Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge 0190120800, 9780190120801

Citation preview

SCHOLARS OF FAITH

SCHOLARS OF FAITH South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

USHA SANYAL

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in India by Oxford University Press 22 Workspace, 2nd Floor, 1/22 Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi 110 002, India © Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. First Edition published in 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the addressabove. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-012080-1 ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-012080-0 ISBN-13(eBook):978-0-19-909989-4 ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-909989-8

Typeset in ScalaPro 10/13 by The Graphics Solution, New Delhi 110 092 Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020

To my mother, Vina Sanyal, in loving memory and to all the Muslim girls and women who are the subjects of this book

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures 1.1 Female literacy in UP versus the rest of India 1.2 Male literacy in UP versus the rest of India 1.3 Girls’ hostel built around an open square, Jami‘at al-Salehat 1.4 New classroom building, Jami‘at al-Salehat 1.5 Kindergarten students, Jami‘at al-Salehat 2.1 Shahjahanpur district map 2.2 Abbreviated genealogical tree of Ahmad Raza Khan and his descendants 3.1 Inside of the madrasa (old location), showing classrooms leading off a courtyard and stairs (June 2012) 3.2 Students in one of the classrooms of the old building, reviewing their lessons for exams 3.3 Students listening to a senior student relate a Hadith during morning assembly 4.1 Madrasa students performing morning exercises 4.2 Day students park their bicycles in the school courtyard during school hours

62 63 66 66 67 101 106

131 134 136 176 190

x

Figures and Tables

4.3 Computer lab at the Islamic public school

195

8.1 Entrance to Al-Huda Institute, Mississauga, Canada 8.2 Classroom in Al-Huda Institute, Mississauga, Canada

321 322

Tables A1.1a A1.1b A1.2 A3.1

A8.1

Syllabus of Madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, ‘Alima Level (June 2013) Syllabus of Madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, Fazila Level (June 2013) Madrasatul Niswan, Delhi (2003)

81 85 87

List of classes and subjects taught at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at (June 2012)

163

Al-Huda online courses, 2011–13

335

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project has been many years in the making. It began modestly when, in 2009, I first heard of Al-Huda online classes and decided to register as a student. I was not teaching at the time, had a high schooler and a middle schooler at home, and relished the idea of reading and studying the Qur’an with knowledgeable teachers. Thus began my four-year association as a student with Al-Huda. Many years later, in 2015, I published a paper about my ‘virtual ethnography’, a modified version of which appears as Chapter 6 in this volume.* The project grew thanks in large part to the encouragement of Sandria Freitag and David Gilmartin of North Carolina State University, USA. At their invitation, I attended a monthly South Asia colloquium in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina from 2010 to 2017. Simultaneously, my receipt of an American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Senior Short-Term Research Fellowship in 2012–13 gave my project its current comparative character. My warm thanks to Sandy and David for their intellectual inspiration and support, to the many participants of the colloquia for feedback on individual papers and chapters, and to the AIIS for the grant that allowed me to begin fieldwork at the madrasa in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India, in * Republished with permission of Brill Academic Publishers from: Usha Sanyal. 2015. ‘Al-Huda International: How Muslim Women Empower Themselves through Online Study of the Qur’an’. Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 13(3): 440–60. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

xii

Acknowledgements

2012. Since then, I have made return visits to the madrasa once a year for short periods of a week or a few days each time. These have given me a longitudinal picture of its growth and expansion over time, and deepened my relationships with the director, his core network of administrators, and a small number of teachers. In India, I must thank the students, administrators, and teachers of the madrasa for their willingness to talk to me and allow me to ask probing questions. Without their cooperation, the research for the first part of this book would not have been possible. I have protected the teachers’ and students’ identities by using pseudonyms. My thanks as well to the late Dr Sartaj Razvi and his family, especially Aiman, of Bareilly and Delhi, who helped me in innumerable ways throughout this research. Dr Sartaj and his wife first hosted me in Bareilly in the 1980s when I was researching the history of the Ahl-i Sunnat/Barelwi movement for my PhD. Years later, they hosted me on numerous occasions in connection with the current project. Furthermore, it was thanks to Dr Sartaj that I was able to visit Jami‘at al-Salehat, the Jama‘at-i Islami girls’ madrasa in Rampur, in 2013. Sadly, Dr Sartaj passed away on 31 March 2019, after the manuscript had been submitted for publication. In Delhi, I have also received invaluable help from Sumbul Farah, who completed her PhD thesis while I was working on this book and, in 2014, collaborated with me on the research that forms the basis for Chapter 5. She and I have published our findings in Modern Asian Studies (2019). I also owe a great debt to my friend and mentor, Roma Chatterji of the Delhi School of Economics, for her advice on new ways of thinking about the issues raised by the study. It was her idea that I do the ‘classroom ethnography’ that forms part of Chapter 4. In Delhi, I must thank Rajib and Kummi Sen, who provided me with a home away from home during my annual visits there. In Bengaluru, I thank my hosts Madhulika and Anil Malpani for their warm hospitality and generosity in 2013. In the US, Rupa Bose has helped me with my website and given me invaluable hands-on advice of a practical kind from one who is a published science-fiction writer and a poet. I thank Al-Huda International for their permission to do the virtual ethnography that constitutes the second part of this work. I was in periodic touch with Ms Taimiyyah Zubair, who coordinates much of the teaching at the Al-Huda Institute in Mississauga, Canada. She

Acknowledgements

xiii

and I met one-on-one on two occasions (in 2012 and 2014), and I sat in on a few of her and other Al-Huda teachers’ classes at Mississauga. It was her taped lectures on ‘word-for-word’ translation and analysis that online students like myself listened to during the four years of the course we took. I regard her, thus, as my teacher. As she is one of Dr Farhat Hashmi’s daughters, her willingness to speak with me and read draft chapters that I sent her in the interests of complete transparency, have been invaluable. In addition, I learned much from Ms Shazia Nawaz of the Testing Center outside Dallas, Texas, during a visit there in 2014. Two onsite visits to Bengaluru, India, in 2012 and 2013, gave me a better sense of the variety and vibrancy of Al-Huda classes which are run by former Al-Huda students, using Dr Hashmi’s taped lectures as a centrepiece. Finally, I thank fellow students of the class I was in, especially Fauzia Qureshi, who answered a lengthy questionnaire and was willing to answer other questions at all times. I have presented different parts of this work at the South Asia Conference in Madison, the Association of Asian Studies Conference in Seattle, as well as in smaller conferences in Philadelphia, Paris, Princeton, Toronto, and elsewhere. The feedback from participants of these conferences has been of immense help to me, especially as I have been an ‘independent’ scholar for many years. I am also grateful to my colleague Paige Rawson at Wingate University, North Carolina, USA, for intellectually stimulating conversations and help with feminist theory. Most of all, I would like to thank those who read parts of the manuscript at various points along the way: Sumbul Farah, Sandria Freitag, David Gilmartin, Barbara Metcalf, Ramya Sreenivasan, Laurel Steele, Sylvia Vatuk, and Pnina Werbner. Muhammad Qasim Zaman read the final draft in its entirety with great attention to detail. My heartfelt thanks to him for his generosity of time and for making suggestions which guided me in my revisions of the manuscript. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript who responded to the request by Oxford University Press, India, for peer reviews. I have tried to the best of my ability to respond to their suggestions. My sincere thanks to the editorial team at Oxford University Press, who edited the manuscript with scrupulous attention to detail and raised questions which have made for a much better book. At home, I have to thank my dear friends Suzanne, Nelly, Jane, Lucie, and Helen for moral support and questions about my project at

xiv

Acknowledgements

our weekly ‘salons’ at Suzanne and Guy’s house, where we drink hot tea, eat cookies, and talk about books read, films and art shows seen or not to be missed, and everything cultural, particularly if it relates to the French. Thank you, Elizabeth, for many years of friendship and an unflagging interest in my work. My friend Tamara Dossin has taken keen interest in it as well for many years, always asking, ‘What have you learned?’—a question not only about what I had learned from my ethnographic subjects but, more importantly perhaps, about the imprint my work with them had left on me personally. I empathize greatly with the subjects of both my ethnographies. After working with them and trying to understand their aspirations for the past several years, it could not be otherwise. It is my hope that this book will help ‘translate’ their worlds into an idiom that scholars and the interested reader will find meaningful. Finally, a big thank you to my wonderful husband, Gautam Bose, and our sons Girish and Arun, for joyous and noisy conversations around the dinner table whenever occasion has allowed. I hope they will read the book and better understand what kept me returning to India year after year while Girish and Arun were in middle and high school, and then college.

INTRODUCTION

Whether identified as ‘orthodox,’ ‘orthoprax,’ or ‘scripturalist,’ the tradition of the ‘ulama’ [Islamic religious scholars] has always been characterized by reliance on the ‘the two sources’ of [Qur’anic] scripture and sunnah… What is crucial here is the fundamental presupposition that truth does not reside in documents, however authentic, ancient, or well-preserved, but in authentic human beings and their personal connections with one another. Documents alone, without a line of persons possessed of both knowledge and righteousness to teach and convey them across the years, are useless as instruments of authoritative transmission. —William A. Graham, ‘Traditionalism in Islam’, pp. 504, 5071

This is a book about new institutions of religious learning that cater to South Asian Muslim girls and women, institutions that have arisen all across South Asian cities and towns, and in the South Asian diaspora, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, and accelerating in the 1990s and thereafter. I examine two institutions in particular, belonging to different schools of thought and differing from one another in terms of social class, geography, and access to technology. The comparative focus of my study necessarily broadens the questions that we must ask regarding the increased 1 William A. Graham, ‘Traditionalism in Islam: An Essay in Interpretation’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1993), 23: 495–522.

Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

2

Scholars of Faith

access of Muslim girls and women to education and the purposes to which they seek to put their educations. Why are South Asian Muslim girls and women seeking opportunities to acquire religious learning today, and what do they wish to accomplish with their newfound knowledge? What is the social impact of women’s greater access to education in South Asia; what societal changes does this exemplify and portend? How important are intra-Muslim debates about interpretive differences among South Asian Sunni Muslims, and what impact—if any—do these internal divisions have on relations between Muslims and the wider non-Muslim society in South Asia, particularly Hindus in India, and in the Western diaspora? South Asian Muslims today are heirs to the twentieth-century history of nationalist struggle for freedom from British colonial rule, which led to Independence in 1947, but also the trauma of Partition on both sides of the subcontinent, with the provinces of Punjab and Bengal being divided between the new nation states of India and Pakistan. Muslims, who had numbered about 25 per cent of the British Indian population prior to 1947, were now a mere 13 per cent of the Indian population, whereas West and East Pakistan were two wings of a Muslim-majority nation with a small non-Muslim population. In 1971, a further act of partition took place when, after a brutal war, the two wings separated into Pakistan (to India’s west) and Bangladesh (to India’s east). Since then, the national contexts of each of these three countries have set the stage for very different life experiences for their respective Muslim populations. As many scholars have noted, Muslim religious movements or organizations that began in the British colonial period have had distinct histories in India and Pakistan. Thus, to take the example of the most prominent ‘ulama-led Sunni Muslim movement in colonial India, that centred on the Dar al-‘Ulum in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Metcalf’s work shows that during the colonial period, the activities of Deobandi ‘ulama followed a dual track. On the one hand, they were scholars, teachers, and Sufis who were religious and cultural leaders of the Muslim community; on the other, they were Indian nationalists who formed the Jam‘iyat al-‘Ulama-i Hind party of ‘ulama, allied with the Indian National Congress in the anti-British struggle for Independence. Some, notably Mawlana Husayn Ahmad

Introduction

3

Madani (d. 1957), engaged in an array of anti-British activities, which earned him a prison sentence and exile.2 Since Independence and Partition, however, the Deobandi ‘ulama in India (like other Indian ‘ulama) have focused far more on ‘cultural preservation’ than on politics, particularly since the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in state and national elections.3 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, who has written extensively on the twentieth-century Deobandi (and other) ‘ulama in South Asia, shows us a different history: while there have been a number of scholars and thinkers of high intellectual calibre in Pakistan, as evidenced especially by their Hadith commentaries, Deobandis have also been at the forefront of political activity and national protest in that country. These activities include the anti-Ahmadi agitation in the 1970s, anti-Soviet warfare in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the rise of the Taliban, and more recently, anti-Shi‘i activities. As Zaman notes, the radicalization of particular Pakistani madrasas ‘is inconceivable in a context other than that provided by the Pakistani state’, although this has not meant that the state and different groups of ‘ulama have seen eye to eye on major national political issues.4 2

Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); on Mawlana Husayn Ahmad Madani, see, among others, Barbara D. Metcalf, Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and India’s Freedom (London: Oneworld, 2009); and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 32–4, and passim. Zaman also examines the views of Deobandi ‘ulama such as Mawlana Zafar Ahmad ‘Uthmani, who argued against Madani’s position. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, pp. 42–7. 3 Barbara Metcalf, ‘Madrasas and Minorities in Secular India’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 92. 4 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 74. Also see Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam; and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

4

Scholars of Faith

Similarly, we see the close connection between religious movements and political context in the case of the Jama‘at-i Islami, a very different kind of religious organization founded in the early 1940s by Mawlana Mawdudi.5 Characterizing the Jama‘at-i Islami as an Islamist organization, Irfan Ahmad’s research on the Jama‘at-i Islami madrasa Jamia‘tul Falah in Azamgarh district, east UP, reveals the degree to which the politics of this institution differs from that of the Jama‘at-i Islami in Pakistan, where Mawdudi moved after Partition.6 Ahmad writes: Whereas in the past the Jamaat called secularism and democracy haram [ forbidden], it now fights to safeguard these principles. Western-style Muslim colleges were previously considered ‘slaughterhouse[s],’ but now the Jamaat seeks their minority status. Having its schools affiliated with the government earlier had been seen as an approval of taghut (idolatory), but now it has no qualms about getting that affiliation. Similarly, whereas earlier it had disregarded other religions, now it accepts them. . . .The pursuit of an Islamic state has also ceased to be central on the Jamaat’s agenda.7

The complexities of this history are not what concern me here. Rather, I wish to make the point that the Deobandis and Jama‘at-i Islami in Pakistan and India (to cite two examples out of many) have had very different relationships with the state and, hence, different public roles in their respective societies. This becomes clear in the course of my examination of the two case studies discussed in this book, as the first is located in a small town in west UP, India, while the second began in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the 1990s, and now has branches in North America which offer both onsite and online classes for women. I have focused on its online classes, headquartered in Canada. This work argues that Islamic religious education today, in the early twenty-first century—particularly that for women—is thoroughly modern. This is a loaded term. What do we mean by a ‘modern Islamic education’? Robert Hefner gives us three important criteria: the functionalization of Islamic education, its internal dynamics, and 5

For the early history of this movement, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 6 Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010). 7 Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India, p. 8.

Introduction

5

debate about who has the authority to be purveyors of shari‘a interpretation among Muslims today. Do the ‘ulama have the authority to interpret the shari‘a in the contemporary world, as they have had over the centuries, or do they now have to share this authority with ‘new Islamic intellectuals’?8 Each of these questions has a direct bearing on the present study. The concepts of the ‘objectification’ and ‘functionalization’ of Islamic education were coined by Gregory Starrett with reference to state-supported mass education in Egypt.9 The objectification of Islam refers to the ‘growing consciousness on the part of Muslims that Islam is a coherent system of practices and beliefs, rather than merely an unexamined and unexaminable way of life. This is a pervasive process throughout the Muslim world.’10 By ‘functionalization’, he refers to ‘processes of translation in which intellectual objects from one discourse come to serve the strategic or utilitarian ends of another discourse. This translation not only places intellectual objects in new fields of significance, but radically shifts the meaning of their initial context.’11 The concept of ‘objectification’, or the idea that ‘Islam’ is a ‘religion’ that can and should be taught as a coherent system, has been a takenfor-granted assumption in state-sponsored secular mass education in postcolonial states since the twentieth century, having been part and parcel of British colonial policy in India and elsewhere. Both the madrasa and the online classes reflect this modern idea, although they are private initiatives rather than state institutions. Francis Robinson refers to it as the ‘rationalization of religious belief and practice’, and identifies it as one of the several outcomes of Islamic reform movements in South Asia since the eighteenth century.12 As for the concept 8

Robert Hefner, ‘Introduction: The Culture, Politics, and Future of Muslim Education’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 32–4. 9 Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 10 Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, p. 9. 11 Starrett, Putting Islam to Work. 12 Francis Robinson, ‘Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 40.

6

Scholars of Faith

of ‘functionalization’, I see this clearly at work in Al-Huda. Chapter 8, which explores Farhat Hashmi’s use of language, shows how the process of functionalization unfolds in her discourse. A notable example is in her discussions of science and scientific knowledge, which she believes are implicitly hinted at in specific verses in the Qur’an. The internal dynamics of the two institutions take us to the local contexts in which they arose and are currently functioning. Here, the Muslim concept of ‘being in the moderate middle’ is helpful. As Neal Robinson points out, ‘at the numerical centre’ (in verse 143) of the second chapter of the Qur’an—the longest of all 114 chapters—is a reference to the Muslims as a ‘middle nation’ (ummatan wasatan).13 For Muslims there could of course be no greater source of authority than the Qur’an, and thus it is no surprise that many Muslim groups claim the coveted ‘middle’ ground for themselves, while denying it to others around them. The Sunni denomination to which the madrasa explored in this book belongs is that of the Barelwis (more formally known as the Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at [people of the prophetic way and the community]). The madrasa’s director sees his denomination as being between two undesirable extremes: those who belittle the Prophet Muhammad on the one hand (the reference being to other South Asian denominations whom the Barelwis generically label as ‘Wahhabi’) and those who revere him to excess (here the reference is to the Shi‘a). Madrasa students at a girls’ madrasa in Delhi, according to Borker, position themselves as being in a different kind of ‘middle’: between women who, like their mothers, are uneducated (jahil, unparh) and modern, secular schoolgirls who do not observe the rules of female seclusion (pardah).14 They regard themselves as embodying the ideal between these two extremes. Al-Huda International, which has been offering both onsite and online Qur’an classes for women in Pakistan and internationally since the early 1990s, likewise thinks of itself as being in the middle, in this case self-identifying with the

13 Neal Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text (2nd edn, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), p. 201. 14 Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 192. Borker points out, though, that while the madrasa students criticized the ‘modern, secular’ students, they also envied them and wished to be like them.

Introduction

7

first of the three groups referred to in verses 2–20 in Chapter 2 of the Qur’an. This group is described as ‘the godfearing’, those who perform the prayer and fulfil the other duties required of them by God. The second group, in contrast, consists of non-believers, while the third—the worst—is made up of people who claim to be Muslim, but are in fact secretly engaged in undermining them. This provides the framework for Al-Huda’s self-definition and its definition of its ‘Others’—both Muslim and non-Muslim. Al-Huda has much to say about Muslims who consider other humans worthy of worship, a notso-veiled reference to Muslims such as the Barelwis, who are both ‘ulama and Sufis. Al-Huda, whose affiliation is with the Ahl-i Hadith, frowns upon Sufism. This discussion leads directly to Hefner’s third criterion of modernity in Islamic religious education, namely, the fracturing of religious authority. As many scholars have pointed out, Muslims in South Asia are internally divided along denominational lines, and the religious institutions they create reflect these divisions as well.15 Metcalf notes that this is less marked in south India than in the north, and that Kerala Muslims have worked in close coordination with the state to offer Arabic not only in madrasas but in state high schools as well.16 However, throughout South Asia, it is not just relations with the state that are subject to negotiation and debate, but also the rise of what Hefner refers to as ‘new Islamic intellectuals’. The founders of Al-Huda International, a husband-and-wife team from Pakistan who obtained their PhDs in Islamic Studies from Glasgow University in the 1990s, and who teach Qur’an and Hadith classes at Al-Huda, are a case in point. A prominent Deobandi scholar in Pakistan, Mawlana Taqi ‘Uthmani, specifically asked on what authority Dr Farhat Hashmi, the leading voice of Al-Huda, could engage in exegesis of the Qur’an, given that she is not the product of a madrasa education but has a degree from a Western university.17 15 See, for example, Metcalf, ‘Madrasas and Minorities in Secular India’, and Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’. 16 Metcalf, ‘Madrasas and Minorities in Secular India’, p. 98. On madrasa education in Kerala, also see Yoginder Sikand, Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India (Delhi: Penguin, 2005). 17 Faiza Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2010b), p. 203.

8

Scholars of Faith

Ironically, Mawlana Taqi ‘Uthmani himself has BA ‘degrees in arts and in law from the University of Karachi and a master’s in Arabic from the University of the Punjab in Lahore’, and is a prominent figure in Pakistan, having ‘served as a judge on the Shari‘at Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court’ for two decades, from 1982 to 2002. He has also published in English the book Introduction to Islamic Finance, thereby addressing not just an ‘ulama audience but a wider, Western-educated one as well.18 Zaman explains that he exemplifies a new phenomenon in Pakistani education, namely, the creation of new opportunities for the ‘ulama to seek academic degrees in the university system after having received a madrasa education. This was made possible by government reforms in the early 1980s which recognized madrasa degrees as ‘the equivalent of university degrees’, provided the madrasas offered some subjects taught in the ‘general curriculum’.19 Even so, the fact that Dr Farhat Hashmi is a Western-educated intellectual (whose earlier education took place in Punjab University in Pakistan), and a woman who is prominent on the national and international stage, has caused considerable dismay among the Pakistani ‘ulama, particularly the Deobandis. These currents of change in modern Muslim education are taking place throughout the world. Contrary to modernization theory in the 1960s, which had assumed that the ‘ulama were becoming irrelevant in the twentieth-century Muslim world because of the growing power of the secular state, scholars see a more complex reality today. Thus, Zeghal writes that al-Azhar in contemporary Egypt, ‘far from being [an] anachronistic institution marginalized by the development of a modern educational system … has been transformed into a hybrid space where multiple kinds (from the scientific to the theological) and levels (from simple memorization and rituals to ideological and political [aspects]) of knowledge and interpretation coexist.’20 Its student 18 Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’, pp. 80–1. 19 Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’, p. 78. 20 Malika Zeghal, ‘The “Recentering” of Religious Knowledge and Discourse: The Case of al-Azhar in Twentieth-Century Egypt’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, p. 109. Zeghal also briefly discusses the

Introduction

9

population has been continuously growing, as demand constantly outpaces supply: in the early twenty-first century, it had 1.3 million students at all stages of study, located in different institutions affiliated with al-Azhar throughout Egypt.21 Moreover, the ‘ulama are stepping outside their traditional roles in a variety of ways, and communicating with new audiences. Zeghal explores the heterogeneity of the views of al-Azhar’s ‘ulama despite the pressure exerted by the state to voice opinions it favours and suppress those it dislikes. In 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister at the time, came to al-Azhar in order to obtain a fatwa from Shaykh Tantawi, the Grand Imam, on the headscarf controversy roiling France.22 While the fatwa pleased Sarkozy (Shaykh Tantawi said it was France’s right to pass whatever laws it considered fit, though a headscarf ban would force Muslim women in France to commit a sin), it caused a furore in Egypt, with some ‘ulama calling for Shaykh Tantawi to resign.23 As this debate shows, the role of the Egyptian ‘ulama has grown in some respects while being constrained in others. Starrett goes further, arguing that ‘[a]s intellectual technologies and political institutions from the West have penetrated the Islamic world, they have helped to create new ways of conceiving of, practicing, and passing on the Islamic tradition’.24 This has the direct effect of ‘creat[ing] competitors possessing the tools of opposition’.25 Charles Hirschkind’s work on the popular practice of listening to Qur’anic recitation in Egypt illustrates how cassette recordings of the Qur’an

Egyptian state’s definition of al-Azhar’s role in defending the tradition of the ‘middle way’ (wasat), far from ‘extremist interpretations’. See Zeghal, ‘The “Recentering” of Religious Knowledge and Discourse’, p. 109. As Zeghal’s article was published in 2007, the 1.3 million figure pertains to the first few years of the twenty-first century. 21 Zeghal, ‘The “Recentering” of Religious Knowledge and Discourse’, p. 110. 22 On this, see Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 23 Zeghal, ‘The “Recentering” of Religious Knowledge and Discourse’, pp. 122–8. 24 Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, pp. 17–18. 25 Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, p. 11.

10

Scholars of Faith

played in Egyptian taxicabs and homes have contributed towards the creation of an ‘Islamic counterpublic’ which interprets the Qur’anic text in everyday contexts and applies its meanings to people’s lives.26

Genesis of This Study This book emerged from my growing curiosity about the lives of Barelwi women, who were absent from my previous work on the history of the Barelwi or Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at movement.27 What was distinctive about the lives of Barelwi women; what set them apart from other South Asian Muslim women? How did the belief system that had been articulated by leaders such as Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921) in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and subsequently dubbed the ‘Barelwi’ school of thought, manifest itself in the lives of women who belonged to families that adhered to this school? As I am a historian rather than an anthropologist by training, I began with a historical lens, looking for twentieth-century Barelwi texts for women. The earliest texts I found belonged to the genre of ‘advice literature’, well-known among Deobandis on account of Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s (d. 1943) Bihishti Zewar or ‘Heavenly Ornaments’.28 Not surprisingly, given the history of competition and rivalry that has marked the Barelwi–Deobandi relationship, the two Barelwi books have similar titles, though with a slight twist: one of the Barelwi texts is called Sunni Bihishti Zewar (‘Sunni Heavenly Ornaments’) while the other is called Jannati Zewar, which also translates as ‘Heavenly Ornaments’. The implication of the first title is hard to miss, namely, that this—rather than the earlier and much better known Deobandi work—is the definitive guide for Sunni Muslim women.

26

Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 27 Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870–1920 (new edn, Delhi: Yoda Press, 2010). 28 Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, a Partial Translation with Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

Introduction

11

Both texts are relatively recent, having been written in the 1970s. This was surprising, considering the book by Mawlana Thanawi dates back to the early twentieth century.29 Further probing revealed that the earliest guide for Barelwi women was not a separate book but a larger, multivolume work by Mawlana Amjad ‘Ali A‘zami (1878–1948) called Bahar-i Shari‘at (‘Garden of Shari‘a’), written over a 20-year period until the early 1940s, which served as an encyclopaedia for guidance on matters of everyday importance for both men and women. That a separate book for women was not deemed necessary until the 1970s was an interesting finding in itself, speaking to the emergence of women’s issues as a matter of greater concern over time.30 From here, I began to ask myself whether these books were actually used by Barelwi women today, or whether they read other books instead? This led me on a search for Barelwi girls’ madrasas, a relatively recent phenomenon in the late twentieth century among all South Asian Muslims, not just Barelwis. My fieldwork in a UP madrasa, described in the first part of this book, revealed that both books are indeed studied and their lessons are sought to be applied in the everyday lives of its students. What transformative impact does such study have on students’ lives? Is the madrasa an agent for change, and if so, in what ways? In what ways are students’ lives different as a result of their having studied at the madrasa? I grappled with these and other questions in the course of my fieldwork and asked students, teachers, and administrators to share their views with me. Indeed, these questions connect the fieldwork at the Barelwi madrasa with my second case study, namely, the Al-Huda online classes examined in the second part of this book. In December 2009, I signed on as an online student in response to an email announcement by Al-Huda of the launch of a new part-time class that would teach students the Qur’an in Arabic. The course took four years to complete. Although on the face of it, the two case studies are so different that (like apples and oranges) one wonders what purpose may 29

Metcalf, Perfecting Women, p. 1. On these texts, see Usha Sanyal, ‘Changing Concepts of the Person in Two Ahl-i Sunnat/Barelwi Texts for Women: The Sunni Bihishti Zewar and the Jannati Zewar’, in Usha Sanyal, David Gilmartin, and Sandria B. Freitag, eds, Muslim Voices: Community and the Self in South Asia (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013). 30

12

Scholars of Faith

usefully be served by examining them side-by-side, the comparison brings into sharp relief the innovative ways in which the technologies of our times—whether it be the printed book or the computer-based remote classroom—are harnessed to the social goals of different actors. In both cases, the goal is to promote an orthoprax lifestyle among Muslim women by means of textual study. While the Al-Huda students focus on intensive study of the Qur’an in the original Arabic, as well as related subjects such as Hadith (prophetic traditions) and fiqh (jurisprudence), the students at the Barelwi girls’ madrasa focus on an array of religious texts selected from the traditional dars-i nizami syllabus followed by South Asian madrasas of all Sunni schools of thought. But the purpose is the same: to transform lives in the here and now by applying the teachings of the texts to their everyday lives. What lessons Al-Huda and Barelwi students take from these texts are of course different, given their different theological positions on a range of issues. But what unites the two endeavours is nonetheless of key importance as well: both foster in their students a new way of seeing themselves and their relationship to the world around them, or to use Appadurai’s felicitous phrase, they create a cultural and gendered ‘capacity to aspire’.31 In each case, students are held responsible for their own religious and social comportment, accountable to immediate authority figures certainly, but ultimately to none other than God. The transformative power of this simple idea is considerable—and ultimately very modern in that it centres on individual action, voluntarily undertaken, to change internal states of mind and consequently outward behaviour as well. Individual action, the school authorities and Al-Huda believe, leads in turn to change at the community and societal level. This said, I am cognizant of—and couch my analysis in relation to—the very different contexts in which the two case studies are situated, in terms of the women’s class and economic status in the 31

Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, in Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, eds, Culture and Public Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 59–84. Hem Borker has used Appadurai’s concept of the capacity to aspire to great effect in her work on women’s education. See Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood.

Introduction

13

larger society; their access or lack of access to urban infrastructure and amenities such as adequate electricity and the basic necessities of everyday life; and importantly, to English-medium schools, as such an education opens doors to social status and employment in adulthood. The overall political context of the case studies is different as well, given that the Barelwi study is located in Shahjahanpur, a small town in west UP, India, while the Al-Huda one is located in cyberspace, with people signing in from all over the world and contributing to the virtual ‘classroom’ experience. Students and teachers from places as far apart as Sri Lanka, India, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, and the United States (US) all came together for four hours twice a week, and once more at the end of the week in small groups to review the week’s lessons. Consequently, the book has a transnational dimension which I hope will contribute to the literature on Islam and modernity, globalization, and new cyberpublics. As first-generation or second-generation South Asian Muslim immigrants, the women I came to know at Al-Huda were middle-class, college-educated, and in many cases married with children and/or employed full time. They were bilingual in English and a South Asian language, usually but not always Urdu. For none of them was Arabic their mother tongue. A few had a history of multiple migrations, having lived in the West or the Gulf, or Saudi Arabia, and then returned to India for good. By visiting some Al-Huda onsite locations—Mississauga (Canada), Texas (US), and Bengaluru (India)—I was able to meet several students and teachers face-to-face and learn some of their stories, which are the subject of Chapters 8 and 9. Although I do not explore issues related to religious extremism in the international arena (as I noted earlier, all my subjects position themselves in the ‘moderate middle’), in 2015 Al-Huda was shaken by an attack on US soil. In the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino, California on 2 December 2015, investigators learned that Tashfeen Malik, 29, the woman who, as part of a husband-and-wife team, had shot and killed 14 people and injured 22 at the Inland Regional Center, had once been an Al-Huda student when she lived in Multan, Pakistan. Although she did not complete the full course, leaving after her marriage to Syed Farook, an American-born Muslim, she had studied there from 17 April 2013 until 3 May 2014. She had reportedly been an intelligent and engaged student who participated actively in

14

Scholars of Faith

class, and introduced three or four of her friends to the course as well. After the attack, The Star, a Canadian newspaper, reported that on 8 December the Al-Huda Institute in Mississauga, outside Toronto, Canada, had closed for the day so as to protect its students from media attention in the wake of the shootings. The Star also reported that in 2014, 4 girls, aged between 15 and 18 and all of Somali origin, who had allegedly studied at the Al-Huda Institute, had left for Syria in order to join ISIS but had been ‘intercepted by Turkish authorities and sent home after their parents discovered their plans and alerted authorities’.32 The Al-Huda Institute, however, disclaimed any knowledge of these students, and was quick to disassociate itself from any ties to terrorism, saying that terrorism is against Islamic teachings and that it would do all it could to cooperate with authorities. By the time these events occurred, I had completed the online Qur’an course at Al-Huda and was beginning to write. It was a shock to know that one of the perpetrators of the attack had been even tangentially associated with Al-Huda. Deniz Kandiyoti,33 in her review of an article I wrote at the time, pointed out that Al-Huda has a lot in common with other pietistic movements—including non-Muslim ones—that centre on the cultivation of the virtuous self, and that preaching violence is not a part of their teachings (this was the point of my article).34 To her point that Al-Huda in many respects resembles pietistic movements from other faith traditions, the Israeli scholar Tamar El-Or describes an event that bears echoes of what I have related earlier in 32

The facts of the case were reported, among other places, in the New York Times. See http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/12/07/world/asia/apcalifornia-shootings-pakistan-connection.html; accessed on 21 January 2016. For the article in The Star, see http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/12/08/ mississauga-islamic-school-closes-citing-safety-concerns.html; accessed on 21 January 2016. 33 I thank Deniz Kandiyoti for her feedback on a short article I wrote after this attack, in December 2015. (The article is unpublished.) She raised a number of questions about Al-Huda’s political views in a personal communication. 34 However, Kandiyoti thought Al-Huda’s understanding of dar al-harb/dar al-islam and what constitutes jahiliya in today’s world would be worth exploring, in order to understand Al-Huda’s stance vis-à-vis the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1930s. I examine Al-Huda’s intellectual history in Chapter 7.

Introduction

15

the chapter.35  In  1995,  she  had completed her fieldwork at Bar-Ilan University, a Jewish seminary outside Tel Aviv, Israel, and had just begun a one-year writing fellowship in the US when she learned that a student from the seminary she had so exhaustively researched had shot and killed the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.36 She agonized about the tragedy for a long time, turning it over in her mind to understand what had happened and why and how she had not seen it coming. In my case, the events of 2015 did not concern anyone known to me or to the teachers and students I had met. This said, it bears noting that Al-Huda has an Ahl-i Hadith and Salafi perspective and while it in no way encourages or condones violence, students taking Al-Huda courses may choose to interpret what they learn in radical ways. Many listen to the taped speeches of well-known mainstream Muslim preachers, scholars, and teachers such as Hamza Yusuf, founder of the Zaytuna Academy, who is very popular in North America, but also to others such as Zakir Naik, the controversial Indian preacher whom the Indian government would like to have extradited from Malaysia.37 In the context of my online relationship with students and teachers, it was impossible for me to know my fellow students as whole persons or to know their social relationships outside the virtual classroom. The ‘franchise’ organizational structure characteristic of Al-Huda—discussed in Chapter 6—also impedes meaningful analysis of this event. I can and do, however, explore Al-Huda’s own intellectual perspective by looking at the writings and speeches of Farhat Hashmi and her husband, Idrees Zubair, and their implications for social and/or political action. This is the subject of Chapter 7.

Major Themes The Embodiment of Ethical Ideals in Everyday Life One of the most important themes in this study is the exploration of how ethical ideals animate and are manifested in the everyday 35 Tamar El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More: Literacy and Identity among Young Orthodox Women in Israel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). I am grateful to Pnina Werbner for bringing this work to my attention. 36 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, pp. 73–86. 37 See https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05/india-arrestpreacher-zakir-naik-170521055023564.html; accessed on 6 October 2019.

16

Scholars of Faith

behaviour of the students. Interest in how ‘ordinary people’ make sense of their lives in everyday contexts has surged in a number of academic fields of study. Cultural studies scholars study cultural phenomena (or ‘texts’, though this term is not confined to the study of a written text; it could just as well be a shopping mall or a cultural practice such as watching television)38—in the past or the present— because they are interested in understanding the ways in which those who use (or practice) the phenomenon make sense of it. To quote John Storey: ‘Cultural studies has always been more concerned with the meanings of cultural texts; that is, their “social” meanings, how they are appropriated and used in practice: meaning as ascription, rather than inscription.’39 The focus on meaning making by the subjects under study follows from an assumption by the cultural theorist that the people in question have agency—that is, that they are ‘mostly aware of what they are actively doing when they consume’.40 However, this agency is exercised within the constraints of social structure, that is, the multiple dimensions of social life across time and place, such as laws, socio-religious sanctions, and social institutions including class and economic relations, and so on. Thus, the way any given people ‘read’ or use a social text is necessarily informed by the social context in which they are historically located. It is the cultural studies scholar’s task to balance agency and structure in his or her analysis. The madrasa students whose daily lives I explore in this book and the Al-Huda online students of the Qur’an who were my virtual classmates for four years (2009–2013) were engaged in a highly purposeful endeavour, namely, to bring about personal change through 38

John Storey, Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life (London: Arnold, 1999), pp. 126–7. 39 Storey, Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life, p. 163. 40 Storey, Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life. The term ‘consume’ is being used in a broad sense to include not just physical consumption of goods, but also symbolic goods, including language, myth, or ritual, for example. See Storey, Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life, pp. 42–4, on symbolic goods. For Talal Asad’s critique of the cultural studies approach to agency, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 79 and Chapter 2 more generally.

Introduction

17

religious study. Al-Huda students are constantly exhorted to subject their daily thoughts and actions to self-scrutiny, to lift the ‘ordinary’ out of its taken-for-granted invisibility and think about it consciously, then decide whether to pursue the action or refrain from doing it based on whether or not it accords with Qur’anic teachings and the example (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad. This kind of deconstruction of the ‘everyday’ is what will lead, Al-Huda believes, to personal transformation—and indeed, as I hope to show, it has been remarkably successful in achieving its goal in the lives of those students and teachers I came to know. Given the primacy of shaping the new self around the teachings of the Qur’an and the Prophet, as interpreted by Al-Huda, the newly constructed self is not free of constraints; to the contrary, not only does the student observe the prescribed prayer schedules every day, but mundane daily activities, sleep schedules, and relationships with extended family, one’s spouse, children, and even neighbours acquire a well-defined pattern and follow a set of guidelines regardless of where in the world the Al-Huda student lives or what her personal circumstances may be. One might say that the process of change consists of making the ‘ordinariness’ of everyday life ‘extraordinary’ within the bounds of well-defined parameters, personal and/or social. Not surprisingly, given the Muslim students’ firmly held eschatological belief in an eternal afterlife after death and God’s judgment based on how they conducted themselves during their lifetimes, time assumes a new dimension as they get deeper into their studies. Indeed, time management is the subject of focused discussions at Al-Huda and is implicit as well in other aspects of daily interactions in the classroom. After they have been in the course for some time, students no longer need to be reminded that in light of the short time (ajalin musamma, or ‘a specified period of time’, as the Qur’an says) given to each one and the suddenness with which they could be struck down without warning, their most important goal in life should be to prepare for death and the life of the hereafter. Once students have internalized this message, it is their biggest incentive for seeking to bring about personal transformation in the here and now, each person looking critically at herself rather than over her shoulder at her neighbour. As noted, the goal of personal transformation, voluntarily undertaken, unites both the case studies in this book. The madrasa students

18

Scholars of Faith

and Qur’an students I observed made it clear that they wanted to study and acquire Islamic knowledge, that they were deeply motivated to do so, and that they held themselves to a high moral standard. The madrasa students’ desire for knowledge and their concomitant willingness to subject themselves to the ethical and practical discipline that follows stood in stark contrast to the attitude of students in an adjoining English-language secular school, as I discuss in Chapter 4. There is a vibrant academic debate today that centres on Saba Mahmood’s important work, Politics of Piety (2005), between critics who believe Mahmood overemphasizes the role of piety and those who see in her work an alternative perspective on expressions of female agency in an Islamic idiom.41 Voicing the former view, Hem Borker’s recent work on a girls’ madrasa in Delhi argues that contemporary scholarship on Muslim women’s religious education falls into one of two traps. Scholars either maintain that such education reproduces existing cultural norms and the marginalization of Muslim women, or they believe that it empowers Muslim women by opening up new opportunities for them to travel, earn community recognition, and have a sense of psychological self-fulfilment. Against these two positions, Borker argues that her study shows a more nuanced, complex negotiation characterized by conflict, contradiction, and ambivalence. Borker’s position is situated within a larger debate in the anthropology of Islam regarding the role of piety in Muslim communities as a whole, as some scholars have critiqued Mahmood on the grounds that she failed to take into account the everyday, fragmented lives of her subjects outside the context of the mosque movement.42 Citing instances of madrasa girls at play or some who went on to university and came in hindsight to see their own madrasa educations as unduly restrictive, Borker believes we should pay more attention to 41 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Among many others, see Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando, ‘Rediscovering the “Everyday” Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Divide’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2015), 5(2): 59–88. 42 For a recent summary of this debate in the anthropology of Islam, see David Kloos and Daan Beekers, eds, ‘Introduction’, Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion (New York: Berghahn, 2018).

Introduction

19

‘the ambiguities inherent in the everyday practices’ of female madrasa students.43 My response to Borker and others who have engaged in this debate is that the Islamic tradition, being inherently discursive, in no way forecloses ambiguity and nuance or the possibility of multiple interpretations of Islamic texual authority. Muslims throughout their history have argued and debated with one another about the meaning of different aspects of the Islamic tradition, and have interpreted its finer points in multiple ways. Indeed, it is the modern reification (or objectification, to use Starrett’s term) of ‘Islam’—by academic scholars and Muslims alike, though coming from different subject positions—which would have us believe that ‘Islam’ is a ‘thing’ with a fixed essence. Thus, madrasa girls who seek to become more pious in their daily lives do not cease to play games, enjoy Bollywood-inflected poetry (in the form of praise poems about the Prophet [na‘t]), sometimes go on outings that have nothing to do with ‘Islam’, or occasionally (as in my case study) question madrasa authorities’ decisions or those of parents or family elders. Relatedly, Kloos argues that although ‘processes of ethical formation are essentially contingent, fragmented, personal, future-oriented, and intersubjectively constituted’, this does not mean that Muslims are ‘locked in or struck by a condition of insoluble moral tensions and unattainable futures’. Rather, they use personal failure as a means of ‘progressive effort, rocky and unpredictable’, towards ‘pursuits of pious perfection’. The key is to recognize that the process of individual (and social) change is a dialectic, in which ‘the struggles inherent in everyday life contribute in productive ways to processes of ethical formation’.44 A second response to the critique of inconsistency comes from transnational feminist theory, which Attiya Ahmad employs to great effect in her recent work Everyday Conversions. Ahmad argues that the theory of transnational feminism pushes us to consider ‘the complex 43 Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood, p. 196, and passim. 44 David Kloos, Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority & Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 12.

20

Scholars of Faith

ways in which discursive traditions—both hegemonic and forms designated and differentiated as “other”—have developed through processes of colonial modernity and are the products of entangled rather than distinctive historical trajectories’.45 In the case of South Asian migrant women to Kuwait converting to Islam, the process of change ‘was neither unidirectional nor linear, but cyclical and recursive … [their] conversion to Islam was marked by emergent relationships and affinities, ones that did not supersede or subsume their existing familial and ethnonational belongings, but developed alongside them, in tandem, and reconfigured them.’46 The processual nature of personal change within the context of the everyday lives of her subjects and their past histories, as well as her taking seriously the South Asian gendered expectation that women are ‘naram’ (malleable and adaptive), which was important to her subjects, lead Ahmad to see that the process of conversion was ‘characterized by changes as well as continuities and uncertainties’. What it means to be pious can thus take different forms for different people, or even for the same person within the course of her lifetime.47 The students at the girls’ madrasa in Shahjahanpur were in their teens: usually starting at the age of 12 or 13, the student is 18 or 19 when she completes her studies. Her most important familial relations are with parents and siblings. In Chapter 5, I explore the impact of the girls’ madrasa education on family relations, based on fieldwork carried out by Sumbul Farah who conducted a number of interviews with former students to complement my observations within the madrasa.48 As the madrasa was founded in 2003, the number of students who had graduated and married and had children was still small at the time of fieldwork. Some indications of the kinds of changes that had already taken place in terms of the students’ relations with 45 Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Workers in Kuwait (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 9. On ‘entangled’ histories, see Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). 46 Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, pp. 20–1. 47 For a recent contribution to this debate, see Kloos, Becoming Better Muslims. 48 Usha Sanyal and Sumbul Farah, ‘Discipline and Nurture: Living in a Girls’ Madrasa, Living in Community’, Modern Asian Studies (2019), 53(2): 411–50.

Introduction

21

their spouses and in-laws are, however, available to us through Farah’s work, and are discussed in this book. The Al-Huda students who took the online Qur’an class I was part of were in a different stage of life from the madrasa students at Shahjahanpur. Most of them were college-educated and all were English-speaking (the class I took was conducted in English). Some were professional women. Several were married and had young children. A small handful were older women with grown children. These students’ primary familial ties were therefore with their spouses and children. I explore how their educational experience changed their relations with members of their families in Chapter 9. As noted earlier in the chapter, the Al-Huda students were located in a variety of countries, from Sri Lanka and India to Canada, the US, Great Britain, and the UAE. These students’ lives were shaped by global travel in a way that was absent in the lives of the madrasa students. In fact, the life of Al-Huda founder Farhat Hashmi may be seen as a modern-day rihla narrative (travelling for the sake of religious knowledge): from Pakistan she and her husband went to Scotland to pursue their PhDs in the 1980s, and in the 1990s they relocated to Canada, from where Hashmi launched an international educational effort that today spans several continents. While the students at the Barelwi girls’ madrasa I studied do not have such international exposure, some of the teachers and administrators at the school—and those affiliated with the larger complex of schools of which it is a part—have travelled abroad, either to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj or umra) or to visit family members living in Europe or North America. Even those who cannot travel for lack of financial means, have access to newspapers, the radio, television, cell phones, and the Internet. Although such access is far from uniform, the Barelwi madrasa students I studied do not live in geographical or cultural isolation. Apart from the fact that they are constantly travelling between home and school, sometimes over hundreds of miles, their lives are shaped by the wider cultural and political forces around them in multiple ways.

Everyday Islamic Discourse What persuades a young girl in a semi-rural part of north India to become more religiously observant? What makes the task of waking

22

Scholars of Faith

up at 5 a.m. to perform the early morning (fajr) prayer desirable? Why do some students undertake a voluntary fast in the middle of summer? What moral arguments do Al-Huda online teachers make to persuade students they cannot even see to wash or bathe before class, wear clean clothes, be in a quiet place, and sit at their computers, headphones at the ready, every class day? Or to take their exams when required, within the specified time limit, without consulting their notes or Qur’ans? To understand how teachers and students engaged in personal transformation in the everyday contexts of the madrasa and the virtual classroom, I listened to lessons and conversations in classrooms (both real and virtual), sat in on conversations between teachers and students in the madrasa staff room or playground during annual visits from 2012 to 2018, listened to students recite na‘t poetry in praise of the Prophet and deliver speeches before fellow students, shared meals with teachers and madrasa administrators, and engaged in one-on-one personal conversation with whoever was free to talk between classes or daily chores and during their free time. Similarly, I met with some Al-Huda teachers and students in Mississauga, Canada; in Dallas, Texas; and in Bengaluru, India, during short visits over the course of 2012–14. And using the technology of virtual learning on which Al-Huda online classes depend, I conversed with a group of classmates via Skype, PalTalk, and email from 2010 to 2013, occasionally following individual students on Facebook, where they posted and shared information about homework assignments for voluntary, extra classes not part of the course itself. Al-Huda also encourages students to listen to taped lectures by Farhat Hashmi and the teachers who taught individual courses, which I did periodically. Excerpts from these conversations constitute a vital primary source in this study. These voices are, indeed, at the heart of the book. Without them, there would be no book. The study of discourse, both oral and written, is particularly fruitful in an examination of Islamic religious education. Like much else that is foundational in Islamic culture, the Islamic discursive tradition is grounded in the oral nature of the Qur’anic revelation as well as the Hadith literature. As Walter Ong has noted, oral communication requires that there be an interlocutor and an audience in order to engage in verbal debate and repartee, which in Islamic tradition occurred within the parameters of different specialized disciplines

Introduction

23

(philosophy, rhetoric, theology, jurisprudence, and the like).49 Talal Asad looks at practice and discourse together, for it is through the daily practice of ritual, the sacralization of every aspect of daily life, reading aloud and memorizing sacred texts, and by engaging in religious and mundane day-to-day dialogue that students begin to participate in the transformative process and thereby develop the motivation to shape their lives around a new ideal.50 Elsewhere Asad describes the relationship between teacher and student as an ‘inner binding’,51 an interactive learning process in which students or those subject to the authority of another willingly and actively subject themselves to a process of self-fashioning and self-transformation. Likewise, Asad defines the term ‘tradition’ as discourses ‘that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history’,52 thereby connecting past, present, and future, and pointing yet again to the importance of practice, including debates among Muslims about correct practice, in determining what constitutes Islamic tradition. The arguments about individual practices are thus as important as the practices themselves: Argument and conflict over the form and significance of practices are therefore a natural part of any Islamic tradition … the process of trying to win someone over for the willing performance of a traditional practice, as distinct from trying to demolish an opponent’s intellectual position, is a necessary part of Islamic discursive traditions[,] as of others.53 49 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). 50 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), especially Chapters 1 and 4. 51 David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 212. Emphasis in the original. 52 Talal Asad ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, Qui Parle (spring/ summer 2009), 17(2): 20. (This is a reprint of the original 1986 article.) 53 Asad, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, pp. 22–3. Emphasis in the original. See also William R. Roff, ‘Whence Cometh the Law? Dog Saliva in Kelantan, 1937’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2009d).

24

Scholars of Faith

When we look at discourse in this way, we are less likely to hasten to label something in facile terms that oversimplify messy realities on the ground. Terms such as ‘Sufi’ and ‘Wahhabi’, for instance, which Western (and other) academic studies often present as opposed binaries, turn out to be less useful than they at first appear. I will return to this point later in the ‘Introduction’.

Performing Identity As interest in the everyday has grown, scholars have also asked how identities are performed in everyday contexts. Sumbul Farah, an anthropologist, argues that Barelwi identity and ethics—or ‘Barelwiyat’—must be publicly ‘performed’ in a variety of ways in order for a person to be seen by others to be a Barelwi Muslim: ‘To “be” a Barelwi, it is necessary to owe allegiance to a particular worldview in a way that one’s faith is inscribed onto one’s self, both within and without. An ineluctable relationship is thus forged between “doing” and “being,” wherein affirmation and denunciation both emerge [as] incumbent upon those who claim to be Barelwi.’54 ‘Performance’ in this case embraces not just the outward manifestations of Barelwi religious identity, which distinguish a Barelwi from a Deobandi (as, for example, in the position of one’s hands during the five daily prayers or the periodic visitation to saints’ shrines), but also, intriguingly, the etiquette (adab) of house construction: Houses are constructed keeping in mind the direction of the Ka‘aba. Toilets in the house are constructed in such a manner that one neither faces the Ka‘aba, nor has one’s back toward it, while relieving oneself. … Beds are always laid in a manner that one never sleeps with one’s feet in the direction of the Ka‘aba. In fact, even if there is a photograph of the Ka‘aba in a room, one must not stretch one’s feet in its direction. The image ‘becomes’ the object and the same order of reverence is required to be shown towards it.55

As Farah goes on to argue, adab is a ‘fluid category, and any attempt to pin it down must necessarily delimit its scope and define its 54 Sumbul Farah, ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz: Modalities of “Being” Barelwi’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (2012), 46(3): 259–81. 55 Farah, ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz’, p. 268.

Introduction

25

range’.56 This gives rise to ambiguity and anxiety on the part of the individual to demonstrate adab in a clear and unequivocal manner through his or her personal behaviour. Likewise, adab is also demonstrated by denouncing the lack thereof in others around one: ‘it becomes a moral duty for everyone to not just follow the tenets of Islam the way they are believed to be followed by Barelwis, but to ensure that everyone around them does the same’. This moral censure takes place at three levels, namely, ‘the silent’ (in one’s heart), ‘the vocal’ (verbal censure), and finally, ‘the physical’ (preventing an act of wrongdoing by physical means). These three levels correspond, Farah writes, to the three ways in which Barelwi identity is performed, that is, through etiquette (adab), action (amal), and censure (aitiraz).57 Farah makes clear that the ways in which Barelwis sacralize the everyday in myriad contexts is distinctive to them, and that this is what constitutes ‘Barelwiyat’.58 Likewise, the Barelwi students at the madrasa I studied also perform their identity in a number of distinctive ways. These include the prayers they recite every day in their morning assembly, their hand gestures when the name of the Prophet Muhammad is mentioned, and their weekly recitation of poetry (na‘t) in praise of the Prophet on Thursday nights, among other things. Al-Huda students also ‘perform’ their identities, though the ways in which they do so are different. In keeping with the Ahl-i Hadith perspective which informs their religious identity (see Chapter 7), they eschew the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday or the observance of saints’ death anniversaries. The most admired skill, and thus the highest kind of ‘performance’, is that of Qur’an recitation (tajwid). Students hone their skills through hours of listening to renowned reciters—indeed, the importance of ‘listening carefully’

56

Farah, ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz’, p. 269. Farah, ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz’, pp. 278–9. 58 Farah cites an interesting example of how ‘Barelwiyat’ is ‘performed’ in everyday life by relating how a woman visiting the graves of the women in Ahmad Raza Khan’s family tried to prevent her slippers from being stolen or lost by shoving them under the carpet at the threshold just outside the sacred precincts and sitting on them. However, another woman noticed this and berated her for the act, accusing her of lack of respect (be-adabi) by placing the slippers so close to the shrines. Farah, ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz’, pp. 275–6. 57

26

Scholars of Faith

with single-minded attention is much emphasized (Hirschkind calls this an ‘ethical listening’, ‘a listening that is a doing’).59 But as with students of the Qur’an in other parts of the world, listening must be accompanied by recitation out loud following accepted vocalization techniques. Recitation practice is thus the other side of the coin— students spend several hours a week listening to and practicing each lesson in their own homes, and in the presence of fellow students and teachers. However, in light of Qur’anic injunctions against the seductions of the voice (for example, Sura al-Isra’ Q 17:64), widely interpreted as Satan’s attempts to lead the believer astray, even when women have achieved proficiency in the art of Qur’an recitation and are able to do so in the presence of others, they do so in private or semi-private, rather than public, settings.60 Another mode of performance is that of verbal tafsir or expounding on the meaning of a word or phrase in the Qur’an. Al-Huda students and teachers exhibit considerable confidence in speaking in group settings—first among fellow students and teachers whom they know well, then, for those who go on to leadership roles as Al-Huda volunteers and office bearers, in larger all-female groups. This confidence is bolstered by the ability to quote fluidly in Arabic from verses of the Qur’an and Hadith, a skill acquired through years of diligent study. Students are taught that they should not fear peer pressure or negative comments by those around them, as God alone is the ultimate judge, not other people. Some women go on to assume great responsibility, involving periodic travel to different Al-Huda centres for da‘wa (dissemination of the Qur’anic message) or to encourage struggling centres and help them in practical ways. Just as important as the ability to recite the Qur’an well, however, is the ‘performance’ of identity at the level of the everyday, which is something all Al-Huda students do in different ways all the time. 59

Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape, p. 34. However, this is not the case in all Muslim societies around the world. In Indonesia, for instance, female Qur’an reciters recite and compete in public— indeed, in national and international—Qur’an recitation contests, as described by Anne K. Rasmussen in Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). The difference may have to do with the fact that most South Asian Sunni Muslims belong to the Hanafi legal school, while Indonesian Sunni Muslims are Shafi‘is. 60

Introduction

27

Here, I am thinking of the admonition to students, for example, not to neglect their early morning (fajr) and late afternoon (‘asr) prayers in particular. These two prayers are singled out over and above the others because it is hard to wake up in time to perform the dawn prayer—one’s instinct is to roll over and go back to sleep—and the afternoon prayer occurs at the end of the workday when the demands of the family and of rush hour traffic tend to crowd out the need to withdraw quietly for the few moments required to perform the prayer. In order to overcome these obstacles, the Al-Huda student has to plan her day so that she finds herself in an appropriate physical location at the required time, which illustrates the importance of time management, noted earlier in the chapter. The importance of performing the prayer at the designated time, in fact, is constantly reiterated, alongside the message to women to reduce the time they spend cooking elaborate meals and the attention they devote to ‘frivolous’ matters such as shopping or entertaining.

