied doyen of Muslim traditionalism in South Asia, ‘Abdul Bari of the Farangi Mahal school. In slight but important contrast from the last chapter, the Khan-­Bari debate brought into view two giants of late Sunni traditionalism in South Asia who offered competing readings of the sharia on cow [ 159 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate politics and the boundaries of interreligious difference. While familiar with the traditionalist normative archive, Abu’l Kalam Azad’s ideological and hermeneutical temperament, as seen in his primary reliance on the Qur’an and his openness to subverting long-­r unning traditionalist normative assumptions (e.g., prerequisite of Quraysh lineage for the mantle of caliphate), exhibited a noticeably modernist outlook. The traditionalist-­modernist divide is, of course, often blurry and should not be viewed as absolutely predetermined by any means. Nonetheless, it is useful and important to be aware of the subtle yet consequential shift in hermeneutical aesthetics and operations that mark the texture of the intra-­Muslim disagreement described in this chapter. Let me begin by returning to another formidable traditionalist player in the galaxy of the South Asian scholarly elite, Ahmad Raza Khan, and conducting a close reading of his important and widely circulated, cited, and contested text The Finest Viewpoint on Cow Sacrifice (Anfus al-­Fikr fi Qurban al-­ Bakr; henceforth The Finest Viewpoint). This Urdu text, liberally interspersed with Arabic, was composed as a legal opinion (fatwa) in 1880. As discussed in the previous chapter, Khan was at the center of intra-­Muslim debates and battles surrounding the normative boundaries of friendship with non-­Muslims, especially Hindus, in the intensely competitive context of colonial North India. The question of cow sacrifice was among the most controversial and incendiary matters in this whirlpool of debates and polemics, and The Finest Viewpoint is Ahmad Raza Khan’s most detailed and comprehensive attempt to address the issue. In what follows, I will consider this text and a number of Khan’s other legal opinions on this topic of cow sacrifice and its relationship to Hindu-­Muslim encounters, written in response to queries from different parts of India, spanning the late nineteenth century until his death in 1921. Khan vigorously disagreed with scholars like ‘Abdul Bari who had called for the cessation of cow sacrifice by assembling the somewhat counterintuitive and massively consequential legal argument that, for Indian Muslims, cow sacrifice was not just permissible but indeed obligatory. By tracing the highlights and trajectory of his argument, I will explore ways in which Khan presented cow sacrifice as a symbol of Muslim distinction (shi‘ar-­i Islam). I argue that, while Khan’s anxieties over preserving public markers of Muslim distinction were animated by the condition of being a colonized minority, the normative imaginary that shaped and laced his discourse was steeped in an imperial Muslim political theology. In the absence [ 160 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate of political sovereignty, the cow—­or, more accurately, the death of the cow—­ held the promise of Muslim sovereign power and dominance in the realm of ritual life. The sacrificed cow was not only a marker and symbol of Muslim distinction; on it also hinged the gift of sovereign power during a moment fraught with the crisis of sovereignty. For Khan, cow sacrifice on special devotional occasions like Eid/‘Id (the Urdu qurbani or the Arabic udhiya) and cow slaughter for everyday purposes (gau kushi), though ritually distinct, were nonetheless part of the same ritual economy and thus normatively overlapping. In other words, both cow sacrifice and slaughter were important markers of Muslim ritual distinction. Even if cow sacrifice on days like Eid was a more devotionally charged act, its distinction from everyday cow slaughter was only a matter of ritual procedure and not one that could be mapped onto the secular binary of sacrifice and mere killing.

The Promise and Anxiety of Muslim Distinction Khan composed The Finest Viewpoint in response to the following question posed to him by a questioner from Muradabad in 1880: In the Hanafi school of law [the predominant Muslim legal school in South Asia], is cow sacrifice an obligatory practice such that abandoning it would constitute a sin that harms a Muslim’s salvation or puts him/her outside the fold of Islam? What about someone who believes cow sacrifice and the consumption of beef as permissible but does not actually sacrifice cows or consume beef? Would the salvational prospects of such a person be injured? Is there any sin attached to a Muslim who while understanding cow sacrifice a permissible practice nonetheless refrains from it in consideration of the disorder and unrest that this act might generate, potentially bringing harm to the Muslim community?15

The hermeneutical puzzle at the heart of this set of questions has to do with the nonobligatory status of cow sacrifice and beef consumption in Islamic law, in which practices are broadly categorized as obligatory (e.g., praying, fasting), forbidden (e.g., alcohol consumption, eating pork), or as simply permissible, meaning practices the commission or omission of which bear no salvational consequences. Generally, cow sacrifice falls under this last category; it is neither obligatory nor forbidden. The interpretive challenge [ 161 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate confronting Ahmad Raza Khan was thus to show that, in the specific context of colonial India, cow sacrifice was not simply permissible but, in fact, obligatory. The centerpiece of Khan’s argument lay in his attempt to draw on and highlight the dynamicity of the Islamic legal tradition. Before venturing into the specifics of his argument, Khan elucidated its theoretical underpinnings by reminding his readers of the elasticity of law and normativity in Islam. Rehearsing an oft-­cited example to make his point, Khan emphasized that, during the Prophet’s life, women were allowed entrance in mosques to offer the five daily prayers. But, in the years following his death, as the Muslim community expanded, and the threat of moral chaos (fitna) through sexual attraction became more palpable, women were barred from entering mosques. Despite their seeming opposition, there was no contradiction between these two normative positions; the latter modification in the law was a reflection of the demands of a new set of conditions.16 The larger principle at work here is that the “legal ruling [on a given matter] revolves around the effective cause [informing that ruling]” (inna al-­hukm yaduru maʿ ʿilatihi).17 The normative value of a practice (e.g., obligatory, forbidden), Khan asserted, was contingent on the conditions in which that practice takes place. He explained that obligations and prohibitions stipulated in the sharia depended not only on the intrinsic nature of an act (li-­ʿayniha) but also on the external conditions and context that enwrap that act (li-­ghayriha). Applying this theoretical frame to the specific question at hand, Khan elaborated that, in the context of colonial India, cow sacrifice represented among the foremost signs and markers of Muslim distinction. This category of Shi‘ar (pl. Sha‘air) or public markers of Muslim distinction was critical both to Khan’s hermeneutical apparatus as well as to modern South Asian Muslim discourses on religion and difference more generally. Referred to in the Qur’an primarily with regard to Muslim obligatory practices like the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj), in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century South Asian Islam the category of shi‘ar became cemented as an index of Muslim distinction in a much wider ambit of everyday rituals and practices. At the heart of Khan’s argument was the claim that since cow sacrifice was a public marker of Muslim distinction, it signified Islam’s honor and dominance in the public sphere. In the absence of Muslim political sovereignty, it was in ritual life and performance that power was enshrined. In effect, abandoning such a practice for the appeasement or under the pressure of a [ 162 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate non-­Muslim community like the Hindus amounted to Islam’s humiliation. As Khan poignantly put it, “Our sharia can never desire our humiliation.”18 Therefore, while cow sacrifice was certainly not obligatory in and of itself, in the context of colonial India deliberately refraining from this practice as an exercise in interreligious hospitality was not permissible. Why? Because this involved the extinction of a marker of Muslim distinction and, in effect, the diminution and humiliation of Islam and the elevation of Islam’s rivals. Moreover, Khan emphasized that one must not frame the issue in terms of whether Indian Muslims can abandon cow sacrifice or not. Taking to task even his questioner from Muradabad, who had used the word “abandon” (tark) in his question, Khan insisted that at work here was not the decision to abandon a practice, but the compulsion to forcibly cease (kaff) a practice. This distinction between willful abandonment or tark and compulsive cessation or kaff was crucial to Khan’s argument. The humiliation to Islam and Muslims lay precisely in being compelled to keep away from a ritual practice (bi’l jabar baz rakhna) due to the pressure of the Hindu community generally, and of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress in particular.19 As Khan commented, addressing his opponents who had argued that, according to Islamic law, Muslims were free to choose whether or not they wished to partake in cow sacrifice: “Yes, you are free to choose on the question of sacrifice, but you have no authority to block and extinguish a marker of Muslim distinction for the sake of pacifying the enemies of Islam.”20 Continuing his Schmittian flair with clearly marked friends and enemies, Khan thundered, “Those who seek to befriend the enemies of Islam are themselves Islam’s enemies. Those who befriend them become one of them. Such people are not scholars; they are tyrants (‘alim nahin zalim hayn). They will spend their afterlife alongside the Hindu Idolaters.”21 Khan’s hermeneutical program articulated and assumed an imperial Muslim political theology whereby the underlying purpose of law was the maintenance and preservation of Islam’s dominance and power. Law represented a simulacrum for power. Moreover, Khan’s legal imaginary took for granted the grammar and assumptions of empire that had informed the formulation of concepts like markers of Muslim distinction in medieval and early modern texts composed in the context of Islamdom. Despite the colonized status of Muslims in modern India, Khan assumed the perfect translatability of discursive concepts and desires intimately entangled with the [ 163 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate condition of premodern Muslim political sovereignty. Worthy to note is the ambiguity involved in the presumption of temporal uniformity that authorizes the seamless inheritance of tradition even after radical transformations in the historical vectors informing the constitution of that tradition. And, even more importantly, note Khan’s insistence on situating power in the domain of ritual life. For Khan, the ideal of Muslim dominance or the threat of humiliation was firmly tethered to the public performance of rituals and practices that marked the distinction of Indian Muslims over competing others. It was not the curation of a Muslim state but, rather, the curation and regulation of a moral Muslim public that occupied his political energies. More specifically, in Khan’s thought, the promise of sovereign power for an imagined Indian Muslim community depended on and was made possible by the sacrifice and erasure of the bovine body. Put more simply, the gift of a sovereign Muslim life was inextricably entwined to the death of the cow.

Negotiating Colonial Power Khan’s articulation and presumption of an imperial Muslim political theology did not mean that he was oblivious to or that he ignored the reality of British colonial power, however. Exactly to the contrary, he was not only keenly aware of British presence but also closely attuned to the opportunities and benefits afforded by that presence. For instance, while arguing for the preservation of Muslim markers of distinction, Khan frequently invoked the colonial promise of tolerance toward individual religious communities and of its commitment to ensuring the freedom of religion. Pressuring Indian Muslims to abstain from cow sacrifice, he often proclaimed, “represented an abomination that the [colonial] authorities should never allow.”22 There are two aspects of Khan’s engagement with the colonial state and law that I wish to especially highlight. First, among his central strategic moves was to establish concordance between the objectives of colonial law and the operative logics of Islamic jurisprudence. Remember, Khan had argued that even though cow sacrifice was not in essence a religious obligation in Islamic law, Muslims were not allowed to be coerced into abandoning this practice. This was because succumbing to such coercion would bring shame and humiliation to the Muslim community, an outcome that cannot [ 164 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate be tolerated in Islamic law. Now Khan connected this premodern logic of Islamic jurisprudence to the modern colonial discourse on coercion. He claimed that the British should never allow the fracturing of a religious community’s honor and freedom by tolerating its subjection to coercive subjugation. In effect, Khan stitched disparate yet intersecting threads in colonial and Islamic law to weave an overlapping discursive project. Second, in trying to demonstrate that precluding Muslims from the ritual of cow sacrifice constituted a breach of religious freedom, he first had to prove that this ritual was indeed wholly and legitimately “religious.” This he sought to do most often by citing numerous Qur’anic verses and the Prophet’s sayings that establish cow sacrifice as among the distinguishing markers of Islam. The most prominent such verse (22:36) reads: “And as for the sacrifice of cattle, we have ordained it for you as among the symbols [of distinction] designated by God” (wa-­l budna ja‘alna-­ha lakum min sha‘air Allah).23 Similarly, in a prophetic report cited in all six canonical books of Hadith in Sunni Islam, the Prophet’s youngest wife and prolific Hadith narrator, ‘A’ishah bint Abi Bakr (d. 678), reported that “the Prophet had sacrificed a cow on behalf of his wives.” Also, the Prophet’s close companion Jabir bin ‘Abd Allah (d. 697) narrated that the Prophet had “commanded his Companions to sacrifice a cow or camel, one on behalf of seven people.”24 Khan’s objective in mobilizing such discursive fragments from the tradition was to prove, as he put it, that “cow sacrifice is a religious ritual for Muslims normatively sanctioned by the Qur’an [and Prophet’s normative model or Sunnah].”25 Having established the religious character of cow sacrifice, Khan proceed to remind colonial authorities of their duty to honor the principle of religious freedom (mazhabi azadi) in an evenhanded manner that does not privilege the sensibilities of one group over those of another. As he poignantly pleaded, “Does religious freedom mean that in affirming the position and priorities of one community, another is compelled to cease the performance of its critical religious rituals?”26 Khan was by no means a liberal secular champion of religious freedom as a normative ideal; what we find here instead is a seemingly illiberal actor’s strategic deployment of liberal desires and principles for the advancement of his own ideological and hermeneutical agenda, avidly participating in the process in the politics of “religion-­ making.” But this strategic deployment of the liberal ideal of “religious freedom” should not be read as an example of an exercise in “native agency” [ 165 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate either. Ultimately, he was drawn and conscripted into the task of contending with a set of conditions and categories (like “religious freedom”) that were not of his choosing or making but steeped in a new modern colonial discursive and political economy. Nonetheless, Khan displayed remarkable adeptness at negotiating the political and institutional terrain of colonial rule in a manner most conducive to the integrity and successful execution of his normative project. In among the most fascinating moves in this text, contrary to his broader argument that cow sacrifice was obligatory for Indian Muslims, Khan stipulated the qualifier that Indian Muslims should in fact refrain from cow sacrifice in those public spaces where the colonial government has outlawed this practice.27 They should not break the law or contribute to the incitement of disorder, he sternly advised. So, was this a gesture of affirming and embracing the virtues and duties of a good liberal citizen? Not quite. Here, again, Khan’s position was leavened first and foremost by the logic and imperative of securing Islam’s power and stature in the public sphere. Muslims should not contravene the law, Khan reasoned, because getting punished or arrested as a result of doing so will bring insult and humiliation to Islam. In turn, this will elevate the position of Islam’s rivals and enemies. Khan authorized his cautionary approach through a curious invocation of tradition: he cited the Qur’anic verse in which God warns Muslims “to not curse unbelievers, for they might respond by cursing God in their vituperative ignorance” (wa la tasabbu alladhina yad‘una min dun Allah fayasubbu Allah ʿadwan bi ghayr ʿilm).28 Note that, in this instance, Khan’s imperial political theology coalesced with the colonial regulation of the public sphere via the law. Also, Khan’s acquiescence to colonial law highlights the fact that, in addition to his apparently harsh and strict attitude on the issue of cow sacrifice, he was eminently capable of acting with unabashed pragmatism. He was not a radical exclusivist unhinged from the limits and power equations of the world he inhabited; rather, his exclusivism was carefully choreographed so as to deftly combine fidelity to the normative ideal of Muslim exceptionalism with the more pragmatic concern for negotiating the monstrosity of colonial power. Again, as part of this, he had little option but to negotiate the power and normative force of liberal secular categories of life like “public order” and “freedom of religion.” While he crafted his own arguments, the political and discursive terrain for which those arguments were crafted, and in which they traveled, was not of his making or choosing. [ 166 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate

Pragmatic Logics Imprints of pragmatism also inflected Khan’s discourse on cow sacrifice. His argument did not merely rest on legal and politico-­theological grounds aimed at securing Muslim distinction; he made frequent recourse to utilitarian forms of evidence demonstrating the benefits of cow sacrifice and the individual and communal harm that its cessation would usher. For instance, lashing out at rival Muslim scholars who had encouraged the sacrifice of goats and camels over cows, Khan noted the financial hardship that such substitution would bring for the destitute. Goat meat was too expensive for poor Muslims, and camels too rare to offer a viable alternative. The underprivileged depended on beef for their nutrition.29 Moreover, he argued, interrupting cow sacrifice one year makes it that much harder to resume it the next.30 He further insisted that the benefits of cow sacrifice were not only limited to Muslims. “The Hindus also share these benefits,” he reminded his readers, taking a strategic time-­out from his otherwise strident communalist attitude.31 For instance, the skin of the cow was usable for multiple purposes that all communities stood to benefit from, such as in the manufacture of shoes. Blocking such avenues of manufacturing would deprive the underprivileged from essential goods, snatch away the employment of thousands of people, and precipitate the loss of millions in the government’s treasury. Ultimately, Khan alarmingly predicted, denying the lower classes access to cow meat is sure to unleash economic unrest, inviting political chaos and upheaval.32 Members of all religious communities, not just Muslims, were vulnerable to the harm emanating from such economic catastrophe and chaos.

Comparative Religion Among the most fascinating aspects of Khan’s hermeneutic was his view on cow sacrifice in Hindu thought and practice. Donning the hat of a comparativist, Khan argued that the supposed sacrality attached to the cow was not part of “the original religion of the Hindus but was rather the invention of their moderns” (hunud ke ‘asal mazhab mayn kahin iss ki mumana‘at nahin).33 As he tellingly wrote, evincing an enthusiastic embrace of modern colonial [ 167 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate notions of religion and “Hinduism”: “The Vedas, which is the foundational source of the religion of the Hindus, explicitly allows cow sacrifice.”34 After all, he relished in pointing out, “the sources of the Hindu tradition amply testify that their ancients were not deprived of the pleasures of beef.”35 And, he continued, it is also well established that figures like “Ram, Krishan, and Laxman took part in animal and cow hunting.”36 Curiously, Khan’s line of argument here mirrors in many ways modernist contemporary Indian critiques of Hindu nationalist conceptions of cow sacrality. For instance, in his well-­k nown and highly controversial book The Myth of the Holy Cow, historian D. N. Jha, much like Ahmad Raza Khan, marshals copious references from the Vedas and other textual reservoirs of the Hindu tradition to establish the preponderance of cow sacrifice and beef consumption in early India. As Jha writes, in a comment that would only have pleased Khan, “The Rgveda frequently refers to the cooking of the flesh of the ox for offering to gods, especially Indra, the greatest of the Vedic gods who was strong-­armed, colossal, and a destroyer of enemy strongholds. At one place Indra states, ‘they cook for me fifteen plus twenty oxen.’ ”37 The convergence of hermeneutical operations between a seeming hardliner nineteenth-­century Muslim traditionalist and a contemporary secular modernist Indian historian is remarkable and serves as a useful reminder of the empirical brittleness of these categories. Ultimately, despite their markedly varied ideological projects, both Jha’s and Khan’s hermeneutic remains locked in a mode of text fundamentalism whereby refuting the claims and actions of one’s opponent must be premised on, and receive sanction from, establishing the divergence of those claims and actions from scripture. This desire to assemble incriminatory evidence from scriptural sources like the Vedas that show Hindu gods to have sacrificed cows and consumed beef does not account for the complex logics of the prominent place accorded to the cow in the Vedic ritual economy, hardly reducible to modern and contemporary debates over cow sacrifice or protection.38 Khan was particularly incensed by his opponents’ claim that cow sacrifice was not obligated by the Qur’an, and that such a suggestion was only the product of the later Islamic jurisprudential tradition (fiqh). As a rejoinder, he not only offered evidence from the Qur’an and sayings of Prophet Muhammad that established cow sacrifice as among the markers of Muslim distinction, as I showed earlier; he also questioned the logic of pressuring Muslims to find evidence justifying cow sacrifice in the Qur’an when the [ 168 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate taboo against cow sacrifice in the Hindu tradition was derived not from the “original Vedas” but the much later shastras. In a telling instance of interreligious translation, Khan challenged his opponents: “If they are intellectually honest, they must prove the prohibition on cow sacrifice from the Vedas. And if they will base their religion (mazhab) on the shastras, then they must also accept Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and the several texts associated with the Hanafi school of law as an equally legitimate foundation of our religion.”39 But, while calling out his opponents for their scripturalist bias, Khan proceeded to proffer his own scripturalist line of attack by mining instances of animal and cow sacrifice in the Vedas. By doing so, he sketched a rise-­and-­fall narrative of Hindu thought and practice in which the purity of a Vedic golden age was ruined by later traditions and scholars. The profound irony of the intimate resemblance of this narrative to the position of Hindu reform movements contemporaneous to Khan such as the Arya Samaj that were at the forefront of the cow protection movement is all too obvious. Finally, combining irony with derision, Khan highlighted the diversity of attitudes and practices regarding animal sacrifice found among Hindus. Some, he pointed out, “consider the sacrifice of any animal forbidden, at times even venturing to extreme cautionary measures like keeping their faces covered lest a fly enter the mouth and die.” 40 In contrast, “others pay no heed to any restrictions and consume and enjoy all kinds of meat with no hesitation.”41 With such divergent and conflicting attitudes within the Hindu community, Khan wondered, why must Muslims go out of their way in guarding Hindu religious sensitivities by issuing and fulfilling legal opinions (fatwa) banning cow sacrifice? Why should Indian Muslims strive so earnestly to not offend Hindu sensitivities on a matter on which Hindus themselves shared no consensus and were in fact embroiled in avid contest?42 That this was an unprofitable pursuit, Khan continued, was further reflected in the fact that Indian Muslims seldom got anything in return for this apparent demonstration of solidarity. As he protested, “Hindus would never halt for even a few hours chants and hymns that echo from their temples, especially those bordering mosques, that hurt Muslim sensibilities.” He gasped in exasperation: “What a lopsided exhibition of Hindu-­Muslim unity!”43 In his view, such unequal terms of friendship could only diminish the stature of Muslims and further amplify the imbalance of power. Presaging [ 169 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate lines of argument from almost a century later in contemporary India, Khan also warned against the effects of the precedent that forbidding cow sacrifice would set into motion. So, he anxiously prognosticated, under the pretext of guarding religious sensitivity and preventing public disorder, Hindus would be able to declare any number of animals sacred and have their killing banned. “Soon,” he mockingly remarked, “we would be forbidden even from killing venomous animals like snakes that pose a grave threat to humans because they are considered godly by some Hindus.”44 As a consequence, he more seriously worried, any Muslim ritual would become susceptible to being outlawed on the artificially constructed grounds that it posed a threat to public order. Khan emphatically argued that no one else but cow protectionist Hindus themselves posed the most serious threat to public order. Why? Because they were the ones who insisted on preventing cow sacrifice even in places where that practice was legally permissible. It is this insistence on banning a legally sanctioned practice that endangered disorder, not cow sacrifice. As Khan cuttingly analogized: “Their call to ban cow sacrifice to preserve public order is akin to disallowing an affluent person from accumulating wealth lest some thieves rob that wealth, leading to chaos and disorder. It is the thieves at fault here, not the person of wealth.” 45 Such warped logic, he concluded, by no means justified the extinction of a prominent and major Muslim ritual. Most disconcertingly, surrendering to such logic made Indian Muslims vulnerable to a slippery slope: Hindus could block whichever Muslim ritual they so wished by harboring unrest and disorder, providing them a convenient weapon to erase Muslim life. In Khan’s view, in order to prevent and resist such perverse misuse of laws on public order in the future, it was imperative to not set the problematic precedent of abstaining from cow sacrifice in public spaces where it was not legally prohibited by the colonial state. In effect, Khan turned the tables on his opponents; it was the Hindus and their naive Muslim supporters who acted as irresponsible if not subversive subjects of the British empire by contravening the spirit and application of the state’s laws. Khan strategically deployed the thoroughly modern concept and ideal of public order to champion the cause of preserving public markers of Muslim distinction, a cause inspired and informed by a premodern Muslim imperial logic of maintaining Islam’s dominance over religious others. But, as I have argued, the discursive and political terrain in [ 170 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate which an actor like Khan staged this strategic alignment between modern and premodern imperial logics and desires was at once uneven and intractable. Khan had no option but to contend with a set of conditions powered by the normative and institutional force of new political and legal categories like public order that shaped and mediated the texture and boundaries of not only Hindu-­Muslim but also intra-­Muslim encounters. As interesting and instructive as Khan’s views here were the sources he cited while airing them. Fascinatingly, many of Khan’s analyses on the place of cow sacrifice in Hinduism were drawn from an essay titled “Cow Sacrifice in Ancient India” (author unknown) published in the April 10, 1894, issue of the English weekly newspaper the Pioneer. Founded in 1865 in Allahabad by the English tea business magnate George Allen, the Pioneer was later sold to a syndicate and moved to Lucknow in 1933. Operating mostly as a regional outlet throughout much of the twentieth century, it has grown into a national newspaper in the last three decades and continues to operate as such in contemporary India. From the 1894 essay in the Pioneer, he marshaled prominent instances in Hindu texts and sources of knowledge, especially in the Rig Veda, that seemed to authorize cow sacrifice. For instance, he quoted Rig Veda 6:16–­47: “O eater (agni), we present to you this pure sacrifice, through this hymn, with a truthful heart. And hope that you will find desirable these bulls and oxen [as sacrifice].”46 Similarly, he cited edict 41 of chapter 5 of the legally oriented text Manusrimiti (Laws of Manu) that Khan wrote in Urdu as Manu ki Samarthi: “On offering the honey-­ mixture [to a guest], at a sacrifice and at the rites in honor of the manes, but on these occasions only, may an animal be slain.” Khan also claimed that such examples from the Hindu tradition sanctioning cow sacrifice were abundantly available in other texts such as the Brahma Purana and the Mahabharata. To further bolster his case, Khan cited the verdict of a recent High Court case on cow sacrifice (presumably from somewhere in Uttar Pradesh). In the verdict of this case (number 687, as cited by Khan), the High Court judges had established that cow sacrifice had remained an active part of Hindu ritual life in the past that was unreservedly supported by the ancient Hindu sages (hukumaʾi hunud). What this plethora of evidence and normative precedents clearly showed, Khan concluded, was that the modern Hindu prohibition and taboo against cow sacrifice was largely a cunning stratagem (hilah) to hurt Muslim sensibilities that had little to do with the Hindu tradition and its normative priorities.47 [ 171 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate A couple of aspects of his engagement with the Hindu tradition are worth underscoring. One, Khan’s argumentative procedure disrupts and complicates the image of a traditionalist scholar disengaged from the technologies and institutions of his time, buried in the discursive galaxy of premodern Muslim thought. As his swift invocations and mobilization of print newspapers and court judgments show, he displayed remarkable agility in oscillating between multiple discursive theaters. And, second, hearkening back to Deoband founder Qasim Nanautvi’s encounter with Hinduism on the polemical stage of Shahjahanpur, as discussed in chapter  2, Khan also approached Hinduism through a lens of translation decisively colored by modern colonial assumptions about religion and scripture. Not only did Khan translate the Vedas as the most authentic repository of a world religion called Hinduism but he also instrumentalized it as primarily a normative text of laws and injunctions. To him, all of the Vedas contained normative value and application—­an assumption that would have seemed at best odd to most interpreters of the Vedas in the Hindu tradition, especially premodern but perhaps also modern. Ironically, it was precisely such a scripturalist approach to religion and normative authority that Khan, as a staunch Hanafi traditionalist, would have found intolerable in the hermeneutical designs of nonconformist (ghayr muqallid) Muslim scholars of the Ahl-­i Hadith school in colonial South Asia who sought to bypass the Hanafi juristic tradition in accessing the Qur’an and Prophet’s normative model. For a traditionalist par excellence like Khan, the normative program of God and His Prophet could only be accessed through the mediating authority and disciplinary protocols of the Hanafi legal tradition and its authoritative texts. But Khan’s suspension of such nuance while assessing the normativity of cow sacrifice in Hinduism shows his capacity for and display of strategic hermeneutical flexibility when so required.

The Cow and the Promise of Communal Harmony For the remainder of this chapter, I want to turn to key aspects of the position that Khan had so vigorously opposed—­namely, that Indian Muslims suspend cow sacrifice as a way to cultivate Hindu-­Muslim harmony and a united political front to oppose British colonial power. I will do so by [ 172 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate focusing on the thought of arguably the most influential proponent and exponent of this view: Qiyamudin ‘Abdul Bari, a leading luminary of the prestigious Farangi Mahal school, an institution known for its curricular emphasis on logic, philosophy, and the rationalist disciplines (henceforth Bari, or ‘Abdul Bari as he is best known). The younger first cousin of another illustrious Farangi Mahal scholar, ‘Abdul Hay Lakhnavi (d. 1887), Bari was a prolific as well as curious personality on the intellectual map of modern South Asian Islam who escapes any neat categorization. While a firm Hanafi traditionalist, he was also a driving force—­indeed, a leading protagonist—­in such otherwise modernist political enterprises as the Khilafat movement. This ability to traverse multiple ideological registers marks an important element of his intellectual makeup that, as we will see, constitutes a crucial ingredient of his engagement with the cow question. Although Bari lived a relatively short life of forty-­seven years (from April 1878 to January 1926), he left behind a trail of intellectual output at once staggeringly voluminous and thematically diverse. His roughly 110 books of varied lengths include important works in grammar, logic, law, theology, Hadith, Qur’an exegesis, Sufism, and ethics, as well as a number of important commentaries and marginalia on major canonical texts such as a commentary on Muhiballah Bihari’s (d. 1707) seventeenth-­century book on Hanafi jurisprudence Musallam al-­Thubut, and marginalia on Ibn Malik’s (d. 1274) famous thirteenth-­century rhyming book on grammar Alfiyya. Bari had spent a formative year of his life in 1903, at the age of twenty-­five, traveling in Yemen, Iraq, and Arabia, where he studied with and was granted certificates of expertise by various prominent local scholars.48 In India, Bari established or played a pioneering role for a number of movements or institutions. He was the founder of the acclaimed seminary Madrasa ‘Aliyya Nizamiyya, named after Mullah Nizamuddin (d. 1748), the esteemed Farangi Mahal scholar who was the architect of the Dars-­i Nizami curriculum. Bari was also a founding member of and an influential player in the Jami‘at-­i ‘Ulama’-­yi Hind (JUH), the alliance of a motley group of traditionalist scholars that came together in 1919 to put up a united political and ideological front during the turbulent politics of the time, though with varying success.49 Though popularly thought of as a venture primarily associated with the Pro-­Congress offshoot of the Deoband seminary, it is telling that the contemporary JUH, on the occasion of the organization’s hundred-­ year anniversary in 2019, put out an eleven-­hundred-­page commemorative [ 173 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate edited volume in honor of Bari titled Remembering Mawlana ‘Abdul Bari Farangi Mahali (Tazkira-­yi Mawlana ‘Abdul Bari Farangi Mahali) featuring over a hundred essays, of varied length and quality, from scholars across India and, in a few cases, even beyond.50 Bari was also among the pioneers of the Khilafat movement and arguably its most polyglot protagonist, who brought together firm grounding in all branches of the Muslim humanities, with a demonstrable penchant and capacity for political and intellectual bricolage. It is unclear if Bari ever met Ahmad Raza Khan or, if so, how often, but they do seem to have exchanged letters on varied issues, including cow sacrifice and Hindu-­Muslim friendship. Not surprisingly, Khan was critical of Bari’s positions on these matters. Though, in one telling instance, while expressing his opinion on the leadership of the JUH, an organization with which Khan maintained a checkered relationship, Khan wrote to Riyasat Khan of Shahjahanpur, the intermediary via whom he corresponded with Bari: “It is better if he [Bari] keeps the presidency of JUH, as he will still be ideologically nearer to us [as opposed to the Deobandi ulama].”51 This comment highlights the fact that it is not simply divisions between modernists and traditionalists that are significant; equally worthy of notice is the often subtle yet searing spectrum of differences and divisions among the traditionalists or the ulama themselves.52 Bari’s thoughts and discourses on cow sacrifice are found in a number of his Urdu speeches, letters, and correspondences devoted to this problem, ranging from late 1919 to most of 1920, when the Khilafat movement was at its peak. Many of these, especially his speeches on this topic delivered at various Khilafat conferences, were published and circulated in popular Urdu newspapers like Hamdam (out of Delhi and overseen by the Farangi Mahal school), Aftab, and Zamindar, arguably the most widely read Urdu newspaper, established by the famous Khilafat movement activist and writer Zafar ‘Ali Khan (d. 1956).53 (The latter two papers were published in Lahore.) Bari’s views on the cow were far more nuanced than a blanket prohibition against its sacrifice. Moreover—­and this point is crucial—­while arguing for a position of interreligious hospitality that pushed for abstention from cow sacrifice, Bari was always careful to frame his argument in and ensure its consistency with traditionalist protocols and parameters of moral argument. Again, his case for interreligious friendship was not based on some abstract appeal to pluralism, but on a specific reading of the Islamic legal tradition that would hold traditionalist merit and authority. At the [ 174 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate heart of Bari’s approach to this issue was a call to deintensify the communal attachments invested in the cow. Coaxing Indian Muslims into abandoning cow sacrifice in order to pave the way for Hindu-­Muslim intimacy, he argued, would turn counterproductive. Instead, the process had to work the other way around. Hindu-­Muslim relations had to be cemented to a point that the volatile sensitivities fueling the problem of cow sacrifice would gradually diffuse on their own. The more the cow was brought into focus as a contested issue, the more its sacrifice became a lightning rod for all concerned stakeholders. Deflating the heightened communal stakes invested in the cow was paramount to reducing its potentiality for stoking interreligious tensions and violence.54 All involved parties had to play their role in executing this process, Bari emphasized. Indian Muslims, he suggested, could refrain from explicitly airing their attachment to cow sacrifice as a marker of faith. And it was best for the Hindu community to not come across as obstinate on this issue and to drop their insistence on the abandonment of cow sacrifice. Over time, such tempering attitudes from the two communities would dissipate and eventually erase the controversy surrounding cow sacrifice, Bari postulated. Retooling communal attitudes toward a problem presented a much smoother and more durable path to its resolution than that of applying the sledgehammer of law and legislation.

Interreligious Hospitality and Traditionalist Land Mines Bari was acutely aware that he must not be seen as normatively obligating Indian Muslims to give up cow sacrifice, lest that throw him in a pit of doctrinal landmines. As he adamantly pronounced: “I am not giving a fatwa or even a recommendation pushing people to abandon cow slaughter; I am just offering my preliminary opinion with a view to foster [Hindu-­Muslim] unity.”55 He was also at pains to impress upon his readers that his position on refraining from cow sacrifice was not issued under the pressure of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, one of the central points of rebuke lobbied by his opponents like Ahmad Raza Khan. “I did not abandon cow slaughter on Gandhi’s insistence,” he defiantly clarified. “I did so on my own accord, after much thought and deliberation, out of consideration for public welfare.” In fact, he went a step further: [ 175 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate “Had Gandhi asked me to give up cow sacrifice, I would have absolutely never done so.”56 Bari’s sensitivity to erasing the impression of Gandhi’s influence on him or on the Khilafat movement more broadly was not without reason. His close friendship with Gandhi was well known; whenever Gandhi would visit the Farangi Mahal in Lucknow, he would stay in the very room where Bari was born, and no meat would be cooked for the duration of his stay. Further—­ and perhaps more substantively—­such was the assurance of the ideological intimacy between Gandhi and Bari in Congress circles that it would regularly feature posters that read: “Ruling from Mahatma Gandhi; Fatwa from Mawlana ‘Abdul Bari” (hukm Mahatma Gandhi ka, Fatwa Mawlana ‘Abdul Bari ka).57 Slogans like these could only have fueled the impression that the leaders of the Khilafat movement were merely puppets in Gandhi’s hands—­an impression that Bari was at pains to undo, for the sake both of his own intellectual integrity and for the intellectual coherence and integrity of his legal argument. Returning to that argument: What public welfare, might one ask, was derived from abandoning cow sacrifice, as Bari had contended? His response to this question was curious. It sought to invert in his favor the very category of “distinguishing markers of Islam” (sha‘air-­i Islam) that his opponents had mobilized against abstaining from cow sacrifice. He argued that the promise of Hindu-­Muslim unity offered through the Muslim cessation of cow sacrifice represented a necessary political ingredient for resisting British colonial power and, thus, for salvaging the Ottoman Caliphate. And the caliphate, he continued, constituted a much more significant and sacred marker of Muslim distinction than did cow sacrifice. As he bluntly asked: “What is the cow when put next to the caliphate?”58 In a fascinating move, Bari did not contest or try to refute his opponents’ claim that cow sacrifice represented an important marker of Muslim distinction in the South Asian context; he readily admitted that it was so. Moreover, he was in agreement with the likes of Ahmad Raza Khan that Indian Muslims must not abandon cow sacrifice under the pressure of Hindus and their leaders like Gandhi. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, Bari explicitly called on the Hindu community to not be stubborn about this issue. He was also quite comfortable in proposing that lower-­income Muslims who could not afford lamb or other more expensive meats should continue cow sacrifice, [ 176 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate lest their refraining from it appear to be coerced.59 Bari’s argument for halting cow sacrifice as a gesture of interreligious hospitality thus did not rest on vitiating cow sacrifice as a ritual practice or on diminishing or challenging its importance to the ritual lives of South Asian Muslims. Instead, he framed his program for forging Hindu-­Muslim unity as what he intriguingly termed an “exception to the norm” (kharq al-­‘ada), whereby a marker of Muslim distinction, that of cow sacrifice, was so to say itself sacrificed to safeguard a much more vital and coveted marker of Muslim distinction: the caliphate.60 In essence, Bari packaged the cultivation of Hindu-­Muslim harmony as a departure from the norm necessitated by a moment of politico-­theological tribulation for the Muslim community with the caliphate under grave threat. By so doing, he astutely maintained his normative loyalty to the principle of Muslim exceptionalism while also justifying the temporary exception of Hindu-­Muslim friendship precipitated by political necessity. He was insistent, however, that this friendship did not entail the diminution of his or any other Muslim’s faith. As Bari summed up: “I am not advocating the “idol worship” of Hindus or losing one’s faith in Islam.”61 Hindu-­Muslim unity, he avidly reminded his audience, especially the skeptics among them, did not involve Muslim participation in Hindu devotional practices. In driving his argument forward, Bari drew a distinction between devotional and societal affairs (ta‘abuddi wa mu‘asharati ‘umur). Hindu-­Muslim friendship, he emphasized, did not involve devotional or religious intimacy and cross-­pollination. What it demanded from Indian Muslims instead was to treat Hindus with goodwill and sincerity in societal matters. Most importantly, for Bari, it was imperative for Indian Muslims to not view Hindu-­ Muslim friendship in the domains of politics and society and the health of their own faith as inversely related. To the contrary, he proposed that Indian Muslims should harness the view that the Hindus represent “a brave community who during a moment of our tribulation, by offering their sincere sympathy and assistance, are striving to make us their bosom friends” (bahadur qawm musibat mayn khulus ke sath hamdardi kar ke hamayn dilli dost banana chahti hai).62 Moreover, “they will also not want me to do something that pushes me outside the fold of Islam.” Here, Bari sought to disrupt and challenge a colonial inspired inverse logic of identity whereby intimacy with the ‘other’ implied by default the destruction of the ‘self.’ As he pithily stated: [ 177 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate “One can remain Muslim and yet strive for [Hindu-­Muslim] unity; there is no harm involved in that” (Musalman reh kar ittihad payda karnay mayn koi nuqs nahin hay).63 Note that Bari was in complete agreement with his antagonists like Ahmad Raza Khan that giving up cow sacrifice because of the pressure of a non-­ Muslim community was unlawful. However, in contrast to Khan, he shifted the focus of the conversation from anxious prognostication over the potential pitfalls of abandoning a ritual practice to elaborating the purposes, limits, and benefits of pursuing unity and friendship with the Hindu “other.” Abandoning cow sacrifice was only a means to a much greater cause: that of guarding a foundational pivot of Muslim identity, the caliphate. There was no question of forcibly banning a ritual practice on someone else’s command. In fact, Bari emphasized the absurdity of such a notion of coercion by contending that, let alone a non-­Muslim figure or community, neither he nor any other Muslim scholar or leader could force Indian Muslims to forgo cow sacrifice. As he sighed, combining blunt clarity with a hint of exasperated resignation: “I never claimed that I will get cow sacrifice banned because that’s not in my power. I will not cheat with people’s sentiments.”64 Bari’s plea here almost echoed the iconic Qur’anic injunction “There is no coercion in religion,” only reformulated as “There is no coercion in abandoning cow sacrifice.” Another instructive overlap of yet subtle difference between ‘Abdul Bari’s and Ahmad Raza Khan’s discourses on Hindu-­Muslim friendship and the cow lay in their invocation of public welfare and order. Recall from the last chapter that among Khan’s central objections to adopting a confrontational posture toward the British colonial state was the objection that such an attitude will only bring destruction and catastrophe upon the Indian Muslim community. Confronting empire was contrary to the welfare (maslaha) of Muslims that was sure to disrupt public order, he argued, and hence injure their capacity to survive and thrive as a community. In his writings, Bari made the exact same point, but from the reverse perspective. He argued that Indian Muslims should abstain from cow sacrifice precisely to prevent chaos and social unrest. Since cow sacrifice was not obligatory but only a simply permissible practice, Muslims served their own welfare by sacrificing some other animal that did not trample the religious sensitivities of a prominent community that was also a crucial potential ally.65 In his own words: [ 178 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate Cow sacrifice is not obligatory (wajib) but simply permissible (mubah); there are many other animals whose sacrifice is preferable to that of the cow. A person [Muslim] has the prerogative to abandon cow sacrifice and beef consumption on grounds that they are not obligatory but simply permissible. One should not insist on sacrificing just for the sake of instigating chaos and unrest. Yes, if the Hindus try to forcibly get Indian Muslims to abandon cow sacrifice, in that case the latter must fully strive to establish this ritual. This religious marker of distinction must not be abandoned due to the coercion [of another community] ( jabar se yeh shi‘ar-­i mazhabi tark nahin karna chahiyay; emphasis mine).66