Apples and Oranges? Sufis and Wahhabis? It is time to say something about the terms ‘Barelwi’ and ‘Wahhabi’, terms often used to refer to the two groups of people in the case studies in this book. What do these terms mean, to the practitioners themselves and to us? What terms do they use to describe their group affiliations? What, in their view, do these issues of nomenclature represent and stand for, and in what way do their theological positions differ from one another? How do we, as academics and outsiders, categorize the people we study, and are the categories we use misleading or helpful? These questions are particularly worthy of attention when speaking of Muslim subjects, as a number of value-laden terms have gained currency in our early-twenty-first century Islamophobic climate, both in the West and in South Asia. To take the term ‘Barelwi’ first, it is widely used in South Asia for the Sunni Muslims who embrace the late-nineteenth-century religious scholar Ahmad Raza Khan Barelwi’s interpretation of Islamic tradition. It originates in the fact that he belonged to the city of Bareilly in the state of UP, India; such designations, known as nisba (Ar., connection, relationship), are commonly added to a person’s first name as a means of identification, together with others which

28

Scholars of Faith

could include the father’s name, Sufi affiliation, or a nickname.61 However, the term ‘Barelwi’ when used to refer to the group under study has a pejorative implication, namely, that the followers of this school of thought (maslak) are local to a particular place rather than part of the wider Muslim world, and that their belief system is therefore deviant, not in keeping with Sunni beliefs.62 The self-designation of the movement, by contrast, is Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at, literally ‘people of the prophetic way and the community’, a classic Arabic term that Muslims in many parts of the Islamic world have used in the past and continue to use today, to describe themselves. It states unequivocally that the movement is Sunni Muslim. Indeed, one may read into this the claim that Muslims who do not agree with their beliefs are logically, therefore, outside the Sunni mainstream. The two terms, and their implicit claims, are thus mirror opposites of one another. (In practice, because the term ‘Barelwi’ is short and immediately calls to mind the South Asian Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at, even its own practitioners use it, and I am therefore using it in this book.) The Barelwi claim that they represent the original Sunni Muslim followers of the Prophet rests on their related claim that because of their ‘love of the Prophet’ (‘ishq-i rasul), they model themselves on him and follow his ‘way’ or sunna in all its particulars. Of course, this ‘way’, known to Muslims worldwide through the Qur’an and the record of the Prophet’s words and deeds (Hadith), guides the everyday behaviour of all practicing Muslims, not just that of the Barelwis. However, differences of interpretation of these founding texts have arisen throughout Muslim history. Since the Prophet is reported to have said that, in the future Muslims would fall away from the path he 61 On Muslim naming and naming patterns as a source of history, see, among others, William R. Roff, ‘Onomastics, and Taxonomies of Belonging in the Malay Muslim World’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2009c). 62 On this issue of terminology, see, among others, Usha Sanyal, ‘Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2007–1 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 71–5; Usha Sanyal, ‘Barelwis’, in Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2011–1 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 94–9.

Introduction

29

had charted out and would split into 72 groups, only 1 of which would be on the correct path, these interpretive differences assume great urgency for Muslims. Being on the wrong path could lead one to be consigned to hell (jahannam) rather than heaven (jannat), a prospect that all believers wish fervently to avoid. Specifically, Barelwi prophetology holds that the Prophet Muhammad, being made of God’s primordial light, had no shadow, and that God so loved him that He gifted (‘ata) him knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm-i ghayb), which included, but was not limited to, the five things mentioned in Q 31:34 (Arberry trans.): ‘God knows the hour, and he sends the rain. He knows what is in the womb. No one knows what he will gain tomorrow, and no one knows where he will die.’63 Ahmad Raza Khan argued that this verse had been abrogated by two later ones (Q 3:179, 72: 26–7) which refer to God reserving for Himself knowledge of the unseen, ‘except a messenger whom He has chosen’ (Q 72: 27). This messenger, Ahmad Raza believed, was none other than the Prophet Muhammad, God’s beloved. A third controversial aspect of Barelwi prophetology is the argument made by Ahmad Raza in numerous rulings (fatwas), that the Prophet intercedes on behalf of the believer at all times, not just on Judgment Day. Furthermore, he is alive and sentient in his grave, and has the ability to be spiritually, and perhaps physically, present wherever and whenever he wishes. The Prophet’s birth anniversary (milad al-nabi) is an especially potent occasion when his presence is felt to be close, celebrated with meetings in which the circumstances surrounding the birth are recalled (zikr-i wiladat). The distinctive Barelwi practice of standing up (qiyam) during the sermon when his birth is mentioned springs from the belief that his spirit is present at the time.64 For Barelwis, such beliefs about the Prophet’s power of intercession underlie the institution of Sufi discipleship, as it links the believer spiritually with the Prophet through a series of human intermediaries, namely, the founders of 63 I have used Arberry’s translation throughout this book, as it is linguistically closer to the Qur’anic Arabic than many other contemporary translations. See Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an, pp. 4, 288–90. 64 Ahmad Raza Khan, Iqamat al-qiyama a‘la tawhin al-qiyama li-nabi (Performing [the Ritual of ] Standing Up Despite the Calumny of those Who Refuse to Stand for the Prophet) (Karachi: Barkati Publishers, 1986).

30

Scholars of Faith

different Sufi orders (tariqas) and the transmitters of their teachings (murshid, pir) over time and place. Clearly, the beliefs outlined very briefly here belong to a cluster of ideas we would recognize as being ‘Sufi’, which is how the Barelwis are characterized. But what does this mean in the lives of the people at the madrasa I describe in this book? How do they live these ideas out in practice? And what of the term ‘reformist’, which I use to describe the madrasa? How can an institution which holds to the beliefs I touched on earlier in the chapter be described as reformist? Are the two not polar opposites, wholly incompatible with one another? Scholars have used terms such as ‘enchanted’, ‘customary’, and ‘counter reformist’,65 to describe such a worldview, as the term ‘reformist’ is usually associated with those who have taken more rationalist positions on the Prophet (seeing him in less superhuman terms), intercession (denying or minimizing the role of human intermediaries before God), and calendrical celebrations (minimizing the importance of, and fanfare surrounding, occasions such as the Prophet’s birth anniversary or the death anniversary of Sufi masters). My characterization of the madrasa as reformist is in part related to my position that we take seriously the self-description of the subjects we are describing. In this case, the nineteenth-century Muslims who described themselves as Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at were in their view engaged in reform (tajdid), and saw Ahmad Raza Khan as the reformer (mujaddid) of the fourteenth Islamic (hijri) century, tasked with reminding South Asian Muslims of the prophetic message and way (sunna) and urging them to live their lives in conformity with the shari‘a in anticipation of Judgment Day. Since then, the descendants of Ahmad Raza, the custodians of his legacy and memory, have come to constitute a spiritual elite in Bareilly who engage in what many see as a corruption of his message of reform—or, in the words of one of my informants, ‘reducing Sufism [tasawwuf] to a bazaar’. Now they in turn are undertaking their own efforts of renewal and reform. As William Roff wrote in a different context, this dialectic or tension caused by a lack of fit or noncongruence between Islamic ideal and reality has obtained in all Islamic societies ‘from the first 65

Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Introduction

31

generation in Arabia to the Indonesia or Morocco—or for that matter the Arabia—of the present’ and ‘acts as a dynamic force within Islamic cultures … constantly engaged in translating synchronic tension … into diachronic “oscillation” (social, cultural, political, or ideational change) in one direction or another’.66 This point is similar to that made by Kloos earlier, namely, that individual Muslims build on past failures to become ‘better Muslims’. Thus, if we take our subjects of study at their word, seeing them as acting within their own ontological structured universe of meaning in pursuit of their chosen personal, social, and institutional goals— rather than to assume ‘that what the natives say is part of an innocent pathology’, and that ‘only the trained observer–analyst can have the diagnostic key’ to understanding what they are really about67—we can avoid getting caught up in limiting binaries and dichotomies. There need be no contradiction, then, in being Sufi and reformist, as indeed the history of Sufism itself shows us.68 The specific forms this reformist impulse takes in the girls’ madrasa, and how they are articulated in the discourse that accompanies the everyday process of learning and living in accordance with lessons learned, are spelled out in the chapters that follow. There is a second argument, rooted in South Asian history, in favour of characterizing the Barelwis as ‘reformist’. As Nizami shows in his study of Sufi reformist movements in South Asia, the philosophical debate between adherents of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s (d. 1240) concept of wahdat al-wujud (unity of Being) and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi’s (d. 1624) concept of wahdat al-shuhud (unity of perception) led to a 66

William R. Roff, ‘Islam Obscured? Some Reflections on Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2009b), pp. 4–5. 67 William R. Roff, ‘Islamic Movements: One or Many?’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2009a), p. 54. 68 A similar point is made by Pnina Werbner in her study of the transregional cult of Zinda Pir. See Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). Also see Pnina Werbner, ‘Reform Sufism in South Asia’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

32

Scholars of Faith

reformist movement within Sufism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi being a Naqshbandi, the reformist impetus was led by the Naqshbandi order. The famous eighteenth-century Delhi Hadith scholar Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) and his descendants at the Madrasa Rahimiya in Delhi brought about a synthesis between the two positions.69 During the eighteenth century, the Rohilkhand region—including Bareilly, Rampur, and smaller towns in the region—came under the influence of another branch of the Naqshbandi order, that of the Mazhari Naqshbandis.70 In the early nineteenth century, the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya, led by Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (d. 1830), attracted adherents of other Sufi orders as well, and by touring towns and the countryside in the Upper Doab in the decade or so preceding the jihad on the frontier, Sayyid Ahmad created a popular reformist movement with local roots. A key figure who supported the ideas of the reformist Tariqa-i Muhammadiya was the Chishti Sufi Shaykh Haji Imdadullah (d. 1899). Although a child during Sayyid Ahmad’s tour in the Upper Doab, he took ‘honorary initiation (bai‘at-i-tabarruk)’ from Sayyid Ahmad,71 and later became the Sufi preceptor to the ‘ulama who founded the Dar al-‘Ulum at Deoband in 1867. Although Haji Imdadullah moved permanently to Mecca after the 1857 uprising, he maintained close relationships with his disciples—many of them ‘ulama and reformist Sufis of the Chishti Sabri order—and also firmly tied the Dar al-‘Ulum to the reformist message of Sayyid Ahmad and the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya. These networks help explain the close ties between Shah Wali Allah’s reformist teachings, reformist currents in the Chishti Sabri order, and the first generation of scholars of the Deobandi movement. The seeds of the Barelwi movement were also sown at this time, in opposition to the ideas of Muhammad Isma‘il’s reformist tract, Taqwiyat al-Iman (Strengthening the Faith). In the 1870s, Ahmad Raza’s father Naqi ‘Ali Khan (d. 1880) participated in debates on imtina’-i nazir ([theoretical] impossibility of an exact equivalent [to the 69 Moin Ahmad Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam: The Chishti–Sabris in 18th–19th Century North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 70 Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam, p. 178. 71 Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam, p. 184.

Introduction

33

Prophet]), an issue that arose out of Muhammad Isma‘il’s claim in Taqwiyat al-Iman that God’s omnipotence was limitless (for example, Q 2:117) and God therefore had the ability, should He so wish, to create another prophet like Muhammad.72 However, although the Barelwis rejected Sayyid Ahmad and his Tariqa-i Muhammadiya as well as the works of Muhammad Isma‘il, they saw themselves as followers of Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (d. 1824), son of Shah Wali Allah. In fact, they regarded Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz as the ‘renewer’ (mujaddid) of the thirteenth Hijri century and Ahmad Raza Khan as that of the fourteenth.73 Thus, despite their differences with the leaders of the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya, the Barelwis considered their intellectual lineage as flowing from the same late-eighteenth-century Wali Allahi tradition as the Deobandis. This shared history is seldom recognized by scholars of the Deobandi and other late-nineteenth-century reformist movements. Turning to my second case study, that of the Al-Huda students of the Qur’an, we encounter a different problem, namely, the use of the term ‘Wahhabi’ to describe the movement, which in South Asia has had negative connotations going back to colonial times. The history of the eighteenth-century Arabian Wahhabi movement—whose practitioners called themselves Unitarians (muwahhidun)—is well known.74 The Indian Ahl-i Hadith, the intellectual and spiritual lineage of Al-Huda founders Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair, is inspired by many of the same sources as the Wahhabis, including among others, the writings of the Syrian Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). However, as Haykel points out, the Wahhabis follow a ‘restrictive interpretation’ of the Hanbali school of law while the Ahl-i Hadith follow no school at all, which is a major difference between them.75 Moreover, the Ahl-i Hadith denied having any affiliation with the Wahhabis of (now Saudi) Arabia. The ideas they espoused included a strong emphasis on studying the foundational texts of the Qur’an

72

For details, see Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 55. Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 229. 74 See the excellent study by Natana J. DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 75 Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14. 73

34

Scholars of Faith

and the prophetic traditions (Hadith) directly in Arabic; rejection of the authority of the four Sunni law schools; exercising independent juristic reasoning on religious issues by following the opinion of chosen scholars, regardless of their affiliation; and rejection of the authority of Sufi masters and the practice of visiting their graves. They regarded the Prophet as a human who did not enjoy knowledge of future events and was prone to error, though they believed him to be sinless (ma‘sum) and assured of heaven. Unlike the Barelwis, they did not believe that he or any other venerated ancestor had the power of intercession from beyond the grave, though the Prophet will have such power on Judgment Day.76 As Preckel indicates, the intellectual genealogy of the Ahl-i Hadith includes: Indian roots in the ideas of Shah Wali Allah and his sons; the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya led by Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi and Muhammad Isma‘il Dehlawi, author of Taqwiyat al-Iman and Sirat al-Mustaqim (The Straight Path); and inspiration from the Yemeni scholar Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Shawkani (1760–1834) and the Indian scholars who embraced his ideas (among whom were some Tariqa-i Muhammadiya followers), particularly his opposition to taqlid (adherence to one of the four Sunni schools of law). While the ideas briefly enumerated earlier correspond to what scholars of Islam would characterize as ‘reformist’, Riexinger complicates the picture by referring us also to other aspects of Ahl-i Hadith belief which are more akin to what scholars refer to as modes of ‘enchantment’. Among the examples he gives are twentieth-century Ahl-i Hadith theological debates in India regarding the Qur’anic exegesis of verses referring to God sitting on (istawa) His throne (for example, Q 7:54), which many Ahl-i Hadith scholars interpreted 76 Claudia Preckel, ‘Ahl-i Hadith’, in Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2007–3 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 92–7. However, as Riexinger points out, many Ahl-i Hadith scholars have forged strong links with the Saudi regime since the 1920s, particularly after 1947. (Many of the books Al-Huda uses in its classes are published in Saudi Arabia.) See Martin Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity? A Study of the Ahl-i Hadis in Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Century South Asia’, in Gwilym Beckerlegge, ed., Colonialism, Modernity, and Religious Identities (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 156.

Introduction

35

literally, and more generally on Ahl-i Hadith acceptance of miracles and attitudes towards science.77 My observations of Al-Huda classes confirm that they accept the occurrence of miracles, for to deny them would be tantamount to diminishing God’s power;78 with regard to science Al-Huda teaches that where a contradiction appears to exist between the Qur’an and the findings of modern-day science, the former must be favoured over the latter, as the Qur’an anticipated the findings of science by over a thousand years. And if the Qur’an seems to make statements that contradict known scientific findings, the error is in Muslims for not interpreting the Qur’an correctly.79 In addition, I agree with Riexinger that the reliance on Hadith leads the Ahl-i Hadith—and Al-Huda specifically—in the direction of ‘enchanted’ rather than ‘reformist’ readings of scriptural texts. Such seems to be the basis for the permissability of engaging in the popular healing practice of ruqyah (Qur’anic healing) or dam (literally, ‘breath’), whereby a person recites the Qur’an and blows on water, which may then be drunk to cure an ailment.80 Al-Huda also places great reliance on supplicatory prayers (du‘a), there being different ones for different occasions, such as particular times of the day, or when visiting the sick, when faced with difficulty or misfortune, when a person dies, and so on. Al-Huda teaches students that God will reward the regular recitation of these du‘as with successful outcomes, provided the student meets the requisite conditions.81 Such ‘fervent belief’, one scholar writes, ‘border[s] on the superstitious’.82 Even if one does not concur with this characterization, given that the student is enjoined to have the right intention and not to imagine that she has any power 77

See Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?, pp. 147–65, especially pp. 154–5. 78 The title of one of the books on the Al-Huda student reading list is indicative of the belief in miracles. It is Safiur-Rahman Mubarakpuri, When the Moon Split: A Biography of Prophet Muhammad (Riyadh: Darussalam, 1998). 79 Farhat Hashmi, Lesson 1.01b (2005); Lesson 1.04e–f (2005). 80 Response by Farhat Hashmi to a student question, October 2013. 81 One of the books assigned for student reading is Abu Ammaar Yaasir Qadhi, Du‘a, the Weapon of the Believer: A Treatise on the Status and Etiquette of Du‘a in Islam (n.p.: Al-Hidaya, n.d.). 82 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 148.

36

Scholars of Faith

over the outcome, which can only rest with God, the fact remains that the emphasis on memorizing and reciting du‘as, and the acceptance of miracles and of Qur’anic healing practices point to the reality that, to quote Roff, ‘[o]ne cannot, in the interests of however desirable a patterned understanding, avoid the burden of complexity’.83 In their self-presentation to students, the leaders of Al-Huda eschew the use of particular maslak identities, even that of the Ahl-i Hadith. They wish to be identified quite simply as Muslims.84 They teach that the first source of Qur’anic interpretation is the Qur’an itself, the second being the prophetic traditions. Recourse to other authorities must take third place, after these primary sources, which must therefore be studied and understood by the individual Muslim, whether man or woman. This is a major difference from the Barelwis, whose interpretations are based on the principle of taqlid, following the teachings of one of the Sunni schools of law (madhhab; in South Asia the dominant school is the Hanafi, and secondarily the Shafi‘i in Kerala, southwest India). To return, then, to how we should categorize Al-Huda, I am guided by Al-Huda teachers who highlight to students the dual tasks of studying, understanding, and memorizing the Qur’an in the original Arabic on the one hand, and that of sharing this knowledge with fellow Muslims and the wider public on the other. The first goal is to acquire Qur’anic knowledge in order to live by the knowledge so gained, and also to be able to identify and know the meaning of Qur’anic verses discussed by preachers during Friday noon-time sermons, so that one is in a position to independently judge whether the preacher’s message should be embraced and accepted or rejected, and if so, on what grounds. Knowledge of the original Arabic Qur’an is clearly the key here. The second task, Al-Huda teaches, is to take this message to others (to do da‘wa), whether they be Muslims or non-Muslims (though in practice it emphasizes the former over the latter), both by embodying what it means to be Muslim (to be a ‘living tabligh [call]’, or a ‘walking Qur’an’, to quote Hashmi) and by means of verbal persuasion. This task is so important that Al-Huda 83

Roff, ‘Islam Obscured?’, p. 21. For this insight, I thank Sandria Freitag with whom I have had many discussions about issues I have wrestled with in this study. 84

Introduction

37

presents it as a duty incumbent on those who have acquired the requisite knowledge. Failure to fulfil this duty is tantamount to selfishness at best and to a sin at worst. Based on these two aspects of Al-Huda, I would characterize it as a da‘wa or proselytization movement,85 a feature that allows for comparison across religious lines. Given the diasporic context of the online classes, this framework is a valuable means of situating Al-Huda as a religious and educational institution for Muslim women within the North American landscape of socio-religious movements more broadly.

The Shared Moral Universe of the Barelwis and Al-Huda: Iman, Ahkam, Adab, and Da‘wa As shown earlier in the chapter, in many respects my two ethnographies are poles apart. Not only are the worldviews of Barelwi and Al-Huda students different, so are their structural positions in terms of social class, rural–urban differences, or the local versus global contexts in which they live. They are also critical of each other’s perspectives on Islam, even though they do not know of one another specifically. Although a Barelwi student would not be able to identify the term ‘Al-Huda’ nor, perhaps, the diasporic Al-Huda student the term ‘Barelwi’,86 they would recognize one another through certain ideas associated with them. Thus, from the perspective of Barelwi men and women, the Al-Huda organization and its objectives are ‘Wahhabi’, which to Barelwis implies arrogance, ignorance of history, and a lack of proper respect for the Prophet Muhammad. Such a person should be avoided at all costs lest one be led astray by his or her seeming erudition; indeed, he or she is worse than a non-believer, for the latter makes no attempt to pretend to be a Muslim, while the Wahhabi is the enemy within, the one that one cannot see, like the Hypocrites 85 On the debate about whether Al-Huda is a movement or not, see Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’. 86 Al-Huda instructors do not name any South Asian Muslim religious groups by name when disputing their ideas. They speak in general terms, as in ‘Some misguided Muslims believe…’. One of my fellow students told me she had found an online reference to ‘A‘la Hazrat’, a term which Barelwis use for Ahmad Raza Khan. She was not familiar with either the term or the Muslims he represented.

38

Scholars of Faith

of the Prophet’s time who professed to be Muslim but were secretly trying to undermine the Prophet’s mission. Likewise, when Al-Huda members speak about people like the Barelwis, they refer to them as ignorant at best and deviant ‘associationists’ (mushrikin) at worst, people who elevate other human beings to superhuman status and even claim that the Prophet was not an ordinary mortal. Have these people not read the Qur’an, they ask, don’t they know how many verses in it unequivocally forbid one to associate partners with God, and the number of times the Prophet said he was but a warner of the punishment on the Day of Judgment? Yet the two groups share a considerable moral vocabulary rooted in belief in core Islamic principles and ideals. They adhere not only to the so-called ‘pillars’ of Islamic monotheism, accepting the Prophet Muhammad as the last prophet and engaging as required in ritual practices on a daily and periodic basis, but more importantly, they share an eschatological vision of Judgment Day, followed by eternal bliss or damnation in the hereafter (akhirat) depending on their actions in this life. They both believe that the soul (nafs) is constantly prone to selfishness and wickedness, falling prey to the wiles of Satan who is always trying to trip people up so they will end up in hellfire. In order to prevail against Satan, the individual must constantly engage in supplication (du‘a) to God and good works in the present worldly life (dunya), including giving to others, fulfilling one’s obligations to God and one’s fellow human beings, and living a simple life without too many material attachments or even excessive attachment to one’s family. This must be done in the context of heterosexual marriage and raising children, taking care of one’s family, and recognizing that other people in society have claims or rights (huquq) over oneself, rather than in a context of celibacy and the renunciation of family ties. This is, both groups would say, a middle path—a concept greatly valorized in the Qur’an, as I noted earlier—between celibacy (or as Muslims might say, the ‘monkishness’ of Christian priests) and licentiousness. Ideally, the latter is pre-empted by the fact that sexuality outside marriage is forbidden (haram) for both men and women. Within the family, men, being the breadwinners, have greater authority in decision-making than women. Supererogatory and extra prayers, both groups believe, are a source of inner strength and hope, as God in His infinite mercy might overlook human weakness and sinfulness if one repents sincerely of one’s sins.

Introduction

39

In order to help one walk on this path, both Barelwis and Al-Huda followers look to strong moral leaders to provide guidance. Whether the leader is a Sufi pir, a teacher at a madrasa, or a layperson, strong moral leaders provide the glue that brings communities together in worship, study, and mutual service. Among both Barelwis and Al-Huda followers, the leader is recognized as one who is sincere, pious, and has a simple lifestyle with few personal needs. These moral attributes must shine through, such that there can be no question of duplicity or cheating—of saying one thing but doing another. In terms of practical, organizational skills, the leader should speak from the heart, but also be a forceful speaker, an effective communicator with those around him or her, and have the ability to raise funds for the organization. In addition, I hope to show that the leader performs the all-important task of cultural ‘translation’, that is, of making relevant to his or her followers the principles that revered religious texts embody, so that they speak to the person and urge him or her to act accordingly. In Starrett’s terms, the leader must make possible the ‘objectification’ and ‘functionalization’ of Islamic education. For this to happen, knowledge—by which is meant knowledge of din, religious knowledge—and the search for it must be acquired, internalized, and affectively ‘performed’ by all who engage in this journey. Or to put it another way, it must be embodied, ‘carried’ by the person,87 visible to the self and others in terms of daily practices and demeanour, in one’s character or akhlaq. Knowledge of the Qur’an—including the ability to recite verses and whole chapters from memory by mastering the rules of recitation (tajwid)—and of the sunna, or ‘way’ of the Prophet, through the Hadith literature, the Prophet’s biography (sira), jurisprudential (fiqh) rulings on specific aspects of religious practice such as prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, the study of Arabic grammar, and so on—become the building blocks for the person one becomes. How this knowledge is acquired, to what purpose, and how students apply what they have learned to their personal lives and circumstances are questions I address in this book. 87 See, for example, Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 268.

40

Scholars of Faith

The Context of Precarity My two case studies share another characteristic, namely, their contemporary sociopolitical context, which, following Judith Butler and particularly Attiya Ahmad, I will call ‘precarity’. In Precarious Life, Butler explores how people make moral claims on us. Analysing Levinas, she asks how the face—our own and that of others (including a nonhuman one)—is framed, represented, and interpreted: To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself. … This is what makes the face belong to the sphere of ethics. Levinas writes, ‘the face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill!’88

Butler probes this paradox in multiple ways, including how the Western media manipulate images of the human face and deliberately withhold images of violent death in modern-day conflicts around the world, as a result of which the viewer is distanced from the human suffering involved and is indifferent to it. At other times the media hone in on a particular face, thereby humanizing it and drawing it close to us. Butler shows how in 2003 and thereafter, the US media used images of the war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East both to glorify the US war effort and to dehumanize the Muslim Other. This dehumanization of the Muslim Other has become widespread in the US, especially since 11 September 2001, and is experienced as a constant sense of low-level hostility or menace in Muslims’ everyday lives, as even a cursory glance at media reports from around the country shows.89 Anti-Muslim sentiment is also pervasive in other

88 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 134. I am grateful to Paige Rawson of the Religion Department at Wingate University, North Carolina, for this reference. 89 See, for example, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/ tempe/2018/03/14/facebook-live-video-2-women-take-items-slur-muslimsmosque-tempe/422724002/; accessed on 11 February 2019, about the theft of flyers from an Arizona mosque so that the mosque congregation would be unable to propagate Islam in the local community. My thanks to Tonya Stevenson for this story.

Introduction

41

parts of the world, fanned in many cases by tacit government support for vigilante attacks and hate crimes. Another way in which ‘precarity’ has been explored is Attiya Ahmad’s study of South Asian migrant workers in Kuwait since the early 2000s. Ahmad’s ethnography focuses on domestic space as the locus of personal change and transformation, both among household workers and separately, among middle- and upper-middle-class Muslim women.90 Among both sets of women, precarity looms large. For domestic workers, it does so both when they migrate to Kuwait and settle into their employers’ households and later, when they return home to South Asia. Most of the women and their families see their initial migration as a necessary but temporary response to economic pressures at home (though for many workers the migration lasts decades, throughout which period they are denied citizenship status and benefits by the Kuwaiti state). The return home is equally traumatic for those who are able or forced by circumstance to return. Over time, relationships with family members begin to be mediated by economic considerations—the women’s earnings being used to pay for family members’ educations, marriages, medical expenses, and so on—while at the same time affective ties are weakened.91 A different set of dislocations was in play among middle-class women such as Auntie Noor, who started a women’s study circle (halaqa) at her home some 20 years after migrating to Kuwait in the early 1970s. Her transformation was the result of her personal experiences centred on her family, which cumulatively engendered a sense of anxiety: In discussing her shift from ‘dawat to dars’ and ‘parties to prayers,’ Auntie Noor often lingered on a particular subset of moments. Whether it was the day her eldest son started going to an international English-medium school, the summers she stayed in Kuwait because of her husband’s work, a nasty disagreement with a cloth seller in Karachi who dismissively called her ‘sheikha,’ or watching alone from the corner of the room as

90 Attiya Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space: Foreign Resident Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the Arabian Peninsula’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 91 Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, pp. 89–91.

42

Scholars of Faith

her husband and their friends debated Pakistani politics, these moments underscored feelings of bafflement and loneliness she associated with her overall diasporic condition,… New forms of Islamic learning provided her with a framework of action in the face of her shifting, liminal diasporic situation.92

Ahmad emphasizes that we must not think of transformation (and conversion to Islam in the case of some of her subjects in Kuwait) as ‘an eventful moment’, but rather as a ‘gradual reworking of their lives embedded in the everyday where the outcomes are not clear at the outset’.93 Elsewhere she writes, ‘[w]e need to shift from a linear understanding of transformation—with two points at the outset, and a precipitating factor or set of factors leading to shift from one point to the other—to a more decentered and fluid concept of transformation, one that accounts for the reconfiguration of what are always a dynamic and shifting constellation of factors’.94 Ahmad’s highlighting of the personal anxieties and insecurities of her subjects, which she characterizes as precarity, helped me conceptualize my case studies in a new way and better understand the underlying logic of the current surge in Muslim women’s religious education in South Asia and beyond.95 Precarity in the Indian case study is not hard to comprehend in view of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise to national power in 2014, and to state power in several Indian states, including UP, before that. Borker refers frequently to the anxiety and insecurity of the Muslim parents of young girls, as in the following: [T]he rising communalization of social space … feeds the heightened sense of insecurity amongst Muslims, leading to greater reliance on community networks for everyday services ranging from housing, education to employment. Schooling emerges as a crucial site where one of the most tangible everyday manifestations of this is the increasing need to provide

92

Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space’, pp. 430–1. Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, p. 19. 94 Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, p. 32. 95 Although Appadurai’s data in ‘The Capacity to Aspire’ are drawn from a very different segment of Indian society, namely, slum dwellers in Mumbai, his theoretical insights on the capacity to aspire are also grounded in situations of deep precarity. 93

Introduction

43

dini talim [religious education] to girls in institutional settings like madrasas. Previously, the privilege of training as alims was largely confined to men…. Women were always entitled to religious education but this learning was limited to the boundaries of the family and the home.96

Borker’s study is a valuable addition to the woefully inadequate scholarship thus far on girls’ madrasas in South Asia, especially her attention to the larger sociopolitical context of contemporary India and to the Government of India’s attempts to ‘reform’ madrasa education.97 Looking at the present political context more broadly, Barelwi sources reflect these anxieties in contemporary writings as well. Commenting on the 2016 ouster of a Muslim legislator in the Maharashtra assembly for his refusal to chant the slogan ‘Bharat mata ki jai’ (Hail to mother India), which the Hindu right-wing Sangh Parivar had made a litmus test of political loyalty for Indian Muslims,98 Salim Barelwi argues that the connection between loyalty to India, the nation, and the slogan is a ‘manufactured’ one. Muslims do not need to chant the slogan in order to prove their loyalty to the nation, he writes. The history of Indian Muslim sacrifice in the Independence struggle against the British and before bears ample evidence of their love for India: If saying ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ is the only measure of love for country, desire to serve the country, and faithfulness to the country, then tell us: Was Tipu Sultan, who never chanted this slogan, a lover of the country or a betrayer? Mr. Subhash Chandra Bose never chanted this slogan. So then, was he too a betrayer of the country? Chandra Shekhar Azad … Ashfaq Allah Khan, ‘Allama Fazl-i Haqq Khayrabadi … Mr. Abul Kalam Azad, the Ali brothers, Gandhiji, and who knows how many other martyrs in the war of independence like them who gave their lives and wealth and honor and rank and reputation, who sacrificed everything, [but] about whom one does not 96

Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood, p. 81. Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood, Chapter 9 (Coda: Policy Reflections). 98 On the Hindu political right and its use of mass media, see Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); on the economic, social, and political marginalization of Muslims in Indian cities, see Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot, eds, Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2012). 97

44

Scholars of Faith

find it said anywhere that they chanted the slogan ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’. … Why then are they remembered in Indian history as martyrs in the war of independence? Why do you not remove their names from the list of martyrs in the war of independence and enter them in a list of betrayers of the country?99

This writer eloquently expresses the context of precarity in which Indian Muslims find themselves forced to defend their loyalty to India at a time when some politicians are raising the cry for their ‘return home’ (ghar wapsi) to the fold of Hinduism.100

Organization of the Chapters This book is divided into two parts which have similar titles: Iman, Ahkam, Adab and Iman, Ahkam, Da‘wa, respectively. While each part deals with a different case study, the similarity in the parts’ titles underscores my argument that both institutions share an Islamic vocabulary and worldview that have much in common, outward differences notwithstanding. The terms iman and ahkam came up frequently in my conversations with teachers and students in both venues. Iman refers to belief in God, expressed at the most basic level by the shahada or testament of faith in the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. Muslims believe Muhammad was God’s last prophet who brought God’s revelation, the Qur’an, a restatement of earlier revelations, to humankind for the final time. Ahkam signifies to Muslims the outward duties of prayer, giving alms, performing the pilgrimage to Mecca, and fulfilling the other basic requirements of the faith. While these terms may be expanded in scope, they are not

99 For a detailed and illuminating history of India as a Mother Goddess, see Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Mufti Muhammad Salim Barelwi, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai Bolne ka Qaziyya Ashuddhi Tahrik ki ek Nai Shakal’, Mahnama A‘la Hazrat (June 2016), p. 23. For more on the controversy, see, for example, www.indianexpress.com, 3 March 2016. The English translations of this Urdu article are mine. 100 On the ghar wapsi movement, see, for example, https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/ghar-wapsi-the-legal-way/293637; accessed on 10 October 2018.

Introduction

45

the subject of significant interpretive difference. I use them here as a common denominator for these and other Sunni Muslims across the interpretive spectrum. I chose the term ‘adab’ for the first case study because in my view it encapsulates what the madrasa is trying to achieve. Adab is a classical term that has much resonance in Islamic culture, from literature (belles lettres) to music to politics and government.101 Although often translated as ‘etiquette’ in English, it carries a complex range of meanings that go much deeper. In explaining the role of adab in the writings of al-Ghazzali (d. 1111 CE) and Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), Lapidus coins the phrase ‘Sunni–sufi Islam’. Al-Ghazzali put the ‘devotional and mystical … aspects of faith at the center of the process by which religious salvation may be achieved’.102 The ‘integration of deeds, virtues, and knowledge was the crux of a Muslim life … knowledge of the heart is more than just information. It is conviction that evokes a desire to put knowledge into action.’103 Ibn Khaldun, although not a Sufi, explained the soul’s quest for spiritual perfection by means of the term ‘malaka’, which is close to what we call, following Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu, habitus: For Ibn Khaldun any skilled activity, craft, or profession … acquired as a result of instruction, practice, and repetition, form[s] a habit. A habit, “malaka” in Arabic, is more than just a learned semiautomatic activity.… It bears the meaning of the Latin, habitus—an acquired faculty, rooted in the soul.’104 Adab is the inculcation of this habitus in the individual in a dialectical process whereby the ‘inner quality is developed as a result of outer practice which makes the practice a perfect expression of the soul of the actor.105 101 The essays in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984c), cover the full spectrum of applications of this important concept in South Asian Islamic culture. 102 See Ira M. Lapidus, ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 46. 103 Lapidus, ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action’, p. 50. 104 Lapidus, ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action’, p. 53. 105 Lapidus, ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action’, p. 54.

46

Scholars of Faith

In part 2, in contrast, I use the term da‘wa to characterize Al-Huda for reasons noted earlier. Da‘wa (also referred to as tabligh, from balagha, discourse) in Arabic means ‘call’ or ‘invitation’. The Qur’an asks Muslims to ‘call people to the way of the Lord’ (Q 16:125) and to ‘command right and forbid wrong’ (Q 3:104). Today’s da‘wa movements are no longer confined to preachers’ sermons during weekly Friday prayers, but have become a popular phenomenon with wide reach through the use of the Internet and other media sources. Scholarship on these new forms of media-based discourse shows how influential they have become since the second half of the twentieth century with the general public, and the role they have played in fragmenting the authority of the ‘ulama around the world.106 These developments are clearly part of the context for the emergence and growth of Al-Huda as a movement since 1994. Starting with the madrasa study, Chapter 1 lays out the historical background of Muslim women’s education in British India and post-Independence India, including statistical data on educational history in UP, and the Sachar Committee Report. The chapter then explores girls’ madrasa education in north India specifically, with focus on a Rampur madrasa for girls, of Jama‘at-i Islami affiliation, and compares this madrasa with the Tablighi madrasa for girls studied by Winkelmann.107 The chapter ends with Appendices 1.1a and 1.1b that lays out the syllabi of the two madrasas examined in the chapter, in order to highlight their ideological differences. This shows us how much the second madrasa has in common with the Barelwi madrasa portrayed in this book, despite differences in their denominational (maslaki) identities. Chapter 2 introduces the first of my two case studies. It discusses the location and history of Shahjahanpur (and Farrukhabad district) in west UP, and the personal history of Sayyid Sahib, the founder of the 106

The scholarly literature on da‘wa in the twentieth century is extensive. For a good overview, see Julian Millie, ‘Da‘wa, Modern Practices’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, The Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2017–1 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 50–4. 107 Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b).

Introduction

47

madrasa. Employing Winkelmann’s concept of ‘core families’, it lays out the web of connections, both familial and Sufi-based, between the leading male administrators of the madrasa. Since the Sufi connections go back to Ahmad Raza Khan’s younger son, Mustafa Raza Khan (d. 1981), the chapter also discusses the contemporary genealogical history and politics of Ahmad Raza Khan’s descendants, in what is a very polarized and politicized environment in Bareilly today. I employ the concept of adab to understand the overall ethos of the madrasa as well as generational and gendered relationships, and the tension between different sources of authority such as age versus knowledge. In Chapter 3, I enter the classroom with the teachers and students. The chapter presents an ‘ethnography’ of two different classes, one a Qur’an class and the other a class of Qur’anic exegesis for advanced students. We also hear discussions about the importance of taharat, or ritual purity. We see how students and teachers interact, and how adab guides their relationship. The chapter shows how teachers skillfully present the material in a way that students find meaningful. It also discusses the role of memorization and peer learning in madrasa education. Appendix 3.1 with the madrasa syllabus at the end of the chapter allows me to highlight the commonalities between ‘traditionalist’ Barelwis and Deobandis/Tablighis. Chapter 4 looks at students’ emotional attachment to the madrasa, comparing them with the students of a secular Barelwi school that initially operated in a different part of the same premises. Student engagement in the madrasa is demonstrated through key ritual moments: morning (fajr) prayer and morning assembly (du‘a), and the student-led weekly (Thursday night) anjuman, a programme of Qur’an recitation, praise poems in honour of the Prophet (na‘t), and speeches (taqrir). The level of student and teacher engagement in the secular Barelwi school is markedly lower. The reasons for this include: students’ lack of interest in the subjects taught; a lax disciplinary environment; and a lack of subjective connection between the lives of the students and the academic curriculum. On the other hand, they appreciate the school for offering them religious instruction, although not required to do so by the state. Chapter 5 examines the lives of six madrasa students who graduated from Jami‘a Nur. This chapter was written collaboratively with Sumbul Farah, an anthropologist, who interviewed the students

48

Scholars of Faith

extensively. The overall conclusion of the chapter (a modified version of which appeared as an article in Modern Asian Studies)108 is that the madrasa succeeds in its mission of inculcating lifelong piety in its students because of the continuity between school and home. The madrasa becomes a new locus of affective ties for students, as it seeks to inculcate values congruent with those of the home and community at large. The chapter reflects on the mapping of religious self-formation onto South Asian norms of feminine behaviour (the concept of being naram, or soft and malleable), and addresses broader issues of madrasa education for Muslim girls in India. Part 2 of the volume starts, in Chapter 6, by taking the reader into the online classroom of the Al-Huda Qur’an class in which I was a student from 2009 to 2013. Against the backdrop of Pakistani politics in the 1990s when Al-Huda International was founded by Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair, it shows how online classes are organized and run at its North American site in Mississauga, Canada. What is distinctive about Al-Huda? What prompts adult women to sign up for its demanding course of study? I argue that online students’ mastery of Arabic and intensive study of Islamic history and theology simultaneously gives them voice and a sense of empowerment, thereby challenging both traditional Islamic authority structures and Western representations of Muslim women. Chapter 7 explores Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair’s intellectual background. Zubair was raised in a family with Ahl-i Hadith affiliations, while Hashmi’s father had ties with the Jama‘at-i Islami. Hashmi gradually became an Ahl-i Hadith follower as well. What distinguishes the Ahl-i Hadith from other South Asian Sunni maslaks? I trace its history from the nineteenth century to the present. Following the educational trajectories of Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair, I look closely at their PhD research in Glasgow, Scotland, on aspects of Hadith transmission, as students of Islamic Studies in the early 1990s. Hashmi’s research has not been available to the public and is therefore of particular interest. What was the impact of Hashmi and Zubair’s intellectual formation on Al-Huda as a social and religious organization, how does Hashmi incorporate secular scientific findings into her classes, and what can one infer from the above about Al-Huda’s politics? 108

Sanyal and Farah, ‘Discipline and Nurture’.

Introduction

49

In Chapter 8, I ask how, concretely, social change occurs at the level of the everyday among a geographically dispersed set of Muslim women studying the Qur’an. I try to answer the question by closely analysing Al-Huda’s messages for women in terms of family and community relationships through examination of Farhat Hashmi’s use of language over an extended period (the mid-1990s to 2005). Seeing Hashmi as a leader who engages in ‘cultural translation’, I try to understand how she makes the seventh-century Qur’anic context relevant to the lives of twenty-first-century South Asian women in the diaspora. The chapter then examines onsite classes in Mississauga, Toronto, and online classes through the lens of other teachers— referring to them as teacher-learners, to highlight their continuing engagement in Islamic learning—especially Taimiyyah Zubair, and the work of Shazia Nawaz at the Testing Center in Hurst, Texas, without which the online classes would not be possible. Chapter 9 turns to the students of Al-Huda classes, both onsite and online. Most of those who spoke with me were young adults, some married with children, some college students, and some professional women. Whether living in North America, Europe, or South Asia, they were drawn to deepening their engagement with the Qur’an on account of lifecycle changes such as the birth of children and the desire to give them a religious education, or social isolation resulting from family migration, or simply out of curiosity. They all reported deriving strength from their deepening engagement with the Qur’an. Bilingual in English and a South Asian language, they were educated middleclass women discovering the Qur’an through Al-Huda classes. All had chosen to live a more orthoprax lifestyle in accordance with what they learned in Al-Huda classes. But in order to succeed, I argue, they had to get their families’ support. They had to do da‘wa. In this chapter, I examine their life stories in light of the concepts of ‘precarity’ and gendered Islamophobia as articulated by Attiya Ahmad and Jasmin Zine, respectively.109

109 Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space; Ahmad, Everyday Conversions; Jasmin Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools: Unravelling the Politics of Faith, Gender, Knowledge, and Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

50

Scholars of Faith

The book concludes by asking ‘Why Now?’ How do we make sense of the contemporary surge in Muslim women’s religious education across South Asia and elsewhere in the world? To start, we must recognize that the growth of Muslim women’s education is part of a wider phenomenon that crosses religious boundaries. This is not an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. Beyond that, I situate the ethnographies presented here in their national contexts, both Indian and Pakistani, to illustrate the growing trend of South Asian Muslim women’s religious education across all social classes. The comparative focus of this book, I argue, encourages us to discard unhelpful binaries such as ‘Sufi’ and ‘Wahhabi’, and to think of the efforts of Muslims across different ideological and class categories as shared, albeit different, responses to the precarious conditions of modernity.

Note on Transcription and the Use of Diacritics I have transcribed Arabic and Urdu words using the letter ‘y’ rather than ‘i’ in words such as ‘Husayn’. I have opted to transcribe some words, such as Hadith, using Arabic rather than Urdu pronunciation. Likewise, when using the possessive ‘of’, as in ‘Ahl-i Sunnat’, I use ‘-i’ rather than the South Asian ‘-e’. Words such as Ashrafiya have been spelled with a single ‘y’ rather than the more usual ‘yy’, with occasional exceptions such as Taymiyya. Proper names are spelled in the manner chosen by the person whose name it is. Thus, I use ‘Raza’ rather than ‘Riza’ for members of Ahmad Raza’s family, as that is their preferred pronunciation. However, many people use ‘Rizvi’ rather than ‘Razvi’ when using the adjectival form of this name. I follow their usage. I have indicated only two diacritics throughout, namely, the hamza, as in Qur’an, and the ayn, as in ‘ulama. In the interests of simplicity, no other diacritics have been used. Arabic and Urdu words are italicized on first occurrence and romanized thereafter.

1 MUSLIM GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN NORTH INDIA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

The ‘informal syllabus,’ namely, the ‘subtle and … all-pervading impact of adab’ which manifests itself in ‘rules regarding discipline, body control, and behavioural expectations,’ is more important than the formal syllabus. —Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 75

A remarkable transformation has been underway in Indian Muslim women’s education over the past few decades. Muslim girls have been attending religious seminaries (madrasas) in increasing numbers since the 1990s, so much so, in fact, that according to one source, ‘by 2000 … girls outnumbered boys in the pupil bodies in most madrasahs’ in the west UP district of Bijnor.1 Sociologists Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey suggest that in part this may be explained by the fact that Muslim parents do not see madrasa education as a route to employment for their sons, as all teaching in madrasas is done in Urdu, which is a disadvantage in the job market in India compared to 1 Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’, Modern Asian Studies (2004), 38(1): 1–53. The quote appears on p. 2.

Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

54

Scholars of Faith

Hindi and, even more so, to English.2 Hence, if Muslim boys attend a madrasa at all they do so for a few years when they are young, then transfer to a secular state school, in the hope that this will lead to a secure government job. Research by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon confirms that Indian parents sometimes choose English-medium education for their sons, and Urdu-medium for their daughters, because of the better income-earning potential of the former.3 However, this still leaves unanswered the question: Why now? If local leaders are taking the initiative in UP and other parts of India, as part of a process of Islamization in small towns and villages, as Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey suggest, why now, when girls’ education has lagged so far behind that of boys (Muslim and non-Muslim) for decades? Why do we hear that girls are more motivated than boys? What persuades parents to let their daughters travel long distances to attend a girls’ madrasa, especially when fear of social disapproval by neighbours and kin held them back in the past? How and why are these decisions made? Are there any discernible patterns in parents’ educational choices for their daughters and issues around social class and class mobility? And can this help us understand theories of self that relate to gender differences among these families in particular and within the Muslim population more generally? Before we can begin to answer these questions, though, we need to start by examining the history of Muslim women’s education in South Asia in the colonial and postcolonial twentieth-century context. This in turn raises larger questions about Muslim literacy vis-à-vis that of other communities, and the socioeconomic conditions in which South Asian Muslims find themselves today. Let me begin with a little history.

2 Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey. ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’. See also Anne Vaughier-Chatterjee, ‘Plural Society and Schooling: Urdu-medium Schools in Delhi’, in Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery, eds, in collaboration with Helmut Reifeld, Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), p. 110. 3 Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, Muslim Girls’ Education: A Comparison of Five Indian Cities (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005), p. 98. The data in this case refer to Hyderabad.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

55

The Growth of Muslim Girls’ Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Much has been written about boys’ madrasas in South Asia, both in the media and by scholars. There are some excellent ethnographies of boys’ madrasas in India.4 While much of the media attention has focused on the madrasas’ real and alleged links with terrorism, scholars have also given careful attention to the need for curricular and other reform.5 Indeed, this is a subject of urgent debate among the ‘ulama themselves. Mawlana Waris Mazhari, a graduate of Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, has written eloquently about the need to drop certain texts on theology and jurisprudence from the syllabus because they address issues that are no longer relevant, urging that madrasas instead spend more time teaching students history, Qur’anic exegesis, and English. He also wants madrasas to address current issues in jurisprudence that arise in the context of globalization, and include technical vocational training, so that students can be self-supporting when they graduate. He acknowledges the difficulties in undertaking extensive reform, but argues that they are not insurmountable and the need of the day is urgent.6 Ebrahim Moosa, formerly a student

4 On the Barelwis, see Nita Kumar, Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras (Delhi: Sage, 2000), Chapter 5; Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011). On the Jama‘at-i Islami, see Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010). The semi-autobiographical account by Ebrahim Moosa is a most welcome addition to the literature. See Ebrahim Moosa, What Is a Madrasa? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 5 The literature on South Asian madrasas and their alleged links to terrorism, as well as broader issues, is vast. I will mention just a handful of academic studies: Jessica Stern, ‘Pakistan’s Jihad Culture’, Foreign Affairs (November/ December 2000); Yoginder Sikand, Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India (Delhi: Penguin, 2005); Jamal Malik, ed., Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? (London: Routledge, 2008); Masooda Bano, The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 6 See especially, Waris Mazhari, ‘Reforming Madrasa Curriculum’, in Akhtarul Wasey, ed., Madrasas in India: Trying to Be Relevant (Delhi:

56

Scholars of Faith

of Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow, and currently a university professor in the United States, believes the dars-i nizami curriculum is not designed for undergraduate students.7 However, this debate need not detain us here. The literature on girls’ madrasas is much more limited, for the good reason that girls’ madrasas are far fewer in number and have a relatively recent history. Throughout much of the twentieth century, to the extent that South Asian Muslim girls were educated, they were educated at home. As Gail Minault shows in Secluded Scholars, there was much ‘opposition to having pardah-observing girls leaving their homes to go to school’.8 Before any efforts were made to start schools for Muslim women, male reformers such as Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (1864–1943) of Thana Bhawan, west UP; Sayyid Mumtaz ‘Ali (1860–1935), journalist from Lahore; Rashidul Khairi (1868–1936), prolific writer of women’s novels and journals in Delhi and Lahore; and others, concentrated their efforts on creating ‘a suitable literature’9 for women studying at home.

Global Media Publications, 2005); and Waris Mazhari, ‘Hindustani Madaris Islamiya: Nisab o Nizam-e Ta‘lim, Imkanat o Masa’il, Ek Ja’iza’ (PhD dissertation, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 2012). 7 Ebrahim Moosa’s own experience was that the ‘gems and value of the Nizami curriculum’ only became evident to him after he had studied ‘a great deal of history, modern philosophy, debates in religious studies, complex debates in modern theology, Islamic law, and moral philosophy—in short, when [he] was a graduate and postdoctoral student’. Moosa, What Is a Madrasa? p. 137. 8 Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 177. The following section on the history of women’s literature and schools in the colonial period is based on my reading of Minault. Also see Ruby Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially Chapter 3. 9 This is the title of Chapter 2 of Minault’s Secluded Scholars. Rashidul Khairi was of Ahl-i Hadith background, as pointed out by Riexinger. See Martin Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity? A Study of the Ahl-i Hadis in Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Century South Asia’, in Gwilym Beckerlegge, ed., Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Movements in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 157.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

57

This literature took many forms. It included religious advice literature, a genre best represented by Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments);10 didactic novels like Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s (1830–1912) famous Mir’at al-‘Arus (The Bride’s Mirror) and Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali’s (1837–1914) Majalis al-Nisa (Assemblies of Women);11 and women’s magazines or home journals in Urdu. Among the latter, one of the most long lived was the monthly Ismat (Modesty, Honour), launched by Rashidul Khairi and his wife in 1908 in Delhi. After Partition in 1947, Ismat’s headquarters were transferred to Karachi, from where it continues to be published to this day.12 Although writings by women were rare at this time, a notable exception was a textbook dating to 1882 by Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal, entitled Tahzib al-Niswan wa Tarbiyat al-Insan (The Cultivation of Women and the Instruction of Humanity). It contained chapters on ‘women’s and children’s illnesses, pregnancy and childbirth, the education and socialization of children, prayer, fasting, pardah, marriage, divorce, death, and mourning, as well as household management, decorating, cooking, and sewing’.13 What was the motivation behind these reformers promoting women’s zenana education? Minault argues, as Metcalf has as well,14 10

On this, see Barbara D. Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, a Partial Translation with Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 11 See, among others, C.M. Naim, ‘Prize-Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahabad Government Gazette Notification’, in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Minault, Secluded Scholars. 12 For a detailed treatment of Rashidul Khairi, the monthly magazine Ismat, and the history of Muslim women’s magazines in the early twentieth century, see Minault, Secluded Scholars, Chapter 3 and passim. 13 Minault, Secluded Scholars, p. 101. On Begam Sultan Jahan of Bhopal, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Islam and Power in Colonial India: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Princess’, American Historical Review (February 2011), 116(1): 1–30. Also see Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 14 See, for example, Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

58

Scholars of Faith

that in the wake of the Revolt of 1857 and the reality of loss of political power to the British, Muslim reformers, especially the religious class or ‘ulama, sought ways to strengthen their communities from within by ensuring stricter adherence to religious precepts at the individual and community levels. They tried to adapt to the loss of old sources of court patronage by founding religious seminaries and engaging in educational reform, using new models provided by British schools and actively publishing religious literature in Urdu and other vernacular languages. In addition, men from service families wanted to take advantage of new opportunities created by the proliferation of the printing press, government employment, and opportunities for employment at regional Muslim courts such as Hyderabad. Recognizing that social reform necessarily had to start within the family, many advocated women’s education so that women could be better wives and mothers. The ‘ulama’s criticisms focused on what they considered wasteful social customs not sanctioned by the shari‘a (Islamic law), such as ostentatious spending at weddings, and practices such as child marriage or the widespread Indian Muslim disapproval of widow remarriage.15 Other reformers such as Sayyid Mumtaz ‘Ali went further, advocating a woman’s consent to marriage, recognition of a woman’s right to divorce (khul‘), changes in the practice of mahr (a woman’s marriage portion), reducing the restrictions of pardah, and facilitating women’s movement outside the home.16 While individual reformers differed in terms of specific measures, they assumed that men must be the leaders of women’s educational reform. Direct leadership roles by women were not contemplated until well into the twentieth century. As Minault points out, the values promoted by the reformers were those of sharif culture, a term that underwent a subtle shift in meaning in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While previously sharafat had been based on high birth, now it was based primarily on behaviour: In Urdu writings of the late nineteenth century, sharif, ‘noble’ in the sense of birthright to position or wealth, gave way to ‘noble’ in the sense of good 15

These were among the major arguments made by Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi. See, for example, Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 66–72; Metcalf, Perfecting Women, Chapter 2. 16 Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 72–95.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

59

character: honourable, upright, cultured, and respectable… In this period, increasingly, to belong to the ashraf was to be from the respectable middle or upper-middle classes. A sharif gentleman was pious without being wasteful, educated without being pedantic, and restrained in his expression of emotion.17

For these ideals to be realized, women had to play an active part in the home. They too had to embody these ideals, and be able to transmit them to their children.18 Gradually, support for women’s schools grew, though the possible breakdown of the norms of pardah society was constantly on people’s minds, leading to considerable opposition. Among the pioneers of schools for girls were the remarkable husband-and-wife team, Shaikh and Begam Abdullah of Aligarh, who despite considerable opposition from sections of the ‘Aligarh establishment’, opened the Aligarh Zenana Madrasa (Aligarh Girls’ School) in 1906 with funding from Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal and Justice Badruddin Tyabji and members of his family in Bombay, as well as the promise of a UP government grant once it had opened.19 With about 50 students in the first year, opposition to the school quickly abated in light of the students’ enthusiasm, the school’s enforcement of pardah rules, and the quality of education imparted. The school grew, and by 1909 moved to a larger house. A number of issues continued to divide the Muslim community, however, both here and in other parts of the country (Punjab and Bengal, among others) where girls’ schools were established. Among

17

Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 4–5. For an excellent recent addition to the literature, being a study of women in the Tablighi Jama‘at movement, see Darakhshan Khan, ‘Fashioning the Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity in Colonial India’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016). 19 Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 234–9. As is well known, Sayyid Ahmad Khan had opposed sending girls to school, though he had no objection to their being educated at home. Other sections of Aligarh’s Muslim educated elite also opposed girls’ education on various grounds. See Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 30–1. On Sayyid Ahmad Khan, see David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), a classic study that has been reprinted many times. 18

60

Scholars of Faith

them was the kind of curriculum to be followed: should it be the same as that in boys’ schools or different? This question continues to be debated to the present day, with some favouring essentially the same syllabus as that of boys on the grounds that the Qur’an advocates that all Muslims seek knowledge, which implies equality between girls and boys, while others argue that girls should be taught subjects such as cooking and sewing in keeping with their ‘future roles as wives and mothers’.20 As Minault points out, in practice most schools opted for a combination of the two. Another problem had to do with the girls’ exposure to public view as they travelled to and from school. As the case of Rokeya Sakhavat Husain’s school in Calcutta (now Kolkata), started in 1911, shows, transportation issues were a big concern for parents.21 The solution, the Abdullahs decided (but apparently not Rokeya), was to open a boarding school, which they did to great fanfare and with success in 1914. Among the girls’ schools described by Minault, a few were madrasas. A notable example was the Madrasat al-Banat in Jalandhar, Punjab, founded by Abdul Haq Abbas, of Ahl-i Hadith affiliation, in 1926. He had spent most of his life promoting reformist and educational causes, though not for girls until somewhat late in life. As Minault notes, Jalandhar was home to the Arya Samaj, which had founded a successful girls’ school in the late-nineteenth century, and therefore it made sense for there to be a Muslim girls’ school to counter its influence—together with that of Christian missionaries, who were also active in the educational field in Jalandhar.22 Abdul Haq Abbas also founded a women’s journal, Muslima, that reported on the activities of the madrasa. He relied on private donations and charged no fees. Among his donors, most of whom were local, were a few prominent figures from Punjab. In addition, given his Ahl-i Hadith affiliation, he also enjoyed some financial support from the ruler of Bhopal. This

20

Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 215–16. Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 258–9. Also see Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India, pp. 189–91. 22 Riexinger refers to the dominance of the Arya Samaj and Christian missionaries in Jalandhar as a ‘duopoly’. Hence there were two major kinds of private schools, not one. See Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, p. 158. 21

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

61

madrasa was in continuous operation until Partition, when Abdul Haq Abbas migrated to Pakistan, starting afresh in Lahore.23 As this brief survey of girls’ education in the colonial period, starting in the late 1800s and leading up to Partition, indicates, efforts to educate Muslim girls were only gradually seen as being central to the rejuvenation of the Muslim community, having had to overcome heavy obstacles in terms of public sentiment, financial resources, and the lack of availability of female teachers. Where they succeeded, they did so because of the determination of a few remarkable individuals, often with the support of family members. In fact, the commitment of not only the wives of founders such as Shaikh Abdullah but also their daughters, daughters-in-law, and further generations of women in the family, is a notable characteristic of many of the earliest girls’ schools. It is also characteristic of the Barelwi girls’ madrasa that is the subject of the next few chapters.

A Brief History of Girls’ Literacy in Uttar Pradesh Literacy rates in this most populous state in India, for both boys and girls, have been growing steadily—as in most other parts of the country—throughout the twentieth century, and into the present. The picture at the beginning of the twentieth century was absymal. In 1901, according to the Imperial Gazetteer of India of 1907, female literacy in the west UP district of Shahjahanpur was close to zero, while male literacy was at a dismal 2.6 per cent (Figure 1.1). In 1911, the situation was hardly any better: the census reported male literacy rates at 4 per cent and female literacy rates at 0.4 per cent, while the all-India male literacy rate was 6.1 per cent.24 Jumping forward 60 years, the rates were still low even in 1971—24 per cent for males and only 8.3 per cent for females, according to the Gazetteer of India for UP.25 Thirty years later, however, the literacy rates, while 23

Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 250–5. The female all-India rate is not reported for 1911. See E.A.H. Blunt, Census of India, 1911, p. 269. 25 Kailash Narain Pande, state editor, Gazetteer of India, Uttar Pradesh, District Shahjahanpur (Allahabad: Government of Uttar Pradesh, 1988), pp. 227–37. 24

62

Scholars of Faith

70%

UP (Female)

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1911

2001

2011

Year

Figure 1.1

Female literacy in UP versus the rest of India

still low, had grown considerably. According to the 2001 census, the female literacy rate in UP as a whole was at 43 per cent of the population aged 7 and above, while the rate for men was 70 per cent. (This was lower than the all-India rate, which was 53.7 per cent for women and 75.3 per cent for men.) In 2011, the UP figures were: 59.3 per cent for women and 79.2 per cent for men. (Again, the all-India rate was higher: women, 65.5 per cent and men 82.1 per cent.) (Figure 1.2). Despite these encouraging numbers, however, Muslims in India suffer from a number of handicaps in education, as in other aspects of socioeconomic life. This was recognized as early as the late-nineteenth century by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), who worked actively to promote Western education among the Muslim elite, both by founding the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College (which later became Aligarh Muslim University), and by encouraging the translation of European scientific works into Urdu.26 26 See Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation. As Peter Hardy points out, Sayyid Ahmad Khan and other nineteenth-century upper-class Muslims argued that acquisition of Western education by Indian Muslims was not only not opposed to Islam ‘but was actually Islamic’. Their success in communicating their ideas to Muslims of the lower classes, Hardy argues, lay in the fact that they framed their case ‘in an Islamic religious idiom’. See Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 94.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

63

90% 80%

UP (Male)

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1911

2001

2011

Year

Figure 1.2

Male literacy in UP versus the rest of India

After Independence in 1947, efforts to improve Muslim education occurred in a context shaped in significant ways by the affirmative action policies of the Central government to overcome the disabilities of untouchability. The Muslims’ position vis-à-vis upper-caste Hindus was probably made worse by the migration of the Muslim elite to Pakistan, where, as muhajirs, they have constituted a distinct group of their own ever since. Meanwhile in India, in the 1990s the situation changed again with the beginning of economic liberalization. In some states, as in UP, this period saw a diminution of state funding for education and a concomitant rise in private educational institutions. This is the current context in which the newer initiatives have been taking place.27 With regard to education more specifically, the Sachar Committee Report noted in 2006 that Muslims suffer from a number of socioeconomic handicaps and that their overall position is similar to that of the Dalits (or untouchables, as they were previously known). These conclusions have been borne out by subsequent research.28 27 See Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication’, p. 34. 28 See, among many others, Rakesh Basant and Abusaleh Shariff, eds, Handbook of Muslims in India: Empirical and Policy Perspectives (New Delhi:

64

Scholars of Faith

Two Contemporary Girls’ Madrasas: Jami‘at al-Salehat and Madrasatul Niswan In order to place Jami‘a Nur,29 the Barelwi madrasa in Shahjahanpur, in context, I want to briefly discuss two contemporary madrasas affiliated with groups other than the Barelwis. At the present time, each of the five major Sunni schools of thought in South Asia,30 namely, Ahl-i Hadith (also spelled Ahl-e Hadis; see Chapter 6 for a discussion of their perspective), Jama‘at-i Islami, Nadwat al-‘Ulama, Deobandi/ Tablighi Jama‘at, and Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at or Barelwi, has a flagship girls’ madrasa in India. The foremost Ahl-i Hadith madrasa for girls is Jami‘a Aisha in Malegaon, Maharashtra; the most important Jama‘at-i Islami madrasa for girls is Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, west UP; that of the Nadwat al-‘Ulama is Kulliyat al-Zahra in Mau, east UP; that of the Deobandis is Jami‘at al-Salehat in Malegaon, Maharashtra;31 and the largest Barelwi madrasa for girls is Madrasa Shams al-‘Ulum (Niswan) in Ghosi, in east UP.32 My overview here throws light on differences in these madrasas’ approach to girls’ education as seen through an examination of their syllabi and student magazines. At the end of this chapter are two appendices which list the syllabi of

Oxford University Press, 2014); also see Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, Educating Muslim Girls: A Comparison of Five Indian Cities (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005). 29 This is a pseudonym, being used to protect the identity of the madrasa. 30 I am omitting mention of the Ahmadiya movement, as most South Asian Sunni Muslims regard them as being outside the pale. And of course the Shi‘a are worthy of mention, but I have no information on Shi‘a girls’ madrasas in India. On madrasa education among the Shi‘a in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Justin Jones, Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Chapter 1. 31 See Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005b), p. 33. 32 My information on the madrasas other than the Deobandi one is based on Chapter 4 of a thesis by Mumtas Begum, A.L., ‘Muslim Women in Malabar: Study in Social and Cultural Change’ (Department of History thesis, University of Calicut, 2006). Available at shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/ bitstream/10603/15747/8/08_chapter%204.pdf; accessed on 6 August 2015.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

65

the two madrasas I have chosen to discuss, namely, Jami‘at al-Salehat in Rampur, UP, and Madrasatul Niswan in Delhi. The reasons for choosing them rather than others are that I was able to visit the former personally, tour the campus, and collect published information on it; as for the latter, it is the subject of an excellent ethnography by Marieke Winkelmann. Hem Borker’s recent (2018) book on Jamiatul Mominat, a madrasa for Tablighi Jama‘at girls in southeast Delhi, is a welcome recent addition to the sparse literature on girls’ madrasas in India, complementing Winkelmann’s in important ways.33 Jami‘at al-Salehat in Rampur, UP, is one of the oldest girls’ madrasas in India today. It is located on a major city street, Shaukat Ali Road, not far from the Rampur train station. Its campus is large and impressive, with two three-storey hostel buildings separated by a lawn from a newer building housing classrooms, dining rooms, a sick room with about a dozen beds, a well-stocked library containing approximately 16,000 books, conference rooms, and administrative offices (Figures 1.3 and 1.4).34 Founded in 1956 for younger girls, it was initially simply called ‘Bachchiyon ka madrasa’ (madrasa for little girls), but in 1972 it was upgraded to the status of Jami‘a, that is, an institution for higher Islamic learning (Figure 1.5).35 In 2013, it had approximately 2,200 students from all over the country, about half of whom were boarders. Boarders cannot be younger than 10 at the time of admission. Jami‘at al-Salehat is a Jama‘at-i Islami madrasa.36 The full course of study lasts 15 years, starting when students are in kindergarten. 33

Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). 34 This brief account is based partly on personal observations of the madrasa during a visit on 7 November 2013. I was given a tour of the premises by the vice principal, Hamida. I thank the late Dr Sartaj Razvi for facilitating this visit. 35 Jamea-tus-Salehat, Prospectus 2013–2014 (Qawa’id o Dhawabit), p. 2. 36 On the Jama‘at-i Islami movement, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On women in the Jama‘at-i Islami, see Irfan Ahmad, ‘Cracks in the “Mightiest Fortress”: Jamaat-e-Islami’s Changing Discourse on Women’, Modern Asian Studies (2008), 42(2/3): 549–75. Ahmad observes in note 19 of his article (p. 559) that ‘Rampur [was] the second

66

Figure 1.3

Scholars of Faith

Girls’ hostel built around an open square, Jami‘at al-Salehat

Source: Author.

Figure 1.4

New classroom building, Jami‘at al-Salehat

Source: Author.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

Figure 1.5

67

Kindergarten students, Jami‘at al-Salehat

Source: Author.

These young students are Rampur residents, not boarders. The kindergarten and primary level lasts six years. Students get a basic Islamic education about monotheism (tawhid) and the pillars of Islam, the life of the Prophet (sira), the Qur’an, supplications (du‘a), and good character (adab o akhlaq).37 The remaining nine years of education are divided into junior (three years), ‘Alima (four years), and Fazila (two years). ‘Alima is considered equivalent to senior secondary or high school level, and Fazila to degree level, that is, a BA. The prospectus explains its educational goals as follows: The Jami‘at us-Salehat, Rampur, is an important centre of higher Islamic learning for the education of Muslim girls. Here, students are taught

headquarters of the Jamaat after Malihabad’. That might account for the girls’ madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat being in Rampur. 37 As-Sahwah, Annual College Magazine, 2011–2012, published by Literary Circle, Jamea-tus-Salehat, Rampur, pp. 41–3.

68

Scholars of Faith

Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), hadith, sirat, jurisprudence (fiqh), principles of jurisprudence, Arabic language and literature, rules of recitation (qawa‘id), writing and rhetoric (insha o balaghat), Islamic history, and so on, at the same high level as is done in countless madrasas for boys through the length and breadth of this country. While the Jami‘at us-Salehat’s singular characteristic is its focus on the religious and Arabic sciences, given the needs of the present time other contemporary subjects have also been incorporated into its syllabus, as well as matters relating to housekeeping and sewing, embroidery, and the like, as these are both necessary and inescapable (na-guzir) skills for women.38

Winkelmann classifies madrasas in India into three categories on the basis of their curriculum. These are: Urdu-medium schools ‘with some Islamic content’, which are strictly speaking, not madrasas at all; madrasas which follow some version of the dars-i nizami syllabus; and ‘dual type’ madrasas which teach the standard religious subjects as well as ‘non-Islamic subjects …such as mathematics, English, Hindi, and computer skills’.39 According to Winkelmann’s informants, madrasa education for girls in India received a big impetus as a result of a 1975 conference in Jeddah on the Islamization of education. In the aftermath of that conference, Mawlana Mukarram al-Nadwi founded the Muhammadiya Education Society in Mumbai: ‘those associated with the Muhammadiya Education Society advocated the integration of Islamic and non-Islamic subjects in the madrasa curriculum. In addition to introducing “dual” curricula in madrasas, a second idea that found enthusiastic following was promoting madrasa education for girls.’40 These claims are supported by Mumtas Begum’s study that surveys a number of girls’ madrasas throughout India. It finds that the Kulliya Aisha Madrasa in Malegaon, Maharashtra, run by the Jami‘a Muhammadiya Education Society of Mumbai, combines modern education (following the Maharashtra government’s guidelines) with the teaching of Arabic and Islamic Studies.41 38

Prospectus, 2012–2013, p. 1. Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 12–13. 40 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 33. 41 Mumtas Begum, ‘Muslim Women in Malabar’, p. 194. However, Mumtas Begum writes that the conference was convened in Mecca by King Abdul Aziz University, not in Jeddah. Further, she also seems to credit Mukhtar Ahmad Nadwi with the creation of the dual curriculum, rather than Mukarram Nadwi. 39

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

69

Using this yardstick, the Jami‘at al-Salehat belongs to the third category, namely, a dual-type madrasa. The syllabus of the Jami‘at al-Salehat has a number of interesting features not found in the madrasa studied by Winkelmann or the Barelwi madrasa with which I am familiar. First, it promotes knowledge of Arabic at an early age. The ‘Alima (secondary) and Fazila (undergraduate) syllabi list a number of classes on Arabic grammar, literature, and language. Moreover, the books prescribed are a combination of classical texts found in the dars-i nizami syllabus of madrasas of all denominations, for boys or girls, and newer works by authors such as the well-known Nadwi scholar Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (d. 1999), who was widely respected in the Arab world as well as South Asia.42 Students develop an impressive level of Arabic reading, writing, and possibly spoken proficiency. The annual college magazine, As-Sahwah, contains a number of student essays in Arabic (as well as Urdu, Hindi, and English). On the other side of the ledger, reflecting ‘modern education’ at the ‘Alima level are classes in civics, in which students study the Indian constitution in Urdu, as well as English, using NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) student readers for Classes X, XI, and the intermediate level (see Appendix 1.1a).43 The fact that students study the Indian constitution at the madrasa is remarkable. I have not observed this being part of the curriculum of the Barelwi madrasa Jami‘a Nur; nor does Winkelmann indicate that it forms part of the curriculum of the Tablighi Jama‘at girls’ madrasa she studied. Its inclusion at the Jami‘at al-Salehat seems to corroborate Irfan Ahmad’s conclusions that the Jama‘at-i Islami in India has been moving away from its exclusivist roots, as enunciated by Mawlana Mawdudi, towards a more inclusive and secular Indian identity. 42 On Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi, see Jan-Peter Hartung, ‘The Nadwat al-ulama: Chief Patron of Madrasa Education in India and a Turntable to the Arab World’, in Jan-Peter Hartung and Helmut Reifeld, eds, Islamic Education, Diversity, and National Identity (Delhi: Sage, 2006). 43 Irfan Ahmad notes that the adoption of NCERT textbooks by the Jama‘at-i Islami’s Green School in Aligarh was welcomed by parents as part of a move away from ideology and towards pragmatism because it gave graduates of the school access to admission to Aligarh Muslim University. The Aligarh Muslim University recognized the Green School’s certificate in 1975. See Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India, pp. 91–3 and passim.

70

Scholars of Faith

At the Fazila level, students also study the psychology of education. This feature of the curriculum may be unique to the Jami‘at al-Salehat, or may be found in select Indian madrasas.44 Its purpose is clearly to produce more effective teachers, as teaching is the most popular profession sought by female madrasa graduates. Students were also encouraged—or perhaps required—to study and read on their own, using the extensive resources of the library, including newspapers. The syllabus also lists a number of books by Mawlana Mawdudi and other scholars of Jama‘at-i Islami affiliation for general study, not included in the regular class syllabus. It is also noteworthy that an anthology of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s essays is taught at the Fazila level. This once again corroborates Ahmad’s argument that the Indian Jama‘at-i Islami has embraced a more open-minded ideology than did Mawlana Mawdudi. According to the vice principal of the madrasa, after the students graduate they go on to study further. They have four preferences. Listed in descending order of importance, these are: Aligarh (BA or MA level); Jamia Millia, Delhi; Hamdard University, Delhi; and Lucknow College, UP. She said that the graduates occupy leadership positions in other institutions of learning after they finish their studies at the Jami‘at al-Salehat. Many have become teachers at Jami‘at alBanaat in Azamgarh. Over time, students had set up affiliated schools in their places of origin. Because of this fewer students at the Rampur madrasa now came from geographically distant places than before. Some students had also gone to the Middle East after marriage and started teaching there.45 Clearly, the Jami‘at al-Salehat’s high academic expectations and impressive student achievement are associated with middle-class status and aspirations. The financial cost to the madrasa in providing good healthcare, attending to the students’ nutritional needs and housing, and providing the onsite facilities of the library, conference rooms, sick room, year-round electricity, and hot and cold water, and so on is reflected in the relatively high student fees it charges. The prospectus lays out the charges for each year of the kindergarten, 44 According to Mumtas Begum, it is a ‘unique course in Jami‘a tus Salihaat’. Mumtas Begum, ‘Muslim Women in Malabar’, note 182, p. 235. 45 From my field notes, 7 November 2013.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

71

primary, ‘Alima, and Fazila courses. The average fees, all inclusive, ranged between INR 5,640 and INR 6,240 for a three-month period in 2013–14.46 Annualized, the fees thus ranged between approximately INR 25,000 and INR 30,000 per student. In addition, students had to buy books or related academic materials, as well as personal items. This was clearly an expensive madrasa education by South Asian standards, unaffordable for many parents. The Madrasatul Niswan in Nizamuddin, New Delhi, is a very different institution.47 Both its size and location indicate its relatively humble lower to lower-middle-class base. The student body numbered about 200, many of them from outside Delhi, at the time of Winkelmann’s fieldwork. It is located deep inside Basti Nizamuddin, far from the main road. Winkelmann describes how for two years, before the construction of a new path leading to the madrasa, she would walk along the narrow lanes leading to the Nizamuddin shrine and its surrounding flower stalls, small restaurants, and butcher shops, through a residential area and adjacent garbage dump, to get to the madrasa.48 The madrasa is affiliated with the Tablighi Jama‘at, an offshoot of the Deobandi movement.49 Winkelmann describes in some detail how students initially tried very hard to convert her to Islam (seeing in her a good opportunity to practice tabligh, or ‘conveying the [Islamic] message’). The post–9/11 context in which she was working was also significant, as prior to this she had faced a great deal of reluctance by different madrasas in Hyderabad and Delhi to give her access. Winkelmann’s fieldwork experience was thus closely intertwined with the historical context of post-9/11 India. But she slowly overcame the obstacles in her path, relating to the administration and 46

Prospectus, 2013–2014, pp. 10–11. This is a pseudonym given to the madrasa by Winkelmann. See Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, note 13, p. 19. 48 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 13–14. As she puts it, the madrasa itself was in a sense ‘veiled’, hidden from public view (Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain, p. 82). 49 Like the Madrasatul Niswan, the madrasa studied by Borker also identifies as Tablighi Jama‘at. It is located in a different part of New Delhi from the one where Winkelmann did her fieldwork. However, Borker does not explore in any detail the significance of the denominational identity of the madrasa she studied. 47

72

Scholars of Faith

students, in part through her own personal journey of marriage and motherhood.50 Winkelmann’s concept of ‘core families’ is a helpful starting point for understanding the connections between different members of the administration. There were three families that made the major decisions regarding day-to-day administration and curriculum development. These families were connected to one another through marriage, a common origin in Barabanki district outside Lucknow, attendance at the same group of madrasas in Delhi and elsewhere, and most importantly perhaps, affiliation and active involvement in the Tablighi Jama‘at.51 The three principal administrators, namely, the founder, manager, and principal, were all related. The founder’s daughter, who was the principal, was married to the manager. In addition, some of the teachers were also part of this family nexus. Several of them also shared the same accommodation, living in a small house not far from the madrasa. In caste terms, the core families were lowcaste Ansaris.52 As Winkelmann explains, the founder and manager travelled frequently ‘in the path of God’ (fi sabil Allah, a Qur’anic phrase) in connection with Tablighi work, thereby also raising funds for the madrasa and recruiting students and teachers through word of mouth. Importantly, they were affiliated with a small group of madrasas that constituted a shared network: they had both been educated or were presently teaching at the Kashful Ulum Madrasa for boys, a Tablighi madrasa, in Nizamuddin’s Tablighi Markaz (Tablighi Centre), while many of the teachers had previously taught at either the Jami‘a Noorul Islam 50 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, Chapter 3, especially pp. 43–4 and passim. See also the comments by Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011); and Sumbul Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam: A Case Study of Barelwi Khanqahs’ (PhD dissertation, University of Delhi, May 2016), for their insights on the difficulties faced by Muslim researchers working on Muslim issues in this time frame and in general. 51 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 51–2 and passim. 52 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 46–7. For the classic study on the Ansaris, whose traditional profession was weaving, see Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

73

in Lucknow, UP, or the Jami‘at al-Salehat in Malegaon, Maharashtra. They were thus part of a wider geographical network of schools.53 The Madrasatul Niswan’s Tablighi connections—and beyond them, those with the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow—manifested themselves in a number of ways, though most especially perhaps in the madrasa’s syllabus. Winkelmann emphasizes the importance of one book in particular, namely, the Faza’il-i ‘Amal (Virtues of [Everyday] Deeds), which students were required to read and study every day. The basic teaching of this Tablighi manual is that one’s daily actions are a means of gaining merit in the hereafter and therefore one should cultivate the virtues that will lead to heaven rather than hell. Among other things, idleness and frivolous or extravagant excess are strongly discouraged, while behaviour associated with a deeply pious, restrained way of life is encouraged. The book thereby promotes the sanctification of everyday life.54 In addition, students also had daily lessons in Islamic upbringing (elsewhere classified as adab), in which a variety of books were used, many of them by the Nadwi scholar Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi. One of them, the Qira’at al-Rashida, uses exemplary stories from the early history of Islam to teach students how to engage in everyday acts such as eating and drinking, dressing appropriately, and so on.55 The Deobandi work Bihishti Zewar, by Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, which is listed in the syllabus for the first year of the ‘Alima course under the category of jurisprudence (fiqh), conveys similar lessons in daily comportment while also teaching practical skills like letter writing. An important insight of Winkelmann’s ethnography is the fact that in practice the madrasa departed in several ways from the printed syllabus that was made available to parents and students at the beginning of the school year.56 Thus, many books in the field of Islamic law were studied selectively, limited to ‘questions related to marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance’, subjects deemed important for an educated Muslim woman to know. As Winkelmann puts it, the 53

Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 51–2. Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 54–5 and passim. 55 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’`, pp. 70–1. 56 See Appendix 1.2 at the end of this chapter for the Madrasatul Niswan’s syllabus. 54

74

Scholars of Faith

madrasa emphasized practical virtues (faza’il) rather than theoretical legal issues (masa’il). Even though the men in charge claimed that the curriculum was ‘the same as the dars-e-nizami taught in madrasas for boys’, in fact it was ‘substantially different, and … in practice often differs from the official curriculum’.57 For example, the two volumes of Qira’at al-Rashida, mentioned earlier, were not listed in the syllabus. However, in other respects the syllabus reflected the reality on the ground, as a contrary finding seems to be that the study of Hadith (prophetic traditions) was emphasized, particularly in the fifth and final year. Study of the Qur’an began in the first year and continued throughout, with the addition of related subjects such as exegesis. In addition to the formal syllabus, Winkelmann points to the importance of what she calls the ‘informal syllabus’, namely, the ‘subtle and … all-pervading impact of adab’ which manifests itself in ‘rules regarding discipline, body control, and behavioural expectations’.58 She illustrates her meaning by giving the example of twin girls, about six years old, who were rather shabbily dressed when they first came to the madrasa, had an unkempt appearance, and carried their Qur’an in a plain cloth cover, but whose appearance, demeanour, sense of confidence, and pride in the way they carried their Qur’an, all seemed to improve and grow after they had been at the madrasa for a short time. As she writes, the girls had quickly imbibed not only their formal lessons, but also the ‘moral undertone’ of the madrasa. The case of the young sweeper girl is even more illuminating, as it shows the potential for upward social mobility implicit in the cultivation of personal modesty; appropriate modes of dress, particularly veiling (pardah); and attempts to acquire religious learning. Not only did the sweeper girl’s personal behaviour change over time, but the teachers began to show her increased respect.59 In the concluding chapters of ‘From Behind the Curtain’, Winkelmann offers some theoretical insights into the wider significance of her work. Following Foucault, she notes that being residential, the madrasa was a ‘total institution’ which was both removed from and enmeshed in its physical environment near the Nizamuddin 57 58 59

Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 69. Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 75. Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 76–7.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

75

shrine. While on the one hand, students imbibed the rather austere adab at the heart of its ‘civilizing mission’, consciously distancing themselves from the noise and periodic wedding-like atmosphere of the neighbouring Nizamuddin shrine, on the other hand they interacted with the world around them at a number of levels: through the daily Hadith classes, taught by a male teacher to fifth-year students at a neighbouring house, for which they had to don their burqas; weekly lessons in machine knitting at the neighbouring Inayat Khan shrine (dargah) attended by some of the teachers; free Hindi-medium afternoon classes at the prestigious Delhi Public School not too far away, attended by the principal’s daughters; knowledge of and exposure to Hindu festivals such as Diwali; and despite formal disapproval, knowledge of public culture, Hindi films, and the like. In these and other ways, the madrasa students were very much enmeshed in the geographical and cultural context of the school.60 Returning to the madrasa’s ‘civilizing mission’, clearly one of the central mechanisms by which it was absorbed was by disciplining the body. There were many examples of this throughout the day. The following image is familiar to those who have observed madrasa students: ‘the teachers’ control over the students’ bodies showed whenever they began to recite a text during class, as without any further ado the students ceased their activities, adjusted their posture, fidgeted with the scarves covering their heads, and started moving their upper bodies along with the rhythm of the teachers’ voice’.61 As Winkelmann notes, discipline of the body was particularly necessary given that space was tight at the Madrasatul Niswan, as students ate, slept, and studied in the same physical space at different times of the day. The teachers’ and senior students’ authority ensured the students’ smooth transition from one activity to the next.62

60 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 48–9, 72, 85. Borker devotes considerable analytical attention to the many ways in which the madrasa students she observed were connected with the outside world, especially those who went on to study at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. See Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood, particularly Chapter 7 and Conclusion. 61 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 80. 62 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 82–3.

76

Scholars of Faith

If discipline is central to the madrasa’s purpose, it is the girls’ ‘willingness to be taught’, to use Saba Mahmood’s apt phrase, that allows that purpose to be realized.63 As Winkelmann notes, the students’ very ‘docility’ and acquiescence to authority should therefore be seen as a form of agency. Likewise, the pardah-observing woman moving about in public space is also actively ‘participating’ in the public sphere, even though such participation is not her primary purpose. Some scholars would say that they constitute a ‘subaltern counterpublic’, that is, ‘a parallel discursive arena where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’.64

Some Thoughts on the Curriculum of Girls’ Madrasas This chapter has looked at a number of different kinds of education for Muslim girls in South Asia over the course of the twentieth century, beginning with home schooling at the start of the period to the tentative move towards institutional forms of learning in the 1920s and 1930s, to madrasa education for girls today. Let me conclude with a few observations about the syllabi of girls’ madrasas. First, the syllabi of two very different girls’ madrasas, as indicated later in the chapter, show that the textbooks chosen for inclusion are at one level the same and at another level different, depending on the denomination (maslak) of the madrasa. The similarity in the overall syllabi derives from the fact that girls’ madrasas are modelled on those for boys, and therefore follow in large part the dars-i nizami syllabus that dates back to the eighteenth century. The major subject areas of the dars-i nizami are: primarily, the Qur’an and sciences associated with Qur’anic study (recitation, exegesis, principles of exegesis), prophetic traditions (Hadith), Islamic law and its principles (fiqh and usul-i

63

Saba Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology (2001), 16(2): 202–36. 64 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 100, quoting Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

77

fiqh), Arabic grammar and literature; and secondarily, Persian, Urdu, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy. In addition, English, maths, and computer science have become standard modern additions at a number of South Asian madrasas, as doing so allows them to gain Government of India recognition of their degrees and facilitates the transition of some madrasa students into the educational mainstream. The differences are also notable, as may be seen by comparing the books used in the Jami‘at al-Salehat and those used in the Madrasatul Niswan—and in the next chapter, those in the Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at—because of their different maslak identities. Thus, to cite the most obvious differences, the Jami‘at al-Salehat wants its students to be well-versed in the writings of Mawlana Abul A‘la Mawdudi, the founder of the Jama‘at-i Islami, while the Madrasatul Niswan teaches the Faza’il-i ‘Amal, a Tablighi text, and to a more limited extent the Bihishti Zewar, an important Deobandi book meant primarily for women, though also read by men. When we look at the syllabus of the Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at in the following chapter, we will see that they use the Sunni Bihishti Zewar and the Jannati Zewar, which are Barelwi texts for women. Likewise, the Urdu translations of the Qur’an used by the different madrasas are also different, and are indicative of the ideological positioning of the authors. It should also be noted, however, that there is some overlap between the different groups. Thus, in the cases examined here, both the Jami‘at al-Salehat and the Madrasatul Niswan use books written by Mawlana Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi. This would indicate that the Jami‘at al-Salehat and by extension the Jama‘at-i Islami feel they share common ground with the Nadwa, despite differences on particular issues such as the acceptance (taqlid) or nonacceptance of rulings by the Hanafi school.65 Likewise, the omission by the Jami‘at al-Salehat of the Deobandi work Bihishti Zewar is indicative of the Jama‘at-i Islami’s perceived ideological distance from the Deobandi school of thought. The fact that the Madrasatul Niswan, with its Tablighi ties, would use the Bihishti Zewar comes as no surprise, as the Tablighi Jama‘at has close ties with Deoband. However, its use  of Mawlana 65 On this, see Hartung, ‘The Nadwat al-ulama’. Moosa notes that Mawlana Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi was a ‘onetime colleague of Mawdudi (with whom he later had differences)’. Moosa, What Is a Madrasa?, p. 27.

78

Scholars of Faith

Abul  Hasan  ‘Ali Nadwi’s Qira’at al-Rashida is not self-evident, as the two groups take somewhat distinct stances on some issues.66 Similarly, as I noted earlier in the chapter, the inclusion of an anthology of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s essays in the Jami‘at al-Salehat syllabus is remarkable, and points to a rapprochement between the Indian Jama‘at and the secular Aligarh Muslim University founded by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in the nineteenth century. A second point that emerges is that the syllabus at the Madrasatul Niswan, as Winkelmann notes, is definitely different from that of boys’ madrasas. She shows how this is so by listing the books of a representative sample of the dars-i nizami syllabus in an appendix to her book. In general, the girls’ syllabus is shorter by a year than the boys’ syllabus and where the same texts are taught, the girls study different sections of those texts, those which are thought to be of relevance to them as future wives and mothers. Furthermore, as one of Winkelmann’s informants noted, there was no mufti course for girls anywhere in India at the time she did her fieldwork, as women are not allowed to issue fatwas. Thus the religious authority of women can never be public, as is that of men. However, there are signs of change. A madrasa in Hyderabad, Jamiat-ul-Mominath, reported on its website in 2019 that 70 girls had received a mufti’s certificate and were ‘spreading din’ (isha‘at-i din) not only in India but abroad as well.67 These observations on the syllabus are borne out by my own research on the Barelwi girls’ madrasa that I explore in the following chapters. The feminization of the syllabus, to my mind, makes sense in view of the purpose of girls’ madrasa education, which is not employment-oriented so much as it is to ensure the educational and religious uplift of the Muslim community as a whole. Unlike Winkelmann, however, I believe that there never was a standard dars-i nizami syllabus even for boys, as each of the Sunni Muslim groups—Deobandi, Barelwi, Nadwi, and others—have changed it to suit their perspectives since they began to establish madrasas of their 66

See Metcalf, Islamic Revival, Chapter 5, on the Nadwa and its differences with Deoband. 67 Jamiat-ul-Mominath website: http://www.jamiatulmominath.com; accessed on 6 March 2019. My thanks to Raisur Rahman of Wake Forest University for bringing this to my attention.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

79

own. Thus, the founders of the Dar al-‘Ulum madrasa in the 1860s changed the original Farangi Mahall emphasis on ‘rational’ sciences to one on Hadith and fiqh.68 Likewise, other ‘ulama have changed the weight given to different subjects and the assigned texts for these subjects as well. Borker’s work on Madrasa Jamiatul Mominat, a Tablighi Jama‘at madrasa near Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, largely confirms Winkelmann’s findings—and mine in this study. However, there are two features in Borker’s ethnography which are notably absent in Winkelmann’s work and mine. The first of these is her documentation of student performances through skits at the madrasa during Republic Day (26 January) celebrations, seeking to show the relevance of pardah in the aftermath of the gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi in December 2012. Such discourse, connecting the practice of pardah with contemporary issues around the safety risks to women in urban spaces in India in an effort to demonstrate the value and relevance of pardah, is a powerful counterargument by this girls’ madrasa to the stereotype of pardah as a signifier of backwardness.69 The second is Borker’s chapter on madrasa girls who choose to go on to university by enrolling in Jamia Millia Islamia. This chapter is valuable for its insights into students’ and students’ parents’ perception of university education as a very different kind of space, one which parents in particular approach with considerable unease. Borker’s ethnography illustrates the sharp contrast students draw between their experience of studying in a madrasa versus a university, and cautions us against assuming a single trajectory for Muslim girls with a madrasa education. A few female madrasa students aspire for a university education and the expanded horizons that it promises, as Borker shows. Her exploration of the difficulties these students encountered at a number of levels—with parents, faculty, and male students—and their stoic and patient endurance of bullying in the classroom by male students, some of whom were former madrasa students themselves, illustrates the strength of girls’ madrasa education 68

See Metcalf, Islamic Revival, Chapter 3. Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood, especially pp. 181–5. 69

80

Scholars of Faith

in equipping them for the challenges they might face when stepping outside the protected spaces of the home and the madrasa. For most female madrasa students and teachers in small towns like Shahjahanpur, UP, however, a university education is beyond their parents’ financial means, especially if they lack family connections in the big city. As Borker’s study well illuminates, the world of the madrasa is linked with the home. The university is perceived as an alien space and is therefore not the choice of most madrasa girls or their parents.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

81

APPENDIX 1.1

A1.1a Syllabus of Madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, ‘Alima Level (June 2013) List of classes and subjects taught at the ‘Alima level ‘Ula (1st year)

Saniya (2nd year) Salisa (3rd year)

Rabia (4th year)

Fiqh

Qur’an

Qur’an

Qur’an

Al-Fiqh al-Muyassir (select chapters)

Parts 29–30

Parts 26–8

Suras al-Anbiya, Hajj, Mu’minin, Nur, Furqan

Arabic Language

Fiqh

Hadith

Hadith

1. Al-Qira’at al-Rashida, Part 2 by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi

1. Al-Fiqh al-Muyassir (select chapters)

Riyaz al-Salihayn Mishkat by Imam Nuri al-Masabih

2. Qasas al-Nabiyyin, for children, 1 and 2

2. Manthurat by Mawlana Muhd. Rab‘i Hasani Nadwi

Translation and Composition

Arabic Language Fiqh

Mu‘allim al-Insha, Part 1, pp. 26–76

1. Al-Qira’at al-Rashida, Part 3 by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi 2. Qasas al-Nabiyyin, Part 3 by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi

1. Mukhtasar Quduri 2. Siraji fi al-Mirath

Fiqh

1. Sharh al-Waqayah, vol. 32. Siraji fi al-Mirath

82

Scholars of Faith

Arabic Grammar Arabic Grammar Arabic Language Principles of Jurisprudence/ and Literature Usul al-Fiqh 1. Hidaya al-Nahw (complete)

1. Kitab al-Nahw, 1st half

1. Kitab al-Sarf, 2nd half

2. Kitab al-Sarf, 1st half

2. Kitab al-Nahw, 2. Mukhtarat 2nd half min Adab al-‘Arab, Part 1, by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi

‘Ilm Usul al-Fiqh by ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Khilaf

3. Kalila wa Dimna (select chapters) History of Islam

Translation and Composition

Arabic Literature Arabic Literature

Tarikh-i Islam, 1st half by Akbar Shah Khan Najibabadi, Chapters 1 and 2

Mu‘allim al-Insha, pp. 77–end of book

1. Al-Miqtatafat min Diwan al-Himasat, Part 1, published by Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur

1. Mukhtarat min Adab al-Arab, Part 1, by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi 2. Kalila wa Dimna (select chapters)

Urdu

History of Islam

Translation and Composition

Arabic Literature

Nawae Urdu, NCERT, 1st half

Tarikh-i Islam, 1st half by Akbar Shah Khan Najibabadi, Chapters 1 and 2

1. Mu‘allim al-Insha, Part 2, 1st part

1. Al-Miqtatafat min Diwan al-Himasat, Part 3, published by Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur

2. Al-Balaghat al-Wazihat

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

Home Science

Urdu

Nawae Urdu, ‘Ilm-i Umur NCERT, 2nd half Khanadari by Musarrat Zabani, 1st half

83

History of Islam

Arabic Literature

Tarikh-i Islam, Part 3 by Akbar Shah Khan Najibabadi

Qatar al-Nida wa bil al-Sada by Ibn Hisham, 2nd half Translation and Composition

Civics

Home Science

Other

Jamhuria-i Hind ka Dastur-i ‘Amal by Hashim Qidwai

‘Ilm-i Umur Khanadari by Musarrat Zabani, 2nd half

Adabi Namune by 1. Mu‘allim Educational Book al-Insha, Part 2, 2nd part House, Aligarh

Civics

Civics

History of Islam

Jamhuria-i Hind ka Dastur-i ‘Amal by Hashim Qidwai

Jamhuria-i Hind ka Dastur-i ‘Amal by Hashim Qidwai

Tarikh-i Islam, Part 3 by Akbar Shah Khan Najibabadi

2. Al-Balaghat Bacchon ki al-Wazihat Tarbiyat by Musarrat Zamani

Other: Adabi Namune by Educational Book House, Aligarh Bacchon ki Tarbiyat by Musarrat Zamani Civics/political science (Mubadi Siyasat by Hashim Qidwai) Islami Siyasat by Mawlana Gawhar Rahman

84

Scholars of Faith

For General Study (mutala‘a-i ‘amm):

For General Study (mutala‘a-i ‘amm):

For General Study (mutala‘a-i ‘amm):

For General Study (mutala‘a-i ‘amm):

Rahmat-i ‘Alam by ‘Allama Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi

Khutbat, Part 1, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Khutbat, Part 2, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Khutbat, Parts 4 and 5, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Khadija al-Kubra by Ma’il Khairabadi

Sirat-i Fatima by Talib al-Hashmi

Hayat-i Tayyiba by Mawlana Muhd. ‘Abd al-Hayy

Adab-i Zindagi by Mawlana Muhd. Yusuf Islahi

Khushgawar Ta‘alluqat by Mawlana Muhd. ‘Abd al-Hayy

Azwaj Mutaharat Hazrat A’isha by Ma’il Khairabadi by Firozana Ahsan

Islam ka Nizam-i Hayat by Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Salamati ka Rasta by Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Dai A‘zam by Mawlana Muhd. Yusuf Islahi

Muslim Khawatin se Islam ke Matalebat by Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Pardah, by Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Guldasta-i Hadith by Mawlana Muhd. Yusuf Islahi

Sham‘a-i Haram by Mawlana Muhd. Yusuf Islahi

Husn Ma‘ashirat by Mawlana Muhd. Yusuf Islahi

Haqiqat-i Shari‘at by Aiman Ahsan Islahi

Khawatin by Sayyid Akhtar Yusufi

Islam apse kya chahta hai? by Mawlana Sayyid Hamid ‘Ali

Yuvak Bharati Standard XI

Yuvak Bharati Standard XII

English Reader Standard IX (third language)

English Reader Standard X

A New Style of General English for Standard IX

A New Style of General English for Standard X

A New Style of General English for Standard X

A New Style of General English for Intermediate

Source: Prospectus 2013–2014, pp. 14–16.

Muslim Girls’ Education in North India

A1.1b

85

Syllabus of Madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, Fazila Level (June 2013)

Fazila course (2 years) 1st year

2nd year

Qur’an: Suras An‘am, A‘raf, Anfal, Tawba, Nur, Ahzab

Qur’an: Suras Fatiha, Baqara, Al-i ‘Imran, Nisa‘, Ma’ida

Hadith: Sunan Abu Da’ud, Sunan Nisa‘i, Sunan Ibn-i Maja

Hadith: Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Tirmidhi

Fiqh: Bidayat al-Mujtahid, vol. 1

Fiqh: Bidayat al-Mujtahid, vol. 2

Principles of Fiqh: Usul al-Shashi, 1st half

Principles of Fiqh: Usul al-Shashi, 2nd half

Arabic Literature: 1. Mukhtarat min Adab al-‘Arab, Part 3 by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi 2: Nusus Adabiyat 3. Muntakhabat min She‘r al-‘Arab, Part 1, published by Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur 4. Tarikh al-Adab al-‘Arabi (Jahili period) by Mawlana Muhd. Wazeh Rashid Nadwi

Arabic Literature: 1. Mukhtarat min Adab al-‘Arab, Part 2, by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi 2. Muntakhabat min She‘r al-‘Arab, Part 1, published by Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur 3. Tarikh al-Adab al-‘Arabi (Islamic period), by Mawlana Muhd. Rabi‘ Hasani Nadwi

Education: 1. Ta‘limi Nafsiyat ke Nae Zwie (New Dimensions of Educational Psychology) by Masarrat Zamani, Dr Ibn Farid 2. Fann Ta‘lim o Tarbiyat, by Afzal Husain Khan

Education: 1. Ta‘limi Nafsiyat ke Nae Zwie (New Dimensions of Educational Psychology) by Masarrat Zamani, Dr Ibn Farid 2. Fann Ta‘lim o Tarbiyat, by Afzal Husain Khan

Logic: al-Mantiq, 3rd (tisra) by Mawlana Muhd. ‘Abdallah Gangohi

Logic: al-Mantiq, 3rd (tisra) by Mawlana Muhd. ‘Abdallah Gangohi

Urdu Literature: Musaddas-i Hali

Urdu Literature: Intikhab Mazamin Sir Sayyid

For General Study (mutala‘a-i ‘amm): For General Study (mutala‘a-i ‘amm): Huquq al-Zawjayn by Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Qur’an ki Char Bunyadi Istilahen by Mawlana Sayyid Abul A‘la Mawdudi

Awrat Islami Ma‘ashire Men by Mawlana Sayyid Jalal al-Din Umri

Da‘wat-i Din awr uska Tariqa-i Kar by Mawlana Aiman Ahsan Islahi

Shahadat-i Haqq by Mawlana Sayyid Jazira-i ‘Arab by Mawlana Muhd. Abul A‘la Mawdudi Rabi‘ Hasani Nadwi

86

Scholars of Faith

Muhsin al-Insaniyat by Na‘im Siddiqqi

Qur’ani Ta‘limat by Mawlana Muhd. Yusuf Islahi

Haqiqat-i Tawhid by Aiman Ahsan Islahi

New Light General English for Intermediate

Fariza Iqamat-i Din by Mawlana Sadr al-Din Islahi

Flamingo

New Light General English for Intermediate

Vistas Supplementary Reader

Flamingo Vistas Supplementary Reader Source: Prospectus 2013–2014, pp. 14–16.

Madrasatul Niswan, Delhi (2003)

Qur’an

1. Memorization Tajwid and Qira’at: of Suras al-Qari‘a 1. Memorization of tajwid from to al-Nas Mu‘in al-Tajwid 2. Tajwid and along with its basic Qira’at, entire grammar Qur’an 2. Memorization 3. Rahmani of Suras al--Fil to Arabic Qa’ida al-Nas

Qur’an

Ibtida’iya (Primary, ‘Idadiya (Primary, Arabic pre-Senior Secondary School) Class)

List of classes and subjects taught

A1.2

APPENDIX 1.2

2. al-Tamrin bil-Tajwid wal Hadar

Exegesis of the Qur’an/Tafsir

Khamsa (5th yr)

Teacher chooses Ma‘arif al-Qur’an chapters from select suras

1. Tashil al-Tajwid, by Qari Muhd. Siddiq Bandwi

Taught with tajwid and basic grammar. Suras al-Zoha to al-‘Adiyat memorized

Tarjuma al-Qur’an, Parts 16–30, with commentary and exercise of Sarf and Nahw

Exegesis/Qur’an Tajwid/Qira’at

Qur’an

Qur’an

Rabia (4th yr)

Salisa (3rd yr)

Saniya (2nd yr)

‘Ula (1st yr)

10. Al-Shama’il lil-Tirmidhi

9. Al-Muwatta, Imam Muhd.

8. Al-Muwatta, Imam Malik

7. Sharh Mani‘ al-Asar lil-Tahawi

6. Sunan Abi Majah

5. Al-Jame‘ al-Tirmidhi

4. Sunan Abi Daud

3. Sunan al-Nasa’i

2. Sahih Muslim

1. Sahih Bukhari

Jalalayn, Parts 1–2

Al-‘Aqida al-Hasana

Tafsir

Du‘a-i Ma‘thura memorized from Masnun Du‘aen, by Muhd. ‘Ashiq Ilahi Bulandshahri

Du‘a-i Ma‘thura memorized from Masnun Du‘aen, by Muhd. ‘Ashiq Ilahi Bulandshahri

Du‘a-i Ma‘thura memorized from Masnun Du‘aen, by Muhd. ‘Ashiq Ilahi Bulandshahri Tarjumat al-Qur’an, and commentary, Parts 1–15

Hadith

Tafsir/Exegesis

‘Aqida

Exegesis of Qur’an/

‘Aqida

‘Aqida

‘Aqida

1. Bihishti Samar, Parts 1–2

Miftah al-Qur’an, Parts 1 and 2

2. Ta‘limul Islam, by Mufti Muhd. Kifayaullah Dehlawi

Fiqh

3. Stitching, cooking, and so on.

2. Dini Ta‘lim ka Risala

1. Ladkiyon ka Islami Course, Parts 1–4 by Shaykh Maqbul al-Rahman Bijnori

Arabic

2. Stitching, cooking, and so on.

1. Memorization of the fundamentals of prayer (namaz), its conditions, bathing, ablution, and other Islamic fundamentals

Tarbiyat/Islamic Tarbiyat/Islamic Upbringing Upbringing

Bihishti Zewar by Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi

Fiqh

Stitching, cooking, and so on.

Usul al-Fiqh

Tahzib al-Akhlaq Nur al-Anwar

Hadith

2. Hayat al-Sahaba, Part 1

2. ‘Aqida al-Tahawia

1. Risala al-Tawhid

‘Aqida

Al-Fauz al-Kabir Tarikh Da‘wat o A‘zimat, for fi Usul al-Tafsir study

1. Mishkat al-Masabih, select chapters

Taqwiyat al-Iman, by Shah Isma‘il Dehlawi

Khawatin aur din ki khidmat by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi

History

Usul al-Tafsir/ Principles of Exegesis

Hadith

‘Aqida

Tarbiyat/Islamic Upbringing

1. Rahmani Qa’ida Arabic

Al-Qalam Islamic Primer

2. Miftah al-Qalam, Parts 1–3

Arabic

English

3. Reading, writing, dictation, and letter writing

Tarikh al-Islam

History of Islam

Insha

2. Mansurat

1. ‘Arbi ka 2. Usul al-Shashi Mu‘allim, Part4 2. Al-Tamrin ‘ala al-Takallum

1. Tashil al-Usul

Usul al-Fiqh

2. Quduri, Kitab al-Boyu

1. Qasas al-Nabiyyin, Part 4

1. Nur al-Izah

Mabad-i Usul al-Fiqh by Mawlana Sayyid Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi

Tarikh al-Islam, Part 3 by Mufti Muhd. Miyan Dihlawi

1. Rahmani Urdu Qa’ida

2. Urdu Zaban, Parts 1–2 by Muhd. Isma‘il Merathi

Arabic Literature

Fiqh

Usul al-Fiqh

History

Urdu

Muqaddama Tanqih al-Lamat by ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddith Dihlawi

Usul al-Hadith

Mishkat al-Masabih, select chapters

Hadith

Summary of ‘Aqida al-Tahawia

or

Urdu

3. Reading, writing, dictation, and letter writing

2. Multiplication 2. Urdu Zaban, Parts 3–5, by Muhd. Isma‘il Merathi

1. Memorization 1. Rahmani Urdu of Urdu tables Qa’ida

Maths

4. Minhaj al-‘Arabiya, Part 1

3. Arabic Sifwat al-Masadir: memorization of names of days, months, and years in Arabic

Balagha/ Rhetoric Tashil al-Balagha

Sira

Tarikh Habib Allah Stitching, embroidery, cooking

Tarbiyat

bil-Lughat al-‘Arabiya

Hidaya, Awwalayn

Fiqh

6. Miftah al-Qur’an, Parts 3 and 4

5. Sifwat al-Masadir, memorization

4. Al-Tamrin al-Takallum bil-Lughat al-‘Arabiya

3. Qasas al-Nabiyyin, Parts 2 and 3 3. Qasas al-Nabiyyin, Part 3

2. Miftah al-Qur’an, Part 5

1. Lisan al-Qur’an; juzan Mukhtar 2. Minhaj al-‘Arabiya, Parts al-Mu‘allimin wal Mu‘allimat 2 and 3

1. Mufid al-Talibin

Book selected by teacher in accordance with student ability

Respect for teachers, regard for books, classroom, and discipline

Arabic Literature

Arabic Literature

English

Home Science

Revision of Tashil al-Tajwid along with Tajwid and Hadar

Tajwid/Qira’at

2. Seraji Mukhtarat, Part 1

1. Tashil al-Fara’idh fil-Mirath

Mirath

Tarbiyat/Islamic Sira Upbringing

Arabic Grammar

Stitching, ‘Ilm al-Sarf cooking, and al-Awwal, by Mushtaq Ahmad so on. Jarthawli

Home Science

Respect for teachers, regard for books, classroom, and discipline

Tamrin al-Sarf for study and exercise

3. Mu‘allim al-Insha, Part 2

3. Mu‘allim al-Insha, Part 1

Sirat al-Nabi, by ‘Allama Shibli Nu‘mani, Parts 3–4

2. Al-Tamrin ‘ala Takallum bil-Lughat al-‘Arabiya

2. ‘Arbi ka Mu‘allim, Parts 1 and 2

Select chapters

1. ‘Arbi ka Mu‘allim, Part 3

1. Translation and Essay writing

Book selected by teacher in accordance with student ability

Select chapters

History

Stitching, embroidery, cooking

History of Islam Tarbiyat/ Upbringing

Insha

Arabic Essay

Maths

Al-Nahw al-Wazeha, Parts 1–3

1. Durus al-Balagha

English

Book selected by teacher in accordance with student ability

Sirat al-Nabi, by Shibli Nu‘mani, Parts 1–2 Arabic Grammar Kitab al-Sarf by ‘Abdur Rahman Amritsari

Book selected by teacher in accordance with student ability

Maths

Book selected by teacher in accordance with student ability

2. Al-Balagha al-Wazeha

Chapter selected by teacher from prescribed book

English

Arabic Grammar

Rhetoric/ Balagha

Sira

Nahw: Al-Nahw al-Wazeha, Parts 1–3

English

Sirat al-Nabi by ‘Allama Shibli Nu‘mani; select chapters

Sira

Tarikh al-Islam wa Sirat al-Nabawiya

‘Ilm al-Sigha by Shaykh Muhd. Rafi ‘Usmani

History of Islam Arabic Grammar

Dini Ta‘lim ka Risala, Parts I–XI by Muhd. Miyan Dihlawi

Urdu

Note: Faza’il-i ‘Amal is prescribed for the entire duration of the course (Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 146). Source: Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 140–9.

Book selected by teacher in accordance with student ability

English

Nahw: Tashil Hidayat al-Nahw

2 JAMI‘A NUR AL-SHARI‘AT, A BARELWI GIRLS’ MADRASA IN UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA

A Muslim has to follow the shari‘a, the first step of which is to offer prayer (namaz) regularly. If you don’t take the first step, how can you climb the ladder? —Sayyid Sahib, December 2014

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at and Its Founder Located in the small, west Uttar Pradesh (UP) town of Shahjahanpur, the madrasa Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, as I am calling it (this is not its real name), in October 2013 had about 300 girls in the boarding school, in addition to a handful of girls who studied there during the day but returned home at the end of classes. Two distinctive features of the madrasa are its denominational affiliation and its rural, largely working-class background. In denominational terms, the founder and students self-identify as Barelwi Sunni Muslims. Also noteworthy is the fact that most of the students of this madrasa come from either rural families in west UP and neighbouring Indian states or from small towns such as Shahjahanpur, with a small number coming from larger cities. In many cases, the girls’ parents have not studied beyond primary school. However, as I discuss in this book, they have invested heavily in the education of their children, both boys and girls. Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India

97

The madrasa was founded in 2003 by Sayyid Ehsan Miyan, affectionately addressed as Abba Huzur (respected father) by the madrasa students. Staff and teachers called him Sayyid Sahib.1 Sayyid Sahib is a tall bespectacled man with a wiry frame, energetic manner, and excellent posture. He wears a long white tunic (kurta) with loose white pants (pyjama), and on his head is a white turban. His manner is direct, informal, and open, with a touch of humour, and his language is simple, even colloquial. He speaks with verve, emphasizing his words with a gleeful slap on the thigh and a glint in his eye when he makes a point that seems but logical and self-evident to him. In response to my questions, he gave me the following information about himself: Sayyid Sahib (SS): I was born in Qasba Saurikh [in the south-western corner of ] district Kannauj, around 1960. I grew up in the village of Kabirpur. My father died when I was a year and a half old, and I was one of five children. I came from a wealthy family with business interests. But because I rejected the life of a businessman, I live simply. I studied in Pilibhit upto the 4th or 5th standard and stayed in my village until I was 18. Then I came to Bareilly to study at [Madrasa] Manzar-i Islam. I was there for just two years. Then I went to teach in Pilibhit, in Qasba Nuriya. The name of the madrasa was Dar al-Shamsiya. It had about 100–125 resident students, all boys. I was a teacher and overall manager of this school for fifteen years. In 1999, I opened a school for boys. Even back then, I planned to open a girls’ school one day. I opened this madrasa in 20062 in response to popular demand. All the Sunni girls in this community were attending Deobandi schools because there was no alternative, and when they graduated they thought like Deobandis. When I opened the madrasa in 2006,

1

There is a vast literature on the role of Sayyids in South Asian Islam. See, among others, Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘Is There Caste among Muslims in India?’, Eastern Anthropologist (2015), 68(1): 1–14; Arthur F. Buehler, ‘Trends of Ashrafization in India’, in Morimoto Kazuo, ed., Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The Living Links to the Prophet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); and Sachiyo Komaki, ‘The Name of the Gift: Sacred Exchange, Social Practice and Sayyad Category in North India’, Talasaki City University Economics (2013), 15(4): 39–48. 2 The madrasa began in 2003 but was formally inaugurated in 2006.

98

Scholars of Faith

many parents withdrew their girls from Deobandi schools, and they filled up the madrasa quickly. Usha Sanyal (US): Who had asked you to do it? The ‘ulama or the people? SS: You know the ‘ulama. They don’t like me. It was the ordinary people. With the ‘ulama, it’s all about desire for fame, wealth, and power. Although I get along with them, I don’t have close relations with them. As a Sayyid, I’m not allowed to take zakat money. So, I used to spend a lot of time travelling to raise money for the madrasas. People give [a donation] when they see you, but if they don’t see you, they don’t give. I am talking of poor people who give small donations. Rich people, and government and public officials, are willing to give, but they want to take a commission.