This statement encapsulating Bari’s stance on cow sacrifice clearly shows that his position was far nuanced than the binary of for or against. Moreover, couching his argument in the language and categories of Islamic law indicates his attention to as well as familiarity with traditionalist logics and modes of argument. When compared to Abu’l Kalam Azad, Bari was a lot more deliberate about addressing and overcoming doctrinal sore spots that might provoke traditionalist sensibilities and hermeneutical protocols. Remember that Azad had primarily premised his argument for salvaging the caliphate through Hindu-­Muslim alliance and friendship on the centrality of the caliphate to the sharia and on the secular obligation of the colonial state’s noninterference in an indigenous community’s matters of religious significance. In subtle but important contrast, Bari’s focus was instead directed to the twin task of demonstrating that he was not advocating repealing a public marker of Muslim distinction, and that his proposal for refraining from cow sacrifice did not involve any hint of Hindu coercion. He realized that in a traditionalist legal imaginary wedded to the ideal and primacy of Muslim sovereign power, not being seen as undermining that power represented his most formidable challenge. To this end, not only did he persistently make the case that the caliphate was a much more consequential and profound marker of Muslim distinction than the sacrificed cow; he also advanced multiple provisions that might mitigate any suspicions regarding the voluntary nature of refraining from cow sacrifice. For instance, in an intriguing move—­and contrary to Ahmad Raza Khan, who had made no deliberate distinction between cow slaughter and sacrifice—­Bari drew a distinction between the general abandonment of cow sacrifice, and that on the specific occasion of ‘Id/Eid, suggesting that it was only the latter that he wanted Indian Muslims to observe. His [ 179 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate reasoning for this distinction was noteworthy. He argued that by avoiding cow sacrifice only on ‘Id, when communal sensitivities are especially heightened and not in general, Indian Muslims would clearly signal that they do not consider cow sacrifice forbidden. As a result, they will not be held liable or guilty for extinguishing a public marker of Muslim distinction. After all, Bari further pleaded, “Islam demands the sacrifice of fine and expensive animals [on the occasion of ‘Id], and that is not cows.”67 On another occasion, when brought to his attention that some Hindu landlords were prohibiting Muslim farmers from sacrificing cows and not providing alternatives, Bari went so far as to argue that such compulsion will paradoxically make cow sacrifice obligatory on Muslims.68 Why? Because a marker of Muslim distinction—­in this case, cow sacrifice—­even if otherwise nonobligatory, turned into an obligation when its performance was threatened or extinguished by non-­Muslim pressure. In other words, sovereign agency over the decision to withhold from a ritual practice was key to maintaining Muslim dominance and superiority in the public sphere. In a curious move, Bari went so far as to argue that if the Hindus insist on or forcibly attempt the cessation of cow sacrifice on the part of Muslims, then this sacrifice will turn into a necessity. Again, Bari’s reasoning was derived squarely from the dictates of Islamic law: that the insistence of a non-­Muslim community that Muslims abandon a ritual practice that serves as a marker of Muslim distinction alters the normative value or status (hukm) of that practice—­in the case of cow sacrifice, from simply permissible to obligatory. In effect, Bari put the ball in the court of the Hindu community with the advisory “If you forcibly stop us [from cow sacrifice], we can’t stop then.” Therefore, for all his gestures and strivings toward carving doctrinal space for interreligious friendship and hospitality, Bari, like Khan, remained committed to and did not let go of the foundational traditionalist logic and assumption of Muslim imperial dominance over non-­Muslims. Though Azad had also cited luminaries from the premodern legal canon to assemble his arguments, Bari’s argumentative apparatus was much more deliberately attuned to the task of satisfying traditionalist logics and checkpoints of legitimacy. All of this is not to suggest that Bari was any less anticolonial in his outlook than Azad. In fact, in one among many such moments of outrage toward the British, Bari had been unequivocal in declaring: “I consider it Jihad to economically hurt the British.”69 He had also explicitly called on Indian [ 180 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate Muslims to avidly support Gandhi’s swadeshi and noncooperation campaigns.70 Conversely, it is not as if Azad was entirely divorced from a traditionalist worldview, as his invocation of medieval stalwarts like al-­Ghazali and others while fortifying his case for the necessity of the caliphate to the sharia demonstrably showed. Nonetheless, juxtaposing Azad and Bari does reveal a difference of style while engaging the tradition to legitimate interreligious friendship and hospitality. Even while advancing seemingly modernist positions on the interaction of Islam, religious difference, and ritual practice, Bari’s discursive mode of operation and strategies of argument were avowedly further rooted in a traditionalist legal and social imaginary. In fact, after the collapse of the Ottoman state in 1924, and the Saudi takeover of Arabia in 1924–­1925, Bari and Azad had explicitly disagreed and fought over the decimation of tombs of the Prophet’s family and Companions by the Saudi authorities in 1925. Bari had decried these measures as severely offensive to traditionalist piety and sensibilities. On the other hand, Azad viewed them as nonobligatory, while openly rejecting ritual practices like the visitation of tombs associated with pious personalities. This doctrinal disagreement, which cracked open seething fissures of traditionalist and modernist normative fidelities within the Khilafat movement, was connected to a larger disagreement between Azad and Bari on the status of Saudi sovereignty over Arabia after the dissolution of the Ottoman state. While Azad had defended and embraced the Saudi conquest of the holy cities (Mecca and Madina), Bari had vehemently opposed it. Eventually, Bari broke with Azad and the Khilafat movement altogether and formed a separate organization called the Association of the Servants of the Two Holy Cities (Anjuman-­i Khuddam-­i Haramayn), a name that announced the organization’s opposition to the Saudi state and its puritan ideology in a fashion not so veiled.71

To Migrate or Not to Migrate? Returning to 1920, the difference of normative temperament between ‘Abdul Bari and his Khilafat movement colleagues can be discerned with even greater clarity from Bari’s rather fascinating viewpoint on the controversial question of whether colonial India represented an abode of war (dar al-­harb), [ 181 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate and, concomitantly, whether Indian Muslims must migrate to a different country or region. On this question, Bari respectfully but firmly disagreed with Azad and his other peers in the movement who had taken the more politically radical stance of declaring British India as having lost its status as an abode of Islam, thus necessitating the migration of Indian Muslims to a land under Muslim sovereign rule. Consistent with a traditionalist temperament of caution, Bari instead argued that, despite being occupied by “unbelievers,” India remained an abode of Islam. Bari made his case by drawing on the eponymous founder of the Hanafi school of law al-­Numan bin Thabit or Abu Hanifa’s (d. 767) observation that a dar al-­Islam turns into dar al-­harb only if it undergoes two transformations: 1. the distinguishing markers of Islam are entirely eviscerated such that Muslims are no longer able to fulfill the necessities of religion, and 2. there remain no regions marked as dar al-­Islam bordering and separating it from dar al-­harb such that it becomes entirely contiguous to the latter.72 Neither of these two conditions were applicable to India, Bari argued; not only were Muslim rituals current, but India also bordered Afghanistan, which was not under complete non-­Muslim rule. Interestingly, in terms of the twin questions of India’s normative political status and the obligation of migration, Bari’s position came much closer to that of Ahmad Raza Khan than his Khilafat movement colleagues like Azad. But, unlike Khan, Bari’s temperament and outlook was much more forgiving and empathetic toward the opposing view and its proponents. Throughout 1920, in a fascinating series of letters to prominent Urdu newspapers, primarily Hamdam and Zamindar, Bari schooled the public and the intellectual elite on the subtleties involved in distinguishing dar al-­Islam and dar al-­harb and in addressing the connected question of migration or hijrat. He readily admitted that this was a contested matter that attracted divergent scholarly opinions. On the one hand, the preeminent early nineteenth-­century scholar and scion of the Wali Ullah family Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, in addition to many scholars among Bari’s own Farangi Mahal school held the view that India was indeed dar al-­harb. For them, essential Muslim rituals were allowed in the country not because the sharia was operational but by default, since those rituals did not oppose British law.73 Bari and his illustrious first cousin ‘Abdul Hayy Laknavi, however, disagreed with this position and maintained that the physical occupation of India by a non-­ Muslim force did not render it a “non-­Muslim country.”74 Bari described this position in a brief but meaningful statement: “India is dar al-­Islam; it is [ 182 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate still in our dominion even though it is under the occupation of non-­Muslims” (Hindustan dar al-­Islam hay. Hamari milk se nahin nikla. Albata kabza ghayr Muslim ka hay).75 For Bari, then, as for many other Muslim traditionalist scholars, the designation of a region as “Muslim” or an “abode of Islam” did not hinge on political control and sovereignty, but on the frequency and density with which Muslim ritual life and markers of distinction were imprinted in the everyday life of the community. He further captured this argument with another short yet arrestingly revealing statement: “The occupation of a Muslim country by unbelievers renders that country a dar al-­harb in appearance but in reality it remains dar al-­Islam” (istila’-­yi kuffar se mulk zahiran dar al-­harb hota hay; haqiqatan dar al-­Islam hi rehta hay).76 On the question of whether Indian Muslims must migrate to a different country, Bari proposed a similarly tempered resolution that refrained from any absolutist position and offered a sympathetic hearing to competing views. Moreover, his approach to addressing this question was again firmly rooted in traditionalist logics of operation. Bari argued that migration or hijrat in and of itself did not constitute an obligation upon every Muslim (Ar. fard al-­ayn/Ur. farz-­i ayn). Rather, its normative status or value according to the sharia depended on the purpose/ objective (gharz) it helped to fulfill. If migration fulfilled an obligatory objective—­such as defending Islam when facing a dire imminent threat—­ then that migration would also be deemed obligatory, and so on. But, even in this case, migration would only be obligatory when all other options had been fully exhausted: migration represented a strategy of last resort (akhri tadbir).77 So, to sum up his position: migration was not an individual obligation and would only be obligatory under the condition that foundational Muslim rituals and markers of distinction were entirely extinguished due to state interference and oppression. And this condition did not, at least not yet, apply to India and Indian Muslims. That said, however, Bari was also at pains to emphasize that while migration was not obligatory, it was not forbidden either, and those Indian Muslims who availed this option to defend Islam and/or for their own moral reform were in no way worthy of rebuke or censure. Again, what mattered was the purpose and objective of migration. Furthermore, there was no precondition that an Indian Muslim could only migrate to a different region if India was under dire threat; moving from an unjust to a more just abode in pursuit of moral reform was a wholly worthy endeavor undeserving of suspicion or [ 183 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate cynical commentary. Bari pleaded with the public to not cast aspersions on his Khilafat movement colleagues who had called for Muslims to migrate from India: “Please hurl your abuses on me instead.”78 But, for all his elasticity, Bari was adamant in insisting that migration must not be declared an obligation, because once an act is adjudicated as obligatory, there remains very little room for juridical modification.79 Though even on this point—­where he clearly disagreed with Azad, who had indeed called hijrat obligatory—­the way he presented this disagreement evinced his reconciliatory and nonconfrontational temperament: “Azad believes in the necessity of hijrat and I that it is not obligatory on individual Muslims (farz-­i ayn) but it will become obligatory if it fulfilled an obligatory purpose.”80 This summation minimized conflict of opinion while reinforcing his central hermeneutical stance: it is the purpose and objective of migration that determines its normative value and ruling. Strangely, as to his own decision and preference to remain in India, Bari provided an explanation that displayed fidelity to his hermeneutical program while registering his yearning for migration: “I, too, would feel a lot more content by moving to Madina, which is also the land of my ancestors, and the [British] government would also be relieved and happy if I did so, but the mission of defending Islam in India will as a result suffer; I am here to defend Islam [from a colonial power].”81 ‘Abdul Bari’s attempt to convince Indian Muslims that they refrain from cow sacrifice was not free of ambiguities. The most glaring ambiguity was reflected in the following question: How was one to determine whether such refraining represented one’s own decision or was a product of external pressure or coercion? What differentiated decision from coercion, and how was that to be decided? Bari left these questions unaddressed. Even so, regardless of how one evaluates the persuasiveness of his argument, it is difficult to not appreciate the trickiness of the hermeneutical challenge he confronted and navigated with a fair dose of nuance and dexterity. Remarkably, as to his own practice on the question of cow sacrifice, Bari left little ambiguity. In a letter penned in August 1920, he explicitly declared: “I will not sacrifice cows during the next ‘Id al-­Adha and it is my desire that other Muslims also imitate me in this practice of abstention.”82 *

*

*

In this chapter, through a close reading of Ahmad Raza Khan’s The Finest Viewpoint and ‘Abdul Bari’s discourses on cow sacrifice, I have tried to shed [ 184 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate some light on the intersection of bovine politics and the negotiation of religious identity and difference in colonial South Asia. As their competing views bring into view, the body of the cow was a site of both immense anxiety and possibility: it represented a discursive field that inhabited a variety of conflicting normative projects and desires. On the one hand, for Khan, the cow (or, rather, the death of the cow) presented the promise and possibility of securing Muslim power and distinction. A great deal rested on the cow; at stake in its sacrifice was the sovereign power and distinction of the Indian Muslim community. From the ruins of political sovereignty, the erasure of the cow offered the promise of an imperial political theology, nestled in the comforting fiction of communal dominance. If the cow was not sacrificed, the coherence and integrity of this political theology unraveled. The figure of the living and unsacrificed cow brought to Indian Muslims the stain of shame and humiliation (zillat). The bovine body, in other words, both determined and mediated the space of distinction separating the sovereign body from the humiliated if not bare life. On the other hand, for Bari, the cow was equally important, for it contained the promise of an alliance and a friendship necessary for Muslim political survival. Notice that, much like his rival Khan, Bari also considered the cow pregnant with power. For him, however, power was enshrined in the imperative of restoring a coveted marker of Muslim political sovereignty: the institution of the caliphate. While maintaining Muslim dominance in the public performance of ritual practice was important, its significance paled in comparison to the caliphate’s aura and sacrality. This is where Khan most distinctively disagreed with Bari: to him, Muslim sovereign power was located squarely in the realm of ritual practice. The Ottoman Caliphate was but an illegitimate fiction. Thus, embedded and enshrined in the views of these scholars on the cow were two competing understandings of power and politics in the aftermath of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia. Ahmad Raza Khan’s and ‘Abdul Bari’s navigation of the potentialities and anxieties attached to the cow also articulated and made visible distinct yet markedly ambiguous conceptualizations of such constructs as religion, law, hermeneutics, and politics. In their discourse, as in that of scholars and contexts engaged in the previous chapters, we find a complex and conflictual negotiation of the logics and aspirations of a particular reading of Islamic law, and the generative conditions and structures of colonial power. The terms and texture of this interplay were far too complicated to render [ 185 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate tenable the temptation of approaching their normative projects through attractive yet distorting binaries like traditional/modern, liberal/illiberal, and inclusive/exclusive. Such binaries can hardly attend to the vexing tensions and aspirations hovering over critical moments of South Asian Muslim intellectual thought, such as Khan’s and Bari’s contest over cow sacrifice and the limits of Hindu-­Muslim friendship. As this chapter draws to a close, I want to very briefly describe the sort of contribution I see it making in the ever-­burgeoning and exciting field of critical animal studies (CAS). In the last two decades or so, CAS has emerged as an important field of inquiry that brings together scholars and thinkers from different disciplinary persuasions, chiefly anthropology; philosophy; literature; and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. In a nutshell, to distill the underlying point of a complex field of study, key works of which were critical to the foreground and background of this chapter, CAS seeks to critique and interrupt the often-­presumed hierarchy between human/nonhuman animals.83 Moreover, and as a corollary, central to the intellectual and political mandate of CAS is the task of uncovering, complicating, and subverting the anthropomorphic assumptions that anchor the human/animal hierarchy and that in turn enable and engine the sovereign and biopolitical power of the modern state. Feminist theorist Kari Weil has succinctly summed up the ideological orientation of posthumanism (a label to which not all scholars attached to this field subscribe) that anchors the field. Posthumanism, she states, “argues that we, humans, are not the reason for the world and decenters the human in order to say that animals, nature, others, are not here for us.”84 Given the symmetry between the anthropomorphic logics that authorize the superiority of the human over the animal and thus sanction dietary practices like beef consumption, and the patriarchal assumption of the superiority of the male over the female, the intimacy between feminist and critical animal studies is not surprising. Donna Haraway, arguably the most prominent and influential scholar attached to this intellectual and political movement, describes its mandate as one that involves puncturing the finality and fantasy of human exceptionalism by cultivating an everyday ethic and practice of interspecies dependance and intimacy, what Haraway famously called “becoming with.” Haraway describes the desired outcome of such a process and practice of interspecies encounters with lyrical purpose: “A great deal is at stake in such meetings, and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no teleological warrant [ 186 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate here, no assured happy or unhappy ending, socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace. The Great Divides of animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic flatten into mundane differences-­the kinds that have consequences and demand respect and response-­rather than rising to sublime and final ends.”85 Despite the enormously productive and sophisticated interventions in CAS, this field has been subject to useful critique, especially from some of its noted practitioners. For instance, although the posthumanist underpinnings of critical animal studies that recenters the agency of nonhuman animals is laudable, scholars like Neel Ahuja and Kari Weil have argued, posthumanism can also work to “project upon an outside, the nonhuman, the possibility of resistance to anthropocentrism” and thus “absolve humans of our responsibility for the kinds of agency we do have in the world, agency that has often been destructive.”86 More relevant to the concerns of this chapter, though, is Ahuja’s perceptive observation that dominant modalities of critical animal studies as operative and institutionalized at Western academic localities like the United States, the UK, and Australia often sideline and ignore discourses and dynamics pertaining to human/nonhuman animal relations in non-­Western contexts like South Asia.87 To Ahuja’s point, I would add that another gaping absence of emphasis in the otherwise sophisticated field of critical animal studies relates to the question of religion, and more specifically to the labor of examining moments of debate within religious traditions that display contrasting articulations of the animal as a linchpin for politics. This absence is particularly acute in relation to exploring animal contestations in Islam, especially South Asian Islam.88 In this chapter I have tried to add such a perspective through the specific case study of intra-­Muslim contestations over cow sacrifice in modern South Asia that were constitutive and reflective of much broader political stakes, projects, and aspirations. In the absence of political sovereignty, the cow and its life and death, I have shown, contained the promise of Muslim politics and sovereign power. The intra-­Muslim debate examined in this chapter highlighted the tussle and entanglement of different visions of sovereignty—­invested in the everyday life of interreligious encounters or in the promise of political structures like the caliphate—­ fought through and over the body of the cow. Though the cow, the nonhuman animal never spoke in this debate: she was the looming force and driver [ 187 ]

The Cow and the Caliphate of its political stakes and consequences. In the final two chapters of this book, I continue my interrogation of the competing meanings and normative projects invested in Muslim distinction from the Hindu Other by examining rival modern South Asian Muslim intellectual discourses on tashabbuh, or the reprehensible imitation of non-­Muslims: a controversial and, arguably, most consequential doctrinal category of religious difference in Muslim thought and practice.

[ 188 ]

FIVE

The Contagion of Imitation A Select Genealogy

ONCE, DURING TRAVELS in Egypt, the famous and formidable late nineteenth-­/early twentieth-­century scholar and litterateur of the Deoband school Ahmad Sai‘d Dihlavi (d. 1918) stopped at a local mosque to offer prayers. While performing ablutions in preparation for prayers, he was interrupted by an Egyptian man, who, obviously not recognizing Dihlavi or his scholarly stature, lodged a verbal protest on the lengthy size of Dihlavi’s beard. “Are you imitating the Jews?” this man intemperately quizzed the prominent foreign scholar from India, climaxing his brief but biting reproach with the ominous saying “Whoever imitates a community becomes one of them” (man tashabbaha bi qawmin fa huwa min-­hum). Nonplussed by this unpleasant yet instructive encounter, Dihlavi registered his solemn bemusement: “The very prophetic saying that we mobilize and cite in India to urge people to grow long beards, this Egyptian unleashed it to rebuke my lengthy beard.”1 This unabashedly and refreshingly self-­deprecating anecdote highlights the ambiguity as well as the elasticity shadowing a doctrinal category in Islam that holds massive politico-­theological implications and consequences for Muslim/non-­Muslim encounters: the category of tashabbuh (pronounced exactly as it reads: ta-­sha-­bbuh), or reprehensible imitation of non-­Muslims. The discursive beginnings of this doctrine are traceable to a famous saying of Prophet Muhammad also narrated in the anecdote: “Whoever imitates a community becomes one of them (henceforth the tashabbuh Hadith).” This [ 189 ]

The Contagion of Imitation pithy saying is pregnant with fatal theological land mines, coated with the threat of no less than losing one’s membership in Islam. It also carries a fair bit of ambiguity. Most importantly and obviously, there is the ambiguity surrounding the question of what is meant by “imitation,” and, concomitantly, in what domains of life the imitation of the Other is considered reprehensible. These twin concerns have haunted the normative problem space of tashabbuh from its very beginnings. As scholar of Islam Muhammad Khalid Masud—­in a brief but informative survey article on this topic—­has observed, the two major narrations of this prophetic report or Hadith, as found in two of the six canonical books of Hadith in Sunni Islam, the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) and the Sunan of Abu Dawud (d. 889), differ markedly regarding the scope of applicability governing tashabbuh. As Masud explains: “Ibn Hanbal’s report restricts the prohibition [against imitating non-­ Muslims] to the ways of belief and worship while Abu Dawud broadens the context and shifts the subject of the hadith from the strictly religious to cultural subjects by placing it in the chapter [of his Hadith collection] about dress [Kitab al-­libas] and in a section entitled Bab fi libs al-­shuhra, meaning “dress as a symbol of social status and religious identity [or dress as a marker of public distinction].”2 While seemingly a doctrine forbidding imitation of the Other in matters of “religion,” the specter of tashabbuh often extends its shadows to practices of the everyday conventionally categorized today as part of “culture.” Indeed, the discursive and doctrinal career of tashabbuh in Muslim intellectual thought and history confirms a suspicion held by many scholars of religion: that distinguishing religion from culture is invariably a messy affair. As a category that indexes the moment when “imitation in religion” turns reprehensible to salvation, at stake in how one defines tashabbuh and its limits is how one defines religion and its limits. Much like its twin concept of intra-­ Muslim Othering, bidʿa, or heretical innovation (meaning new practices and beliefs that oppose the normative model of the Prophet and his companions), tashabbuh also serves to demarcate the boundaries of Islam as an ongoing discursive tradition. More portentously, it also marks the distinction between Muslim identity and difference. Before proceeding, mention must be made that tashabbuh or the quality of simulation/imitation is not always referred to in a negative light in Muslim intellectual thought. Let me give just two among many possible examples of moments where tashabbuh is understood positively as a quality to [ 190 ]

The Contagion of Imitation emulate and aspire to. For instance, in his famous and one of the earliest Persian translations of the Qur’an in South Asia Fath al-­Rahman bi Tarjamat al-­ Qur’an (completed in 1738), the eighteenth-­century Indian polymath Shah Wali Ullah, while elaborating how he wanted his readers to engage his Qur’an translation, inverted the usually negative connotation attached to the term tashabbuh or reprehensible imitation of non-­Muslims. Wali Ullah transferred tashabbuh to an antipodal register of meaning by urging a practice of collectively reading and engaging the Qur’an through which Indian Muslims might establish the bond of affective imitation and, in turn, intimacy with the Prophet’s Companions. In Wali Ullah’s own words, “[Indian Muslims] must strive to imitate the Prophet’s Companions who would also sit together in study circles [while one of them] recited the Qur’an” (wa tashabbuh payda kardeh bashand ba sahabah-­yi karam keh bi-­hamin halqah halqah minishistand wa qari-­yi ishan qir’at mi kard).3 Moving a bit further in time and space, for a second example, one can turn to the equally fascinating and detailed Arabic text-­cum-­manual on the etiquette of Sufism and Sufi practice, A Book of Etiquette for [Sufi] Disciples (Kitab Adab al-­Muridin) by the twelfth-­century founder of the Suhrawardiyya Sufi order Abu al-­Najib al-­Suhrawardi (d. 1168). In this text, Suhrawardi coined the term the mutashabihun (imitators) to refer to lay members following a Sufi order who strive to imitate the habits and practices of more advanced Sufi masters. While earlier Sufis like Abu Nasr al-­Sarraj (d. 998) had “used the term mutashabihun pejoratively to signify “those who falsely pretend to be Sufis,” Suhrawardi, while explicitly citing the tashabbuh Hadith, framed the desire to imitate the pious folk as a marker of what he curiously termed “truthful simulators.”4 In his own words, “He who holds onto the dispensations [of Sufi practice] and refined himself according to their [accomplished Sufi masters] norms of etiquette is one of the truthful simulators to whom the Prophet attached his statement: “whoever imitates a community becomes one of them.”5 These examples notwithstanding, the dominant accent and focus of the category of tashabbuh in Islam is that of a reprehensible mode of imitation with profoundly deleterious consequences for Muslim individual and communal identity—­and it is this modality of this category that will be examined in this and the next chapter. More specifically, this and the next chapter examine Muslim scholarly discourses and debates on the content and application of tashabbuh in colonial South Asia. How are premodern categories of interreligious difference [ 191 ]

The Contagion of Imitation invested in establishing Muslim distinction and theological superiority over non-­Muslims and rooted in the context of Muslim empire, read, debated, and put to use in new conditions defined by the absence of that imperial context and marked by the new political reality of colonialism? This, remember, is a central question at the heart of this book. Few categories of Muslim thought offer a more fertile case study for exploring this question than that of tashabbuh. In colonial India, where Muslims found themselves a colonized minority after centuries of political rule over large parts of the region, the anxiety over securing Muslim distinction from competing non-­Muslim Others assumed striking urgency. And in a moment and world punctuated by the loss and absence of political sovereignty, it was often in the regulation of interreligious encounters and imitation in everyday life that sovereign power was cultivated and consigned. Tashabbuh is also a category that connects in particularly effective and forceful ways the theological, political, and everyday dimensions of interreligious friendship and intimacy. In a traditionalist Muslim imaginary, interreligious imitation was a form and manifestation of interreligious friendship that was theologically perilous, ontologically disfiguring, and politically crippling. The threat posed by interreligious imitation was nourished precisely by the larger threat of the erasure of Muslim distinction through friendship and intimacy. Undesirable imitation was only a symptom of the deeper disease of harmful intimacy and friendship with the Other that, if left unchecked and untreated, presented the dire prognosis of the self’s erasure. In other and simpler words, friendship and intimacy, if left unmonitored and unregulated, was a sure recipe for erasure and indistinction. What I plan to show and argue in the course of this chapter and the next is that intra-­Muslim debates and disagreement on the question of tashabbuh are reflective of broader ideological and normative fault lines dividing the Muslim intellectual elite of modern South Asia. I will develop this argument over the course of two chapters that perform separate but connected tasks. The current chapter presents a select but substantive genealogy of overlapping yet opposing modern South Asian Muslim intellectual discourses on tashabbuh. Though focused on the thought of prominent ulama, this chapter also considers in some depth the articulation of this issue in literature, primarily as seen in well-­known novelist and scholar Nazir Ahmad Dihlavi’s (d. 1910) hugely fascinating though less studied late nineteenth-­ century novella Son of the Moment (Ibn ul-­Waqt). The next chapter continues [ 192 ]

The Contagion of Imitation interrogating the theme of interreligious imitation, but with the explicit purpose of capturing and shedding light on two contrasting and among the most authoritative trajectories of Muslim reform in South Asia represented by the famous scholar and founder of Aligarh Muslim University Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and rival ulama from the Deoband school. For the latter, I will center my attention on the grandson of Deoband founder Qasim Nanautvi (whom we met in chapter 2) and celebrated scholar in his own right Muhammad Tayyib al-­Qasimi (d. 1983), to whom I will refer to with his more popular name, Qari Tayyib. Early in his career in 1929, while still thirty-­two years of age, Tayyib wrote arguably the most extensive text in the South Asian context on the doctrinal stakes and significance of Tashabbuh, pithily titled Reprehensible Imitation in Islam (Al-­Tashabbuh fi’l Islam). While Tayyib was not Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s contemporary, this text was in large measure a stinging rebuttal of Khan’s views on this topic and of the worldview that nourished those views. Through its composition, Tayyib continued the legacy of his preeminent grandfather, who had also vigorously disagreed with Khan on matters of theology and hermeneutics, though in a decidedly more measured and less combative register than his grandson. In the next chapter, I will interrogate this enormously interesting and consequential debate between Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Qasim Nanautvi as a prelude to and in preparation for examining the opposing views of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Qari Tayyib on the problem of tashabbuh. Through this exercise, I will highlight ways in which an intra-­Muslim disagreement on the limits of imitating non-­Muslims was entangled with profound dilemmas over how one ought to imagine and engage difference and Otherness in conditions of colonial modernity. The two rival rationalities of Muslim reform from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that occupy chapter 6 continue to exert tremendous influence while also igniting fierce controversy in postcolonial South Asia. How is one to preserve identity when confronted with difference in a moment of political fragility? This question, at the centerpiece of the tashabbuh debate in colonial South Asia, only assumed ever more urgent significance in the ensuing decades. Thus, in a sense, these two interconnected chapters seek to capture the beginnings of a massively consequential and to this day intensely contested intra-­Muslim division in South Asia on the boundaries of Muslim/non-­Muslim—­especially Hindu-­Muslim—­relations and friendship. But before I get to modern South Asia, let me first present some brief [ 193 ]

The Contagion of Imitation reflections on prominent discussions on tashabbuh in the premodern Muslim intellectual tradition to situate and contextualize the modern South Asian career of this concept.

Premodern Reverberations Like any prominent concept from the Islamic discursive economy, especially a controversial and keenly contested one, tashabbuh has been addressed and engaged in multiple ways by prominent scholars of the premodern Muslim intellectual tradition. Khaled Masud has pithily encapsulated the intellectual context of Muslim scholarly anxieties over external contagion: “Muslim encounters with Greek, Magi, and Indian scholarly traditions posed an epistemological crisis. One of the foremost issues in Muslim theology (‘ilm al-­kalam) was to define an epistemological framework in order to assimilate or reject alien ideas and sciences.”6 Muslim scholars responded to this challenge in myriad ways, with subtle but important variations. The late eleventh-­/early twelfth-­century polymath Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali (whom we met in chapter 3 in the context of discussions on the caliphate) combined the legal and theological aspects of tashabbuh with its sociopsychological thrust. For al-­Ghazali, the nature of the relationship that Muslims harbor with non-­Muslims, and the gradations of love and enmity exhibited by that relationship, are deeply theological decisions, rendered by the human subject as an indicator of servitude to God. Centuries before Carl Schmitt had proposed a political theology premised on the friend/enemy distinction, al-­Ghazali had anticipated Schmitt with an arresting observation, in the “Book on the Etiquette of Intimacy and Brotherhood” (Kitab Adab al-­‘Ulfa waʾl ‘Ukhuwa) of his magnum opus Resuscitation of Salvational Knowledges (Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-­Din). “Everyone who loves someone else for the sake of God,” al-­Ghazali contended, “had no alternative but to hate another person for God [as well]. So, if you love a person because he/she is obedient and beloved to God, you must also hate that person if he/she disobeys God and is viewed by God with revulsion. If a reason propels you to love a person, then by necessity, the opposite of that cause should also lead you to hate that person.” He closed his point pithily but purposefully: “These two conditions [love and hate], are intimately bound. . . . ​Their manifestation in human actions is called friendship and enmity” (kul man yuhibbu fi-­llah la budda an [ 194 ]

The Contagion of Imitation yabghadu fi-­llah, fa-­innaka in ahbabta insanan li-­annahu mutiʿ li’llah wa Mahbub ‘and Allah fa-­in ʿasa-­hu fa la budda an tabghaduhu li-­annahu ʿasin liʿllah wa mamqut ʿand Allah. Wa man ahabba bi sababin fa bi’ldarura yabghadu li didihi, wa hadhan mutalaziman la yanfasil ahad ʿan al-­akhar..fa idha zahara fi’l fiʿl summiya muwalat wa muʿadat).7 Al-­Ghazali’s views on engaging non-­Muslims in everyday life emerged from this foundational theology of love and hate. Since unbelief and heresy represented grounds for hate, the choreography of Muslim encounters with non-­Muslims in the everyday must also signal and exhibit that condition of antipathy. To that end, as an example, al-­Ghazali suggested that “a Muslim should not be the first to greet a non-­Muslim. If a non-­Muslim comes across a Muslim in a street, the non-­Muslim must walk on the opposite side of the street.”8 In his pioneering work on the topic of tashabbuh in premodern Muslim intellectual thought, Youshaa Patel has charted and explained the etymology, history, and varied valences of this concept with encyclopedic depth and analytical ebullience. The following discussion primarily relies on Patel’s analysis, though I add my own glosses and insertions as well where needed. According to Patel, the conceptual and doctrinal career of tashabbuh saw a critical shift from a “narrative statement to a normative dictum” corresponding with the emergence and consolidation of a Muslim “imperial ethos” beginning with the reign of the Umayyad dynasty in late seventh/ early eighth century.9 The phrase “whoever imitates a people becomes one of them,” Patel informs us, is part of a longer utterance of the Prophet’s that bears an apocalyptic tone and texture. That longer prophetic saying, which Patel calls the “apocalyptic version” of the tashabbuh Hadith, goes as follows: “I [that is the Prophet] was sent [by God] on the eve of the Hour [Judgment Day] [to fight] with the sword until God is worshipped alone without any partner ascribed to him. My provision has been placed under the shadow of my spear, and abasement and contempt have been placed upon the one who disobeys my command. And whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.”10 In the century following the Prophet’s death in 632 CE and thereafter, though this longer apocalyptic version never disappeared, a redacted version that only contained the last sentence of the longer version (“whoever imitates a people becomes one of them”) assumed widespread currency and canonical status. Though in circulation from the earliest decades of Islam, the figure most decisively responsible for the canonicity of the redacted version was the [ 195 ]

The Contagion of Imitation famous ninth-­century Iraqi Hadith scholar and compiler Abu Dawud al-­ Sijistani. Abu Dawud, as he is most commonly called, included the redacted version in his major Hadith compilation Sunan Abi Dawud in the section on dress, and the subsection on “dress as a marker of distinction” as mentioned earlier. For Abu Dawud, redaction of a longer Hadith served the pedagogical purpose of amplifying the legal and normative import of the Hadith: the reprehensibility of imitating the religious Other to the point of losing one’s own membership in Islam. Thus, the politico-­theological project of securing Muslim distinction, especially through the public performance of religion and embodied markers of religious identity like dress, was normatively wedded to the dangerous contagion of imitation. It is by shunning imitation that distinction of the self and thus the hierarchy of self and Other was maintained—­a prized objective of an imperial Muslim political theology. As Patel sums up the primary shift in the conceptual economy of interreligious imitation from the time of the Prophet’s life to the context of Muslim empire a century later and beyond: “Imitating non-­Muslims was not perceived negatively in the beginning, but as Islam became a distinct confession, social boundaries between Muslims and non-­Muslims sharpened, casting a stigma on religious assimilation.”11 This is how a longer statement of the Prophet’s enlaced in apocalyptic imagery was discursively and normatively circumscribed as a theologically stinging rebuke of interreligious imitation. Curiously and crucially, the redacted form in which this prophetic saying was recorded, compiled, and hence canonized by Hadith scholars like Abu Dawud not only informed its normative posture and point of emphasis but also underwrote its amenability to Muslim imperial politics. Patel’s larger point, thus, is twofold: 1. the seemingly documentarian and normatively neutral labor of transmitting, compiling, and classifying the Prophet’s words is in fact profoundly normative and indeed determinative of what does and does not count as Islam; and 2. the intellectual history of the tashabbuh Hadith mirrors the development of Sunni normativity on the question of Islam and difference, and the entrenchment of an imperial Muslim political theology. But the canonicity of the redacted version of the tashabbuh Hadith did not resolve the ambiguities surrounding its interpretation and nor erase varied readings of its scope and terms of application in premodern Muslim legal discourses. As an illustration of this intra-­Muslim variety of interpretation, Patel presents the thought of two Damascene scholars separated by three [ 196 ]

The Contagion of Imitation centuries, the well-­k nown Ibn Taymiyya and the lesser-­k nown Najm al-­Din al-­Ghazzi (d. 1658), who authored the two most extensive texts centered on tashabbuh in medieval and early modern Islam. On the one hand, Ibn Taymiyya, writing in the wake of the Mongol invasions against the Abbasid empire, understood interreligious imitation, especially through participation in non-­Muslim rituals and festivals like the Christian Maundy Thursday and the Persian/Zoroastrian Nawruz as heretical.12 In his hugely influential and widely read Arabic text Necessitating the Straight Path for Opposition Against Dwellers of Hellfire (Iqtida al-­Sirat al-­Mustaqim li Mukhalafat Ashab al-­Jahim; henceforth Necessitating the Straight Path), Ibn Taymiyya conjoined the threat of interreligious imitation with the dangers of interreligious friendship. He did so by connecting the tashabbuh Hadith with the famous and furiously contested Qur’anic verse 5:51 that we also encountered in chapter 3 in the context of Abu’l Kalam Azad’s squabble with Ahmad Raza Khan on the question of friendship: “O people of faith, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are each other’s friends. Whoever takes them as friends (yatawwalahum) becomes one of them.”13 For Ibn Taymiyya, juxtaposing this Qur’anic verse with the tashabbuh Hadith clearly demonstrated that interreligious friendship and interreligious imitation produce the same normative outcome: losing one’s membership in Islam and becoming “one of them”—­that is, among the non-­Muslim community that is the object of friendship or imitation. Again, the foundational desire that informed Ibn Taymiyya’s negative valuation of interreligious friendship and imitation was the survival of a hierarchical social and political order that valorized Muslims over non-­Muslims. To him, “imitation indexes someone’s admiration” and thus inverts “the ideal social order in which Muslims were superior, not inferior.”14 Again, the prohibition against imitating the Other was inspired by the logic and imperative of an imperial Muslim political theology. In contrast to Ibn Taymiyya, Najm al-­Din al-­Ghazzi, the other major thinker Patel discusses, held a view of tashabbuh that was not exclusively negative or driven by the impulse to block contagion.15 Rather, he deftly combined the exclusionary legal dimension of this concept aimed at preserving the friend/enemy distinction with a psychosocial analysis of imitation as a manifestation of love that reflects affection for and approval of the Other. Patel suggests that al-­Ghazzi, unlike Ibn Taymiyya, was less beholden to polemical concerns and hence offered a more capacious theorization of tashabbuh centered on the category of love that weaved together his fidelity [ 197 ]

The Contagion of Imitation to Shafi‘i law and to Sufism.16 But, despite crediting al-­Ghazzi with the successful “synthesis” of Islamic law and Sufism, Patel himself, in one of the less convincing moments of his work, posits the law/Sufism binary in describing the differing positions of Ibn Taymiyya and al-­Ghazzi and their traces on the modern career of the tashabbuh Hadith. He writes: “Modern readings of the imitation Hadith—­some inspired by the type of Salafism that became dominant in Saudi Arabia-­often draw on Ibn Taymiyya’s gloss—­in order to warn and deter Muslims from aping the West. The prevalence of these sharia-­ oriented discourses [like Ibn Taymiyya’s] have marginalized the Hadith’s Sufi-­inspired interpretations, like al-­Ghazzi’s, which have been virtually forgotten.”17 Drawing an opposition between the inclusive capaciousness of Sufi inspiration and the rigid parochialism of Salafi-­inspired law seems rather unhelpful and reductive. After all, in addition to being a Hanbali legal scholar, Ibn Taymiyya was also attached to the Sufi tradition of the Qadiriyya order; moreover, as Ovamir Anjum has forcefully argued, his varied receptions in the modern and contemporary modernity do not always faithfully represent the sophistication of his original thought.18 For instance, as the Pakistani traditionalist scholar Ammar Khan Nasir has shown, rather than the stringent maximalist he’s often made out to be, Ibn Taymiyya in fact approached the categories of the normative and the heretical in a much more nuanced and calibrated fashion. While discussing Ibn Taymiyya’s views in Necessitating the Straight Path on the contested ritual of Prophet Muhammad’s birthday celebration, Nasir shared a fascinating and particularly illustrative fragment from Ibn Taymiyya’s thought. Say a person engaged in a heretical practice: what must be evaluated, Ibn Taymiyya argued, was whether that person would indeed be drawn to a salutary normative practice if he were withdrawn from the heresy he’s currently engaged in, or would he turn to another heresy even worse. If the latter, it was best to find and intensify some salutary aspect in the original heresy rather than forbid it, for human souls only abandon a practice when they find the alternative more appealing.19 This is hardly the view of a sharia-­oriented doctrinaire. And, finally, interpretations of the tashabbuh Hadith that connected the discourse of love—­drawing from the Sufi as well as the legal tradition (law is never bereft of love)—­with the normative imperative of establishing Muslim distinction and superiority are found amply in the modern period as [ 198 ]

The Contagion of Imitation well. Deoband scholar Qari Tayyib’s meditations on reprehensible imitation that form the focus of the next chapter is a prominent such modern example. As I will have occasion to discuss in more detail, Tayyib, in a manner reminiscent of al-­Ghazzi, described love as “the foundational stone” on which the entire problem and doctrine of tashabbuh rested. But, at the same time, love for Tayyib was not a conduit to interreligious permissiveness but rather the animating source and force of an exclusionary politics and practice necessary for establishing normative and affective fidelity to the Prophet. This quibble, though substantive, does not detract from my debt to Patel’s path-­paving work that helps us grasp critical lineaments of the conceptual history of tashabbuh in medieval and early modern Islam and that provides important backdrop to modern South Asian Muslim scholarly reflections on this category. I next turn to a select sampling of such modern South Asian discourses on tashabbuh that, while evincing some of the same themes and tensions found in premodern Islam, also add their distinctive South Asian flavors, priorities, and aesthetic registers. Rather than aiming at comprehensiveness, I have tried to present readers with illustrative and prominent examples of disparate yet overlapping conceptualizations of tashabbuh in modern South Asian Muslim thought. This will help to contextualize and situate the opposing views of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Qari Tayyib on tashabbuh that feature in the following chapter.