Although Sayyid Sahib distanced himself from the Barelwi ‘ulama in the above conversation, his own background and occupation—teaching Hadith, Qur’anic exegesis, and Sufism (tasawwuf) in his boys’ madrasa—was very much that of an Islamic scholar (‘alim). Rather than excluding himself from the category, he was drawing a line between certain Barelwi ‘ulama with whom he had differences, and himself. In his characteristically understated way, he was indicating to me where he stood in the intra-Barelwi politics centred on Bareilly city, not far from Shahjahanpur. Sayyid Sahib’s other distancing move in this conversation, less surprisingly, was an inter-denominational (maslaki) one indicating his differences with the Deobandis. It is, therefore, particularly noteworthy that a Deobandi scholar writing a history of the ‘ulama of Shahjahanpur, writes about Sayyid Sahib in the following terms: He is a man of great intelligence and integrity. The mawlana has a penetrating intellect, is to the point, is attentive to ritual purity, kind, of good character, a follower of the sunna, and conciliatory in every respect. In the field of knowledge, his efforts and service are most praiseworthy. He has made the spread of knowledge his goal and purpose, and has already done a lot in this field. He established a madrasa in Qasba Nuriya, in district Pilibhit, another one in Faridpur, district Bareilly, and built an impressive two-storey building in [Shahjahanpur] for a boys’ madrasa. But his thirst for knowledge was not satisfied. After a few years he laid the foundation for a girls’ madrasa, which today is operating with great success.3 3 Shah Mahmud ‘Ali Khan, Sar-zamin-i Shahjahanpur ke ‘Ulama-i Fuhul, Huffaz, o Qura’ (Shahjahanpur: n.p., 2014), pp. 168–9 (my translation).

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India

99

A little further, Shah Mahmud ‘Ali Khan says: Ehsan Miyan has never made the Prophet’s pulpit (minbar) a wrestling arena (akhara). Rather, he has always protected its honour (ihtiram). He has neither asked for a predetermined fee for delivering a speech, nor made it [the speech] an instrument with which to speak against people of other denominations (maslak). The purpose of his life is religious knowledge, the advancement of tawhid and the sunna, and the rebuttal of reprehensible innovation (bid‘a). … Despite the maslak-related differences (tazadd) between us, I have never felt that I was talking to an ‘alim of an opposing (mukhalif) maslak. Because of his love of the truth, misguided (be-rah) people of his own maslak don’t like him. And how could they, when Sayyid Sahib is neither given to cursing his opponents nor to writing fatwas against them? … Indeed, he is a man of Allah.4

This is a remarkable tribute to a Barelwi scholar by a Deobandi one. The last few sentences refer to the fact that Sayyid Ehsan Miyan has been criticized by the descendants of Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan. I will explore these internal politics later in this chapter. Sayyid Sahib was also pragmatic in his approach to politics, favouring the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Suresh Khanna in Shahjahanpur, for example, over the Congress Party’s Muslim one, Azam Khan, in the 2012 elections because the former had responded positively when Sayyid Sahib and other local Muslims had approached him on specific issues in the past. I learned that Sayyid Sahib had gone out of his way to help women whose families were unable or unwilling to provide for them, by employing them as wardens in the madrasa. Although he was not involved in the day-to-day management of the girls’ madrasa, his leadership was key in terms of setting the tone and ensuring that the school operated on an even keel, with teachers and managers being on good terms with one another and knowing that they could turn to him for advice at any time via cell phone. In the course of time, I came to learn something of the importance both of the geographical connection of the school management with the districts of Kannauj and Farrukhabad, and of Sufi networks in Sayyid Sahib’s fund-raising and school-building efforts. Both sets of relationships were signalled by kinship terms: familial terms referring 4 Khan, Sar-zamin-i Shahjahanpur ke ‘Ulama-i Fuhul, Huffaz, o Qura’, p. 170.

100

Scholars of Faith

to relationships through marriage or biological descent in the first case, and Sufi terms referring to the spiritual brotherhood formed by common allegiance to a Sufi master in the second.

The Kannauj–Farrukhabad Connection: The Core Families Farrukhabad district is located to the south of Shajahanpur (Figure  2.1), and south of that is Kannauj district (before 1997 it was part of Farrukhabad district). The river Ganges crosses it in the northeast, and smaller tributaries (the rivers Kali and Ishan) cross the district itself. This geography makes communications between north and south difficult, as the railroad connecting Shahjahanpur with Hardoi (and on to Lucknow) in the east skims the eastern edge of the district. There is no train line linking the north of the district with the south because of the many river crossings. When Sayyid Sahib goes home to Qasba Saurikh in western Kannauj, he has to make his way by other means, as the rivers have no railway bridges. This was explained to me by Abu Ji, another person of great authority at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at. Abu Ji’s village of Azizalpur (about 20 miles south of Farrukhabad city in Farrukhabad district) was just across the northern border of the district of Kannauj. It took him 3 hours by bus to travel between Shahjahanpur and his village, a distance of about 50 miles. The land in the district of Farrukhabad, like the Gangetic plains (Doab) of west UP more broadly, is flat and well-watered, and therefore alluvial and productive. Potatoes were an important crop, with two harvests, Abu Ji told me. Abu Ji had a son-in-law who owned a cold storage building used for storing potatoes. Farmers harvested their potatoes in February–March and brought them in for cold storage. Each farmer’s sacks of potatoes were counted and labelled; in July the farmers would return to take their potatoes for sale in the market. By September–October the storage units would be empty or nearly so. This was the time for cleaning and maintenance, after which the electricity would be turned off for the winter. The storage unit owner’s profit depended on the size of the crop that year, for a full crop meant the unit would be filled to capacity.5 5

Personal conversation with Abu Ji, October 2013. The District Gazetteer for Shahjahanpur District, 1988, noted that in the 1950s irrigation through

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 101

ra gha Gha

To

SHAHJAHANPUR DISTRICT PILIBHIT

Ba

reil

ly

Sehramau

Deukali

BAREILLY

Mohanpur Banda Khutar Nahil

Khudaganj Nigohi

Pawayan

Baragaon Sindhauli

ti

Tera

Goma

Miranpur Katra Jaitipur

KHERI

Tihar

BADAUN

Shahwaznagar Banthra

SHAHJAHANPUR Kundaria Ambedkar Nagar Rosa Khandhar Chandapur

Shahganj

Sai

Madnapur

To Si

tapur

Ra

mg

an

Rafiabad

ga

HARDOI

Mirzapur Ga

Legend

Jalalabad

ng

a

Allahganj

FARRUKHABAD

National Highway Major Road Railway District Boundary River District HQ Major Town Other Town

Figure 2.1

Shahjahanpur district map

Abu Ji means ‘father’ in Urdu. His real name was Riaz Ahmad, but no one referred to him as such. He was a tall, thin, bespectacled man in his late fifties with a flowing white beard and a straight back. He was seen at all hours of day and night in his white tunic (kurta) and blue checked lungi, keeping a watchful eye  on

tube wells and private pumps was introduced in the district, allowing for extension of agriculture and a second crop (do-fasli). This was, in the words of the Gazetteer, a ‘turning point in the field of agriculture’. The main food crops grown in the 1970s were paddy, wheat, sugar cane, pulses, and potatoes. Kailash Narain Pande, Gazetteer of India, Uttar Pradesh, District Shahjahanpur (Allahabad: Government of Uttar Pradesh, 1988), pp. 82–3.

102

Scholars of Faith

students,  teachers,  and all  those who crossed the threshold of the madrasa premises. Although to me he seemed an intrinsic part of the madrasa—so central was his role in its day-to-day operations—in fact he had only worked there for six years. He loved to travel, and had had an interesting but hard life, travelling widely in India as a truck driver and tour bus driver, and later working at a bakery in Mumbai. He had returned to west UP to help take care of his aged parents. Since he had begun working at the madrasa six years earlier at Sayyid Sahib’s request, he had filled a key administrative role, taking care of staffing issues and account keeping. On a day-to-day basis, his voice could be heard calling out students’ names early in the morning when their parents called them by cell phone, and he was also seen selling student supplies and small bits of candy to students who came to him through the day and during their free time in the late evening, money in hand. More importantly, he knew when students or staff were sick and decided what action to take, oversaw the distribution of food to students at dinner time, and slept at the madrasa premises at night to ensure the students’ safety and security. In short, he played a central role in the day-to-day running of the madrasa. Abu Ji’s relationship with Sayyid Sahib went back many years: it was in part a familial one, as one of his daughters was married to a nephew of Sayyid Sahib, Talib, who worked on the madrasa website, among other things. (Being ‘father’ or ‘Abu Ji’ to Talib, the term came to be adopted by everyone at the madrasa, students included.) This relationship by marriage involved two men of high social standing, Sayyid Sahib being a Sayyid (descendant of the Prophet Muhammad), and Abu Ji a Pathan. (The other dimension of their relationship was their discipleship to the same Sufi master, discussed in the next section.) These relationships were reflected in the strong bonds of trust between Sayyid Sahib and Abu Ji, and in practical ways too. Thus, just down the street from Sayyid Sahib’s simple two-room house in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Shahjahanpur (where brand new buildings for the girls’ madrasa were under construction in 2012 and 2013), lived Talib with his family. And a short distance away from their houses was the boys’ madrasa, which had about 150 residential students. Both Sayyid Sahib and his eldest son taught there. This part of town—more like a small village on the outskirts of the town

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 103

itself—was surrounded by green fields and, unlike the dense construction around the original girls’ madrasa in the city, had plenty of open space. For this reason, the daily baking of bread (rotis) for the hundreds of students, both boys and girls, took place in two large earthen clay ovens in a lean-to outside the boys’ madrasa. (Before the girls were moved to the new premises in 2014, all the other cooking for the girls took place at the girls’ madrasa in the city.) The girls’ rotis were taken by minivan from here to the neighbourhood in the city where the girls’ madrasa was located, a drive of about 20 minutes. Occasionally there would be a crisis, as when the cook in the girls’ madrasa did not come and all the food had to be cooked in the boys’ madrasa and transported by minivan to feed the girls. Whenever Abu Ji needed to come here, if he had time he would pay his daughter and grandchildren a quick visit and have a cup of tea before returning to the city.6 In 2014, the situation became a lot simpler, as both the girls’ and boys’ madrasas were now located within a stone’s throw of one another, and the cooking for both was therefore done in the same kitchen. There were two other men in the girls’ madrasa who had a Kannauj connection. Particularly interesting was Hazrat, whose real name was Mawlana Muhammad Husayn. Unlike Abu Ji, though, he was Sayyid Sahib’s disciple (murid), not his spiritual ‘brother’. Hazrat taught jurisprudence (fiqh), Hadith, and Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir) to the advanced students in the girls’ madrasa, and also fulfilled important administrative functions like paying teachers’ salaries. He was treated by the girls as mahram (a male family member forbidden to a woman in marriage). Students wore full face veils (niqab) when attending his classes, but sat around the room with him without a partition (unlike the case with another male teacher who taught Qur’an recitation). The teachers’ interaction with him outside the classroom was respectful but familial, in that they conversed with him without formality. He and his family—wife and five small children—occupied a room 6

Abu Ji also had a granddaughter in the girls’ madrasa, an 11-year-old girl (in October 2013) called Jannat whom he had raised himself after the tragic death of her mother (one of Abu Ji’s daughters) when she was a year old. But when I went to visit in December 2014, she was no longer there, having gone to live with her father, older siblings, and other relatives.

104

Scholars of Faith

on one side of the school building, where they had their own bathing facilities and a small courtyard. Before 2014, when the girls’ madrasa moved to the new location, Hazrat’s living quarters were separated from the main section by high walls and a door that Abu Ji locked at night from the girls’ side, effectively locking them out of the school until the next morning. Even after the girls’ madrasa moved, Hazrat continued to live at the old location. He would come to the madrasa every morning and leave at the end of the school day. Lastly, there was Phupha, Sayyid Sahib’s brother-in-law (bahnoi, sister’s husband), who supervised the kitchen and the preparation of meals, and in his spare time helped Abu Ji manage the flow of visitors at the front reception counter. He was a genial, friendly presence, loved by all. On special occasions when the teachers wanted to cook something in the staff room, they would give him some cash and ask him to buy them vegetables and meat, a small personal service he performed for them that had nothing to do with their official duties. Together, these men and their families constituted what I call, following Winkelmann,7 the ‘core families’ of the Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at.

The Leadership’s Spiritual Network through Mustafa Raza Khan Sayyid Sahib was a Sufi master to many of the men, and to some young students and older women in his social network and the madrasa. Thus, Hazrat was Sayyid Sahib’s disciple (murid). In other cases, his relationship to them was that of a ‘Sufi brother’ (pir bhai). Thus, Abu Ji and Sayyid Sahib were related spiritually by virtue of their discipleship to the same Sufi master, Mawlana Mustafa Raza Khan (d. 1981), the younger son of Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan (1856–1921) whom Barelwis always respectfully refer to as A‘la Hazrat (‘[his] high presence’). In this section I will explore the nature of the Sufi dimension of the madrasa’s identity, as it sheds greater light on the internal splits between different branches of the Barelwi leadership, hinted at in Sayyid Sahib’s comments to me, as well as the connections between different madrasa administrators. 7 Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b), especially pp. 51–8.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 105

As noted, Sayyid Sahib’s Sufi pir was Mustafa Raza Khan, known as ‘Mufti-i A‘zam-i Hind’. Mustafa Raza’s tomb is in Bareilly, and his descendants have built a Sufi centre in the area, near Ahmad Raza’s much larger mausoleum. His pir was the true kind, Sayyid Sahib said, one who was spiritually pure and did not seek fame and glory. Implicitly he was contrasting Mawlana Mustafa Raza Khan with other descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan. While never criticizing them directly, he often expressed his frustration with the state of the Muslim community, saying that the Muslims were their own worst enemies. Blaming the Barelwis specifically for many practices which amounted to ‘the dunya (world) entering the din (religion), instead of the din coming into the dunya’,8 he laid the responsibility on the Barelwi ‘ulama, who had made a ‘business’ out of their religion. On one occasion, he said: A Muslim has to follow the shari‘a, the first step of which is to offer prayer (namaz) regularly. If you don’t take the first step, how can you climb the ladder? Likewise, Sufism (piri-muridi) also has to be conducted within those limits. But they have made it into a business. They have become egotistic and self-important just because they are descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan. They make you wait hours on end in their waiting rooms before they see you, then they want you to bow to them. I am not willing to do all that.

Comments such as these came up periodically in our conversations. Although Sayyid Sahib did not name any names, the leading descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan are well known (Figure 2.2). According to Sumbul Farah, when she did her fieldwork in 2010–12 there were two competing centres of power in Bareilly, as well as a number of ‘satellites’.9 One of the main centres was Mawlana Akhtar Raza Khan (known as Azhari Miyan), who held the office of mufti (jurist who issues fatwas), and was the only one of Ahmad Raza’s descendants with a reputation for scholarship. A great-grandson (third-generation descendant) of Ahmad Raza through his older son

8

Personal conversation with Sayyid Sahib, December 2014. Sumbul Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam: A Case Study of Barelwi Khanqahs’ (PhD thesis, University of Delhi, May 2013), pp. 119–27 and passim. 9

106

Scholars of Faith

Hamid Raza Khan, he was in his seventies at the time.10 His house in Bareilly was at the centre of a vast network of disciples and followers from all over the world. In 2000, he inaugurated a large and modern educational centre in Bareilly, called the Centre of Islamic Studies Jami‘atur Raza. Financed through donations from wealthy foreign Barelwi admirers of Akhtar Raza, it is set on a large campus, and has large well-equipped classrooms amidst manicured lawns (surprisingly green even in June, when I saw them). The second centre of spiritual authority was Subhan Raza Khan (known as Subhani Miyan), a fourth-generation descendant of Ahmad Raza. He was the current head (sajjada nishin) of Ahmad Raza’s shrine, and as Azhari Miyan’s nephew was considerably younger than him. He managed the Madrasa Manzar-i Islam and was the editor of the monthly journal A‘la Hazrat, but seemed to have fewer financial resources than his uncle. The politics of the descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan in Bareilly, and between the scholar–mufti (Azhari Miyan) and the sajjada nishin,

Ahmad Raza Khan (1856–1921)

Hamid Raza Khan (1875–1943)

Mustafa Raza Khan (Mufti-i A’zam-i Hind) (1892–1981) (7 daughters, 1 son who died in infancy)

Ibrahim Raza Khan (1907–1965)

Rehan Raza Khan

Subhan Raza Khan (Subhani Miyan) SAJJADA NISHIN

Hasan Raza Khan (1859–1908)

Tahsin Raza Khan (d. 2007)

Akhtar Raza Khan (Azhari Miyan) MUFTI (d. 2018)

Figure 2.2 Abbreviated genealogical tree of Ahmad Raza Khan and his descendants Source: Sumbul Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam: A Case Study of Barelwi Khanqahs’ (PhD thesis, University of Delhi, May 2013), pp. 119–27 and passim. 10 Born in 1943, Mawlana Akhtar Raza Khan died on 20 July 2018, at the age of 75.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 107

the spiritual successor to the shrine (Subhani Miyan), have been explored in great detail by Farah. She writes: ‘The sense of entitlement that marks the family’s attitude[,] coupled with the veneration of the believers serves to characterize the descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan as the religious elite of Bareilly. They wield much power over the masses and occupy … high ritual status. The metaphor of royalty can therefore be aptly evoked in this context.’11 As Sayyid Sahib indicated in his conversations with me, he had distanced himself from active involvement in the affairs of the Barelwi ‘ulama in Bareilly, choosing instead to build his own networks through travel, teaching, and Sufi ties with men in different UP districts. As a result, the ‘ulama in Bareilly had no active involvement in his educational efforts, though one of them (Tahsin Raza Khan, son of Ahmad Raza’s younger brother Hasan Raza) was invited to the foundation stone laying ceremony of the girls’ madrasa in 2006. The ‘ulama in Bareilly played little to no part in funding any of his projects. In effect, what we have here is a Sufi network that traces its spiritual roots back to Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan through his younger son Mawlana Mustafa Raza Khan, while simultaneously distancing itself from the spiritual lines that go through Ahmad Raza Khan’s older son Hamid Raza Khan and his male descendants, particularly the sajjada nishin of Ahmad Raza’s shrine.12 Since Mawlana Mustafa Raza Khan had daughters but no sons, his spiritual lineage had been overshadowed by that of Hamid Raza Khan. However, to his disciples, who numbered in the thousands, his presence in their lives was real even 30 years after his death. In many cases, the people who revered him were young boys when they took their oath of loyalty (baya‘) at his hands. They ascribed small, everyday strokes of good fortune in their lives to the blessings of their pir, Mustafa Raza Khan, who was watching over their affairs.13 11

Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam’, p. 133. For genealogical charts and trees, see Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam’, pp. 100–3 and Appendix. 13 Thus, to cite an example, a man from Bareilly who was trying to get to Shahjahanpur to meet Sayyid Sahib and me in December 2014 boarded the wrong train, one that would have taken him straight to Lucknow instead of stopping at Shahjahanpur. However, he was able to persuade the conductor to stop the train about 10 miles outside Shahjahanpur to allow him to get off, 12

108

Scholars of Faith

Construction of the new school buildings that Sayyid Sahib began to build in Shahjahanpur and Bareilly in 2012 was made possible by two grants from the Maulana Azad Educational Foundation in 2011. He said these grants, totalling INR 22 lakh altogether (INR 2.2 million, or approximately USD 32,000) gave him the strength (himmat) to get started.14 Thereafter, the people who helped him build his four schools from scratch were small business owners, townsmen, and villagers from the districts of Shahjahanpur and other parts of west UP. Many were his Sufi disciples. In addition, he was constructing a co-educational public school on the outskirts of Bareilly that sought to combine secular and religious learning. Land and bricks for the buildings of this ambitious project had been donated by owners of brick factories that dotted the landscape on the highway from Shahjahanpur to Bareilly, a distance of 40–50 miles. The importance of the Sufi ethos of the madrasa was underscored for me when one Thursday night in August 2015 a student gave a verbal performance, reciting in verse Sayyid Sahib’s Sufi genealogy. Some of the verses went as follows: He who is the lifeblood of Sunni identity/Jo sunniyat ki jan hai Leader of the community/Qaum ka imam hai He who is the slave of the Prophet/Nabi ka jo ghulam hai His name is Raza/Raza us ka nam hai My Raza, my Raza/Mere raza, mere raza Raza, raza, raza The beloved of the Prophet/Nabi ka pyara ladla Who is a mountain of knowledge/jo ‘ilm ka pahar hai You are the roar of the lion/tu sher ki dahar hai The one of whom the Wahhabis were afraid/Wahhabi jis se dar gaye

an act of kindness that he ascribed to the blessings of his pir, Mustafa Raza Khan. 14 According to Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, Educating Musim Girls: A Comparison of Five Indian Cities (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005), p. 31, government schemes such as the Maulana Azad Educational Foundation ‘for the establishment of schools, including residential schools and colleges for girls—have made an insignificant dent in their educational deprivation’. They point out that ‘civil society initiatives have played a crucial role in educational expansion’ in all states.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 109

Many of them were [thoroughly] reformed/Bahut se hi sudhar gaye He is the leader of love/Woh ‘ishq ka imam hai My Raza, my Raza/Mere raza, mere raza Raza, raza, raza … He who, all his life/Jo umr bhar batilon ke Has been breaking the hearts of those who are false/Dilon ko torta raha He in whose veins flowed/Ragon men jis ki mustafa ke His love of the Prophet/‘Ishq daurta raha He refuted the Wahhabis/Wahhabiyon ko radd kiya And gave [us] the Fatawa-i Rizwiya/Fatawa-i Rizwiya diya He who fulfils all needs/Jo hajat-i tamam hai He is the imam of love/Woh ‘ishq ka imam hai Raza is his name/Raza uska nam hai. My Raza, my Raza/Mere raza, mere raza Raza, raza, raza.15

This poem was interesting on several counts. First, the Thursday evening student-led programme (anjuman) in which it was performed was one of the few occasions when the madrasa made explicit its Barelwi and Sufi identities. This did not happen in every student presentation, but allusions scattered throughout student sermons or poems gave ample evidence of themes such as love of the Prophet, which is a signature Barelwi refrain, and certain characteristics such as knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm-i ghayb) which Barelwis ascribe to him.16 Unlike the well-known flagship Barelwi boys’ madrasa, Jami‘a 15 Manqabat, August 2015. This poem was written by Na’im Tahsini. Personal communication with Na’im Tahsini in Bareilly, 22 August 2015. I am grateful to the late Dr Sartaj Razwi for arranging the meeting with Na’im Tahsini, and to Dr Mawlana Waris Mazhari of Hamdard University for helping me with the translation and meaning of the poem. Personal conversation in Delhi, 30 August 2015. I also thank Sumbul Farah, who corrected mistakes in transcription and translation. I have omitted a number of verses. Some of them mention the Sufi chain of transmission from ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani, the founder of the Qadiri order in Baghdad, through Ahmad Raza Khan to his younger son Mustafa Raza Khan, and other luminaries of the Barelwi Sufi master–disciple relationship. 16 On the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen, see Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Mawlana Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1880–1920 (new edn, Delhi: Yoda Press, 2010).

110

Scholars of Faith

Ashrafiya in Mubarakpur, east UP,17 the girls at the Jami‘a Nur alShari‘at did not routinely engage in open denunciation of other Sunni groups. It was much more subtle than in the Jami‘a Ashrafiya: a taken-for-granted ‘truth’, a given that the Deobandis were ‘Wahhabis’ and therefore Other. Given that Sayyid Sahib never used vitriol when expressing his anti-Deobandi views in conversation or in writing, the madrasa’s lack of overt anti-Deobandi rhetoric is not surprising. The poem was also interesting because of its specific references to Ahmad Raza Khan as an ‘imam’, leader of the community, not in the Shi‘i sense of the term but in the Sufi sense as ‘a leader of love’ (‘ishq ka imam), because it was ‘He in whose veins flowed his love of the Prophet’. Yet he was also referred to as the author of the Fatawa-i Rizwiya and the rebutter of Wahhabis. Thus the two went together, the Sufi and the religious scholar or ‘alim. The poem went on to mention Ahmad Raza’s younger son Mustafa Raza Khan, Sayyid Sahib’s Sufi pir. And the reference to Azhari Miyan (in verses not quoted earlier) was also significant, as it signalled that, in the Barelwi politics among Ahmad Raza’s descendants, Sayyid Sahib had aligned himself with the scholarly mufti rather than the caretaker of the Sufi shrine. The poem also made clear, however, that these men ultimately derived their spiritual legitimacy from their descent from Ahmad Raza Khan, as he was its primary subject. It was, in effect, an abbreviated spiritual genealogical tree (shajara) linking Sayyid Sahib to Mustafa Raza Khan, and through him to Ahmad Raza, and through him to Shaykh Sayyid ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani, the putative founder of the Qadiri order, and from there directly to the Prophet Muhammad. Given that some of the girls at the Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at were Sayyid Sahib’s disciples, it was also their genealogical tree or shajara.

The Wardens Below the level of the ‘core families’, the madrasa administration consisted of between 8 and 12 older female wardens, many of whom were required to live at the madrasa with the students during the academic year. Those who had been at the madrasa for a number of years 17 On the Jami‘a Ashrafiya, see Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011).

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 111

were affectionately referred to in kinship terms by both students and adults. This use of fictive kinship terminology was yet another way in which relationships were forged, acknowledged, and strengthened. It reflected the madrasa’s quasi-familial role in students’ lives, and served to temper authority and social hierarchy with affection and a sense of mutual belonging.18 The oldest and best-loved of the wardens, Fatima,19 was a lady known to staff and students alike as Khala Ammi, ‘Aunt Mother’. Her niece, who had taught Hindi (but had since married and left for Mumbai, to be with her husband), called her Khala Ammi, and soon everyone else did too. She was probably in her late fifties or early sixties when I met her. She had had a hard life: her mother had died when she was little, and her father when she was a young woman. She married, had two children who died in infancy, and then her husband abandoned her for another woman (whom he married). Thereafter she returned to live with her natal family. She told me how she came to work at the madrasa: There was a meeting (jalsa) for forty hours that I wanted to attend, but I was being discouraged from going by my nephews (sister’s sons, bhanjas) because it was not open to women. But I took two little girls with me in a rickshaw and went there and sat in a cordoned off section, in my burqa. Sayyid Sahib was the speaker. When he learned of my interest, he expressed no opposition to my being there, as I was in my burqa and in a separate section. I also attended celebrations [at the English-medium school adjoining the madrasa] for 26th January and 15th August.20

Her story showed her pluck and courage. Had she not defied the authority of her male relatives in order to go to the public meeting and listen to Sayyid Sahib speak, she would never have come to his 18

This function of the madrasa is explored in some depth in Usha Sanyal and Sumbul Farah, ‘Discipline and Nurture: Living in a Girls’ Madrasa, Living in Community’, Modern Asian Studies (2019), 53(2): 411–50. 19 All the personal names of wardens, teachers, and students (that is, the women and girls at the madrasa) have been changed in order to protect their identities. The names of the male administrators, however, have not, as they play public roles and would therefore be hard to shield from view. 20 Recorded field notes, August 2015. India celebrates its Republic Day on 26th January and Independence Day on 15th August.

112

Scholars of Faith

attention. Later Sayyid Sahib invited her to work in the madrasa. That was back in 2003. She said she was treated with great respect, and of all the wardens she was the only one who was still there. All the others had come and gone.21 Sayyid Sahib took her in as a means of helping her, recognizing at the same time her high moral standing, family background, and personal character—qualities that collectively defined her as sharif or noble, which since the twentieth century has been measured more by behaviour than by birth, as we saw in Chapter 1, following Minault. Although of rural (dehati) background, her sense of self was rooted in her embeddedness in two relational networks: she was proud of the fact that she came from a good family and that she was the disciple of a great Sufi master, Mawlana Mustafa Raza Khan. These sources of identity gave her the strength to stand up to desertion by her husband and allowed her to hold her head up high, building a new life for herself in the demanding but supportive environment of the madrasa. Her brother’s and sister’s married families were her other homes, and she would occasionally visit them in her village outside Shahjahanpur. She particularly loved her sister and her sister’s son, who told her she should retire from her work at the madrasa and come to live with him and his family. She suffered from a weak heart and other ailments that she attributed to ‘old age’ (more likely simply poverty), such as ear aches, acute itching of the body, and seasonal colds and coughs, which she was loath to get treated by a medical doctor, choosing instead to ignore them altogether or treat them with home remedies. In the summertime, she would bring mangoes from the trees at her sister’s home to share with the other wardens and teachers. She taught the girls embroidery and sewing and when not busy with madrasa duties, would busy herself with knitting or embroidering gifts for people.22 A vegetarian by choice for over 30 years, she was also an excellent cook

21

In fact, there were two others who had been there for several years, though not as long as Fatima. They were still there when I visited in November 2016. 22 Over the course of my many visits to the madrasa, Khala Ammi made me small attractive cloth purses with tinsel, a woollen vest, and delicious nonvegetarian meals as a goodbye gift prior to my departure, though she herself would not partake of them.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 113

(of meat as well as vegetarian dishes). She was always willing to take the girls to the doctor, even when she herself was sick. Abu Ji said there was no question of her ever being asked to leave. She could stay at the madrasa as long as she wished, he said. This was not the case with most of the wardens, for the turnover among them was quite high. I got to know one of the wardens, Zeenat, quite well, for on my first visit to the madrasa she was assigned to stay with me in my room. Her 10-year-old granddaughter, who attended the madrasa, also stayed with us. Zeenat was 65 years old. A Pathan and a native of Shahjahanpur, she came from a well-to-do family. She was well-educated, having earned her BA in the 1960s, and then studied at a co-ed college for her BEd. After that she married her first cousin, a brilliant man who had studied at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, she said. About two or three years into their marriage, he went to Mecca, completed the hajj, and then got a job at Jeddah, where he worked for a year. Zeenat and their son remained in Shahjahanpur during this time. Before returning to India, her husband went back to Mecca to perform the hajj a second time. But then disaster struck. While he was in Arafat, he was bowing in prostration when a bus ran over him. The bus driver had failed to see him while he was bending down. They took him to the hospital, where he died. So Zeenat was widowed at a young age with a three-year-old son. Then followed a lengthy process of applying for a visa to go to Saudi Arabia in the hope of finding his body (which she never did), and later of going to court for a compensation package, which she ultimately got. She said Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian foreign minister at the time and prime minister later, had facilitated her visa and compensation package. But her husband’s two brothers refused to split the family property three ways so she could have her husband’s share. Instead, they gave her a small sum of money and said she had no further claims on them. For the next several years she was able to manage on her own by putting her compensation money in a fixed deposit and living off the interest,23 while working as a warden in a variety of girls’ schools 23 Interest on loans or bank deposits is not accepted as a legitimate source of income in Islamic law. This period in her life predated her madrasa employment.

114

Scholars of Faith

in the region. Then followed another round of misfortunes caused by her son’s ill-health and inability to work because of severe back problems. He was married with two small children at the time I knew Zeenat, and the entire family lived together. They had tried to open a retail store in Delhi but the venture had failed, and they had lost their savings in the attempt. Now back in Shahjahanpur, Sayyid Sahib had hired her as a warden at the madrasa as a means of helping her out, giving her free board and lodging, a small salary, as well as an education for her grand daughter.24 Hasina, a young woman with three children, the youngest being in the ninth grade, had also had to face a number of misfortunes caused by the death of her husband. When I met her in 2013, she had been in the madrasa for only a month. She had lost her husband about five years earlier. He used to work in a large garment export factory in Mehrauli, outside Delhi. Hasina explained that from there the clothes were sent to the United States and other countries. But the Indian government demolished the factory because of a road widening plan, and her husband died of a heart attack around the same time. Hasina decided to return to her parents’ home in Shahjahanpur. They sheltered her and her children and helped take care of them. Now Hasina was worried about her mother, who was sick. She also worried about one of her children who had poor memory retention, even though he was smart. She was no longer at the madrasa when I returned the following year. I learned from Abu Ji that she had been too pious, engaging in superoregatory prayers when she should have been performing her duties. It was all very well to be pious, he said, but it should not be done at the expense of the students!25 Listening to Abu Ji telling me the story of this warden and others, I realized that he acted as arbiter and judge in deciding which warden was worthy of the madrasa’s trust. If Sayyid Sahib helped honourable (sharif) women in financial trouble by hiring them, within the madrasa Abu 24

When I returned to the madrasa a year later, Zeenat was no longer working there. I learned, though, that her son was doing better and had recently secured a job at a friend’s motor parts workshop. On his monthly salary of INR 4,500/- (less than USD 100) he was supporting his mother, wife, and two daughters. 25 From my field notes, November 2013 and December 2014.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 115

Ji kept his ear to the ground on a daily basis and advised Sayyid Sahib if the new hire should be retained or let go, and if so on what basis. The final authority, however, was Sayyid Sahib’s. Not surprisingly, the personal stories of the wardens I spoke to illustrated to me their ‘precarity’, to use Attiya Ahmad’s term.26 Zeenat, the second warden I profiled earlier in the chapter, was fortunate in that her case attracted the attention of the highest politician at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and she received a compensation package. Not surprisingly, she was also well educated and her father was in a position to give her sound advice when her husband died and her brothers-in-law turned against her. Most are not so fortunate. Despite these initial advantages, she was in dire financial straits when I met her later in her life. In her study of family courts in Chennai, in which she focuses especially on Muslim women, Vatuk notes that the ‘paternalism’ of the Indian legal system pushes women (of all religions) to remain in bad marriages on the assumption that a woman needs a male ‘protector’, no matter how abusive.27 Legal remedies are of little practical help to most lower-class women in distress, no matter what their religion, for reasons ranging from the culturally alien language of the courts, high court expenses, the lengthy nature of the legal process itself, and the likelihood of a verdict that is unfavourable to the woman. For these reasons, the solution presented by Sayyid Sahib by hiring these women was a pragmatic one which offered immediate help—albeit limited, because their salaries were low. Their connection with the madrasa was for the most part of short duration, particularly if they were young and had small children whom they had had to leave with relatives while they stayed at the madrasa. Since the pay was low and the work hard, and they had to satisfy the demands of aging parents

26

Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), Chapter 1 and passim. 27 Sylvia Vatuk, ‘“Where Will She Go? What Will She Do?” Paternalism toward Women in the Administration of Muslim Personal Law in Contemporary India’, in Gerald James Larson, ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 226–8 and passim.

116

Scholars of Faith

or young children, young women like Hasina could not find a longterm future there. What happened to these young or middle-aged women after they left the madrasa? There is no way of knowing, as their relationship with the madrasa ended there, with no lasting ties between them. Of all the people I met at Jami‘a Nur, the wardens’ relationship with the madrasa seemed the most contractual of all. Their plight highlights the lack of institutional mechanisms and resources for young widows with small children or women whose marriages fail them and whose parents and natal kin are unable or unwilling to provide them help, food, and shelter. Recent scholarship on Muslim female judges (qazis) who run women-only shari‘a courts throws light on promising solutions being adopted in parts of India to address such issues, providing a space and forum for dispute resolution within a shar‘i framework rather than an alien Western one. Despite resistance from some ‘ulama, these shari‘a courts seem to be gaining ground.28 How much relief they are able to provide in the long term is an open question, however. I end this section with a story about another warden, a long-timer who, like Khala Ammi, had been at the madrasa for many years. This warden, Safiya, was highly educated and Sayyid Sahib addressed her (as he did me) as Madam. She did not reside at the madrasa but came every morning and left in the evening. Either widowed or separated from her husband (and apparently childless), she lived with her married brother, his family, and an uncle. Safiya had studied geography at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi and had hoped to do an M.Phil. She worked at the Meteorological Department in Delhi for several years. However, a bus accident led to a foot injury, and she had to take an extended leave of absence and ultimately lost her job there. She returned to her family home near Shahjahanpur, and around 2010 became a warden at the madrasa. There she had a number of administrative functions, including accounts management and keeping track of school supplies and other day-to-day functions. Additionally, she helped the regular English teacher by teaching an English class, 28 Justin Jones, ‘“Where Only Women May Judge”: Developing Genderjust Islamic Laws in India’s All-Female ‘Shari‘ah Courts’, Islamic Law and Society (2018): 1–30.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 117

as some grade levels have two sections. Unlike the other wardens, her behaviour with staff and students was brisk and businesslike, though also cheerful and sociable. In her spare time, she would read quietly from one of the religious texts in the staff room, or scan her cell phone for current news or family pictures, which she shared with the other teachers. She was the most worldly wise of all the staff. Having lived in Delhi, she knew which part of the city I come from, and sometimes talked to me in English, asking me questions about what had brought me to the madrasa (and why it was taking me so long to finish my research). Safiya was thus different from the other administrative staff. She commanded attention and respect because of her education, forthright manner, and worldly knowledge. In 2015, though, a small altercation between her and Sayyid Sahib illustrated for me an underlying tension between her authority as an older, educated woman with work experience outside the madrasa and the young teachers whose life experience was much more limited but who nonetheless commanded authority as purveyors of religious knowledge. At issue was the safety of the students. To put this in context, we need to understand the politics of space29 that speaks to the administration’s deep concern for the physical safety of the girls. The new madrasa building and location deliberately fails to call attention to itself. Apart from a small board on the main street with the name of the madrasa in Urdu, one would not know it was down the wide brick lane running at right angles to the street. Instead, one notices the boys’ madrasa buildings on both sides of the main street, on the corner of the street and the lane, and the boys entering and leaving the buildings, buying snacks from roadside stalls, or walking away singly or in groups.30 To get to the girls’ madrasa, students and staff walk or drive about a city block down the brick lane (which is devoid of vendors and traffic unrelated to the

29 Nita Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity: Essays on Education in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 95. 30 This description dates to 2015. Since then the layout of buildings and side streets has changed, the boys’ madrasa having moved a little further away from the girls’ madrasa than it was before. Nonetheless, the general point being made here is valid.

118

Scholars of Faith

madrasas) till they reach its tall metal gates straight ahead. Here, all who wish to enter must present themselves at the front office, which is equipped with a laptop computer, two-way mirrors on the walls, and a telephone, and identify themselves to the person seated behind the desk. If cleared to enter, they sign their names in a large register and let themselves in through the small metal door within the big metal gate. Visitors must wait on the plastic chairs provided, until the students come to them. The madrasa itself, invisible until one crosses over to the other side of the gate, consists of double-storey buildings on all four sides of a large open courtyard, as well as other buildings connecting it to what used to be the boys’ madrasa (the boys’ madrasa having moved to another set of buildings on the other side of the public road some distance away). The dispute regarding security arose when some students apparently left the madrasa premises early one morning without prior authorization by the security personnel at the office. Sayyid Sahib held Safiya responsible for this breach of regulations because she had been deputed as gate keeper on the morning of the incident. It was early in the new school year, and a confluence of factors had led to more confusion than usual. Key among them was the fact that Abu Ji was no longer in charge. He had left at the end of the previous academic year after his father’s death had left his 90-year-old mother all alone and in sore need of him, back home in Azizalpur village, Farrukhabad district. In addition, the girls’ madrasa was now in a new location, with construction still ongoing. That year there had been a huge influx of new students, some as young as six. The madrasa had gone from 300 students to about 450 in a single academic year. The result, not surprisingly, was a great deal of confusion. Sayyid Sahib, who normally had a hands-off approach to day-to-day administration, had no choice but to intervene and try and solve problems as they arose. On the day in question, Sayyid Sahib attended the morning assembly and addressed the students. He said: You [girls] have come to the madrasa to learn the knowledge of religion (din). Knowledge of din creates an internal fear (dakhili khawf) in people. Hazrat Mawla ‘Ali [the Prophet’s son-in-law] said [Sayyid Sahib quoted in Arabic], The greatest teacher is death (mawt). Who are these [women] here? They are your teachers. You are afraid of them. But when you are

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 119

away from them, you resume your mischief. But death, said Mawla ‘Ali, is the greatest teacher. Will death reach your mother? [The students, ‘It will’.] Will death reach your father? [The students, ‘It will’.] So the biggest teacher is death. Now you’ve understood what I’m saying to you. This is dakhili khawf. Din creates this khawf in those who believe. And the person who internalizes this fear acquires humanity (insaniyat). And after that a person gets spirituality (ruhaniyat). [The students repeated the words after him.] If you don’t have humanity, you can’t have spirituality. First you have to improve yourself (islah karen), you have to remove your shortcomings (kamiyan), your defects (‘aib), in order to acquire humanity. Quarrelling, arguing, harming or hurting each other with your words, ruining other people’s reputations (izzat ka nuqsan pahunchana), whichever girl has these characteristics, she cannot have humanity. You learn grammar [among other things] in your classes. But beyond that is Sufism—tasawwuf—or ithar. What does this mean? In the Qur’an, there is a verse about the Prophet’s family (ahl-i bayt), about Mawla ‘Ali and Fatima. What did God say about them? ‘These people, they would prefer others over themselves even if they themselves were starving.’

Sayyid Sahib then told a story about himself. He wanted to go to the bathroom, he said, but he allowed someone else to go ahead of him even though it was his turn. This is called ithar. You go first, you go first (pahle ap, pahle ap). [His body language and gestures made the students laugh.] If you don’t have these things in yourself, then you cannot become a religious scholar (‘alima). You can learn about the world (dunya), but you cannot become an ‘alima. Is that understood? This is your lesson for today. When you learn this, then you can go into society and do some good, solve problems. Tell me, how will a doctor who is sick cure others? Can he make others well when he himself is sick? [The students, ‘No!’] Did you understand me? [The students, ‘Yes!’]

Then he asked the new girls: ‘What did you eat yesterday? [“Chick peas (chhole)”, they responded.] What will you eat today? What do you want to eat? Meat and zucchini (lauki gosht)? Yes, do you want to eat meat and zukkini today? That’s what you will eat today. Now you girls go, go to your classes.’31

31

Sayyid Sahib, 19 August 2015. Tape recording.

120

Scholars of Faith

After the students had dispersed and gone to their respective classrooms, he addressed the teachers, who had remained in place, turning to the question of students leaving the premises without permission. Although Safiya defended herself in a spirited manner, her responsibilities were reassigned to the teachers: SS: The girls must not wear their burqas until they get past the gate and into the office. That way they can be identified. Then they should put on their burqas. The teachers should make two groups, of three each. Three teachers should eat, sleep, then get up and offer their namaz, and take over the responsibilities from the other three teachers, who have been watching the gate all this time.32

Then the teachers and Sayyid Sahib started to laugh because Phupha came and joined the group. Sayyid Sahib’s tone of frustration gave way to light-hearted banter. This vignette sheds light on relations between Sayyid Sahib—who as founder of the madrasa has overarching institutional and personal authority—and the wardens, teachers, and students. The warden, although senior to the teachers, was accused of a lapse of judgment and reneging on her responsibility, while a number of teachers, far younger than her in years and experience, were assigned increased responsibility. The unexpected arrival of Phupha—a man whose lack of institutional authority coupled with his goodwill towards everyone, no matter the person’s rank, led him to be universally loved—defused an otherwise tense situation. But soon another question arose on the heels of the first. It centred on a simple question: how many students did the madrasa have, and who were they? If the madrasa could not identify each and every student by name and grade, it could not regulate their movements into and out of the madrasa space each day. It immediately fell to the teachers to make a list of all the students, especially the new ones, as quickly as possible. And this they did, with record efficiency, under the leadership of one of Sayyid Sahib’s daughters and the new English teacher, who taught at all grade levels. By the following day, they had a list for Sayyid Sahib. 32 This onerous system was not in place when I visited the following year; at most, it appears to have been a temporary measure while the new students settled into the madrasa routine.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 121

The Teachers As I have indicated earlier in the chapter, the day-to-day teaching and on-the-spot troubleshooting at the madrasa were largely in the hands of female authority figures, namely, the wardens and the teachers. When I first visited the school in June 2012, there were three wardens and nine teachers. Four of the teachers were former alumni of the school. Three of them had studied up to the highest level of Fazila, while one had studied up to the ‘Alima level. All four teachers lived with the students at the school. The three with Fazila degrees were Sufi disciples (murids) of Sayyid Sahib. Two of them—Maryam and Hafsa—were Sayyid Sahib’s daughters.33 The fourth teacher was a Sufi disciple of one of Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan’s descendants, Tahsin Raza Khan. In addition, the Hindi teacher (Khala Ammi’s niece, who subsequently got married and left the madrasa) had an MA from a college in Bareilly. She too lived in the school. Since their educational qualifications were higher than those of the wardens, the Fazila teachers were in the highest tier in terms of salary, despite their relative youth compared to the wardens—a fact which supports the point made earlier in the chapter about their authority being greater than the wardens’.34 In terms of social class background, there was a mix of castes. Sayyid Sahib’s daughters were the highest in terms of social status, being Sayyids or descendants of the Prophet. At the other end of the social scale, one of the teachers was the daughter of a bangle seller and lived in a village in a neighbouring district. Her father had a little land but seemed to be poor and of low status. She and Sayyid Sahib’s older daughter Maryam were good friends and stayed in touch even after her departure from the school. Other friendships between teachers also seemed to transcend class and status identities. 33 This is in contrast to the situation described by Winkelmann, in which the principal at the Madrasatul Niswan in Delhi sent her daughters to the prestigious Delhi Public School rather than the madrasa to study. See Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, p. 48. Sayyid Sahib’s elder son had studied at the boys’ madrasa, Jami‘a Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at (a pseudonym) and was now teaching there. The youngest son attended the Hindi-medium secular high school near the boys’ madrasa during the day and the madrasa at night. 34 See Appendix 3.2 of the next chapter on 2011 salary scales for teachers and wardens.

122

Scholars of Faith

On each of my subsequent visits to the madrasa (which took place for short periods every year until 2018), I noted the high turnover of both wardens and teachers. We saw earlier that over the years, wardens such as Khala Ammi had been accepted as part of the school administration and had become fixtures of the establishment, much like the ‘core families’ related to Sayyid Sahib through either genealogical or Sufi ties, while others had been dismissed or had left for personal reasons. The pattern is slightly different for the teachers. In general, the madrasa recruits new teachers from among the graduating class of students to replace others who leave to get married. I encountered only one case of the dismissal of a teacher in the seven years I have visited the madrasa. This was the bangle-seller’s daughter, who had left by 2013, ostensibly because she was to be married. But she had twice been chastised for engaging in the corporal punishment of a student, which the madrasa does not allow. She was warned after the first occurrence, but when it happened again she was dismissed. In a pattern that is familiar from the history of Muslim girls’ educational institutions in South Asia since the early-twentieth century (and that we will see repeated in Al-Huda later in this book),35 Sayyid Sahib has been preparing the groundwork for his two daughters to take over the leadership of the madrasa in due time. Over the years, they have developed a reputation based on their knowledge of the religious sciences, their good manners and comportment (adab), and their knowledge of the madrasa itself. In 2016 Amina, a cousin of theirs, formerly a student and then a teacher, became part of this select group. In December of that year she became Sayyid Sahib’s daughterin-law, after marrying Sayyid Sahib’s eldest son, who was a madrasa teacher in the boys’ madrasa adjoining Jami‘a Nur. Simultaneously Maryam married Amina’s older brother.36 After their marriage, both

35

See Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 258–9, for the example of Shaikh and Begum Abdullah, founders in 1906 of the Aligarh Zenana Madrasa, and their daughters and daughters-in-law, who continued their work after them. 36 Amina and Maryam are parallel cousins, as their fathers are brothers. While this is not unusual in Muslim families, the urilocal residence of Maryam’s husband is, as it reverses the normal pattern whereby a woman

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 123

couples moved in with Sayyid Sahib and his wife in a newly constructed house right outside the madrasa gates, with ample room for expansion when, in due course, the two younger children also get married. In this way, Sayyid Sahib has ensured that the madrasa will be in stable hands in the next generation. To conclude this section, it is instructive to look at the teachers’ and wardens’ stories side by side for the patterns they reveal. While the teachers are young women approaching adulthood and married life with the anxieties and expectations attendant on this crucial period in their lives, the wardens are older, sometimes middle-aged women who have experienced marriage and/or motherhood, and in some cases widowhood or separation. Every warden’s life story I heard involved a profound marital disappointment. Fatima experienced a double loss, namely, the death of her two young children and subsequent desertion by her husband; Zeenat lost her husband to accidental death in the early years of her marriage and had to raise a young son on her own; Hasina’s husband died young of a heart attack, leaving her without a source of income and three young children to raise; and Safiya appears to have had a childless marriage. In each case, the women’s natal families lent them vitally needed support without which the women would probably have faced a life of unremitting poverty. This pattern is common in South Asia and is not limited to Muslim families. What is unusual for women in their situation is that the madrasa offered them a source of employment and self-respect and allowed them to be financially self-sufficient—if not wholly, then at least partially so. In the teachers’ case, their financial independence from their families is a remarkable, if unremarked upon, factor in their relations with their parents and in their future marriage prospects. I never heard the teachers discuss money or what impact their earning capacity had on their relations with personal kin. I believe they hand over the bulk (if not all) of their earnings to their parents, and are thus able to

leaves her natal home to live with her husband and his family in the husband’s natal home. This was the conundrum Sayyid Sahib faced, as the future of the girls’ madrasa was dependent on his two daughters’ presence and firm leadership in years to come.

124

Scholars of Faith

provide financial assistance in times of need.37 While the pay is not in absolute terms very high (see Appendix 3.2 in the next chapter), their ability to contribute to their families has social ramifications, some of which I explore in Chapter 4. Unlike the wardens, who have family responsibilities outside the school, the teachers are young, unmarried girls who appear to enjoy the company of their peers and to be totally immersed in the day-today life of the madrasa. In this context, they form friendships with their peers which sometimes continue even after they have left Jami‘a Nur.38

Adab and Tajdid, Etiquette and Reform Sayyid Sahib had begun to teach his daughters the dars-i nizami syllabus at home before he founded the girls’ madrasa. They completed the course in the madrasa all the way to the advanced (Fazila) level. Since then, both daughters had been teaching a variety of subjects at the madrasa. As noted earlier in the chapter, they exercised considerable personal authority in the classroom and during afterschool hours on the strength of their knowledge of the curriculum and several years of teaching experience. Morever, they embodied a number of key Islamic virtues—piety, humility, self-restraint, and self-effacement, among others—outside the classroom. These qualities conferred great authority in and of themselves, enhancing the respect they enjoyed by virtue of their Sayyid descent. As I noted in the ‘Introduction’, the Arabic concept of adab (often translated as etiquette, though the English term does it little justice) is at the heart of what the madrasa seeks to teach its students, both

37 The madrasa method of teacher remuneration appears remarkably informal, as in 2016 I witnessed a senior male teacher enter the staff room with cash in hand and call the teachers one by one to collect their pay. They were being paid for the previous two months. He also asked them to let him know if they needed more money, though to my knowledge none did. As this happened during the cash shortage caused by the demonetization put in place by the Modi government in November 2016, it is possible that the offer of extra cash was linked to that event and was not a normal occurrence. 38 Chapter 5 examines some of their stories.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 125

male and female. Central to the purpose of Jami‘a Nur is the daily inculcation of a certain way of being in the world, or, to use the perfect Arabic word for it, adab. While this term has multiple meanings and dimensions,39 the sense in which it applies to the students and teachers of Jami‘a Nur is as an Islamic ideal of personal conduct grounded in obedience to the rules of shari‘a as interpreted by the Barelwi ‘ulama.40 The enthusiastic responses of the students at Jami‘a Nur would seem to indicate that the students had internalized these ideals thoroughly and saw themselves as future agents of change in their home environments. At the heart of the concept of adab, Barbara Metcalf tells us, is the acceptance of hierarchy, which has both a religious and a social dimension: in religious terms, it entails acknowledgement of the oneness of God—hence one must faithfully perform the daily and periodic duties of prayer, fasting, and the like, as enjoined by the shari‘a—while in social terms, for a woman it means abiding by the hierarchies of age and gender. To quote Metcalf, she must ‘know her own position’.41 According to Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, whose guide Bihishti

39

See, in particular, Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Introduction’, in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984a). Also see Ira M. Lapidus, ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam’, in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 40 Francis Robinson’s essay about the Farangi Mahalli family, in the same volume, is pertinent to my discussion here because both the Farangi Mahallis and the Barelwis share a similar worldview. They both embrace the idea that shari‘a must be complemented by Sufism (tasawwuf). Unlike the Deobandis, the ‘ulama of Farangi Mahall have encouraged the visitation of Sufi shrines, particularly during ‘urs. See Francis Robinson, ‘The “Ulama” of Farangi Mahall and Their Adab’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 155–6, for example. 41 Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Islamic Reform and Islamic Women: Mawlana Thanawi’s Jewelry of Paradise’, in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984b), p. 192.

126

Scholars of Faith

Zewar has been widely read by South Asian women and men for over a century now, ‘literacy and education … enhanced a woman’s capacity to speak standard Urdu and practice scripturalist religion, manage the household efficiently and profitably and raise well-behaved children, and fulfill her obligations to all those with whom there are reciprocal ties’.42 By doing all this within the bounds of the rules of seclusion (pardah), she will bring honour to her family and gain the respect of those around her. In this view of the world, there appears to be no difference between the Deobandi explanation in Bihishti Zewar and the more recent treatments in the Barelwi guides for women. If, as Metcalf suggests, age and gender hierarchies are at the heart of adab, we may find, contrary to our expectations of immediate effects, that the changes are slow and incremental, and follow the woman’s progression through the lifecycle.43 Following students back home, we may be able to track the recent dramatic expansion of madrasas— and perhaps the related ties to Sufi networks for implementation of these institutional changes—to a larger range of actors who understand more closely the needs of different (rural rather than urban; poorer rather than wealthier) subpopulations of Indian Muslims.44 Finally, looking at the issue in historical terms, we have to see the rise in the number of girls’ madrasas as a continuation of the process of reform (tajdid) that began in ‘ulama circles in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ‘ulama believed then that education was the key to lifting the Muslim community out of weakness and ignorance, that the reason they had lost political power to the British was that they had allowed non-Islamic accretions to seep into the daily

42

Metcalf, ‘Islamic Reform and Islamic Women’. See David Kloos, Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority & Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), on how people’s ideas about religion change over the course of their lives, especially Chapter 4. On p. 129 Kloos notes, ‘theological arguments … exert a different appeal to different people at different moments in their lives’. 44 Attiya Ahmad’s study of female domestic workers in Kuwait discusses the importance of the gendered discourse of South Asian women being ‘naram’, soft and malleable, in their social relations with others, particularly members of the household. This concept throws additional light on the discussion of adab earlier. See Ahmad, Everyday Conversions. 43

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 127

religious  practices of Muslims. They had fallen away from shari‘a norms, and the way out was through education. Now, 150 years later, we are seeing a continuation of the same process. The challenges facing the Muslims in South Asia are different today. Their socioeconomic status has altered (with fewer ashraf Muslims than before), and once again the ‘ulama—and the Muslim community more generally—are responding with a concerted effort to educate the young.

The Contemporary Context of Indian Girls’ Madrasas A key difference at the present moment seems to be that the focus of madrasa education in many parts of India has shifted from boys to girls. Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey’s research indicates that in 2000 there were fewer male students in madrasas in Bijnor, west UP, than girls. They report that fewer Muslim boys stayed at the madrasa all the way to the end of their educations, preferring to switch to a secular government school at some point, as that was a better avenue to getting productive employment in the future.45 My observations at the Jami‘a Nur reveal that the boys’ madrasa next door to the girls’ madrasa was not expanding, while the latter was expanding rapidly. Moreover, Sayyid Sahib’s younger son was pursuing both a madrasa education and a secular one (in a Hindi-medium government school) simultaneously. Borker’s study of a girls’ madrasa in Delhi, and Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon’s work comparing Muslim girls’ education in five different Indian cities provide valuable data, allowing us to assess the overall applicability of my findings in Shahjahanpur. Borker refers to the ‘increasing feminization of madrasa enrolments documented by recent government reports’, and notes that according to 2013 government statistics (District Information System for Education, or DISE), 45

See Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’, Modern Asian Studies (2004), 38(1): 1–53, p. 2. In many parts of the country, boys also had the option of getting paid employment in the informal sector without much more than a middle school education, as Hasan and Menon report in Educating Muslim Girls.