South Asian Ulama Discourses on Tashabbuh: A Select Tour I will begin with—­a nd engage one final time in this book—­the views of Ahmad Raza Khan that forge together nicely the theological and everyday dimensions of the often ambiguous normative project of securing Muslim distinction from the threat of interreligious mixture and imitation.20 For instance, Khan was once asked for his opinion on Muslims visiting Hindu festivals like Ramlila (the dramatic reenactment of Rama’s life) and Dussehra (the commemoration of Rama’s victory over Ravana). More specifically, he was asked about the normative consequences of spending time in such spaces, where statements and chants that signaled polytheism or unbelief were openly aired. Would that harm one’s doctrinal status as a Muslim?21 [ 199 ]

The Contagion of Imitation Khan’s response was calibrated according to what the nature of the festival was, why someone went there, what that person did there, and, most critically, what happened to them while they were there. In Khan’s view, if the festival was religious in nature, then visiting it was forbidden in almost all situations, because such a gathering would invariably involve discourses and activities that conflicted with the doctrinal necessities of Islam. But, while forbidden, merely visiting such a festival would still not constitute unbelief. However, a positive reaction to what went on there could portend dire salvational consequences. Khan argued that if, for example, a Muslim began to think favorably of Hindu chants and rituals that promoted polytheism and the rejection of divine sovereignty, then he or she risked being charged with unbelief. This risk was also great for someone who took such chants and rituals lightly and did not pay much heed to the offense they caused. Such people would not just be expelled from the fold of Islam, as a consequence; their marriage contract would be annulled.22 An expensive visit to a festival indeed! Even if it were not a religious festival but one that primarily involved nonreligious entertainment, it was best to avoid spaces dominated by Hindus, Khan advised. “It is not possible for such events to be free of objectionable and repulsive activities,” he asserted.23 But what about Muslim vendors and traders who went to such places only for their business and livelihood? They were allowed to do so, Khan admitted, provided there was no sign of polytheism or unbelief, and they neither saw nor involved themselves in anything repugnant. Again, though, it was best if they avoided such venues altogether. For Khan, there was only one situation in which attending Hindu festivals, religious or nonreligious, was not only absolutely permissible but also good and praiseworthy: if a Muslim scholar went there to educate people about and invite them to Islam. He pointed out that the Prophet himself used to frequently make such visits to invite non-­Muslims to Islam, in his attempt to authorize this exception to the rule.24 So, for Khan, only a Muslim scholar with the appropriate skills of pedagogy and persuasion could frequent Hindu festivals; only a scholar with the capacity to attract, guide, and save the otherwise salvationally doomed was insulated from the threat posed by the deviant heretical spaces, discourses, and festivals. Such a scholar entered the dangerous terrain of heresy and unbelief equipped with the required intellectual gear and armor. As for the rest, the common folk, it was best if they [ 200 ]

The Contagion of Imitation kept away from such dangers lest their salvational prospects prematurely implode. None of what Khan said here would have been objectionable to his otherwise fierce intellectual antagonists, the pioneers of the Deoband school. They disagreed vehemently on crucial questions of theology, law, and practice, especially on the role and status of the Prophet in modernity. But, on the question of interreligious imitation and friendship, the outlook of these otherwise bitter rivals who were interlocked in arguably the densest and defining intra-­Muslim polemic in South Asia (the Barelvi-­Deobandi polemic) was remarkably aligned. The brief but telling comments of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, the other major founder of the Deoband madrasa in addition to Qasim Nanautvi, on tashabbuh and related matters, which are scattered throughout the famous collection of his juridical opinions called Fatawa Rashidiyya, are aptly illustrative of this point. For instance, a questioner once asked Gangohi if it was permissible for a Muslim passing by a street where a member of the Hindu reformist outfit the Arya Samaj was delivering a proselytizing lecture to pause and listen in. In his reply, much like his nemesis Ahmad Raza Khan, Gangohi drew a distinction between a Muslim commoner and a Muslim scholar. Listening to the sermon of a non-­Muslim competitor was impermissible for regular folk because of the harm it might cause their faith, but there was no harm if a Muslim scholar stopped by and listened for the purpose of meting an instant rebuttal.25 On another occasion, Gangohi was asked whether it was permissible for Muslims serving the colonial state as, say, as low-­ranking police officers at the subinspector rank, to attend and become spectators to Hindu ritual festivals like Diwali and Holi for the administrative purpose of maintaining law and order. Even though Muslims were positioned with authority at such venues, Gangohi deemed such spectatorship forbidden (haram). Why? Because it amplified the size and splendor (taksir wa rawnaq) of a ritual festival belonging to a non-­Muslim community.26 Notice how both these examples involve the performance of an imperial Muslim political theology through the calibrated choreography of the body in the public sphere. Securing and preserving Muslim distinction and, therefore, power, as Gangohi’s opinions show, represented not only a cognitive exercise to do with the production and transmission of knowledge but also an embodied imperative fully involving the sensoria like sight and sound. The final fragment of Gangohi’s thought on tashabbuh that I wish to share distills a [ 201 ]

The Contagion of Imitation crucial aspect of Deobandi as well as South Asian Muslim traditionalist discourses on this concept more broadly. When Gangohi was once asked for his view on a South Asian Muslim’s wearing a cross or an English hat, and whether there was any difference between the two in terms of their normative repercussions, he responded by making a curious distinction between the two sartorial options. Wearing a cross, Gangohi firmly stated, was forbidden and indeed a form of unbelief (kufr) because the cross symbolized unbelief. On the other hand, an English hat or, say, English attire like suits and pants did not symbolize unbelief but represented a community’s dominant mode of dress. It is Gangohi’s next set of comments that most interest me: “Donning English hats or suits and pants in India involves imitation (tashabbuh) in dress [of a non-­Muslim community] and hence constitutes a sin. However, in England, where Muslims also wear such clothes, there is no sin attached because these forms of clothing do not represent specific markers of a non-­Muslim Christian community [the British] but are commonly worn by Muslims and non-­Muslims alike.”27 The same sartorial act—­wearing an English hat—­ yielded two completely opposite normative outcomes, sinfulness and permissibility, depending on the context. In India, where English clothing was specific to and hence a marker of distinction for the English, such clothing was taboo and thus a source of reprehensible imitation for Indian Muslims. But, in England, where no such taboo existed, there was no problem of imitation or stain of sinful reprehensibility. In other words, the reprehensibility of imitation was attached to the way it breached a taboo. If Muslims and non-­Muslims shared a practice to begin with, like that of wearing Western attire in the West, there was no taboo to breach and no concern about imitating the Other. The ominous specter of reprehensible imitation or tashabbuh only appeared, then, when a marker of Muslim distinction was vulnerable to erasure, or when a non-­Muslim marker of distinction threatened to assimilate Muslim identity and practice. Both these scenarios undermined Muslim distinction, which was unacceptable, because distinction indexed power. As I will detail in the next chapter, it was not Gangohi but Qari Tayyib, his bosom friend and colleague Qasim Nanautvi’s grandson and a star of the third generation of Deoband scholars, who expounded on this relationship between distinction and power most elaborately. Here, the [ 202 ]

The Contagion of Imitation point I want to put forward is a slightly different one. Certainly, scholars like Gangohi approached the category of reprehensible imitation under a capacious conceptual canopy that included explicitly devotional practices as well as more everyday matters like sartorial choices. But their objection to interreligious imitation was animated by the very specific concern over safeguarding markers of Muslim distinction in the public sphere and not by a blanket or absolute rejection of all relations with non-­Muslims or of all acts associated with them. For instance, on the crucial question of whether South Asian Muslims should refrain from learning and teaching English, Gangohi had no qualms endorsing the learning of English so as long as that does not harm one’s faith or lead to sinful behavior.28 Similarly, in terms of the etiquette of everyday life, he deemed permissible greeting or saying salam to a Hindu if needed.29 My point here is neither to laud these moments of flexibility, nor to redeem the inclusivity index of actors like Gangohi, but to underscore the very specific doctrinal and political reasoning that informed their prohibition against imitation: the maintenance of theological supremacy over non-­Muslims through the maintenance of embodied distinction in the public sphere. As I have argued throughout this book, in the absence of Muslim political sovereignty in modern South Asia, it is in the theater of everyday ritual life and interactions that sovereign power was increasingly claimed, exercised, and negotiated. The heightened concern over and the unprecedented volume of discursive ink and energy expended on the question of interreligious imitation from the nineteenth century onward is yet another example and instance of this larger point I have tried to make throughout this book. The intensity of focus on the everyday as a site of circumscribing Muslim distinction from non-­Muslim imprints comes through in even more dramatic and elaborate ways in the discourses on tashabbuh of the early nineteenth-­century firebrand scholar Shah Muhammad Isma‘il (d. 1831), whom Gangohi held in great reverence and whom he considered a pioneering reformer of the modern era. Grandson of the illustrious eighteenth-­ century North Indian scholar Shah Wali Ullah, Isma‘il is a hugely influential and equally controversial thinker whose intellectual persona included both an activist agenda of popular reform and deeply erudite and specialist works on political theory, law, theology, and mysticism. His legacy is also heavily marked by his leading role in the ill-­fated and alternately [ 203 ]

The Contagion of Imitation memorialized or chastised (depending on perspective) jihad campaign against Sikh rule in the Pashtun populated North West Frontier region between 1826 and 1831; he died on the battlefield in 1831 in the town of Balakot, located today in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwah in Pakistan. His views on tashabbuh are found in a less discussed text of his called Remembrance of Brothers (Tazkir al-­Ikhwan) that is often published together with his arguably most famous and inarguably most controversial tract Energizing Faith (Taqwiyyat al-­Iman) that had vigorously and at moments abrasively attacked long-­running devotional and everyday rituals popular among South Asian Muslims, calling them an affront to divine sovereignty.30 Curiously, Isma‘il read the term qawm, or community/people, in the Prophet’s saying “Whoever imitates a community becomes one of them” as not just restricted to religious identity but extended to other forms of identity including gender. So, this Hadith, in his view, also admonished and warned against a man imitating a woman or a woman imitating a man, and not just a Muslim imitating Christians, Hindus, or Zoroastrians.31 For Isma‘il, as for many others, at the heart of Tashabbuh or reprehensible imitation was the sin of effecting a category mistake. I will return to this point in more detail while discussing Qari Tayyib on tashabbuh; what I want to quote from Ismai‘il’s text now is an excerpt from an otherwise page-­long list of everyday practices he categorized as falling under the menacing banner of reprehensible imitation that Indian Muslim masses must therefore cease and avoid: Celebrating Holi and joining Hindus in playing with colors during the festival; decorating homes with lights during Diwali and exchanging gifts and sweets to mark the occasion; venturing to festivals (maylawn) at the Ganges and Narbada rivers and in Haridwar [all three major centers of Hindu devotional life] on Dussehra and on Basant [kite flying festival]; refraining from cow meat and considering the consumption of beef taboo out of reverence for the cow; embracing English mannerisms of speech and comportment; riding tailless horses; using gold and silver cutlery; wearing black in moments of mourning.32

Notice in this brief list the range and variety of objectionable attitudes and practices that encompass ritual life, the attunement of senses, everyday [ 204 ]

The Contagion of Imitation habits, and the avoidance of sacred geographies associated with the religious Other.

A Logic of Difference at the Cusp of the Colonial Order Not all South Asian ulama, however, subscribed to such an expansive notion of tashabbuh that cut across devotional practices, cultural attitudes, and everyday habits. For instance, Isma‘il’s famous uncle, teacher and noted scholar of Hadith Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz (Shah Wali Ullah’s eldest son), pivoted his discussion on tashabbuh on the intentionality of a Muslim actor in how a particular practice or fragment of life dominant among non-­Muslims was materialized. According to ‘Aziz, even if a practice was disproportionately common in a non-­Muslim community, there was no restriction for Muslims to partake in it, especially for their benefit and comfort, so long as that practice was not specifically exclusive to that non-­Muslim community.33 Similarly, in a statement more explicit than Gangohi’s, Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz found no harm in learning the English language and script for the purpose of gaining access to Western texts and knowledge traditions, with the condition that such language acquisition was not undertaken with the intention of imitating the British. Similitude (tashbih) with the religious Other was only prohibited, ‘Aziz argued, when it involved the desire to be counted as among them, or the intentionality of inclining one’s heart (istimalat al-­qulub) toward them through imitation. These two prohibitive conditions were met, in turn, in two situations that ‘Aziz considered the red line that could not be doctrinally or affectively crossed: 1. imitation in a practice, such as to do with dress and food, that was exclusively specific to a non-­Muslim community, and 2. imitation in devotional rituals and religious festivals explicitly associated with non-­Muslims.34 ‘Aziz’s views on tashabbuh were informed by his broader conception of interreligious friendship, which he described in a brief but telling set of remarks (in Persian) in which he referred to friendship interchangeably in its Arabized form of muwalat and with the Persian and Urdu word dosti. The key to his evaluation hinged on whether the act of friendship was deliberate and on the nature of the political relationship at work between Muslims and the befriended non-­Muslim community. ‘Aziz was explicit in declaring [ 205 ]

The Contagion of Imitation that deliberate friendship with non-­Muslims was equivalent to unbelief (kufr) in the realm of faith and forbidden (haram) in nonreligious worldly affairs (muwalat bi-­maʿna dosti agar bi jihat al-­din bi-­anha [non-­Muslims] mutahaqqaq shawad bi’l ijmaʿ kufr ast wa bi-­iʿtibar-­i dunya agar ikhtiyar-­i in shakhs ast pas haram ast). He inserted a curious caveat, switching from Persian to Arabic: “But love, however, is a matter beyond volition” (fa al-­mahabba ‘amr la yadkhul taht al-­ ikhtiyar).35 He elaborated with the example of the pure instinctive love (tabaʿ-­i mahaz) for a non-­Muslim parent or spouse; such instinctive love could not be forbidden. His point was to distinguish between deliberate acts of interreligious friendship that bore harmful normative consequences because they were deliberate, and involuntary relations of love as in the context of familial intimacy that bore no salvational repercussions. Nonetheless, he stressed, one must strive to minimize any such intimacy. What about transactional relations of cooperation (muʿawanat) with non-­ Muslims, especially a non-­Muslim polity—­for instance, by offering one’s services for renumeration or by providing voluntary help with no compensation in return? In both of these scenarios, ‘Aziz argued, the permissibility of such relations depended on the political dealings and designs of the non-­ Muslim community in question. In the case of belligerent non-­Muslim entities that fought Muslims and usurped their political power, rendering services for employment or voluntarily was not only forbidden but also among the most heinous sins (kabaʾir). On the other hand, if non-­Muslims were not actively hostile to Muslims, already controlled a territory, and employed Muslims in various trades to furnish their treasury, then that was permissible according to the apparent laws of the sharia. But a deeper analysis, ‘Aziz quickly added, revealed that any relationship of employment in which non-­Muslims served as powerful employers was not entirely free of prohibitive elements. At the least, remaining employed by non-­Muslims involved flattering them and turning a blind eye to their corrupt deeds. Moreover, wishing them well, acting as a trusted source of good advice, and exalting them with honorific greetings like qiblah or “my lord” (to the British) elevated and amplified their strength and stature—­an outcome contrary to the political aims and aspirations of the sharia.36 Thus, while deeming permissible and not forbidding employment in the service of non-­Muslims, ‘Aziz was careful to add layers of caution so as not to fracture the protocols of an imperial Muslim political theology in an early nineteenth-­century world defined by dwindling Muslim political sovereignty. [ 206 ]

The Contagion of Imitation He added another intriguing and instructive note of nuance: “One must also differentiate between different kinds of non-­Muslims, those who are obedient to faith like the British (farangiyan) and the Sikhs, and those who resist and oppose faith like the Marathas.”37 Notice how ‘Aziz’s categories of difference do not correspond with a world religions paradigm that reduces particular communities to contained religious identities; it is not any generic category of “Hindus” but specifically the Marathas of Northern India that he considered wanting in faith, reflecting local political dynamics as much as differences of theology. ‘Aziz thus occupies a fascinating intermediary moment between the precolonial eighteenth century, with noticeable yet still amorphous categories of interreligious difference and the mid-­to-­ late nineteenth century with increasingly defined notions of difference premised exclusively on impervious religious identities. Returning to the main issue of tashabbuh, I hope the preceding discussion has made amply clear that it is not as if ‘Aziz did not have a notion of reprehensible imitation or was an unbridled inclusivist; far from it. But the emphasis of his thought was on the intentionality of the actor and on ascertaining the exclusive specificity of a practice to a non-­Muslim community, rather than on blocking the means to any practice that appeared stained by the blotch of non-­Muslim appearance and identity, as was the case with his nephew Shah Muhammad Isma‘il.38 Again, this subtle intra-­Muslim difference (in this case, between a prominent nephew/uncle duo) cannot be reduced to or mapped onto binary divisions like inclusivist/exclusivist or purist/pluralist. Rather, it reflects varied expressions and points of emphasis of a common normative tradition whereby contrasting readings of that tradition are yet bound by certain shared interpretive assumptions, expectations, and boundaries.

Engaging Europe and Early Islam Another fascinating and instructive example of a subtle logic of a less rigid notion of tashabbuh is found in the thought of the prolific and panoramic late nineteenth-­/early twentieth-­century thinker Shibli Nu‘mani. As I mentioned in chapter 3, in the context of discussing the idea of the caliphate, Nu‘mani in many ways exemplified the trope of a firmly traditionalist scholar with yet explicitly modernist leanings on many critical issues. On the caliphate, [ 207 ]

The Contagion of Imitation remember, although Nu‘mani had died in 1914 before the Khilafat movement took off, in contrast to the stalwarts of that movement like Abu’l Kalam Azad and Sayyid Sulayman Nadvi to whom he was a revered mentor, Nu‘mani had maintained that Ottoman rulers were not legitimate caliphs, since they lacked the Prophet’s Quraysh lineage. On tashabbuh, while Nu‘mani did articulate a more permissive position, his purpose was less to forge Hindu-­ Muslim collaboration (as was Azad’s). Instead, Nu‘mani’s main object of critique was what he saw as a pervasive attitude of suspicion toward Europe and European thought and technologies in the guise of heightened concern over preventing the reprehensible imitation of the Other. Though he did not take any names, Nu‘mani left no ambiguity that his ire was primarily directed at the traditionalist scholars or ulama colleagues in his midst. For Nu‘mani, a defensive and myopic view of imitating non-­Muslim practices evinced ignorance of Muslim history, especially the life of the Prophet and his Companions. As he put it: “Our scholars strive their utmost to steer clear of European knowledge traditions, arts, language, civilization, and culture. If they ever adopt or use anything European out of compulsion, they won’t do so without churning some curses. I think that such an erroneous attitude is the product of a lack of attention on Muslim history in the long running curricula in which traditionalist scholars are trained. They are therefore oblivious to the details of the societal norms that anchored the lives of the Prophet, the four Rightly Guided Caliphs [in Sunni Islam], and the Prophet’s other Companions.”39 Drawing on the magnum opus of the eminent Shah Wali Ullah of the eighteenth-­century God’s Conclusive Argument (Hujjat Allah al-­Baligha), Nu‘mani posited that in early Islam the underlying principle governing engagement with non-­Muslim communities was this: whatever among their practices made sense were kept in place, and those that were seen as defective were corrected. So, for instance, the second caliph in Sunni Islam, ‘Umar ibn al-­ Khattab, had continued the practice of imposing land tax (kharaj) and the tithe (ʿushr) on his subjects for the generation of revenue that had been put in place by the pre-­Islamic Zoroastrian Sasanian king of Persia Anushirvan (d. 579). “If ‘Umar felt no embarrassment about adopting strategies of governance from an Iranian Magian [Zoroastrian] king, why are we today so hesitant to embrace beneficial aspects of European civilization?” Nu‘mani wondered with disdainful displeasure.40 Similarly, he furnished, other key structures and mechanisms of governance that formed the bedrock of [ 208 ]

The Contagion of Imitation ‘Umar’s caliphate like the treasury, public accounts, public works, administrative divisions, and the postal system were all modeled on Persian, Byzantine, and Greek examples and templates. “Had it been today,” Nu‘mani continued sarcastically, “our ulama would have shut down any such measures by firing away the Hadith ‘whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.’ ”41 The fulcrum of Nu‘mani’s argument rested on history. A constricted and hypervigilant notion of interreligious imitation and encounter ran contrary to the very historical narrative and consciousness of the exemplary early years of Islam. In Nu‘mani’s view, the era of the Prophet and his Companions showcased a logic of Muslim power and identity that confidently engaged and assimilated difference for its own benefit. And it is precisely ignorance of this prophetic time that nourished the miasmic reluctance to approach the cultural and civilizational contributions of non-­Muslim communities as anything but corrosive agents of contagion. Crucially, despite Nu‘mani’s explicit critique of traditionalist scholars, and the obvious modernist overtones of his argument, his position was still firmly grounded in a particular reading of the tradition and its history, and not in an uncritical embrace of a modern mandate of religious inclusivism. Nu‘mani’s attachment to an imperial Muslim political theology becomes most apparent if one turns to what is perhaps the most revealing moment of his discourse on tashabbuh, again connected to the reign of ‘Umar ibn al-­ Khattab. ‘Umar, Nu‘mani narrated, had registered his displeasure at Muslim men intermarrying with Christian and Jewish women in the newly conquered majority non-­Muslim Byzantine and Persian territories. ‘Umar was concerned that such intermarriage would cause Muslims to muddy and lose their own religious identities. In response, an unnamed Muslim commander once asked ‘Umar whether he had expressed this prohibitive view in his capacity as a caliph or as his personal opinion. When ‘Umar replied that it was his personal opinion, people paid little heed to his cautionary stance and continued this practice undeterred.42 The openness and room for disagreement, even with a powerful sitting caliph, and the possibility of speaking one’s mind and following one’s volition, as Muslims had done by questioning rather than uncritically accepting ‘Umar’s views, was only part of what Nu‘mani wanted his readers to notice. “The exercise of free thought was an essential quality among Muslims then, which is why they acted according to their wishes, despite ‘Umar’s opposition and contrary view,” he [ 209 ]

The Contagion of Imitation wrote in a not-­so-­subtle swipe at what he saw as the unyielding conformism among Muslims in his present.43 More importantly, he punctuated, the outcome of intermarriage with Jews and Christians had further strengthened rather than weakened Muslim imperial power. How? True, Nu‘mani admitted, many non-­Muslim cultural mores and everyday practices did enter and become part of Muslim life as a result of intermarriages. More significantly, not only were the distinctive markers of Muslim ritual life left unharmed, but also the creedal tenets of Islam were cemented in the hearts of these non-­Muslim women, many of whom eventually became Muslim as well. “Truth be told, this [intermarriage with non-­Muslim women] was among the major reasons for the [imperial] expansion of Islam,” Nu‘mani declared in a note of triumphalist defiance.44 Consider how Nu‘mani couches his argument for a capacious and flexible engagement with Europe and European knowledges and practices through the logics of Muslim imperial power. And much like he drew on the memory of the time of the Prophet and his Companions to assemble his case for erasing anxieties over imitating the Other, so, too, did scholars like Qari Tayyib who found interreligious imitation as a harbinger to catastrophe (as I will detail in the next chapter). Examples of thwarting interreligious diffusion from the reign of ‘Umar were central to their argument as well. But before we get to that, I want to add one more instructive fragment to the genealogy of tashabbuh in South Asian Muslim intellectual thought presented in this chapter. I do so by turning to modern Urdu literature.

“Son of the Moment”: Imitation as a Recipe for Self-­Destruction Among the most productive and enticing discussions on the problem of tashabbuh in modern South Asian Muslim thought finds expression not in legal texts or juridical compendia, but in literature. I have in mind the scholar-­cum-­novelist Nazir Ahmad Dihlavi’s (commonly known as Deputy Nazir Ahmad; henceforth Nazir Ahmad) enormously interesting though less studied Urdu novella Son of the Moment that will occupy the remainder of this chapter. While not trained at a Muslim seminary, Nazir Ahmad was steeply grounded in a traditionalist intellectual and social milieu. From a family of respected traditionalist scholars including his father Sa‘adat ‘Ali Khan, he was homeschooled in Arabic and Persian in the North Indian town of Bijnor. [ 210 ]

The Contagion of Imitation He later settled in Delhi, where he attended the famous Delhi College and studied with the noted scholar of Islam and Arabic Mamluk ‘Ali (d. 1851), who had also taught and mentored the pioneers of the Deoband Madrasa including Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (whom we met in chapter 2 and will meet again in the next). After completing his education at Delhi College that included both the study of Islam and other subjects (e.g., history, geography), Nazir Ahmad was employed by the British state in various bureaucratic positions in the North-­Western Provinces and the Deccan, including that of deputy collector in the Revenue Department. As part of his experience working for the British state machinery, he acquired sufficient English language skills to undertake motley state-­sanctioned translation projects including the translation of the Indian Penal Code into Urdu. He is most famous, however, for his work as an Urdu novelist and litterateur, with the novel The Bride’s Mirror (Miraʾat al-­ʿUrus) published in 1869, centered on the theme of a traditionally grounded program of moral edification for Indian Muslim women, by far the book that has most durably imprinted his legacy. A bestseller in its own time and later, more recently it was adapted into a wildly popular TV series by Pakistan’s GEO Television (aired in 2012–­2013). His novella Son of the Movement (Ibn ul Waqt), which I will examine in some detail, brings into view an aspect of Nazir Ahmad’s scholarly persona and writing that has perhaps been less probed, if not suppressed, in Western scholarship on his thought: his deep grounding in and articulation of a traditionalist Muslim intellectual imaginary and vocabulary.45 Written in 1888 and also set in the context of the immediate aftermath of the 1857 mutiny, Ibn ul Waqt centers in large measure on the tensions and conundrums of interreligious and intercultural imitation.46 The promise and peril of interreligious and intercultural friendship and imitation is the organizing theme of the novella. In premodern Sufi thought, the term Ibn ul Waqt, as in the celebrated Masnavi of Jalaludin Rumi, connotes the importance of Sufi practitioners and disciples investing focused concentration on the state, mood, and conditions of the moment in which they find themselves and not be tempted or occupied by the thought of what the future holds or will bring. This sentiment is best captured by the most famous couplet in which Rumi invokes this category: “O friend, a Sufi is a son of the moment; Saying tomorrow is not a part of his path” (Sufi Ibn ul-­Waqt bashad ay rafiq; Nist farda guftan az shart-­i tariq).47 Nazir Ahmad, while persisting with the meaning of intense focus on the present moment, also inverts the import of this premodern [ 211 ]

The Contagion of Imitation formulation by casting the figure of Ibn ul Waqt, his novella’s protagonist, as deeply attuned to his present and yet afflicted with the malady of presentist opportunism. Ibn ul Waqt—­who exhibits all-­too-­obvious similarities to Nazir Ahmad—­is a young man from a relatively affluent Muslim family in Delhi boasting formidable intellectual pedigree, with deep ties to the Mughal aristocracy and to the religious elite of the city. He was educated in both a traditional madrasa (where his favorite subject was history) and Delhi College and excelled equally in both settings. With his social and intellectual standing, Ibn ul Waqt was in no need of befriending or imitating any foreign people or civilization; he was secure and thriving in his own stead. However, a foundational belief and philosophical position—­one, coincidentally, with ample precedent in the Muslim tradition as well—­propelled him to admire and adore British norms, habits, intellectual traditions, and general manners of habitation.48 That position was this: that “the possession of political power and sovereignty necessarily signifies a community’s overall superiority.”49 A staunch faith in this underlying principle animates Ibn ul Waqt’s attraction to British traditions of knowledge and ways of life. Ultimately, in the course of the novella, we find him suspended and eventually unraveled in the quest to coalesce British and indigenous South Asian cultural moorings. His intimate entanglement with colonial forms of life was serendipitous. At the height of the violence and bedlam engulfing the mutiny, he comes across and rescues a catastrophically injured British officer and top bureaucrat named Mr. Noble. Ibn ul Waqt, endangering his own life, provides Noble shelter in his home for an extended period lasting more than three months, until Noble fully recovers and his wounds are healed. The two strike up a close friendship. They converse extensively, at times well into the night, on sundry sociological, theological, and political matters, including the causes and aftermath of the rebellion, the categorization of the rebellion as jihad, and the unfolding dynamics of the relationship between the British government and its Indian Muslim subjects. Noble tries to return the favor of Ibn ul Waqt’s courageous magnanimity by introducing his newly cultivated friend to the British intelligentsia in Delhi. He also props up Ibn ul Waqt as an ideal candidate to take up the mantle of a “native reformer” who could drive his community on the path of civilizational progress—­a task that Noble admits cannot be successfully executed by outsiders like the British on their [ 212 ]

The Contagion of Imitation own. In Ibn ul Waqt, Noble found someone ripe and eager to assume this self-­ missionizing project. However, while in awe of British political power, Ibn ul Waqt is not entirely uncritical of colonial politics. His evaluation of the brewing mistrust between Indian Muslims and the British government—­that spectacularly imploded during the mutiny—­pinned blame on the latter’s indifferent if not outright disparaging attitude toward the former, culturally and politically. As a result, he sighed, “the cultivation of love and trust between Indian Muslims and the British has become as difficult as that between a lion and a goat . . . ​ [therefore], the British continue to be seen by Muslims in the country as a vexing riddle eluding access and comprehension.”50 Interestingly—­and Nazir Ahmad is very deliberate in stressing this nuance—­Ibn ul Waqt’s push for greater understanding and intimacy between Indian Muslims and the British is not animated by a general commitment to liberal pluralism. Exactly to the contrary, his argument was informed by the diagnostic claim that the underlying source of the indifference and mistrust plaguing British-­Muslim relations was the deleteriously overweening influence of Hindus on Indian Muslims. It is in imitation of Hindus that Indian Muslims had harbored a fatalist and direly suspicious attitude that saw the British only through the eyes of cynicism and as objects of impurity. The unfortunate effect of such a Hindu-­inspired attitude was that Indian Muslims were left bereft of all the socioeconomic and political benefits afforded by British colonialism for indigenous communities. “I will, God willing, excise this “Hinduness” (Hinduyyat) [that has afflicted] Indian Muslims and fermented their undue hatred towards the British,” Ibn ul-­Waqt proclaimed.51 Unlike Hinduism, he contended, “Islam is such an excellent and confident faith that its followers can thrive regardless of the presence or absence of Muslim political power.”52 He continued with an arresting comment: “Yes, the British are in power [in India]. But the condition of Muslims is also not as miserable as it was say, for the early Muslim community in [seventh-­century] Mecca before they were forced to migrate to Madina. In fact, the religious freedom that Muslims enjoy in British India is even better than what they would in a Muslim polity.”53 The crux of Ibn ul Waqt’s reform mission then centered on erasing the fear and estrangement that dominated Indian Muslim attitudes toward the British. Instead, he sought to irrigate grounds for a relationship of regular contact and exchange that [ 213 ]

The Contagion of Imitation might ameliorate the politico-­cultural chasm separating the colonizer and the colonized, a chasm that in his view served no one’s welfare. In this quest, he is actively and fulsomely patronized by Noble. He is provided the coveted position in the colonial state machinery of Deputy Collector (overseer of a district’s administration and revenue collection)—­a rare achievement and status for an indigenous subject, especially a Muslim. And with that came the comfort and luxury of a government-­allotted home in the spacious environs of the cantonment, with servants at his fingertips, in addition to a variety of other amenities. But the key ingredient for realizing the mission of intercultural intimacy that Ibn ul Waqt strove for was “change in [external] appearance” (tabdil-­i wazʿa), a recurrent and central category in the novella. With considerable help from Noble and his retinue of Indian servicemen, and through much struggle of his own to overcome a steep learning curve, Ibn ul-­Waqt immerses himself in the project of adopting the appearance and mannerisms of a “gentleman,” as he trains his body in elite British norms of dress, dining etiquette, speech, and comportment. It is not as if he bade farewell to his faith or to his religious ritual obligations, but, increasingly, as he moves into the British cantonment in Delhi, far removed from his earlier environ encircled by mosques and Sufi shrines, maintaining ritual discipline becomes ever harder. Meanwhile, in the Muslim quarters of Delhi, speculations about the transformation in Ibn ul Waqt’s appearance, and his blossoming friendship with Noble, run rife. Had Ibn ul Waqt become Christian by sharing meals with Noble and by offering him refuge during the mutiny? Did his imitation of British habits and dress render him culpable of the dire sin of reprehensible imitation (tashabbuh)? These are the kind of questions that permeated among worshippers after the early afternoon (zuhr) congregational prayers one day, as they waited for the mosque’s prayer leader–­cum–­religious counselor to complete his rituals and turn to them to offer some guidance. “A person does not become Christian by eating with an Englishman,” he replied, while adding the further cautionary note, “but the warning presented in the Hadith ‘whoever imitates a people becomes one of them’ is activated for him; hence, a Muslim should refrain from such a practice.”54 The prayer leader’s measured reply does little, however, to ameliorate Ibn ul Waqt’s social ostracization in his original neighborhood, where the rumor mill churns news of his conversion to Christianity unabated. Again, crucially, it is not any hint of theological or doctrinal proclivity toward Christianity [ 214 ]

The Contagion of Imitation or deviation from Islam that nourish such incriminating impressions; rather, they are sparked and sustained by Ibn ul Waqt’s everyday gestures of imitation, like using Western cutlery and furniture and, most damningly, donning British clothing. The cantonment, where he had moved, was too remote and intimidating for the common folk to venture. But, in the more public venue of the court where Ibn ul Waqt worked during the day, plenty of people—­at least “fifty a day”—­would see him wearing British clothing, sharing meals with British officers, and smoking cigars. What most bothered the Muslims of Delhi about him was that, despite “an external appearance that mirrored the British, he still called himself Muslim.”55 The ambiguity generated by the dissonance between bodily display and confessed faith commitments is what rendered Ibn ul Waqt a source of consternation, mockery, and prickliness to his community. For the first few months, Ibn ul Waqt’s tryst with colonial power generated him rich dividends; he is accorded wealth, status, and gravitas. As a consequence, it’s not just local Indians who harbor towards him jealousy; many Britishers mask their resentful antipathy for what they see as his undue proximity to Mr. Noble. Moreover, this antipathy is generally mixed with a dose of condescension toward his earnest attempts at assimilating to British culture, reflected, for instance, in their frequent lampooning of his deficient English. As Nazir Ahmad poignantly puts it: “The English took him [Ibn ul Waqt] into their society but not with an open heart.”56 Despite these often invisible challenges, however, Noble’s support and patronage ensured that Ibn ul Waqt thrived in his new environs and aired his mission of reform with assured confidence. But that equanimity would be suddenly and dramatically disturbed. Noble, afflicted with a long-­running and excruciating headache with which he had thus far persevered, was compelled to head back home to Britain for treatment. Ibn ul Waqt’s pillar of support, thus, unexpectedly vanished. And, with that, his fortunes plummeted. The Collector (or “Collector Sahib,” as he is called in the novel) who replaced Noble at first indirectly and eventually through an official notice rebuked Ibn ul Waqt. Ostensibly, the sheet of charges against him included a combination of maltreating subordinates, arrogance, ostentation, profligacy, and financial impropriety. But the underlying cardinal sin that ticked off the Collector (whom we later learn is called “Mr. Sharp”), paradoxically, was Ibn ul Waqt’s imitation of British dress and appearance (angrayzi wazaʿ). If all “natives” begin to dress [ 215 ]

The Contagion of Imitation and appear like the British, he reasons, the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized will disappear, and with that British political sovereignty will dissolve.57 The maintenance of cultural difference and superiority was crucial to maintaining sovereign power. This assumption bore a curious and striking resemblance to dominant Muslim traditionalist discourses on tashabbuh (as Qari Tayyib’s thought explored in the next chapter will reveal). Allowing imitation between self and the Other, in any direction, leads to the erasure of distinction, and eventually the evisceration of the self. This is the foundational assumption that was shared between the character of the British Collector Sahib in Nazir Ahmad’s novella and doyens of Muslim traditionalism like Qari Tayyib. Ibn ul Waqt’s optimistic viewpoint on bridging intercivilizational distance through a program of reforming the self by imitating the more powerful Other collapsed catastrophically. He was buried in a pile of debt that he had accumulated to finance his new ways of life. And, to make matters worse, due to the Collector’s constant interference and enforced obstacles, he found functioning at work increasingly untenable. Add to this the nuisance of having to negotiate indigenous government servants like the court clerk (sarishtadar) who, with Noble now out of the picture, unleashed their aversion towards Ibn ul Waqt, often by spewing venom against him to the already acerbic Collector Sahib. In short, Ibn ul Waqt’s reform project stood in tatters. The last few chapters of the novella present an extended series of conversations and exchanges between Ibn ul Waqt and his cousin (his father’s sister’s son) meaningfully named “Hujjat al-­Islam,” or the “proof of Islam.” Before the eruption of the mayhem of 1857, Hujjat al-­Islam had left for hajj to Mecca and stayed put in Arabia after learning about the situation back home. But the volatility of Ibn ul Waqt’s condition, socially and financially, and its deleterious effects on his and, by extension, Hujjat al-­Islam’s family, compelled the latter to return. Though not a scholar, Hujjat al-­Islam is a pious, learned, and self-­assured Muslim who confidently practices and embodies tradition. Yet he is not anticolonial. Nazir Ahmad is careful to imbue the character of Hujjat al-­Islam with marked shades of nuance; while firmly committed to Islam and a traditionalist worldview, he is also appreciative of the potential benefits of colonial power for religiously rooted folks like him. In fact, it is thanks to Hujjat al-­Islam’s intercession and mediation that the Collector does not fire Ibn ul Waqt and rehabilitates him professionally. It is not the imitation of the Other but, rather, the maintenance of [ 216 ]

The Contagion of Imitation distinction that elevates a person in the eyes of that Other as well, Nazir Ahmad seems to argue through the character of Hujjat al-­Islam. Though Hujjat al-­Islam comes to Ibn ul Waqt’s rescue, he is left aghast at the indifferent distance his cousin has cultivated toward a traditionally oriented Muslim moral economy. From finding it impossible to pray in peace without being interrupted by the din of barking dogs to seeing no dish on the daily dinner menu that had not brushed pork or some other prohibition: Hujjat al-­Islam feels suffocated by Ibn ul Waqt’s adopted home and new environs.58 There was nothing wrong in learning English or seeking employment with the British. But where Ibn ul Waqt went horribly wrong, Hujjat al-­Islam earnestly diagnosed, was in adhering to the twin conviction that working for the colonial state will bring to his own community the prophylactic of “reform,” and that establishing relations with the British required the outward adoption of British appearance.59 This twin conviction, despite Ibn ul Waqt’s admittedly good intentions, had borne the net result of his increasing and encrusted apathy toward faith and the disciplined ritual life it demanded. The novella ends inconclusively, with Hujjat al-­Islam engaging Ibn ul Waqt in a series of intense theological debates on questions of divine will, human agency, and the place of faith and religion in a world encircled by the looming shadow of modern science and rationality. Ibn ul Waqt’s persistent volley of questions suggests that his stoic and learned yet avidly defiant cousin’s discourse helped disentangle at least some of his bristling doubts. But was there any substantive breakthrough? And did Hujjat al-­ Islam’s intervention propel Ibn ul Waqt to reconsider his mission of reforming the self by assimilating with and imitating the colonial Other?’ Nazir Ahmad leaves these questions open. It is as if the very point of the novella is that the sort of quandary generated by unbridled projects of interreligious and intercivilizational imitation remains aporetically suspended between self and Other, neither here nor there, impossible to resolve. On the surface, Ibn ul Waqt represents a stinging rebuke of a vision of modernization premised on assimilation and imitation. Such a path to reforming the self leads to the self’s destruction; this is the upshot of Ibn ul Waqt’s ill-­fated experiment. But a deeper reading of this novella pivots on a theorization of power that needs distinction for its survival. Sovereign power can only maintain itself if the sovereign and its subject do not assimilate and maintain distinction. This sentiment is best captured by the Collector, [ 217 ]

The Contagion of Imitation Mr. Sharp, who, while conversing with Hujjat al-­Islam, described the underlying source of his displeasure with Ibn ul Waqt with an arresting set of words: “I would never harbor any derision for you,” Sharp says, “because you are an Indian and dress like one. But your cousin, despite being an Indian, wants to look like a [British] Sahib. . . . ​If an Indian for no obvious reason and when it brings him no comfort, begins dressing like the British, it can only mean that he is making a claim to being our equal. [Therefore], when the native imitates the distinctive markers (shiʿar) of our national identity, it can only serve as a means to demean and undermine the colonial government’s authority, and to render ineffectual its sovereign power.”60 Notice here the same concern with preserving distinctive markers of identity that also dominated the thought of prominent Muslim traditionalist actors like Ahmad Raza Khan discussed in this chapter and the previous two chapters. Nazir Ahmad mapped and imposed a logic of imperial sovereignty at the heart of traditionalist Muslim discourses on tashabbuh onto the logic of colonial sovereignty. Again, the foundational principle informing such a logic of sovereignty was this: that assimilation and imitation eviscerates sovereign power while distinction preserves it, and whoever seeks to disturb the coherence of this logic gets buried under the rubble of the piercing force of sovereign power. That tragic victim was Ibn ul Waqt. So, in a sense, through this novella, Nazir Ahmad advances two arguments simultaneously: the universality of a Muslim traditionalist logic of sovereignty that was shared even by non-­Muslim purveyors of empire and the dangerous futility of aspiring to progress by imitating the powerful. It is unclear whether Nazir Ahmad had a specific person in mind that he sought to depict with the character of Ibn ul Waqt. On the one hand, Nazir Ahmad’s own biography as a graduate of Delhi College who went on to serve the British state as a deputy collector bears a striking resemblance to Ibn ul Waqt’s narrative. Though Nazir Ahmad, of course, saw himself as a beneficiary of colonial power who was yet not colonized by that power and successfully maintained his distinct identity and appearance (e.g., in his choice of clothing) as a Muslim scholar and writer. So, in a certain sense, Ibn ul Waqt, while sharing the form and trajectory of Nazir Ahmad’s life, embodied the exact opposite in terms of substance and outcome, the latter would have argued. The reception of this book is also rife with the speculation that it depicts and rebukes arguably the most famous proponent of engaging Western knowledge traditions as an ingredient of reforming Islam and Indian [ 218 ]

The Contagion of Imitation Muslims in the nineteenth century: Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Adding fuel to this speculation is the fact that Khan, much like Ibn ul-­Waqt, boasted an aristocratic pedigree and had served and ascended in the colonial state bureaucracy, occupying the coveted post of a civil judge (sadr-­i amin) in Bijnor (appointed in 1855). Moreover, and much like Ibn ul-­Waqt, Khan had tried earnestly to ameliorate the mistrust and alienation dominating the relationship between the colonial state and the Indian Muslim community, while also reminding the British of their responsibility to bridge this divide, precisely in the post-­1857 context. Nazir Ahmad did not confirm or deny the merit of these striking resemblances. Regardless, there is no denying that Sayyid Ahmad Khan is a key figure in the discursive theater of modern South Asian discourses on tashabbuh. This is so not only because of his views on the topic but also on account of the reaction and repudiation those views generated among Muslim traditionalist quarters. It is this fascinating but less explored intellectual and political tussle between Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the ulama, especially major Deoband ulama, on the question of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations in colonial modernity that is the subject of the next chapter. What I hope to show—­by first exploring Khan’s views and then the twentieth-­century Deoband stalwart Muhammad Qari Tayyib’s stinging and comprehensive rebuttal of those views—­is that this intra-­Muslim disagreement on negotiating the interplay of identity and difference as a colonized minority brought into view two competing and highly influential genealogies of reform in Muslim South Asia, the afterlives of which continue to haunt the postcolonial present.