128

Scholars of Faith

a little over half of all madrasa students were girls.46 Hasan and Menon note an increase in girls’ educational institutions, including madrasas, in Kolkata and Delhi.47 In Delhi, the literacy rate for Muslim girls went up from 66.9 per cent in 1991 to 75 per cent in 2001.48 Alongside this, the average age at marriage also went up, from 16 or 17 to 20.49 In Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, girls’ education rates went up as a result of parents’ (especially mothers’) eagerness to educate their daughters.50 In Aligarh, west UP, the principal of the Aligarh Girls’ School, established by Shaikh and Begam Abdullah in the early-twentieth century, noted: ‘Twenty years ago … [the] girls used to sit in the back row, embroidering and sewing. Today they want to do maths and science, and be able to compete.’51 In Calicut, Kerala, the last of the five cities studied by Hasan and Menon, the outlook for Muslim girls’ education was largely positive, in keeping with a history of high literacy rates in the state. In many states, however, Hasan and Menon note that Muslim girls’ education tends to level off after middle and high school, as parents withdraw their daughters from school in order to get them married. On the whole, it appears that the growth in Muslim girls’ madrasa education is part of a larger trend, which Justin Jones calls the ‘democratisation of religious knowledge’.52 As data become available about the increasing number of girls’ madrasas in India, a madrasa in Hyderabad that offers mufti courses for women, and all-women’s shari‘a courts in places like Mumbai, Jaipur, and Kolkata,53 we seem to 46 Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 41. The overall number of madrasa students reported here is 24.75 lakh, or approximately 2.5 million boys and girls. However, experts’ estimates vary widely and are hard—if not impossible—to verify. 47 Hasan and Menon, Educating Muslim Girls, pp. 40–1, 60. 48 Hasan and Menon, Educating Muslim Girls, p. 81. 49 Hasan and Menon, Educating Muslim Girls, p. 75. 50 Hasan and Menon, Educating Muslim Girls, pp. 89, 104. 51 Hasan and Menon, Educating Muslim Girls, p. 117. The interview appears to have taken place in 1999 or 2000. This is the same school described by Minault in Secluded Scholars, which was the basis of my summary in Chapter 1. 52 Jones, ‘Where Only Women May Judge’, p. 17. 53 Jones, ‘Where Only Women May Judge’, p. 4.

Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, a Barelwi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India 129

be looking at a wider trend of change from below, originating within local Muslim communities. Whether the goal is to educate daughters in the religious sciences and give them the tools to become personally orthoprax and raise orthoprax children, or to solve the problems of married women who have abusive husbands, are widowed, or are otherwise struggling economically because of adverse family circumstances, access to religious and secular knowledge seems to be growing among several lower-class sections of the female Muslim population in India. This is a hopeful sign, for such knowledge gives them the potential to become engines of change and engage in the uplift of the Muslim community as a whole.

3 PEDAGOGY AND DAILY LIFE AT JAMI‘A NUR AL-SHARI‘AT

Nowadays cotton is spun into cloth with machines. But before, didn’t people spin their own cotton? Spin your own cotton. Don’t pay attention to the defects of the other spinner. There are four defects in your cotton: stinginess (bughz), anger (gussa), jealousy (hasad), and hatred (kina). —Sayyid Sahib, class on Qur’anic exegesis, November 2016

Before Jami‘a Nur moved to its present location on the outskirts of the city in 2014, the girls’ madrasa was housed in a large, rather dark three-storey building with pale yellow walls in the middle of a crowded Shahjahanpur neighbourhood. The building was on one corner of a city square, surrounded by shops and narrow streets. During the course of the day, street noises included the constant blaring of horns from passing cars, vans, and an array of slower traffic, including horse carts and vendors with pushcarts shouting out their wares, and the barking and yelping of dogs at night. When I first visited the madrasa in the summer of 2012, I also heard men on cycle rickshaws speaking into loudspeakers and urging residents to vote for an array of different candidates for local office. The Jami‘a Nur shared this building with two other schools founded by Sayyid Sahib: an English-medium Islamic Public School for Girls (which also admitted boys up to the fifth grade) and a Hindi-medium school of the same name for girls (and boys up to the fifth grade). Both Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

131

schools followed the UP board curriculum, using NCERT textbooks. The English-medium school had about 1,000 students in 2013, while the Hindi-medium one was much smaller, with about 200. A handful of the girls in the Islamic Public School, both English-medium and Hindi-medium, were living in the madrasa, but the majority of them were day scholars.1 The girls’ madrasa, on the top two floors of the building (Figure 3.1), was independent of the other two, and had a different academic calendar, curriculum, and teachers. The boys’ madrasa, with about 150 residential students, is called Jami‘a Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at. It is located in a quiet area outside the centre of the city, surrounded by green fields. As noted in the previous chapter, the girls’ madrasa moved next door to it in 2014. Across the

Figure 3.1 Inside of the madrasa (old location), showing classrooms leading off a courtyard and stairs (June 2012) Source: Author. 1

The differences between boarding and day students point towards differences in the geographic and class bases of the English-medium and madrasa populations. This question is addressed in the next chapter.

132

Scholars of Faith

street from the school, down a side lane, was Sayyid Sahib’s house. A simple two-room house at the end of a big courtyard with papaya trees, a hand pump, and a place to do ritual ablution (wudu’), it was invisible from the street on account of its tall whitewashed walls. A new two-storey house was being built close by when I visited in 2015. In addition, Sayyid Sahib has a large public school for girls and boys in Bareilly, about 50 miles to the north of Shahjahanpur, with a girls’ madrasa occupying its top floor. The next chapter will look at Jami‘a Nur in a comparative framework to understand what is distinctive about it in relation to Sayyid Sahib’s two secular schools in Shahjahanpur. In this chapter, I turn to the academic curriculum and related issues at Jami‘a Nur.

Learning and Teaching Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at confers the ‘Alima and Fazila certificates on its graduates. The ‘Alima certificate can take up to six years of study, depending on the educational level of the student when she joins, and the Fazila takes another two years. The course of studies is broadly in keeping with the dars-i nizami syllabus, though it incorporates variations that reflect its dual focus on girls and on imparting Barelwi teachings.2 Thus, a noticeable difference in its syllabus from that of a Deobandi or Tablighi girls’ madrasa lies in the fact that the well-known book of ‘advice literature’ for women, Bihishti Zewar by Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, is not used because Mawlana Thanawi was a leading scholar of the Deobandi school, to which the Barelwis are opposed.3 Rather, it uses its own books, known as Jannati Zewar 2 See Appendix 3.1 at the end of this chapter for details of the syllabus at the madrasa. 3 On the Bihishti Zewar, see Barbara D. Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, a Partial Translation with Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). This book is part of the syllabus at the Madrasatul Niswan studied by Winkelmann (‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India [Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b]) and the Madrasah Islahul Banat studied by Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Aisha, the Madrasah Teacher, in Mukulika Banerjee, ed., Muslim Portraits: Every Lives in India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), which have Deobandi and/or Tablighi affiliations.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

133

and Sunni Bihishti Zewar, both written in the 1970s by Barelwi ‘ulama. In other ways, however, the ethical ideals it seeks to inculcate in its students are a lot like those in Deobandi or Tablighi madrasas, such as the one studied by Winkelmann in 2005. There were 12 classes altogether every day (Figure 3.2), as 4 of the grades had 2 sections each. Three of these sections fell in the pre-‘Alima classes, those into which new students were admitted if they lacked basic literacy and could not yet follow the ‘Alima course. They began by learning simple Urdu, Hindi, English, arithmetic, the basic teachings of Islam, and Qur’an recitation. At this stage, they simply memorized short verses or chapters of the Qur’an (including, of course, the Fatiha, the opening chapter, but also the short chapters in the last, thirtieth section of the Qur’an), without necessarily understanding the meaning of the Arabic words.4 The purpose was to give them basic familiarity with the sound of the Qur’an, and to get them used to reading and sounding out the words. Before the students started on the first year of the ‘Alima course, they would also have studied Persian grammar and the first of two advice texts for women, namely, Jannati Zewar (‘Heavenly Jewels’). Prior to 2014, when the madrasa moved into more spacious quarters, the youngest age at which students could join the madrasa was about 10; in 2015 it began to accept the younger siblings of some of its current students, some as young as 6. Usually, however, students were around 13 or 14 when they embarked on the full course of studies at the ‘Alima level. Thereafter, the list of books they would read over the next five years would cover the normal range of subjects included in dars-i nizami syllabi throughout South Asia. In increasing degrees of complexity, they would study Persian literature and grammar, Arabic literature and grammar, Qur’an recitation, translation of the Qur’an (in year 4), exegesis of the Qur’an (in year 5), logic (in year 3), jurisprudence (starting in year 2), principles of jurisprudence (in years 4 and 5), and Hadith (traditions of the Prophet; in years 4 and 5). In addition, this being what Winkelmann calls a ‘dual type’ madrasa curriculum, that is, one that includes subjects taught in the state curriculum, English and Hindi are taught throughout the student’s 4 See Dale Eickelman, ‘The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1978), 20(4): 485–516.

134

Scholars of Faith

Figure 3.2 Students in one of the classrooms of the old building, reviewing their lessons for exams Note: Their teacher is to the right, facing the students (not in picture). Note the bedding stacked against the walls. Source: Author.

course of studies, though arithmetic is not taught beyond the first pre-‘Alima years. Finally, students also take certain subjects pertinent to them as women, namely, Jannati Zewar, followed by two years of Sunni Bihishti Zewar (‘Sunni Heavenly Jewels’), in years 1 and 2, and sewing and embroidery classes (in years 3, 4, and 5). One of the teachers explained the logic behind the choice of subjects and the order in which they are taught to students, as follows: We don’t introduce the Qur’an until the fourth year because you can’t teach the Qur’an right away. If students make even a single mistake in pronunciation, they can come out of their religion (din se bahar ho sakte hain). Instead, students first learn Hadith starting in the second year, and while they are doing this, they will be taught relevant verses from the Qur’an as well. When they come to the Qur’an in the fourth year, they will recognize verses that they had already learned in earlier classes. They also study jurisprudence (fiqh) and day-to-day problems related to women—because

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

135

if women don’t understand the finer points of ritual purification (taharat), fasting, ablution (wudu’), etc., who will? Not the men, right? This falls on the women. For example, if an item of clothing is ritually impure, it must not be allowed to come in contact with other clothes which are clean. Women have to learn these things so they can educate their children properly. They need to know about questions that pertain to them as women, not those which have no relevance for them.

In the next section, I will take the reader through a typical morning at the madrasa, starting with students’ early morning waking up routines at the old Shahjahanpur location, and then follow some students into their classrooms to better understand the process of teaching and learning.

A Morning at the Madrasa: Going to Class In June 2012, many madrasa students slept outdoors on the flat, open rooftop of the madrasa building. As always, their day started early with the first sounds of the call to prayer: 4:45 a.m.: Flip-flops shuffle down the steps from the rooftop of the school building as the girls make their way downstairs to their rooms. Flip-flop, flip-flop … over a hundred pairs of feet. 5 a.m.: The muezzin intones the morning azan from a mosque close by. Flies begin to make it impossible to sleep outside anymore; beds and bedding need to be moved indoors and many try to catch a little more sleep. 6 a.m.: The public address system comes to life: ‘Sadia, your parents are on the line’, and Sadia makes her way to the wardens’ room. And so on, for the next hour or so and again in the evening. Students are not allowed to use individual cell phones at school. 6:30 a.m.: The whole building is abuzz with morning activity as students roll their bedding, stacking it by the walls of their classrooms; wash their faces; brush their hair; wear their uniforms; and eat breakfast. 7:30 a.m.: Two hundred and thirty girls line up in neat rows in the main hall outside their classrooms. Each is dressed in a green and white checked kameez, white salwar, and white dupatta. Their teachers, dressed in colourful outfits, stand facing them. 7:45 a.m. Assembly begins. The school day has started.5 5

From my field notes, June 2012.

136

Scholars of Faith

Figure 3.3 Students listening to a senior student relate a Hadith during morning assembly Source: Author.

At morning assembly (which the madrasa refers to as du‘a), students recite the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur’an, followed by a prayer (hamd) in praise of God, and a prayer (du‘a) for the Prophet. Then an individual fifth-year (Khamsa) student comes to the front of the assembly, and facing the students, relates a Hadith on a topic of her choice—for example, purity rules (taharat), prayer, the etiquette to be observed when eating and drinking or walking, and so on (Figure 3.3). This done, they disperse for class, leaving in a single file, row by row.

Two Ethnographies of Classes at the Madrasa: A Qur’an Class and an Exegesis Class Between 2012 and 2016, I attended a number of madrasa classes with permission from the administration and teachers. In this section I present an ethnography of two different classes. The first is a

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

137

fourth-year Qur’an class I attended in 2015, in which students studied verses 26 through 29 of Sura al-Baqara, the second chapter. I present it in full, as I think doing so will help readers get a better picture of the nature of madrasa education in general, and of this madrasa in particular. The second is an exegesis class taught by Sayyid Sahib, whom I have described in the previous chapter. These two ethnographies will in addition allow me to compare the content and style of Jami‘a Nur classes with Al-Huda classes on the Qur’an, in the later chapters of this book.

The Qur’an Class Students (standing): Al-salam alaikum. Usha Sanyal (US): Walaikum al-salam. All sit. Some moments of silence as students wait for the teacher to call on them to read. Student: Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim. Moves right finger on page as she reads. Reads Qur’an 2:23 to 2:25 at rapid pace, phrase by phrase, translating each phrase into Urdu, then moving on to the next. ‘And if you are in doubt …’ Teacher interrupts to correct her Arabic pronunciation, emphasizing the first syllable: ‘al-nasu [the people]’. Student repeats the words, then resumes reading. Teacher corrects her translation of 2:25 several times. Student repeats after the teacher each time. When the student has finished, the teacher asks, ‘What is the meaning of this verse [2:25: “And give good tidings …”]?’ The student translates, at first hesitantly, then more rapidly. The teacher repeats the meaning in Urdu. Teacher: Should we read on? Students: Yes. Teacher and students together: Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim. Teacher reads, slowly and clearly, the first of four new verses (Qur’an 2:26– 2:29). After reading the entire verse 2:26, she translates it into Urdu. ‘Allah tells us that … (allah farmata hai ki … )’. Then she refers students back to two previous verses (2:17 and 2:19) read some days earlier, to make the point that Allah gives examples when He wants to explain something to the people.

138

Scholars of Faith

Teacher: Allah tells us that undoubtedly He is not shy (haya’) about citing the example of a mosquito or something more than that (usse barh kar).6 And there were those who believed, and they knew that what was being revealed was God’s truth. And there were those who disbelieved (kufr kiya), and who said, ‘What is God’s purpose in giving this example?’ God misleads many people with this and He guides many with it. Those who are misled by these means are the disobedient (fasiqin). This is like the examples given in the two previous verses that we read. In the previous verses [2:17, 2:19], God compared the believers with light and nonbelievers with darkness. When those verses were revealed, the nonbelievers and Hypocrites objected, ‘Why is God, who is so great, citing such a worthless thing [light and darkness] as an example? Since He is so great, He should cite examples that are great.’ It was to rebut those people that this verse was revealed. In it, it is said that God does not shy away from citing whatever example He wishes, whether insignificant or great. The verse then says, as for the believers, they knew that what was revealed was God’s truth. So the believers knew that God cites examples that are in keeping with the subject under discussion. In this verse [2:26] the nonbelievers only knew that God is great, they were not thinking of what was being explained. So the example given will be in keeping with the thing [being explained]. Why are examples given? [Teacher pauses, then resumes when no one responds.] So that humans may understand what is being explained. If something is lowly and the example given is lofty, will people understand or not? If the thing is lowly, the example will be lowly, and if the thing is lofty, the example will be lofty. Students (in unison): … will be lofty. Teacher repeats point again. Reads the verse phrase by phrase, translating it into Urdu and moving on to the next. Teacher: Who is being referred to as disobedient here (fasiq)? … There are three types of disobedient people (taghabi, inhimaq, juhud). The first are those who accidentally say or do something wrong and seek forgiveness for it; the second are those who do or say something they know to be very wrong (gunah kabira) but do not seek forgiveness for it, they just keep doing it repeatedly; and the third are those who consider forbidden 6 The literal words here, ‘and above it’ also have a different interpretation, which I heard in an Al-Huda online class, namely, that there is a small mite on top of the mosquito, and that the words ‘and above it’ therefore refer to something even smaller than the mosquito.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

139

(haram) things to be good. A person in the second category will be considered a fasiq, while a person in the third group is outside the faith (iman se kharij). What are they? Students (in unison): … outside the faith. Teacher: [Reads and translates v. 2:27]. And those people who break the covenant that God commanded be kept joined, after confirming it (pakka karne ke bad), and they spread corruption on the earth, they are the losers (ghate me hain). What is God’s covenant? First, there is what God revealed to the Prophet, on whom be peace, in the Qur’an. And second, God took three promises from mankind. First, before God created the children of Adam, He collected them all and made a covenant with them that He is one. And they agreed. Second, God took a promise from all the messengers that they should spread the message (tum log tabligh karna aur dusron tak pahunchana). Third, He took a promise from all the religious scholars (‘ulama) that they shall not hide the truth. [Teacher now repeats the points made above.] So, who is being referred to here, what is being broken? Here, the real meaning is the breaking of a relationship (rishta torna). God forbade the breaking of relationships, but what is happening today? A lot of people break relationships. Second, people break mutual ties of friendship, love, and so on. Third, people are told that they should do good, but they don’t. But the real thing is that the meaning here is ‘to break a relationship’. So God tells us that they spread corruption in the world and they are the losers. [Teacher reads and translates verse 2:28.] So how do you deny God when you were dead (murda) and He gave you life, then He will give you death, then He will give you life again, and then you have to go back to Him. Before you were born, you were nothing. He created you from nothing, then you were a drop of water, then He put flesh on you, then He gave you a body, then He put a spirit (ruh) in it, then He sent you into the world. You were nothing, right? Then God will also give you death. Won’t He? We all have to die. Then He will give you life again. When? On the Day of Judgment (qiyamat ke din). And you will have to go back to Him again. So if you know everything, then why do you deny God? [The teacher reads 2:29 and translates. Some students read the Arabic text alongside the teacher.] And He is the one who made everything on the earth. The earth has everything on it—land, rivers, mountains, isn’t it? And He made the sky evenly (thik asman kiya), and He created seven heavens, and He is the lord of everything (har chiz par qadir hai). He made the world for you, seven heavens for you, everything to eat and drink, but even then, what do you do, you deny God.

140

Scholars of Faith

Teacher (addressing students): You want me to teach you again? You weren’t able to remember it (tumse yad nahin hua)? Do you want me to start from the beginning? Students: Yes. The teacher then translates the four new verses into Urdu clearly and at an even pace, not as slowly as before but not so fast that the students are unable to follow her, either. After she has finished, the students begin reading the verses out loud, rocking back and forth. The teacher is silent. A student leans over towards her and asks her to review the word fasiq in verse 2:26, so she explains it to the student individually while the others continue their recitation. Another student asks her to review verse 2:29. The room fills with the voices of the students and teacher.

The Exegesis Class: Jalalayn The following is an exegesis class of the text Jalalayn taught by Sayyid Sahib to fifth-year (Khamsa) students in November 2016: A student reads the Arabic text, verses 260–1 of Sura al-Baqara; Sayyid Sahib interrupts her frequently to correct her pronunciation. (The student was sitting next to me. All the students were wearing their nose pieces.) Sayyid Sahib: [Recites God’s name.] Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim. Sayyid Sahib: Allah is giving another proof here, about the fact that He has complete power to bring the dead back to life on Judgment Day (qiyamat ke din). This verse was revealed to address the people of Mecca, and most Meccans at that time denied the existence of an afterlife. For them, life consisted solely of what was in the world. They said, ‘What, when we are reduced to rotten bones and decaying flesh and merge with the dust, will Allah bring us back to life then?’ They were deniers (munkir) of this. This is the reason for people doing bad deeds. People fear the government and this fear keeps them from breaking the law. In the same way, this denial of the afterlife is the reason why people commit sins (gunah) and bad deeds (bad-kariyon ka sabab). So in this verse, Allah is giving His answer to this position. Ibrahim is a prophet who is accepted by Jews and Christians [as well as Muslims], although the Jews’ way of accepting him is somewhat strange (mustaffiya). He is known as the ‘father of the prophets’ (abul ambiyya).

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

141

Allah saved him from the fire of Nimrud, as we studied in the previous verses. Nimrud had ruled for 400 years. How many? Students (in unison): 400. Sayyid Sahib: And when he claimed to be God (khudai da‘wa kiya) and challenged and disrespected the messengers (paighambar ki tawhin ki), Allah gave the smallest and weakest of His creatures, the mosquito (macchar) sovereignty (musallat) over him. What did He choose? Students: A mosquito! Sayyid Sahib: And the mosquito came and entered his body through his [Nimrud’s] nose and made its way to his brain. And none of Nimrud’s doctors (hakim) were able to cure him. So one hakim said that there is nothing to be done but to hit him on the head. So a man was given the job of hitting Nimrud on the head with a shoe to give him relief. This was the punishment he had to bear. Then he was reduced to nothing, and he died and his wealth died with him. This was the result of his challenge (muqabala) to a prophet (paighambar). [Some text omitted here.] Sayyid Sahib: Now this is the third proof. Hazrat Ibrahim was a prophet (nabi), and the knowledge of prophets is greater than that of ordinary people. They know more about Allah’s power (qudrat), His essence (zat), prophets have ‘ilm al-yaqin, ‘ain al-yaqin, and haqq al-yaqin. [These terms were explained in the previous class: ‘ilm al-yaqin, what is known through information (khabar), not seen by oneself; ‘ain al-yaqin, what is known through sight; haqq al-yaqin, knowledge of the truth of something through experience (mu’aina, mushahida)]. But even so prophets keep entreating Allah (du‘a karte rahte hain) to increase their knowledge. So one day Ibrahim asked Allah, ‘We all know that you bring the dead back to life, but show me how you do this. I want to see with my own eyes’. He had ‘ilm [al-]yaqin, but he wanted to witness it himself (haqq al-yaqin). [Sayyid Sahib walks the students through the different kinds of knowledge with examples.] Sayyid Sahib: So Allah asked him, ‘Do you not believe?’ Ibrahim said, ‘Yes, I believe, but I want to witness it’. So Allah gave him an extraordinary (ajib) proof. He said, ‘Bring four birds’. So he had four different birds brought to him. They were: a peacock (mor), a vulture (gidh), a crow (kawwa), and a chicken (murgh). Then he said, ‘Now sacrifice (ziba karo) all four of them’. So they were sacrificed. Their feathers, skin, meat, heads were separated.

142

Scholars of Faith

Then Allah said, ‘Now grind everything together (qeema kar do) so that the pieces are mixed together’. Sayyid Sahib: What did he tell Ibrahim? Students: Grind them together. Sayyid Sahib: Around them there were seven mountains. How many mountains were there? Students: Seven. Sayyid Sahib: Then he told Ibrahim, ‘Keep their heads with you and go and deposit their meat on the mountains’. Where was he to put the meat? Students: On the mountains. Sayyid Sahib: And they had been completely ground together. They had been ground together. They had been ground together. [These words are repeated slowly, emphatically.] So, the pieces were put on the mountains. Ibrahim put everything on the mountains and came back. Then Allah said, ‘Now call those pieces of meat’. So all those pieces of meat began to fly from the mountains [towards Ibrahim]. Each of the four birds reunited with its original feathers, meat, and head, and the crow became a crow again, and the chicken became a chicken again, and they began to speak. So Allah said, ‘You see? In the same way, a human being can be burned and set afloat on a river and his ashes scattered to the east and west, [or] buried under the earth, but on Judgment Day I will awaken everyone from wherever they are and call them to Myself. And I will make everyone stand in the court (‘adalat) of judgment.’

This is the incident that Allah is relating in this verse of Sura al-Baqara. [Sayyid Sahib recites the verse in Arabic, with intonation, translates each word with grammatical explanation, then pauses.] Now the question arises, Why did Allah ask Ibrahim, ‘Don’t you believe?’ Doesn’t Allah know everything? The truth is, when a question is asked, it is not always asked because the questioner does not know the answer. Sometimes you ask me a question because you do not know the answer. Sometimes I ask you a question in an exam to see if you know the answer. But sometimes the question is asked to demonstrate (zahir karne ke liye) that the other person knows the answer. If I ask this student to tell me the answer to a problem, it is not because I think she is ignorant, or because I am ignorant, but because I

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

143

know that she is capable and I want to show that this student knows the answer while the other student does not. Students repeat after him: She knows the answer. Sayyid Sahib: Do you understand? Students: Yes. Sayyid Sahib: Allah asked Ibrahim so that Ibrahim would tell him that yes, he believed, and others around him would know that Ibrahim believed and that he wanted to increase the level of his belief by witnessing that in which he already believed. [Sayyid Sahib reads on from the Arabic text.] The Friend of God (khalil al-illah) asked Allah this question. And Allah asked him the question not in the same way in which He asked Nimrud, but with love. He asked Nimrud to make the sun rise from the west, but was Nimrud able to do it? Students: No. [Sayyid Sahib interrupts the class for a few minutes to answer a call on his cell phone.7 Speaks softly but urgently for a few moments into the phone. Then, turning his attention to the class once more, he repeats the lesson with grammatical details.] Sayyid Sahib: Then Ibrahim caught a vulture, a crow, a peacock, [and] a chicken. Allah could have chosen to ask Ibrahim to catch an animal such as a dog, goat, or cow, or some other animal. But birds resemble mankind in many ways. A peacock has a great moral defect, as it thinks it is superior to everyone else. Because it is so beautiful, it is always preening itself, and is full of pride (ghamand). And the vulture has the defect of stinginess (kanjusi). And the crow has the defect of greed and anger (hirs, lalach, ghazab). And the chicken has the defect of having too much desire [ for things] (khwahishat). These four things are [ found] in humans too. And they are very dangerous for humans. So far I have done the exegesis at the level of shari‘at. Now I am going to give you the spiritual (ruhani) exegesis of these verses. Catch the four birds inside you. And sacrifice them, get rid of them. Catch jealousy, greed, anger, desire, and stinginess and cast them out, and 7 I did not observe any of the other teachers at the madrasa using a cell phone in the classroom. Sayyid Sahib, by virtue of his administrative duties, was the exception to the rule.

144

Scholars of Faith

you will be able to fly like the birds. Just as Ibrahim’s shoes flew. Did his shoes fly? Students: Yes, they did. Sayyid Sahib: The magician came. He made the shoes fly. [Sayyid Sahib reads from the text. Then he recites a verse by Baba Farid Ganj-i Shakkar. He repeats it several times with rhythm and rhyme until the students can recite it, and they fully understand and appreciate its meaning.] Card your own cotton/dhunle dhuniye apni dhun Don’t ask about the other one’s defects/parayi dhun ke pap na pun There are four defects in your cotton/teri rui men char binole Stinginess and anger, jealousy and hatred/bughz wa gussa hasad wa kina Leave them and listen to me/unko chhor de meri sun

Nowadays cotton is spun into cloth with machines. But before, didn’t people spin their own cotton? Spin your own cotton. Don’t pay attention to the defects of the other spinner. There are four defects in your cotton: stinginess (bughz), anger (gussa), jealousy (hasad), and hatred (kina). Then listen to me. We are so proud of our titles: ‘alim, ‘alima … But first we should take out our own defects. [Now Sayyid Sahib mimics an imaginary ‘alim who thinks very highly of himself and throws his weight around. The students start to laugh. Then he turns to the next verse.]

Analysis Of the two classes I have presented above, the format of the first is typical of the madrasa classes I observed, while the second is more fluid and raises a different set of issues. Structurally, the first class had a tripartite structure, as did all the ‘Alima and Fazila classes I observed. During the first 10 minutes of the 35–40-minute class, the teachers of classes at all levels called upon one or a few randomly selected students by name to answer questions relating to the previous day’s class material. The student would stand up, respond to the question from memory and when the teacher asked her to explain in her own words the meaning of the words she had just read or recited, she was required to show her understanding of the text by doing so.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

145

Then she sat down and the teacher proceeded to the next point. If she was unable to answer the question, her neighbours were not allowed to help her, although the teacher sometimes tried to do so by asking related questions in an effort to jog her memory. If this failed, she would remain standing while the teacher called upon another student to answer the same question. The first student was silent and hung her head down low out of shame and embarrassment, her white headscarf obscuring her face, and remained standing in her place for several minutes until the teacher signalled to her that she could sit down again. This happened in silence, with little to no attention paid by the students sitting near her. Their full attention was on the teacher. The second part of the class, in which new material was introduced, involved intense engagement between the teacher and students, as we saw in both transcriptions. In the Qur’an class, the teacher went to great lengths to make sure the students understood the new material she was presenting and repeated the points she wanted them to understand more than once, as she deemed necessary. I observed this particularly in the more advanced classes which had fewer students, and which sometimes involved understanding a problem from several points of view. In the Qur’an class transcribed earlier in the chapter, the teacher made a connection between the Qur’anic text and the lives of the students in her exegesis of 2:27 when she said, ‘God forbade the breaking of relationships, but what is happening today? A lot of people break relationships. Second, people break mutual ties of friendship, love, and so on. Third, people are told that they should do good, but they don’t.’ While these comments were not an invitation to students to discuss their personal experiences of such matters in class, the teacher was asking them to reflect on the meaning of this verse in relation to their own lives and to internalize the message that verbal promises between individuals are the basis for relationships built on love and trust, and that these ties should be mutually binding. She thus related the term ‘covenant’ (‘ahd) in the verse to the everyday lives of the young students and their relationships with their natal families as well as their future relationships with affinal kin. By emphasizing that in this verse God was forbidding the breaking of relationships, she was signalling strongly that it was binding on the students as observant Muslims seeking to obey God’s will to do all in

146

Scholars of Faith

their power to nurture their relationships with parents and kin, and with their future husband and families through marriage. The third part of the Qur’an class was devoted to in-class review of the new material learned, in which students had the opportunity to personally approach their teacher for further clarification of specific points they had not fully understood. This face-to-face contact between student and teacher sometimes continued after class in the evenings during free time, if the student sought to approach the teacher in the staff room or elsewhere. If others were present at the time, they offered their comments on the question at hand. It could thus become a free-flowing discussion with comments flowing from one student to the other, the teacher arbitrating between them. But such exchanges occurred outside the classroom, never during classtime, and they were usually related to exam preparation when students wanted to make sure they had understood the material correctly, as the teacher had presented it. In neither of the classes I presented earlier was the teacher–student exchange intended to open a subject up for discussion. Rather, when the teacher asked a question, s/he wanted to make sure that the students were listening and paying attention, and that they had understood what was being taught. This was characteristic of both the classes presented earlier in the chapter. Sayyid Sahib’s class, which I have characterized as being more fluid—in both structure and presentation—is a demonstration of what an experienced, knowledgeable, and gifted teacher can do to hold students’ attention and make broad connections between the material being studied and ontological truths that s/he believes in. The students were fully attentive in his class in part because of the awe he inspires in them by virtue of his status as the founder of the madrasa, his depth of knowledge, and his Sayyid ancestry, and because it is a privilege to be taught by him. But their attention was also a response to his performative abilities: his highly effective use of humour and mimicry to pour scorn on people who pride themselves on their looks or wealth or knowledge and consider themselves to be above other people (by analogy with the crow and other birds in the Qur’anic exegesis) made students laugh on several occasions. Indeed, like a skilled performer warming to his role, he grew more animated as the class progressed, and when he presented his spiritual exegesis of the verse by reciting the poem by the fifteenth-century Shaykh Baba

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

147

Farid Ganj-i Shakkar, the whole lesson appeared to come together in a profound way, revealing the deeper meaning of the verse. Thematically, the light-heartedness of some of the moments in Sayyid Sahib’s class was balanced by the underlying seriousness of the larger issues he addressed, chiefly that of God’s absolute sovereignty and power, as demonstrated by the story of God bringing the birds back to life after their headless bodies had been completely ground down and mixed with one another. The theme of God’s absolute onenness and sovereignty and of mankind’s absolute subjecthood and powerlessness is one to which Sayyid Sahib returns frequently in conversation. He was thus able to effectively link the subject matter of the class with the ontological truths he believes to be self-evident, truths with which the students as practising Muslims also fully identify. However, not all Sunni Muslims would accept the authority of the Sufi saint, Shaykh Baba Farid Ganj-i Shakkar, and by interpreting the verse in light of his poem, Sayyid Sahib was identifying with certain strands of Islamic theology, especially the Barelwi school of thought to which he belongs.

Classroom Discussions of the Fiqh of Taharat as It Relates to Women No discussion of the madrasa students’ education at Jami‘a Nur would be complete without consideration of the central role played in it by the fiqh of taharat, the jurisprudence of ritual purification, insofar as it relates to women. Taharat is discussed at every level of the madrasa curriculum, from the first year (‘Ula) through the sixth (Sadisa), with increasing levels of complexity. I found it being discussed when I attended a second-year (Saniya) class on the Sunni Bihishti Zewar, as I had fully expected, but also in a fifth-year (Khamsa) class on the book of jurisprudence Hidaya, and a lesson on Quduri, another book of jurisprudence, among others. A teacher explained that taharat is taught at length in the first half of the academic year, while other subjects such as fasting and marriage are taught in the second half. And as the teacher quoted at the beginning of this chapter asked rhetorically, ‘If women don’t understand the finer points of ritual purification (taharat), fasting, ablution (wudu’), etc., who will? Not the men, right? This falls on the women. … Women have to learn these things so they can educate

148

Scholars of Faith

their children properly.’ This comment illustrates the close connection between the students’ book knowledge and the practical purpose of the madrasa curriculum, namely, to inculcate a habitus of everyday piety that will carry over into their lives as wives and mothers. Winkelmann’s observation, noted in the previous chapter, is worth repeating here: the Tablighi Jama‘at girls’ madrasa in Delhi, she noted, emphasized practical virtues (faza’il) rather than theoretical legal issues (masa’il).8 Or in the words of Moosa, the Jami‘a Nur illustrates what he rues as the madrasa’s ‘republic of piety’, a feature shared by most South Asian madrasas today, those for boys included, over the ‘republic of letters’ or knowledge for the sake of knowledge, of a previous era.9 In the context of Jami‘a Nur and other girls’ madrasas, taharat deals with personal matters such as menstruation and sexuality, and their connection with ‘prayer-readiness’, to use Maghen’s term. According to Maghen, ‘Tahara, despite its prominent place in the Muslim ethos and considerable girth in the fiqh literature, is probably the single most neglected area in Western Islamic studies’.10 Yet he argues convincingly that in the legal literature, discussion of sexual issues is ‘never far removed’ from the discussion of religious ones, for the two are ‘integrally connected’. In order to pray, one must be ritually pure, performing either the greater or the lesser of the two ablutions, either a full bath (ghusl) or washing of the face and limbs (wudu’), depending on the state of one’s ritual impurity. Failure to perform the correct purity-restoring ablution threatens to invalidate one’s prayer. The Sunni Bihishti Zewar starts by saying: Purity (taharat) is such a necessary part of the canonical prayer (namaz) that without it there can be no prayer. According to the ‘ulama, a person who deliberately offers the prayer without first purifying him- or herself is guilty of infidelity (kufr). The Prophet said that prayer is the key to heaven (jannat) and purity is the key to prayer (Imam Ahmad).11

8

Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b), p. 69. 9 See Ebrahim Moosa, What Is a Madrasa? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Chapter 6. 10 Ze’ev Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh: Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 245. 11 Sunni Bihishti Zewar, p. 1.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

149

In this section of the book, detailed instructions are therefore given to the reader to help her distinguish different conditions requiring either wudu’ or ghusl. In particular, women’s menstrual cycle, sexual intercourse, and childbirth are discussed, being conditions that require either the woman’s temporary cessation of prayer (during menstruation and childbirth) or a purificatory bath (after sexual intercourse). Throughout this section, and indeed in the book as a whole, the woman is told to be constantly vigilant regarding her correct response to different situations. She must also keep track of how many prayers she has missed, and has to make up once she is past the temporary period of ritual impurity. The author also emphasizes the importance of offering the required daily prayers, and of making up missed ones, before undertaking any additional, supererogatory devotions (nafl).12 Some examples of classroom discussions of different aspects of taharat which I observed will illustrate the detailed manner in which the subject is analysed. Thus, in a class of the Sunni Bihishti Zewar for second-year students, the teacher presented a Hadith from the book, as follows: Every time you rinse your mouth [in wudu’], the sins of your mouth are washed away. When you clean your nose, those of the nose are flushed out, when you clean your ears, the sins of your ears are washed out. And when you wash your hands the sins of your hands come out. And the sins of your head come out when you rinse your head. And so on. When a person does wudu’ once, then s/he gets the reward (sawab); when you do wudu’ twice, then you get twice the reward. But if you do it three times, the third set of benefits is only for the prophets.

In a class for more senior students, the discussion took on greater complexity. The fifth-year class on Hidaya discussed a difference 12 For example, on p. 124 the book reads, ‘Making up missed prayers (kaza namazen) is more important than offering extra (nafil) prayers’. This statement is repeated frequently throughout the book. The two preceding paragraphs are based on my chapter ‘Changing Concepts of the Person in Two Ahl-i Sunnat/Barelwi Texts for Women: The Sunni Bihishti Zewar and the Jannati Zewar’, in Usha Sanyal, David Gilmartin, and Sandria B. Freitag, eds, Muslim Voices: Community and the Self in South Asia (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013), pp. 213–14.

150

Scholars of Faith

of opinion between two scholars on the things that break wudu’ (nawaqiz) in different contexts. According to Imam-i A‘zam (Abu Hanifa, the eponymous founder of the Hanafi school or madhhab), the teacher explained, the impurity in question had to be sufficient in quantity to constitute a flow, whereas for Imam-i Shafi‘i (al-Shafi‘i, the founder of the Shafi‘i school) the quantity was immaterial to its capacity to break wudu’. Even a small amount was sufficient. So the question was, how did one reconcile the two positions? The teacher explained the situation as follows: There are two kinds of proofs: rational (‘aqli) and transmitted (naqli). When the impurity comes out, it destroys the purity (taharat). This is clear from reason (‘aql). The limbs have to be washed. Then, applying analogical reasoning (qiyas), he [Abu Hanifa] says: ‘There is a condition, that is, the impurity (from blood or pus) must be flowing, if not one will not say that the impurity came out.’

The teacher then explained that the impurity must exit the body, it must come out. If it does not do so, if it is not evident, then it will be immaterial to the situation. The mouth is full of vomit (ulti, qai). When will it be said that the mouth is full? When it comes out of the mouth. There is no difference whether there is just a little or a lot. Vomit is an accidental cause of impurity (hadas), whether it is much or little. This is the opinion of Imam-i Shafi‘i. But according to Imam-i A‘zam, if there is a spot or two of blood, purity will not be broken. There has to be a flow. Then it will be broken (naqis). Since there is disagreement between [these two] Hadith, how do we reconcile them? The Hadith from Imam-i Shafi‘i deals with there being only a little vomit, whereas the Hadith from Imam-i A‘zam deals with a different situation. So the difference in their opinions stems from the different situations.

The lesson here, students learned, was that different situations and contexts lead to different outcomes. In practical terms, they had to know how to tell them apart and how to respond accordingly.

The Role of Memorization in Madrasa Learning: Field Observations As the subject of ‘rote’ learning is often raised in criticism of madrasa teaching practices, I turn now to my observations of student

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

151

memorization in the course of my fieldwork. To return to the first part of the Qur’an class in which students demonstrated their ability to memorize material learned the previous day, I was impressed but also puzzled by their capacity to memorize large sections of material in a relatively short time. How did they do it? I also realized after observing classes in different subject areas that memorization of class material was not limited to the Qur’an. It spilled over to all the other subjects as well. In addition, I also puzzled over the fact that I had never observed the students taking notes. They were not allowed to write anything on the books themselves (as these belonged to the madrasa), but I had never seen them take notes in a notebook to help them remember the lesson. How did the students memorize their lessons so quickly and so well without recourse to writing? When I raised the question in a group discussion in 2014, one of the teachers corrected me, saying the students did indeed take notes. And she called one of the senior students, 18 years old, intelligent and full of enthusiasm, and asked her to show me one of her notebooks. As I recorded in my field notes from 2014: The notebook contained neat handwritten notes on the subject written on the outside cover. There is a notebook for almost every subject the student studies. Since there are 8 periods per day, she would have anywhere up to 8 notebooks for each academic year. However, not every subject needs a notebook. They said that since Hadith, for example, is easy to remember (as it is in narrative form), they don’t make notebooks for Hadith classes. But other subjects—grammar, fiqh, Sunni Bihishti Zewar, etc.—all have notebooks. At the end of her studies, the student will have all these notebooks in her keeping, and they will be a good reference for her whenever she needs to review something she had studied at the madrasa. These notebooks are dictated by the teacher and corrected by her to make sure they don’t contain any errors. The text dictated is a summary of the contents of the book. Each student’s notebook will contain identical notes. When a student is called upon in class to answer a question, she recites the relevant part of the notes she took most likely the previous day.

This was how students learned and memorized their lessons. Note taking in the madrasa context was thus akin to dictation, in that each student’s notes were ideally identical to those of her classmates. Individuality was not what was prized, rather it was uniformity and

152

Scholars of Faith

accurate reproduction of the words dictated by the teacher. Ultimately, the reason for the high value placed on such uniformity has to do with the fact that the madrasa is imparting religious knowledge (dini ta‘lim), which is of a higher order than the knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic (the three r’s) imparted in secular schools. Students respond to this message. Their demeanour in madrasa classes attested to their intense engagement with the religious questions they were studying and discussing with their teachers. I will show in the next chapter how different was the atmosphere in the two secular schools that occupied different parts of the same building until 2014. A third issue that puzzled me initially was that the amount of new material introduced in each class was relatively small and the amount of time spent on it was also quite brief, between 10 and 15 minutes approximately. Then I realized that each student was taking eight different classes in quick succession through the course of the morning, and she had to master the new material presented in each of those classes by the next day. So it followed that the amount of new material presented in each class would have to be brief, covering perhaps a couple of pages in each class. In the next section on peer learning, I will address the issue of memorization in further depth.

An Evening at the Madrasa: Peer Learning On one of my visits to the madrasa, I noted: The madrasa students spend about 4 hours each day after classes are over and 1 hour in the morning before school starts— the same amount of time as school itself—memorizing their lessons. This is what the mutala‘a consists of. Muta‘ala takes place every afternoon after school, and every night. Much of the activity is done in small groups where one student recites aloud to another, and the other corrects her if she makes a mistake. Then they switch roles. The teachers are always at hand during these study sessions should the student have a question.13

There are two intertwined issues here: memorization and peer learning, as much of the work of memorization takes place in concert with

13

From my field notes, 2014.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

153

other students outside the classroom, in an informal group setting. Dale Eickelman addressed both issues very insightfully in his 1978 article ‘The Art of Memory’, in which he argued that memorization precedes understanding, which is demonstrated by the ability to invoke Qur’anic verses in appropriate social contexts: Former students [of the Qur’an in Marrakesh, Morocco] emphasized that throughout the long process of memorizing the Qur’an they asked no questions concerning the meaning of [a] verse, even among themselves, nor did it occur to them to do so. Their sole activity was memorizing proper Qur’anic recitation. … ‘Understanding’ (fahm) in the context of such concepts of learning was not measured by any ability to ‘explain’ particular verses. … Instead, the measure of understanding was implicit and consisted of the ability to use particular Qur’anic verses in appropriate contexts … [and] to make appropriate practical reference to the memorized text.14

Moreover, Eickelman notes that although the Islamic ‘concept of knowledge’ rests on the assumption that there are fixed truths that can be ‘possessed’ through memorization,15 scholars and students did in fact discuss and comment on what they were learning in informal study circles and peer groups. However, because these efforts were not culturally valorized by the public, no attention was called to them. I found, likewise, that while students at Jami‘a Nur studied or ‘learned’ their lessons in large part through a process of memorization, this did not mean that they did not understand what they were reading or memorizing. Older students who were even a few years into the ‘Alima curriculum displayed an ability to understand and convey to others the meaning of what they were memorizing. When I asked a student to read to me from a book of Hadith in Arabic, for example, she did so at breakneck speed, from which I knew that she had memorized the text. However, when I stopped her and asked her to explain to me what she had read, her neighbour, who was listening intently to our exchange, immediately stepped in to convey the gist of the text’s meaning in her own words, using simple Urdu. In this case, the text was about the marriage contract (nikah). The students

14 15

Eickelman, ‘The Art of Memory’, pp. 494–5. Eickelman, ‘The Art of Memory’, p. 510.

154

Scholars of Faith

told me that the bride-to-be must give her consent—even if this be silently indicated through a gesture or simply by not objecting—for her marriage to proceed. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy vividly highlights the differences between cultures that are primarily oral (those that have ‘primary’ orality) and print cultures in which modern sound technologies (radio, television, and a host of new media) play a supporting role (those that have ‘secondary’ orality).16 He places these on a historical continuum, with a number of societies, including Middle Eastern ones, falling somewhere in between. These societies, he writes, ‘retain enough oral residue to remain significantly word-attentive in a person-interactive context (the oral type of context) rather than object-attentive’.17 The implication of the word ‘residue’ is clearly that societies are moving in a linear direction from orality to print (and now to electronic media). But as Messick points out, this is a Western-centric model. It is more accurate to see Muslim societies as exhibiting ‘a complex motif of a fully realized type of civilizational literacy’ which have their own ‘particular understandings, and relative valuings, of the recited and the written’. In the Muslim context, the oral was privileged over the written because it was deemed to be closer to divine truth than written communication: ‘recitation purported to convey an authoritative genuineness of expression by replicating an originally voiced presence’.18 They coexisted, each in its own sphere, the former being associated with ‘shari‘a jurisprudence and supporting fields’, and the latter with professions such as medicine, history, and philosophy.19 Moreover, as Messick shows, not every kind of text within the field of shari‘a jurisprudence was memorized. The crucial distinction here was between the ‘matn’ and the ‘sharh’, the original (stable, fixed) text and the (unstable, incomplete) commentary thereon. This relationship was modelled on the relationship between the Qur’an and the Hadith—the latter being a commentary on the former. Only the

16 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982 [2002]). 17 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 67. 18 Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 24–5. 19 Messick, The Calligraphic State, p. 28.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

155

former was memorized, not the latter. This dovetails nicely with the student notebooks at the madrasa being made for subjects other than Hadith. The former is concise, the latter expansive, therefore by definition not amenable to memorization. There is much new research on the importance in Muslim societies of attentive listening and its implications for social relations, notably by Charles Hirschkind on cassette sermons in Egypt but also by Anna Gade on Qur’an recitation in Indonesia. They both emphasize the importance of listening as a religious act, deriving from the belief that the Qur’an, the literal word of God, transforms the human heart if one listens actively to its message. In both studies, affect is central to the author’s analysis of individuals listening to, learning from, and acting on the Qur’anic message. As Hirschkind describes it, a person whose heart is receptive to the Qur’anic message, who is ‘Qur’anically tuned’, responds to a good sermon with his or her whole body: ‘For such a person, auditory reception involves the flesh, back, chest, and heart—in short, the entire moral person as a unity of body and soul.’20 Gade shows that a person’s emotional involvement in Qur’anic learning holds the key not only to continuous practice, but to escalating practice and self-imposed standards of perfection. As a reciter gains greater competence, she is motivated to expand her engagement with the Qur’an and push herself towards constantly increasing levels of excellence. She is ‘lured’ into the learning process in a ‘spiraling horizon’, ‘familiar and definable … yet … never static’.21 Importantly, Gade emphasizes that the transformation of self that follows is accompanied by community transformation over time in a ‘feedback loop’, on account of the individual’s moral responsibility to contribute towards the greater good of the community at large. In her view, the process

20 Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 76. When Al-Huda online students were moved by a Qur’an recitation heard on tape, they would frequently say that it gave them goosebumps from sheer emotion. 21 Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 175–6. The words in quotes are from Gade’s citation, on p. 176, of Ron Williams and James Boyd’s description of repetitive ritual action.

156

Scholars of Faith

is better understood in terms of the Islamic concepts of adab and da‘wa than the Foucauldian concept of technology of the self, which ‘views the self as constituting itself as a subject within social systems. … [This concept] must be enhanced with the recognition that they are also “technologies of the community”’.22 I think these insights help us situate the learning process at the madrasa in a wider frame, and free us from the narrow view of memory work as being intellectually stifling and stultifying.23 At the madrasa in 2012, I noted the teachers’ high degree of emotional engagement with the students under their care. An example of this was the system whereby each teacher was assigned one particular classroom as her responsibility. She checked on her room first thing after she woke up, making sure all the girls were okay, that the room was left clean before school began, and that nothing in the room (for example, light bulbs) was broken or needing repair. If there was, she would let the office know so that they could take care of the problem. Thereafter, at different points during the day, she checked the girls’ attendance so that she knew where each one was at any given time. And if a girl in her room had a personal problem, she would be the one to whom the girl would go for advice and help. I also found a similar degree of intellectual engagement. The daily teaching load seemed to be quite heavy for some teachers, as they taught students throughout the different grade levels from the start of the school day until the end of school around midday. They also taught different subjects. One teacher, for example, taught jurisprudence to senior students, Arabic grammar to third-year students, Persian literature to first-year students, and elementary Urdu to the youngest students—all in the course of a single day’s teaching. The English teacher, who did not live in the madrasa, seemed on the other hand to teach just English and arithmetic to all the different grades. 22

Gade, Perfection Makes Practice, p. 75. Moreover, Gade also points out that the learning process itself takes place in part in a community setting, as in study circles. See Gade, Perfection Makes Practice, p. 102. 23 For similar insights from a high-caste Tamil village school, see Bhavani Raman, ‘Disciplining the Senses, Schooling the Mind: Inhabiting Virtue in the Tamil Tinnai School’, in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, eds, Ethical Life in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 43–60.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

157

It being exam time when I did my first round of fieldwork in June 2012, students were no longer taking classes. In fact, they had two separate sets of exams: the first were state-mandated exams which students had to pass in order to satisfy UP state madrasa board requirements. These over, students then had about two weeks’ break before they gave a second set of exams, which teachers said were harder, set by them and graded in-school. The exam results would be given to each student before she left for her month-long Ramadan break. Students spent the fortnight reviewing the material with their teachers during the day and doing group study in the evenings. The teachers made up the exams and then spent several hours a day over the course of two or three days preparing detailed lists of where each student would be seated. The reason for this was that space being so tight, students had to sit close together when taking their tests and the teachers wanted to make sure that no one could look at her neighbour’s work while she was taking her test. So they scrambled the entire study body in such a way that students would sit next to other students from different classes, taking entirely different tests at the same time. Seniors and juniors would thus be seated side by side in accordance with the plan worked out by the teachers ahead of time. In the next section of this chapter, I turn the focus on the students themselves, so we can hear their voices directly and see the madrasa from their perspective.

Students and Student Life The girls who attended the madrasa were largely rural and many were from poor families. Their monthly fees in 2012 were very low, at INR 500 per month (equivalent to less than USD 10 at the time of writing), which covered board and lodging, as well as tuition. Since some students’ parents could not afford even this much, the school had reduced fees for some, and yet others paid no fees whatsoever. The school was constantly stretched for funds. Administrators made up some of the shortfall by drawing upon funds from the English-language school, which had higher fees even though it was a day school. As mentioned, space was very tight at the madrasa. All the classrooms were on the second floor of the building. Students stored their personal belongings in trunks arranged in neat rows along the four

158

Scholars of Faith

walls of their classrooms. In the summer months, they had the option of taking their bedding up to the flat roof of the building and sleeping there rather than in their hot, stuffy classrooms—this was a valuable space with many uses during the day as well. Every evening, students assembled here for evening (maghrib) prayers, forming neat rows and praying in unison. The space also had domestic uses, a section of it being used to hang laundry. Back downstairs, outside the classrooms was a large hall where the morning assembly was held, and where students formed informal study groups after school hours. One part of this open space had been cordoned off to create a makeshift sick room for students. Great discipline was required to ensure that each student had a clean uniform for the school day and a change of clothes for the rest of the day, not to mention sharing water for bathing and ablutions before prayer time. Although I was unable to have an extended conversation with the students, as they were in the midst of final exams, I put together some simple questions in writing, asking them to tell me about themselves and what they were learning at the school. Here are some responses:24 I am 14 years old. I study in Saniya [the second year of the ‘Alima course]. I have been at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at for four years. I am from Lakhimpur Kheri town. My mother is a housewife [student’s usage]. My father works at a tyre service station. He studied to the eighth grade when he was young. Then he searched for a job and after a lot of effort he was successful. All his life he has taken care of us and made sure we had proper education and training. We are eight sisters and no brothers. Two of us study at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at. And five of my other sisters study at the G.G.I.C. Inter College [name of college written in English]. My youngest sister is too young to go to school. I love everything at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at. But most of all, I love the studies. And I love the rules and regulations (pa-bandi) here, because over here great attention is paid to veiling (pardah). And in the morning, after the dawn (fajr) prayer, we recite the Qur’an, which I like a lot. And I like the way things are done here.

24 I wrote the questions in Devanagari script and received the answers the same way. Students are well-versed in both Devanagari and Nastaliq scripts, in addition to being able to read and write simple English.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

159

In response to the question, ‘What have you learned at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at and what will you do differently when you go home?’ she wrote: I have benefited a great deal from my education at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at. In moral and ethical terms (akhlaqi taur par), I have learned good manners (husn-i suluq) when interacting with people, including neighbours, and how to live amicably with others, how to be kind to those who are younger, and how to honour the elderly. In terms of worldly matters, I have learned how to conduct myself well on a daily basis, how to distinguish between right and wrong, and how to keep good company and avoid bad company. In terms of religion, I have learned how to pray and fast, how to recognize the permitted (halal) from the forbidden (haram), the difference between that which is obligatory (fard, wajib) from that which is recommended (sunnat) and approved (mustahabb). I also learned the duties (ahkam) of the shari‘a, how to offer prayer … and questions related to the essentials of the faith (zaruriyat-i din). And which actions will take us to paradise and which ones to hell. I pray to God that I may do good deeds and act upon whatever I have learned in this madrasa so that I may be admitted to heaven.

In response to my question, ‘What are your future aspirations in life?’ she wrote: After completing my studies, I would like to start a madrasa of my own so that this tradition of learning (silsila) may continue. When I return home, first of all I will teach my parents the duties of offering prayer and keeping the fast and I will teach my sisters how to pray. I will teach everyone in my household that they must pray [daily]. I will teach them all the good things I learned in this madrasa. I used to pray even before I came here, but there were lots of things that I didn’t know. I will teach those things to my family and to my neighbours (muhallewalon ko). And I will tell my mother, and my sisters, and women in the neighbourhood that they must observe pardah, and I will teach them good things, God willing.

I have quoted this student’s response extensively because of the details she provided, not to mention her idealism and desire to lead an orthoprax life, and urge those around her to do likewise. Other students also responded in similar terms, speaking enthusiastically of what they had learned at the madrasa, and how they had learned to practice the basic duties of prayer and fasting during Ramadan, which

160

Scholars of Faith

they had either not done before or had done incorrectly or intermittently. They all spoke of their desire to teach their families how to do these things. Another striking response was the frequent mention of respect for parents, especially their mothers, as in the following: When I go back home after completing my studies here, first of all I will kiss my mother’s feet, as paradise lies beneath the feet of the mother. Then I will teach others whatever I have learned here so that this knowledge may make its home in the heart of every human being the world over. I will fulfil the wishes of my mother and my father, and will follow in my teachers’ footsteps and light up the whole world with the knowledge given to me by them, and pray to God that no Muslim will be bereft of this light. Amen.