[ 219 ]

SIX

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide Competing Rationalities of Reform in Muslim South Asia

THOUGH THE TOWNS of Aligarh and Deoband are located in the same Northern Indian province of Uttar Pradesh and are only 150 miles apart, the epistemic distance separating the institutions and reform movements that took their name established less than a decade of each other in the late nineteenth century was often pronounced and, at times, seemingly irreconcilable. Admittedly, despite their often serious theological differences, scholars and students attached to the institutions of Aligarh and Deoband have also historically shared overlapping intellectual networks and projects. For instance, the noted late nineteenth-­/early twentieth-­century Deoband scholar and revolutionary ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi (d. 1944) saw and cited himself as a bridge between Aligarh and Deoband.1 To mention another example a bit further from Northern India, though a graduate of Aligarh, the legendary twentieth-­century Pathan political thinker and activist ‘Abdul Ghaffar Khan (d. 1988), who led the famous Khuda’i Khidmatgar (Servants of God) movement, also cultivated and maintained bosom relations with the ulama of Deoband, especially Sindhi and the widely influential Mahmud Hasan (d. 1920)—­a fact that frequently goes unmentioned. Ghaffar Khan presented a moving account of his relationship with Deoband ulama in his voluminous Pashto autobiography My Life and Strivings (Za Ma Zhwand wa Jid o Juhd).2 But these examples of mutual exchange and cross-­pollination should not lead us to undermine the substance or consequence of the epistemic divisions separating these schools and schools of thought, which in turn [ 220 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide represent two among the most influential rationalities of Islam in South Asia. These divisions, their theological foundations, and their implications for Hindu-­Muslim friendship constitute the focus of this chapter. More specifically, the Aligarh-­Deoband divide—­which pitted against each other in vigorous debate arguably the two most formidable streams of the Muslim scholarly elite in South Asia—­is popularly imagined as a clash either between attachment to tradition and openness to modernity, or between inclusive cosmopolitanism (Aligarh) and exclusivist puritanism (Deoband). In what follows I hope to complicate these binary perceptions by elaborating in considerable detail the normative fault lines that separated the social and hermeneutical imaginaries of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the Anglo-­ Muhammadan Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) founder, and his dissenters from a towering bastion of Muslim traditionalism in modern South Asia: the Deoband school and movement. To accomplish this task, the bulk of my attention will center on describing the rival worldviews of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the twentieth-­century Deoband luminary Qari Tayyib, as reflected in their opposing positions on tashabbuh, or reprehensible imitation of non-­Muslims. The contrasting ways in which these scholars imagine and contend with the issue of Muslim/non-­ Muslim relations in general, and of tashabbuh in particular, represents an ideal discursive venue to examine deeper disagreements about how one ought to imagine Islam and its place in the modern world between two prominent rationalities of modern South Asian Islam. To set the stage for that discussion, I begin by first interrogating critical fragments of Khan’s fascinating and massively consequential though rarely studied intellectual tussle with his own contemporary and Tayyib’s grandfather Qasim Nanautvi, whom we met in chapter 2 in the context of the Shahjahanpur interreligious polemic. The Khan/Nanautvi debate centered in large measure on three pivotal questions: what constitutes the tradition and its sources of knowledge in conditions of colonial modernity, how one should interpret them, and who has the authority to do so. These questions pivot in turn on the following foundational question: What represents authoritative knowledge in the aftermath of political power and authority? The terms and stakes of this debate capture perhaps the two most influential rationalities of reform in modern Muslim South Asia, represented by the towering institutions and thought styles of Aligarh and Deoband. What follows is the intellectual and conceptual infrastructure necessary for making sense of the contours [ 221 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide and significance of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s disagreement on the question of tashabbuh and Hindu-­Muslim relations with his traditionalist (in this case, Deobandi) interlocutors-­cum-­rivals, in his own life and beyond.

Rival Hermeneutical Visions: The Sayyid Ahmad Khan–­Qasim Nanautvi Tussle What are the critical hermeneutical and theological fault lines separating traditionalist and modernist articulations of Islam in modern South Asia? Some specific aspects of this otherwise broad question can be gainfully addressed by turning to a subtle yet substantive disagreement between two among the most preeminent representatives of modernism and traditionalism in South Asia: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi. Through a close reading of their most significant points of debate, I hope to clarify as well as complicate the traditionalism/modernism divide in South Asian Islam. My main argument is that although the Khan-­Nanautvi disagreement cannot be reduced to a modernism/traditionalism binary, it nonetheless reveals some fascinating and massively important points of difference that correspond to some signature normative commitments of modernist and traditionalist sensibilities. Of all the actors engaged in this book, Sayyid Ahmad Khan is perhaps the most extensively written about in the Western academy, with multiple monographs and edited volumes devoted to his thought, politics, and the history of the Muhammadan Anglo-­Oriental College that he founded in 1875, known today as Aligarh Muslim University.3 However, one aspect of his thought that deserves much greater and more focused attention is his nuanced yet serious disagreement with the traditionalist ulama of his time and later. Few arenas of his intellectual career highlight this aspect more pointedly than his views on tashabbuh and Hindu-­Muslim intimacy. Khan is popularly perceived and often categorized as a “modernist” who sought to harmonize Islam with the challenges and opportunities of Western modernity thrust on South Asian Muslims through the event of British colonialism. A modernist he certainly was, but far more complicated than a monochromatic one who could be readily set in opposition and contrast to the traditionalism of the ulama. As religion scholar Khurram Hussain in a splendid recent study on Sayyid Ahmad Khan has argued, what we find in Khan’s thought and [ 222 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide intellectual career is a form of double critique that diagnosed and sought to redress what he saw as dissatisfactions with both colonial modernity and Muslim traditionalism.4 Moreover, Khan was intimately connected to and familiar with the knowledge traditions and intellectual milieux of South Asian ulama and Sufi masters. To give perhaps the most striking example of intersecting scholarly genealogies between Khan and the traditionalist ulama in the context of this chapter, he and Qasim Nanautvi in fact shared a common teacher: Mamluk ‘Ali (d. 1851), the famous instructor of Arabic at the prestigious Delhi College. During his early life, Khan and his family were closely associated with one of Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan’s (on whom chapter 1 was focused) chief disciples in Delhi Shah Ghulam Ali Dihlavi (d. 1824). Similarly, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s critique of popular customs and everyday life among the masses shared visible commonalities with the critique of customs (rusum) launched by the pioneers of Deoband and their reformist predecessors like Shah Muhammad Isma‘il (who was discussed in the previous chapter). 5 Khan’s major text in this regard, The Path of Normativity in Repelling Heretical Innovation (Rah-­i Sunnat dar Radd-­i Bidʿat) published in 1850 was in large part inspired by work on this topic by Isma‘il, whom he held in great reverence.6 This is all to underscore a point made convincingly by Muhammad Qasim Zaman that the borderlines separating Muslim traditionalist and modernist scholars in colonial South Asia were markedly more porous than the defined and often irreconcilable nature of such divisions in the postcolonial moment.7 Few scholars better exemplify this point than Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Yet, while recognizing these nuances and the limits of the modernist/­ traditionalist binary, one also ought not minimize the very critical and substantive ways in which his normative sensibilities and reform project collided with the traditionalist worldview. This was not a collision between rationalism and irrationality, openness and dogmatism, or progress and regress, but, rather, a reflection of contrasting rationalities of tradition and reform in the rapidly transforming conditions of colonial modernity. One of the most instructive and fascinating discursive moments that highlight the divergent hermeneutics and politics pitting Sayyid Ahmad Khan against the traditionalist ulama, especially the ulama of Deoband, can be found in an exchange of letters between him and the enigmatic yet towering Deoband founder Qasim Nanautvi in 1874 that was later published as an Urdu text called Glistening Faith (Tasfiyat al-­ʿAqaʾid) by Nanautvi’s followers. In its printed [ 223 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide form today, Glistening Faith is a short epistle of roughly forty pages, though its brevity belies its layered complexity. The exchange between Nanautvi and Khan was initiated by the latter; Khan, via an intermediary, Pir Ji Muhammad ‘Arif (d. unknown), presented Nanautvi with fifteen principles of faith and hermeneutics that he claimed form the basis of his religious thought and reform agenda. He quipped sarcastically: “These are the principles due to which I’ve been declared an apostate and unbeliever. . . . ​Please advise me if there is any error in them.”8 The underlying principle that undergirded his list of fifteen was that once a Muslim believed in God and in the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood, it was impossible for him to be faulted for unbelief. The other most critical principles he listed included statements (not in the exact order they appear in the text) such as: 1. “God’s and the Prophet’s words cannot contradict empirical reality”; 2. “when any verse in the Qur’an seems to contradict truth or empirical reality, there are only two possible explanations for this apparent contradiction: either we have misunderstood that Qur’anic verse or we have erred in our understanding of truth and empirical reality. Any explanation other than these two possibilities from a Qur’an commentator or scholar of Hadith is unacceptable,” 3. “only normative injunctions derived from revealed texts [such as the Qur’an] are conclusive; the rest based on the exercise of human reason (ijtihad) and analogical approximation (qiyas) are speculative (zanni),” 4. “all normative injunctions in Islam are compatible with nature (fitrat); if they were not so the blind would sin for not seeing and a person with eyesight would sin for seeing” and the one most directly undercutting the authority of the ulama, 5. “The words and actions of any human other than Prophet Muhammad are normatively acceptable and authoritative in matters of religion only when they are supported by the Prophet’s words and actions. And [concomitantly], refusing to accept all humans other than the Prophet [as sources of religious normativity] cannot necessitate unbelief. Denying this principle constitutes polytheism in prophethood (shirk fi’l nubuwwa). The intended objective of this principle is to establish that just as Prophet Muhammad’s stature is radically superior to that of common people, so too are his words and actions.”9 In a certain sense, one can read the five principles of Sayyid Ahmad Khan I have translated and transcribed—­a nd his fifteen principles more broadly—­as reflective of a theological manifesto of Muslim modernism.10 They are premised on such signature modernist moves and objectives as establishing concordance between scripture and empirical reality, valorizing [ 224 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide the Qur’an and the Prophet’s normative model as sources of religious normativity while downplaying the role of traditionalist protocols of hermeneutics, and curating a paradigm of salvation that tethers together revelation, nature, and the human intellect. Moreover, temporally located in 1874, seventeen years after the 1857 rebellion that not only saw the consolidation of British colonial power but also a flurry of Christian missionary activity in Northern India often particularly hostile to Islam and Muslims, Khan’s fifteen principles were also enveloped by the anxiety to respond to these new set of conditions.11 Particularly urgent in this regard was the pressure to establish Islam’s (and, more specifically, the Qur’an’s) compatibility with new Western scientific precepts and discoveries. Strikingly, for example, also in 1874, Khan had published a treatise called An Exegesis on Skies (Tafsir al-­Samawat) that sought to reconcile the Qur’an with the Copernican worldview.12 On the surface, the five stated and the ten other closely related principles proffered by Khan come across as rather standard theological dicta that for the most part read as reasonably logical and uncontroversial. What bone of contention might one possibly pick, for instance, with such generalized and seemingly innocuous statements as “God’s and the Prophet’s words cannot contradict empirical reality” or “Only normative injunctions derived from revealed texts [such as the Qur’an] are conclusive.” However, what Qasim Nanautvi found objectionable in them was the seductive simplicity with which they were presented, bereft of the necessary qualifiers, commentary, and notes of caution that must accompany such grand theological proclamations with far-­reaching normative consequences.

Mind the Haste! Engaging Tradition Beyond Modernist Soundbites In his reply, Nanautvi bemoaned the obstinate certainty with which Khan held on to his signature positions. “He adamantly persists with his infamous positions and refuses to retract them. . . . ​His style of writing evinces the stubborn surety of a person who thinks he can never be wrong,” Nanautvi protested.13 These “infamous positions” of Khan’s, as Nanautvi put it, included the nonexistence of Satan or miracles, and the more general rationalist hesitation to accept any incongruence between revelation and [ 225 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide empirical reality. While not disagreeing emphatically with any of the principles Khan had laid out, Nanautvi instead sought to preemptively quash what he considered the dangerous implications that their uncritical embrace risked brewing. In his response to almost all of Khan’s fifteen principles, Nanautvi introduced and elaborated additional categories, nuances, and hermeneutical considerations that constricted as well as sharpened the scope and applicability of those principles. His main concern was to insert the layers of traditionalist hermeneutical density that he found perilously missing in Khan’s attractive yet potentially misleading formulations of the tradition and its application. For instance, take Nanautvi’s response to Khan’s proposition that “God’s and the Prophet’s words cannot contradict empirical reality,” closely connected to the latter’s other principle that “when any verse in the Qur’an seems to oppose reality, either that verse has been misunderstood or reality has not been accurately captured.” Nanautvi agreed with the gist of these two statements. But he inverted the terms of their articulation, sensing and thus subverting the naturalist impulse to circumscribe revelation to reality that seemed to animate them. In his own words, “Yes, God’s and the Prophet’s words cannot contradict empirical truth and reality, but there is no better resource to discover truth and reality than God’s and the Prophet’s words.” He meaningfully continued, “So, if any form of knowledge about the empirical world and reality opposes the Qur’an and authenticated sayings of the Prophet, it will be considered false. But this cannot work the other way around: God’s and the Prophet’s words cannot be falsified because of being contrary to empirical reality. [In other words], knowledge derived from human intellect that contradicts revealed knowledge cannot be considered normatively sound and legitimate” (ishara-­yi ‘aql mu‘ariz-­i ishara-­yi naql ho tuh hargiz qabil-­i i‘tibar nahin).14 Nanautvi’s punch line went as follows: “The rational [emphasis mine] principle involved here thus is that the Qur’an and the authentic Hadith serve as the ultimate arbiters of what gets counted as sound and unsound rational proofs” (gharz ‘aql ki bat yeh hay keh kalam Allah awr ahadis-­i sahiha namuna-­yi sihat awr suqm-­i dala’il-­i aqliyya samjhay ja’eyn nah bar ‘aks).15 On first view, the difference between Nanautvi’s and Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s positions seems either negligible or more a product of semantic sequencing than substance. However, through his elaborations on Khan’s stated principle, Nanautvi ensured that the hierarchy of knowledge between [ 226 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide revelation and human rationality was not disturbed; in fact, he argued that revealed knowledge (the Qur’an and Hadith) was the underlying source and criterion of rationality. So, while not disagreeing with Khan’s statement per se, Nanautvi was keen to add a set of caveats that foreclosed the possibility of restricting the ambit of revelation to empirical reality and thus of valorizing human rationality as a source of knowledge in competition or at par with revelation. These caveats were crucial for Nanautvi’s purpose of reversing the order of emphasis in Khan’s principle from according human rationality an amplified role in accessing revelation to rendering the former conclusively subservient to the latter. Moreover, Nanautvi made it a point to underscore that this reversal of priority was not any less rational, but reflective of a different mode of rationality than that entailed in Khan’s ostensibly straightforward and noncontroversial, yet, on closer inspection, normatively loaded, proposition.

The Battle for Religious Authority and Its Sources The second example I want to discuss gets to the heart of the intra-­Muslim contestation over religious authority that opposed Sayyid Ahmad Khan against pioneers of Deoband like Nanautvi, and other ulama: Khan’s principle that “the words and actions of any human other than Prophet Muhammad are normatively unacceptable in matters of religion unless that non-­ Prophet’s words and actions are supported by the Prophet’s words and actions. And [concomitantly], refusing to accept all humans other than the Prophet [as a source of religious normativity] cannot necessitate unbelief.” Remember, Khan had put forth an addendum to this principle with a critical and curiously phrased category: “Anyone who does not adhere to these two propositions stands guilty of committing polytheism in prophethood (shirk fi’l nubuwwa).”16 Again, apparently, there was nothing contentious about this principle. Recognizing the Prophet’s uniqueness as a font of normativity and admitting the hierarchy of authority separating him from other humans seem like fairly standard doctrinal dicta that should not ruffle any traditionalist feathers. However, at issue again was the accent of Khan’s formulation that was clearly aimed at undercutting the role and authority of the ulama as mediators between the Prophet and the people while furthering the modernist mandate to erase human hierarchy in accessing [ 227 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide normative knowledge. Moreover, by introducing the menacing specter of “polytheism in prophethood,” Khan had dramatically raised the stakes of the discussion. In his signature style, Nanautvi took Khan to task for what to him amounted to simplifying to the point of distortion a problem that demands many further layers of elaboration. Again, it isn’t the principle itself he takes issue with, but its untethered application in Khan’s hands that Nanautvi sought to challenge. Nanautvi quizzed Khan’s proposition by furnishing his argument on the latter’s own rationalist turf, arguing that if one began to question the normative authority of a discursive moment because its agent was not the Prophet, or because his words were not directly sanctioned by the Prophet, then the very authority of the Prophet’s own words or the Hadith would itself become suspect. Why? Because, after all, Nanautvi reminded Khan, as well as all those enthralled by his modernist ruses, the narrators of the Prophet’s sayings and actions such as the Prophet’s Companions were also nonprophets. But, despite that, the knowledge about what the Prophet said or did that they generated is not questioned, but taken in good faith, that what they are narrating about the Prophet is indeed true. Based on this assumption of good faith or positive outlook (husn-­i zann / Ar. husn al-­zann) regarding the Hadith narrators, the Hadith is embraced as a touchstone of normative knowledge that ought to inform the religious lives of the community. Given that, Nanautvi wondered aloud: “What sin have scholars of law and the jurists committed” that their positions and sayings are not accorded the same acceptability and positive outlook?17 The fundamental flaw in Khan’s enticing though problematic formulation, which put all nonprophets on the same footing, was its lack of attention to the degrees and hierarchy of religious authority vested in different actors such as the Prophet and the later jurists. As the interpreters of law, Muslim jurists or the fuqaha’ derive laws and normative injunctions (ahkam) that the community is obligated to follow. At times these laws might be based on direct references from the Qur’an and Hadith—­what Sayyid Ahmad Khan called “the Prophet’s words”—­a nd at other times they might be based on their own legal reasoning and thus represent their “non-­prophetic words.” Nanautvi’s point was that these laws derived by Muslim jurists (ahkam-­i mustakhraja-­yi fuquhaʾ-­i muslimin) that are based on their legal reasoning are not on the same normative plane as the injunctions that come directly from conclusive proof texts such as the Qur’an or the Hadith (ahkam-­i mansusa). As an [ 228 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide analogy, he gave the example that the obligatoriness (farziyyat, Ar. Fardiyya) of prayers is not on the same plane as that of fasting, yet they are both obligatory.18 Similarly, although the words and positions of a jurist based on his legal reasoning are not on the same normative plane as the words of the Prophet, they are both salutary sources of religious normativity. When one accepts the words of the jurist (meaning his interpretation of the law) as a source of normativity, one does so with the assumption that those words do not occupy the same stature as the Prophet’s words. But crucially—­and here lay the kernel of Nanautvi’s argument—­recognizing a hierarchy (tafawut) of different sources of normativity did not puncture the authority or credibility of any of those sources occupying that hierarchy. Nanautvi summed up his argument with a couple of pithy statements: “Hierarchy of knowledge does not injure the authority of the knowledge source lesser in stature,” and “The hierarchy differentiating the Prophet’s and the Muslim jurists’ words has nothing to do with ‘polytheism in prophethood.’ ”19 Nanautvi admitted this much from Khan’s principle: refusing to accept the jurists’ words and, hence, their authority does not constitute grounds for unbelief. But, again, as if bidding farewell with a final punch to an already defeated opponent, he added the gloss, “Though, for that matter, even refusing a single Hadith does not necessitate unbelief, but only a grave sin (fisq), and refusing to accept the jurist’s normative authority also constitutes a sin even if much less grave.”20 Note again, in this last example, that Nanautvi did not disagree with the essence of Khan’s stated position that privileged the Prophet as a source of normative guidance and laws. There was no disagreement about that. Rather, the point of contention—­a nd what posed a direct threat to the religious authority of the ulama—­was the unfettered manner (ʿala al-­itlaq) in which Khan had presented his proposition with no commentary or restraining qualifiers. For Nanautvi, this principle had less to do with amplifying the sacrality of the Prophet than it did with undermining the role and stature of the traditionalist scholarly class. Throughout this text, he robustly defended that role and stature by unleashing the discursive arsenal of traditionalist hermeneutics and rationality that complicated and thereby unsettled what to Nanautvi were Khan’s seductive but dangerously reductive modernist soundbites. Though I have only discussed two illustrative examples from a text with several other layers of fascinating discursive encounters, I hope I have [ 229 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide captured the broad lineaments of the intra-­Muslim division represented by the disagreement between Qasim Nanautvi and Sayyid Ahmad Khan. As I mentioned earlier, the tone and style of this disagreement was not polemical or derisive. In fact, both Nanautvi and Khan seemed to compete with each other for the laurels of self-­effacement, with Khan exaggerating humility while seeking correction of his views from Deoband ulama and Nanautvi expressing ample doubt that the opinion of a “poor powerless” scholar like himself could reach or have any effect on a towering government bureaucrat like Khan.21 These gestures were, of course, coated with more than a tinge of sarcasm. But, even then, the absence of polemical fireworks that engulfed so many of intra-­Muslim and interreligious contestations of late nineteenth-­century South Asia is notable. However, as I said earlier, the respectful decorum or relatively less acrimonious tone of this disagreement should not lead us to undermine its significance or consequences. At stake and at work in Nanautvi’s exchange with Khan were two competing rationalities of reform in Muslim South Asia that offered contrasting prescriptions for how one must stratify the tradition to best confront the monstrous menace of colonial modernity. For Khan, the rupture of colonialism necessitated a rupture in tradition whereby its sources, sources of authority, and hermeneutical procedures and priorities had to be reconfigured; otherwise, the seismic cleavage of colonial modernity was bound to swallow South Asian Muslims under its unyielding edges. In contrast, Nanautvi also exhibited no qualms about benefiting from the technological potential and possibilities of the modern moment, as he amply did during the polemic of Shahjahanpur (examined in detail in chapter 2) and in his other reformist activities. Also, though not at the expense of traditionalist knowledge, Nanautvi openly encouraged his pupils to acquire proficiency in English so they might negotiate the colonial public sphere with confidence, much like his close friend and fellow founder of Deoband Rashid Ahmad Gangohi had (as discussed in the previous chapter). Again, the Khan-­Nanautvi debate—­a nd, by extension, the Aligarh-­ Deoband divide—­was not a contest between tradition and modernity. That said, we nonetheless find in these two thinkers significantly diverging outlooks on how one must contend with the conditions and challenges of colonial modernity. For Nanautvi, in contrast to Khan, surviving the vicissitudes of colonial modernity required not jettisoning or indelibly transforming but rather more vigorously reasserting and reemphasizing traditionalist [ 230 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide conceptions and protocols of knowledge regimes and transmission. In Khan’s view, however, there was no other way to manage and repel the encroaching specter and presence of modern colonial power but through a thorough refurbishment of the architecture of tradition. This underlying epistemic division is not simply a matter of hermeneutical gymnastics and doxological hairsplitting; it holds profound and far-­reaching implications for a range of ethical questions, most prominently that of how one imagines the limits of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations and friendship in modernity, for at its heart lies the problem of how one ought to guard the self and tradition from the threat of difference and innovation during a moment of unprecedented transformation. This is why the preceding discussion serves as a crucial contextual backdrop to Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s views on tashabbuh, and Nanautvi’s grandson Muhammad Qari Tayyib’s biting refutation of those views. What follows should further clarify and illuminate the competing rationalities of reform showcased in what I am calling the Aligarh-­Deoband divide.

Interreligious Friendship and Civilizational Progress Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s understanding of Hindu-­Muslim relations and encounters in the theater of everyday life was etched to his broader notion and project of “civilizational progress.” This interconnection was best articulated in his famous collection of essays Polishing Ethics (Tahzib al-­Akhlaq), also known as Muhammadan Social Reformer, initiated in 1868 with an article that carried the English word civilization in its title: “Civilization Meaning Refinement and Polishing [Ethics]” (Civilization yaʿni Shaʾistagi awr Tahzib).22 The analysis that follows is based on different fragments and essays of Polishing Ethics today available in four volumes; I primarily rely on relevant sections of volume 2, which is roughly six hundred pages in its printed form. According to Khan, civilization (he often used the English term) referred to the natural human inclination to transform what is bad into what is good.23 As he put it: “What is civilization? To keep one’s actions and emotions in a state of balance, to value time, and to constantly search for and interrogate the causes of events. What you get from these qualities and pursuit is spiritual contentment and physical health.”24 For Khan, civilizational progress represented the touchstone of what he called “pure Islam” (thayt Islam): an Islam that was free of [ 231 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide juridical hairsplitting over subsidiary problems of law and that had no place for speculative theology.25 It is this broader view of Islam as a repository and safeguard of civilization and civilizational progress that can effectively address and counter the unprecedented challenges wrought by colonial modernity that informed his views and discourses on Hindu-­Muslim relations and the problem of tashabbuh. Khan’s attitude toward tashabbuh and the anxiety over imitating Hindu customs and traditions combined skepticism with dismissiveness. In a move bound to raise alarm in traditionalist circles, he argued that, to begin, the authenticity of the famous prophetic report “Whoever imitates a community becomes one of them” is dubious, since its chain of transmission, as stated in the Hadith collection of Abu Dawud, is not reliable.26 More significantly, Khan continued, what made the application of this prophetic saying in everyday life impossible was that its meaning and purpose were unclear. For instance, what was meant by imitation? Or what normative purpose did the category of community, or qawm, serve? Khan elaborated his point: “Say an Englishman imitated Iranians and Pathans by wearing clothes commonly associated with these communities, and people also began to think of the Englishman as an Iranian or Pathan. Or say an Indian Muslim dons Arab, Iranian, Pathan, Russian, or British clothes in imitation of these communities and people around him also consider him a part of the communities. What is the normative outcome or implication of either of these scenarios?” Khan’s question, in essence was, so what? A question simple yet piercing. Khan further argued that the logic of heightened concern over imitation of the Other was undermined by the Prophet’s life itself. For instance, the Prophet is known to have worn garments and clothes popularly associated with Roman Catholics, Jews, and even the unbelievers of Arabia; in fact, even at the time of his death, he is said to have been wearing a style of robe most common among Roman Christians ( jubba kisrawani).27 Khan’s objective in mobilizing such data from the tradition was to argue that imitation of non-­ Muslims could not possibly represent a normatively charged or consequential matter. “Suppose,” he suggested provocatively, “that the Prophet was born in London, Germany, or some part of Asia. Does not rationality dictate that he would have worn clothes that are commonly worn by people in these places. So, what normative lesson or outcome is there to derive from such imitation [of the Other].”28 [ 232 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide But what about forms of embodied imitation that explicitly signal attachment to the devotional norms and habits of a non-­Muslim community, such as wearing the cross, placing a mark on the forehead (a customary Hindu practice), or understanding religious festivals of unbelievers as occasions of celebration and partaking in them as such? While this kind of embodied intimacy with non-­Muslims might seem like a justified cause for concern, it actually was not, Khan contended. “In my view,” he said decisively, echoing the principle he had presented in his exchange with Qasim Nanautvi, “once a person has proclaimed faith in God’s oneness and in Muhammad being God’s [final] messenger, no act can render that person outside the fold of Islam.”29 Khan’s next statement most abrasively registered his opposition to dominant traditionalist attitudes toward the boundaries of Muslim/non-­ Muslim friendship and also highlighted the way his own outlook on this question connected with his larger motif of civilizational progress. He wrote, mixing sarcasm with purpose: “So if we join our Hindu, Parsi [Zoroastrian], and Christian friends in celebrating their religious occasions like Diwali, Dussehra, Nauroz, and Big Friday as a way to acquire the happiness of community and civilizational prosperity, will we be rendered unbelievers! May God grant refuge from such thinking. If Islam is indeed such a benighted religion, then its destruction is inevitable.”30 Khan expressed this last sentiment with the popular Urdu idiom “For how long will the goat’s mother stay alive, falling prey to the knife is her inevitable fate.”31 The upshot of Khan’s discussion on tashabbuh, then, was that the very prophetic report on which this doctrine was based—­“Whoever imitates a community becomes one of them”—­was not really a prophetic report, because it was suspect in terms of both its authenticity and clarity of intended meaning (riwayatan wa dirayatan). Any meaning ascribed to this statement was conjectural, he argued—­though that did not stop him from proffering his own conjecture as to what it referred to. Khan postulated that the context of this statement had to do with identifying and distinguishing disfigured dead bodies when they get mixed up, so they could be prepared for burial according to the rites and norms of the religious community to which the deceased belonged. For instance, henna on the hair and beard and circumcision are distinguishing markers on (male) Muslim bodies that can be used for purposes of identification. Therefore, Khan concluded, “whoever imitates a people becomes one of them” meant “among dead bodies, whichever [ 233 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide contains bodily markers resembling those associated with a particular religious community is of that community.”32 By limiting the application of the doctrine of reprehensible imitation to dead bodies, Khan in effect packaged the very concern and anxiety over imitating the religious Other as a dead issue with no relevance to living bodies. Such a dismissive attitude was bound to spark the ire of traditionalist ulama in South Asia, for many of whom protecting the community from the contagion of untoward imitation was an imperative at once theologically and ontologically existential. Before I get to what is arguably the most prominent and extensive rebuttal of Khan’s views on tashabbuh, a brief but critically important comment about him. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s image of a permissive and unhinged champion of pluralism and interreligious intimacy, harbored by his admirers and despisers alike, is available for considerable nuance and correction. To give just one example, I want to gesture toward a fascinating Urdu text (with a heavy dose of Arabic references) of his titled Laws on Food of the People of the Book (Ahkam Taʿam-­i Ahl-­i Kitab), published in 1868 by the famous Munshi Nawal Kishore Press in Lucknow. In this roughly hundred-­page text, Khan intensively mined the Islamic legal tradition to extract authoritative fragments and precedents that legitimize the consumption of food (otherwise not forbidden in Islam) prepared by Christians and Jews.33 His primary interest, of course, was to break the Indian Muslim taboo about eating food prepared by the British and about dining with them. What I want to highlight is Khan’s framing of the problem that propelled him to write this book: The permissibility of food prepared by People of the Book [Christians and Jews] has become a matter of tremendous controversy and debate. [Many] Indian Muslims consider such food impure and anyone who understands it as permissible or consumes it is labeled a Christian or unbeliever, cast outside the fold of Islam, and subjected to copious censure and abuse. This myopic attitude among Indian Muslims is the outcome of their attachment to thousands of Hindu customs [emphasis mine]. I am thus writing this brief treatise to break this cycle of intra-­Muslim rancor. . . . ​Its argument is that food prepared by People of the Book, so long as it is not otherwise forbidden, is completely permissible for Muslims to consume.34

This statement clearly evinces not only Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s intellectual elitism (an attribute shared by almost all scholars of his era), which was [ 234 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide deeply critical of the attitude and practice of the masses, but also the hierarchical worldview that informed his understanding of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations. It is the influence of and attachment to “Hindu customs” that had corrupted Indian Muslims on questions of ethics such as food and purity and stymied the embodied experience of sharing food with the more theologically acceptable class of the People of the Book, mainly Christians. These are hardly the words of a porous pluralist. Khan’s hierarchical classification of non-­Muslim religious communities that privileged the “People of the Book” over Hindus was firmly grounded in a traditionalist Muslim imperial worldview. And, to reinforce this hierarchical worldview, Khan turned to and relied on the Islamic legal tradition, primarily—­though in no measure exclusively—­from the Hanafi school (references from the Maliki school were crucial to his argument in this text as well). This is all to point out that a thinker can simultaneously hold a modernist rationalist position that deems doctrines like tashabbuh of little relevance to the modern world and yet subscribe to a staunchly traditionalist hierarchical view of non-­Muslim religions and their authenticity. Modernist and traditionalist are useful heuristic categories that capture the lineaments of varied thought styles in Islam, but the limits of these categories are often exposed and frustrated by the nuance and complexity embodied by the thought of multivalent Muslim scholars like Sayyid Ahmad Khan—­or, for that matter, any of the actors discussed in this book. Such possible nuances were often sidelined, however, by Khan’s intellectual opponents, who found his revisionist reworking of key theological and hermeneutical covenants a bit too foundational and far reaching to deserve vindication.

Distinction and the Integrity of Identity: Qari Tayyib’s Rebuttal of Sayyid Ahmad Khan Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s views on tashabbuh and other such contentious matters attracted rebuttals and denunciations by myriad traditionalist scholars during his own lifetime and later. But the scholar who launched the most detailed and devastating recrimination of Khan’s discourse on tashabbuh and of the worldview that informed it was the twentieth-­century Deoband stalwart Qari Muhammad Tayyib. Trained under the tutelage of leading stars in the Deoband intellectual galaxy including Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri [ 235 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide (d. 1927), Mahmud Hasan, and Anwar Shah Kashmiri (d. 1933), Tayyib’s intellectual and political career casts an expansive shadow over the religious landscape of colonial India, as well as those of postcolonial India and Pakistan. He served as the rector (muhtamim) of the Deoband Madrasa for a long stretch, from 1928 to 1980, during which he played a key and deliberate role in elevating the international stature and recognition of the seminary and its associated thought style. A prolific traditionalist scholar and poet, as well a gifted orator, among his more than hundred publications on numerous topics is also the famous work The Normative Orientation of Deoband Ulama (Maslak-­i ‘Ulamaʾ-­yi Deoband). In this widely read Urdu text, Tayyib sought to present and establish Deoband as a reform movement defined foremost by its commitment to the principle of theological and normative balance (iʿtidal).35 In 1929, at the age of thirty-­t wo, and almost thirty years after Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s death, Tayyib wrote the pithily titled yet equally fascinating and abrasive text Reprehensible Imitation in Islam (Al-­Tashabbuh fi’l Islam), henceforth Reprehensible Imitation. In this approximately two-­hundred-­page text in noticeably sparkling and intensively Arabized Urdu (the latter a common feature in nineteenth-­ and early twentieth-­century South Asian ulama texts), Tayyib sought to thwart Khan’s seemingly permissive attitude toward interreligious imitation and the epistemic foundations on which that attitude rested. In so doing, he in large measure continued the legacy of his esteemed grandfather and one of the founders of the Deoband Madrasa, Qasim Nanautvi, who had also intellectually sparred with Khan on similar doxological questions, as discussed earlier in this chapter. But the tone and texture of Tayyib’s rebuttal was in many ways much more cutting and damning than his grandfather’s argumentative style. Even so, as I hope to show in what follows, the polemical fervor of Tayyib’s Reprehensible Imitation did not undermine its philosophical density and intellectual complexity. While focused on the theme of the dangers of imitating non-­Muslims, Tayyib presented a deeply philosophical reading of the political theology undergirding the logic of religious identity that, in his view, stood vulnerable to evisceration in the absence of Muslim distinction. Indeed, in terms of his attunement to mining the underlying philosophical assumptions and stakes at work in seemingly communal questions of interreligious encounters, Tayyib resembled and furthered his grandfather Nanautvi’s mode of operation, even if at times with greater discursive bite and urgency. [ 236 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide My aim in what follows is to elaborate the most comprehensive and prominent South Asian Muslim traditionalist argument for considering the imitation of non-­Muslim customs and practices a grave threat to the discursive and doctrinal integrity of Islam. Among all references from the premodern Muslim intellectual tradition that Tayyib mobilized and drew on in his work, the one that he most prominently relied on and featured was Ibn Taymiyya’s (a Hanbali rather than Hanafi jurist) Necessitating the Straight Path (Iqtida al-­ Sirat al-­Mustaqim), discussed in the previous chapter. Again, what this shows is the hermeneutical and strategic elasticity of traditionalism as a thought style and mode of moral argument that, while maintaining fidelity with a particular textual corpus (in this case, that of Hanafi law), can nonetheless cast, appropriate, and put to use a much more expansive and flexible discursive net. Before turning to the interpretive and doctrinal problems at work in the question of tashabbuh, Tayyib first described in considerable detail and depth the political and philosophical stakes of this issue. He himself characterized this text as divided between two segments: the first based on philosophical inquiry (muhaqqiqana), and the second on polemical interrogation (munazarana).36 At the heart of the discussion on tashabbuh, Tayyib argued, was the category of power. The possession of power and authority makes undesirable things look attractive and the lack thereof turn even desirable things unattractive. This is why, he rather provocatively argued, that British colonialism, despite being so distant from the prophetic path, had acquired such an aura and gravitas in India while Indian Muslims had been rendered a subservient minority. In this condition, regaining power and majesty (satwat wa shawkat) required the apparent and inner imitation of prophetic time and practice, while shunning the imitation of the non-­Muslim Other.37 The two options available were starkly clear: imitation of (the path of) prophets (tashabbuh bi’l-­anbiyaʾ) versus imitation of various Others (tashabbuh bi’l-­aghyar). It is the “catastrophic dangers” associated with the latter variety of imitation, Tayyib announced, that compelled him to raise his pen, adding the clarifying note that his intention was not to create burdensome restrictions for Indian Muslims but to prevent the evisceration of “Muslim identity” in India. The cornerstone of Tayyib’s analysis pivoted on what he considered the intimate and inverse relationship between power and the preservation of the distinction of identity, and the loss of power through [ 237 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide imitation of and mixture with the Other. He summed up this sentiment with a description of the foundational purpose of the doctrine of tashabbuh in Islam as “protecting the welfare and goodness of Islam from the damage and detriment of abrogated religions through the prohibition of external and internal imitation [with those abrogated religions]. In other words, [the prohibition against tashabbuh was meant to] guard the mixture of truth and falsehood, benefit and harm.”38 As Tayyib helpfully elaborated: “The prohibition against imitating non-­Muslims (manaʿ-­i tashabbuh) is the principle through which [Islamic] normativity safeguards its boundaries from confusion, destructive assimilation, and ultimately, extinction.”39 Islam’s survival, in other words, depended on taking tashabbuh seriously and guarding against its corrosive effects. The stakes were existentially high. Tayyib assembled his case for this broader argument through various strategies, as he lay the preparatory groundwork for his eventual destination of a systematic refutation of Khan’s views on tashabbuh. Among the pivotal points that anchored his argumentative apparatus was the ineluctable interlocking of the ontological form of an object and the purpose and function of that object in the world. Form (surat) and existence (wujud), Tayyib argued, are inextricably entwined; every object in the universe possesses a distinct form through which it is known to others. Every class of existence—­humans, animals, plants, physical matter—­appears in its own distinct form. Humans come in human form, lions in lion form, and plants and stones in their own form. And, within each category of existence, there are further classifications corresponding to distinct forms, like the male and the female among humans, who are distinct in form and, as a corollary, in terms of associated names, actions, and moral responsibility. It is this deep-­seated intimacy between the form of a category of existence and its associated purpose or functionality that accords the world order and coherence—­that makes possible “the order of things,” to borrow from the title of Michel Foucault’s famous text.40 Tayyib postulated that any ambiguity or confusion in this correspondence between form on the one hand, and the purpose and function of existence on the other, unsettles the order of things, inviting chaos. When form is disturbed or transformed, the being represented by that original form also changes. So, for instance, if a rope takes the form of a snake, then people will consider that rope to be a snake and run away from it. Since the rope has taken the form of a snake in imitation of the latter, it will henceforth be called a snake, thus falsifying and [ 238 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide obliterating its original identity as a rope.41 The point Tayyib was getting at is this: mixture and imitation destroys the coherence and distinction of identity. In his own and rather poignant words: “Mixture and obfuscation are precisely what falsify the existence [of all beings] in the universe. And distinction and separation are the gifts that establish and highlight the [distinct] existence of all beings. If the sharing and conjoining of ontological categories in this world is not coupled with [maintaining] distinction through separation, then each thing in the world will become nothing” (ikhtilat awr iltibas hi woh chiz hay jo kaʾinat keh wujud ko batil karti hay awr iss keh bil-­muqabil imtiyaz wa fasl woh dawlat hay keh har chiz keh wujud ko sabit awr numayan karti hay. Agar ʿalam mayn ajnas ke ishtirak ke sath fusul ka imtiyaz nah ho tuh ʿalam ki har shaʾy la shaʾy ho jaeʾy gi.)42 Tayyib extended his argument to religions and religious communities, which are also marked by certain specific spiritual and bodily characteristics, the life and integrity of which depend on the maintenance of separation and distinction. Much like the material realm, where objects are defined by their distinct ontological qualities, so, too, are religious traditions and communities defined by specific habits, customs, practices, and spiritual features and commitments. The material and religious realms are symmetrical in their adherence to and dependence on the principle that the preservation of order, and identity, Tayyib argued, requires distinction. He next applied this general theory to the specific case of Islam, the spiritual content of which, and its bodily devotions like prayers, fasting, and jihad, he explained, were analogous to the body’s organs in terms of the specificity of their functionality. And, he continued, in the style of a detective gradually resolving a puzzle, when the spiritual and bodily components of Islam coalesce in a person, that person is called a Muslim, and as a collective such people constitute the Muslim community, or qawm. Therefore, if the embodied form of Muslim religious life and practice was not kept distinct and was allowed to get obfuscated and camouflaged through the contamination by the Other, then the collective name and form of the Muslim community was bound to unravel.43 Tayyib summed up this sentiment with a piercingly blunt statement: “It is through the survival of the distinction of external forms of religious truths that the existence of those truths can be kept alive.”44 Otherwise, no religious community is able to preserve its name and identity. It is through the distinction of religious practice that the distinction of a religious community is ensured; as the former is erased or diluted, so is the [ 239 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide latter. Had this not been a sound principle, Tayyib pleaded, then there would only have been a singular religion and sharia in the world, with no need for distinction and multiplicity.45 Before continuing, it is useful to note that such theorization of the relationship between ritual distinction and the survival of identity is hardly specific to Tayyib or to thinkers in the Islamic tradition for that matter. To take one example, as Adrienne Boyarin informs us in her brilliant study on the politics of Jewish-­Christian “sameness” in medieval England, in canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III forbade Jews from appearing in public on the three days before Easter on the “presumption that ritual practice, speech, and affect would distinguish Christians and Jews where appearance alone might not.”46 Boyarin helpfully adds: “The problem [in this case] is not essential but performative: it allows for scenarios in which Jews and Christians could be mistaken for one another [emphasis mine].”47 This threat of being mistaken for the Other—­what Tayyib variably termed as iltibas, or obfuscation (of identity), and ikhtilat, or (unwanted) mixture, is precisely what animated his discourse on tashabbuh, much as it had Pope Innocent III’s canon 68.