This student wrote that she was 17 years old, had been in the madrasa for 4 years, and was studying in the Salisa class (third year of the ‘Alima course). Also noteworthy in student and teacher discourse in the Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at madrasa was the absence of overt anti-Deobandi rhetoric. While certainly welcome, this absence puzzled me initially in view of the structured incorporation of such rhetoric in Jami‘a Ashrafiya, the Barelwi madrasa for boys in Mubarakpur, Azamgarh district, east UP, through group debates and speeches by students, and its importance in shaping their sense of a ‘Barelwi’ identity, as reported by Arshad Alam.25 If students were not taught to define themselves against another denominational group (maslak), how then did they identify as ‘Barelwis’? Was the pursuit of a Barelwi identity expected to be ‘lived’ through different practices? The daily practices of the teachers and students did, in fact, contain clues about the Barelwi identity of the madrasa. One such practice was that of touching their thumbs to their eyes and then kissing the thumbs every time the Prophet was mentioned in a speech or sermon, as a gesture of love and respect. No less significant was the way texts were read and interpreted in the course of the school day. For instance, when commenting to me about the opening page of the book Sunni Bihishti Zewar, one of the teachers noted that the Hadith 25 See Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011), pp. 185–97.

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

161

cited on that page illustrated the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen. For a Barelwi, this was a point of disagreement with Deobandis, and her statement would therefore have been self-explanatory and selfevident to both students and teachers, and therefore not the subject of discussion or dispute. Similarly, when I asked Sayyid Sahib what prompted him to choose the names he had for his schools, he said, ‘We [Barelwis] are between the Wahhabis [read, Deobandis, Ahl-i Hadith, the Saudi establishment, and so on] on the one hand and the Shi‘a on the other. While the Wahhabis denigrate the Prophet’s family and the Shi‘a go overboard in praising them, we are in the middle.’ So the Barelwis were Sunnis who loved the Prophet and therefore also loved Sayyids, who are his descendants, and the concept of Nur [light] was emblematic of that love.26 They demonstrated the perfect balance between two extremes. In these many unremarkable, everyday ways, Barelwi self-identity was created without any overt need to engage in negative denunciation of an absent ‘Other’. Moreover, as I explore in the next chapter, the ritual practices the students learned at the madrasa bore the hallmark of the Barelwi interpretation of Islam, and their Barelwi identities were articulated in particular ways in their morning assembly or du‘a and weekly Thursday evening student presentations. The contrast between this madrasa and Jami‘a Ashrafiya, the boys’ madrasa in east UP, should be clearer in Chapter 4, in the context of their different approaches to the Thursday evening programme. Reading the students’ responses and observing them during fieldwork, I did not get the impression that they were at the madrasa because it was the only choice they (or their parents) had. Rather, like Aisha, the madrasa teacher described by Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey,27 26 Note that the madrasas’ and secular schools’ names have been changed in order to protect their identity. The meaning of the question and Sayyid Sahib’s response are therefore not as clear-cut as I would have liked. Of course, as a Sayyid, Sayyid Sahib also enjoys a special relationship with the Prophet’s family. For the Barelwi reverence for Sayyids, see Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Mawlana Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1880–1920 (new edn, Delhi: Yoda Press, 2010). 27 See Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Aisha, the Madrasah Teacher’, in Mukulika Banerjee, ed., Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008).

162

Scholars of Faith

they seemed totally at home there, totally immersed in the world of the madrasa, and by all appearances thriving in the atmosphere of disciplined, rigorous study and religious observance, and the nurturing environment of supportive teachers and administrative staff, as well as fellow students, that the madrasa offers.28 If, as Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey note, part of the reason rural parents and those from small towns choose to educate their daughters today is that it makes girls more eligible on the marriage market, by the same token their educations also postponed marriage by a few years and allowed them to develop self-esteem through their newfound knowledge and leadership skills through active participation in school activities. In the case of the madrasa students, they also knew that their religious education was highly valourized by their families and communities, and if displayed in appropriate ways at home, would enhance their status among both affinal and consanguinal relatives. As I have noted previously, there is not much difference in the overall message to women between the Jami‘a Nur and the girls’ madrasa studied by Winkelmann. Though the two madrasas adhered to different maslaks—Barelwi and Tablighi Jama‘at, respectively— their students had similar socioeconomic profiles and made do with a number of privations in terms of space and the lack of resources, but had a high sense of motivation and engagement with the goals of their madrasa. In the next chapter, I will explore the issue of madrasa students’ high level of emotional engagement with their education in a different light, comparing what we have learned in this chapter with the learning environment in the secular schools that until 2014 were located in the same building as Jami‘a Nur. What, if anything, distinguishes the student populations of the different schools, their learning and teaching styles, and their overall ethos?

28 I am reminded of a student who fell ill while I was there and who cried when her parents came to take her home so she could get treatment. I was told that she did not want to go home. This happened during final exams, just a few weeks before the students were to return home for the Ramadan holidays.

English

(Elementary Urdu)

Ta‘amir-i Adab

Nur al-Idha

Nahw Mir

(Arabic Grammar)

Farsi

(Persian)

(Jurisprudence)

(‘Allama Abul Muhd Ikhlas Hasan ibn-i Ammar)

Saniya ‘Alima 2nd year

‘Adadiya Pre-‘Alima

‘Ula ‘Alima 1st year

Bukhari Sharif Majmu‘a-i Qira’at (Qur’an Recitation)

Majmu‘a-i Qira’at (Qur’an Recitation)

Hidayat al-Nahw (Arabic Grammar)

(Hadith)

Sadisa 6th year Fazila 2nd year Khamsa 5th year Fazila 1st year

Rabia ‘Alima 4th year

Salisa ‘Alima 3rd year

List of classes and subjects taught at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at (June 2012)

Saliha Awwal Saliha Dom Pre-‘Alima Pre-‘Alima

A3.1

APPENDIX 3.1

Khush Khati

Qira’at

(Writing and Dictation)

Naqal o imla

(Qur’an Recitation)

(Arabic (Qur’an Recitation) Grammar)

(Persian Grammar)

(Basic Quranic Teachings)

Al-Nahw al-Wazih

(Urdu Writing)

Majmu‘a-i Qira’at

(Urdu Writing)

Khush Khati

Tashil alMasadir

(Qur’an Recitation)

Qira’at

Nurani Ta‘lim

Hindi

(Arithmetic) (Persian)

(Logic)

Jawahar al-Mantiq

(Sewing)

Silai

(Hadith)

Muwatta Imam Muhammad

(Translation of the Qur’an)

(Arabic Literature)

(Qur’an Recitation)

(Basic Islamic Teachings)

Gulistan

Hisab

Qur’an Sharif

English

Tarjuma-i Qur’an

Qalyubi ma‘a Insha

Majmu‘a-i Qira’at

Nurani Ta‘lim

(Arabic Grammar in Persian)

Panch Ganj (Juris prudence)

(Arabic Grammar and Literature)

(Superorega- (Arabic) tory Prayers)

Faiz al-Adab (Qur’an Recitation)

(Arithmetic)

Minhaj al-‘Arabiya

Sharh al-Waqayah

Masnun Du‘a

Majmu‘a-i Qira’at

Hisab

(Jurisprudence)

Hidaya

(Exegesis)

(Jurisprudence)

English

Jalalayn Shafir

(Hadith)

(Principles of Jurisprudence)

Hidaya, 2 vols.

Tirmidhi

(Hadith)

(Exegesis of the Qur’an)

Nur al-Anwar

Muslim Sharif

Jalalayn Sharif

Qira’at

Source: Author.

(Supplicatory (Qur’an Prayers) Recitation)

Du‘a

(Elementary Urdu)

Naqal o imla English and Hindi (Urdu Writing)

Ta‘amir-i Adab

Qasas al-Nabiyyin (Stories about the Prophets, Arabic Literature)

(Arabic Grammar)

(Advice Literature for Women)

English

(Advice Literature for Women)

Sunni Bihishti Zewar

Mizan al-Sarf

(Advice Literature for Women)

Sunni Bihishti Zewar

English

Jannati Zewar

(Writing and Dictation)

Naqal o Imla

English

Qur’an sharif

(Embroidery)

Karhai

(Embroidery)

Kashida Kari

(Arabic Grammar)

(Adab and Arabic)

English

Mukhtarat ma‘a Insha, 2nd vol.

Manshuraat ma‘a Insha

(Principles of (Hadith) Jurisprudence)

(Arabic Grammar in Persian)

Mishkat Sharif

Usul al-Shashi

‘Ilm al-Sigha English

166

Scholars of Faith

APPENDIX 3.2

Teacher Categories The teachers of the English-medium school and the madrasa are classified into three groups: 1. PRT: Primary Teachers (pre-Nursery to KG). 2. TGT: Trained Graduate Teacher (has to have a BEd degree conferred by the government)—they teach grades 1 through 5. 3. PGT: Post-graduate Teacher (must have an MA/M Sc/MPhil).

Teacher Salaries (2011 Data) Salaries are as follows: (1) INR 1,000–1,500, (2) INR 2,000–2,500, and (3) INR 2,500–3,500. Teach grades 6 and above. The ‘Alima teacher (mu‘allima), who has completed the seven-year course, belongs to the highest category.

Wardens The wardens are classified into: (1) senior and (2) junior. There are 2 wardens, present 24 hours a day every day, and another who comes during daytime hours. Five teachers stay in the madrasa all day, every day. Four more come during the day.

Student Fees (2011 Data) English-Medium School Admission fees (a one-time fee for all English-medium students, once a year): INR 500/-

Pedagogy and Daily Life at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at

167

Miscellaneous fees (one-time, once a year): INR 500/PNC, NC, and KG: INR 150/- per month Grade I–V: INR 200/- per month Grade VI–VIII: INR 225/- per month Grade IX–X: INR 275/- per month. (These classes have science practicals.)

Madrasa Fees INR 500/- per month for hostel (except for the 60 students who are not charged any fees). Day scholars are also not charged.

4 ATTACHMENT TO SCHOOL The Madrasa and the Islamic Public School for Girls Compared

Madrasa student: ‘I have two brothers and one sister. My older brother studies in Bareilly’s St. Julius Public School and my younger sister studies in Janata Public School. … Had I not come to Jami‘a Nur I would be like other ordinary worldly women (bazaru awraten). What I have learned at Jami‘a Nur I would never have learned in an ordinary college. Here we are taught everything relating to religion (din) and we are also taught how to implement (‘amal karna) those teachings in our lives.’ (October 2013) Class XI public school student: ‘I want to become a doctor. It is also my parents’ dream (sapna) that I should go far and make their name shine. I too have to achieve something (kutch karke dikhana hai). I have to become something (kutch banke dikhana hai). That we girls are not weak. I have to go out and study. It is my dream that I might go out and study and become something and be recognized. … Pray for me that I may be successful in my purpose. And pray for this college too that it may prosper fourfold every day.’ (October 2013)

In her examination of education in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Veronique Benei looks at ‘how people come to … bond with their nation, how they become passionate in its defense or praise and express their senses of belonging’, in other words, at the embodiment Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

Attachment to School

169

of nationalism in schoolchildren.1 Where studies on Muslim womens’ education such as Minault’s Secluded Scholars and Winkelmann’s ‘From Behind the Curtain’ emphasize self-control and the restraint of passion, this work focuses on how passion is channelled in certain directions to produce a certain kind of citizen. Benei uses the concepts of sensorium and embodiment to understand how schoolchildren come to feel both Maharashtrian and Indian, where these identities are implicitly identified as Hindu and the nation is gendered as feminine. She examines the patriotic songs sung by schoolchildren during morning assembly, the use of standardized Marathi at school, school textbooks, fieldtrips to historic sites that evoke Shivaji’s defence of the ‘Maratha nation’, and, most tellingly, student drawings, to show how attachment to a Hindu Indian nation is constructed. In this chapter, I draw on Benei’s insights as well as van Gennep’s concept of incorporation2 to examine how the madrasa creates a sense of belonging in its students. I do this by looking more closely at the daily prayer ritual and morning assembly or du‘a, the latter a daily event on any school day, and at the weekly anjuman, a studentled programme to which reference was made in Chapter 2.3 What emotions do these rituals evoke in the students, and how do these emotions bind them more closely to the school? Another way I try to answer these questions is by drawing a contrast between the students at the madrasa and the day students in the English-medium and Hindi-medium schools that until 2014 operated out of the same building as the madrasa. What accounts for these differences between the secular schools on the one hand and the madrasa on the other, and the students’ attachment to their school and what it represents? 1

Veronique Benei, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 27. I am grateful to Barbara Metcalf for this reference. 2 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 3 A third such ritual which bears inclusion here but has had to be omitted for lack of data, is the ritual of the dastar-bandi or annual graduation ceremony, at which I was unfortunately not present. For a helpful account of this from a Barelwi boys’ madrasa, see Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011).

170

Scholars of Faith

Rites of Incorporation at the Madrasa: The Fajr Namaz, Du‘a, and Anjuman In the previous chapter, I portrayed the course of a regular school day at the madrasa, starting with early morning prayer, morning assembly, and a few sample classes. Here I will try to convey the subjective experience of the first two of these daily rituals, namely, the morning prayer and assembly, as I observed them in 2015 and 2016 after the madrasa had transferred to its more spacious new location. I was able to witness these everyday events from my vantage point in the teachers’ staff room, which doubles up as their dormitory at night. The teachers had made space for me to sleep and set down my small suitcase in a corner of their large room. Every morning, the muezzin calls the Muslim faithful to perform the dawn (fajr) prayer. His voice rings out in melodious Arabic over a loudspeaker from a nearby mosque. It comes across loud and clear in the dark, at about 5:30 a.m. in the winter. All is quiet, everyone is asleep in the teachers’ staff-room-cum-dormitory. Soon someone stirs, sits up, adjusts her scarf over her head, silently stands and straightens out her kameez, and steps into her flip flops. Unlatching the locked door which leads into a wide well-lit hallway outside, she steps out and walks down it, knocking loudly and urgently on each classroom door to wake up the sleeping students. This duty falls to a different teacher each morning. She has to go upstairs to the first floor and repeat the process. Then, coming back in, she wakes up anyone still sleeping in the staff room, and toothbrush and toothpaste in hand, makes her way to the bathrooms on the other side of the hall from the classrooms, to brush her teeth and do her ablutions (wudu’). Not a word is spoken as others follow suit. After a while the shuffling of feet and the sound of splashing water from the direction of the bathrooms become loud and insistent. Some students use the lone hand pump in the open courtyard in front of the building, under a now dimly lit sky, and pump out water for each other. Cupping their hands under the tap, they splash the fresh cool water over their faces and the tops of their heads, and their arms, legs, and bare feet in the prescribed manner. Then, the dampness still clinging to their hands and feet—for they do not towel themselves dry—they return to their classrooms where they each have their own small rectangular prayer

Attachment to School

171

rug. Spreading it out on the bare cement floor (or, for teachers in the staff room, on one of the wooden beds on which the teachers sleep), each student and teacher starts her prayer while facing the qibla, the direction of Mecca. The morning prayer, preparations for which are largely conducted in silence or in muted voices, is an individual ritual among teachers and students, no one leading the others, though they may choose to spread out their prayer rugs next to one another. As they do not all begin at the same time, they complete the ritual at different times during the course of the next half hour. The only ones who exempt themselves are those who are menstruating; they might sleep a little longer than the others, then brush their teeth and use the extra time to straighten out their clothes, comb their hair, and get ready for the day. In the staff room, once the prayer has been offered, each teacher reaches for a copy of the Qur’an and for the next 10 minutes or so, reads a section of it to herself in a low voice, opening to whichever chapter she had left off at the day before, and rocking gently back and forth as she recites. Only after this is done and she has put the book back on the shelf does she turn to the others in the room and engage in conversation. One of the teachers squats down on the floor in front of the little stove in the staff room and soon puts a cup of hot tea in my hands. She gives me a big smile, then hurries on to prepare for the day. These preparations include personal grooming and hygiene, having a light breakfast, and on occasion reviewing the text to be taught in the first class period, before the bell rings for morning assembly in the open courtyard. Unlike the transition into prayer readiness through wudu’, however, the transition back to the preoccupations of the day is seamless, unmarked by ceremony. This predictable daily cycle of activities sets the tone for the school day. The predawn period is notable for its relative silence and the inward focus of each person on her ritual responsibilities, communing with God in full awareness of, but distance from, the others all around her. The entrance into a state of ritual purity follows prescribed rules. The wudu’, as Maghen writes, is a portal, a door ‘through which the believer passes many times daily between a condition appropriate to the bodily and a condition appropriate to the disembodied; between awareness of the tangible present and awareness of the incorporeal

172

Scholars of Faith

absent (ghayb); between the sensual human and the psychic divine’.4 The simple acts of eating, sleeping, and using the toilet since the last prayer from the night before require that the believer enter that portal in order to re-enter sacred space and time. There being five such prayers through the course of the day, sacred time and space are thus interwoven throughout the day with the human sphere. Maghen suggests that this is not because the latter is less laudable but because the devotee should turn her undivided attention to one or the other at different times. The two should not be in competition with one another: ‘the passion for man and the passion for God cannot (or should not) co-exist in the same heart at the same time, specifically because of their underlying similarity’.5 The fear and love of God—in terms of gratitude and awareness of one’s own human frailty and moral imperfections—must therefore be expressed in the course of the day through prayer, an activity distinct and separated from other preoccupations. For the madrasa, the task is to heighten the student’s awareness of God’s presence in her life to the point where it becomes as real to her as her own companions, teachers, and family, and the guiding light in the decisions she makes in her life. Ideally, as the student goes through her day, she will live fully in the moment, fully focused whether she is at prayer or in the midst of study, fulfilling her responsibilities to those around her, or enjoying time with her friends. At 7:45 a.m. students are alerted by the sound of the first bell that it is time for du‘a or morning assembly. I discussed the du‘a in the previous chapter in terms of its performative aspects. Here I want to look at it as a rite of incorporation, that is, at its affective qualities. What are the words of the du‘a, and what are its emotional and qualitative properties? In what way does it effect transformational change in students? Although I am calling the short ceremony at the start of

4

Ze’ev Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh: Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 32 (emphasis in the original). 5 Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh. Maghen is particularly focused on sexual love between man and wife, and he makes clear that sexuality is not deemed intrinsically dirty, shameful, or negative in the Islamic perspective. Rather, it is seen as a blessing from God and therefore as a laudable sentiment, one that deserves to be honoured in equal measure as the love of God.

Attachment to School

173

the school day ‘morning assembly’, because this is what it is functionally, the term du‘a is of course a religious one, meaning supplication, or supplicatory prayer. But while the namaz or salat, described earlier in the chapter, is separated from everyday, corporeal time by the portal of wudu’, the du‘a does not need to be set apart in this way. The du‘a is at heart a prayer of supplication to God that can be personal or collective, and can follow right after the salat as when an imam (prayer leader) appends his own supplication to God at the end of a congregational prayer (salat-i jumu‘a), asking God to safeguard Muslims around the world or in particular communities. But it can be offered by itself as well and can sometimes be very emotional. A du‘a can be in any language. It does not have to be in Arabic, unlike salat.6 The morning assembly at the madrasa begins with all the students lining up in about a dozen rows 30 or more deep in the open courtyard, dressed in the madrasa’s uniform of green and white checked tunics (kameez), loose white trousers (salwar), and white headscarf (dupatta). The teachers stand facing them, lined up in a single row. They do not wear uniforms, but dress in colourful outfits of their own. The assembly begins with the collective recitation (qira’at) of the Fatiha, the first chapter of the Qur’an, followed by a senior student coming to the front of the student body and leading the students in a versified poem which combines the praise of God (hamd) with that of the Prophet (na‘t).7 The students recite 3 verses of a longer (15-verse) praise poem by Ahmad Raza Khan, as follows: 1. He is the Lord who made you generous in every fibre of your being/Wahi rabb hai jisne tujhko hamatan karam banaya He made us the beggars who come to your threshold/Hamen bhik mangne ko tera asta banaya

6 As we will see in Chapter 6, there are du‘as for every situation, from prayers for safe travel to prayers for safe childbirth, recovery from illness, and a host of everyday situations. 7 The verses translated here are numbered 1, 2, and 14 in the original. My English translation follows the interpretive commentary of Mawlana Ghulam Ahmad Qadri, Sharh Kalam-i Raza fi Na‘t al-Mustafa, al-Ma‘ruf Sharh Hada’iq-i Bakhshish (Delhi: Adabi Duniya, 2010), Na‘t sharif number (76), pp. 733–4, 739, 742–3.

174

Scholars of Faith

To you be all praise, O Lord/Tujhe hamd hai khudaya 2. He made you the ruler of created beings, He made you the one who distributes His bounty/Tumhen hakim banaya tumhen qasim ‘ataya He made you the one who removes [our] faults, He made you the one who cures [our] defects/Tumein dafe‘ balaya, tumhen shafe‘ khataya Who else like you has ever come [to us]?/Koi tumsa kawn aya? To you be all praise, O Lord/Tujhe hamd hai khudaya 3. O Lord, no difficulty presents itself to you in [changing my] impure thoughts/Yeh tasawurat-i batil tere age kya hai mushkil? You who possess supreme power, make them pure, O Lord/Teri qudraten hain kamil unhen rast kar khudaya I have brought them to your beloved’s [court of ] intercession/Main unhen shafi‘ laya To you be all praise, O Lord/Tujhe hamd hai khudaya

This is followed by a prayer for well-being (du‘a-i khayr), the words of which are well-known to the students, as the prayer is included in one of their textbooks, Jannati Zewar (‘Heavenly Jewels’). Some of the verses, also written by Ahmad Raza Khan, are as follows:8 Supplication/Munajat O Lord, may the gift of your presence be [with me] everywhere/Ya illahi har jagah teri ‘ata ka sath ho Whenever there is difficulty, may the assistance of the remover of difficulties be there [with me]/Jab parhe mushkil shah-i mushkil kusha ka sath ho O Lord, when the severe darkness of the grave descends/Ya ilahi gor-i tirah ki jab aye sakht rat May the life-increasing morning of his beloved face be there [with me]/ Unke pyare munh ke subhe jan fizan ka sath ho

8

The English translations from the Urdu original are mine. The supplication (munajat: from Ar. naja’, to be saved, thus, a prayer that saves from punishment in the afterlife) is in ‘Abd al-Mustafa A‘zami’s Jannati Zewar (n.d.), Urdu edition, p. 448.

Attachment to School

175

O Lord, when the noise of the Day of Judgment descends [on me]/Ya ilahi jab pare mahshar men shor warid-gir May the presence of the peace-giving Prophet be there [with me]/Aman dene wale pyare Mustafa ka sath ho O Lord, when my boldness brings colour [to my face]/Ya ilahi rang la’en jab meri bebakiyan May I have the presence of his downcast glances [with me]/Unki nichi nichi nazaron ki haya ka sath ho O Lord, when [my] tears flow in consequence of my transgressions/Ya ilahi jab bahen ankhen hisab-i jurm se May I have the supplication of those smiling lips [with me]/Un tabassum rez honthon ki du‘a ka sath ho

After the students complete their recitation, a student from the fifth (Khamsa) year steps to the front of the assembly and gives a short speech on a subject of her choice: the subjects usually include ritual purification (taharat), prayer (namaz), the etiquette of eating and drinking, and so on. The presentation centres around a few prophetic sayings (Hadith), and lasts about 5 minutes. This marks the end of the du‘a. But before students are dismissed and leave single file for their first class of the day, teachers might have an announcement to make or Sayyid Sahib may appear in their midst to talk to them briefly. Since 2015, a new feature appended to the du‘a has been a few minutes of physical exercise (Figure 4.1). Led by three senior students who step to the front of the student body (the teachers standing behind them, watching), all the assembled students follow the movements of the leaders. What makes the fajr salat and the du‘a rites of incorporation? I would argue that through the practice of these rites, students learn to become Sunni Muslims in the Barelwi mould. The daily prayers—of which the morning prayer is the first—are the most universal of the three rites. Barring certain details involving the position of the hands during prayer,9 the way the madrasa students offer their namaz is 9 On the specificities of the Barelwi mode of offering the prayer, see Sumbul Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam: A Case Study of Barelwi Khanqahs’ (PhD dissertation, University of Delhi, May 2016), pp.

176

Figure 4.1

Scholars of Faith

Madrasa students performing morning exercises

Source: Author.

replicated in Muslim communities the world over, particularly among Sunni ones (the Shi‘i prayer ritual differs from the Sunni one in a number of small details, while being broadly similar).10 As many students indicated in their responses to my questions, they had either prayed irregularly or incorrectly before coming to the madrasa. Thus, as I learned from one of the students I quoted earlier, when she returned home she would ‘teach [her] sisters how to pray, [she would] teach everyone in [her] household that they must pray [daily]’.

77, 218 and passim (2013); see Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 274–5, on the Ahl-i Hadith mode of offering the prayer. 10 On the differences between Sunni and Shi‘i rituals and legal practices, see Daniel Brown, A New Introduction to Islam (3rd edn, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017), Chapter 10.

Attachment to School

177

The emotional restraint and inward focus of the morning prayer, noted in my description at the beginning of this chapter, is counterbalanced by the full-throated, collective du‘a that begins the school day. Under the watchful eyes of their teachers, who know each student by name and will call out to reprimand anyone who steps out of line or whispers to her neighbour, the students’ voices join in a clear, melodious chant in praise of God and in affirmation of their need for God’s forgiveness in light of their sinfulness: O Lord, no difficulty presents itself to you in [changing my] impure thoughts/You who possess supreme power, make them pure, O Lord.

Yet, in close conjunction with the praise of God is the Barelwi hallmark theme of love of the Prophet, who ‘made you generous in every fibre of your being’, ‘made you the ruler of created beings … the one who distributes His bounty’, ‘the one who removes [our] faults … the one who cures [our] defects’. For all these reasons, the students recite, ‘He made us the beggars who come to your threshold’ to ask for the Prophet’s intercession with God. The Barelwi scholar Mawlana Ghulam Hasan Qadri, responding to critics who comment on the Barelwis’ ‘inability to praise God [in a hamd] without simultaneously praising the Prophet [in a na‘t]’, writes: The beauty with which A‘la Hazrat Imam of the Ahl-i Sunnat [Ahmad Raza Khan] has brought together praise of God [in hamd] in the first verse with love of the Prophet [in na‘t] while keeping in mind (malhuz) the difference between the two, is something only he could do and it is a loud slap in the face of those critics who never tire, day and night, from saying that these Sunnis don’t recite hamd so much as they keep harping on na‘t. The reason we [Barelwis] do this is that you have become deniers of na‘ts. For us, while hamd [in praise] of God is our faith (iman), na‘t [in praise] of the Prophet is the life of that faith. We do not affirm the unity of God (tawhid) alone without prophethood (rasalat). Rather, we fill our lungs with tawhid and repeat the name of the prophethood of the king at the same time.11

The students, unconcerned about these inter-maslaki debates with their accusations and counter-accusations, raise their voices harmoniously in praise of both God and the Prophet. By reciting the verses, 11

Ghulam Hasan Qadri, Sharh Kalam-i Raza fi Na‘t al-Mustafa, p. 734.

178

Scholars of Faith

they make the words of the na‘t’s author Ahmad Raza Khan Barelwi their own words. It is they who are dependent on God’s forgiveness for their sins, they who call upon the Prophet to intercede for them. In the madrasa, their voices create an atmosphere of enthusiastic yet disciplined affirmation of the vision of the founder, Sayyid Sahib, and the intellectual tradition to which he belongs. This is the one time in the day when the whole school comes together. It is thus an important moment of incorporation. The collective aspects of the ritual are balanced by the opportunity for a few senior students to take a leadership role by either leading the other students in the recitation of the na‘t or reading out from their handwritten notes the short speech they have prepared on a religious theme of their choice. Since the group exercises were added at the end of the assembly in 2015, the students’ energy level and participation in the ritual have been further heightened by the opportunity for physical exercise. The last ritual I want to consider now, that of the Thursday evening anjuman (assembly, meeting, a word of Persian origin), is undoubtedly the one that most clearly calls out the madrasa’s Barelwi identity. As Alam points out in his study of Jami‘a Ashrafiya, the Barelwis’ largest boys’ madrasa in India, inter-maslaki competition is far more important in Indian madrasas today than is anti-Hindu rhetoric. In the east UP town of Mubarakpur, where Ashrafiya is located, ‘[t]he principal antagonism … is no longer between Hindus and Muslims; rather it is between different social groups of Muslims themselves’.12 Like the students at Jami‘a Ashrafiya, students at Jami’a Nur also ‘perform’ their Barelwi identities every Thursday evening, when they hold what they call an anjuman, in which groups of students either recite na‘t in praise of the Prophet or make speeches on different religious topics.13 The ‘absent Other’ in these performances are the Deobandis, 12 Alam, Inside a Madrasa, p. 46. On the importance of policing boundaries between maslaks, see Sumbul Farah, ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz: Modalities of “Being” Barelwi’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (2012), 46(3): 259–81. 13 The Ashrafiya assembly is called bazm, on which see Alam, Inside a Madrasa, pp. 191–7. Interestingly, the same division of labour prevails at Ashrafiya as at Jami‘a Nur, in that junior students present na‘ts while senior students present taqrir. However, the specifics of how the groups are formed and how topics are allocated, are different in the two madrasas.

Attachment to School

179

who, as I have argued elsewhere, are depicted as the ‘enemy within’, in large part because they share a great deal of common theological ground with the Barelwis.14 Barelwis therefore draw boundaries around them rather than around those theologically further removed from themselves, such as the Ahl-i Hadith or the Shi‘a, to speak only of Muslims. Hindus are seldom the subject of overt comment, being too far removed from the students’ social world of family, neighbours, and local town (qasba). Given the purpose of the anjuman, which is religious persuasion (tabligh or da‘wa), we can understand why emotion, even impassioned oratory, is considered an asset in this context and is admired. The weekly anjuman gives students the opportunity—indeed, it compels them—to stand before their fellow students and make an oral presentation, whether a na‘t or a speech on a religious topic (taqrir). Na‘t poetry, a characteristic feature of Barelwi gatherings in general, has a long history in the Muslim world, and is one of a number of related genres of praise poems, including the qasida (ode) and qawwali (devotional song). Indeed, Schimmel writes ‘the first praise poems for the Prophet were written during his lifetime’.15 A poet who became famous in later Muslim history was Ka‘b ibn Zuhair. Ka‘b’s qasida, which he recited in the Prophet’s presence, had initially been composed in order to denigrate him. But Ka‘b sought the Prophet’s forgiveness, and his poem came to be known as the Burda (cloak) because the Prophet was so impressed with it ‘that he cast his own mantle, the burda, on Ka‘b’s shoulders, thus granting him forgiveness’.16 Centuries later, this poem became the precursor for 14 See Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Mawlana Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1880–1920 (new edn, Delhi: Yoda Press, 2010). 15 Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1987), pp. 178–9. Schimmel relates that like a contemporary journalist, the Prophet’s poet Hassan ibn Thabit was charged with recording events as they happened. Denigrating the Muslims’ enemies and praising the Muslims for bravery in battle, he also ‘extol[led] his spiritual virtues and his religious mission’, making ‘repeated allusions to the light that radiated from the Prophet … his miraculous birth and his hoped-for intercession’. 16 Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, p. 180.

180

Scholars of Faith

another poem of the same name, Al-Burda, written by the Sufi mystic Muhammad al-Busiri (d. 1298) of Egypt.17 Busiri’s Burda, which Schimmel describes as ‘a true compendium of medieval prophetology’, enjoys great respect and is frequently recited in South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora, by Barelwis and others.18 Among South Asian Barelwis, Ahmad Raza Khan’s Salam (salutation, greeting) holds pride of place. The words of this poem are well known in India and Pakistan, being recited on numerous occasions. Consisting of approximately 170 stanzas, it praises the Prophet—and secondarily his Companions, members of his family (ahl-i bayt), and the Sufi mystic ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani (ghawth-i a‘zam), among others— and calls down God’s blessings on them in simple verse characterized by a lilting cadence that ends in the recurrent rhyme (radif) ‘hundreds of thousands of salutations’ (lakhon salam). The poem praises the Prophet’s physical features, personal qualities, and kindness (shama’il wa lata’if), and entreats God (in a du‘a) at the end, ‘O Lord, just as during our lifetimes we have never ceased to extol your beloved, the Prophet, so too on Judgment Day we pray that you will give us the good fortune of praising him’.19 At Jami‘a Nur, students start to learn the Salam from the very beginning of their madrasa educations. I found verses of the Salam in the book Ta‘amir-i Adab studied at the pre-‘Alima level by students aged 10 or 11. As Schimmel writes of 17 To quote Schimmel: ‘According to legend the poet had suffered a stroke, and in his misery he turned to the Prophet and wrote a poem in his honor. Faith in the Prophet’s healing power was and is still strong, and indeed Muhammad appeared to Busiri in a dream and cast his mantle over him as he had done during his lifetime with Ka‘b ibn Zuhair. … And as Ka‘b was granted forgiveness of his trespasses, Busiri was healed by the touch of the Prophet’s mantle and could again move about the next morning.’ Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, p. 181. 18 Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, p. 185. On the recitation of the Burda in the South Asian diaspora, see Marcia Hermansen, ‘Milad/ Mawlid: Celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday’, in Edward E. Curtis IV, ed., The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction (New York: NYU Press, 2017). 19 According to Sumbul Farah, the Salam now includes the names of descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan, by adding their names to the list of those to whom salutation is given. Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam’.

Attachment to School

181

South Asian na‘t poetry in general, the Salam is characterized by ‘strong rhythmical and comparatively simple rhymes, which are often repeated like a litany’.20 The recitation of such poetry, according to an Indian scholar, does far more than simply express veneration and love of the Prophet. Rather, it builds up character by instilling in its listeners the desire to emulate the Prophet (the ‘Perfect Man’) and strive towards the kind of spiritual and moral perfection he represents.21 The Prophet is thus a role model for women no less than for men. Turning to the anjuman at Jami‘a Nur in November 2016, the programme began after evening prayers (maghrib), at about 7 p.m., and lasted for a little over two hours. It consisted of about 20 presentations, some from young students new to the madrasa and others from those senior and more familiar with the process. Students gathered together in two large adjoining classrooms, some in one room, some in the other, and sat crammed together on cotton rugs (daris) on the floor. The teachers also divided into two, half and half, seated on plastic chairs facing the students at the front of the large room. By their side were a few students (two on this evening, though there could be as many as four) who emceed the programme, calling out each student’s name by turn. When a student heard her name being called, she got up from the audience and made her way to the front. Rather than weave her way through the seated students, however, she would step to the back of the assembled students, exit through the classroom door at the back of the room, and re-enter through the door close to the front of the room. During the few minutes it took her to do this, students collectively chanted a durud in praise of the Prophet. As soon as she began her presentation, the audience was required to be quiet and listen attentively, and to refrain from clapping at the end. Each presentation was evaluated by the teachers, and the students’ performance orally graded on a scale of three (excellent, average, or poor) at the end of the evening, as were the students emceeing the event. Thereafter, the names of the presenters for the following week’s anjuman were announced. Finally, everyone stood for the collective 20

Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, p. 211. Ghulam Dastgir Rasheed, ‘The Development of Na‘tia Poetry in Persian Literature’, in Islamic Culture (1965), 39: 53–69; quoted in Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, p. 178. 21

182

Scholars of Faith

recitation of select verses of Ahmad Raza Khan’s Karoron Durud,22 after which teachers and students dispersed for night (isha‘) prayers and bed. For madrasa students, the anjuman was the highlight of their week, organized and conducted entirely by themselves and their teachers. The next day was Friday, their weekly holiday. Throughout the evening, the host (nazima) emceed the programme without a microphone. Another girl, sitting next to her, took notes in a notebook. The host stood up, and projecting her voice easily in the large crowded room, welcomed the students. Addressing them as ‘women of the Muslim community’ (khawatin-i ummat-i islamiya), she said: ‘God Himself has told us to remember His blessings towards us. God has showered us with many blessings. This gathering is intended to honour the Prophet. God Himself said, “Undoubtedly, God and His angels bless those who bless the Prophet”.’ The evening then began with a student reciting a selection of verses from the Qur’an (al-Infitar, the Cleaving Asunder, Q 82:1–8 and 16), a short Meccan chapter about the signs of the Day of Resurrection. The next student delivered a hamd in praise of God. Thematically, the presentations that followed conveyed: praise of the Prophet, including miracles (such as a tree moving and prostrating before him in acknowledgement of his status as God’s last prophet) which Barelwis and other Sunni Muslims ascribe to him; theological concepts disputed by some Muslims, such as the belief that the Prophet, being made of light, had no shadow, that he was the first of God’s prophets in addition to being the last, and that he intercedes with God at all times; praise of Ahmad Raza Khan and his veneration of the Prophet; references to Islamic history particularly with regard to South Asia; and non-Muslims’ assertion that Muslims engaged in violence to convert Hindus to Islam (this came up in the last student’s presentation, and she countered it by reminding the audience that Mu‘in al-Din Chishti beat back the attacks of Prithviraj Chauhan with nothing but his Qur’an in one hand, and rosary in the other).23 22 A durud is a prayer calling down God’s blessings on the Prophet. Ahmad Raza Khan’s Karoron Durud, like his Salam, is very well known among Barelwis, and is included in most standard collections of his na‘t. 23 For more on these two fascinating figures, see Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past 1200–2000

Attachment to School

183

Many presentations exhorted students to emulate the Prophet in all walks of life and strive to be better Muslims. These themes were touched on in prose and poetry, with some quotations from the Qur’an and frequent allusions to Hadith. Remarkably the students spoke without reference to written notes, relying on memory throughout. They strove to convey emotion through hand gestures and a charged style of oratory. The best students enunciated clearly and directly addressed the audience at frequent intervals, modulating their voices in accordance with their subject matter and inviting student participation through call-and-response. Less practised students either rushed through their presentations or spoke in a monotone which did not hold audience attention. This being a weekly event that many students looked forward to with anticipation, their level of engagement and attentiveness was remarkably high through most of the programme. While the madrasa operates within the framework of Barelwi concepts and a Barelwi worldview, the anjuman conveys, just as importantly, how students should become better Muslims in terms of the things they do each and every day. One student spoke forcefully (in a 10-minute speech or khitabat) to her audience on the subject of prayer:24 In Hadith, the Prophet said, ‘Offer your namaz the way I do. Stand the way I stand, bow down the way I bow down, and prostrate yourselves the way I do. In short, copy my way of doing things completely. But you need to be thoughtful (‘aql chahiye) when emulating me. If you think that because you are copying me, you are like me, you will end up going astray, and you won’t even know you are doing so, and all your devotions will be wasted.’ My dear lovers of my dear master (aqa)! Offer the namaz in just the way that our master offered it. Our master would stand in prayer all night,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and P.M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-din Chishti of Ajmer (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 24 In my transcription of the student’s presentation, I have used the word ‘prayer’ to translate the Urdu word ‘namaz’ in the interests of readability. It should be clear, however, that the reference is to the Islamic canonical prayer which has to follow prescribed procedures and rules—not to freely formulated personal prayer (du‘a).

184

Scholars of Faith

which is why he is without fault (be-gunah). Thus, whoever offers her prayer with humility (khushu‘ wa khuzu‘), helplessness (‘ajizi), sweetness and feeling (lazzat o taraz), the way Allah and His Prophet told her to, her prayer will definitely lead to her sins being forgiven. Because prayer is the glory (shan) of the believer, prayer is the life (jan) of the believer, prayer is the defining trait (pahchan) of the believer. Prayer is light (nur), prayer is proof (burhan), prayer is the sign of faith (‘alamat-i din). When you pray, God is immensely pleased with you. So how can God be content to allow such a humble servant (banda) to remain trapped (munhakim) in her sins?

What made this student’s presentation so compelling to the audience was in part her confident, forceful delivery which made artful use of alliteration (as in the words jan, shan, pahchan, and burhan, earlier) and elicited audience participation. She made use of Urdu couplets, call-and-response in which the audience asked God to bless the Prophet, and storytelling through Hadith, only one of which I have transcribed. In addition, she invoked the emotion of love to make her point: the believer’s love of God and love of the Prophet, if reflected in the way she offered her daily prayer, would in turn cause God, in His love for her, to forgive her sins. While love of the Prophet is a signature Barelwi refrain and thus unsurprising in itself, what made this student’s message compelling to her audience was that she connected this love with them personally: it was their prayer offered in emulation of the Prophet’s own that would earn them forgiveness for their sins. In a sense, she was thus elevating their stature in their own eyes. Had they ever thought of themselves in quite this way before they came to the madrasa? They were important to God in their own right, she was suggesting, and could earn a place in heaven by means of daily prayer offered in emulation of the Prophet with heartfelt, personal, and emotional engagement with the ritual rather than simply performing routine bodily motions without thought or mindful attention to detail. However, while her discourse was uplifting, it was cautionary at the same time, the outcome being conditional on the students’ internalization of the purpose and meaning of the prayer ritual.25 She therefore ended her speech with an admonishment: 25 Perhaps there was also an implicit criticism of Sunni Muslims outside the Barelwi fold in her comment that while Muslims should emulate the Prophet, they should not make the mistake of thinking that by so doing they

Attachment to School

185

It is a shame that we claim to be followers of Imam Abu Hanifa [the eponymous founder of the Hanafi school], but in reality … we can’t even offer our five daily prayers [regularly]. What a shame! When we see others praying, we mock them by calling them ‘mullah’ and other derogatory names. And those who do not pray are considered ‘modern’. O Muslims! Come to your senses! Repent! Repent! The door to forgiveness is still open. … There are many forms of worship such as fasting, going on pilgrimage, giving in charity (zakat). But there is no worship like this worship, about which the Prophet said that it erases your sins and bad deeds. This is why the Qur’an speaks repeatedly about offering namaz. In one place, God says, ‘Offer the prayer, give zakat, and bow down with those who bow down’. … O my pure Muslim sisters! Repent and make namaz the beauty of your life. Prayer is servitude to God. Prayer is the guide of your life. Prayer is a source of good and of blessing. Prayer is knowledge of God. Prayer is the source of freedom. Ultimately, prayer is the coolness of the eyes of your master [the Prophet]. If you really want to love the Prophet, offer your prayer with humility. Don’t omit even a single one. If you want to go to heaven, wear the sign of your servitude to the Prophet around your neck. Salam alaikum.

The urgency and emotional tone of this student’s speech, conveyed through her use of the imperative mode (‘Repent! Repent! The door to forgiveness is still open’), were forcefully delivered, the words ringing out loud and clear in the packed room. It was one speech among several and like others of its calibre, it commanded audience attention (and earned the highest grade at the end of the evening). In insisting on students’ personal responsibility to become better Muslims, it is also a good example of the kind of reformist Barelwi message I believe this madrasa conveys to its students. It is notable that while the anjuman touched on Barelwi themes, particularly love of the Prophet, and therefore signalled the madrasa’s Barelwi identity, it did so without overtly denouncing any other Muslim group. This is very different from what Alam reports having observed at the Jami‘a Ashrafiya, the flagship Barelwi boys’ madrasa in Mubarakpur, east UP. That madrasa is an ‘ideological space’ in

might resemble him. For Barelwi Muslims, this is an unthinkable proposition, as the Prophet was no ordinary mortal. See Sanyal, Devotional Islam, for Barelwi–Deobandi differences, among others.

186

Scholars of Faith

more ways than one: Alam reports that administration and staff have to sign a pledge in which, inter alia, they declare that they are ‘true Sunni Muslim[s]’ who accept the truth of every word of Ahmad Raza Khan’s 1906 fatwa Husam al-Haramayn, in which he denounced as unbelievers (kafir) a number of Muslims—mainly Ahmadis and Deobandis—by name.26 To better understand why the Jami‘a Ashrafiya takes this provocative stand, we need to review its history. As Alam explains, until 1906 the people of Mubarakpur were very supportive of their lone Sunni madrasa, the Misbahul Ulum. That year, however, there was a split between the ‘ulama of Mubarakpur on the theological issue of whether God could, even theoretically, create another prophet like the Prophet Muhammad (an issue known as imkan-i nazir). Two camps emerged, with those arguing that this was theoretically possible (the Deobandi position) opposed against those who argued that it was not (imtina’-i nazir, the Barelwi position).27 Over the next several years, Misbahul Ulum (now the Barelwi madrasa, as the Deobandis had created their own new one, Ehya ul-‘Ulum) struggled, not least because one of the teachers was of Deobandi persuasion.28 It was in this context that in 1934, Mawlana Amjad ‘Ali A‘zami (a disciple of Ahmad Raza Khan) sent his disciple ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to Mubarakpur (from Ajmer), to ‘participate in an akhara (wrestling arena) and emerge victorious’.29 26 See Alam, Inside a Madrasa, pp. 183–4. On this fatwa, see Usha Sanyal, ‘Are Wahhabis Kafirs? Ahmad Riza Khan and His Sword of the Haramayn’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick, and David S. Powers, eds, Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 204–13. 27 For details, see Alam, Inside a Madrasa, pp. 59–60. I discussed this debate in the ‘Introduction’ (in the section called ‘Apples and Oranges?’) 28 Alam notes that for many years after the Mubarakpur ‘ulama split on this issue, the people of Mubarakpur continued to offer Friday and ‘Id prayers together. It was only after a separate ‘Idgah was built in the late 1920s that the ideological split became evident to the general Muslim population. The teacher in question was Shukrullah Mubarakpuri. Alam, Inside a Madrasa, pp. 63–5. 29 Alam, Inside a Madrasa, pp. 55–8. Also see Usha Sanyal, ‘Ahl-i Sunnat Madrasas: The Madrasa Manzar-i Islam, Bareilly, and the Jamia Ashrafiyya, Mubarakpur’, in Jamal Malik, ed., Madrasa Education in South Asia: Teaching Terror? (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Attachment to School

187

The term akhara is significant. Associated with Hindu masculinity and male celibacy, Alter shows that wrestling is a ‘public performance’, an enactment of identity that can be read as a ‘public text’.30 The present context makes clear its association with male competition for power between Barelwis and Deobandis in Mubarakpur. ‘Abd al‘Aziz was being charged with revitalizing the weak Barelwi madrasa, winning the hearts and minds of the Mubarakpur Muslims, and defeating the local Deobandis. Alam notes, ‘The qasba had indeed become a wrestling arena between the Deobandis and the Barelwis. Much depended on Abdul Aziz, on not only how skillfully he would manage the affairs in madrasa Misbah Ulum, but also how eventually he would shape a community of Barelwis.’31 (In addition, we might say that over time perhaps a second akhara came into being as well, in that the Ashrafiya leadership was in the hands of low-caste Ansaris who were in competition with the Madrasa Manzar-i Islam in Bareilly which was dominated by the Pathan descendants of Ahmad Raza Khan.)32 The tone of belligerent Othering continues to this day. Where Jami‘a Nur students present speeches at the Thursday anjuman, Jami‘a Ashrafiya students participate in stylized oratorial performances called bazm in which they denounce the absent Deobandi Other in stark terms. Other practices include producing ‘wall magazines’ (posters) against Deobandi positions and reading the incendiary works of a former Ashrafiya graduate, Arshadul Qadri.33 The practice at Jami‘a Nur, by contrast, is to emphasize the positive—love of the Prophet being at its core—and explore the implications for action which that entails in students’ own lives. Denunciation of the Deobandi Other is implied but is not at the front and centre of discourse. Sayyid Sahib sets the tone for the madrasa, and as I noted in Chapter 2, the Deobandi author of a history of Shahjahanpur ‘ulama

30

Alam, Inside a Madrasa, p. 66; on akharas, see Joseph S. Alter, Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India (Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011), especially Chapter 2. 31 Alam, Inside a Madrasa, p. 66. 32 The word ‘akhara’ was not used in this sense by Amjad ‘Ali A‘zami, of course. 33 Alam, Inside a Madrasa, Chapter 7.

188

Scholars of Faith

speaks of him in the highest terms as a man of God, one who ‘has made the spread of knowledge his goal and purpose … and has never made the Prophet’s pulpit a wrestling arena’.34 The two madrasas thus offer a clear contrast from one another. In order to better understand what is distinctive about Jami‘a Nur, in the next section I turn to the English-medium school (and secondarily also the Hindi-medium school) that operated on different floors of the same building until 2014, when the madrasa moved to its new premises in a different part of the city of Shahjahanpur.

Islamic Public School for Girls: The English-Medium School My observations of the two public schools operating out of the same large building as the madrasa Jami‘a Nur until 2014 were made on a single occasion, in October 2013. By the time I returned the following year, the madrasa was no longer in the same building. In fact, the two schools were now about 10 miles apart in the same city. I was unable to continue my observations of the ‘secular’ public schools for comparative purposes. The following picture is therefore limited in scope, but it is useful nonetheless in allowing us to view the madrasa from the perspective of the Islamic public school, itself a small segment of the Indian public school system as a whole. Like Jami‘a Nur, the Islamic Public School for Girls (and boys up to the fifth grade) is a private school that begins at kindergarten and goes all the way to Inter, or twelfth grade.35 School timings are 7:30 a.m. to noon, Monday through Saturday. In the afternoon, from 12 noon to 3:30 p.m, a Hindi-medium school operates on the first floor of the building. In 2012, the school had just under 1,000 students, of whom about 100 were small boys; the Hindi-medium school had around 200 students. Although the English-medium and Hindi-medium schools operated out of the same building as the madrasa, the students of the different schools did not see or interact with one another during school 34 Shah Mahmud ‘Ali Khan, Sar-zamin-i Shahjahanpur ka ‘Ulama-i Fuhul, Huffaz o Qura’ (Shahjahanpur: n.p., 2014), pp. 168–9. 35 As with Jami‘a Nur, the Islamic Public School for Girls is a pseudonym adopted to protect the school’s identity.

Attachment to School

189

hours, being on different floors or separated by internal architectural divisions on the same floor. Nevertheless, the noise level from the English-medium school, which was particularly high when students arrived and left, and during recess, did reach the madrasa on the first and second floors of the building. Students arrived in all forms of transportation, ranging from a few small white school vans crammed with students, their backpacks on the van’s roof, to cycle rickshaws with as many as five child passengers, to bicycles ridden by students. During the school day, the internal courtyard at the back of the building was full of pink bicycles belonging to the day students (Figure 4.2). In 2012, the school had a female principal, Mrs Khan, probably in her mid-fifties, who, like all the adult women at the school, wore a salwar kameez with a dupatta over her head when I met her (and like the teachers, she draped a black abaya over her clothes when exiting the school premises). She was well-spoken in English and had travelled widely outside India, having lived for 8 years in Tanzania and 5 in Abu Dhabi. A middle-class woman educated at Carmel Convent in Mumbai, she studied psychology in college in Mumbai, and many years later, after her children were grown, did her master’s in Bareilly. She had been principal since 2006, when the school was still quite new. She told me she saw her job as a form of social work that helped poor Muslim girls and boys who would not otherwise get an education.36 But by 2013, Mrs Khan had retired, and the school had a different principal, Sultana. A former teacher at the school, Sultana was a slim and energetic woman who seemed to be in her forties. She had been a teacher at the school since it had opened in 2003–4. As principal, she took an active role as an administrator and disciplinarian, making her presence felt by visiting different classrooms to make sure classes proceeded smoothly. In addition, being a devout person, she also found time to give students religious instruction apart from the formal curriculum, a feature many students seemed to appreciate, as we will see presently. However, by the time I returned to Jami‘a Nur in 2014 (in its new location), Sultana had left because her husband’s job had been transferred to Bareilly. She was replaced by a male principal.

36

Personal conversation with Mrs Khan, 27 June 2012.

190

Scholars of Faith

Figure 4.2 Day students park their bicycles in the school courtyard during school hours Source: Author.

In addition to the principal, administrative and financial leadership of the school was exercised by the manager, Mr Khan (not a relative of the former principal), whose association with the school was also of long duration. A bachelor in his late thirties, he had been a runner as a young man and was very fond of sports; after school hours he played football with some of the boys at the former ordnance factory grounds in Shahjahanpur, as there was no sports field at the school. His family was from Shahjahanpur and was of Pathan origin—like the warden Zeenat discussed in Chapter 2, to whom he was distantly related, he had distinctive physical characteristics such as light eyes and fair skin. His Pathan ancestry gave him elite status, as did Sayyid Sahib’s Sayyid ancestry and Abu Ji’s Pathan ancestry, both being part and parcel of the core families of the madrasa, as discussed in Chapter 2. In addition to the manager, there was a management committee responsible for running the affairs of the English-medium and Hindi-medium public schools.

Attachment to School

191

The syllabus of the English-medium school included a variety of subjects: chemistry, physics, biology, maths, computers, Hindi, English, Urdu, Arabic (until the eighth grade), sociology, education, drawing, economics, geography, civics, and history. The Hindi-medium school offered the subjects listed above, but no science or computer classes, nor Arabic.37 The two schools used NCERT books recommended by the UP board of education (UP Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad, UPMSP, or Board of High School and Intermediate Education).38 This board, headquartered in Allahabad in east UP, has four regional centres in the state, of which Bareilly is one.39 According to its website, the UP Board is ‘the biggest examining body in the world’, responsible for ‘holding the examinations and preparing the results of nearly 32 lakh [3.2 million] students’ in 2002, the last year for which statistics were publicly available as of this writing (in 2018).40 The Islamic Public School website, for its part, claims the following: Best College of U.P. BOARD; C.B.S.E. Pattern for upto class 12th; Dedicated Staff; Healthy Atmosphere for Girls; Hindi and English Medium; Pleasant, Peaceful and most secure area; Minimum Fees Structure; Conveyance Facility; Fee Relaxation for poor students; Alima Classes are also running for girls; Inculcation and promotion of Islamic culture in English environment.41 37 In this section, I focus largely on the English-medium school, with occasional references to the Hindi-medium school. 38 Textbooks produced by the NCERT are used throughout India by schools that are recognized by their state boards of education. For more on the NCERT, see http://www.ncert.nic.in/about_ncert.html. 39 According to the UP Board’s website, its main functions are: • To grant recognition to aspiring schools. • To prescribe courses and text books for High school and Intermediate level. • To conduct High school and Intermediate Examinations. • To provide equivalence to the examinations conducted by other Boards. (See http://upmsp.nic.in/aboutus.htm; accessed on 5 March 2017.) 40 See http://upmsp.nic.in/aboutus.htm; accessed on 5 March 2017. 41 I am deliberately not citing the school’s website address, as doing so would reveal its identity.

192

Scholars of Faith

My observations bear out some of these claims, though the quality of teaching and school discipline were somewhat mixed, as I detail later in the chapter. School fees for the day students at the Islamic Public School were higher than for the madrasa students, and their books could also become expensive. In 2012, the average fees per month were INR 750 or USD 12 per child (the fees being somewhat lower for children in the junior classes and higher at the high-school level), in addition to one-time admission fees and a one-time fee of INR 500 charged at the beginning of each academic year. In 2013, the average fee had gone up to INR 900 per month. In 2015, by comparison, madrasa student fees were INR 800 per month, up from INR 500 a few years earlier.42 In addition, parents at both the public school and the madrasa had to pay for school uniforms (the public school students had two different uniforms, a green and white one for Mondays through Fridays, and a different one, all white, for Saturdays) and books, as well as transportation. Teachers’ salaries in both the school and the madrasa were based on their educational qualifications. They ranged from INR 1,500 per month for elementary grade teachers to INR 2,000 for teachers with a BA, BEd, or MA in the public school and INR 2,500–3,500 for teachers who had a Fazila degree (2011 rates; see Chapter 3, Appendix 3.2). While these fees and salaries will seem negligible to US and other readers, the actual figures matter less than the way they were experienced by parents and teachers. In both cases the evidence suggests that parents considered the fees to be too high while some wardens and teachers felt their salaries should be higher. At the same time, the madrasa was constantly short of funds. Until 2013–14, when the madrasa and public school were still in the same building, the latter was used to offset some of the madrasa’s expenses; in other words, it helped subsidize the madrasa. These comparisons between the fee and salary structure at the public school and madrasa raise the question of the class composition of 42

These figures are based on the informal conversations I had with the school manager and Sayyid Sahib, the founder of Jami‘a Nur. I did not ask to see the official school or madrasa records and neither did the school manager nor Sayyid Sahib offer to show them to me.