Imitation, Disfiguring, Dissolution Reprehensible imitation, or tashabbuh, was, Tayyib argued, another name for disfiguring essential boundaries (takhrib-­i hudud) and, through doing so, falsifying the essence of being (ibtal-­i zatiyyat). When the boundaries encircling any category of existence disintegrate, he explained, two outcomes issue forth: the being represented by that category is no longer capacious enough to a. contain its constituent ingredients, and b. block external entities to enter and disturb its constitution. For instance, he elaborated, with the help of another analogy, humans are only considered humans and not plants or stones until they remain within the limits of life and consciousness. In the absence of cognizance and life, as those limits dissolve, humans cease to be human and begin resembling entities like stones.48 He next delivered the punch line of this analogy: “Just like humans depart the fold of humanity on imitating and mixing with the non-­human, so too human collectives and communities lose the specificity of their identity when they imitate foreigners.”49 Real or substantive communal identity (haqiqi qawmiyyat) [ 240 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide vanishes through mixing with the Other, Tayyib punctuated. And, he further analogized, it is for the same reason that women imitating men and the other way around is prohibited. The catastrophic consequences of transgressing gender boundaries are plentifully obvious in Europe, where women adopting manly mannerisms and occupations has meant that they are neither women nor men. Tayyib regretted with purposeful alarm that “they [the Europeans] call it freedom and equality, but it is in fact disfiguring existence (mukharrib-­i wujud).”50 One may note in passing that Tayyib’s binarism here sits in illustrative friction with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s memorable statement in her classic Epistemology of the Closet: “Categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions . . . ​actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A; but second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B.”51 It is precisely this unsettled and unresolved tension over the simultaneous subsumption of and dependence on the Other for achieving the desired stability of the “self” that hovered around Tayyib’s discourse on tashabbuh, and that was at the heart of his emphasis on the importance of ontological binary distinctions. To cite one last analogy mobilized by Tayyib in this context, elderly people have been warned against imitating the youth by wearing unduly attractive clothes or spending long hours drowned in leisure, because doing so would mean transgressing the ontological boundaries of old age (mashaykhat) by seeking entry into the distinct category of youth (shabab). Interestingly, in contrast to the two-­way prohibition against queering or troubling gender boundaries, in this case, the opposite direction of imitation (i.e., the youth imitating the elderly) was in fact encouraged rather than prohibited. For the young to imitate the old, Tayyib argued, was an ascending form of imitation whereby the lesser imitated the higher, like the sinner imitating the pious, or an unbeliever a Muslim. This kind of imitation with an ascending direction of goodness was not reprehensible but salutary imitation (tashabbuh bi’l khayr).52 The point that Tayyib sought to impress upon his readers and audience through these motley analogies was this: “[Divine] nature has gifted every category of being, group, and community a distinct ontological existence. And, just as in the material realm (takwiniyyat), God has stipulated limits and boundaries for every bit and iota of existence, similarly in the realm of [ 241 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide religion and normativity every religious tradition and community have been accorded distinguishing boundaries, the strict maintenance of which ensures the acquisition and fulfillment of that community’s welfare and objectives.”53 The existential threat to this cosmic scheme and order of existence was iltibas, meaning confusion or obfuscation (of distinction). In Tayyib’s own ominous words,“Iltibas is that darkness that first conceals, then falsifies, and [eventually] destroys the existence of a thing.”54 Etymologically from the same verbal roots as la-­bi-­sa meaning to clothe, cover, and conceal (from which we get the word libas, or clothing), iltibas and its twin concept ikhlilat, or mixture, Tayyib further expounded, “represent the first step to the erasure of everything truthful” (har sadaqat ke mitnay ka pehla qadam iltibas awr ikhtilat hay.)55 In an arresting observation, he argued that it is for this reason that a Muslim who resembles an unbeliever (kafir numa) represents a much bigger threat to Islam than a declared unbeliever. Why? Because an unbeliever keeps his distinction with Muslims intact, whereas a person with the qualities of an unbeliever who claims to be a Muslim confuses that distinction.

The Ambit of Reprehensible Imitation An obvious question emerges here: In what realms and activities of life must one guard from imitating the non-­Muslim Other? Was this prohibition only reserved for matters of “religion” and devotional practices, or did it extend to the domain of “culture” and everyday life as well? As I pointed out in the previous chapter, this question has hovered over the category of tashabbuh and its normative limits and application in Muslim intellectual thought for several centuries. How one answers it also depends on and reveals one’s definition of religion and its limits, highlighting in the process the elasticity of tashabbuh as an index and a marker of transgression. Qari Tayyib understood the parameters of tashabbuh in a resoundingly capacious fashion to include matters of faith, practice, societal relations, culture, and civilization. Tashabbuh, he emphatically argued, applies to inner piety and the external manifestation of faith and piety through ritual practice and everyday societal conduct. Again, he fortified his argument for the importance of including external form and appearance (zahiri hayyat) with a vivid analogy: “In the battlefield, if a soldier from your army wears the uniform of the enemy army, [ 242 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide no matter how much this soldier denies switching allegiance, he will be presumed to have done so. Similarly, if a soldier from the enemy forces puts on your army’s uniform, he will remain protected until his deceit is revealed.”56 It is the external “uniform,” the appearance of the body, that determines whether someone is a member of one’s own community or has imitated the Other to the point of becoming one of them. To the possible objection that his expansive conception of tashabbuh was too harsh and narrow minded, Tayyib shot back with the rejoinder that it is precisely such alleged narrow-­ mindedness that in the past had generated for Islam and Muslims power, majesty, and progress, arrogating the last category of progress, or taraqqi, from the discursive arsenal of modernism. For specifics and authoritative precedent, Tayyib turned to the famous Pact of ‘Umar, believed in the tradition to have been instituted around 637 by the second caliph in Sunni Islam ‘Umar ibn al-­Khattab to govern Muslim/ non-­Muslim (primarily Christians and Jews) relations in the just-­conquered territories of Syria and Palestine. This document (as discussed in the introduction) comprises a series of prescriptions and proscriptions for non-­Muslim communities aimed at establishing Muslim distinction and superiority in the public sphere, ranging from the prohibition to teach children the Qur’an to the obligation to wear the girdle, or zunnar, around the waist.57 Though the origins of this document are still debated, most scholars today (especially Western) date it not to Umar ibn al-­Khattab but to the much later eighth-­ century Umayyad caliph ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-­‘Aziz or Umar II (d. 720; the Caliph ‘Umar’s great-­grandson). Tayyib, however, worked with the assumption of its traditional attribution to ‘Umar ibn al-­Khattab. He also borrowed liberally from references to the Pact of ‘Umar in Ibn Taymiyya’s famous text Necessitating the Straight Path (Iqtida al-­Sirat al-­Mustaqim). Tayyib highlighted that, during Islam’s unprecedented expansion under ‘Umar’s reign, he judiciously strived to maintain hierarchy and distinction between the conquering Arabs and non-­Arab populations (like the Persians) by commanding each group to hold on to its signature customs and manner of appearance.58 The noteworthy aspect of ‘Umar’s efforts in this regard that Tayyib wanted his readers to particularly register was that it’s not only Muslims who were urged to not imitate the conquered non-­Muslims but also the other way around. Maintaining distinction (imtiyaz) was the key to maintaining political power and supremacy, as seen most emphatically in ‘Umar’s command that “non-­Muslims must not wear garb typically associated with Muslim [ 243 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide Arabs so that they [the conquered non-­Muslim populations] are marked out [in public] as distinct (la yalbisu libs al-­muslimin hata yuʿrafu).”59 This command, in Tayyib’s view, demonstrated ‘Umar’s acute concern that the unbeliever explicitly announce his unbelief through embodied gestures like clothing, so that “the darkness of unbelief does not mix with and dim the light of Islam” (ta keh yeh kafirana zulmat apni amayzish se Islami nur ko mukaddar na bana sakay).60 Moreover, ‘Umar combined attention to matters of everyday life like dress with commandments and prohibitions aimed at maintaining difference, distinction, and hierarchy in religious and devotional affairs. These included not allowing elevating the cross in churches, reciting scripture only in a low voice inside churches in the presence of or near Muslims, and not burying non-­Muslims in Muslim graveyards.61 The underlying principle that emerges from ‘Umar’s pact, Tayyib emphasized, was that the distinction between different communities, in terms of both religious and everyday societal affairs (bi iʿtibar-­i mazhab wa muʿashara), must remain clear and invulnerable to confusion. Truth and falsehood must persist in their distinct forms so that their foundations and manifestations are not subject to mixture. This is the philosophical lesson that Tayyib wanted Indian Muslim scholars and commoners to derive from the Pact of ‘Umar, an exemplary expression and manual of how one ought to sustain an imperial Muslim political theology.

Imitation, Hierarchy, and Justice Lest you thought he was an exclusionary of an absolutist ilk, Tayyib stressed two critical qualifiers to his elaboration of how one ought to understand the concept of tashabbuh and its application. First, to avoid the plausible misreading that the measures he had outlined to establish distinction from the non-­Muslim Other were overly harsh or unjust, Tayyib underscored the seemingly paradoxical difference between humiliation (tazlil) and subjugation (tawhin) on the one hand, and tyranny (zulm) and injustice (be insafi) on the other. The institution of supremacy (iʿzaz) and subjugation, he explained, is meant to preserve the hierarchy of human relations (farq-­i maratib), while injustice and transgression are nourished by sheer bigotry (taʿassub-­i mahaz). Therefore, committing any form of injustice against non-­Muslims protected under Muslim rule (dhimmis) and instigating disorder among them was [ 244 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide completely forbidden; in fact, Tayyib emphasized, in terms of the right to protection of life and wealth, they were equal to Muslims. But, as his distinction between humiliation and injustice makes obvious, justice for Tayyib was not premised on equality. Rather, it entailed the maintenance of a strict hierarchy of human relations that did not descend to tyranny, bigotry, or transgressive usurpation of life, property, and wealth. In other words, in Tayyib’s worldview, inequality did not equal injustice.62 Second, in the course of responding to a popular but in his view ill-­ informed objection to the prohibition against imitating non-­Muslims, Tayyib was at pains to clarify that this prohibition did not encompass each and every human act. In formulating his argument, he drew on two categories of human actions in Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh): involuntary acts (iztirari), and voluntary acts (ikhtiyari). The first category of involuntary acts, as the name suggested, were those that were inevitable and beyond human control in terms of their necessity, like eating to satisfy hunger, or sleeping for proper functioning. Sharing such natural instincts ( jibilli ishtirak) with non-­ Muslims was in no way problematic, he unambiguously declared.63 “It’s not as if,” he added with a tinge of deliberate sarcasm, “that Muslims should die of hunger because non-­Muslims also eat.”64 The doctrine of tashabbuh had nothing to do with involuntary and ontologically universal matters (iztirari awr takwini); the prohibition against imitating non-­Muslims was only applicable in relation to acts that were voluntary and agentive, in the realm of both devotional practices (taʿabbudi) and everyday customary practices (taʿawwudi). Tayyib used examples of attire to help specify both of these categories; so, for instance, while wearing a Christian cross or a Sikh bracelet would constitute imitation in devotional practice, wearing an article of clothing that serves as a distinctive marker of identity for a non-­Muslim community like a “Western hat” represents imitation in customary practices. Importantly, again, crucial to Tayyib’s definition of tashabbuh was its expansive orbit of operation that encompassed matters of both religion and salvation (din) and those involving everyday societal relations (muʿashara).65

Maddening Modernism Having elucidated key features of Tayyib’s general and overarching views on tashabbuh and its limits and application, I next turn to specific aspects of his [ 245 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide spirited critique-­cum-­rebuke of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s discourse on tashabbuh in Tahzib al-­Akhlaq, and of the broader assumptions and worldview that informed that discourse. This next discussion will complete and close my analysis of the competing rationalities of reform in Muslim South Asia, represented institutionally by Aligarh and Deoband, and individually by Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his Deoband counterparts like Qasim Nanautvi and Qari Tayyib that has occupied much of this chapter. Much like his grandfather Nanautvi had a few decades earlier, Tayyib primarily faulted Khan for reconfiguring critical concepts in the tradition, like that of tashabbuh, in a manner that cast aside their complex layers and logics in the quest to render them palatable to modernist sensibilities. The doctrine of tashabbuh posed a thorny barrier to Khan’s ultimate normative project of expunging the importance of traditional forms of life and embodied markers of distinction from the hearts and minds of South Asian Muslims. And, Tayyib argued, this is why Khan was so dismissive of tashabbuh as a normative category in Tahzib al-­Akhlaq. Though the tone of Tayyib’s discourse (remember, this was among his earliest texts, written at the age of thirty-­t wo) was significantly more biting than that of his grandfather, the central philosophical assumption that animated their positions was remarkably similar. That assumption was this: that the epistemological disfigurement of the tradition, its sources, and its protocols of interpretation leads to the ontological disfigurement of the individual Muslim subject and community. In some contrast to his grandfather, however, Tayyib’s rebuttal of Khan’s views was considerably more direct and deliberate about puncturing the latter’s religious authority as a competent interpreter of the legal tradition. Tayyib took Khan to task on four specific counts. First, he took strong exception to Khan’s claim that the prophetic saying “Whoever imitates a community becomes one of them” from which we get the doctrine of tashabbuh is inauthentic because of its unreliable chain of transmission (connecting it to the Prophet), and because its normative purpose and consequences were thoroughly obscure. For Tayyib, these objections were no more than whimsical concoctions. Borrowing from Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of the tashabbuh Hadith, he rehearsed and listed its precise chain of transmission that connected it to the Prophet and his Companion ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Umar, with additional confirmatory notes on the credibility of each of the six transmitters/authorities on that chain to establish what in his view was its incontrovertible authenticity.66 Moreover, Tayyib schooled [ 246 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide Khan, this Hadith was narrated through multiple chains of transmission and recorded in more than one authoritative compilation—­for instance, in prominent tenth-­century Hadith scholar Abu’l-­Qasim al-­Tabarani’s (d. 971) The Large and Medium Encyclopedia (al-­Muʿjam al-­Kabir and al-­Muʿjam al-­Awsat), among others. Therefore, even if one hypothetically accepted Khan’s claim that a given chain of transmission for this prophetic saying was unreliable, according to rules of Hadith criticism, the preponderance of several other reliable chains of transmission rendered such a doubt moot.67 As for Khan’s argument that the doctrine of tashabbuh bore no clear normative purpose or consequence, Tayyib counterargued with purpose. Maintaining mutual distinction (bahmi imtiyaz) between Muslims and non-­Muslims by ensuring that the former are not confused for the latter in the public sphere, not providing non-­Muslims the opportunity to ridicule Muslims by undermining the outer manifestations of the sharia like dress, and resisting the erasure of the practices of the pious ancestors (ilghaʾ-­i taʿamul-­i salaf ): these were the hugely consequential normative stakes invested in the prohibition against imitating non-­Muslims, Tayyib highlighted, as if exasperated that he was made to spell out something so obvious.68 Second, Tayyib took on Khan’s contention in Tahzib al-­Akhlaq that, since the Prophet himself used to wear a cloak ( jubba) associated with Roman Christians, the prohibition against clothing connected with any non-­Muslim community in the name of preventing interreligious imitation contradicted the Prophet’s own practice. In his response, Tayyib pointed out that, to begin, a universal (kulli) principle cannot be contradicted or undermined by an isolated instance of a particular ( juzʾi) practice; a particular cannot negate the universal. Khan, he argued, had once again demonstrated his incompetence regarding basic concepts and operations of traditionalist hermeneutics. Tayyib proceeded to offer the intriguing explanation that the cloak of Roman Christians—­or, for that matter, Syrian Jews—­that the Prophet donned was simply manufactured by these communities; it did not represent their distinctive marker of identity (shiʿar). He elaborated with an analogy closer to home: although “Pears Soap” was manufactured by the British, it was mostly used by people in the colonies like India. Therefore, Pears Soap can hardly count as a “distinctive marker” of British identity. Similarly, when one calls a particular type of clothing “Italian” or “Banarsi” (from Banaras), that designation simply refers to the place of production from where it [ 247 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide originates and is then exported elsewhere; it may not even be worn as much in the regions of origin.69 Therefore, Tayyib postulated that, sure, the Prophet wore cloaks made by Roman Christians, Jews, and those made in Yemen; he also wore shawls made by Coptic Christians. But none of these examples suggests that his sartorial choices reflected a desire to imitate any of these communities. All these examples revealed was that the Prophet wore items of clothing manufactured by different communities and in different places. There was nothing normatively significant about that. Why? Because the preponderant use of these items of clothing beyond their community and place of origin, like that of Italian and Banarsi clothes or Pears Soap, meant that these items did not represent a marker of distinction (shiʿar) for any specific community. Therefore, wearing cloaks made by Roman Christians, as had the Prophet, did not equate to imitating Roman Christians. Tayyib’s curious explanation about the Prophet’s cloak was cloaked in considerable ambiguity. Most centrally, Tayyib left unaddressed the question of at what point or volume of generalized use does a material object, like a specific article of clothing that originates in or is associated with a particular community, cease to represent that community’s marker of distinction. In other words, on what empirical or subjective criteria was one to distinguish a normatively charged marker of distinction whose imitation ought to be avoided from a normatively inconsequential or harmless embodied object or practice? Tayyib did not resolve these ambiguities. But it is precisely this lack of resolution that extended him the elasticity to mold and configure the concept of “marker of distinction” in a manner that could both expand and contract the orbit of what counted as tashabbuh, depending on the desired vector of his argument at a given moment. Khan’s claim in Tahzib al-­Akhlaq that received the most visceral reaction of contempt from Qari Tayyib was that imitation of a non-­Muslim community on “petty” matters like clothing, such as the dhoti, or piece of cloth wrapped around the lower body by Hindus, does not make someone an unbeliever. Tayyib sensed in this assertion a smug modernist dismissal of a traditionalist sensibility that took the matter of imitating non-­Muslims in everyday life seriously, as if ulama invested in the problem of tashabbuh were wasting their energies on an issue at once inconsequential and myopic. In his response, Tayyib argued that it was nothing short of ridiculous to hold the view that only a practice that involves unbelief (kufr) should be subject [ 248 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide to prohibition. If that were the case, Tayyib retorted—­again in the tone of a teacher meting a lesson to a pupil who suffered simultaneously from carelessness and shallow hubris—­then heinous sins in Islam (kabaʾir) like fornication, adultery, and murder that don’t lead a person to becoming an unbeliever should also not be prohibited. Further, apart from this logical incoherence, the underlying conceptual defect that in turn was reflected in Khan’s nonchalant attitude toward the gravity of tashabbuh as a doctrinal and societal problem concerned his inability to recognize the intimacy between external and inner imitation (zahiri wa batini mushabahat).70 External imitation in what to Khan seem like petty matters of clothing represented a symptom of a much deeper inner malaise with corrosive and catastrophic consequences for the soul as well as the body. A patient-­like face (marzili surat) indicates a sick, not strong or healthy, interior. Similarly, bodily actions represent manifestations of inner emotions. Tayyib poignantly commented: “It is only when the decision and desire to imitate the ‘other’ has gripped the psyche that the body replicates that sentiment externally.”71 And this process, Tayyib pointed out, also works the other way around: embodied imitation of the Other in everyday life and practice serves as the conduit to inner imitation that corrupts the soul and rattles the foundations of faith, as religious identity stands erased and assimilated into difference. These are the profound stakes at work in regulating interreligious imitation that Khan had failed to appreciate or perceive, Tayyib expressed with regret. It was thus Khan who suffered from myopia, not the ulama who protected their community against the contagion of tashabbuh.72 On this particular point, Tayyib pleaded that even if one rejected the intimacy between the inner and the exterior, between faith and the body, or in a given instance that interconnection was not manifested, it made little sense even then to disfigure the outer body by erasing or muddling its distinct form and identity. To take this train of thought to its destination, Tayyib proposed to Khan and his “reformist sympathizers” (whom Tayyib referred to with the English-­Urdu hybrid term reformarawn) a challenge: “Go to a gathering in a ‘civilized society’ [muhazzab society, playing on the title of Khan’s text Civilizing Morals/Tahzib al-­Akhlaq] wearing all feminine attire and only a masculine hat. . . . ​Would you not feel embarrassed by the disapproving ogling of people at this gathering? If the undesired reaction of other people incites embarrassment, then why does God’s reaction [to corrupt practices] not induce some shame?” Tayyib wondered with contrived curiosity. This [ 249 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide analogy was meant as a not-­so-­veiled jab at Khan’s to-­this-­day-­iconic image of him wearing a Western suit with a fez cap—­an image and a practice that to his admirers signifies an ability to comfortably straddle modern Western and Muslim cultural universes, but to Tayyib highlighted a disfigured self with a confused and prosthetic form and identity.73 Finally, Tayyib pounced on Khan’s speculative judgment in Tahzib al-­Akhlaq that the tashabbuh Hadith—­namely, “He who imitates a community becomes one of them”—­referred to “identifying and distinguishing disfigured dead bodies when they get mixed up [with the help of bodily markers that resemble those belonging to a particular religious community], so that the dead body could be prepared for burial according to the rites and norms of the religious community to which the deceased belonged.” Tayyib relished in highlighting for his readers the gaping self-­contradiction involved in Khan’s proffering this peculiar reading of the tashabbuh Hadith when his entire discussion had hinged on the argument that this Hadith has no clear purpose or referent. More substantively, the explanation that Khan had presented for this Hadith had in fact established the necessity of abandoning the imitation of non-­Muslims—­the opposite of his broader argument, Tayyib claimed. In effect, Sayyid Ahmad Khan had checkmated himself. How? Well, Tayyib elaborated, if Khan was advocating the position that the obligation of a funeral could not be held without distinguishing Muslim and non-­Muslim corpses, then per the Islamic legal principle that the prelude to an obligation is also obligatory (muqaddimat al-­wajib wajib), he was advocating that Muslim distinction is an obligation! If establishing Muslim distinction was obligatory in death, then it was so in every hour of life. After all, Tayyib argued, cementing his case, the marks of distinction from which Muslim corpses are distinguished from non-­Muslim ones are marks impressed upon the body in life, not in death. Death, in fact, is a reflection of life. Therefore, if Khan found Muslim distinction in death as obligatory, then he had also declared Muslim distinction in life as obligatory, endorsing in the end the very position he had opposed throughout Tahzib al-­Akhlaq. The self-­contradiction saturating Khan’s discourse, Tayyib suggested, putting some final icing on his polemical cake, was a product of the defective (munkar) and hypocritical (munafiq) character of Khan’s pen, which had ended up cheating itself.74 Tayyib concluded with a note of stinging triumphalism: “There is no escape (mafar) from accepting the normative purpose and potency of the tashabbuh Hadith [‘whoever imitates a community [ 250 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide becomes one of them’] . . . ​and from embracing the doctrine of tashabbuh as an unambiguously established, purposeful, indisputable, conclusively effective, universal, and consummate normative principle” (Wazih al-­dalala, natija khayz, ghayr mutaʿariz, bayyin al-­taʾthir, ʿam wa tam sharʿi usul).75

The Foundational Force of Love In a remarkable final section of Reprehensible Imitation, Tayyib dramatically shifted gears. He jettisoned his otherwise feisty tone and put aside the legal and theological dimensions of this issue to meditate on what he described as the “foundational stone of love” on which the entire imperative of why one ought to refrain from tashabbuh rests. The desire for love (shaghaf-­i muhabbat), Tayyib explained, causes the lover to completely lose volition over his actions, as everything in life and death are resigned for the beloved, though, in earthly love, such self-­effacement is temporary, as the beloved is temporary. But what if one fell in love with a beloved who was eternal? In this case, the effects of love—­that is, abandoning the desire for every entity except the beloved, including one’s own self (nafs)—­will also be permanent. This condition, Tayyib claimed, was real love (haqiqi ʿishq). And it is this desire to abandon (shaghaf-­i tark) every person, form, thought, practice, and marker of distinction which was the Other of the beloved that propels the desire to abandon the imitation (tark-­i tashabbuh) of all that was the Other of the Prophet, the ultimate eternal beloved. Prior to any consideration of legal commandments, prohibitions, or rational arguments, it is this instinctive love for the Prophet that drives the faithful (muʾmin) to erase from their lives any practice, habit, or societal norm that privileges rather than dismantles attachment to desires of the self and to all that represents the Other (ghayr) of the Prophet.76 “The foremost law of the station of love,” Tayyib feelingly wrote, “is to erase even the thought of all that is the ‘other’ of the beloved, let alone harboring any desire for [imitating] the ‘other.’ ”77 Thus, for Tayyib, before the law, love is the power that ensures separation and distinction between the lover and every Other of the beloved. Confusing such distinction by imitating the Other contravened and ultimately fractured the covenant of love binding the lover and the beloved. Tashabbuh, or the imitation of non-­Muslim Others, was another name for precisely such confusion and betrayal of the beloved. It signaled the weakness—­or, in worst [ 251 ]

The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide cases, the absence—­of love between a Muslim and the Prophet. The absence of love for the Prophet, in turn, meant the absence of faith. “Faith,” Tayyib summed up, “was but a claim to passional love (daʿwa-­yi ishq).”78 It was this foundational intimacy of faith and love that was encroached upon and irreparably severed by the catastrophically destructive force of tashabbuh, or imitation of the non-­Muslim Other. *

*

*

Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s and Muhammad Qari Tayyib’s radically opposing views on the relevance and application of tashabbuh reflected and rested on contrasting visions of religion and reform in conditions of colonial modernity. For Khan, being occupied with issues of everyday life like imitation of non-­Muslims in dress and social customs was symptomatic of a petty and regressive vision of religion that impeded rather than facilitated the political and spiritual growth and prosperity of South Asian Muslims. Confronting the challenges of colonial modernity required a thorough recalibration of traditionalist hermeneutical methods and normative priorities in a fashion that presented friendship and collaboration with the non-­Muslim Other as an opportunity rather than a threat to civilizational progress. But, as I have shown, what to Khan was petty and insignificant was to Tayyib of existential importance. To Tayyib, it was precisely by vigilantly guarding embodied forms of everyday practice from the corrosive contagion of imitation that one preserved Muslim distinction and power in a world otherwise enfolded by the absence of political sovereignty. A mandate of civilizational progress that prescribed assimilating into the Other was in fact a recipe for social and eschatological destruction that also involved disfiguring the normative sources of the tradition and authoritative protocols of interpreting those sources beyond recognition. Again, as we have seen with other case studies discussed in previous chapters, at stake in the Khan-­Tayyib disagreement on the question of tashabbuh or interreligious imitation were competing visions of how the legacy of Muslim normative sources and tradition ought to inform the moral decisions and conundrums of a radically transformed present. Although these competing visions of Islam and Muslim identity in colonial modernity cannot be reduced to a modernism/traditionalism binary, they do index massively divergent—­and to this day hugely influential and contested rationalities—­of tradition and reform in Muslim South Asia. [ 252 ]

Epilogue

Recap of Key Arguments In this book, I have argued that South Asian Muslim scholarly discourses and disputes over Hindu-­Muslim friendship cannot be reduced to and explained by predetermined and popular binaries like inclusivist/exclusivist, pluralist/puritan, modernist/traditionalist, pro-­colonial/anticolonial or violent/ peaceful. I have made this point, in different ways and registers, in every chapter of this book. For instance, while Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan conducted a sympathetic reading of Hindu thought and practice, it was still firmly embedded in an imperial Muslim political theology that saw Islam as the completion of salvific time. Qasim Nanautvi, though a staunch traditionalist scholar, showed remarkable agility at employing and mobilizing the technological and institutional infrastructure of colonial modernity to advance his normative agenda. He was deeply connected to a premodern Muslim scholarly tradition of interreligious disputation, but his case for the superiority of Prophet Muhammad’s miracles over those of other prophets was heavily indebted to thoroughly modern logics of scientific rationalism and historicism. Moreover, though Nanautvi tried his utmost to establish Islam’s superiority over Hinduism and considered Hindu miracles not even worthy of discussion on account of their historical unreliability, he nonetheless explicitly stated that the prophets left unnamed in the Qur’an may well be the Hindu avatars. [ 253 ]

Epilogue Abu’l Kalam Azad argued for the seemingly pluralist gesture of Hindu-­ Muslim collaboration, but that did not prevent him from calling jihad against the British an obligation for every Indian Muslim. Ahmad Raza Khan views on Muslim/non-­Muslim relations in everyday life were attached to an idealized vision of manifesting Muslim sovereign power through ritual distinction in the public sphere. At the same time, he advocated the pragmatic position of maintaining transactional relations with the British state and characterized the proposal of waging war against it catastrophically foolhardy. Shibli Nuʿmani was stinging in his critique of his ulama colleagues for what he saw as their reluctance to engage and adopt European knowledges and cultural/political practices in the name of blocking interreligious imitation. And yet he framed his argument not through recourse to a liberal discourse of pluralism, but by making the point that Muslim imperial power in early Islam was facilitated with rather than undermined by the adoption of non-­Muslim (Zoroastrian, Christian, and Jewish) practices and strategies of governance. ‘Abdul Bari of the Farangi Mahal school advocated the seemingly pluralist position that Muslims should abstain from cow sacrifice to honor the religious sensibilities of the Hindu community, but he did so explicitly through a traditionalist legal hermeneutic. Remember, he even argued that if the Hindus inisted that Muslims abandon cow sacrifice, that insistence will paradoxically render the practice obligatory. Similarly, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, though often an avid modernist deeply critical of Muslim traditionalism, was comfortable with employing the categories and language of traditionalism when they suited his purposes. Indeed, it is his familiarity with Muslim traditionalist knowledge and discourse that allowed him to engage Deoband founder Qasim Nanautvi in a substantive and spirited but thoroughly respectful intellectual disagreement. Finally, while Qari Tayyib loathed the prospect of Hindu-­Muslim friendship and intimacy in the public sphere, he saw his mission to thwart the imitation of the religious Other precisely as a labor of love. Collectively, these examples highlight the impossibility of canonizing intra-­Muslim discourses and disagreement on important normative questions like interreligious friendship into easily digestible binary framings and explanations. These thinkers and their thought are far too complex and nonlinear for such a possibility. [ 254 ]

Epilogue Second, I have argued that negotiating the normative assumptions and conditions of Muslim empire that shaped the premodern legacy of the Islamic legal tradition in a world marked by the loss of Muslim political sovereignty has represented a central conundrum informing South Asian ulama discourses on the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship. Different scholars, depending on their ideological temperament and project, have wrestled with this conundrum in varied ways. In this regard, I have made two interconnected points. First, every chapter in this book has shown that normative attachment to the ideal of Muslim political and theological superiority over non-­Muslims has not prevented South Asian ulama from articulating novel and often unexpected readings of the tradition, nor from creatively appropriating and mobilizing modern colonial discourses and technologies. And yet, to state the second point, such creative engagement with the terrain of the modern colonial order did not represent an expression of “native agency” because the rules, terms, and discursive landscape governing that terrain were frequently not of their making and choosing. Qasim Nanautvi’s defensive recourse to the category of “world histories” while defending Prophet Muhamad’s miracles (see chapter 2), Abu’l Azad’s invocation of the “secular principle” of the state’s nonintervention in matters of religious sensitivity while lambasting the British attack on the Ottoman caliphate (see chapter  3), and Ahmad Raza Khan’s mobilization of the category of “religious freedom” to make the case that Indian Muslims must not be compelled to abandon cow sacrifice (see chapter 4): these are all good examples of this point. And, third, I have argued—­especially in the latter four chapters of the book—­that, with the loss of Muslim political sovereignty, in South Asian ulama imaginaries, Muslim sovereign power was increasingly located in and exercised through the regulation of everyday ritual life and practice in the public sphere. In turn, Muslim sovereignty and dominance over non-­Muslims, a defining ingredient of an imperial political theology, was increasingly equated with the preservation of markers of Muslim ritual distinction (shaʿaʾir-­i Islam). Therefore, even though Ahmad Raza Khan and Qari Tayyib belonged to two otherwise fiercely rival orientations of Muslim traditionalism in South Asia (the Barelvis and Deobandis), they were in complete agreement on equating the erasure of Muslim distinction in the public sphere with the erasure of Muslim sovereign power. In the absence of a Muslim [ 255 ]

Epilogue state, it is in the practice and choreography of everyday ritual life that the fantastical promise of Muslim sovereignty was enshrined. To complicate matters a bit further, however, not all scholars held such a view. In contrast, for scholars attached to the Khilafat movement, while a Muslim state in India was no longer available, that lack was compensated by the Ottoman Caliphate. Preserving markers of Muslim distinction in the public sphere was important, but no marker of distinction or sovereignty was as imperative as the caliphate. In this book I have presented critical and prominent fragments of Muslim scholarly discourses and debates in early modern and modern South Asia on the normative boundaries of interreligious, especially Hindu-­Muslim, friendship. And, through an exploration of this particular theme, I have sought to detail and showcase the depth, complexity, and ambiguities of South Asian Muslim intellectual traditions as they have operated in conversation with the broader Islamic discursive tradition. In the remainder of this epilogue, I will highlight some aspects of the contemporary relevance, reverberations, and afterlives of the discussion conducted in this book by turning to a couple of specific but enormously instructive moments in contemporary India and Pakistan.

Modern States, Imperial Sovereignty In late June 2020, the famous cricketer turned philanthropist turned politician Imran Khan (b. 1952), the then-­prime minister of Pakistan, extended a government grant of Rs 100 million for the construction of a Hindu temple and crematorium on a twenty-­thousand-­square-­foot plot in the centrally located H-­9/2 sector of the country’s capital Islamabad.1 The Sri Krishna Mandir, as the proposed temple is called, promises to be the first Hindu temple within the city limits of the capital, where, according to the Hindu Panchayat Islamabad that will oversee its management, the Hindu population has reached almost three thousand, mainly due to migration from the lesser developed southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan. The prime minister’s grant was issued in response to a request by a delegation of religious minority ministers in the national assembly (MNAs), most prominently Lal Chand Malhi, a Hindu MNA from the province of Sindh and Parliamentary Secretary for Human Rights, who belonged to the ruling Pakistan Tehrik-­i Insaf (Pakistan Justice Movement, or PTI Party).2 While “Muslims in India [ 256 ]

Epilogue were being prevented from going to mosques,” Malhi boasted with patriotic fervor, “we are here building a temple, which proves the accommodative policy of Pakistan.”3 However, in early July 2020, less than two weeks after a simple but widely covered ground-­breaking ceremony, construction of the temple’s boundary wall was halted amid blazing furor over the project by Muslim religious clerics and scholars of various stripes. For these protestors, there was nothing objectionable about a minority community’s building for its use places of worship; the objection had to do with a Muslim state’s patronage of a Hindu temple, a site of “polytheistic idol worship,” through expenditure from the national exchequer. As summed up by the eminent contemporary Deobandi scholar and jurist Mufti Taqi Usmani (b. 1943), internationally renowned for his work on Islamic finance, who also boasts considerable clout in traditionalist circles in Pakistan and India, as well as among the general public: “In a Muslim state like Pakistan, non-­Muslims have the right to build their places of worship as their population grows. But it is not permissible for the government to sponsor the construction of a Hindu temple in a city like Islamabad with such a small Hindu population.” 4 In his protest against the proposed temple, Mufti Muneeb ur Rehman (b. 1946), another prominent and considerably more controversial Deobandi scholar often at loggerheads with modernist political and nonpolitical segments of Pakistan, due to his long-­running position as chair of the government appointed Moonsighting Committee (he was removed from this post in December 2020), was more blunt. “For us to raise the slogan of aspiring for ‘the state of Madina’ and then draw on the national exchequer to build houses of idol worship is preposterous,” he thundered, taking a not-­so-­veiled swipe at the integrity of Imran Khan’s trademark call to model Pakistan on the principles of socioeconomic justice and empathy that animated the welfare state of Madina in the seventh century led by Prophet Muhammad.5 His next few words connect more directly to my concerns, as they capture the logic of an imperial Muslim political theology underlying the thrust of his position: “Even if you build a hundred temples,” he said, “the Hindus and Jews (Hunud wa Yahud) will not be satisfied, and will demand that the government bend in subservience yet further.” 6 Penchant for rhetorical flourish is not the main reason that drove Muneeb ur Rehman to frame his comments through the rhyming construct of “hunud wa Yahud” (Hindus and Jews), when obviously the negligibly small population of Jews in Pakistan had [ 257 ]

Epilogue little to do with the issue at hand. Rather, his discourse reflected an unfiltered translation of a premodern imperial political theology that saw the maintenance of political supremacy and theological superiority over non-­ Muslims as a foundational principle of governance and sovereignty. Among the most searing commentaries on the Islamabad temple controversy as it unfolded was advanced by Hafiz Hasan Madani, the Salafi-­leaning traditionalist scholar and assistant professor of Islamic studies at the University of Punjab. Born in 1973, Madani was trained in the canonical Dars­i Nizami curriculum (the standard curriculum of Islamic seminaries in South Asia) at the Jamiʿa Islamiyya seminary in Lahore, where he graduated in 1992, and, after attaining a one-­year diploma in Arabic from the Islamic University in Madina, he completed his bachelor’s degree, his master’s degree, and, eventually, in 2009, his PhD in Islamic studies at the University of Punjab, where he had also been teaching since 2013. His intellectual profile characterizes an increasingly common modality of neotraditionalism in the landscape of contemporary Muslim thought that straddles and combines grounding in traditionalist seminary training and in the modern university. Madani regularly contributes to and, since 2001, has served as an editor for Muhaddis, the widely read monthly online Urdu journal with a visible conservative bent. In the journal’s August 2020 issue, Madani wrote a lengthy essay in which he sought to synthesize and elaborate the normative case of the Pakistani Muslim religious intelligentsia against the construction of a new Hindu temple in Islamabad. Among his many points, in a moment that exemplified his reliance on a Muslim imperial hermeneutical framework, Madani argued that the construction of a Hindu temple represented a normatively offensive proposal particularly in Islamabad. Why? Because, he claimed, it contravened the legal principle that in a city founded by Muslims with no previous non-­Muslim populations (amsar or garrison towns), the construction of non-­Muslim places of worship was impermissible. In assembling his case, Madani invoked a curious combination of premodern authorities. To cover his traditionalist bases, he cited the well-­ known fourteenth-­/fifteenth-­century Ottoman Hanafi jurist and judge Badr al-­Din al-­‘Ayni (d. 1453), who, in his commentary on the canonical twelfth-­ century Hanafi compendium al-­Hidaya by the famous Burhan al-­Din al-­ Marghinani, wrote: “In towns like Kufa, Basra, Baghdad, and Wasit that were founded by Muslims, it is not permissible to build synagogues and churches, and nor is it allowed for non-­Muslims to erect any individual or [ 258 ]

Epilogue congregational places of worship; on this there exists a consensus of the [Muslim] scholarly community.”7 Moreover, to satisfy the discursive appetite of more neotraditionalist or Salafi-­oriented audiences, Madani mobilized the ever-­looming Ibn Taymiyya (whom we met in chapter 5): “There is agreement among Muslims that in towns founded by them, protected non-­ Muslims (ahl al-­dhimma) cannot build churches, just like in towns conquered by Muslims without warfare, their churches are kept intact.”8 Applying these fragments from the tradition to his present context, Madani argued that Islamabad—­a city built from scratch by the Pakistani state in the early 1960s to serve as the country’s capital around fifteen years after its founding—­was analogous to premodern Muslim garrison towns (amsar) like Kufa, Basra, and Baghdad. To complete the analogy, just as building synagogues and churches was impermissible in premodern Kufa and Basra, so, too, was building a Hindu temple not permissible in contemporary Islamabad.9 Despite the etymological resonance of Islamabad meaning “city populated by Islam,” the primary modernist motive of administrative felicity that drove the shift of Pakistan’s capital from the southern port city of Karachi to Islamabad in the 1960s and the context of early Muslim expansion that saw the emergence of garrison towns like Kufa and Basra in the seventh century are substantively incongruous. For Madani, however, the citational weight of textual precedent overpowered contextual incongruity. It is precisely identifying and highlighting this contextual dissonance that has rendered the Islamist-­t urned-­modernist thinker Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (b. 1951) the primary object of irritation and rebuke for Madani and several other likeminded scholars. On the Islamabad temple controversy, Ghamidi, a hugely influential scholar and television/YouTube personality, had applied his long-­held and well-­known view that Pakistan represents not an Islamic state but a Muslim majority “nation-­state” (qawmi riyasat) in which religious minorities possess equal civic rights as do Muslims. Hence, for Ghamidi, since the very foundational assumptions of premodern Muslim imperial sovereignty were inapplicable to a modern nation state like Pakistan, the objection against the government’s patronage of a Hindu temple was a nonstarter. If Muslims and non-­Muslim minorities both paid equal taxes to the state, they were also entitled to equal rights and privileges as citizens. Moreover—­and it is on this point that Ghamidi is most unpalatable and controversial to scholars with traditionalist sensibilities—­he contended that premodern Muslim jurisprudential categories like “abode of Islam” (Dar [ 259 ]

Epilogue al-­Islam) and “abode of war” (Dar al-­Harb) hold no substance or weight in the modern era of the nation-­state. These categories, in his view, are not primordially integral to Islam, but represent rather contingent and historically specific expressions of a jurisprudential tradition wedded to a bygone political context of Muslim empire.10 It was not only the substance of Ghamidi’s position but also (and perhaps even more so) the appropriation and attraction of this position for the Western educated liberal secular elite that fueled Madani’s fury. As he pejoratively put it, “Ghamidi is [serving as] the spokesperson for the liberal class (liberal tabaqa).” Madani added the additional and meaningful note that where Ghamidi and his followers fundamentally err is in their inability to recognize that Pakistan is not simply just any other nation state but an ideological polity (nazariyyati hukumat) always aspiring for a more perfect Islamic identity and order. This is why, Madani argued, one found in the country constitutional advisory boards like the Council of Islamic Ideology (formed as part of the 1962 constitution), federal shariʿa courts, and dozens of Islamic laws interwoven into the state fabric.11 Other than the contest over religious authority, the suspicion harbored toward Ghamidi by a sizable segment of the religious elite is also nourished by his previous advisory work on the modernizing campaigns of the military dictator Pervez Musharraf (r. 1999–­2008; d. 2023). The perception that his concern over the imposition of premodern Muslim imperial norms in the contemporary world is not supplemented with a correspondingly enthusiastic critique of secularism and the international political order of Western modernity has also left him vulnerable to the charge that Muslim traditionalism and the ulama are the primary targets of his normative agenda. Ghamidi’s valorization by many among the liberal elite and the professional middle class as a vital voice of reason and moderation counteracting the allegedly rigid and narrow-­m inded traditionalism of the ulama further encrusts this mistrust. Ironically, what such framings of Ghamidi as a “liberal reformer” by his opponents and supporters alike miss is that, on some key hot button issues,—­for instance, the Qur’anic prohibition of financial interest—­his position often mirrors that of the traditionalists.12 Moreover, as Humeira Iqtidar has recently suggested, his insistence on the minimal role of the state in regulating religion and in implementing Islamic laws, especially on matters of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations, point to a nonliberal [ 260 ]

Epilogue notion of tolerance based on individual humility and state minimalism that thus disrupts the equation of liberalism and tolerance.13 These nuances don’t thrive, however, in the crucible of polemical embers. The construction of the Islamabad temple morphed into a flashpoint for rival visions of the normative relationship between Islam and Pakistan: for some a litmus test of the country’s commitment to minority rights, and for others a barometer of Muslim sovereign power in a world beset by the oppressive pressures of an always enveloping liberal secular order. The furor and impasse generated by the Islamabad temple controversy compelled the Pakistani government to refer the matter for further guidance to the Council of Islamic Ideology (Islami Nazariyyati Council; henceforth CII), a government advisory body of eight to twenty members (almost exclusively male) with varying intellectual profiles including traditionalist ulama from different ideological persuasions, Islamic studies professors, Sufi masters, and legal experts. Then and currently led by Qibla Ayaz (b. 1953), a University of Edinburgh PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, the CII’s official mission is to advise the government and the legislature on whether or not a particular law or state measure is “repugnant to Islam.”14 After three months of deliberation, in October 2020, the CII published a brief, two-­page official opinion (in Urdu) titled “The Expenditure of Government Funds for the Construction of New Non-­Muslim Places of Worship.” This document deemed that the construction of the Islamabad temple was permissible. Its brevity, however, belies the succulent ironies of its hermeneutical operations. To me, of greater interest than the CII”s eventual verdict is the interpretive path it took to reach that verdict. Its framing and points of emphasis evince a concerted effort to carefully tread and avert potential doctrinal landmines. Its first page, for instance, makes no mention of the central issue at hand: of whether the Pakistani government can sponsor the construction of a Hindu temple. Instead, it recommends that an existing but dysfunctional Hindu temple in the outskirts of Islamabad in Saidpur be opened and made functional and accessible for the Hindu community in the capital. The word “Hindu temple” (mandir) is mentioned just twice, emphasizing instead the function of the proposed site as a crematorium (shamshan ghat) and “Hindu community center” for occasions like weddings and devotional ritual ceremonies.15 Having sufficiently secularized the Hindu temple as primarily a community center–­crematorium, page 2 of [ 261 ]

Epilogue the document proposes an ingenious solution to the problem of a Muslim state’s funding of a Hindu temple. The CII suggested that the funding for the temple could be ensured through an amendment in the “Evacuee Trust Property Board Act” put in place in 1960 for the management of extant Hindu temples and Sikh Gurdwaras in Pakistan (and, conversely, mosques in India) as part of the Liaquat-­Nehru Pact of April 1950 (also known as the Delhi Pact). The Liaquat-­Nehru Pact sought to safeguard the welfare and rights of “the left behind minorities” in each newly independent country (following the 1947 partition of South Asia).16 Crucially, although the Evacuee Trust Property Board falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government of Pakistan, its primary source of revenue are the properties left behind in the country by Hindus and Sikhs who had migrated to India. So, what the CII proposed was an amendment to this act that brought under its purview the funding of not only existing but also new Hindu temples and Sikh Gurdwaras built to accommodate rising populations of these communities in particular localities of the country. Since the original source of the funding is non-­Muslim, the normative challenge of a Muslim state’s patronage of a Hindu temple would not arise. The Muslim majority state thus simply serves as a conduit connecting Hindu patrons (those who evacuated their properties in what became Pakistan and left for India after the partition) with Hindu beneficiaries (i.e., the Hindu community of contemporary Pakistan desiring a new temple). In another proposal, the CII suggested that since members of minority communities were citizens of Pakistan, and the state was responsible for the welfare of all its citizens according to the 1973 constitution, the government could apportion a pool of funds for the welfare of minority communities and hand those funds over to (representatives of) those communities so they may expend them as they found most appropriate. The CII argued that this arrangement presented “no objections according to the shariʿa,” because, as with the first option, the Muslim state does not directly authorize and expend funds for the explicit purpose of the construction of a Hindu temple.17 The purpose of the funds is made specific and explicit not by the Muslim state but by its non-­Muslim recipients. Notice how, even though the intention of these suggestions offered by the CII is to establish a mechanism for the construction of the Islamabad temple and other such future endeavors in a fashion that is normatively legitimate according to Islamic law, the sources of authority mobilized for that [ 262 ]

Epilogue purpose are nonreligious—­namely, the 1950 Liaquat-­Nehru Pact and the 1973 constitution. The CII’s advisory note signed by its fourteen members at that time and stamped by the authority of the state, cleared the path for the construction of the Islamabad temple by lending the project Islamic and constitutional legitimacy. Soon after, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) of Islamabad, responsible for the acquisition, allocation, and management of government property and land in the city, issued a no-­objection certificate to the Hindu Panchayat Islamabad; at the time this book was going to press, construction work on the temple was ongoing. But, despite its material consequences, the ostensible resolution offered by the CII hardly resolved the underlying conundrum at the heart of the Islamabad temple dispute that has hovered over the chapters of this book. That conundrum is this: How should one imagine and engage the legacy of dominant premodern normative attitudes on Muslim/non-­Muslim relations in a world in which the political context of Muslim imperial sovereignty that informed those attitudes is no longer available? This dilemma isn’t relevant just to Pakistan’s most recent past. For instance, note the persistence of premodern jurisprudential categories in the following comments by the prominent traditionalist scholar of the Deoband school Muhammad Yusuf Banuri (d. 1977) in the aftermath of the 1974 amendment to the Pakistani constitution that declared the Ahmadiyya as outside the fold of Islam: “Before the constitutional amendment, the normative status of the Mirzaʾis [derogatory term for the Ahmadiyya] was that of hostile unbelievers (Kuffar-­i Muharibin) and after the amendment, their status is that of non-­Muslim minorities under Muslim protection or in other words that of dhimmis, on the condition of course that they live in Pakistan as minorities and don’t lay claim on being Muslim.”18 Banuri’s mobilization of categories like dhimmi and muharib (hostile unbeliever) clearly indicates that he is operating according to a premodern Muslim imperial jurisprudential framework, while simultaneously seeking to align that framework with the calculus of modern state sovereignty. This attempted alignment generates a vexing puzzle: How is one to accept the Ahmadiyya as a religious minority literally minoritized through the sledgehammer of modern state law while also, by approaching them primarily through premodern categories of religious difference, refusing to embrace the constitutional rights and privileges at least officially accorded to religious minorities? The source of this problem lies in turn with the difficulty of maintaining normative fidelity with the conceptual vocabulary [ 263 ]

Epilogue of a discursive tradition that is not so easily translatable into the requirements and protocols of modern citizenship and constitutional rights. As Wael Hallaq, in his equally contested and productive book The Impossible State, most plainly puts it, “Any conception of a modern Islamic state is inherently self-­contradictory.”19 And more important is the second and perhaps less appreciated part of Hallaq’s argument: “The inherent self-­contradictions entailed by a modern Islamic state are primarily grounded in modernity’s moral predicament.”20 Thinking with Hallaq—­a nd, of course, as the Ahmadi example also demonstrates—­the exclusionary politics and mechanisms of the modern state are often dramatically more violent and durable than the imperial logics of sovereignty governing premodern empires. My point is not to draw a fictitious contrast between premodern intolerance and modern liberal tolerance, or to present South Asian ulama as mired in the long-­exhausted fiction of Muslim empire. Rather, through the examples presented in this book, I have sought to highlight an important and perhaps less examined dimension of the problem of interreligious encounters in South Asia: the intra-­Muslim debates and tensions generated through the encounter between the legacy of precolonial discursive traditions and norms and the conditions and institutions of colonial modernity and, more recently, the postcolonial state. This encounter, I have tried to show, has represented a site of considerable aspiration, anxiety, and intellectual fermentation. As with other moments explored in this book, the Islamabad temple controversy showed that at stake in the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship are often unresolved intra-­Muslim disagreements over the normative texture and limits of Islam. In many ways, the opposing imaginaries of Islam and difference made visible in this episode mirrored the debates and conversations staged by figures like Ahmad Raza Khan, Maulvi Abdul Bari, Qari Tayyib, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan a century or so ago. But the postcolonial afterlives of intra-­Muslim contest on the question of Hindu-­Muslim friendship in a setting like Pakistan also mark certain crucial ruptures and differences. Most notably, these include 1. the magnified role of a conceptually fragile yet powerfully intrusive state in regulating religious difference; 2. the piercing pressure of the global discourse of religious freedom and minority rights often impressed by Western imperial states like the United States and its state and nonstate collaborators (such as NGOs like Amnesty International); 3. the sheer variety of actors and intellectual/social profiles [ 264 ]

Epilogue involved in such debates in the public arena; 4. the very constitution of that arena that beyond print and texts is also dominated by digital and social media; and 5. the ever-­w idening epistemic and cultural chasm separating traditionalist ulama from their modernist and secularist critics. If the negotiation of premodern Muslim imperial notions of sovereignty and the demands of modern state management of religious difference has haunted the career of Hindu-­Muslim encounters in contemporary Pakistan, as the Islamabad temple debate highlighted, in neighboring India, where Muslims represent a sizable yet increasingly beleaguered and surveilled minority, the problem of Hindu-­Muslim friendship has emerged through yet different discursive and political registers. It is to one specific, fascinating, and—­for the purposes of what has unfolded in this book—­enormously relevant recent articulation of such a register that I next turn in drawing this book to a close.

“Our history has not been written”: Viewing the Past Beyond Good and Bad Muslims On January 16, 2020, Sharjeel Imam, a charismatic thirty-­one-­year-­old Muslim leader and key organizer of protests against the then recently instituted Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), widely seen as particularly discriminatory toward the country’s Muslims, addressed a select but charged group of people under an outdoor tent at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). A native of Bihar, Imam studied at prestigious institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (where he attained his undergraduate and master’s degree in Computer Sciences) and the famous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, where he completed a master’s degree and was pursuing his PhD in modern history.21 His speech at the AMU in January had followed another provocative speech he had delivered around a month before at Jamia Millia University in Delhi. These two speeches, each around an hour long, delivered at arguably the two most distinguished nonseminary Muslim institutions of higher learning in India, were later cited as grounds for sedition charges against Imam in five different provinces of the country. The pretext on which the sedition charges were framed relied on his call during one of his speeches for instituting roadblocks or chakka jam as a means of protest, which was cast as a call for insurrection against the state. He [ 265 ]

Epilogue surrendered himself to Delhi police on January 28, 2020. In late April of that year, Imam was formally charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the version of which was amended in 2019 during Narendra Modi’s second term as prime minister, allows the government to proscribe individuals as terrorists with amplified powers accorded to the National Investigation Agency to probe cases.22 Imam remains imprisoned in the maximum security Tihar jail in New Delhi, and his trial, widely condemned for the explicitly Islamophobic tenor of its proceedings, is ongoing as this book goes to press. Imam is one among several activists and intellectuals (mostly Muslim) shackled and apprehended by the Indian state for their opposition to the controversial CAA and NRC. The CAA is an amendment to the 1955 Citizenship Act passed by the Indian parliament in December 2019 that excludes Muslims (as well as Sri Lankan Tamils) from the list of communities that may acquire Indian citizenship on grounds of arriving in India by the end of 2014 because of or fearing religious persecution in the neighboring countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. These restrictive parameters of the CAA meant that Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar were denied the possibility of citizenship. The closely connected NRC refers to the National Register of Citizens, which requires people to produce documents of ancestry to be registered as Indian citizens—­a n obviously xenophobic and discriminatory practice undertaken in the province of Assam since 2015 and that the current Hindu nationalist BJP government led by Narendra Modi has sought to expand throughout the country, sparking widespread protest and outrage. Together, the CAA and NRC are seen as symptoms of an increasingly emboldened and violent form of Hindu majoritarian politics sanctioned by the state that targets all religious minorities (including Dalits, Sikhs, and Christians) but especially Muslims, as seen most viscerally in horrific episodes of beef lynchings of the sort I discussed in chapter 4. The purview of Imam’s speech at the AMU, however, while delivered in the context of growing protests against the CAA and NRC, was much wider and more historically extended than recent events having to do with the oppressive Hindu nationalism of the BJP. Indeed, the central thrust of his speech, delivered in a casual yet commanding style, was aimed precisely at disabusing the supposed bifurcation between a pre-­a nd post-­BJP India through a stinging critique of the popular romanticization of India’s otherwise secular credentials as a laboratory of interreligious harmony and [ 266 ]

Epilogue coexistence. “The Indian constitution and its alleged claim to secularism are inherently discriminatory towards Muslims,” Imam underlined, adding that, in essence India’s constitution and political order were engineered by and primarily served the sensibilities of upper-­caste Hindus. “To rely on the constitution,” he declared, “is to invite our death.”23 Rather than protesting a particular government, political party, or set of laws, what was required of Indian Muslims, Imam argued, was a thorough reinterrogation and consequent reinvention of the very political terrain in which Indian Muslims were presented as objects of toleration under the gaze of an upper-­caste Hindu majority state apparatus. Imam contended that the CAA and NRC presented an opportunity to tell the narrative of more than seventy years of injustice and anti-­Muslim discrimination that was hardly specific to the present. In fact, the bulk of his speech was critical not of the BJP but of the Indian National Congress that Imam described as intimately implicated in the plight and persecution of Muslims in contemporary India. “Congress is [our] enemy number one. . . . ​The entire political order (nizam) is against us,” Imam punctuated, while pointing out that the lynching of Muslims over beef consumption was not a recent phenomenon but one that dated back at least a hundred years.24 Over the course of his speech, Imam nimbly moved between talking about suggested mechanisms of protest (the charge of sedition against him was based on his mention of blocking roads to Assam that would cause the province “to dismember from India for at least a few months if not permanently”); launching sarcastic salvos at the elite civil society of Delhi that, in Imam’s view, exoticized Muslims protesting the state at venues like the famous Shaheen Bagh as much as sympathized with them; and issuing biting critiques of secular and Marxist Indian Muslim historians like Irfan Habib for what Imam saw as their imprisonment to secular nationalist views and framings. Previously, in one among his several well-­k nown opinion pieces, he had also launched a scathing and perceptive indictment of his own university, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, that Imam called out for its rampant Islamophobia, even—­and, at many times, especially—­among its secularist Muslim student leaders.25 The part of Imam’s speech at the AMU that is most relevant to this book and that thus most interests me concerns its last ten minutes or so, in which he offered some provocative but enormously interesting reflections on the history of South Asian Islam and on the ways in which that history gets refracted through liberal secular commitments and desires in the [ 267 ]

Epilogue contemporary moment. More specifically, Imam offered his commentary on intra-­Muslim debates over Hindu-­Muslim friendship and cow slaughter in the early twentieth century that were the focus of chapters 3 and 4 in this book. According to him, scholars attached to the Khilafat movement like Abu’l Kalam Azad made a terrible mistake by aligning with and befriending Gandhi and the Indian National Congress for the politically and certainly theologically needless goal of protecting the Ottoman government. It is this moment of Hindu-­Muslim collaboration, Imam provocatively argued, when the Khilafat movement scholars forewent cow slaughter to gain Gandhi’s political support that eventually paved the way for the contemporary Hindu nationalist cow protection movement that has wreaked havoc on Indian Muslims. As he bluntly put it: “That support [offered by Gandhi to the Khilafat Movement] has become poison for us today” (woh support aj hamaray liyay zehar ki shakal mayn hay).26 Thus, for Imam, what appeared as the unprecedented anti-­Muslim violence of Hindu nationalism today was in fact founded on the seemingly pluralist gestures of Hindu-­Muslim friendship forged during the context of the Khilafat movement a century ago. By foregoing cow slaughter then, the leaders of the Khilafat movement like Abu’l Kalam Azad (whom Imam explicitly named) had made future generations of Indian Muslims vulnerable to being policed by majoritarian Hindu sensibilities on this issue. “Their intentions may have been noble,” Imam admitted, “but one must still point out their grave mistake.”27 Imam proceeded to raise the following intriguing question: Why is it that it is primarily pro-­Congress Muslim scholars like Azad, those who championed Hindu-­Muslim partnership, who get most extensively featured in both nationalist and scholarly historiographies of South Asia? More specifically, Imam raised the example of the founder of the Barelvi orientation Ahmad Raza Khan and his text on cow sacrifice The Finest Viewpoint on Cow Sacrifice (Anfus al-­Fikr fi Qurban al-­Baqr), examined in detail in chapter 4, to wonder why that kind of a perspective critical of Gandhi, the Congress, and the prospect of Hindu-­Muslim intimacy does not receive the same attention or consideration as an important articulation of South Asian Muslim history and identity. Though, Iman clarified, he did not agree with all aspects of Khan’s thought, he did find immensely convincing and critically significant Khan’s intellectual resistance against a vision of Hindu-­Muslim friendship premised [ 268 ]

Epilogue on the erasure of Muslim ritual life and normative commitments. Imam lauded Khan for correctly pointing out that the key question was not whether cow sacrifice represented an obligatory practice for Muslims (as the Khilafat movement leaders had framed the issue), but whether it was permissible for Muslims to abandon cow sacrifice under the pressure of the Hindus. But since Khan was not pro-­Congress or a supporter of Hindu-­Muslim friendship, despite the erudition of his work, it was largely absent from history textbooks and therefore at best marginal to the knowledge set and intellectual consciousness of South Asian Muslims. If anything, Imam lamented, Khan is at times only remembered in passing as a “colonial agent” on account of his opposition to the supposedly anticolonial Khilafat movement.28 His larger point was that the very politico-­conceptual lens through which the history of South Asian Islam and Muslims was often seen, even and especially by South Asian Muslims themselves, was heavily colored by the normative projects and sensibilities of a nationalist brand of pluralism mediated by a Hindu majoritarian ethos. As he put it with poignant simplicity: “We need to write our history. Our history has not been written; writing our history will take fifty more years. But that will only happen if we realize that we must write our history.”29 Imam’s plea here is one of denationalizing South Asian Muslim history, rather than the more familiar project these days of decolonial history. The responsibility for the erasure of nonsecular Muslim voices and intellectual projects like Ahmad Raza Khan’s lay not with British colonizers, but with the colonial and henceforth postcolonial purveyors and supporters of a brand of Indian liberal secularism imbued with the normative priorities of the majority Hindu population who are chiefly responsible for the erasure of opposing Muslim voices and projects like Ahmad Raza Khan’s. In other words, one can read Imam’s protest as a call to view the history of South Asian Islam through a prism disinterested in valorizing “good Muslims” who are seen as amenable to nationalist visions of secular pluralism and ignoring or censuring “bad Muslims” who don’t fit that vision. I have given this brief sketch of Sharjeel Imam’s controversial but fascinating speech for two reasons. First, Imam’s substantive engagement with the thought of Ahmad Raza Khan and that of Khilafat movement scholars like Abu’l Kalam Azad on issues of Hindu-­Muslim friendship and cow sacrifice shows the immense and often vexing contemporary relevance of the intra-­Muslim traditions of debate in early modern and colonial South Asia that have occupied this book. The political context of Imam’s speech, [ 269 ]

Epilogue enveloped by the looming threat of state-­sanctioned Hindu nationalist violence, of which he became a prime target, and that of late British colonialism a hundred years ago that foregrounded Ahmad Raza Khan’s intellectual skirmish with his Khilafat movement opponents, are obviously quite different. But what both these discursive moments hold in common is the conundrum of how the normative and ideological boundaries of Islam in relation to non-­Muslim Others must manifest in the ritual and everyday conduct of Indian Muslims. The other reason I have discussed Imam’s speech here is that it helps me highlight for the reader the historiographic stakes and intervention of this book, and the sort of political horizons in which those stakes and intervention are situated and implicated. As a student of religion, I obviously don’t share Sharjeel Imam’s positionality (as much as I admire his struggle against state violence and injustice) or his explicit normative judgments on historical actors like Abu’l Kalam Azad. Indeed, that Imam often generalizes the thought of Khilafat movement scholars like Azad and others (e.g., ‘Abdul Bari) and does not consider some of its nuances and complexities that don’t always align with modernist or liberal secular notions of “good religion” is an important ambiguity shadowing his views. However, one does not have to agree with all aspects of Imam’s views or of his politics to find profoundly critical and convincing his overarching point about the importance of approaching the historical field of South Asian Islam in a manner that is not imprisoned to the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary. Imam’s provocation serves as an urgent reminder to take seriously, and on its own terms, the normative logics and rationality of a thinker like Ahmad Raza Khan, whose conceptions of religious identity and difference sit rather uncomfortably with contemporary liberal secular notions of a good Muslim eagerly aspiring for interreligious assimilation and harmony. As I aimed to show in chapters 3 and 4, Khan’s refusal to assimilate and his avid insistence on preserving and harnessing Muslim distinction in the public sphere were informed by a political theology of Muslim imperial sovereignty. But consider the attraction of that refusal for a contemporary actor like Sharjeel Imam, who issued his own refusal to carve his religious identity or to view the history that has shaped his identity under the pressures or expectations of liberal secular understandings of “good Islam” and “good Muslims.” Again, one does not have to agree with or endorse Khan’s or Imam’s disparate yet converging ideological positions on Islam and difference to recognize their [ 270 ]

Epilogue significance as complex and influential articulations of South Asian Muslim identity that deserve serious and substantive intellectual engagement and analysis. Given the rise of various stripes of religious nationalism in South Asia, there has been an understandable push in scholarship on the region to identify and explore more porous and pluralist and less contentious histories of interreligious encounter in the region that do not privilege religion as the underlying locus of individual or communal identity. Certainly, questioning and countering the isolation of religion as a fixed and unsullied category of life that is then mobilized for pernicious projects of nationalist and communalist violence is a laudable pursuit. But, as religion scholar Shankar Nair has presciently pointed out, in some influential segments of South Asian studies perhaps this trend has moved a bit too far to the other end of the spectrum by suppressing the significance of religious thought and convictions altogether, especially those found less amenable to present-­d ay notions of interreligious coexistence.30 This is an unfortunate and ultimately unhelpful omission for a couple of different reasons. First, even if one wanted to substantively critique a logic of life, one must first strive to understand and come to grips with its key details, complexities, and ambiguities. And, second, leaving a phenomenon unstudied or beholden to generalized depictions is a sure recipe for facilitating its most simplified, extreme, and pathological inheritances. Haughty dismissals, programmed indifference, or dramatic caricatures do not do much to advance the cause of intellectual inquiry or critique. Instead, it is far more productive to engage and wrestle with the fractious internal workings of a tradition on its own terms, especially aspects that don’t align with modernist sensibilities, as a way to unsettle stereotypical and superficial conceptions of that tradition. This, in turn, paves the way for a form of critique premised on uncovering the ambiguities of a worldview precisely through the careful and sympathetic readings of its logics. In the preceding pages, I have sought to mobilize and apply such a politico-­conceptual posture and commitment toward a specific theater of Muslim intellectual discourse and debate. I have labored throughout this book to underscore that attending to the detailed logics, nuances, and tensions of competing Muslim scholarly discourses on Hindu-­Muslim friendship holds the promise of disturbing and disrupting any canonized notions of good and bad Muslims, inclusivists and exclusivists, moderates and extremists. This is not simply an academic [ 271 ]

Epilogue exercise in bursting binaries. Rather, close and detailed readings of a tradition on such crucial moral questions as interreligious friendship are essential to making available a form of dual critique that neither succumbs to the fantasy of religious exceptionalism nor surrenders the problem of religious difference to the arbitrating authority of the modern state.31 Ultimately, the analysis presented in this book presses the importance of imagining a horizon of interreligious and Hindu-­Muslim friendship that is not imperiled by pathological inheritances of imperial political theologies, nor leavened by the seductive yet frequently sour promises of modern secular power and state sovereignty.

[ 272 ]

APPENDIX

Suggestions and Discussion Questions for Teaching This Book

Different parts of this book will be suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in religious studies and connected disciplines. In what follows I present some pedagogical suggestions for instructors wishing to teach this book, first in regard to chapter selections suitable for varied courses, followed by a couple of discussion questions on each chapter that can be used for in-­class or out-­of-­class assignments. I am presuming a class that meets twice a week for an hour and twenty minutes; instructors can cater these suggestions to their specific teaching contexts. For instructors teaching general undergraduate surveys on South Asian religions or religions of Asia wishing to provide students an overview of Muslim intellectual debates on Hindu-­Muslim friendship, I would recommend assigning the introduction and chapter  1 over two class sessions, or just the introduction for a single class session. In courses on Muslim political thought, South Asian politics, modern South Asian history, or on South Asia in anthropology, assigning chapters  3 and 4 in a single class session or over two sessions will work best. Chapter 2 is ideally suited for class sessions on themes of colonialism and religion in South Asia in departments of religious studies, history, and anthropology. It will also work well in segments of a syllabus on the modern period in introductory courses on Prophet Muhammad, Islam, and interreligious dialogue/relations in various departments. [ 273 ]

Appendix Chapters 5 and 6 (in a single class session or spread over two) are most suitable for courses on Islamic law, modern Muslim thought/Islam and modernity, as well as those with a significant focus on the theme of Muslim/non-­Muslim relations. Instructors offering advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on more specific themes like Hindus and Muslims, South Asian Islam, or interreligious relations will be best served by teaching the entire book with the following chapters divisions over three class sessions: introduction and chapters 1 and 2; chapters 3 and 4; and chapters 5, 6, and epilogue. In courses on theories and methods in religious studies, chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be most suitable.

Discussion Questions Introduction What does the author mean by “imperial Muslim political theology”? Why is this category important to the concerns of this book and how does it connect with its main argument? Describe and explain the central arguments of this book.

Chapter 1 What were some of the key categories of equivalence deployed by Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan in his translation of Hindu thought and practice? What do you make of his attempted translation? Explain and analyze the author’s key argument that Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan’s views on Hinduism cannot be reduced to the binary of inclusivist/ exclusivist. How is an imperial Muslim political theology reflected in Jan-­i Janan’s project of interreligious translation?

Chapter 2 How did Qasim Nanautvi argue for the superiority of Prophet Muhammad’s miracles over the miracles of all other prophets? Explain fully with specific examples. [ 274 ]

Appendix In what ways was the “Polemic of Shahjahanpur” made possible by and reflective of the new conditions of colonial modernity in South Asia? What was different about this interreligious debate compared to such debates in the premodern period? Explain fully.

Chapter 3 What does muwalat mean, and what were the two conceptions of this category found in the thought of Ahmad Raza Khan and Abu’l Kalam Azad? How does the author argue that Khan’s and Azad’s disagreement over Hindu-­Muslim friendship cannot be framed as a battle between moderate and extremist or peaceful and violent Islam? Answer this question by explaining major aspects of their respective positions on Hindu-­Muslim relations and friendship.

Chapter 4 Explain the precise legal argument and logics through which Ahmad Raza Khan deems cow sacrifice as obligatory for Muslims in the South Asian context? What is at stake for him in whether South Asian Muslims continue or cease to undertake cow sacrifice? Through what interpretive moves does ‘Abdul Bari make a case for the normative legitimacy of abandoning cow sacrifice for the sake of protecting the Ottoman Caliphate through forging an alliance with Hindus against the British? What are some of the key overlaps and differences between his and Ahmad Raza Khan’s legal thought and approach?

Chapter 5 What does the category of “reprehensible imitation” or tashabbuh mean, and how has it been understood and interpreted by prominent South Asian and non-­South Asian Muslim scholars? Discuss with reference to at least three thinkers who held varied understandings of this category. [ 275 ]

Appendix How is the theme of imitating the “other” represented and engaged in Nazir Ahmad Dihlavi’s novella Son of the Moment (Ibn al-­Waqt)? What do you think is the main argument of this novella with respect to the relationship between Islam, religious difference, and Western modernity?

Chapter 6 What were the key points of theological and interpretive disagreement between Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Qasim Nanautvi? Choose and describe any two. What are the author’s views on conceptualizing this disagreement as reflective of broader divisions between traditionalist and modernist modes of Islam? What was it about Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s views on tashabbuh that Qari Tayyib found so reprehensible, and how did he go about countering those views? What are the deeper political and philosophical assumptions that informed Tayyib’s discourse on tashabbuh?

Epilogue What was the Islamabad Temple controversy about, and how did it make visible the conundrums and paradoxes of an imperial Muslim political theology in the contemporary world? What did Sharjeel Imam mean when he said, “Our history has not been written,” and how does the author connect this sentiment to the argument and intervention of this book?

[ 276 ]

Glossary

Af‘āl-­i ta‘abuddī: devotional practices Af‘āl-­i ta‘awuddī: customary practices Aḥkām-­i Manṣūṣa: normative rules and injunctions derived directly from conclusive proof texts such as the Qur’an and/or the Hadith ‘Ayn al-­yaqîn: certainty derived from observation Barelvī: a reformist group/normative orientation with beginnings in late nineteenth-­century Northern India Barkat-­i jismânî: bodily charisma Dār al-­Ḥarb: abode of war; non-­Muslim-­ruled territory Dār al-­Islām: abode of Islam; Muslim-­ruled territory. Da‘wa-­y i ishq: claim to passional love Farḍ al-­‘ayn/Farz-­i ayn: a practice that is obligatory upon every individual Fiqh: jurisprudence Ghayr Muqallid: someone who does not adhere to the canonical authority of the legal schools Ḥaqq al-­yaqĪn: certainty derived from physical experience or embodiment Hijra(t): migration Ḥukm: the normative ruling or value attached to a practice Ḥusn-­i ẓann: positive outlook; giving the benefit of the doubt Ibṭāl-­i zātiyyāt: falsifying the essences of being [ 277 ]

Glossary Ikhṭililāt: mixture (that diminishes the distinction of the self) ‘Ilm al-­k alām/‘ilm-­i kalam: dialectical theology ‘Ilm al-­yaqĪn: discursive certainty Iltibās: confusion or obfuscation (of distinction) Istimālat al-­q ulūb: inclination of hearts I‘tiqād: faith Jibillī ishtirāk: sharing natural instincts Julāha: lower-­caste weaver kabā’ir: heinous sins like fornication, adultery, and murder Kāfir numā: resembling an unbeliever Kharq al-­‘āda: exception to or subversion of the norm Muqaddimat al-­wājib wājib: the doctrine that the prelude to an obligation is also considered obligatory Qiyāmat-­i kubrā: the ultimate afterworld Qurayshiyyat: the doctrine that only members with lineage of the Quraysh tribe may lay claim to the Caliphate Mubāḥ: a practice that is neither obligatory nor forbidden but simply permissible Mubāḥasa: debate Muḥārib bil fi‘l: active aggressors against Islam Mujāhadāt: pietistic exertions Mujarrad-­i mu‘āmalāt: mere pragmatic/transactional relations Mu‘jiza: miracle Mukāshafāt: mystical unveilings Munāẓara: polemical debate Muqallid: someone who adheres by the normative authority of the canonical schools of law Muqayyad fi’l-­j ihah: bound to direction Muwālāt: friendship, alliance, or relationship of clientage Muwālāt-­i ḥaqīqiyya: substantive friendship based on affection and intimacy Muwālāt-­i ṣuwariyya: superficial or masked friendship Necharī: derogatory term referring to modernist purveyors of naturalism Nijāt: salvation Rasm (pl. Rusūm): customs; habits [ 278 ]

Glossary Riyāziyyāt: ascetic practices Sajdah-­y i ta‘abbudī: prostration of servitude Sajdah-­y i taḥayyat: prostration of greeting Shi‘ār-­i Islām/Sha‘āi’r-­i Islam (pl.): distinctive markers of Islam Shirk fi’l nubuwwa: polytheism in prophethood Ta‘aṣṣub-­i mahaz: sheer bigotry Takhrīb-­i ḥudud: disfiguring normative boundaries Tāghūt: evil idol Tanāsukh: transmigration/metempsychosis Tark-­i muwālāt: abandoning relations of friendship, service, intimacy, or cooperation Tashabbuh: reprehensible imitation of non-­Muslims Tashabbuh bi’l khayr: salutary imitation Thānawiyya: dualists ‘Ulamā’ (sing. ‘ālim): seminary-­educated traditionalist Muslim scholars Wājib: an obligatory practice Zillat (dhilla (Ar.): shame; humiliation

[ 279 ]

Notes

Introduction 1. See, for instance, Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 2. See Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 3. See Thomas Hansen, Angana Chatterji, and Christophe Jafrelot, Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 4. See David Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 630–­59. 5. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 8–­9. 6. Alexander Nehamas, On Friendship (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 1–­62. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1994). 8. Derrida, 153. 9. Derrida. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” translated by Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (2000): 16. 11. Derrida, 1. 12. Muslim scholars have differed on the precise meanings of the terms Wilaya and Walaya with some like the fourteenth-­century exegete Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) and the late thirteenth-­/early fourteenth-­century Indian Sufi master Nizam al-­Din Awliya (d. 1325) making a distinction between the connotations of friendship and intimacy and that of sovereign power and authority while [ 281 ]

Introduction











others like the canonical eighth-­century grammarian Sibawayh (d. 796) consider the two terms essentially identical in their meaning. For a useful discussion on some of the overlapping connotations associated with the terms Wilaya and Walaya in Islamic thought, see Vincent Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 1–­5. Cornell concludes that, “when all is said and done, Walaya and Wilaya are best seen as semantic fraternal twins that coexist symbiotically, like yin and yang. Each relies on the other for its meaning” (4). 13. Al-­Raghib al-­Isfahani, Mufradat Alfaz al-­Qur’an (Damascus: Dar al-­Qalam, 2021), 698. 14. This interlocking of friendship and power holds particular significance in the Sufi and Shi‘i traditions, whereby God’s intimacy and friendship with Sufi masters and with the Family of the Prophet (ahl al-­bayt) serve as a crucial underpinning for their politico-­theological authority. 15. Qur’an 2:257. 16. Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabi (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993), 21. The latter sensibility of political power carries into contemporary terms like wali al-­‘amr or possessor of political and legislative authority. For a useful analysis of this term in the context of contemporary Egypt, see Samy Ayoub, “The Egyptian State as a Mujtahid: Law and Religion the Jurisprudence of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court,” Arab Law Quarterly 36 (2022): 1–­30. 17. Anna Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Peter Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18. Ernst, Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga (New Delhi: Sage, 2016). 19. Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-­Muslim” Encounter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). 20. Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-­Persian State Secretary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Audrey Truschke, Cultures of Encounter: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 21. Though Azad is another figure about whom much has been written in the Western academy, here I try to offer a slightly more detailed account of his thought on the question of the caliphate and Muslim/non-­Muslim relations. 22. See SherAli Tareen, “Struggles for Independence: Colonial and Postcolonial Orders,” in The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tattoli, and Babak Rahimi (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 521–­42. 23. See Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Muslim Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 24. This is not to argue, of course, that any particular strand of normative scholarship—­traditionalist, modernist, Islamist or more ambiguous composites [ 282 ]

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of these categories—­are more or less legitimate or “authentic” than others. To avert any misreading of my emphasis on ulama discourses in this book, I should offer the clarification that assigning the mantle of authenticity to the ulama is not among my purposes. 25. For examples of this process in varied contexts like the Ottoman empire, the Arab Middle East, and South Asia, see and compare Samy Ayoub, Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); and Zaman, Modern Muslim Thought in a Radical Age. 26. For a detailed survery of the Maturidi school of theology, see Gibril Haddad, The Maturidi School: From Abu Hanifa to Al-­Kawthari (Oldham: Beacon, 2021). 27. Jean Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 1–­27. 28. Elshtain, Sovereignty, 27. 29. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 30. Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14. 31. Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, 35–­38. 32. Anver Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmīs and Others in the Empire of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25. 33. Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law, 24. 34. In Skepticism in Classical Islam (New York: Routledge, 2014), Paul Heck has presented a useful and perceptive analysis of key fragments of al-­‘Amiri’s religious thought in the context of the tradition of “skepticism” in Islam, which Heck defines as “the recognition of the existence of arguments that were equally compelling but mutually incompatible” (73). He also discusses some aspects of The Proclamation of the Virtues of Islam, though with a slightly different thematic focus than mine. I have persisted with his translation of the text’s title. Paul Heck, Skepticism in Classical Islam (New York: Routledge, 2014), 66–­107. 35. This selection of religions was derived from the Qur’anic verse 22:17, which reads: “Indeed on the day of judgment God will distinguish between the faithful and the Sabaeans, Christians, Magians, and the polytheists; indeed, God is a witness to everything.” To his list al-­‘Amiri added Jews/Judaism, which are curiously missing in this verse. 36. The appendices are devoted to addressing and rebutting the doubts leveled against Islam by non-­Muslims, primarily having to do with the authenticity of a religion itself divided into competing sects and groups, and Islam’s claim about the confirmation of Muhammad’s prophethood in Jewish and Christian scriptures when scholars of these traditions themselves had made no such claim. al-­‘Amiri responded to these doubts by pointing out that division and diversity of interpretation does not negate religious authority and authenticity [ 283 ]

Introduction









and by culling what to him were clear references to Prophet Muhammad in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. 37. Abu l-­Hasan al-­‘Amiri, Al-­Iʿlam bi Manaqib al-­Islam (Riyadh: Dar al-­‘Asala li’l Thaqafa wa’l Nashr wa’l Iʿlam, 1988), 95–­119. Al-­‘Amiri describes the study of Hadith as sensory (hissiyya), theology as rational (‘aqliyya), and law as that which brings together the sensory and the rational (Ibid, 80). 38. al-­‘Amiri, Al-­Iʿlam bi Manaqib al-­Islam, 80. 39. al-­‘Amiri, 121–­25. 40. al-­‘Amiri, 138–­42. 41. al-­‘Amiri, 153. 42. al-­‘Amiri, 167. 43. Though one might be tempted to view al-­‘Amiri’s discussion here as an example of a tenth-­century instantiation of a modern secular politics of “religion making” that translates non-­Western religious traditions according to a Western Protestant template of normative religion, this temptation is best resisted. The institutional power of the emerging modern state, and the new technological and epistemic conditions of colonial modernity (that, for instance, privileged “rational” scientific knowledge over theology as a source of truth) are obviously absent in al-­‘Amiri’s context. These two moments cannot be folded into each other. Nonetheless, the points of similitude between the modern “world religions” discourse that seeks to capture the essence of competing religions through their allegedly shared characteristics and the comparative model presented by al-­‘Amiri are indeed striking. 44. Antonia Bosanquet, Minding Their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-­ Qayyim’s Aḥkām ahl al-­dhimma (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 45. Milka Levy-­Rubin, Non-­Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6. 46. Levy-­Rubin, Non-­Muslims, 106. 47. These included rules such as: non-­Muslims “shall not seek to resemble the Muslims by imitating any of their garments,” “shall not bury the dead near the Muslims,” or teach their children the Qur’an. See Levy-­Rubin, 171–­72. 48. Ayoub, Law, Empire, and the Sultan, 42–­47. 49. On the formations of the Islamic legal tradition, see Wael Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Ahmed El-­Shamsy, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 50. Khaled Abou El-­Fadl, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities: The Juristic Discourse on Muslim Minorities from the Second/Eighth to the Eleventh/Seventeenth Centuries,” Islamic Law and Society 1 no. 2 (1994): 141–­87. 51. Abou El-­Fadl, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities,” 155; for an extensive and excellent analysis of al-­Wansharisi’s and other Iberian and North African Maliki jurists’ legal positions on the question of engaging non-­Muslim political rule, see Jocelyn Hendrickson, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021). [ 284 ]

Introduction 52. Hendrickson, Leaving Iberia, 180; for a detailed and brilliant exposition of al-­ Juwayni’s legal and political thought, see Sohaira Siddiqui, Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-­Juwayni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 53. Ibn ‘Abdin, Rad al-­Muhtar ‘ala al-­Dur al-­Mukhtar (Riyadh: Dar ‘Alam al-­Kutub, 2003), 6:174–­75. I thank Ammar Nasir for pointing me to this passage in Ibn ‘Abidin’s text. 54. Ammar Nasir, “Rethinking Muslim Political Theology” (unpublished paper on file with author), 10. 55. Nur al-­Hasan Kandhlawi, Baqiyyat Fatawa Rashidiyya (Kandhla: Mufti Elahi Baksh Academy, 2012), 437. My many thanks to Ammar Nasir for sharing this resource with me. 56. Kandhlawi. 57. Nasir, “Rethinking Muslim Political Theology,” 10. 58. For more on the rich and complex traditions of premodern Muslim scholarly discussions and disagreements on the categories of Dar al-­Islam and Dar al-­ Harb, see Calasso Giovanna and Giuliano Lancioni, eds., Dar al-­Islam/dar al-­harb: Territories, People, Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 59. See Brannon Ingram, Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018; and SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). 60. Quoted in Yohanan Friedmann, “Dar al-­Islam and Dar al-­Harb in Modern Indian Muslim Thought,” in Calasso and Lancioni, eds., Dar al-­Islam/Dar al-­ Harb, 351–­52. 61. Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity 62. Saul Newman, Political Theology: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 3. 63. Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India; The Trajectories of the Indian State in Subaltern Studies 7, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyan Pandey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 64. For more on the Arya Samaj, see Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-­Century Punjab (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976); and Cassie Adcock: The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 65. For a useful social and institutional history of the Farangi Mahal school, see Francis Robinson, The ʿUlama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 66. See, for instance, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 15–­53; Tareen, Defending Muhammad, 37–­51 and 167–­78; and Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 35–­36; Peter Gottschalk, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). [ 285 ]

Introduction 67. Salman Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (London: Hurst, 2014), 170. 68. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political (Candor, N.Y.: Telos, 2007), 91.