Attachment to School

193

students and teachers at the two institutions. What distinguished the two populations in class terms? It seems reasonable, based on the picture painted in the preceding paragraph, to assume that the students at the public school were largely urban and of a higher class standing than those at the madrasa. To some degree, this was indeed the case. Since the public school was a day school, its student body and teaching staff were locally based. From the informal conversations I had in 2013 with a small class of nine second-year Inter students (Class XII, the equivalent of high school seniors in the US) of a Hindi-medium education class, I learned that many of their fathers were engaged in small businesses such as a scrap yard (two students), a motor parts company, a cloth shop, and a factory (two students). One was a tailor. None were engaged in agriculture.43 Many of the students mentioned that they lived in joint families. One related that she was one of five daughters, and because her maternal grandparents had had sons but no daughters, she had lived with them ever since she was a few months old. In her grandparents’ household, there were also several uncles and their wives and children. She visited her parents and sisters once a week but considered the extended family she lived with to be her ‘real’ family. Another student said she lived in a joint family consisting of her parents and several of her father’s brothers and their wives and children. A couple of students talked of older brothers whose educational aspirations included entrance into IIT Kanpur and a PhD programme. All the students spoke freely and seemed closely bonded, having studied together for several years at the same school. If these students’ stories seemed to reflect a South Asian urban working-class background with middle-class dreams, this impression was reinforced by conversations I had with other students in the English-medium and Hindi-medium schools. Two English-medium science students, also in their last year of high school (Inter, second year) talked about their classes and their aspirations for college.

43 However, this is not to say that none of the public school students’ parents were engaged in agriculture. I did encounter one student who said her father was a farmer. She was a Hindi-medium student studying as a boarder, because she came from a village far away. She lived with the madrasa students but studied in the Hindi-medium school during the day. There were about 12–15 such students in 2013.

194

Scholars of Faith

Amina had been in the school since the fifth grade and her friend Shahnaz since the eighth grade. They both liked the school. Currently they were studying physics, chemistry, biology, Hindi, and English. There were 22 students in their class, of whom 7 were in the science stream and 15 in the arts stream. Unfortunately for the science students, there was no science lab in the school. (The school also lacked a library and playground, though it had a small computer lab, as seen in Figure 4.3). When I asked them about their future plans for college, they told me there were three colleges in Shahjahanpur: Arya Mahila College (for women), G.F. College, and S.S. College. They wanted to go to G.F. College, where they had friends and where one of them had a sister. They said S.S. College was for rural people.44 When I asked them if they had ever studied at a madrasa, they said no. ‘Do you want to?’ I asked. ‘No’, they replied. Further indication that the student populations of the madrasa and the public schools were different emerged from a small number of student questionnaires that I asked both the madrasa and public school students to complete. In response to my question, ‘How did you learn about the madrasa/school?’, the madrasa students pointed overwhelmingly to word of mouth information networks between their parents (usually their fathers) or a relative and Sayyid Sahib, or the recommendation of a religious elder (a mawlana) or friend’s father. In contrast, some of the public school students said that they or their parents had heard about the school from a TV news channel or newspaper.45 Differences also emerged in response to my question, ‘What would you like to do when you finish your studies here?’ All the madrasa students said they wanted to teach others what they had learned, either in their own families or in a madrasa. The

44

The full names of the last two colleges they mentioned are: Gandhi Faizam Degree College, Shahjahanpur, established in 1947 and affiliated to Rohilkhand University, Bareilly, UP, and Swami Shukdevanand Degree College, established in 1964, also affiliated to Rohilkhand University. Kailash Narain Pande, Gazetteer of India, Uttar Pradesh, District Shahjahanpur (Allahabad: Government of Uttar Pradesh, 1988), p. 232. 45 Ten madrasa students and 18 public school students completed the questionnaires. Of the 10, 9 mentioned such oral networks. Of the 18 in the latter group, 4 students mentioned newspapers or television.

Attachment to School

Figure 4.3

195

Computer lab at the Islamic public school

Source: Author.

responses of the public school students were more varied: three said they wanted to become doctors; seven said they wanted to become an ‘Alima; four wanted to become teachers; one wanted to help the poor; and one simply wanted to get a job.46 While the large number of students who wanted to become ‘Alima is noteworthy, given that they were public school students, three of them gave negative reasons for their choice. One student wrote: ‘I want to study in the ‘Alima because there is no good arrangement (achhi suvidha) for studying here after the Inter. For this reason, one will have to go outside [Shahjahanpur]. But my parents did not give their permission (anumati) for this. So for this reason I want to do the ‘Alima after finishing Inter.’ That all the students—both from the madrasa and the public schools—had a personal or professional goal in mind after they had completed their studies at the madrasa or school is in itself highly

46

Two students did not respond to the question.

196

Scholars of Faith

significant. That these girls, whose future would in all likelihood be marriage, motherhood, and domesticity, articulated an interest in teaching and learning in response to my question seemed to indicate that the school had opened up new worlds of possibility, new ways in which they could imagine themselves. In my questionnaire I had also asked about their parents’ educational level and occupations. All the madrasa students’ fathers had some formal education: two had an MA, two had completed their Inter, three had studied up to the tenth grade, one up to the fifth grade, and two had madrasa educations. An overwhelming number (8 out of 10) of their mothers, however, had no formal education. That was fully 80 per cent of my small sample. In the case of the public school students, most of the fathers had some formal education (1 MA, 4 Inter, 8 up to the tenth grade, 2 up to middle school) as did 8 of the 18 mothers. One mother, in fact, had a BA. However, over half (10 out of 18) had no formal education. Moreover, in no case did the mothers of either the madrasa students or the public school students work outside the home. Regardless of whether the trajectory of their lives followed in the same path as their mothers or whether they did in fact venture out in new directions, that the students expressed a desire to either continue their studies beyond Inter or become teachers or doctors was striking. One English-medium public school student in the eleventh grade, whom I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, expressed herself very eloquently: After I complete my studies here I want to continue further. I want to become a doctor. It is also my parents’ dream (sapna) that I should go far and make their name shine. I too have to achieve something (kutch karke dikhana hai). I have to become something (kutch banke dikhana hai). That we girls are not weak. I have to go out and study. It is my dream that I might go out and study and become something and be recognized. I want to become a doctor and take care of the weak and poor. I want their blessings. That’s all—for me my dream to become a doctor is important.

This student was 1 of 10 children, all educated, some up to BA. Her father was an imam and a hakim, and her mother had no formal education. But she had big dreams. I also got to know some of the public school teachers. Some were struggling to support siblings and parents on their monthly salaries. One teacher, Rehana, about 30, taught education, sociology, SST

Attachment to School

197

(social studies), and home science at the high school and inter levels. She was one of five sisters. Their parents had died when they were very young. Rehana had managed to educate herself and also get a couple of her sisters married, though she herself was single. She seemed to be the only wage earner among the sisters. She was slight of build, cheerful, and energetic. When I met her she had henna (mehndi) on her hands, having recently attended the weddings of two former teachers at the English-medium school. Similarly, the principal, Sultana, was helping her married daughter get through a crisis resulting from the severe illness of her one-year-old son. The doctors had been unable to diagnose the cause. At her wit’s end, Sultana finally got an amulet (ta‘wiz). Although she did not say that this is what cured her grandson, he did recover.47 Some of the teachers were clearly role models for the students. Many students who answered the questionnaire mentioned Sultana by name, commending her as a teacher of English and for having taught them about Islam. Thus, one wrote: ‘Every day at assembly Sultana mam tells us very nice things. About namaz, she asks every day and makes us do namaz (namaz ki pa-bandi karati hain).’ Another said: ‘Sultana Mam teaches us a lot about religion. … I have learned a lot in this school about religion (din).’ All the students said they appreciated the fact that the school gave them religious instruction and that the teachers were good, caring people. For these students and their parents, the fact that the public school gave students religious instruction was one of the main reasons they liked the school despite the overcrowding, high noise level, and its lack of a proper playground, library, or science lab—all of which they brought up in their responses. These responses problematized for me the class distinction between the madrasa and the public schools. The distinction that had appeared

47 She also told me that a few days earlier she had accompanied her daughter and grandson by train to Bareilly. The train arrived but her daughter had still not arrived at the station. When she explained their plight because of the baby’s illness, the conductor very kindly delayed the train’s departure by a few minutes until she arrived. Sultana said she did not know of any other country in the world where someone—and a stranger at that—would stop a train for a sick baby.

198

Scholars of Faith

rather clear-cut at first was in fact not so. Religious instruction and the religious ethos of the school mattered to these students. The fact that parents strategically placed their children in different school systems was also significant. As the madrasa student quoted at the beginning of this chapter indicated, two of her siblings were in private schools: one in a Christian school (St. Julius Public School) and the other possibly in a Hindu private school (Janata Public School).48 She herself was firmly committed to her path as a madrasa student who wanted to live a religiously observant life. The second student I quoted, who expressed her strong desire to be a doctor, had an imam for a father and had initially wanted to become an ‘Alima. Other instances of eclectic school choice came from madrasa students who said they had siblings at Aligarh Muslim University, public schools, and convent schools. School choice seemed to be determined by a mix of factors: the religious orientation of the parents (Muslim, Sunni, Barelwi), the academic interests of the child, and financial affordability. However, one of the teachers I talked to suggested that increased levels of education and urbanization over time led to decreased interest in religion and religious observance. Shagufta, a kindergarten teacher with a BEd, who was a widow with three grown children in their twenties, had been teaching in the school for several years. When I asked her why some parents chose to send their children to the English-medium school and others to the madrasa, she said that the parents who chose the madrasa were ‘very pardah nishin’, that is, they observed gender segregation and female veiling in public spaces to a greater degree than others. ‘But didn’t all teachers and students observe gender segregation (pardah)?’ I asked. ‘Yes’, she responded, ‘but the families that preferred an English-medium education for their children were more flexible’. For example, when she left town and went to a place where there were no relatives, she might take off her burqa or hijab in public spaces. The madrasa-going families would never do that. The people who chose an English-medium education 48

In India, following the British educational tradition, the word ‘public’ refers to what in the US is called a ‘private’ school, that is, it is funded by private citizens rather than by the government. In contemporary usage, some privately funded schools now refer to themselves as ‘private’. Governmentrun schools in India are referred to as ‘government schools’.

Attachment to School

199

for their children believed that they had to do so in order to get ahead in the world. The ones whose children were in madrasas were uneducated and their children were the first ones in their families to study. The madrasa children’s children would choose to study in Englishmedium schools, in her view. Shagufta was correct that the madrasa student population was more rural than that of the public school (3 out of 10 questionnaire respondents said their fathers were in farming, versus only 1 out of 18 public school respondents), and as already discussed, the formal literacy rate of the madrasa students’ mothers was much lower (20 per cent) than that of the public schools (around 50 per cent). But the public school students’ responses indicated clearly that they valued the religious education and ethos of the Islamic Public School. This was what made it distinctive and better in their eyes and in those of their parents than other public schools available to them. They wanted a balance between religious and worldly learning, in which both played a part.

Stepping into the Classroom It was early in the school day in October 2013, and on the third floor of the school building, a young teacher was quizzing her fifth grade students orally in English on their biology lessons. I had stepped into a rather dimly lit, large rectangular room on one side of a wide hallway separating two rows of classrooms and had been given a chair facing the students, near the teacher. The boys were seated on the left of the room at four long rows of desks, one behind the other, while the girls were seated in exactly the same way on the right. Their numbers seemed to be evenly balanced. Facing them and behind the teacher’s back was a blackboard. As homework, the teacher had asked the students to make a chart showing the respiratory system. Many of the boys had not made their charts and did not know their material. Most of the girls had, and most were able to answer the teacher’s questions. She posed a question in English and the student responded, reciting from memory. One or two seemed very good. However, it was clear that English was not the students’ or the teacher’s spoken language. This made the interaction sound stilted and wooden.

200

Scholars of Faith

The teacher looked very stern. While the student she had called upon was answering her questions, the other students were talking and paying no attention. She had to repeatedly ask the class to stop talking. Occasionally she would hit her desk with a wooden stick to get their attention. In one of the rows on the boys’ side of the room, a couple of boys were squabbling about a pencil sharpener which one of them claimed had been taken from him. The teacher punished him by asking him to stand and keep standing. Unlike the madrasa student I had seen being punished in the same way the day before, the boy giggled and squirmed and didn’t seem a bit apologetic or ashamed. He just turned to his friends and the boys around him, all of whom were whispering loudly. The teacher’s questions to the students showed that she had a good command of her material. The class, however, was uninterested in the subject being taught. At some point, a staff member walked into the classroom and handed the teacher a register. In it she wrote down how many students were present that day and how many were absent, and signed her name. This register was signed by each teacher at the school and given to the principal every school day. Turning her attention to the class once more, she continued to call upon the students one by one to answer her oral questions. When all the students had had their turn, she sat down and told the students to revise their lessons by themselves in preparation for the coming exam. This teacher was very young. She was 18, had studied at a convent school in Jhansi while living with her grandparents, and already had her BA from G.F. College, where she had graduated among the top 10 students in her class. She was frustrated at the Islamic Public School. She wanted to teach classes beyond seventh grade but was not being allowed to, as she did not have the required qualifications (a BEd or MA). Now she wanted to study further. She wanted to go to Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. Next I stopped by at a ninth-grade class, in a relatively well-lit and open classroom with bare white walls, where Hindi-medium and English-medium students had been joined together in one large class. The teacher was not teaching anything, though, as the students were supposed to be reviewing their lessons for the coming exams. Some students asked me questions about where I was from and what

Attachment to School

201

I taught. One student invited me to her home to meet her parents.49 After some time an older teacher came into the room and the previous teacher left. She seemed to be popular with the students. She addressed them affectionately as ‘child [bete]’, usually to ask them to stop being so noisy (bete, itna shor mat karo). Unfortunately for me, the students had just finished the first half of the academic year and had taken their oral exams the day before. This would be followed by a midterm written exam shortly. Then the second half of the academic year would follow. I had come at the wrong time, when students were not receiving formal instruction. Still with the same teacher in what was now a sixth-grade class, we again sat at the head of a classroom—this one had been added by installing metal partitions in one part of the wide hallway between the classrooms on either side, and seemed temporary and incomplete— facing a room full of noisy students sitting in pairs at their desks. Finally, the teacher asked them to start reading from their English textbook. As she called on different students by name, each student stood up, read a few sentences, then sat down. The text was a short story about a family of birds on a tree who were being threatened by a snake. The mother bird prayed for her babies to be saved. Then a hawk came and snatched the snake in its mouth and cut its body into two. Turning to me, the teacher said the school chose stories with a moral lesson. To me the book seemed much too easy for the students, in contrast to the madrasa students who were studying difficult Arabic texts in another part of the building. Also in contrast to the latter, these students were bored and distracted. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the school’s low level of expectations was in part responsible for the students’ apathy.

Where Is the Passion? Comparisons across the Two Schools Despite the unevenness of my data for the reasons I have indicated, I want to make some broad observations about what we can learn 49

However, the madrasa authorities did not want such visits to take place. They said I could talk to students within the building premises but not elsewhere.

202

Scholars of Faith

from my account about the distinctive features of these very different schools. Fittingly, given that the madrasa and the English-medium and Hindi-medium public schools see themselves as fulfilling different goals, their students also had different personal and social goals in mind: the madrasa students were focused on self and community transformation in terms of greater adherence to everyday orthopraxy while the public school students were focusing on secular professions which would materially help their families and society. Teaching and medicine were foremost on their list of priorities, and at a more personal level they also expressed their desire to take care of their parents. (Latika Gupta and other scholars have noted that Indian girls often express a preference for teaching because the teaching profession can be pursued without disturbing expected gender roles in society. I explore this further in the next chapter.)50 While I did not observe the kinds of rites of incorporation at the public schools that I did at the madrasa, the students of the latter do have morning assembly, observe annual holidays, and are subject to school norms, expectations, and routines on a regular basis. Even the simple act of wearing a school uniform—indeed, two different ones, as on Saturdays they dress in an all-white uniform—is a means of creating school loyalty. My enquiries showed that they liked their school and expressed a clear attachment to their teachers, fellow students, and to the school at large. This was not the result of academic interest in their classes, for they seemed completely detached from what they were being taught in class. But as discussed earlier, they liked the fact that their teachers gave them religious instruction outside the official curriculum, taught them basic things like how to offer namaz, and encouraged them to do this more regularly. This interested them despite the fact that most of them did not want to be madrasa students. What their schools represented, then, was a place where being good (Barelwi) Muslims was encouraged and recognized. In the context of Indian public education in the current era of the Bharatiya Janata Party and right-wing Hindu nationalism, for the parents of these children, the Islamic Public School offered a safe, good, and 50 Latika Gupta, Education, Poverty and Gender: Schooling Muslim Girls in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2015), pp. 91–5.

Attachment to School

203

affordable education that had the potential to launch their child on a viable path towards professional employment in the future. But how realistic were their expectations? Nita Kumar has written insightfully on Indian public and private education in Banaras and Kolkata in her book The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity (2011). She places all the Banaras schools in four tiers: at the lowest rung, in her view, are the government municipal schools; then follow the English-language schools, which have the ‘outward trapping[s] and paraphernalia’ of ‘convent schools’ but none of their educational philosophy or teacher training, and are only marginally better; then come the madrasas, themselves internally distinguished by maslaki orientation (Barelwi, Deobandi, and so on) and more importantly, by their affiliation either with the Basic Shiksha Parishad or the UP Madrasa Board: ‘for every hundred students educated in the latter, religious system, some one thousand are educated in the secular, nationalist system’.51 Schools in the fourth tier, that of the elite missionary or English-medium public schools, which open doors to professional middle-class jobs, are only available in the metropolitan cities. Jami‘a Nur and the Islamic Public School, in light of this analysis, belong to the third and second tiers, respectively. Judging by Kumar’s diagnosis of the problems of Indian education, the bulk of Indian schools—largely those of the first three tiers—suffer from the structural limitations of what she calls ‘provincialism’.52 These schools are characterized by ‘incompleteness’ at several levels. In terms of the physical space they occupy, they are often located in repurposed private homes rather than in buildings constructed as schools, and are characterized by ‘overcrowded rooms with inadequate light and air’. Not only does the child have to suffer the pain of sitting in such rooms through the school day, but he or she is subjected to a meaningless curriculum as well as ‘[a] body trapped in synthetic uniforms and badges, threatened by the ogres of homework and 51

Nita Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity: Essays on Education in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011). The quotations are from pp. 62 and 90. 52 On this term and its ramifications, see Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity, Chapter 1.

204

Scholars of Faith

examinations, altogether victim to overdisciplining’.53 The tragedy of it all is that ‘this disciplining is for nothing’ because the ‘students of provincial schools are denied the rewards of the national–global’. And in a circular loop that appears to justify their exclusion, the products of these schools fail to become the ‘inwardly directed’ modern citizens and embodiments of the ‘minimal virtues of punctuality, uprightness, and masculinity’ that the system intended them to become.54 If on the one hand, the Islamic Public School may be raising some students’ expectations unduly high, the greater problem seems to be that most students are not engaged and motivated to learn. Kumar, who describes several Banaras schools in her ethnography, ascribes this problem to the schools’ failure to connect the formal educational syllabus with the lives of the students and their families, and the exclusion of their local histories from the national historical narrative. This is where Kumar’s observations and mine converge most strongly. My conversations with students and teachers and observations of classroom interaction suggested apathy on the part of many teachers—and a sense of frustration among those wanting but unable to do more—and lack of interest on the part of many students at the Islamic Public School. Similar observations have been made by others. Latika Gupta’s ethnography of a Muslim girls’ school in Darya Ganj, Delhi, also speaks of teacher apathy and students’ lack of interest in their school work, although at home the girls defended their right to go to school when their parents questioned the utility of educating girls beyond the eighth grade. Going to school gave them a precious means of escaping the surveillance of parents, making friends with other girls their age, and, most importantly, postponing marriage by a few years.55 As Kumar notes, there is much blame to go around in the state– family–school triad, beginning with the fact that most state and local schools, whether public or private, are chronically underfinanced and understaffed, and have been since British colonial times. Schools in 53

Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity, p. 45. Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity, pp. 45–6. Emphasis in the original. 55 See Gupta, Education, Poverty and Gender, especially Chapter 4, ‘Articulated Discourse’. 54

Attachment to School

205

the first three tiers also suffer from the fact that working-class parents’—particularly the mothers’—lack of formal education makes them unresponsive to the schools’ desire for parental involvement in their child’s education. Sultana, the principal of the Islamic Public School, ascribed the students’ lack of discipline in the classroom to their home environments. Since the students came from homes where they had no parental support, she said, they suffered from a lack of discipline and motivation to study. They were starting off at the very bottom of the ladder and the school was doing all it could to help them improve their prospects.56 Kumar reports on a similar conversation with the teacher Mansoor Master of Jamia Hamidia Rizvia, a madrasa in Banaras.57 However, the Islamic Public School had a great advantage over other provincial schools in one respect, namely, that the teachers belonged to the same social milieu and were broadly speaking from the same community, both in class terms and in terms of religious orientation, as the students. They understood their problems, and many were personally invested in the academic success of their students. Moreover, as noted earlier, at the heart of the attachment between the students and the school was the inclusion by the school of a moral, ethical, and religious dimension to the instruction imparted during the school day, for which students credited their principal Sultana in particular. For this reason, they discounted the physical discomforts and lack of facilities such as a playground, library, or science lab, saying that they liked their school and wanted to see it prosper. Turning now to the madrasa Jami‘a Nur, I have described at some length the high level of engagement of its students and teachers. The students at Jami‘a Nur who complete their studies to the ‘Alima and Fazila levels, I suggest, imbibe the Barelwi ethos of the founder, Sayyid Sahib, and their teachers and seek to embody it personally. As they acquire greater knowledge of the textual sources of the Qur’an and its exegesis, of Hadith, jurisprudence, and related fields of Islamic learning, their lessons, far from being disconnected from their personal lives, increasingly shape the ways in which they conduct themselves outside the classroom. 56 57

Personal conversation, November 2013. Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity, p. 53.

206

Scholars of Faith

But there is more to it than this. The madrasa succeeds in large part because it connects the students to the Islamic scholarly tradition at large. It is much more than just a Barelwi madrasa. By drawing young Muslim girls from families with little prior knowledge of Islamic history and the Islamic scholarly tradition and giving them direct access to the medieval texts which make up the backbone of this tradition, the madrasa opens their horizons to worlds they had never known and which they can proudly call their own. The experience of sitting in a study circle with other girls of one’s age—sometimes outside in the open playground on a sunny winter’s day, but more likely in a big, well-lit classroom with windows—moving one’s finger on the line one is reading, and turning the pages of a gigantic, heavy book of Tirmidhi, for example, is a real, tactile one, not merely a passive act of absorbing received knowledge. The book, placed reverentially on a pillow, is shared by two students sitting side by side. They lean their heads forward together fully concentrating on the page, so as not to lose their place as students take turns reading at a rapid pace. Likewise, as they read and distinguish the text (matn) from the commentary (sharh) written in tiny print at an angle in the margins on the left, right, and bottom of the page in a Hadith book like Tirmidhi, or a book of Qur’anic exegesis like Jalalayn, they are traversing a wellknown path, one whose markers—made up of different inks, type sizes, and physical placement—they have grown familiar with over their years at the madrasa. Their success in reading, understanding, and mastering these texts also constitutes a visible and tangible link between them and the Islamic scholarly tradition.58 Likewise, for younger students, the pleasure of copying lines of Urdu calligraphy in order to learn how to connect the letters of the Arabic alphabet correctly, is a means of participating actively in a new world of learning. The children’s brows are furrowed in concentration

58 See Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 30–1 and passim, for an evocative discussion and excellent analysis of the layout of the physical text. On the importance of commentaries in the Islamic scholarly tradition, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Attachment to School

207

over the task of getting the shapes of the letters and the consonant and vowel dots and dashes above and below the lines just right. When the student finishes repeating the teacher’s line—likely a line of na‘t poetry by Ahmad Raza Khan—at the top of her calligraphy notebook, on the lower four or five rows of lines, she passes her notebook to the teacher, who corrects her mistakes with a red ballpoint pen there and then, and hands it back. The dozen or so students are all sitting in a semicircle on daris on the floor, in a small classroom with a sunlit window, across from their teacher. The visual experience of recognizing text and being able to write fluently in Urdu and Arabic is of course but one dimension of the larger madrasa ‘sensorium’, to recall Benei. The equally, if not more important, auditory aspect, has been frequently commented on in public media and the scholarly literature, often to cast doubt on the practice of memorization. Charles Hirschkind, in The Ethical Soundscape, has studied it in depth. Hirschkind’s use of phrases such as ‘a listening that is a doing’, ‘the tradition of agentive listening’, and ‘ethical listening’ indicates that listening in the Islamic context is an act, an embodied response to oral speech. In the Islamic ‘soundscape’, the listener must do more than passively hear the utterance. She must be actively engaged, fully attentive, and respond with the appropriate bodily gestures and speech.59 Studying the Qur’an has its own distinct and well-known rules of adab and set of practices. When during the day the younger students learn the rules of tajwid, with its complex and precise methods of sounding out the words of the Qur’an, they practise the articulation of Arabic sounds difficult for a native Urdu speaker, to be corrected repeatedly by their teacher. How they handle the Qur’anic text and under what conditions are issues of lively debate between different maslaks. At the madrasa, students are meticulous in their observance of the directive of textual guides such as the Sunni Bihishti Zewar, and their young teachers, who embody their feminine ideal. Other daily verbal and bodily responses constitute micropractices that become 59

Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 34, 50, 53. Also see Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam’, pp. 144, 256, and passim.

208

Scholars of Faith

part of the students’ habitus: When the azan is called in the morning, students rise, wash, and perform the dawn prayer; when they hear the Salam, they stand; if the Prophet’s name is uttered during an oral presentation, they kiss their thumbs and ask God to bless him, using formulaic phrases that are familiar to Muslims the world over; if the azan is sounded while they are in the midst of a conversation, they adjust their veils over their heads and the speakers fall silent. These and countless other small gestures and forms of speech ultimately serve to connect the student to the wider Muslim community. Some of these practices are specific to the Barelwis while others have much wider reach, uniting Muslims from West Africa to Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. Subjective attachment to the madrasa thus has many dimensions and is built up slowly over time, differently for each student. Turning from how Muslim girls connect with the Islamic scholarly tradition, in the following chapter I explore the work of Sumbul Farah, who interviewed a handful of Jami‘a Nur graduates in their homes, to see what practical impact their madrasa educations had on them after they returned home. My focus will be on how the students internalize and process the madrasa’s civilizing mission, and how the madrasa’s religious message in turn interacts with South Asian gendered discourses and becomes meaningful to students in the context of family and community expectations.

5 LIFE AFTER THE MADRASA

Education finds its fulfillment in teaching. When I was a student, I did not realize the importance of all that I was learning. But when I began to teach, I became like a sooty pot that is scrubbed clean and shiny (main bartan ki tarah manjhti chali gayi). —Ghazala, Jami‘a Nur madrasa graduate, 2015, speaking to Farah Expressed in an affective register, my interlocutors were referring to their ability to adjust to their newfound circumstances, an adjustment hinging upon a gendered characteristic they associated with proper womanhood. Women, they repeatedly indicated, are naram. —Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, p. 109

What impact does students’ education have on their lives after they leave the madrasa and rejoin their natal families, and then marry and become wives and mothers? This is a critical question in assessing the long-term impact of the madrasa. Here I draw on the research of Sumbul Farah who followed a few Jami‘a Nur graduates to their homes and talked to them for extensive periods, sometimes making multiple visits to learn about their home lives. We learn from this about the continuity between the school and the home, the prestige accorded by family members and neighbours to the madrasa students’ religious knowledge and their consequent increase in authority vis-à-vis other members of the family, their eagerness to hold classes for women and children in their neighbourhoods, and their relations Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

210

Scholars of Faith

with their spouses, among other things. Although the sample of student interviews is small, Farah’s data throw light on the transformative potential of Jami‘a Nur, and doubtless on that of countless other girls’ madrasas similar to this one throughout India and South Asia.1 Before I present Farah’s research findings and comment on how they illuminate my own research on the students at the Jami‘a Nur madrasa, a brief word about my fieldwork experience is in order here. In late 2011, I asked Farah to help me find a Barelwi girls’ madrasa in west Uttar Pradesh (UP) whose management would agree to the madrasa being the site of my ethnography. Her own Barelwi background and PhD research on everyday Barelwi practices in and around the Sufi shrines (khanqahs) of Bareilly gave her a unique vantage point and access to community sources and resources. After some time, she came up with a short list of madrasas near Bareilly that seemed promising sites and she visited a couple of them, accompanied by her father, a respected and well-known doctor in Bareilly and a practising Sunni Muslim of the Barelwi school himself. Farah recommended the madrasa Jami‘a Nur both because of its proximity to Bareilly and the willingness of Sayyid Sahib to host me for the duration of my fieldwork. For me its attraction was enhanced by the fact that Shahjahanpur is accessible by train from Delhi, my home of origin. Thus began my association with Jami‘a Nur. However, when I arrived in Delhi in June 2012 to begin my fieldwork, I learned that Sayyid Sahib was having second thoughts. His prime concern, he told Farah and later me as well, was that conditions at the madrasa were difficult and I would not be comfortable there, being accustomed to much more luxurious living conditions in the United States. It took considerable effort on the part of several people, including myself, to persuade him to change his mind. Eventually he relented, telling me I should come and see him at the madrasa for a preliminary visit. This initial visit led to an invitation to stay, and subsequently to permission to make several return visits. 1 Farah’s research findings have been published in Usha Sanyal and Sumbul Farah, ‘Discipline and Nurture: Living in a Girls’ Madrasa, Living in Community’, Modern Asian Studies (2019), 53(2): 411–50. This chapter draws on our article and Farah’s unpublished field notes, cited with her permission.

Life after the Madrasa

211

While Sayyid Sahib welcomed me warmly on all my subsequent visits to Jami‘a Nur, even allowing me to tape record madrasa classes and conversations with teachers and staff, I found in time that he was reluctant to allow me to visit students at their homes. The reasons for this were hard for me to fathom.2 But rather than argue with him I asked Farah if she would collaborate with me on this aspect of my research. She agreed to conduct a number of student interviews, meeting former students and their families at their homes. Putting our findings together we wrote a joint article on the madrasa and its impact on the students’ home lives. Due to the importance of her data to the overall study, in this chapter I draw on Farah’s work to show the influence the madrasa has had on these students’ lives.

Six Graduates and Former Students Recount Their Lives Using pseudonyms to protect their privacy, Farah narrated the life stories of six different Jami‘a Nur students after they had left the madrasa. They were: the sisters Nayla and Khushboo, the sisters Nida and Naghma, and the cousins Ghazala and Hajira. I will take up their stories in this order, and analyse the lessons learned from their life stories in the next section of this chapter. Putting these findings together with the small but growing literature on girls’ madrasas in India, I bring to bear the insights of Attiya Ahmad’s work with South Asian domestic workers in Kuwait to show how the girls process the teachings of the madrasa in tandem with a gendered South Asian discourse about the importance of women being malleable and pliable (that is, the expectation that they will develop the quality of 2 He was apparently in some doubt about my citizenship status. Friends and associates had told him that he should have made sure I had registered my presence with the local police office before allowing me to stay at the madrasa. On post–9/11 fieldwork difficulties, see, among others, Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b); Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011), and Sumbul Farah, ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam: A Case Study of Barelwi Khanqahs’ (PhD dissertation, University of Delhi, May 2016). As these works make clear, both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers face challenges, though the nature of the difficulties they encounter is different.

212

Scholars of Faith

being naram) around members of their households, particularly in the marital home. It is through the unvoiced and unremarked upon integration of these two discourses in their everyday lives, I argue, that the young madrasa graduates inhabit and perform their new religious identities.

Nayla and Khushboo Farah’s first respondent was Nayla, who lived in Bareilly’s Old City, in the heart of Bareilly. She went to Jami‘a Nur after finishing her studies at a mainstream, secular high school. She was accompanied by her older sister Khushboo, so that together the two sisters would find it easier to make the transition from being at home to living in a residential madrasa. Unfortunately, ill-health forced Khushboo to drop out after two years. Nayla, on the other hand, continued until she had completed the course, which she did in seven years. Their father, himself a religious scholar (‘alim), took great pride in his daughters’ religious education. Although he was away from home a great deal in connection with his work, Farah was able to meet him for one extended conversation. He told her that before their daughters were born, he and his wife had visited Ajmer and had supplicated the thirteenth-century Sufi saint Shaykh Mu‘in al-Din Chishti (popularly known as Khwaja Gharib Nawaz, the Benefactor of the Poor) at his shrine for the birth of a daughter. He had prayed to God to bless him with daughters who would become scholars (‘alima). Now that this had come to pass, they felt blessed by the fact that their younger daughter had become an ‘alima and their son had memorized the Qur’an (which gave him the title of hafiz). He too was studying at a madrasa, the Madrasa Manzar-i Islam in Bareilly, where his experience had been very good. Nayla thought the madrasa had been enormously important to her growth as a person. She told Farah that she had felt completely at home there and was not even homesick when she first joined. She said the madrasa revealed to her what ‘Islam really is’,3 and that without this knowledge a person risks his or her success in the world and his or her afterlife. She felt that while people were 3

Farah, unpublished field notes.

Life after the Madrasa

213

easily impressed by women who become doctors or engineers, they were not nearly as impressed by one who becomes an ‘alima, even though the latter is clearly of greater importance. Farah noticed her easy ability to quote verses from the Qur’an and interpret them in her own words. As Nayla went on to explain, the knowledge gained at the madrasa had to be implemented in real life. She told Farah about a couple in Mumbai that her family knew well. One day the woman called them in great distress. Her husband had pronounced the triple divorce (talaq) in a fit of anger. Nayla responded that in that case, it was imperative that she move out of her marital home immediately because the triple talaq made it illegitimate for her to continue living in the same house as her (now former) husband. But the woman did not follow through, and Nayla and her family felt helpless to intervene. She said the woman was leading a life of sin and ruining her prospects in the afterlife as well. Nayla’s mother agreed. They had tried to counsel the woman on the proper Islamic response to her situation, but they could not do anything if she ignored their advice.4 Khushboo also gave Farah a serendipitous illustration of the implementation of the knowledge she had gained at the madrasa. Their father was particularly proud of his daughters’ public speaking (taqrir) skills. Khushboo had a clear, ringing voice and confident demeanour and Farah could imagine her as an effective speaker. But when her father asked her whether she would like to speak at an upcoming event, Khushboo, who had recently got married and was visiting her parents, declined. She said her in-laws and husband were not keen on her doing so. She hoped they would change their minds in the future and if they did, she would go back to giving taqrir. Her response was in keeping with the teachings of the madrasa, which emphasized the importance of a married woman acting in accordance with her husband’s wishes as long as they did not go against the shari‘a. Another time, when Nayla had addressed a group of women in a taqrir, a woman in the audience came up to her to congratulate her on her delivery. But Nayla noticed that the woman was wearing nail polish 4 In 2018, in an important ruling, the Supreme Court of India declared the practice of triple talaq to be unconstitutional. Farah’s interview took place in 2014.

214

Scholars of Faith

and told her that ‘painted nails were disapproved of in Islam’.5 Nayla said the woman’s fear of God (khawf-i khuda) led her to immediately remove the nail polish. After completing her madrasa studies, Nayla had taught for some time at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu’minin (Jami‘a Umm for short),6 Sayyid Sahib’s girls’ madrasa in Bareilly. But the madrasa was on the outskirts of town and she had a long commute to get there and back. For this reason, and also because her low teacher’s salary did not leave her with much money after paying for transportation, she left. Now she wanted to study further. Nayla and Khushboo’s stay-at-home mother was very supportive of Nayla’s wish to study further, though she said it had to be somewhere closer to home than Shahjahanpur had been. Their mother also took pride in the girls’ embroidery, needlework, and fabric painting skills, showing Farah a tablecloth and bedsheets that they had painted at the madrasa. At this, Nayla laughed and said that they had often been called on to display their painting skills at Jami‘a Nur. Although they had painted a bedsheet for a teacher when she was getting married, they tried to conceal their skills from others at the madrasa lest they receive too many such requests. Khushboo had taken the items she had made to her married home as part of her trousseau. In addition to talking about the deep impact of their madrasa experience on their lives, Nayla and Khushboo also gave Farah a glimpse into its more light-hearted—if somewhat subversive—moments. One Muharram, when Muslims customarily cook khichra, a meat, lentil, and rice dish which is greatly relished but is time-consuming to cook, some of the boys at the boys’ madrasa played a prank on the girls at Jami‘a Nur. As Farah relates the story: Some boys approached the cook for an extra helping of khichra after they had finished their portion, asking for some of the khichra set aside for the girls’ madrasa. But the cook refused outright. The boys, rebuffed, [decided to get back at the cook and] slipped a laxative into the khichra meant for the girls. Unaware of what the [boys] had done, the girls heartily enjoyed the khichra, only realizing later—too late—that something was wrong with the food when they all started to have diarrhoea.7 5 6 7

Farah, unpublished field notes. A pseudonym. Farah, unpublished field notes.

Life after the Madrasa

215

Farah recounts that Nayla and Khushboo were in splits of laughter recalling the incident, which resulted in a doctor being called to the madrasa (in a reversal of normal practice, as students are usually taken to the nearest doctor by a warden). The culprits were identified and severely punished. Although corporal punishment is generally not practised at the madrasa, on this occasion the boys received a beating. Through Nayla, Farah got to meet Nida. Nayla called Nida on her phone to introduce them.

Nida and Naghma Nida was one of the first girls in her part of Bareilly—a village called Umariya on the outskirts of town—to attend Jami‘a Nur. Her younger sister Naghma and a cousin Shabeena also joined the madrasa after her. When Farah met her in 2014, she was a newly wed bride. Farah had to get her husband’s consent before being allowed to visit her.8 Nida told Farah that she had had a hard time adjusting to madrasa life. She did not know anyone there. The experience of being uprooted from her familiar surroundings and having to stay with people she did not know was difficult for her initially. When she cried and longed for home, older girls who had been at the madrasa for some time would comfort her. Before she knew it, she had got used to the place and she too was comforting newcomers. In fact, Nida thought that going to the madrasa was a turning point in her life because of what she had learned there. The madrasa taught students the reason for their lives as well as their rights and duties in the world, she told Farah. Most parents, teachers, husbands, wives, and children do not know the rights and responsibilities entailed by these roles. Now that she was married, she clearly recognized both her responsibilities and rights as a wife. After her marriage, Nida had continued to read books about religion and she often spoke about religious matters to her husband. He for his part took pride in his wife’s knowledge of religion and encouraged her not to stop reading. In practice, however, she confessed that married life left her with little time for such pursuits. 8 Farah got permission after her father spoke to Nida’s husband on the telephone and explained to him why Farah wanted to interview Nida.

216

Scholars of Faith

Before her marriage, Nida had taught at Jami‘a Umm, Sayyid Sahib’s girls’ madrasa in Bareilly, just like Nayla. She too found the commute long and tiring, particularly as the madrasa insisted on teachers arriving punctually, and she had had a very demanding course load. She used to prepare her lectures (mutala‘a) diligently every evening, sometimes even falling asleep with her book in her lap. But she said she was glad to have had the experience, because teaching others what one had learned was one of the purposes of learning itself. She quit her job before she got married. Nida’s younger sister Naghma, who was not married when Farah met her, was living with her parents in Umariya village. She too was teaching at Jami‘a Umm, the same madrasa where Nida had taught.

Ghazala and Hajira Ghazala was a graduate of Jami‘a Nur and a teacher at Jami‘a Umm— like the previous interviewees—when Farah met her in 2014. She was thus a work colleague of Naghma’s. Alongside this, Ghazala was pursuing further studies, though Farah does not tell us what she was studying.9 Ghazala came from a village called Manpuriya outside Bareilly. She had three brothers and a sister, none of them formally educated. She was the only one of her siblings to be educated. As with Nayla and Khushboo, her younger sister had also attended Jami‘a Nur, but she fell sick often and was unable to adjust to life at the madrasa. So her parents pulled her out and by the time Farah met Ghazala, she was happily married, according to Ghazala. Two of Ghazala’s older brothers had wives and children; they all lived in the same household as Ghazala. Theirs was a joint family consisting of the parents, two married sons and their families, and one unmarried daughter, Ghazala.10 Ghazala had a close relationship with her mother. She was especially grateful to her mother for making it possible for her to study. In households like hers, mothers depended on their daughters’ help with domestic chores in order to do the large quantity of cooking and 9

Farah says Ghazala was pursuing her ‘graduation degree’. Farah does not tell us where the third brother was living. Presumably he had moved out of the family home for the purpose of employment. 10

Life after the Madrasa

217

cleaning that was required every day. Her daughter’s absence from home during the many years she was at Jami‘a Nur was thus a real hardship for her. This was also the case with Nayla and Khushboo’s mother. As Farah says, ‘in such a scenario, girls can continue with their studies only if their mothers are willing to forgo their help and allow them to spend that time learning’.11 Ghazala told Farah that while the madrasa had given her knowledge (‘ilm), her mother had given her nurture and ethical and moral nourishment (tarbiya), all of which together made her the person she was.12 The importance of the mother in facilitating or impeding a daughter’s education is also illustrated by the counter-example of Hajira, Ghazala’s cousin. Hajira had had to withdraw from the madrasa for precisely that reason. Being the oldest child of her parents, with seven younger boys who needed to be looked after, the youngest of them only six years old when Farah met the family, Hajira’s mother could not do without Hajira’s help at home. She tried for a while, but eventually Hajira had to give up her madrasa education in order to help her mother at home. Ghazala had a hard time adjusting to life at the madrasa at first, particularly the cramped quarters at the madrasa’s initial location (prior to 2014), the cloistered lifestyle, and the loss of personal space and time. But she was careful to keep these privations to herself for fear that her family might withdraw her from the madrasa if she complained. She wanted at all costs to study and learn. Her determination to succeed also helped her overcome a bout of severe sickness and physical weakness. Like other madrasa graduates, Ghazala recalled how at this time the madrasa teachers took special care of her. She particularly remembered Darakhshan, a teacher who assisted her during exam time, writing down the answers that Ghazala gave her verbally so she would be able to complete her exams. But Ghazala could be outspoken if she thought an injustice was being done to someone. On one occasion, a girl fell very sick and the madrasa called her parents and asked them to take her home. By the time the parents arrived, however, it was late at night and the madrasa 11

Farah, unpublished field notes. Farah, unpublished field notes. ‘‘Ilm mujhe madrasa ne diya magar taribiyat meri maa nein.’ 12

218

Scholars of Faith

refused to relax its rule forbidding students to leave the premises at night. The parents were obliged to spend the night in the open courtyard outside the madrasa building. When Ghazala heard about the incident, she and some other students got together and protested the madrasa’s treatment of the parents to the authorities, saying that either they should not have told the parents about their daughter’s illness in the evening (as it would take them a few hours to get to the school) or they should have allowed them to take their daughter home right away. Making them spend the night out in the open was not right. When Sayyid Sahib learned of Ghazala’s leadership role in registering the students’ objection, he was impressed by her for acting on her convictions and articulating her views fearlessly. He told the school administrators to help her in every way possible so that she would be able to complete her studies at the madrasa. Ghazala’s strong personality was also evident after she had graduated from school and returned home. Convinced of the importance of teaching and passing on her knowledge to others, she and her cousin Hajira started a small neighbourhood school for girls, intending to give them basic Islamic classes in the afternoons. They were dismayed to see young girls in their village immodestly dressed or engaging in conduct that they considered un-Islamic. They felt that the girls needed guidance with daily life skills such as how to dress, how to carry themselves, and how to live in an Islamically correct manner. They used the book Sunni Bihishti Zewar, which they had studied at Jami‘a Nur, to guide them. Their classes were so popular that adult women in the neighbourhood also began to attend them. The classes continued for several months. Farah reports, ‘They taught the women about their everyday duties, the importance of pardah, and the correct way of remaining clean and offering prayers. They corrected the women’s mistakes when reciting the Qur’an and taught them how to pronounce the Arabic words with proper enunciation and intonation (makharij).’13 In the same way, Ghazala also taught her young nieces and nephews how to pray correctly. When Farah went to meet her one evening, she observed Ghazala’s nieces and nephews spread out their prayer mats next to one another and line up in anticipation of the prayer. The 13

Farah, unpublished field notes.

Life after the Madrasa

219

little girls had tied their scarves over their heads. Ghazala excused herself from her conversation with Farah and led them in prayer. They followed her gestures and tried to follow the recitation of the prayer, doing just as she did. Ghazala and Hajira also demonstrated their skills at taqrir. Ghazala gave a taqrir—with Farah and Hajira as her audience—about the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima’s veil (dupatta) and how it compared with those of ordinary Muslim women. Ghazala asked rhetorically why it was that when Hazrat Fatima prayed with her dupatta on, her wishes were fulfilled by God, but when ‘we-ordinary-sinningwomen do so, our wishes go unheard’. Ghazala went on to ‘establish how “pure” Hazrat Fatima’s dupatta was. No man had ever set sight on it. She would wash and dry it inside the house lest any man’s eyes fall on it even inadvertently. She recited a poem about the dupatta: Never has such a dupatta been heard of, nor will it ever be in the future’.14 When she had finished Ghazala asked Hajira to recite a na‘t for Farah, and Hajira obliged, reciting verses about the Prophet with a lot of emotion. Her voice echoed off the walls of her house very impressively, Farah said. Looking ahead, the two cousins talked about the fact that their parents were on the lookout for spouses for them. Hajira wanted a deeply religious man, not a ‘modern’ person. Hajira objected to women wearing make up, just as Nayla had objected to the woman in the audience wearing nail polish. But Ghazala was more accepting of people being different from herself. She thought that living in a joint family had made her more accepting of differences between people. She wanted a man who would be religious but also enjoy spending time with her. She talked wistfully of her brothers taking their wives on their motorcycles for an outing and wished that religious men would not think it was wrong to enjoy the ways of the world (duniya ke tawr tariqe). Islam does not forbid married women from adorning themselves (provided their husbands want them to), she said, nor does it stand in the way of married couples enjoying themselves. She hoped the person her parents found for her would be able to straddle the two worlds in this way. 14 Farah, unpublished field notes. ‘Na kabhi suna hai, na sunega, aisa dupatta.’

220

Scholars of Faith

The Dynamics of Family Decision Making: Should Girls’ Education Be Supported? In the lower-middle-class households of Daryaganj, Old Delhi, in which Gupta conducted her fieldwork, there were two intertwined factors underlying the issue of girls’ education: limited funds and early marriage for girls. Since the girls’ families had limited financial means, they were reluctant to allow their daughters to study up to high school and beyond. From their perspective, the funds they would have to commit to their daughters’ continued education could be better used to arrange a good marriage for them. From the perspective of some of the daughters, however, their aspiration to study and teach was linked to their desire to postpone an early marriage. If they could get their parents to agree to let them continue their studies beyond the eighth grade, they would be able to break out of the cycle of early marriage and the lifetime of domesticity which defined their mothers and sisters.15 But this outcome could only be realized by pleading with their mothers and getting them to argue their case with their fathers and extended kin, all of whom were opposed to it in principle. As Farah’s interviews with the six graduates and former students of Jami‘a Nur illustrate, a similar dynamic took place among some of the madrasa students’ families, though the fact that their daughters were going to study at a madrasa and gain religious (dini) knowledge predisposed the parents to be more favourably inclined.16 In their case, word-of-mouth recommendations from other parents or relatives who had sent their daughters to the madrasa also played a role in the parents’ decision to send their daughters to Jami‘a Nur. But mothers were key players in this decision, as we saw in Ghazala’s case, for without her willingness to do without her daughter’s help at home for the many years she would be away, Ghazala would not have

15 Latika Gupta, Education, Poverty and Gender: Schooling Muslim Girls in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2015), pp. 90–5. On the importance of the aspiration to study, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, in Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, eds, Culture and Public Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 59–84. 16 For similar observations in a girls’ madrasa in Delhi, see Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood.

Life after the Madrasa

221

been able to go to the madrasa. While financial considerations were not absent, the daily burden of the lost household help of their daughters weighed on these students’ mothers perhaps even more severely than the financial burden. This was a direct consequence of the fact that Jami‘a Nur is a residential madrasa, whereas the school studied by Gupta was a day school whose students returned home every day. What Ghazala and other Jami‘a Nur students thus illustrate is that the students at the madrasa had to have the support of their families in order to study there, especially their moral support. Students who did not enjoy such support were obliged at some point to drop out of the madrasa, even if they wished to continue their studies. This was the reason Ghazala hid from her parents the personal discomfort she felt when she was a new madrasa student. Being acutely aware of the difficulties her absence from home was causing her mother, she wanted to give her parents no grounds to withdraw her from the school. Nayla and Khushboo had no such worries, as their parents had prayed to Khwaja Gharib Nawaz in Ajmer for the birth of daughters and had wanted them to become ‘alima. A sociologically significant factor that influences parents’ decisions in the early twenty-first century South Asian context is the shift in expectations among families looking for eligible brides for their sons. Contrary to previous trends, young men today express a preference for an educated wife with whom they can have a companionate marriage (the powerful image of Ghazala thinking wistfully of her brothers taking their wives on their motorcycles for an outing to the movies, perhaps, comes to mind). They also want their wives to become mothers who will be good role models for their children. Indeed, as Darakhshan Khan’s research shows, historical trends in favour of companionate marriage in South Asia go back to the late-nineteenth century, when the British Indian colonial government opened up lower-level administrative jobs at the district level and young men and their wives began to set up home in towns far from their families of origin.17 As the Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey write: ‘nowadays some education is an asset in the marriage market because boys are said to want educated 17 Darakhshan H. Khan, ‘Fashioning the Pious Self: Middle-Class Religiosity in Colonial India’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016).

222

Scholars of Faith

brides, even if they are not highly educated themselves’.18 Yet the landscape is far from uniform and countervailing anxieties among girls’ parents include the fear that educated daughters will require larger dowries, and among those looking for eligible brides, the fear is that educated daughters-in-law will put on airs and be ‘uppity’.19 Therefore, while girls’ education is now desired, too much—by which is meant a perceived disparity between the education of the bride and groom—is not. Moreover, Borker’s research among female madrasa students in Delhi shows that most Muslim parents perceive university education for their daughters in a negative light for a host of reasons, including the lack of gender segregated classrooms and the presence of non-Muslims in the classroom.20

Continuities between the Madrasa and the Home In our article ‘Discipline and Nurture’, Farah and I argue that the madrasa is a place not only of discipline but also of nurture, which encourages students to develop a habitus through predictable routines and responsibilities throughout the day. The students’ relationships with Sayyid Sahib and the wardens and teachers are couched in terms of fictive kinship, as the titles Abba Huzoor, Khala Ammi, and Baji, among others, indicate. These kinship terms capture the dual aspects of respect for authority figures—or ‘discipline’—on the one hand, and affection and trust—or ‘nurture’—on the other. The institution of the madrasa thus creates new relationships between students and their teachers and elders, who are non-kin, by couching them in familial terms. As Minault notes, the ‘Indian extended family [has the] ability to expand virtually indefinitely through the device of

18 Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’, Modern Asian Studies (2004), 38(1): 1–53, p. 40. 19 See Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication’, pp. 41–3, for the class and rural–urban dimensions of girls’ madrasa education. 20 Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), Chapter 7.

Life after the Madrasa

223

fictive kin’ and provides a model which can be and is used in many social contexts in South Asia, regardless of religious affiliation.21 The nurturing atmosphere of the madrasa is most evident when a student falls sick and teachers express their affection for her by taking care of her in different ways. Students were particularly liable to fall sick in the old madrasa location, when they were living and studying in very cramped quarters. The new relationships fostered by the madrasa are also significantly structured by the circumscribed space of the madrasa—and here I do not refer to the space being either physically cramped or open. Rather, in Foucault’s terms, the madrasa is a ‘total’, or ‘complete and austere’ institution which closely regulates the student’s daily life and is thus a place of discipline, and potentially, of punishment22—though not of corporal punishment in Jami‘a Nur. As I indicated in Chapter 2, the madrasa shields its students from outside attention by failing to call attention to its physical presence. The madrasa is not visible until one walks down a brick road and goes past the visitors’ centre through a small metal door set into a much larger black metal gate. To enter, one has to first get the permission of the man seated behind his desk at the visitors’ centre and sign in. Within the madrasa, space is once again set off in particular ways, especially because—as in many South Asian madrasas—the classroom space alternates between a place of rest and recreation in the evening and a place of study during the day, as students move through their daily schedules of prayer, classroom study, afternoon nap, evening peer learning, and nighttime sleep in the same space. How one moves through physical space during the course of the day is thus constantly subject to the disciplinary authority of the madrasa. The performance of gender roles is another important axis in the madrasa space, indicated most visibly by pardah practices. I have noted what students said about its importance in their questionnaire 21

Gail Minault, ‘Introduction: The Extended Family as Metaphor and the Expansion of Women’s Realm’, in Gail Minault, ed., The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1981a). 22 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977).

224

Scholars of Faith

responses, and a teacher’s comment that madrasa students were likely to observe pardah rules more strictly than the students of the Islamic Public School. Pardah provides important clues about the performance of gender. As noted earlier, the madrasa space is overwhelmingly female, but there are some male teachers, administrators, and staff members on the premises at various times during the day. In senior Hadith and jurisprudence classes, the teachers are often male, and the Qur’an recitation class is also taught by a male qari’. I observed two different strategies in such classes: in some Hadith classes and in the Qur’an recitation classes, the male teacher sat behind a curtain, in what Minault calls ‘a kind of pardah in reverse’.23 In other classes, such as the Qur’an exegesis class on Jalalayn that I discussed in Chapter 3, the teacher, Sayyid Sahib, sat before the students without any intervening cloth partition, while the students wore a nose piece, a black triangular cloth, attached to the ears, hiding the lower part of the face. I observed the same practice in a class on Persian literature taught by a young ‘alim as well. And in a third instance, I have observed Hazrat teaching some classes from behind a partition, and others without one. The only pattern I have discerned in terms of which option is chosen is that classes with younger students, which tend to have more students and to be taught in larger classroom spaces, are usually taught with the teacher seated behind a cloth partition, while smaller classes for more senior students tend to be taught without it. However, it could also be a matter of personal preference on the part of the teacher. As Farah and I note in ‘Discipline and Nurture’, the students’ practice of wearing a nose piece ‘vividly illustrates … the “public–private” nature of the madrasa space’.24 That is, it is an intermediate kind of space, one that partakes in some ways of features of the private realm of the home, as indicated by students’ use of fictive kin terms modelled on the family, and in other ways of the ‘amoral’ public realm, in which pardah nishin Muslim women interact with men who are not 23

Gail Minault, ‘Sisterhood or Separatism? The All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference and the Nationalist Movement’, in Gail Minault, ed., The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1981b), p. 102. 24 Sanyal and Farah, ‘Discipline and Nurture’.

Life after the Madrasa

225

kin.25 Thus, the madrasa expands the social horizons of the students’ worlds by taking them outside the protective walls of the home, bringing them into a new kind of space where they will meet girls who come from different parts of the country and some male authority figures who are not kin, but where they are nevertheless protected from exposure to public spaces and public view. As Farah’s interviews with the six students from Jami‘a Nur reveal, after students have finished their madrasa educations or have had to leave the madrasa early for personal reasons, the madrasa experience continues to shape their lives at home. Following Moosa’s distinction between three aspects of madrasa learning—ta‘lim, or the acquisition of religious knowledge, particularly knowledge of shari‘a; ta’dib or the acquisition of adab, etiquette; and tarbiya, or the cultivation of moral excellence—we see how students apply the lessons learned at the madrasa to their lives at home, and later to their married lives. To take ta‘lim first, students are punctilious in applying the rules of shari‘a as they have been taught to do in their daily lives, whether by praying regularly, at the prescribed times and in the prescribed manner; by observing pardah; or by refusing to go against the wishes of their new husband and in-laws, as in the case of Khushboo when she refused her father’s invitation to address a women’s group in a religious discourse or taqrir. Likewise, they observe the rules of adab when they honour their parents, especially their mothers, for the sacrifices they have made to facilitate their educations away from home, or the myriad rules of etiquette they have learned in Hadith and other classes about the behaviour the sunna prescribes during menstruation, how they should eat and drink in the  approved manner, how they should address an 25

On the use of the term ‘amoral’, see Faisal Devji, ‘Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900’, South Asia (1991), 14(1): 141–53. At home, women of the family do not observe pardah before mahram relatives (those males with whom marriage is forbidden by the shari‘a) and contrariwise, they appear in pardah when meeting non-mahram men, though this does not include donning a niqab, the all-embracing, usually black, robe thrown over their regular clothing. The latter is worn when urban women move about in public spaces such as the marketplace, or when they need to go to the bank or a government office on important family business. If possible, such visits take place in groups of two or more women.