1. Translating the “Other” 1. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 2. For perhaps the most convincing and thorough articulation of this argument, see Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 3. Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West, 6. 4. For instance, Aziz Ahmad, I. H. Qureshi, I. M. Ikram, and, to a certain extent, Fazlur Rahman are notable members of this camp. This list is, of course, by no means exhaustive. 5. Imtiaz Ahmad, Sarvelli Gopal, and Mushirul Hassan are all good examples. 6. See, for instance, the collection of essays in Sarvelli Gopal, ed. Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-­Ramjanmabhumi Issue (New Delhi: Penguin, 1991). 7. James Laine, “Two Nations,” unpublished paper on file with author. The examples of scholars cited here are my own. 8. For instance, see Bruce Lawrence and David Gilmartin, eds., Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); and James Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 9. Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020); Rajeev Kinra, “Revisiting the History and Historiography of Mughal Pluralism,” ReOrient: Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 5, no.  2 (Spring 2020): 137–­82. 10. Jan-­i Janan was Mirza Mazhar’s poetic epithet. But, since he is most well known as Jan-­i Janan, I use this name throughout this chapter. 11. Yohanan Friedmann, “Muslim Views of Indian Religions,” Journal of the American Oriental Society (April–­June 1975): 214–­21. Warren Fusfeld, “The Shaping of Sufi Leadership in Delhi: The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiya, 1750–­1920” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981). Thomas Dahnhardt, Change and Continuity in Indian Sufism (New Delhi: DK Printworld, 2002). 12. For a fuller analysis of the conceptual and political problems associated with the Islamic Law-­Sufism binary, see Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 1–­36. 13. Shah Ghulam ‘Ali Dihlavi and Muhammad Iqbal Mujaddadi, Maqamat-­i Mazhari: Ahval o Malfuẓat o Maktubat-­i Ḥazrat Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan Shahid, (Lahore: Urdu Science Board, 2001). [ 286 ]

1. Translating the “Other” 14. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Arwah-­i Salasah (Karachi, Dar al-­Isha‘at, 2001), 24. 15. Thanvi, Arwah-­i Salasah, 22. 16. Sana’ullah Panipati, Tafsir al-­Mazhari (Beirut: Dar Ihya’ al-­Turath al-­‘Arabi, 2004). 17. For an excellent explication of this problem, see Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). 18. Khaliq Anjum, ed., Maktubat-­i Mirza Maẓhar Jan-­i Janan Shahid: ma‘ Savanih ‘Umri (Lahore: Makki Darulkutub, 1997), 240. 19. For a compelling study of the relationship between Mughal rulers and their subjects in Delhi during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Abhishek Kaicker, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 20. Quoted in K. A. Nizami, Shah Wali Ullah Dihlavi ke Siyasi Maktubat (Delhi: Nadvat al-­Musannifin, 1969), 25. 21. Nizami, Shah Wali Ullah Dihlavi, 12. 22. Dihlavi and Mujaddidi, Maqamat, 78–­85. 23. For a broader study of the political dynamics and history of Afghan communities like Rohillas in Northern India during this period, see Naveena Naqvi, “Writing the Inter-­Imperial World in Afghan North India: 1774–­1857” (PhD diss, University of California, Los Angeles, 2018). 24. Dihlavi and Mujaddidi, Maqamat, 86. 25. Anjum, Maktubat-­i Mirza (Lahore: Makki Darulkutub, 1997). 26. Carl Ernst, Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga (New Delhi: Sage, 2016), 234. 27. Ainslee Embree, Alberuni’s India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 17–­19. 28. Embree, Alberuni’s India, 24. 29. Embree, 24. 30. Embree, 27. 31. Embree, 111. 32. Embree. 33. Mario Kozah, The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science: Al-­Bīrūnī’s Treatise on Yoga Psychology (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2. See also his translation of al-­Biruni’s Kitab Batanjali; and Mario Kozah, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (New York: New York University Press, 2022). 34. Kozah, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 81. 35. Kozah, 76. 36. Supriya Gandhi, The Emporer Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020); Munis Faruqi, Princes of the Mughal Empire: 1504–­1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 37. Dara Shukoh, Majma‘ al-­Bahrayn, ed. Sayyid Na’ini (Tehran: Nashr-i Nuqrah, 1987), 40. 38. Shukoh, Majma‘ al-­Bahrayn. 39. Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 187. [ 287 ]

1. Translating the “Other” 40. For a detailed analysis of specific interpretive and thematic aspects of this text, see Gandhi, Emperor Who Never Was, 194–­213. 41. Munis Faruqui, “The Case of Dara Shokoh” (lecture delivered at T2F Karachi, Pakistan), YouTube video, 12:00, February 21, 2012, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?­v​=­7MreWrLgKG8. 42. Friedmann, Medieval Muslim Views, 216. 43. Friedmann, 216. 44. Friedmann. 45. Bruce Lawrence, The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader: Islam Beyond Borders, ed. Ali Altaf Mian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), 118. 46. Lawrence, 119. 47. Lawrence. 48. Carl Ernst, “Muslim Interpreters of Yoga,” in Yoga: The Art of Transformation, ed. Deborah Diamond (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2013), 59–­68. 49. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, “A Muslim Bhagavadgita: ‘Abd al-­Rahman Chishti’s Interpretive Translation and Its Implications,” Journal of South Asian Religious History 1 (2015): 1–­29. 50. Shankar Nair, Translating Wisdom: Hindu-­Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 51. Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 52. Audrey Truschke, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-­Muslim Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 53. Ernst, “Muslim Interpreters,” 66. 54. Ernst, Refractions of Islam in India, 462. 55. Ernst, 462. 56. Ernst, 468. 57. Ernst, 467. 58. Ernst, 470. 59. ‘Umar Mihrabi, “Hujjat al-­Hind,” unpublished manuscript, ADD. MS, 5602, British Library Manuscript Collections, British Library, London. 60. Muzaffar Alam, “ ‘Umar Mihrabi’s Hujjat al-­Hind” (unpublished paper, 2016). I thank Carl Ernst for sharing this reference and other resources on this text. 61. Mihrabi, “Hujjat al-­Hind,” 1–­8. 62. Mihrabi, 21–­50. 63. Najm al-­din Razi, The Path of God’s Bondmen from Origin to Return [Mirsad al-­‘Ibad min al-­Mabda’ ila al-­Ma‘ad], trans. Hamid Algar (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan, 1982). 64. Mihrabi, “Hujjat al-­Islam,” 65. 65. Mihrabi, 64. 66. Mihrabi, 22. 67. Tony Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim–­Hindu Encounter Through Translation Theory,” History of Religions 1, no. 3 (February 2001): 263. 68. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence,” 260–­87. 69. For a useful and engaging overview of how Muslim scholarly translations of Hindu thought and practice resemble and compare with precolonial [ 288 ]

1. Translating the “Other”







intra-­Hindu and Hindu-­Buddhist projects of interreligious comparison and translation, see Reid Locklin, “Hinduism Compared,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2022), 536–­50. For a concise and useful list of important Muslim intellectual works on Hindu thought and practice in various time periods, see Malik Mohamed, The Foundations of the Composite Culture in India (Delhi: Aakar, 2007), 129–­33. 70. The question of the salvation of the Other has remained a much contested and debated problem throughout Muslim intellectual history, occupied the imagination of several major scholars, and generated a variety of responses and meditations. For more on that topic, see Mohammad Khalil, Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Jacques Waardenburg, ed. Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 71. Dahnhardt, Change and Continuity in Indian Sufism, 10–­11. 72. An Urdu translation of this letter is also available in Maqamat-­i Maẓhari that was compiled by Shah Ghulam ‘Ali Dihlavi and edited and translated by Muhammad Iqbal Mujaddidi. I have elsewhere translated into English (with a commentary) the Urdu translation; see SherAli Tareen, “The Perils and Possibilities of Inter-­Religious Translation: Mirza Mazhar Jan-­i Janan on the Hindus,” Sagar: A South Asia Research Journal 21 (May 2014): 43–­51. 73. Qamar ul-­Din Muradabadi, ed., Kalimat-­i Tayyibat (Muradabad: Matba‘-­i Matla ‘al-­‘Ulum, 1891), 27. 74. Persian for Vedas. 75. Muradabadi, Kalimat-­i Tayyibat, 27–­28. 76. Muradabadi, 27–­28. 77. Muradabadi, 28. 78. Muradabadi. 79. Muradabadi. 80. Muradabadi. 81. Muradabadi. 82. Muradabadi. 83. Qur’an 35:24, in The Message of the Quran, trans. Muhammad Asad (Gibraltar: Dar Al-­Andalus, 1980). 84. Qur’an 10:47. 85. Muradabadi, Kalimat-­i Tayyibat, 28. 86. Muradabadi, 28. 87. Qur’an, 40:78. 88. Muradabadi, Kalimat-­i Tayyibat, 28. 89. Muradabadi, 29. 90. See Talat Halman, Where the Two Seas Meet: The Qur’anic Story of al-­Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries as a Model of Spiritual Guidance (Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 2013). 91. Muradabadi, Kalimat-­i Tayyibat, 29. 92. Muradabadi, 29. Literally meaning “like a stick,” the practice of dand’vat represents a Hindu salutation involving falling, lying prostrate, or bowing before a [ 289 ]

1. Translating the “Other” person or an entity. It usually signifies the recognition of moral authority in a situation that demands the expression of such respect. 93. See Carl Ernst, Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam (Boston: Shambala, 2011), 120–­47. 94. Muradabadi, Kalimat-­i Tayyibat, 29. 95. See Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). 96. See Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West. 97. Yohanan Friedmann, “Muslim Views of Indian Religions,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 90 (April–­June 1975): 221. 98. Friedmann, “Muslim Views of Indian Religions,” 4. 99. Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 4. 100. Derrida, 4. 101. Derrida, 6. 102. Dihlavi and Mujaddidi, Maqamat, 101, 127. 103. On the problems and contradictions of such a modern discourse of tolerance, see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Post-­Secular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 104. See, for instance, Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-­Century Banaras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert Frykenberg, “Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 523–­50; and Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 105. I have elaborated on the conceptual shortcomings attached to this gesture of imputing agency to indigenous religious actors elsewhere; see Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, 160–­61. 106. See, for instance, Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and David Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 630–­59. 107. Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2. 108. Ernst, Refractions of Islam in India, 229–­30. 109. Ernst, 235. 110. Gauri Viswanathan, “Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2003), 38. [ 290 ]

2. Deciding the “True” God 111. Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West, 45–­106. 112. Mandair, 45–­106. 113. Mandair, 175–­240. 114. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995). 115. Quoted in Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 41. 116. Quoted in Hugo Friedrich, “On the Art of Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12–­13. 117. Friedrich, “On the Art of Translation,” 14. 118. Quoted in Friedrich. 119. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.  1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 256. 120. Cristiana Giordano, Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 15. 121. Giordano, Migrants in Translation, 15. 122. Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-­Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8.

2. Deciding the “True” God 1. Though Khuda Shinasi literally means “recognizing God” or “discerning God,” the sense of this term here clearly goes beyond mutual edification and primarily connotes affirming and establishing the supremacy of one’s own theology over those of others. Hence, I have rendered the name of this event Mayla­yi Khuda Shinasi as the Festival of Deciding the (True) God. 2. Qasim Nanautvi, Mubahasah-­i Shahjahanpur (Karachi: Dar al-­Isha‘at, 1977). Other than this text, in conducting my analysis of Nanautvi’s discourse I have relied on two other Urdu texts in which appear the particular moments of the second iteration of the Shahjahanpur polemic that form the focus of this chapter: Qasim Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa (Multan: Jami‘ah Dar al-­‘Ulum Rahimiyya, 2005), 73–­92; and Manazir Ahsan Gilani, Savaniḥ-­e Qasimi, vol. 2 (Lahore: Maktabah-­yi Rahimiyyah, 1976). I have also considered the text Guftugu-­yi Mazhabi (Religious Conversation), published in 1876 by Ziya’i Press in Meerut: a forty-­four-­page epistle that records the Deobandi narrative on the first iteration of the Shahjahanpur polemic in 1875. Though fascinating in many places, this text is largely focused on a two-­way debate between Nanautvi and Father Knowles and excludes almost any engagement with Hinduism, and it is also much shorter than the narrative record and transcript of the second iteration’s proceedings. I have thus focused my attention on the latter event and associated texts. 3. S. Akbar Zaidi, Making a Muslim: Reading Publics and Contesting Identities in Nineteenth-­Century North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 171–­208. [ 291 ]

2. Deciding the “True” God 4. See Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-­Mutiny India (Richmond: Curzon, 1993); Kenneth Jones, ed., Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 5. Quoted in Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 165. 6. For an arresting study on the colonial reconfiguration of religion as an increasingly defined and competitive category in South Asia, see Teena Purohit’s splendid book The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 7. I thank Muhammad Qasim Zaman for this correction. 8. Hafiz Akbar Shah Bukhari, Akabir-­i ‘Ulama’-­yi Deoband (Lahore: Idara-­yi Islamiyyat, 1999), 24–­25. 9. Notable exceptions are Fuad Naeem’s “Interreligious Debates, Rational Theology, and the ‘Ulamā’ in the Public Sphere: Muḥammad Qāsim Nanautvī and the Making of Modern Islam in South Asia,” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2015); and Atif Siddiqui, “Theological and Intellectual Roots in Deobandi Thought: A Paradigm from Muḥammad Qāsim Nānawtawī’s Discourses with Special Reference to His Ḥujjat al-­Islām,” American Journal of Islam and Society 37, nos. 1–­2 (2020): 41–­66. 10. Bukhari, Akabir-­i ‘Ulama’-­yi Deoband, 26. 11. Bukhari, 22. 12. Jonathan Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oxford: Oneworld, 2015). 13. Bukhari, Akabir-­i ‘Ulama’-­yi Deoband, 25. 14. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa (Multan: Jami‘ah Dar al-­‘Ulum Rahimiyyah, 2005). 15. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Taqrir-­i Dilpazir (Deoband: Shaykh ul-­Hind Academy, 1996). 16. ‘Abdul Quyyum Haqqani, Tazkirah wa Savanih Al-­Imam al-­Kabir Mawlana Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (Nowshera: Al-­Qasim Academy, 2012). 17. Kenneth Jones, Socio-­Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 96. 18. The Ka‘bah is a sanctified cubical structure in Mecca that in Muslim thought is believed to have been built by the Prophet Abraham as a symbol of monotheism. Muslims perform their daily prayers in the direction of the Ka‘bah. That direction is known as the Qiblah. 19. Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 31–­50. 20. Nanautvi. 21. Manazir Ahsan Gilani, Savanih-­yi Qasimi (Lahore: Maktabah-­yi Rahmaniyyah, 1976), 2:364–­450. 22. Muhammad Hayat, Guftugu-­yi Mazhabi (Meerut: Matba‘ Ziya’i, 1876), 30–­32. 23. Hayat, Guftugu-­yi Mazhabi, 21. 24. Gilani, Savanih-­yi Qasimi, 2:415. 25. Gilani. 26. Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 13. [ 292 ]

2. Deciding the “True” God 27. Nanautvi. 28. Gilani, Savanih-­yi Qasimi, 2:431–­32. A slightly lengthier version of this narrative is found in Hayat, Guftugu-­yi Mazhabi, 40. 29. Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 15. 30. Nanautvi, 11. 31. Nanautvi, 77. 32. Nanautvi, 99. 33. Nanautvi, 100. 34. Nanautvi, 101. 35. Nanautvi, 93–­94. 36. Nanautvi, 102. 37. Nanautvi, 102–­3. 38. Gottschalk, Religion, Science, and Empire, 3–­53. 39. In addition to the text of the Shahjahanpur polemic, I have also referred to Qasim Nanautvi’s Qiblah Numa (discussed earlier) in presenting his thought on the question of prophetic miracles. 40. Dayananda Sarasvati, An English Translation of the Satyarth Prakash; Literally, Expose of Right Sense (of Vedic Religion) of Maharshi Swami Dayanand Saraswati, “The Luther of India,” Being a Guide to Vedic Hermeneutics, trans. Durga Prasad (New Delhi: Jan Gyan Prakashan, 1970), 654–­722. 41. Jonathan Brown, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45. 42. Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 68–­69. 43. Nanautvi. 44. Nanautvi, 71–­73. 45. Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 68–­69; Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 35–­39. 46. Qur’an 54:1–­2; The Message of the Quran, trans. Muhammad Asad (Gibraltar: Dar Al-­Andalus, 1980). 47. Hussein Abdulsater, “Split Moons, Eclipsed Narratives: The Literary History of a Cosmological Miracle,” Narrative Culture 5, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 171. 48. Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 40; Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 74–­77. 49. Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 74–­77. 50. Nanautvi, 74. 51. Nanautvi, 78. 52. Nanautvi, 83. 53. Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 83; Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 40–­41. 54. Nanautvi, Qiblah Numa, 91. 55. Nanautvi. 56. Nanautvi, 91–­92. 57. Gilani, Savanih-­i Qasimi, 438. 58. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, 183. 59. Mahmood, 206. 60. Mahmood, 207. 61. Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 41. 62. Nanautvi. 63. Qur’an 40:78. [ 293 ]

2. Deciding the “True” God 64. Nanautvi, Mubahasah, 42. 65. Nanautvi. 66. Unsatisfied with the available English translation, and since I do not read Devanagari, I requested and hired my colleague in India Zulqarnain Haider to transcribe (not translate) the entirety of Satya Dharma Vichar into the Urdu script, which is how I accessed and read the text. The page numbers cited correspond with that of the original Hindi text. 67. Dayananda Sarasvati, Satya Dharma Vichar (Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, n.d.), 1. 68. Sarasvati, Satya Dharma Vichar. 69. Sarasvati, 6. 70. Sarasvati, 2. 71. Sarasvati, 13–­17. 72. Sarasvati, 8. 73. Sarasvati, 9. 74. Sarasvati, 10. 75. Sarasvati; this is, of course, a famous mantra from the Baghavad Gita, especially chapter 17, verses 23–­28. 76. Sarasvati. 77. Sarasvati. 78. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 86. 79. Prakash, Another Reason, 88. 80. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 68. 81. Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 82. Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 83. See, for instance, Garcia-­Arenal Mercedes and Gerard Wiegers, eds., Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018). 84. See, for instance, Jonathan Brown, “Faithful Dissenters: Sunni Skepticism About the Miracles of Saints,” Journal of Sufi Studies 1 (2012): 123–­68. 85. Abeysekara, Politics of Postsecular Religion, 84; emphasis added. 86. Scott, Refashioning, 66. 87. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 88. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

3. Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies 1. Islamia College Lahore was established in 1892 by the Anjuman-­i Himayat-­i Islam (Society for the Defense of Islam, AHI) that in turn was formed in 1884 as [ 294 ]

3. Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies













a middle-­class voluntary reformist association with modernist leanings. For an excellent intellectual and social history of the AHI, see Maria Magdalena-­ Fuchs, “Islamic Modernism in Colonial Punjab: The Anjuman-­i Himayat-­i Islam, 1884–­1923” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2021). 2. Ahmad Raza Khan, Al-­Mahajja al-­Mu’tamana fi Ayah Mumtahana, in Ahmad Raza Khan, Fatawa Rizviyya (Lahore: Raza Foundation, 1998), 14:417. 3. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Naeem Qureshi, Pan-­Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 4. Qur’an 60:8–­9, in The Message of the Qur’an, trans. Muhammad Asad (Bitton: Book Foundation, 2003). 5. Qur’an 5:51. 6. For an engaging analysis of contemporary Muslim discussions and disagreements on Qur’an 5:51, see Johanna Pink, “Tradition and Ideology in Contemporary Sunnite Qur’anic Exegesis: Qurʾanic Commentaries from the Arab World, Turkey, and Indonesia and Their Interpretation of Q 5:51,” Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010): 3–­59. 7. Christopher Pinney, “Latrogenic Religion and Politics,” in Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, ed. William Mazzarella and Raminder Kaur (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 29–­38. 8. Ian Douglas, Abul Kalam Azad: An Intellectual and Religious Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). See also Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, Islamic Seal on India’s Independence: Abul Kalam Azad-­A Fresh Look (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 9. For the analysis conducted in this chapter, I have relied on two editions of this text that bear these two titles; the specific edition used is stated in the citations. 10. As Megan Robb has shown, the connected questions of the legitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate and that of how Indian Muslims must view the colonial state were not only fiercely debated in scholarly texts but also occupied editorials and essays of prominent Urdu newspapers across Northern India and Panjab, such as the Madinah newspaper that forms the focus of her study. Megan Robb, Print and the Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 126–­60. 11. Other than Azad, Shawkat ‘Ali, his younger brother Muhammad ‘Ali Jawhar, Hakim Ajmal Khan (d. 1927), and ‘Abdul Bari were key figures at the political and intellectual helm of the Khilafat movement. 12. Qur’an 4:59, in The Qur’an: Translation, trans. ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Ali (Washington, D.C.: Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., 2001). 13. On the emotional attachments to the idea of the caliphate, especially as manifested after the fall of the Ottoman and Abbasid empires in 1922 and 1258, see Mona Hassan, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016). 14. Aziz Al-­Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 81–­181. [ 295 ]

3. Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies 15. On the fascinating and vexing implications of such competing claims to the caliphate for Muslim soldiers serving in the British army, see Kate Imy, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 53–­86. 16. Minault, Khilafat Movement, 2. 17. “The Chauri Chaura Incident” took place on February  4, 1922, in the small town of Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district of the province of Uttar Pradesh (then United Provinces); police opened fire on a large group of around twenty-­ five hundred protestors attached to the noncooperation movement. In response, some among the protestors set a police station on fire, killing all twenty-­t wo of its Indian occupants; three among the protestors also died. As a consequence, Gandhi called off the noncooperation movement. 18. Faisal Devji, “The Khilafat Movement,” Exeter-­Habib Seminars on Islam After Colonialism, September 4, 2020, YouTube video, 1:24:39. https://­w ww​.­youtube​ .­com​/­watch​?­v​= ­6dz7pM3IVWs. 19. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 73. 20. Faisal Devji, “Pan-­Islamic Genealogies,” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming. 21. Devji, Impossible Indian, 89. 22. See for instance, Minault, Khilafat Movement, 1982; Qureshi, Pan-­Islam in British Indian Politics, 1999; and Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau, Regionalizing Pan-­ Islamism: Documents on the Khilafat Movement (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005). In chapter 5 of her book Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), historian Ayesha Jalal provides a useful though rather scattered and often more judgmental than insightful account of Abu’l Kalam Azad’s understanding of jihad, and its intersection and relationship with contemporaneous anticolonial movements of the early twentieth century. Jalal’s analysis does not bother to consider with even perfunctory seriousness the opposing views and thought of prominent ulama like Ahmad Raza Khan, thus presenting a rather skewed and selective picture. I have elsewhere discussed some of the major conceptual problems with aspects of this informative but generally problematic book; see SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 79–­81. 23. Abu’l Kalam Azad, Jazirat al-­‘Arab: Mas’ala-­i Khilafat (Delhi: Hali, 1961), 231. 24. Abu’l Kalam Azad, Mas’ala-­i Khilafat (Lahore: Data, 1978), 36. 25. Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 24 97. 26. Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph, 34. 27. Crone and Hinds. Crucially, as Ovamir Anjum has pointed out, the theological assumption underpinning this position that is common to Ash‘arites like Ghazali and others is that “the source of the obligation of caliphate is revelation, not reason.” Anjum helpfully adds: “To say that a practice is an obligation by revelation and not accessible to reason means that it is analogous in Islamic [ 296 ]

3. Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies law, for instance, to the prescribed ritual prayer, which cannot be known by reason alone; nor can any of its details of performance.” Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 128. 28. Ovamir Anjum, “Who Wants the Caliphate?,” Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, October  2019, https://­yaqeeninstitute​.­org​/­read​/­paper​/­who​-­wants​ -­the​-­caliphate (accessed February  20, 2023). For an extensive and excellent overview of the often overlapping yet subtly varied conceptualizations of Muslim political sovereignty in the classical period, see Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, 93–­130. 29. Salman Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (London: Hurst, 2014), 126. 30. Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate, 179. 31. Anjum, “Who Wants the Caliphate?,” 7. 32. Curiously, the hermeneutical labor of circumventing and bypassing authoritative traditionalist requirements for claims to caliphal authority such as prophetic lineage had also occupied several early modern Ottoman thinkers, though Azad seems not to have drawn on their discourse. See Huseyn Yilmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 189. 33. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 29. 34. Azad, Mas’ala-­i Khilafat, 206–­8. 35. Azad, 188. 36. Azad. 37. Azad, 209. 38. Azad. 39. Azad, 209–­10. 40. Azad, 210. 41. Azad. 42. Azad, 141. 43. Azad, 33. 44. Azad, 144. 45. Qur’an 49:13. 46. Azad, Mas’ala-­i Khilafat, 145. 47. Azad, 146. 48. Azad, 167. 49. Quoted in Azad, 174. 50. Azad, 173. 51. Azad, 174–­75. 52. In fact, as historian John Willis has pointed out, even Rashid Rida—­otherwise Azad’s modernist ally—­had openly disagreed with and rebuked Azad on this particular point about the necessity of possessing Quraysh lineage to make claims over the caliphate, at a venue none other than the preface to the Arabic translation/edition of Azad’s text, which appeared in 1922 in Rida’s famous [ 297 ]

3. Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies al-­Manar journal. See John Willis, “Debating the Caliphate: Islam and Nation in the Work of Rashid Rida and Abul Kalam Azad,” International History Review 32, no. 4 (December 2010): 725. 53. Azad, Jazirat al-­‘Arab, 218. 54. Azad, Mas’ala-­i Khilafat, 249. 55. For more on the formation and operations of Anglo-­Muhammadan law, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 17–­31; Scott Kugle, “Framed, Blamed, and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no.  2 (May, 2001), 257–­313; and Sohaira Siddiqui, “Navigating Colonial Power: Challenging Precedents and the Limitation of Local Elites,” Islamic Law and Society 26, no. 3 (June 2019): 272–­312. 56. Shaunna Rodriguez, “The Place of Political Membership: Abul Kalam Azad’s Critique of Borders and Nations,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 41, no. 3 (December 2021): 379. 57. Vincent Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 58. Azad, Jazirat al-­‘Arab, 232. 59. Azad, 282. 60. Azad, 233. 61. Abu’l Kalam Azad, Mas’ala-­yi Khilafat (Lahore: Data, 1978), 297. 62. Azad, Mas’ala-­yi Khilafat, 303. 63. Qur’an 9:23. 64. Azad, Mas’ala-­yi Khilafat, 286–­87. 65. Azad, 289. 66. Azad, Jazirat al-­‘Arab, 229. 67. Azad. 68. Azad. 69. Azad, 239. 70. Usha Sanyal, Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005); Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity. 71. Tareen, 244–­82. 72. Tareen, 167–­334. 73. For examples of such caricatured representations of the Barelvi school in even some scholarly sources, see Tareen, 1–­34. 74. Ahmad Raza Khan, Al-­Mahajja, 428. 75. Khan, 431. Nechari is a clear reference to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who was among Azad’s major intellectual influences. 76. Khan. Siwam refers to the ritual of distributing food to the community, especially the destitute, on the third day after a person’s death. A ritual that dominates Muslim India, its purpose is to transmit the spiritual rewards and blessings received from the charitable act of distributing food to the soul of the deceased. Usually, before the food is consumed, students and graduates of Muslim seminaries say some prayers over the food to sanctify it; hence Khan’s reference here. 77. Khan, 436. [ 298 ]

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78. Qur’an 60:8–­9, in Message of the Qur’an, trans. Muhammad Asad. 79. Khan, Al-­Mahajja, 454. 80. Khan, 452. 81. Khan. 82. Khan, 453. 83. Khan. 84. Khan, 536. 85. Khan, 537. 86. Khan, 446. 87. Khan, 532. 88. Khan, 532. 89. Ahmad Raza Khan, Iʿlam al-­Aʿlam bi anna Hindustan Dar al-­Islam, in Fatawa Rizviyya (Lahore: Raza Foundation, 1998), 14:105–­40. 90. Khan, Iʿlam al-­Aʿlam, 535. 91. Khan, 509. 92. Khan, 509. 93. Khan, 510. 94. Cited in Khan, 514. 95. Cited in Khan, 514. 96. Khan, 473. 97. Khan, 473. 98. Khan, 518. 99. Khan, 518. 100. I am grateful to Vincent Cornell for alerting me to this insight. 101. Ahmad Raza Khan, Dawam al-­ʿAysh min Al-­Aʾima min al-­Quraysh, in Ahmad Raza Khan, Fatawa Rizviyya (Lahore: Raza Foundation, 1998), 14:173–­248. 102. Shibli Nuʿmani, Maqalat-­i Shibli (Aʿzamgarh: Dar al-­Musannifin Shibli Academy, 1999), 1:69–­74. I want to thank Gregory Maxwell Bruce for bringing this reference to my attention. 103. I have borrowed this term from my previous work Defending Muhammad in Modernity. 104. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 13. 105. My conceptualization of identity and accountability here is indebted to Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Post-­Secular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 84.

4. The Cow and the Caliphate 1. Radhika Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 2. Al-­Jazeera, “The Lynching That Changed India,” October  2017, https://­w ww​ .­a ljazeera​. ­c om​/f­ eatures​/­2 017​/­10​/­5​/­t he​- ­l ynching​- ­t hat​- ­c hanged​- ­i ndia (accessed September 10, 2019). [ 299 ]

4. The Cow and the Caliphate 3. Human Rights Watch, “Violent Cow Protection in India: Vigilante Groups Attack Minorities,” February  2019, https://­w ww​.­hrw​.­org​/­news​/­2019​/­02​/­19​ /­india​-­vigilante​-­cow​-­protection​-­g roups​-­attack​-­minorities (accessed September 10, 2019). 4. Parvis Ghassem-­Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-­Muslim Violence in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 5. 5. Ghassem-­Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat, 14. 6. Naisargi Dave, “Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming,” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 3 (2014): 433–­56. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Mary-­Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 32. 8. Cassie Adcock, “Sacred Cows and Secular History: Cow Protection Debates in Colonial North India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 30, no. 2 (2010): 297–­311. 9. Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 125. 10. De, 127. 11. De, 126. 12. De. 13. Lord Lansdowne’s telegram to London, “Riot in Rangoon,” June  27, 1893, IOR/L/PJ/6/351, File 1307, Cefice Records, Asian and African Studies Collection, British Library. 14. For more on the Awadh Punch, see Jennifer Dubrow, Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018). 15. Ahmad Raza Khan, Anfus al-­Fikr fi Qurban al-­Bakr, in Fatawa Rizviyya (Lahore: Raza Foundation, 1998), 14:545. 16. Khan, Anfus al-­Fikr, 550. 17. Khan, 552. 18. Khan, 553. 19. Khan. 20. Khan, 569. 21. Khan, 573–­74. 22. Khan, 556. 23. Qur’an 22:36; translation mine. 24. Khan, 564. 25. Khan, 559. 26. Khan. 27. Khan, 557. 28. Qur’an 6:108; translation mine. 29. Khan, Anfus al-­Fikr, 554. 30. Khan, 571. 31. Khan, 555. 32. Khan, 559. 33. Khan, 556. [ 300 ]

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34. Khan, 565. 35. Khan, 556. 36. Khan. 37. D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow (London: Verso, 2002), 29. 38. For a comprehensive philological study on the place and role of the cow in Vedic ritual and economic life, see Doris Srinivasan, Concept of Cow in the Rigveda (Delhi: Motilal, 1979). 39. Khan, Anfus al-­Fikr, 565. 40. Khan, 556. 41. Khan. 42. Khan. 43. Khan, 572. 44. Khan, 556. 45. Khan, 557. 46. Quoted in Khan, 565. 47. Khan, 566. 48. Muhammad Inyatullah, Tazkira-­yi ‘Ulama’-­yi Farangi Mahal (Lucknow: Barqi Press Farangi Mahal, 1928), 106–­18. 49. ‘Imran ‘Ali Qasimi, Tazkira-­yi Mawlana ‘Abdul Bari Farangi Mahali (New Delhi: Jami‘at ‘Ulama-­yi Hind, 2020), 57–­58. 50. Qasimi, Tazkira-­yi Mawlana. 51. Quoted in Qasimi, 834. 52. For a detailed study of Khan’s often polemical disagreements with the pioneers of the Deoband school, see SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). 53. Zamindar was a newspaper known for its avid support and coverage of the Khilafat Movement, and it attracted several journalists and writers to its fold precisely for that reason. See Robb, Print and the Urdu Public, 152. 54. Qiyam al-­Din ‘Abdul Bari, Risala-­yi Hijrat wa Risala-­yi Qurbani-­yi Gaw, in Sayyid ‘Ali Ja‘fari, Awraq-­i Gumgashta (Lahore: Muhammad ‘Ali Academy, 1968), 169–­70. 55. Bari, Risala-­yi Hijrat, 169. 56. Bari, 170. 57. Qasimi, Tazkira-­yi Mawlana ‘Abdul Bari, 450. 58. Bari, Risala-­yi Hijrat, 171. 59. Bari. 60. Bari, 170. 61. Bari, 179. 62. Bari, 180. 63. Bari, 171. 64. Bari, 180. 65. Bari, 174. 66. Bari. 67. Bari, 181. 68. Bari, 182. [ 301 ]

4. The Cow and the Caliphate 69. Bari, 171. 70. Bari, 156–­57. 71. John Willis, “Azad’s Mecca: On the Limits of Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no.  3 (2014): 578–­79. 72. Bari, Risala-­yi Hijrat, 149. 73. Bari, 150. 74. Bari, 152. 75. Bari. 76. Bari. 77. Bari, 157. 78. Bari, 166. 79. Bari, 150. 80. Bari, 162. 81. Bari, 151. 82. Bari, 181. 83. Most notably, other than the works of Naisargi Dave, Jacques Derrida, and Radhika Govindrajan already discussed, I have profited from Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel Macquarrie, Victoria Niva Millious, and Elaine  M. Power, eds., Messy Eating (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Lori Gruen, ed., Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 84. Kari Weil, “Doing What You Can,” in King et al., Messy Eating, 108. 85. Haraway, When Species Meet, 15. 86. Cited in King et al., “Introduction,” in Messy Eating, 5. Weil, “Doing What You Can,” 109. 87. Neel Ahuja, “Asking Hard Questions,” in King et al., Messy Eating, 157. 88. A notable and important exception to this tendency is Sarra Tlili’s exceptional book Animals in the Qur’an (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) that makes a convincing case for exploring nonanthropomorphic readings of the Qur’an, and for appreciating the importance of nonhuman animals to the ethical mandate of the Qur’an.

5. The Contagion of Imitation 1. Narrative courtesy Talha Nemat. 2. Khaled Masud, “Cosmopolitanism and Authenticity: The Doctrine of Tashabbuh Biʾl-­Kuffar (‘Imitating the Infidel’) in Modern South Asian Fatwas,” in Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past, ed. Derryl Maclean and Sakeena Ahmed (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 160. [ 302 ]

5. The Contagion of Imitation 3. Shah Wali Ullah, Fath al-­Rahman bi Tarjamat al-­Qur’an (Karachi: Nur Muhammad Nasih al-­Matabi‘ wa Karkhanah-­yi Tijarat-­i Kutub, 1980), 2. 4. Manahem Milson, trans., A Sufi Rule for Novices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 18. 5. Sifu Rules for Novices, 82. 6. Sifu Rules for Novices, 162. 7. Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali, Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-­Din Kitab Adab al-­‘Ulfa wa’l ʾUkhuwa waʾl Suhba waʾl muʿashara maʿ Asnaf al-­Khalq (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 2005), 621. 8. Masud, “Cosmopolitanism and Authenticity,” 162. 9. Youshaa Patel, “ ‘Whoever Imitates a People Becomes One of Them’: A Hadith and Its Interpreters,” Journal of Islamic Law and Society 25 (2018): 359–­426. Patel’s monograph on tashabbuh “The Muslim Difference” (Yale University Press) was not yet available as this book went to press. 10. Patel, 368. 11. Patel, 387. 12. Patel, 392. 13. Qur’an 5:51; translation mine. 14. Patel, “Whoever Imitates a People,” 394. 15. Al-­Ghazzi’s text, also in Arabic, is titled Husn al-­Tanabbuh li-­ma Warada fi al-­Tashabbuh. 16. Patel, “Whoever Imitates a People,” 398–­402. 17. Patel, 403. 18. Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19. Ammar Khan Nasir, Mas’ala-­yi Tashabbuh Ibn Taymiyya ki Nazar Mayn, Madrasadiscourses​.­org, May 30, 2021. 20. This discussion is adopted from SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 288–­89. 21. Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, 288–89. 22. Tareen, 289. 23. Quoted in Tareen. 24. Tareen, 290. 25. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Fatawa Rashidiyya (Karachi: Dar al-­Isha‘at, nd), 574. 26. Gangohi, Fatawa Rashidiyya, 554. 27. Gangohi, 211. 28. Gangohi, 574. 29. Gangohi. 30. I have examined various facets of Shah Muhammad Isma‘il’s life and intellectual career in considerable detail in my book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press 2020), 52–­166. 31. Shah Muhammad Ismaʿil, Tazkir al-­Ikhwan (Lahore: Matba‘ Ahmadi, n.d.), 186. 32. Isma‘il, Tazkir al-­Ikhwan, 187. 33. Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, Fatawa ‘Azizi (Delhi: Matbaʿ Mujtabaʾi, 1904), 1:104. 34. ‘Aziz, Fatawa ʿAzizi. 35. ‘Aziz, 107. [ 303 ]

5. The Contagion of Imitation 36. ‘Aziz. 37. ‘Aziz, 107–­8. 38. This does not mean, of course, that Shah Muhammad Isma‘il was some monological maximalist either. He, like his uncle Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, was perfectly capable of operating in multiple registers, at times in a more maximalist reformist mode like in his most famous text Energizing Faith (Taqwiyyat al-­Iman) in which he acerbically torched popular North Indian customs, and at other times in remarkably pragmatist terms such as in his Persian text on political theory, The Station of Leadership (Mansab-­i Imamat), in which he deemed even a morally depraved political leader acceptable so long as he kept distinguishing markers of Islam current in the public sphere. And, despite their seemingly contradictory impulses, these two texts in fact coalesced in a coherent politico-­theological program of salvaging and reinforcing divine sovereignty in the public performance of religion. I have elaborated this point in considerable detail in Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, 52–­156. 39. Shibli Nu‘mani, Maqalat-­i Shibli, 1:162. 40. Nu‘mani, Maqalat-­i Shibli, 1:163. 41. Nu‘mani, 1:167. 42. Nu‘mani, 1:166. 43. Nu‘mani, 1:167. 44. Nu‘mani. 45. See, for instance, the otherwise erudite studies that examine Dihlavi’s thought in some detail: Jennifer Dubrow, Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018); and Maryam Wasif, Who Is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). On Nazir Ahmad’s life and different aspects of his intellectual career, see also Christina Oesterheld, “Nazir Ahmad and the Early Urdu Novel: Some Observations,” Annual of Urdu Studies 16 (2001): 1–­42; Bilal Mushtaq, “Novel Community: Urdu Novel and ‘Muslim’ Community in Nineteenth-­Century Colonial India” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2022); and Darakhshan Khan, “In Good Company: Piety and Conjugality in Colonial North India,” American Journal of Islam and Society 35, no. 3 (2018): 1–­25. 46. Nazir Ahmad Dihlavi, Ibn ul Waqt (Lahore: Sang-­i Mil, 2013). 47. Cited in Leonard Lewisohn, “Metaphysical Time in Rumi’s Mathnawī: Sufi Terminology of Metaphysical Time,” Mawlana Rumi Review 9, nos. 1–­2 (2020): 26. 48. For instance, the famed eighteenth-­century North Indian Muslim scholar Shah Wali Ullah (d. 1762) held the view that “there is no legitimate claim to political authority if one has failed to translate that claim into political power and effective rule.” Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Political Power, Religious Authority, and the Caliphate in Eighteenth-­Century Indian Islamic Thought,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, no. 2 (2020): 321. 49. Dihlavi, Ibn ul Waqt, 7. 50. Dihlavi, 81–­82. [ 304 ]

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51. Dihlavi, 102. 52. Dihlavi, 101. 53. Dihlavi. 54. Dihlavi, 65. 55. Dihlavi, 106. 56. Dihlavi, 107. 57. Dihlavi, 132–­47. 58. Dihlavi, 152–­55. 59. Dihlavi, 221–­22. 60. Dihlavi, 179.

6. The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide 1. SherAli Tareen, “Revolutionary Hermeneutics: Translating the Qur’an as a Manifesto for Revolution,” Journal of Religious and Political Practice 3, nos. 1–­2 (2017): 7. 2. ‘Abdul Ghafar Khan, Za Ma Zhwand wa Jid o Juhd (Kabul: Dawlati Matba‘, 1983, 70–­76. 3. For instance, see the classics Christian Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (Delhi: Vikas, 1978); David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); and, more recently, Yasmin Saikia and Raisur Rahman, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Khurram Hussain, Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); Amber Abbas, Partition’s First Generation: Space, Place, and Identity in Muslim South Asia (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); and Charles Ramsey, God’s Words, Spoken and Otherwise: Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–­1898), Revelation, and Coherence (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 4. Hussain, Islam as Critique. 5. Brannon Ingram, “Crises of the Public in Muslim India: Critiquing ‘Custom’ at Deoband and Aligarh,” in Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia, ed. Barton Scott, Brannon Ingram, and SherAli Tareen ( New York: Routledge, 2016), 47–­ 62; SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 178–­223. 6. Tareen, Defending Muhammad, 178–­223. 7. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 15–­53. 8. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Tasfiyat al-­ʿAqaʾid in Maqalat-­i Hujjat al-­Islam (Multan: Idara-­yi Ashrafiya, 2018), 2:323. 9. Nanautvi, Tasfiyat al-­ʿAqaʾid, 323–­25. 10. I have conducted a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of Glistening Faith as well as translated all fifteen of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s principles as they appear in this text elsewhere; SherAli Tareen, “The Theological Fault Lines of [ 305 ]

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Traditionalism and Modernism in Muslim South Asia: The Aligarh-­Deoband Divide,” forthcoming. 11. For a detailed study of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s engagement with the Bible, see Charles Ramsey, God’s Word, Spoken or Otherwise: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s (1817–­1898) Muslim Exegesis of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 12. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, 156. 13. Troll, 326–­27. 14. Troll, 328–­29. 15. Troll, 329. 16. Troll, 324. 17. Troll, 332. 18. Troll. 19. Troll, 334. 20. Troll, 333. 21. Troll, 323, 326. 22. Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), 81. 23. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Tahzib al-­Akhlaq (Lahore: Tajiran-­i Kutub-­i Qawmi, n.d.), 114. 24. Khan, Tahzib al-­Akhlaq, 116. 25. Khan, 117. 26. Khan, 223–­24. 27. Khan, 225. 28. Khan. 29. Khan, 226. 30. Khan. 31. Khan. 32. Khan. 33. On the broader theme of the importance of food for the construction of religious difference, see David Freidenreich, Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 34. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Ahkam Taʿam-­i Ahl-­i Kitab (Lucknow: Munshi Nawal Kishore, 1868), 2. 35. Muhammad Naushad al-­Nuri, “Taʿrif Mawjiz bi-­Muʾallif al-­Kitab,” in Muhammad Tayyib al-­Qasimi, trans., Al-­Tashabbuh fiʾl Islam [Arabic translation] (Deoband: Majma‘ Hujjat ul-­Islam, 2016), 19–­33. 36. Muhammad Tayyib al-­Qasimi, Al-­Tashabbuh fiʾl Islam (Deoband: Matbaʿ Qasimi, 1929), 15. 37. Tayyib, 12. 38. Tayyib, 17. 39. Tayyib. 40. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archealogy of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970). 41. Tayyib, Al-­Tashabbuh fiʾl Islam, 23–­27. [ 306 ]

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42. Tayyib, 27. 43. Tayyib, 30–­32. 44. Tayyib, 32. 45. Tayyib, 33–­34. 46. Adrienne Boyarin, The Christian Jew and the Umarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-­Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 2. 47. Boyarin, Christian Jew and the Umarked Jewess. 48. Tayyib, Al-­Tashabbuh fiʾl Islam, 35–­37. 49. Tayyib, 37. 50. Tayyib. 51. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 9–­10. 52. Tayyib, Al-­Tashabbuh fiʾl Islam, 39. 53. Tayyib, 40. 54. Tayyib, 44. 55. Tayyib. 56. Tayyib, 55. 57. Levy-­Rubin, Non-­Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire, 172. 58. Tayyib, Al-­Tashabbuh fiʾl Islam, 64–­66. 59. Quoted in Tayyib , 66. 60. Tayyib, 66. 61. Tayyib, 64–­65. 62. Tayyib, 67–­68. 63. Tayyib, 83–­84. 64. Tayyib, 84. 65. Tayyib, 85–­86. 66. These were Uthman bin Abi Shayba (d. 849), Abu al-­Nadr (d. 820), Hashim bin al-­Qasim, ‘Abd al-­Rahman bin Thabit bin Thawban (d. 781), Hassan bin ‘Atiyya (d. 737), and Abu al-­Munib al-­Jurashi (d. 727). 67. Tayyib, Al-­Tashabbuh, 94–­96. Youshaa Patel has provided a detailed map of the various chains of transmission for this Hadith and compilations in which it is found in the appendices to his article discussed in the last chapter, 415–­26. 68. Tayyib, 98. For more on the Pact of ‘Umar, see Levy-­Rubin, Non-­Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire, especially 58–­112; and Albrecht Noth, “Problems of Differentiation Between Muslims and Non-­Muslims: ‘Re-­reading the Ordinances of ‘Umar’ (al-­Shurut al-­‘Umariyya),” in Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Robert Hoyland (London: Routledge, 2004), 100–­122. 69. Tayyib, 100–­103. 70. Tayyib, 121–­23. 71. Tayyib, 140. 72. Tayyib, 142. 73. Tayyib, 143–­44. 74. Tayyib, 159–­61. [ 307 ]

6. The Aligarh-Deoband Divide

75. Tayyib, 161–­62. 76. Tayyib, 170–­77. 77. Tayyib, 179. 78. Tayyib, 172.

Epilogue 1. Imran Khan was removed from the office of the prime minister of Pakistan in April 2021 following a controversial vote of no confidence in the parliament that he alleged was part of a US-­backed conspiracy to topple his government. 2. “PM Approves Grant for Construction of Hindu Temple in Islamabad,” Dawn, June 27, 2020, https://­w ww​.­dawn​.­com​/­news​/­1565405. 3. “Groundbreaking of First Hindu Temple in Capital Held,” Dawn, June 24, 2020, https://­w ww​.­dawn​.­com​/n ­ ews​/1­ 564798. 4. Quoted in Hasan Madani, “Islamabad Mayn Naʾay Mandir ki Taʿmir ka Masʾala: Ahl-­i ʿIlm wa Danish ke Mawqifawn ka Khulasa awr Tahlili Tajziyya,” Muhaddis Online, August 2020 (accessed March 28, 2021). 5. Madani. 6. Madani. 7. Badr al-­Din al-­‘Ayni, quoted in Madani. 8. Ibn Taymiyya, quoted in Madani. 9. Madani. 10. Javed Ghamidi, “Construction of Hindu Mandir in Islamabad,” YouTube video, 4:57, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​= ­eNldLBKDxI0. 11. Madani, “Islamabad.” 12. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 84. 13. Humeira Iqtidar, “Is Tolerance Liberal? Javed Ahmad Ghamidi and the Non-­ Muslim Minority,” Political Theory 48, no. 5 (2021): 1–­26. 14. For more on the history and workings of the Council of Islamic Ideology, see Sarah Holz, Governance of Islam in Pakistan: An Institutional Study of the Council of Islamic Ideology (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022). 15. Council of Islamic Ideology Pakistan, “Sarkari Fund se Na’i Ghayr Muslim ‘Ibadat Gah ki Ta‘mir,” October 28, 2020, 1. 16. Council of Islamic Ideology Pakistan, “Sarkari Fund,” 2. Ironically, it is this same Nehru-­Liaquat pact that in 2019 the then–­home minister of India Amit Shah had used to justify the controversial and anti-­Muslim Citizenship Amendment Bill or the CAA. 17. Council of Islamic Ideology Pakistan. 18. Banuri, Ihtisab-­i Qadiyaniyyat, 16:333, quoted in Ammar Nasir, “Islami mazhabi fikr ki tashkil-­i naw” [Rethinking Muslim political theology], trans. SherAli Tareen (unpublished paper on file with author), 37–­38. 19. Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), xi. [ 308 ]

Epilogue 20. Hallaq, Impossible State. 21. Muzzammil Imam, “Facts Are Important: Sharjeel Imam and Perceptions of Abhijit Majumder, a Rebuttal,” Youth Ki Awaz, October  2020, https://­w ww​ .­y outhkiawaaz​. ­c om​/­2 020​/­10​/­f acts​- a­ re​- ­i mportant​- s­ harjeel​- ­i mam​- ­a nd​ -­perception​-­of​-­abhijit​-­majumder​-­a​-­rebuttal/ (accessed February 20, 2023). 22. “Citizenship Act: Activist Sharjeel Imam’s Speech at Jamia Was Divisive, Delhi Police Tells Court,” Scroll​.­in, September  2, 2021, https://­scroll​.­in​/­latest​ /­1004437​/­c itizenship​- a­ ct​- ­a ctivist​- ­s harjeel​- ­i mams​- ­s peech​- ­a t​- ­j amia​- ­was​ -­divisive​-d ­ elhi​-p ­ olice​-­tell​-­court. 23. “Full Speech of JNU Student Sharjeel Imam,” YouTube video, 1:01:17, Janu­ atch​?­v​=­hIvVVmqaxTI. ary 29, 2020, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/w 24. “Full Speech.” 25. Sharjeel Imam, “JNU: Left-­wing Students Shouldn’t Act Superior, Islamophobia Is Running Rampant Among Them,” Firstpost, August 2017, https://­w ww​ .­f irstpost​.­com​/­india​/­islamophobia​-­in​-­jnu​-­is​-­a lso​-­rampant​-­a mong​-­left​-­w ing​ -­student​-­organisations​-­claiming​-­to​-­be​-­secular​-­3375398​.­html (accessed February 20, 2023). 26. “Full Speech.” 27. “Full Speech.” 28. “Full Speech.” 29. “Full Speech.” 30. Shankar Nair. Translating Wisdom: Hindu-­Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 9. 31. This point is obviously indebted to Saba Mahmood’s foundational work Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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[ 322 ]

Index

Abbasids, 126, 128, 295n13 ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Umar, 246 ‘Abduh, Muhammad, 7 ‘Abdul Hamid II, 129–­30 ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abbas, 141 Abu ‘Abd Allah ibn Tumart, 131 Abu Hanifa (al-­Numan bin Thabit), 182 Abyssinia, 22–­23 Afghanistan, 182 Aftab (newspaper), 174 afterworld/afterlife, 50–­51, 60 Ahmadiyya, 263 ‘A’ishah bint Abi Bakr, 165 Akhlaq, Mohammad, 153–­54 ‘Ali, Maulvi Hakim, 115, 140 ‘Ali, Shawkat, 119, 121 Aligarh-­Deoband divide: commonalities between schools, 220; contrasting responses to colonial modernity, 229–­31, 252; not reducible to traditionalist/ modernist binary, 221, 222–­23, 229–­31, 234–­35, 252; Qasim Tayyib on tashabbuh, 235–­45, 251–­52, 254–­55; Sayyid Ahmad Khan on tashabbuh, 193, 231–­35; Sayyid Ahmad Khan/ Qasim Nanautvi exchange, 193,

223–­31, 236; Tayyib’s rebuttal of Khan, 245–­51. See also Khan, Sayyid Ahmad; Nanautvi, Muhammad Qasim; Tayyib, Qari Muhammad Aligarh Muslim University, 222, 265. See also Aligarh-­Deoband divide; Khan, Sayyid Ahmad ‘Aliyya Nizamiyya Madrasa, 173 Al-‘Amiri, Abu l-­Hasan, 13–­16, 48 Arabia, 59, 63–­64, 118, 132, 135, 137, 181, 198. See also Ottoman caliphate Aryas, 107–­8 Arya Samaj, 83, 104–­9, 156, 157, 169, 201, 285n64 Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir (emperor), 38, 41, 43, 49–­50 Awadh Punch (magazine), 158–­59 Al-­‘Ayni, Badr al-­Din, 258 Azad, Abu’l Kalam: Ahmad Raza Khan’s criticism of, 141–­42; on caliphate’s centrality to Islam, 119–­20, 122, 124–­26, 149–­50; called for jihad against the British, 129, 132–­33, 134, 137–­38, 150, 254, 296n22; called for migration out of India, 134, 144, 184; on defense of Ottoman caliphate, 132–­33, 134; early life and career,

[ 323 ]

index Azad, Abu’l Kalam (continued) 118–­19; on friendship with British and Hindus, 134–­38, 254; Imam’s critique of, 268–­70; on legitimacy of Ottoman caliphate, 127–­32, 208; modernism and traditionalism of, 7, 119, 160, 181; political/civil view of interreligious friendship, 116, 134–­36, 149–­50; on Saudi state, 181; support of Gandhi and noncooperation movement, 115–­16, 121, 141, 146–­47; valorization of secularism, 122, 136–­38, 151, 179, 255 Azazeel (novel), 101–­2 ‘Aziz, Shah ‘Abdul, 23–­24, 182, 205–­7

157–­59, 166; calls for jihad against, 129, 132–­33, 134, 150, 180, 254, 296n22; and debate over “civilizing” effect of Christianity, 90–­91; depicted in Son of the Moment, 211–­19; juridical use of Muslim texts, 133–­34; patronage of Shahjahanpur festival, 85, 87; proclamation of sovereignty (1858), 80–­81; and status of India as dar al-­Harb/dar al-­Sulh, 22–­24, 134, 144, 181–­83, 259–­60. See also Khilafat movement; noncooperation movement; rebellion of 1857; secularism burial customs, 233–­34, 250

Badayuni, Nur Muhammad, 41 al-­Balkhi, Abu Zayd, 14 Banuri, Muhammad Yusuf, 263 al-­Baqillani, Abu Bakr, 131 Barelvi school, 25, 119, 138–­39, 140, 268. See also Khan, Ahmad Raza Bari, ‘Abdul: anticolonialism of, 180–­81; career and scholarship, 172–­74; on cow sacrifice, 155, 159, 160, 174–­81, 254; friendship with Gandhi, 176; on Hindu-­Muslim friendship, 174–­75, 177–­78; leader of Khilafat movement, 270, 295n11; on markers of Muslim distinction, 176–­80, 182–­83; on migration, 134, 181–­84; on Ottoman caliphate, 176–­79, 185; traditionalist hermeneutic, 174, 176, 179–­81, 182, 183, 254 al-­Basri, ‘Abdallah ibn Salim, 41 beef. See cow sacrifice/slaughter Bengali texts, 57–­58 Bhagavadgita, 49, 53, 294n75 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 266–­67 Bihari, Muhiballah, 173 al-­Biruni, 46–­49, 51, 66, 69, 72–­73 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), 266–­67 Brahma, 60 Brahmans, 52, 56, 84 British colonial government: attitude toward cow sacrifice/slaughter,

CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), 265–­67, 308n16 caliphate: Ahmad Raza Khan on, 148–­49; Azad on, 119–­20, 122, 124–­26, 132–­34, 149–­50; British aggression toward Ottoman caliphate, 116, 119–­20, 134, 135, 136–­38; Khilafat movement’s defense of Ottoman caliphate, 24, 115–­16, 120–­24, 132–­33, 134, 176–­79, 185; legitimacy of Ottoman caliphate, 127–­32, 148–­49, 185, 208; as marker of Muslim distinction, 176–­79, 256; Nanautvi on, 91; premodern Muslim thought on, 125–­26; and Quraysh lineage, 127, 129–­32, 149, 207–­8; spiritual significance of, 119–­21, 122, 124–­26, 149–­50. See also Khilafat movement; ‘Umar Ibn al-­K hattab CAS (critical animal studies), 186–­87 caste system, 61, 83, 89 certainty, levels of, 94 charisma, bodily, 93–­96 Chauri Chaura incident, 121 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christianity, 15, 22–­23, 52, 101–­2, 197, 225, 234, 240, 283n36; as authentic but abrogated religion, 62, 100, 103; Azad on Muslim-­Christian enmity, 127–­28; clothing associated with, 232, 247–­48;

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index debate over “civilizing” effect of, 90–­91; depicted in Son of the Moment, 214–­15; in doctrinal debates at Shahjahanpur festival, 89–­90; intermarriage with Christians, 209–­10; Jesus Christ, 89–­90, 94–­96, 103; participation in Christian festivals, 197, 233; theology of sovereignty, 10; Trinity, 48, 85. See also Festival of Deciding the (True) God CII (Council of Islamic Ideology), 261–­63 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 265–­67, 308n16 colonialism. See British colonial government; secularism Coptic Christians, 101–­2 Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), 261–­63 Cow Protection Society, 157 cow sacrifice/slaughter: Ahmad Raza Khan on, 155–­56, 160–­66, 170–­71, 185; and anti-­Muslim violence, 142–­43, 153–­54, 157–­58, 266, 267; Bari on, 155, 159, 160, 174–­81, 254; and coercion by non-­Muslims, 162–­66, 176–­80, 184, 268; in colonial context, 156–­59, 166; cow protection movement, 157, 268; cow’s significance in Hinduism, 153–­54, 167–­72; Khilafat movement discouraged, 155; as obligatory (wajib) vs. permissible (mubah) practice, 155–­56, 160, 161–­63, 175, 179, 254; pressure from Gandhi and Indian National Congress, 155, 163, 175, 176; in the Qur’an and Hadith, 165, 168; as ritual marker of Muslim distinction, 148, 155–­56, 160–­66, 170–­71, 176–­80, 185, 204 creation of the world, 56, 60, 89, 106–­9 critical animal studies (CAS), 186–­87 Dadri lynching, 153–­54 dandvat, 64 dar al-­harb, 21–­24, 134, 144, 181–­83, 260 dar al-­Islam, 144, 182–­83, 259–­60 dar al-­sulh, 22–­24 Dara Shukoh, 38, 49–­51, 61, 66

date palm tree miracle, 93–­96 Delhi College, 81, 211, 212, 218, 223 Deoband Madrasa: associated with JUH, 173–­74; founders of, 79, 201, 230; narrative of Shahjahanpur festival, 79, 85, 87–­88, 89, 105; rivalry with Barelvi school, 25, 140; scholars associated with, 81–­82, 211, 235–­36, 257, 263. See also Aligarh-­Deoband divide; Gangohi, Rashid Ahmad; Nanautvi, Muhammad Qasim Derrida, Jacques, 3–­4, 36, 68–­69, 75, 156 Devji, Faisal, 121–­23 Dihlavi, Ahmad Sa‘id, 189 Dihlavi, Nazir Ahmad, 210–­19 Dihlavi, Shah Ghulam ‘Ali, 223 distinguishing markers of Islam. See markers of Muslim distinction Diwali, 69, 201, 204, 233 dress/clothing: as marker of Muslim distinction, 17, 190, 196, 202, 214, 215–­16, 218; in Son of the Moment, 214, 215–­16, 218; and tashabbuh, 202, 215–­16, 218, 232–­33, 243–­44, 245, 247–­50 Dussehra, 199, 233 Eid/‘Id, 158, 161, 179–­80, 184 empiricism: compatibility of Qur’an and Hadith with empirical reality, 224–­25, 226–­27; empiricist historicism at Shahjahanpur festival, 91–­92, 97–­101, 106–­9, 113, 255 Ernst, Carl, 46, 54, 55, 72–­73 Europe, engagement with, 207–­10, 254 existence, 238–­39 Farangi Mahal school, 173, 174, 176, 182. See also Bari, ‘Abdul fasting, 14, 15, 125, 229 Festival of Deciding the (True) God: Arya Samaj narrative of, 104–­9; background and participants, 81–­88; and category of religion in secular colonial modernity, 80–­81, 86, 92, 109–­14, 151, 152; debated topics, 89–­91; and

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index Festival of Deciding the (True) God (continued) empiricist historicism, 91–­92, 97–­101, 106–­9, 113, 255; miracle debate, 91–­101, 110–­11, 113; Nanautviʼs Islamization of Hindu prophets, 102–­4 festivals: Christian festivals, 197, 233; Diwali, 69, 201, 204, 233; Dussehra, 199, 233; Holi, 69, 201, 204; Muslim participation in non-­Muslim festivals, 69–­70, 197, 199–­201, 204, 205, 233; of the Prophetʼs birthday, 139, 198; Ramila, 199. See also Festival of Deciding the (True) God five daily prayers, 129, 147, 162 form, 238–­39 friendship. See Hindu-­Muslim friendship; interreligious friendship; muwalat (friendship) Gandhi, Mohandas: Ahmad Raza Khan condemned Muslims’ alliance with, 123, 143–­44, 146–­47, 150, 163; friendship with ‘Abdul Bari, 176; Khilafat movement’s alliance with, 146–­47, 155, 176, 268; and noncooperation movement, 115, 116, 121, 181; pressured Muslims to stop cow sacrifice/slaughter, 155, 163, 175, 176; view of Hindu-­Muslim friendship, xiii, 123 Gandhi, Supriya, 38, 50, 51, 286n9, 287n36, 287n39 Gangohi, Rashid Ahmad, 201–­3, 230 al-­Gardizi, Abu Sa‘id, 51–­52 gender boundaries, xi, 162, 241 Ghamidi, Javed Ahmad, 259–­61 Ghani, Shah ‘Abdul, 81 al-­Ghazali, 20, 82, 125, 131, 181, 194–­95 al-­Ghazzi, Najm al-­Din, 197–­98 Govindrajan, Radhika, 153, 154, 302n83 Gujarat pogrom, 154 Hadith: accounts of cow sacrifice, 165; accounts of the Prophet’s miracles, 96, 98, 99, 110; authority of, 224,

228–­29, 246–­47; criterion of rationality, 226–­27; Prophet’s tashabbuh hadith, 70, 189–­91, 195–­98, 204, 209, 214, 232–­34, 246–­47, 250–­51 Hamdam (newspaper), 174, 182 Haraway, Donna, 186–­87, 302n83 Hasan, Mahmud, 81, 220, 236 al-­Hidaya, 122, 258 Al-­Hilal (newspaper), 118–­19 Hinduism: as category in colonial context, 71–­76, 92; cow’s significance in, 153–­54, 167–­72; depicted in Son of the Moment, 213; and doctrinal debates at Shahjahanpur festival, 89–­90, 97–­101, 106–­9; Hindu nationalism in India, 153–­54, 265–­70; imitation of Hindu customs, 69–­70, 199–­201, 204, 205, 232–­35, 248; and Islamabad temple controversy, 256–­65; Jan-­i Janan’s translation of, 58–­71, 76–­78; medieval and early modern Muslim studies of, 46–­58; participation in Hindu festivals, 69–­70, 199–­201, 204, 205, 233; possibility of Hindu prophets, 53, 56–­57, 59, 61–­63, 102–­4, 253; Sarasvati’s critique of, 83–­84. See also cow sacrifice/slaughter; Festival of Deciding the (True) God; Hindu-­ Muslim friendship; Hindu texts Hindu-­Muslim friendship: Ahmad Raza Khan on, 141–­48, 163; Azad on, 134–­36, 254; Bari on, 174–­81; Gandhi on, xiii, 123; between Khilafat movement leaders and Gandhi, 146–­47, 155, 176, 268. See also interreligious friendship Hindu texts: Bhagavadgita, 49, 53, 294n75; Laws of Manu, 61, 66, 74, 171; Mahabharata, 56, 66, 98, 99, 171; Puranas, 72, 84, 171; Upanisads, 51, 66, 71, 72; Vedas, 60, 71, 74, 83, 89, 168–­69, 171–­72 historicism: empiricist historicism at Shahjahanpur festival, 91–­92, 97–­101, 106–­9, 113, 255; and

[ 326 ]

index Mahmoodʼs thesis on interreligious conflict, 101–­2 Holi, 69, 201, 204 hospitality, interreligious: doctrinal, 58–­65, 67–­69, 76–­77, 104, 174, 177; and interreligious friendship, 4; and translation, 36, 76–­78 humiliation (tazlil), 244–­45 humiliation (zillat), 163, 164, 166, 185 Husayn bin ‘Ali, 120 Husayni, Khayrudin, 118 Ibn ‘Abidin (‘Allama Shami), 21, 146 Ibn Khaldun, 126, 131 Ibn Malik, 173 Ibn Manzur, 5 Ibn Nujaym, Zayn al-­Din, 18 Ibn al-­Qayyim al-­Jawziyya, 16–­17 Ibn Sina, 49 Ibn Taymiyya, 16, 196–­97, 237, 243, 246, 259 idol worship: criticized by medieval/ early modern Muslim scholars, 48, 52, 55, 57; and Islamabad temple controversy, 257; Jan-­i Janan on, 59, 63–­64; Sarasvati accused Muslims of, 84–­85 ikhlilat (mixture), 242 iltibas (confusion or obfuscation), 240, 242 Imam, Sharjeel, xviii, 263–­70 Imam Razi (Fakhr al-­Din al-­Razi), 82 Imdadullah, Hajji, 81, 82 imitation. See tashabbuh (reprehensible imitation) imperial Muslim political theology: background in premodern Islam, 12–­18; exceptionality/superiority of Islam, 12–­18, 61–­62, 67–­69, 77, 100, 114; incongruity between norm of Muslim empire and colonial modernity, 8–­9, 18–­21; and Islamabad temple controversy, 256–­65; Islam as completion of time and history, 61–­62, 68–­69, 77, 100–­1; and postcolonial Islamic states, 263–­65; spiritual significance of

caliphate, 119–­21, 122, 124–­26, 149–­50; status of India as dar al-­Harb/dar al-­Sulh, 22–­24, 134, 144, 181–­83, 259–­60. See also caliphate; markers of Muslim distinction; sovereignty Indian National Congress, 115–­16, 121, 155, 163, 173, 175, 176, 267, 268 Indramani, Munshi, 106 Innocent III (pope), 240 intermarriage, 209–­10 interreligious friendship: Ahmad Raza Khan viewed as threatening to Muslim distinction, 116–­17, 123, 139, 141–­50, 163, 254, 255; Azad’s political/civil view of, 116, 134–­36, 149–­50; Azad and Khan compared, 116–­17, 148–­50; ‘Aziz on, 205–­7; depicted in Son of the Moment, 211–­19; and fear of self-­erasure, 192, 196, 215–­16, 217–­18; and hospitality, 4, 69; as love triangle, x–­xiv; muwalat, 5, 28, 116, 135, 144, 150, 278, 279; Qurʼan on, 117–­18, 135–­36, 141, 146–­48, 197; tension with enmity, 3–­4, 33, 194–­95; tension with sovereignty, 3–­7, 77–­78, 177; and translation, 36, 76–­78. See also Hindu-­Muslim friendship al-­Isfahani, al-­Raghib, 5 Islamabad temple controversy, 256–­65 Islamia College, 115, 123, 140 Isma‘il, Shah Muhammad, 203–­5, 207, 223 Jabir bin ‘Abd Allah, 165 Jamia Millia University, 265 Jami‘at-i ‘Ulama’-­yi Hind (JUH), 173–­74 Jan-­i Janan (Mirza Mazhar): compared with colonial reification of religion, 65–­66, 73–­76; death, 41–­42, 44–­45; disdain for nonelite masses, 69–­70; doctrinal hospitality toward Hinduism, 58–­65, 67–­69, 76–­77; on Islam as completion of time and history, 61–­62, 68–­69, 77, 100; “juridico-­theological” characterization of Hinduism,

[ 327 ]

index Jan-­i Janan (Mirza Mazhar) (continued) 66–­67, 74, 76; life and political context, 40–­46; on possibility of Hindu prophets, 59, 61–­63, 103 Jawaharlal Nehru University, 265, 267 Jawhar, Muhammad ‘Ali, 119, 121 Jesus Christ, 89–­90, 94–­96, 103 Jha, D. N., 168 jihad: calls for jihad against the British, 129, 132–­33, 134, 150, 180, 254, 296n22; Gandhi accused of inciting, 143–­44; in Son of the Moment, 212 Jinnah, Muhammad ‘Ali, xiii–­xiv, 121 Joshua, 97 Judaism, 13, 15, 48, 189, 197, 234, 257, 283n35; as authentic but abrogated religion, 62, 100, 103; intermarriage with Jews, 209–­10; medieval English laws regarding, 240; miracles by Old Testament prophets, 93, 95, 97 JUH (Jami‘at-­i ‘Ulama’-­yi Hind), 173–­74 al-­Juwayni, 20–­21 Ka’bah, 84–­85, 125 Kabir Das, 86 Kashmiri, Anwar Shah, 236 Khan, ‘Abdul Ghaffar, 220 Khan, Ahmad Raza: absent from nationalist historiography, 268–­70; on the caliphate, 148–­49; compared with Qari Tayyib, 139–­40; on cow sacrifice, 155–­56, 160–­72, 179, 185, 255; founded Barelvi school, 119, 138, 268; on importance of Muslim distinction, 116–­17, 123, 139, 146–­50, 155–­56, 160–­66, 170–­71, 185, 255; polemical disagreements with Deobandi school, 139, 174; on relations with non-­Muslims, 123, 141–­48, 150, 163, 254, 255; on religious freedom, 164–­66, 255; response to Islamia College controversy, 115, 140; scholarship of, 139; on tashabbuh, 199–­201; traditionalism and modernism of, 168, 172, 254 Khan, Hakim Ajmal, 295n11

Khan, Imran, 256, 257 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad: Ahmad Raza Khan’s critique of, 298n75; attitude toward colonial modernity, 230–­31, 252; on civilizational progress, 231–­33; fifteen principles of faith, 223–­31; parallels with protagonist of Son of the Moment, 218–­19; on tashabbuh, 193, 231–­35, 245–­51; Tayyib’s rebuttal of, 245–­51; transcends traditionalist/modernist binary, 7, 222–­23, 234–­35 Khan, Zafar ‘Ali, 174 Khilafat movement: Ahmad Raza Khan’s criticism of, 141–­45; alliance with Gandhi and Indian National Congress, 146–­47, 155, 176, 268; alliance with noncooperation movement, 121, 123, 140–­41, 143–­45, 146–­48, 181; attitude toward anti-­ Muslim violence, 142; calls for migration, 134, 144, 184; covered by Zamindar, 174; defense of Ottoman caliphate, 24, 115–­16, 120–­24, 176–­79, 185; historiography of, 121–­24; Imam’s critique of, 268–­70; scholars associated with, 119, 120, 121, 174, 270. See also Azad, Abu’l Kalam; Bari, ‘Abdul; caliphate Khuda’i Khidmatgar (Servants of God), 220 Khusraw, Amir, 52 al-­Kindi, Abu Yusuf, 14 Knowles, Father, 85, 87–­88 Krishna, 103–­4, 168 Lakhnavi, ‘Abdul Hay, 173, 182 Laws of Manu, 61, 66, 74, 171 Liaquat-­Nehru Pact, 262, 263 love: al-­Ghazali on love and hate, 194–­95; instinctive, 206; for the Prophet, 93–­94, 251–­52; and tashabbuh, 197, 198–­99, 251–­52, 254 lynchings, 153–­54, 266, 267 Madani, Hafiz Hasan, 258–­60 Mahabharata, 56, 66, 98, 99, 171

[ 328 ]

index Mahmood, Saba, 28, 101–­2, 111, 290n103, 309n31 Malhi, Lal Chand, 256 Mamluk ‘Ali, 81, 211, 223 Marathas, 43, 44, 45, 207 al-­Marghinani, Burhan al-­Din, 133, 258 markers of Muslim distinction: Ahmad Raza Khan on, 116–­17, 123, 139, 146–­50, 255; Bari on, 176–­80, 182–­83; caliphate as, 176–­79, 256; and coercion by non-­Muslims, 162–­66, 176–­80, 184, 268; cow sacrifice as, 148, 155–­56, 160–­66, 170–­71, 176–­80, 185, 204; and dar al-­harb/dar al-­Islam, 182–­83; and depraved political leaders, 304n38; dress/clothing as, 17, 190, 196, 202, 214, 215–­16, 218, 247–­48; shaʿaʾir-­i Islam/‘shi’ar-­i Islam, 147, 160, 162, 165, 176; Tayyib on importance of distinction for Muslim identity, 236–­45, 252, 255 metempsychosis (transmigration), 48, 49, 59, 64–­65 migration (hijrat), 20–­24, 134, 144, 181–­84 Mihrabi, Ibn ‘Umar, 55–­56 miracles, 91–­101, 110–­11, 113, 225 moon splitting miracle, 96–­97, 98–­100 Moses, 63, 93, 95 Mughal empire, 38, 40–­46, 54, 128, 212 Muhammad. See Prophet Muhammad Muhammadan Anglo-­Oriental College. See Aligarh Muslim University Muneeb ur Rehman, Mufti, 257–­58 muwalat (friendship): meanings of, 5, 28, 116, 135, 278; muwalat-­i haqiqiyya (friendship based on affection/ intimacy), 144, 278; muwalat-­i suwariyya (superficial/masked friendship), 144, 150, 279; tark-­i muwalat (abandoning relations of friendship), 134. See also interreligious friendship Nadir Shah, 43 Nadvi, Sayyid Sulayman, 149, 208

Najaf Khan, Mirza, 44–­45 Najib al-­Dawla, 44 Najm al-­Din Razi, 56 Nanautvi, Muhammad Qasim: critique of Sayyid Ahmad Khan on tashabbuh, 193, 225–­31, 236; defense of praying toward the Ka’bah, 84–­85; empiricist historicism of, 91–­92, 97–­101, 113, 255; intellectual biography, 81–­83; participation in Shahjahanpur festival, 79, 87–­104, 105, 110–­14; on possibility of Hindu prophets, 57, 102–­4, 253; on the Prophet’s miracles, 91–­101, 110, 113; self-­effacing personality, 83, 87; traditionalism and modernism of, 82–­83, 110, 113; use of technology, 82, 230 Naqshbandi order, 40–­41, 42, 66 nechari, 140, 298n75 Nizamuddin, Mullah, 173 noncooperation movement, 115–­16, 121, 123, 140–­48, 181 Nu‘mani, Shibli, 149, 207–­10, 254 ontological distinction, 238–­42 Ottoman caliphate: British aggression toward, 116, 119–­20, 134, 135, 136–­38; Khilafat movement’s defense of, 24, 115–­16, 120–­24, 132–­33, 134, 176–­79, 185; legitimacy of, 127–­32, 148–­49, 185, 208 Pact of ‘Umar, 16–­17, 243–­44 Pakistan, 121, 204, 236, 256–­65 Panipati, Qazi Sanaʾullah, 42 A Passage to India, xii Patanjali, 49 Patel, Youshaa, 195–­99, 307n67 Pioneer (newspaper), 171 posthumanism, 186–­87 Prophet Muhammad: and abrogation of pre-­Islamic religions, 62, 67–­68; adoption of non-­Muslim practices, 208, 232; in Barelvi orientation, 138–­39; birthday of, 139, 198; bodily charisma of, 93–­96; and cow

[ 329 ]

index Prophet Muhammad (continued) sacrifice, 165, 168; as eternal beloved, 251–­52; on ethnicity and lineage, 130, 132; foretold caliphal era, 120; invited non-­Muslims to Islam, 200; in Jewish and Christian scriptures, 283n36; love for, 93–­94, 251–­52; miracles of, 91–­101, 110, 113; mocked by Sarasvati, 84, 92; and Quraysh lineage, 127, 129–­32, 149, 207–­8; sought asylum in Christian Abyssinia, 22–­23; and sources of religious authority, 224–­25; on superiority of Islam, 12; tashabbuh Hadith, 70, 189–­91, 195–­98, 204, 209, 214, 232–­34, 246–­47, 250–­51; veneration of images of, 48 prophets: and divine sovereignty, 139; imitation of, 237; “polytheism in prophethood,” 224, 227–­29; possibility of Hindu prophets, 53, 56–­57, 59, 61–­63, 102–­4, 253. See also Jesus Christ; Joshua; Moses; Prophet Muhammad prostration, 15, 64, 65, 84–­85 Puranas, 72, 84, 171 Pyare Lal, Munshi, 86, 88

Ramila, 199 Rangoon riot (1893), 158 rebellion of 1857, 22, 80, 118, 121, 148, 225; depicted in Son of the Moment, 211, 212, 213, 216 religious freedom, 136–­38, 164–­66, 255 reprehensible imitation. See tashabbuh (reprehensible imitation) revelation, divine, 225–­27. See also Hadith; Qur’an Rida, Rashid, 7, 118, 297n52 ritual practices: in Al-‘Amiri’s analysis of world religions, 15–­16, 48; Azad prioritized caliphate over ritual piety, 129, 149; dangerous capacity for attracting imitation, 16, 48, 69–­70; obligatory (wajib) vs. permissible (mubah), 155–­56, 160, 161–­63, 175, 179, 181, 254; Sarasvati’s critique of Hindu rituals, 83–­84. See also cow sacrifice/slaughter; fasting; festivals; five daily prayers; idol worship; markers of Muslim distinction; prostration; tombs, veneration of Rohillas, 43–­44, 45 Rumi, Jalaludin, 211

Qur’an: authority of, 228–­29; collective reading of, 191; compatibility with empirical reality, 224–­25, 226–­27; on cow sacrifice, 165, 168; on friendship with non-­Muslims, 117–­18, 135–­36, 141, 146–­48, 197; miracle accounts, 92, 96, 98; Nanautvi asserted historicist superiority of, 98; nonanthropomorphic readings of, 302n88; on pre-­Islamic prophets, 61, 62, 103; on salvation and the afterlife, 50–­51; scriptural basis of the caliphate, 120; Shah Wali Ullah’s translation of, 191 Quraysh lineage, 127, 129–­32, 149, 207–­8

Sabaeanism, 13 Saharanpuri, Khalil Ahmad, 235 Salah al-­Din Ayyubi, 127–­28 salvation, 50–­51, 58, 61, 66, 190, 200–­201 Sarasvati, Dayananda: accused Muslims of idol worship, 84–­85; contributions to Shahjahanpur debate, 89, 90, 92, 98–­99, 105–­9; and Cow Protection Society, 157; critique of contemporary Hinduism, 83–­84; and publication of Satya Dharma Vichar, 104 al-­Sarraj, Abu Nasr, 191 Saudi state, 181 Schmitt, Carl, x, xi, 3, 10, 33, 127, 163, 194 Scott, Father, 89–­90, 105–­6 secularism: Azad’s valorization of secular ideals, 122, 136–­38, 151, 179, 255; and category of religion/

Ram, 103–­4, 168 Rama, 199

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index religious identity, 35–­36, 47–­49, 65–­66, 71–­76, 80–­81, 86, 92, 109–­14, 151–­52, 172, 207, 284n43; invocations of religious freedom, 136–­38, 164–­66, 255; and polemic between Azad and Khan, 151–­52; Schmitt on, 10; secularist historiography, 270–­72 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 241 shaʿaʾir-­i Islam/Shi‘ar-­i Islam, 147, 160, 162, 165, 176. See also markers of Muslim distinction Shah ‘Alam II (emperor), 44, 45 Shah Hafiz Sa’d Allah, 41 Shahjahanpur festival. See Festival of Deciding the (True) God al-­Shahrastani, Taj al-­Din, 51–­53 al-­Shawkani, Muhammad, 132 al-­Shaybani, Muhammad, 18 Sikhs, 43, 45, 67, 204, 207, 245, 262, 266 Sindhi, ‘Ubaydullah, 220 Singh, Sital, 54–­55 siwam, 141 Son of the Moment (Ibn ul Waqt), 210–­19 soul, 49, 59, 64–­65, 95 sovereignty: and fear of self-­erasure, 192, 196, 215–­16, 217–­18; and spiritual significance of caliphate, 119–­21, 122, 124–­26, 149–­50; tension with friendship, 3–­7, 77–­78, 177; walaya/wilaya, 5–­6 al-­Suhrawardi, Abu al-­Najib, 191 Sunami Gulshan, Muhammad Ahmad, 41 sun miracles, 97 al-­Tabarani, Abu’l-­Qasim, 247 tashabbuh (reprehensible imitation): dangerous capacity of embodied practices for attracting imitation, 16, 48, 69–­70; depicted in Son of the Moment, 210–­19; of dress/clothing, 202, 215–­16, 218, 232–­33, 243–­44, 245, 247–­50; fear of self-­erasure, 192, 196, 215–­16, 217–­18; and love, 197, 198–­99, 251–­52, 254; overview of South Asian ulama, 199–­210; positive senses of,

190–­91, 197–­98; in premodern Islam, 194–­99, 207–­10, 243–­44; and preservation of sovereign power through distinction, 191–­92, 195–­97, 203, 215–­16, 218; salutary imitation (tashabbuh bi’l khayr), 241; sharing food with non-­Muslims, 214, 215, 234–­35; tashabbuh Hadith, 70, 189–­91, 195–­98, 204, 209, 214, 232–­34, 246–­47, 250–­51 tashabbuh bi’l khayr (salutary imitation), 241 Tayyib, Qari Muhammad, 193, 199, 202, 210, 216; attitude toward colonial modernity, 252; career, 235–­36; critique of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, 245–­51; on importance of distinction for Muslim identity, 236–­45, 252, 255; on love, 251–­52, 254; on ontological distinction, 238–­42; on tashabbuh, 235–­45, 251–­52, 254 teaching suggestions and discussion questions, 273–­76 Thanvi, Ashraf ‘Ali, 82 time/temporality: Aryan system of, 107–­8; Islam as completion of history, 61–­62, 68–­69, 77, 100–­1 tombs, veneration of, 16, 59, 64, 181 traditionalism and modernism: of Ahmad Raza Khan, 168, 172, 254; Aligarh-­Deoband divide not reducible to simple binary, 221, 222–­23, 229–­31, 234–­35, 252; of Azad, 7, 119, 160, 181; Bari’s traditionalist hermeneutic, 174, 176, 179–­81, 182, 183, 254; of Ghamidi, 260–­61; of Nanautvi, 82–­83, 110, 113; of Nu‘mani, 149, 207; of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, 7, 222–­31, 234–­35; among South Asian ulama broadly, 7–­9; and tensions within Khilafat movement, 181. See also Aligarh-­Deoband divide translation: within imperial Muslim political theology, 70–­71; and interreligious friendship and

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index translation (continued) hospitality, 36, 76–­78; medieval and early modern Muslim studies of Hinduism, 46–­58; and modern category of religion, 35–­36, 47, 48, 49, 71–­76, 169, 172. See also Jan-­i Janan (Mirza Maẓhar) transmigration (metempsychosis), 48, 49, 59, 64–­65 Trinity, 48, 85 Truschke, Audrey, 38, 54, 282n20 Turkish empire. See Ottoman caliphate ulama: authority of, 227–­29; and Islamabad temple controversy, 260; opposed to tashabbuh, 202, 234, 248–­49; thought cannot be reduced to simple binaries, 11–­12, 25, 70–­71, 150–­51, 185–­86, 198–­99, 207, 221, 253–­54; traditionalism and modernism among, 7–­9 ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-­’Aziz (Umar II), 16, 243 ‘Umar Ibn al-­K hattab, 146, 208–­10, 243–­44 Umayyads, 128, 195, 243

unbelief: before and after Islam, 68; of non-­Muslims, 63, 65, 195; and practices forbidden for Muslims, 69, 101, 141, 199–­200, 202, 206; and Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s principles of faith, 224, 227, 229, 233, 248–­49 Upanisads, 51, 66, 71, 72 Usmani, Mufti Taqi, 257 Vedanta, 54–­55 Vedas, 60, 71, 74, 83, 89, 168–­69, 171–­72 Vishvamitra, 98 walaya/wilaya, 5–­6, 135 wali, 5, 135 Wali Ullah, Shah, 40, 41, 43, 191, 208, 304n48; descendants of, 23, 81, 182, 203, 205 al-­Wansharisi, Ahmad, 20 Weil, Kari, 186, 187, 302n83 world histories, 98–­100, 111, 255 World War I, 119, 136 Zabita Khan, 44 Zamindar (newspaper), 174, 182 Ziedan, Youssef, 101–­2 Zoroastrianism, 13, 15, 197, 204, 208

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