226

Scholars of Faith

older person, and how they should look after a guest, for example. And tarbiya, or nurture, is expressed when they take care of their younger siblings or nieces and nephews, teaching them the correct method of prayer, or when they decide to educate those who have not had the good fortune to study at a madrasa, as they have. Ghazala was so appreciative of her mother’s sacrifice in doing without her household help for the years she was at the madrasa that she said she had learned tarbiya from her mother, and ta‘lim from the madrasa. Her statement seemed to elevate the former over the latter in overall significance and importance. As Farah points out, when students return to their homes, they experience many changes: among other things, there are fewer restrictions on their physical movements and they have greater freedom than at the madrasa in determining how they use their time. A new situation thus presents itself: whereas at the madrasa they were subject to its strict scheduling regimen, now they see [the] lack of [such] regulation as a challenge that they must overcome in order to fashion themselves as pious subjects. … [They] begin to see the activities of their homes and neighborhoods through the lens of Islamic practice, [and begin to see] what seem to them to be deviations and transgressions which must be corrected and transformed in accordance with their understanding of proper Islamic behavior.26

In other words, students’ internalization of the madrasa’s worldview gives rise to a sense of obligation to teach those at home what they learned at the madrasa. This includes family members as well as members of the community. Yet there is a tension here, for they must be careful not to transgress gender and age hierarchies and social expectations. While none of the students addressed this directly, their expression of deference towards parents, parents-in-law, and husband was an indication that they were acutely aware of the need to strike a finely tuned balance between their desire to ‘teach’ and society’s expectation that they would ‘obey’.

A Passion for Teaching As many students expressed to both Farah and me in our conversations and questionnaires, they were eager to teach others what the 26

Sanyal and Farah, ‘Discipline and Nurture’.

Life after the Madrasa

227

madrasa had taught them. Indeed, as many studies have noted, teaching in general is a popular profession among South Asian women of all religious communities as it offers a mode of paid employment which does not require them to make a radical break from societal norms for women. Instead, it offers them a means of working outside the home in a safe environment while keeping them connected to the caretaking and domestic roles that they and their families expect them to fulfil. In addition, Latika Gupta points to the aspirational aspect of a girl’s expressed desire to teach. It allows her to think of herself as becoming a different kind of person from her mother, and of being special in a way she is not at present. But it is an ‘accommodated distinction’, to use Gupta’s phrase, because it allows her to stretch the family’s norms of what it considers appropriate female behaviour, but not too much, not beyond what society will permit.27 Gupta’s fieldwork was conducted in a secular government-aided school for Muslim girls in Old Delhi, similar in some respects to the Islamic Public School I discussed in Chapter 4. As I noted there, many students at the Islamic Public School felt disengaged from the formal curriculum of the school; what many appreciated the most was the school’s instruction in matters related to religion and morality, which is a class offered at the Islamic Public School but not required by the UP state government. However, the students and teachers at Jami‘a Nur displayed a high level of motivation and self-discipline for the reasons I explored in Chapter 4. I suggested that the subjects of the madrasa curriculum and ethos of the madrasa itself connected them with something larger than themselves, namely, the Islamic tradition and the Islamic past, which gave them a sense of pride in their identity as Muslim girls. The motivation for their desire to teach was thus somewhat different as well. While at one level it could have been linked to a desire to postpone marriage by a few years and chart a path that would be different from that of their mothers, I believe it also has a strong moral component centred on individual ethics, reform, and self-fashioning. This was evident in a number of students’ responses to my questionnaire, including the student I quoted in Chapter 3. The following is a sample of the responses I received:

27

Gupta, Education, Poverty, and Gender, p. 93.

228

Scholars of Faith

Student 1: After I leave here I want to teach. I want others to benefit by the knowledge I have gained. I want others to know their duties (ahkam) towards Allah and His prophet; I want to encourage others to do good (nek) deeds. They should observe namaz and the fast, treat others well (husn-i suluk), and treat their parents well, wish for others what they wish for themselves. And they should stay away from bad things like drinking alcohol, stealing, having sex outside marriage (zina), and being unjust (zulm) to one another. Student 2: I will teach my brother and sisters good things. Like: If an elder asks them to do something, then they shouldn’t make a face. They should consider it their responsibility to do it and do it well. Student 3: When I finish my studies, I want to start a madrasa and spread the religion of Islam. And those people who are ignorant (ghafil) of the religion of Islam, I want to tell them about it in order to earn the pleasure (raza) of Allah and His prophet. Student 6: I want to teach my brother and sisters the knowledge I have gained here. And I want to make them observe the namaz and fast. And I want my brother and sisters to stay away from bad things.

In these students’ minds (and those of others not quoted here), being a good, moral person and being an observant Muslim thus went hand in hand. They mentioned in the same breath wanting to teach their siblings to tell the truth, to do as their elders asked them without making a face, and to stay away from bad things, together with praying regularly, fasting, and performing other duties God wanted of them. Interestingly, none of them said anything about wanting to persuade their families, neighbours, or other Muslims to give up their false ‘Deobandi’ or ‘Wahhabi’ views. The fact that this rhetoric never rose to the surface of their discourse suggests once again that Jami‘a Nur students did not define themselves in opposition to Deobandis. Rather, as they saw it, the madrasa taught them to be good and moral Muslims tout court, without qualification. While others would define certain behaviours and beliefs at Jami‘a Nur as ‘Barelwi’, the students did not need to use labels to describe the madrasa and its teachings. As I noted in the previous chapter, this perspective flows from the tone set by Sayyid Sahib, in which interpretative differences are articulated without demonizing other Muslims (Deobandis chiefly, but other groups as well).

Life after the Madrasa

229

Farah’s interviews with the six graduates and former students of Jami‘a Nur take this enquiry a step further, as they show us how the students implemented the lessons they had learned at the madrasa. As we saw, Nayla, Nida, Ghazala, and Naghma had all taught for some time at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu’minin (or Jami‘a Umm), Sayyid Sahib’s madrasa for girls in Bareilly. That was fully 75 per cent of her interview sample. Two of the interviewees, Ghazala and Hajira, ran a small neighbourhood school for several months. Khushboo was the only person Farah met who had not taught classes, though she too excelled at a form of teaching, namely, oral public speaking or taqrir in which she conveyed to her female audiences moral lessons and guidelines to live by. Teaching was thus something they all cared about deeply. Their comments suggest that they saw it as an obligation to give back to the community what they had been privileged to learn at the madrasa. In Nayla’s case, this view was expressed by her father, who told Farah that when Sayyid Sahib first offered Nayla a teaching job at Jami‘a Umm, he had consented gladly without even asking about her salary and other terms of employment, because he ‘believed it was only fair for his daughter to pay the madrasa back after she had received an education. He considered it to be a service to the community and the society at large.’28 Another view, closely associated with the one mentioned earlier, is that by teaching others one learns more deeply and profoundly what one had known only superficially before. Thus teaching benefits oneself as well as others. Nida had also taught at the madrasa for a while, but eventually left because of the distance of the madrasa from her home. She told Farah that despite the madrasa’s emphasis on punctuality and the heavy teaching load, ‘[I was] happy to get a chance to teach because I believe that it is one of the purposes of learning itself—to teach others what I had learned for myself’.29 Ghazala

28 Farah, unpublished field notes. Nayla’s father also expressed his dissatisfaction, however, with what he considered to be high madrasa fees which made the madrasa unaffordable for some parents, and low teacher salaries which did not provide a living wage. 29 Farah, unpublished field notes.

230

Scholars of Faith

expressed this view most eloquently, as I quoted at the start of this chapter, when she compared herself to a sooty pot being cleaned and made to shine by the experience of teaching. Her use of the passive form—she said she was continually ‘being scrubbed’ (mein manjhti gayi) clean, in an action very familiar to Indian housewives, both rural and urban, who constantly have to clean their blackened cooking pots to make them shine again—highlighted her implicit meaning, that the act of teaching in and of itself enabled her to ‘see’ and understand more clearly the underlying logic and wisdom of what she had earlier accepted uncritically. The madrasa students’ ‘passion for teaching’ is nowhere better exemplified than in the introductory Islam classes run by Ghazala and Hajira in their neighbourhood, as this was a voluntary, unpaid labour of love. Hajira in particular was filled with distaste for what she considered the village girls’ unacceptable modes of dress and speech, and their ignorance of the proper rules of prayer and Islamic conduct. In Ghazala and Hajira’s classes we clearly see the ‘civilizing mission’ of the madrasa at work, which wants to reform the daily practices of Muslims in rural, semi-urban, and urban India to bring them into greater conformity with textual shari‘a norms.

Mapping a New Religious Habitus onto South Asian Gendered Norms Attiya Ahmad’s work among migrant South Asian domestic workers in Kuwait (all non-Muslim) in the early 2000s brings to the fore how gendered norms informed the choices and decisions they made, including the decision to convert to Islam, during their long sojourn there. In her chapter ‘Naram’ (soft, malleable), Ahmad discusses the unvoiced cultural expectation shared by the domestic workers, their employers, and their families in South Asia that they would adapt to the lifestyle of the household of which they were a part. Apart from having to learn how to use unfamiliar gadgets, make different kinds of food, speak a new language (Arabic), and understand a family’s religious practices, they had to create new affective bonds with their employers. Ahmad describes paid domestic work as a realm requiring ‘too much of the self rather than too little’. Through their labour, they became ‘dual agents of reproduction’, reproducing both their

Life after the Madrasa

231

family and work households.30 Only age and length of service conferred privileges and the relaxation of these gendered expectations. Furthermore, when they returned to their natal families, there too they had to fit into existing hierarchies based on age and gender. Their financial contributions to their families were verbally unacknowledged so that social relations could continue as before, undisturbed by their presence. Despite the obvious differences between the contexts and life histories of the domestic workers and the madrasa students in my ethnography, I found surprising resemblances between the two populations—resemblances that I believe have analytical value. Being domestic employees, the women had to adjust (to be naram) so as to fulfil their employers’ expectations. However, these expectations were not carried over to male domestics: the latter were expected to be unchanged by their Kuwaiti migration experiences.31 After many years of service with a single family and their emotional integration into it, some of the women chose to become Muslim despite the discouragement of many employers and the hostility of their natal families. As Ahmad notes, in South Asia the gendered expectation that women are ‘naram’ is articulated in the context of marriage, whereupon girls leave their natal families and begin to reside with their husband’s family: Studies have highlighted how women’s malleability is channeled toward, and considered essential to, their marriageability and ability to adjust to married life. Marriage involves significant transformation, most notably, the remaking of women’s subjectivities and social belongings such that they accommodate themselves to, and come to be identified with, their husband’s household.32

30 Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 115–6. 31 Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, pp. 103–4. 32 Ahmad, Everyday Conversions, p. 109. It is ironic that the domestic workers in Kuwait seldom marry and that these gendered expectations are put to the service of their employers’ households. Their lives are characterized by what Ahmad calls ‘suspension’.

232

Scholars of Faith

The students at Jami‘a Nur who adapt to life at the madrasa undergo a similar process of adjustment. Many, such as Nida and Ghazala, are homesick when they arrive. Over time they adjust and come to value the madrasa both for what they learn there and for the sense of purpose they acquire by internalizing its religious vision. By being ‘naram’, they begin a process of self-making in the religious mould of this particular Barelwi madrasa. In 2015, I happened to be at the madrasa when a new student illustrated what might happen when someone rejects the madrasa and its mission—when she refuses to be ‘naram’. [A] new student, who had little prior education and was placed in a class with younger students, was very homesick. One of Sayyid Sahib’s daughters, tired of trying to cajole her, told her that all the madrasa students were separated from their parents and yet they were going about their business normally. The new student first responded rudely [saying that she, the teacher, could not know what it was like to be away from home, given that her parents lived close by], then [she] pretended to faint, falling to the ground, in the hope that this would persuade the administration to call her parents and ask them to get her. (The student’s father came and got her two days later.)33

In the discussion that followed, the student was roundly criticized for having dared to speak to Sayyid Sahib’s daughter so rudely, as if the two were equals, when one was an uneducated young student and the other a highly educated teacher. What made the incident even more galling for the madrasa authorities was the fact that the student’s father was a disciple (murid) of Sayyid Sahib. Sayyid Sahib had done his disciple a favour by taking his daughter in. The lesson the madrasa’s teachers and administrators took from this incident—or ‘moment’, as Ahmad terms it—was that unless a person wants to learn, there is nothing that anyone can do to help. If the desire (ichha) for learning is lacking, the person is unteachable—in other words, if she refuses to be ‘naram’, she will fail. Her failure would follow her home and be a source of shame and family censure. For the madrasa administration, the fact that Sayyid Sahib’s daughter is a Sayyid made the student’s behaviour even more inexcusable and perhaps also incomprehensible, other than to ascribe it to her lack of education. 33

From my field notes, 2015.

Life after the Madrasa

233

*** This chapter concludes my ethnography of the Jami‘a Nur madrasa students, and the examination of the transformative role of the madrasa in their lives. By juxtaposing, in Chapter 4, the daily lives of the madrasa students with a glimpse of student life in the Islamic Public School with which the madrasa shared a building until 2014, and by taking a brief look at the lives of a handful of madrasa graduates in their home environments in this chapter, I have tried to show what distinguished the students of Jami‘a Nur from their secular counterparts, and also how students’ families negotiated many variables in deciding whether to send their daughters to the madrasa, which is often far from home and entails long periods of separation between parents and their daughters. How the madrasa changed the students and what lasting impact their educations has had on their subsequent family lives can only be glimpsed from a distance. But the outlines seem clear: the students return home imbued with a strong desire to adhere to the dictates of the shari‘a in their lives, as the madrasa authorities interpret it, and to abide by the duties of a practising Muslim. The reformist impulse of the madrasa thus carries over into the community at large through the students, though undoubtedly they will have to adjust in practical ways to the particular circumstances of the families into which they marry. The process of change is thus a negotiation over a lengthy period of time, perhaps throughout adulthood, between community expectations of women’s roles, or the adab of social relations in daily life, and the textually based knowledge of shari‘a norms that the madrasa students imbibe and embody through ritual practice and personal demeanour. The broader question of what impact the spread of girls’ madrasas in South Asia will have on society at large is the subject of vigorous academic debate. In the current political climate in India, Muslims find themselves on the defensive politically, socially, and economically. By all measures, Indian Muslims are less well-to-do, live in poorer neighborhoods, and are less educated than their Hindu counterparts, as the Sachar Report and other studies have documented. There are some who argue that in view of this replication of the colonial imbalance of power—in which Hindus occupy the role of former British colonialists and Muslims that of Hindus, Muslims, and other Indians in the

234

Scholars of Faith

colonial period—madrasas such as Jami‘a Nur merely reinforce the cultural isolation of Muslims by separating Muslim girls from the Indian mainstream. It is thus a defensive posture that can do nothing to help the Muslim community overcome its marginalized status in society. In fact, in the long run, it reinforces that social marginalization. On the other side of the debate, there are those who point out that the Indian state has failed in its constitutional duty to provide Muslim communities an affordable education and to ensure the availability of adequately paid jobs in their neighbourhoods. Since the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, state schools have been virtually absent in rural and semi-rural India, where millions of Muslims live. Private schools have had to fill the gap. Given this reality, madrasas are performing a valuable and much-needed service by providing Muslim parents an inexpensive education for their children and giving them a hot meal during the school day. I would argue that this social service role of madrasas is only part of the story. The efflorescence of girls’ madrasas in South Asia today must be seen in historical context, as a logical extension of the educational efforts of the Muslim reform movements in South Asia that began in the late-nineteenth century. It is significant that girls’ madrasas are associated with the major South Asian maslaks—Deobandi, Barelwi, and Ahl-i Hadith, to name the largest ones, to which we must add the Jama‘at-i Islami and the Shi‘a. These girls’ madrasas are therefore part of the maslaki competition for influence that has infused intra-Sunni politics in South Asia since the late-nineteenth century, and continues to so do today. Although Jami‘a Nur does not actively participate in inter-maslaki competition, the madrasa curriculum and students’ micropractices at the quotidian level speak to its Barelwi worldview. In this sense, it participates in the competitive marketplace of ideas that South Asian Sunni Muslims have had to choose from since the late-nineteenth century. Given the likely future influence of the female graduates on their home communities after they marry and have their own children, I expect each of the maslaks to continue to expand madrasa education for girls. At present there is no evidence that the current anti-Muslim climate in India is leading the maslaks to come together in the interests of Muslim self-preservation. In Part II of this book I turn to the very different context of Al-Huda International, which takes us to Pakistan and the South Asian diaspora in North America.

6 AL-HUDA INTERNATIONAL Muslim Women Empower Themselves through Online Study of the Qur’an

Tell the people [O Muhammad], ‘If you sincerely love Allah then follow me: Allah will also love you and forgive you your sins. Allah is forgiving, merciful. Also tell them, ‘Obey Allah and His messenger.’ Allah does not love the disobedient. —Qur’an 3:31–2 The Prophet (on whom be peace) is told to say to the people, if you all love Allah—that is, if you incline towards him with obedience—then follow me, with attention and care, and follow closely, every footstep [of the way]. If you are following someone in another car, and you don’t know the way, you won’t follow at a distance, will you? No! You will make sure you are right behind that car, not letting it out of sight. —Exegesis of above verses by an Al-Huda teacher Jihad in our time is to spread the din of Allah through da‘wa. —Al-Huda teacher, 24 May 2010 Think that today is your last day. —Al-Huda teacher, 16 January 2012 Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

238

Scholars of Faith

Al-Huda International is a relatively new Muslim organization to have emerged in South Asia, having been founded in 1994 in Pakistan by Dr Farhat Hashmi and Dr Idrees Zubair. It began modestly when, after giving birth to her son in 1994, Farhat Hashmi took maternity leave from her teaching job at the International Islamic University. While at home, she started teaching her children and their friends the Qur’an. According to one of her daughters, other people liked her lessons so much that they asked her to teach them too. She decided to take a full year’s maternity leave and try teaching the Qur’an at home as an experiment. When the year was up, instead of going back to her job at the university, she resigned and expanded her Qur’an classes. Al-Huda was born when Hashmi moved her classes to a building in Nazimabad, Islamabad.1 Since then, Al-Huda has spread rapidly to other parts of Pakistan and elsewhere in the world where the Pakistani diaspora is wellestablished, notably in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, and parts of the Middle East. It is thus no surprise that it has attracted two book-length academic works already, namely, Sadaf Ahmad’s Transforming Faith (2009) and Faiza Mushtaq’s PhD dissertation, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’ (2010). Al-Huda (literally, ‘the guidance’) is an organization for Muslim women with a straightforward and simple goal, namely, to teach Muslim women the Qur’an in the original Arabic and to understand its meaning, and beyond that, to encourage them to internalize its message and use it as a guide for personal ethical transformation. While this goal may sound quite unremarkable to outside observers—given that the Qur’an is the pre-eminent source of religious guidance for all Muslims everywhere and that its authority as the literal word of God is the bedrock of Muslim faith—the goal of teaching Pakistani women how to read it in Arabic is in fact both innovative and highly ambitious. Indeed, as the vast majority of Muslims in non-Arabic speaking countries are unacquainted with Arabic and know only parts of the holy book by heart, the implications of such a movement for wider social change are immense. In the view of the founders of Al-Huda, if Muslim women (and all Muslims eventually) could read the Qur’an 1 This information is based on my personal conversation with Taimiyyah Zubair, Hashmi’s daughter, on 21 May 2014.

Al-Huda International

239

directly, without recourse to a translation, God’s word would enter their hearts and change their lives, so that they would begin to live the way God wants them to, the way the first Muslims did back in the time of the Prophet Muhammad (572–632 ce). The emergence of Al-Huda at the present historical juncture is part of a broader worldwide phenomenon of women’s movements in the Muslim world that Saba Mahmood characterizes as ‘piety’ movements. Like the Egyptian women’s mosque movement that Mahmood analyses, Al-Huda seeks to inculcate in its female followers the values of personal piety (taqwa) and its associated qualities of patience (sabr) in the face of personal hardship, adherence to scripturally enjoined norms of Islamic behaviour, female segregation and public veiling, and acceptance of male authority in the family, among other things. For the social scientist, movements such as these raise the broader question of how one is to understand what appear from the outside to be ‘antifeminist’ Muslim women’s movements. All three writers whose works most immediately concern me here—Saba Mahmood, Sadaf Ahmad, and Faiza Mushtaq2—address this issue in different ways. All three are Pakistani women, and two of them (Mahmood and Ahmad) write candidly about their personal identification as feminists to whom the movements they were studying initially seemed ‘objectionable’3 or ‘problematic’.4 In the course of their fieldwork, however, both Ahmad and Mahmood came to see the movements they were studying in a different light. Mahmood writes, ‘Over time, I found these [ feminist] ideals could no longer serve as arbiters of the lives I was studying because the sentiments, commitments, and sensibilities that ground these women’s existence could not be contained within the

2 My thanks to Faiza Mushtaq for generously sharing her PhD dissertation with me. This work has helped me enormously in understanding the Al-Huda movement. See Faiza Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2010b). 3 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 198. 4 Sadaf Ahmad, Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), p. 10.

240

Scholars of Faith

stringent molds of these ideals’. Their world had to be understood on its own terms, not in terms of the ‘ur-languages of feminism, progressivism, liberalism, or Islamism’.5 Mushtaq, a sociologist, understands the women of Al-Huda in Pakistan ‘as active producers of knowledge about what womanhood means as they negotiate th[e patriarchal] structures’ of Pakistani society,6 not as ‘subjects totally determined’ by those structures. Thus, movements such as Al-Huda have caused academics interested in them to expand the very notion of what it might mean to be a ‘feminist’. Winkelmann’s work on a Tablighi-Jama‘ataffiliated madrasa in Delhi also points in this direction.7 Moreover, as both Ahmad and Mushtaq point out, Al-Huda must also be understood in its Pakistani context,8 and in the context of the history of Muslim reform movements in South Asia over the past century.9 Before I move on to the focus of this chapter, namely, Al-Huda’s online Qur’an classes, I would like to briefly describe how Al-Huda operates in Pakistan.

Al-Huda International in Pakistan As noted earlier, Al-Huda began as a Qur’an school for girls in Islamabad, Pakistan, and now has schools in all the major Pakistani cities. As both Ahmad’s and Mushtaq’s ethnographies make clear, the organizational framework within which the Al-Huda women operate is a highly structured one. It is modelled on the secular schools of Pakistan and yet is very different from them, in that it also uses concepts and methods taken from the world of business and marketing, emphasizing the optimization of time and resources and the use of technology to achieve its goals. Mushtaq aptly describes this organizational form as a ‘hybrid’. Al-Huda’s founders come from a South Asian reformist Islamic milieu, specifically from Ahl-i Hadith and Jama‘at-i Islami

5

Mahmood, Politics of Piety, pp. 198–9. Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 35. 7 Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b). 8 Ahmad, Transforming Faith, pp. 25–37. 9 Mushtaq, ’New Claimants to Religious Authority’, Chapter 2. 6

Al-Huda International

241

backgrounds.10 Both these organizations advocated reform of religious practice in order to increase adherence to the normative example of the Prophet, though their chosen paths were different. The Ahl-i Hadith favoured the study of Arabic in order to understand the Qur’an and Hadith by oneself, without recourse to the recorded decisions of the four schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Shafi‘i, Hanbali, and Maliki). This path of independent juristic reasoning (ijtihad) was in radical opposition and contrast to the Deobandi, Barelwi, Nadwi, and other traditionalist movements of the late-nineteenth century, which advocated taqlid or juristic adherence to the decisions of a specific school (madhhab), which for most South Asians was the Hanafi school. The Ahl-i Hadith were also strongly opposed to Sufism, as are the founders of Al-Huda. The Jama‘at-i Islami, founded in the early-twentieth century by Mawlana Mawdudi (d. 1979), did not emerge from a madrasa-educated milieu of Islamic scholarship but from a university-educated urban one, and sought to bring about institutional change from above, through political means. As Zaman points out, Mawdudi attached central importance to the concept of God’s ‘sovereignty’ (hakimiya) as mentioned in Q 12.40 and other Qur’anic verses. Zaman explores the writings of a range of South Asian Muslim thinkers, including Mawlana Azad (d. 1958) and Muhammad ‘Ali (d. 1931), on this singularly ‘modern’ idea and examines its twentieth-century resonance, including in the writings of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) of Egypt.11 Ultimately, the language of the sovereignty of God was included in

10 On the Ahl-i Hadith, see Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 268–96; Claudia Preckel, ‘Ahl-i Hadith’, in Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, 2007–3 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 92–7. On the Jama‘at-i Islami in Pakistan, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and most recently Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), Chapter 4. On the Jama‘at-i Islami in India, see Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-eIslami (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010). 11 Zaman, Islam in Pakistan, pp. 139, 141–5, and passim

242

Scholars of Faith

the 1949 Objectives Resolution of Pakistan. However, the modernist Pakistani state, while acknowledging God’s sovereignty, envisaged a democratic state guided by the ethical norms and values of the Qur’an. The vision of the modernist state and that of Mawdudi were incompatible.12 Al-Huda, while politically quiescent,13 unlike the Jama‘at-i Islami, resembles it in terms of its appeal to the secular, Western-educated elites of Pakistani society; its use of secular models of organization; and its well-defined organizational structure (which in the case of the Jama‘at was distinctly authoritarian). Maimuna Huq’s ethnographic study of Jama‘at women’s Qur’an study groups in Bangladesh shows striking similarities between the teaching style of Al-Huda and that of the women she studied.14 It is also worth noting that Al-Huda shares with all the nineteenth-century reformist movements the latter’s ready adoption of the latest technology (at that time, the printing press, the telegraph, and the like) in order to disseminate their views as widely as possible. As Gilmartin points out, the link between state and society has historically been a weak one in the Muslim world, even when the rulers themselves were Muslim. In Pakistan, the relationship between the two—between the moral community of individual believers and the nation-state—has been ambivalent and subject to constant tension between the rulers and the army on the one hand, and Pakistani society on the other.15 Today Pakistanis are turning increasingly to the 12 Fazlur Rahman said that Mawdudi’s confusing of political sovereignty with the religious worship of God was ‘the greatest mischief’. Zaman, Islam in Pakistan, p. 155. 13 In this, it is like the Tablighi Jama‘at, which emphasizes personal piety and faithful adherence to the duties enjoined on all Muslims. The Tablighi Jama‘at also emphasizes outreach or da‘wa, as does Al-Huda. See Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004a), pp. 185–6, 272–5, and passim. 14 Maimuna Huq, ‘Reading the Qur’an in Bangladesh: The Politics of “Belief” among Islamist Women’, Modern Asian Studies (2008), 42 (2/3), pp. 457–88. 15 David Gilmartin, ‘A Networked Civilization?’, in miriam cooke and Bruce Lawrence, eds, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Al-Huda International

243

universal umma beyond the state to define themselves as Muslims. According to Mushtaq, Al-Huda’s relationship with elite Pakistanis was important in its early years, and Al-Huda was not subject to state interference in its curriculum or functioning. In Mushtaq’s view, this was largely the result of Dr Farhat Hashmi’s personal connections with people in positions of political authority,16 and of the organization’s deliberate policy of staying away from direct political involvement, in accordance with its stated aim of promoting Islamic knowledge in a ‘nonsectarian’ and ‘nonpolitical’ manner.17 The broader Pakistani context for the creation of Al-Huda was the period of Zia’s presidency from 1977 to 1988. At this time a number of initiatives were promoted by the government to highlight the country’s Islamic identity. Mushtaq notes that the ‘Council of Islamic Ideology was restructured, a Federal Shariat court was created with an appellate jurisdiction, and a Majlis-e-Shura (Consultative Assembly) was to be a legislative body with appointed rather than elected members. These institutions were meant to oversee the implementation of shari‘a law for an Islamic state and the ulama were given prominent representation in them.’18

The Zia government, which came to power in the midst of the Nizam-i Mustafa (the Prophet’s System) movement, took a number of additional steps to increase the Islamic nature of the state: in 1979 it promulgated the Hudood Ordinances,19 and in 1980 it began 16 On this, see Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 110. Mushtaq notes that Farhat Hashmi came to the attention of Mrs Leghari, the wife of Farooq Leghari, the president of Pakistan from 1993 to 1997. Mrs Leghari became an admirer of Farhat Hashmi and invited her to present dars at the presidential residence. According to Mushtaq, support from ‘elite circles’ was ‘crucial’ in Al-Huda’s early years. I should say, however, that Taimiyyah Zubair, who read this chapter in draft form, commented that ‘Al-Huda is an NGO, I don’t see why the state should interfere in the functioning or curriculum of Al-Huda. … Her personal connection with Mrs Leghari I believe is irrelevant to this, as Al-Huda existed even before Mrs Leghari became familiar with Al-Huda’. 17 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 110. 18 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 69. 19 Zaman, Islam in Pakistan, pp. 187–8. Also see Anita M. Weiss, Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan (New York:

244

Scholars of Faith

collecting zakat dues and making them available to the ‘ulama, who used some of the funds to establish madrasas.20 Some changes had begun earlier, during the Bhutto era, such as ‘greater space for Islam in the military’,21 a trend that increased under Zia. The narrative of jihad became marked in Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, both among the religio-political groups (the Deobandis, Barelwis, Jama‘at-i Islami, and Salafis) and in the government. Anti-Shi‘i activity, spurred by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which had given the Pakistani Shi‘a a sense of strength and hope, also increased in the 1980s: in Punjab’s Jhang district, which had a sizeable Shi‘i landlord population, a new militant Deobandi group, the Sipah-i Sahaba (Army of the Companions [of the Prophet]), was founded by Haqq Nawaz Jhangawi (assassinated 1990) in order to engage in anti-Shi‘i militancy.22 As Zaman noted in an earlier work, the anti-Shi‘i activities of the Sipah-i Sahaba were implicitly also an attack on Barelwi Sunnis.23 The Zia government also put its stamp on the field of education. The number of madrasas in the country increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, the result of multiple factors including the war in Afghanistan and the influx of Afghan refugees into Pakistan, and also increased prosperity in the 1980s among lower-middle-class and middle-class Pakistanis working in the Gulf states.24 Both Zaman and Mushtaq point out that the Zia government’s recognition of the highest degrees conferred by madrasas as having university equivalency in the government-funded educational system allowed madrasa

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), on the implications of these changes for Pakistani women. 20 Zaman, Islam in Pakisan, pp. 125–6, 185. As Zaman points out, there were strong Shi‘i protests to this move, as the Shi‘a wanted to be subject to Ja‘fari law, not Sunni Hanafi law. 21 Zaman, Islam in Pakisan, p. 237. 22 Zaman, Islam in Pakisan, pp. 189–90. The Sipah-i Sahaba was banned in 2002 by General Pervez Musharraf, along with a number of other groups, but it continues to operate under other names. 23 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 121. 24 Zaman, Islam in Pakistan, pp. 125–7.

Al-Huda International

245

graduates to gain recognition for their madrasa educations and also opened the door to employment in government agencies.25 With regard to state-funded government education, Islamization in government was expressed in terms of the creation of a new subject, ‘Pakistan Studies’. The 1986 curriculum of this new subject has been laid out in the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s (SDPI) 2002–3 Report.26 Starting in the 1980s, the congruence of Islam and Pakistan became central to the ideological message imparted by the school system as a result of these policy decisions. According to the SDPI Report, this reorientation of the government curriculum had multiple dimensions across the educational system. Mushtaq writes: As part of the Zia regime’s Islamization drive, new syllabi were drawn up and official textbooks were re-written to further reinforce the equation between Pakistan and Islam and instill loyalty to both amongst students. These revisions included various distortions of history, such as presenting the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent as a nation defined by a common, uniform religion and always distinct from the Hindus and other communities, glorifying early Muslim conquests of the region and vilifying other religious traditions, turning Jinnah into a religious-minded figure and the ulama into supporters of the movement that created Pakistan, and painting heroic images of the Pakistani armed forces. During this period, the teaching of Arabic as a second language, Quranic recitation, and breaking for ritual prayers during school hours were made compulsory, female students and teachers were forced to cover their heads, and applicants for teaching positions had to demonstrate their knowledge of Islam. Some of

25 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 78; Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 148. 26 A.H. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim, compilers, ‘The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistani Urdu, English, Social Studies and Civics’, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s 2002 Report’ (Islamabad [2002–3]: unpublished). This 130-page report analyses the cumulative effect of the curricular decisions made during Zia’s rule and by subsequent civilian and military governments up to 2002, the year when the report was written.

246

Scholars of Faith

these practices have been rolled back by subsequent governments but they have been unwilling or incapable to take on the religious lobby by making curricular changes, and the public school system continues to indoctrinate students into extremist views.27

According to Mushtaq, this was the system in which Al-Huda students were educated. When they joined Al-Huda, they were therefore receptive to the idea that they needed to bring their lives into greater conformity with the normative ideals of a universal ‘Islam’ unencumbered by sectarian labels and affiliations.28 At the highest educational levels, those at which Al-Huda’s founders Hashmi and Zubair have taught is the International Islamic University (IIU) in Islamabad, which was founded in 1980 by General Zia with Saudi assistance, with the ambitious goal of contributing to an ‘Islamic renaissance’ through the research and teaching of its scholars.29 Mushtaq notes that part of the appeal of Al-Huda for urban Pakistani women in the 1990s was that it offered an alternative to madrasa education, which did not attract them. The secular liberal, Western-oriented feminist movements—All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) and the Women’s Action Forum (WAF)—did not attract them either, as they perceived these organizations as being too Westernized, ‘out of touch with Islamic values, and following a foreign agenda’.30 More attractive to many urban women were the women’s wings of the Jama‘at-i Islami and other Islamist groups, which they saw as promoting a more authentic vision of what it meant to be a Pakistani woman. It was in this urban context that Al-Huda classes emerged in the early 1990s, offering a wholly different way of being Muslim and modern at the same time. This brings me to the present, online context of this chapter. As noted earlier in the chapter, in the online context, unlike the Pakistani one, the Al-Huda community is geographically dispersed and often living in a non-Muslim society. Although most of the students who join Al-Huda’s online English classes today are of South Asian origin, and overwhelmingly Pakistani (rather than Indian, Bangladeshi, and  so 27 28 29 30

Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 84. See Ahmad, Transforming Faith, p. 182 and passim. Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 90. Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 100.

Al-Huda International

247

on), the concerns that they have as Al-Huda teachers, students, or administrators are necessarily different from those of the Pakistani women who flocked to Farhat Hashmi’s classes in the 1990s. They are more likely to identify themselves as middle-class women in Canada, Britain, or the United States than as upper-class Pakistani women. They are also English-educated, computer-savvy, immigrant, and bicultural. This context is truly ‘international’, as indicated in Al-Huda’s very name for itself.

Doing Virtual Fieldwork Since 2007, when Al-Huda began offering online classes in North America,31 the number of such classes has grown every year, and they continue to expand. From its Canadian headquarters in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, where Farhat Hashmi and her family have been living since 2005,32 Al-Huda manages a complex and sophisticated network of classes which are partly live and partly based on taped lectures of its onsite classes in Canada. I was a participant–observer in one of Al-Huda’s many online classes between December 2009 and October 2013, and in this virtual ethnography I base my comments on my observations as a student during this period. In December 2009, I registered in the online Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English Course, which is a three-and-a-half-year diploma course offered twice a week.33 Students who successfully complete the course receive an Al-Huda diploma, which in Pakistan is neither recognized by the state nor by any of the traditional madrasas.34 My research experience was quite different from that of Mahmood, Ahmad, and Mushtaq in at least two respects: first, the fact that my ethnography was online and not face-to-face, and second, the fact that I was a nonMuslim studying the Qur’an alongside Muslim students. After I joined, teachers who interacted with me went out of their way to help me feel comfortable with the groups I was in and to 31

Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 123. Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 115–16. 33 This is the same ‘flagship’ course which, if taken on a full-time basis, can be completed in 18 months. 34 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 132. 32

248

Scholars of Faith

be accommodating. While including me in all regular class activities, they also made allowances for the fact that I was studying at Al-Huda for the purposes of research and permitted me to observe rather than participate in some activities, such as Qur’an recitation from memory (tajwid). In other respects, such as giving periodic tests, I participated like a regular student. In what follows, I want to give the reader a sense of what it was like to be a virtual student of the Qur’an.

A Typical Day at a Taleem al-Qur’an Online Class, 2010 It is a Monday, about noon Eastern Standard Time in the US and Canada. Class begins promptly at 12:15. You put on your headphones and log on to the website on PalTalk a few minutes beforehand, prepared for computer glitches, as often happens on a Monday. Over the weekend, the course administrator will have emailed you the password, which often changes from week to week to prevent unauthorized persons from accessing the site. Students also have access to a secondary site, called WizIQ, which runs in tandem with PalTalk and is specifically used to hold a class called ‘Reflections from the Qur’an’, using PowerPoint presentations. However, most of the classes are conducted on PalTalk. While you wait for the course administrator to come online, students listen to recorded Qur’anic verses and greet each other by typing in ‘As-salam alaikum, sisters’ and the appropriate response in various abbreviated formats. Some students chat with one another directly, exchanging news. On the right of the computer screen, the students’ names and IDs show up as soon as they ‘enter’ the ‘room’. By looking at the last two letters of the ID, you can tell where the person is located geographically. Apart from abbreviations such as CA, FL, KY, MI, and so on, which tell you that the person is in the US, you also see UK (for the United Kingdom), SL (for Sri Lanka), UAE (for the United Arab Emirates), AB (for Alberta, Canada), and so on. You quickly realize that everyone is dealing with different time zones. For some people, particularly the ones in India and Sri Lanka, it is late at night. In fact, it is already about 10 p.m. when the class starts—and it will go on for a little over four hours. However, most of the students are based in different parts of the US.

Al-Huda International

249

Attendance is taken soon after the exchange of greetings, with each student’s name being called out in quick succession. Each student responds by typing a ‘1’ to indicate that she is present. Sometimes she also types in her ‘group name’ after the 1. All students are divided into groups of about six or seven and meet with their group mates under the supervision of a group leader later in the week to review the previous week’s lessons. The group meeting is a smaller, more intimate setting than the regular class, and schedules are more flexible as well, accommodation being readily made for students who have urgent family obligations to attend to. (This is, in fact, a good way to make friends and get to know one another.) Almost all the groups are named after one of the wives of Prophet Muhammad: thus, there is a Group Khadija, Group Sauda, Group Aisha, and so on (Group Fatima is the exception, being named after the Prophet’s daughter). The first class of the day, Qur’an recitation (tajwid), in which students listen to Arabic recitation of the current lesson, is usually conducted by a coordinator (or moderator) located in the US. When the course began, a teacher from India, soft-spoken but firm in her manner, would recite each verse herself, twice over, in real time, asking students to listen the first time and recite with her on the second round. However, after several months she switched to having students listen to a well-known Qur’an reciter (qari’) instead. This part of the class lasts 15–20 minutes. The recitation might be followed by a class on how to recite. At the beginning of the course, students learned Arabic pronunciation (makharij) of the different letters of the alphabet, with an emphasis on correct vocalization techniques. Midway through the course, though, the teacher introduced a new class, namely, rules of Qur’anic recitation, a rather technical and difficult subject. Periodically she tests students’ recitation skills, asking them to come up to the microphone and recite ‘in front of’ the rest of the class. Everyone listens carefully, and at the end of the short recitation the teacher corrects her mistakes, though she is also careful to praise her for her overall performance. These tests are graded. The first part of the class usually lasts about 45 minutes, after which the tajwid teacher bids the students good-bye and signs off after saying a short prayer. Since she is in India, it is close to midnight for her. She also has a three-year-old baby girl. It is time for them to go to bed.

250

Scholars of Faith

Students are required to buy the Qur’an in two very different formats. One is the Arabic Qur’an (the mushaf), which is especially marked in different coloured inks to facilitate recitation. Indeed, one of the topics discussed both during this first part of the class, and in group sessions, has to do with the number of beats required for the pronunciation of specific Arabic words in a given verse, the correct place to pause, and so on. Second, students also have the translated Qur’an in 30 parts (juz). During the translation class, they will refer to whichever juz they are studying that day, in order to understand each verse, word by word, in English. During the Qur’an recitation class, however, students are instructed to follow along in the mushaf (which has no English translation) rather than the juz. This is done so as to force them to relate text to meaning without an aid, thereby testing their powers of memorization and comprehension. These 2 sets of books are published in India (the mushaf by a publisher in Delhi) and Pakistan (the 30 juz by a publisher in Islamabad), respectively.35 Each juz consists of the Arabic Qur’an with two English translations under each line of Arabic: first, a literal, word-by-word translation of each word (and parts of each of them, in case of conjoined words), and second, a more idiomatic English translation under that. Dr Idrees Zubair, one of the cofounders of Al-Huda, has certified each of the juz to be true and accurate, and has signed his name at the end of the book. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Glasgow, where he did his research on a medieval Hadith scholar.36 35 Mushtaq points out that the books used by Al-Huda bear a marked Ahl-i Hadith interpretative imprint. Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 106, 136n24. Also see p. 136: ‘In Al-Huda’s case, the particular content of Islamic education is shaped not only by concern for women’s needs and responsibilities, but also by a reformist and literalist Ahl-i Hadith orientation that prioritizes the Qur’an and hadis as foundational sources of knowledge and denigrates competing styles and practices of Islamic learning’. Also see Chapter 3, passim. 36 Dr Idrees Zubair’s PhD thesis, which may be obtained from the British Library, was submitted to the University of Glasgow in 1989. It is entitled ‘A Critical Edition of Kitāb Tuḥfat Ḍhawī al-Irab fī Mushkil al-Asmāʼ wa alNisab by Abū al-Thanāʼ Maḥmūd b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, known as Ibn Khaṭīb al-Dahshah al-Ḥamawī (734–850/1349–1431); with Introduction and Notes’. I would like to thank Taimiyyah Zubair for personally responding to

Al-Huda International

251

His ideological leanings are with the Ahl-i Hadith, while those of his wife (Farhat Hashmi) and her parents while in college, were with the Jama‘at-i Islami.37 I must add, however, that Taimiyyah Zubair, their daughter, emphasized to me that her mother’s family connection with the Jama‘at-i Islami was not as close as scholars believe. The next class is usually a du‘as (supplications) class. The teacher for this class is based in Canada and does not address the online students in real time. Instead, the class hears her taped lecture, replayed for them by a moderator (situated in the US), who interacts with the online class directly throughout the day, moving them from one subject to another, making sure there are no technical problems (voice issues were a constant problem in the first few months, with the teacher’s voice suddenly either going silent mid-sentence or exploding in a cacophony of static, which hurt the ear), and answering student questions. The du‘a class teacher asks her students to open a book of supplicatory prayers—there are prayers for the morning and evening, prayers for knowledge and good health, and so on—and to start reciting. (These books are available for purchase from Al-Huda but can also be downloaded from their website.) The du‘as are taken very seriously. Students are told that if they do not start their lessons with a supplication to God, their efforts may not be successful. Du‘as are jointly read aloud, translated, and must later be memorized. This is also a time when the teacher might address students on matters of etiquette, the dress code, and other disciplinary issues. She speaks authoritatively, directly, and colloquially (asking on one occasion, for example, ‘When you say your du‘as, are you on autopilot, or do you think about what you are saying?’ ‘On autopilot’, lamented an online student.). After this class is over students are usually given a break and encouraged to walk around and stretch, though the break often coincides with prayer time. Since the online students are located in different parts of the US and on different continents, they will be leaving

my request for a copy of Farhat Hashmi’s PhD thesis, which is unavailable at the University of Glasgow. I discuss this work in Chapter 7. 37 Ahmad, Transforming Faith, pp. 38–40; Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 107–8.

252

Scholars of Faith

their computers to say different prayers—for some it is time to pray the afternoon (‘asr) prayer, while for others it is time for the evening (maghrib) or night (‘isha) prayers. The next class is one of the most intense, requiring that one pay close attention and take rapid notes on what the teacher says. This teacher, Taimiyyah Zubair, is also in Canada (as before, this lesson is taped), and is a daughter of the founders of Al-Huda. The lesson consists of word-to-word translation of the Qur’an. Over a period of three-and-a-half years (the length of this online course), the Qur’an will be translated word-by-word from beginning to end—starting with the Fatiha (Chapter 1) on the first day, to the 114th or last chapter in Juz 30 at the end of the course. The number of verses dealt with in each class varies, depending on their length and complexity, but as time goes by, the speed of translation and exegesis picks up. On average about 10 juz pages are translated every class. Careful attention is paid to every detail of the Arabic—its literal and figurative meanings, its contextual meaning, the way the meaning can change depending on the preposition that follows, the association of meanings that appear unrelated, and so on. To give an example, when studying Chapter 4, ‘The Women’ (Al-Nisa), verse 34, which discusses the conditions under which a husband may strike his wife, the word ‘daraba’ (wa-idribuhunna) was translated as ‘strike’, as in tapping lightly, rather than ‘beat’, and the teacher discussed the change in the meaning of daraba when it is followed by the preposition fi (in) and when it is followed by a‘la (upon). Thus, ‘daraba fi’ means to travel, and is related to striking because one strikes the earth with one’s foot as one walks. One would not say that the foot beats the earth, but that it strikes it. But daraba can also mean ‘cite’ or strike in a figurative sense, as in verses where God is said to ‘strike a similitude’, or give an example to illustrate a point. The long-term effect of this kind of analytical dissection of the Arabic is to give students an appreciation of the linguistic nuances of the Qur’anic text, while also encouraging them to accept the interpretation of the teacher. Her authority, based on her erudition, makes the students eager to learn and follow, while despairing of how far behind they are in their own mastery of the text. Another aspect of the word-for-word translation class is its constant reference to the students’ own day-to-day lives, and the connections

Al-Huda International

253

they can—and indeed must—learn to make between the Qur’an and the everyday events of their lives in Canada (and by extension, elsewhere as well). As the epigraph at the start of this chapter illustrates, one of the hallmarks of Al-Huda’s teaching style is to speak in terms of the everyday. When talking about the importance of obeying Allah and the Prophet, as in the exegesis of Q 3:31–2, the teacher illustrated perfectly the need to follow closely behind, or one would be lost—just as one would do if one were following a friend’s car in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Taimiyyah’s ability to quote different Qur’anic verses effortlessly from memory is thus coupled with her knowledge of the context of the students’ own lives, of their daily preoccupations as Canadian Muslim women—or, for the online students, Muslim women in other parts of the West. As one who has lived in the same cultural milieu as they have, and who, like them, speaks flawless English, she can relate to them in ways that an Urdu-speaking older woman could not. However, because Taimiyyah Zubair also grew up in Pakistan and speaks Urdu, she is intimately familiar with the Pakistani context. This allows her—like some, but not all, of the other Al-Huda teachers—to play an important hinge role in bridging the two worlds. Pakistan was the primary context of her parents, and to this day her mother, Farhat Hashmi, expresses herself far more fluently in Urdu than in English. This class, together with the exegesis (tafsir) class that follows, represents the heart of what the online Al-Huda course—and Al-Huda more broadly—seeks to accomplish, namely, to make the Qur’an’s message comprehensible to each student, to make its message come to life in the context of their own lives, and to exhort students to live by its rulings and spirit. The goal is, in short, to create ‘pious selves’, no matter where in the world they may be. The tafsir class, the last one for the day, reviews the verses studied earlier in light of Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) and Qur’an commentary, in particular the tafsir of Ibn Kathir (1301–1373 ce). Here more than elsewhere, connections are made between the idealized past and the less-than-ideal present. Thus, commenting on a verse in which the Companions asked the Prophet what foods they could lawfully eat (‘They ask you what was made lawful for them. Say! All good, clean things are lawful for you.’ Q 6:4), the teacher asked rhetorically,

254

Scholars of Faith

‘How often do we ask questions just for the sake of asking? Do we ask because we really mean to act on our knowledge?’ Using the occasion offered by this verse as a teaching tool to highlight the students’ failure to meet the high standards set by the first Muslims of history, she exhorted them yet again to bring the Qur’an into their lives through pious action in the everyday world. Another way in which this was done in the first few months was by giving students a ‘reflection question’ based on that day’s lesson, asking them to offer their own thoughts about how they would implement a particular teaching. Over time, the mix of classes changed somewhat, with some receding to the background while others were added. Thus, while grammar was less frequently addressed later in the course than at the beginning, other subjects were added. These included ‘Reflections from the Qur’an’, in which PowerPoint presentations depicting different verses were projected on the screen while the teacher talked in real time about what students were seeing. Students responded by typing in comments which could be seen on one side of the computer screen. Other subjects were: the life of the Prophet (sira), which was taught from an English-language book called When the Moon Split; rules of recitation; and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet).

The Students: Online Relationships and Dynamics, and Their Responses to the Course As online students, it goes without saying that the teachers and students could not see one another directly. This fact, unremarkable because it was so basic, appeared to have a significant impact on the way the class interacted. Thus, students could not, and therefore did not, look around and observe how the others were dressed, what they looked like, where their friends were sitting, or anything else at a visual level. Notably, for quite some time I observed that none of the informal discussions among the students dealt with matters related to dress, unless specifically brought up by the teacher or the Qur’anic text itself. (This is not to say, however, that audiovisual aids were not used, for Al-Huda utilizes all the latest technology. It is simply to say that the students did not see each other.) Almost all the work of teaching and learning was aural, emphasizing the capacity to listen carefully. However, the students did not

Al-Huda International

255

hear one another talk, except briefly as described earlier, and again in the small groups in which they participated on a regular basis once a week through Skype. Although students quickly learned to recognize the voices of the teachers, they were almost completely unfamiliar with those of their fellow students. The way one ‘knew’ one’s fellow students in this online environment was thus quite different from the way one gets to know other people in a physical classroom. Yet— given that this was a long course, lasting three-and-a-half years (or one-and-a-half for full-time students)—people did of course form close relationships. During the four hours of class, students and teachers communicated almost constantly by typing comments, responses, or questions on the computer screen. These hastily typed messages—the subject of which was almost always occasioned by the circumstances at hand— were the means for the creation of a new kind of community among the students, and between them and the onsite teachers and moderator, themselves former students of Al-Huda’s Taleem al-Qur’an course, just a few years senior to them in terms of their association with Al-Huda. As time went by, some students took a more active role in the class and emerged as leaders, helping others who, having joined after the start of the course, were struggling to catch up, or those who were simply less knowledgeable than they. Friendships also formed, particularly among students who lived in the same city or geographically close to one another. All the students were women, and almost all of them were of South Asian origin. Their families’ first language was either Urdu or one of the other South Asian languages, such as Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sinhala, or Telugu. For none of them was Arabic their native language. The need to master the intricacies of Arabic in order to fully understand the Qur’anic text gave rise, over time, to a deepening sense of appreciation for the complexity of the language and a sense of accomplishment in having come so far. In my view, the challenge posed by this linguistic hurdle was itself an important source of bonding among students. (Once I inadvertently logged on during a student ‘reunion’ of recent graduates and immediately felt like I had gate-crashed a party, judging by the sounds of joy as different students ‘met’ each other again. As in any room where everyone knows one another and you do not. I felt like an outsider. I quietly closed the door, as it were, and left the room.)

256

Scholars of Faith

The fact that the students of the class I was a part of had chosen to enrol in Al-Huda’s English course rather than one of its Urdumedium courses indicates that they were more comfortable communicating in English than in their families’ language of origin. When they discussed issues that arose in class, they did so in English—with a liberal sprinkling of Islamic/Arabic abbreviations, greetings, and so on—though their knowledge of Urdu was also periodically evident. Their bilingual upbringing, as also the Western context in which many (though not all) of them lived, were apparent in small ways, unremarked upon, during class. However, judging from their English accents and references to everyday matters in informal conversation, to me many of them seemed to be second-generation immigrants who had grown up in Canada, the US, Great Britain, or elsewhere in the South Asian diaspora. This would account for their decision to be part of the English class rather than the Urdu ones, which had far more students because those classes were centred on Hashmi’s Urdu lectures on tape. Most of the women were young, in their twenties or thirties. Some were married with small children. Others were unmarried, or, in a few cases, older women with grown children. Also, they were—overwhelmingly, though not exclusively—Muslim by birth. There may have been some converts, judging by the fact that some of the students had Christian first names. Some described themselves as ‘reverts’, that is, Muslims who did not practise their faith until recently (similar to being ‘born again’, in the Christian context). Also important was the obvious fact that the students were educated. Al-Huda as an organization attracted educated, upper- and upper-middle-class Pakistani women from the very start,38 though its current students represented a wide spectrum of income categories, from the wealthy to the poor. Since its relocation to Canada (and the US) it had attracted middleclass, second-generation South Asian Muslim women.39 38 Ahmad, Transforming Faith, pp. 22, 40, 46, 46n, and passim; Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 110–16. 39 Taimiyyah Zubair, Farhat Hashmi’s daughter, commenting on the class composition of Al-Huda students, wrote:

Our vision is Quran for all, in every hand, in every heart. You will find in every Al-Huda class, students from very diverse backgrounds. On my recent visit to

Al-Huda International

257

Once a student joined, Al-Huda made every attempt to keep her from leaving. To encourage students in the task ahead, the teachers told them at the very start that it was ‘easy’ to understand and memorize the Qur’an, as there is much repetition in it. Thus, they must not be intimidated. They were given positive reinforcement and praise for their efforts, as well as tips on how to study and how to organize and manage their time (including advice on cutting down on time spent cooking elaborate meals on social occasions), and religious sources of encouragement. Despite their best efforts, however, some students did drop the course on account of small children, illness, family problems, and so on. In no case, however, to my knowledge, did students leave for economic reasons. The monthly fees for the course were quite low (USD 26.25 for US students, and less for those in South Asia, when I took the class in 2009–13). In my class, there were about 50 students at the outset, and a year later there were between 35 and 40. Two years into the course, there were just under 30. While some left, a few also joined during the year. The teachers and students radiated a sense of confidence. There was a clear sense of empowerment among women who had completed the course (all the teachers were former Al-Huda graduates) as well as students who had dedicated themselves to mastering the Qur’an and staying the course, which meant they had embarked on a process of self-transformation. They were clearly attracted to Al-Huda’s method of marrying a modern teaching style—which emphasizes active rather than passive learning, and incorporates considerable variety in the daily routine—with an urgent religious message—namely, that the here and now is the field of action in which each Muslim individually must work towards (his or) her own salvation in the hereafter, and that the stakes for success or failure could not be more momentous,

Pakistan, as I sat in a hall full of over 500 students, I saw all sorts of women: from the highly educated to even those that could barely read/write. At Al-Huda, everyone is welcome. When I took the course myself in Karachi, there were women from [the] upper most classes of Pakistan (Noor Jehan’s daughter being one) and also women that came from the most rural areas of Karachi. This is something that you would instantly observe when you sit in any Al-Huda class.

The same, she wrote, was true of Al-Huda’s classes in Canada.

258

Scholars of Faith

for failure would condemn one to eternal hellfire. In these and other ways, Al-Huda worked assiduously to create a ‘pious self’. Over time, it was clear that the shared experience of taking the long classes, sometimes at odd hours of the night, had helped these students to bond with one another. In fact, the bond had grown so strong that before an unprecedented two-month break for Ramadan and the summer of 2010, some students thought the break was too long. They were afraid that they would forget what they had learned. They encouraged one another to keep practicing the Qur’an every day; to use their free time to pray each prayer at its allotted time, not putting it off until the last minute; to review the lessons they had studied since the class began; talk to family and friends about what they were learning so some of them might decide to try the course themselves; and to spend time with relatives and friends, renewing social relationships which had been neglected over the past year. Other words of advice included a simple message: smile and do good works such as visiting a sick person or cooking for a neighbour, thereby earning a reward for yourself in the hereafter. On a day when (after the break was over) the Qur’an lesson turned to permitted (halal) versus forbidden (haram) foods, there was a lively discussion online as students tried to sort out which grocery stores they could patronize for the purchase of meat. Since they had to avoid any meat over which the name of God (basmallah) had not been pronounced, they agreed that they could not buy meat at a Christianowned store. But what about Jewish butcher shops? Were they acceptable, given that Jews observe kosher? They decided they would ask their group in-charges, in effect asking their group leaders to render a religious judgment based on their greater knowledge of Islamic precepts. In a sense, they seemed to be expecting their group leader to have the kind of specialist knowledge that in previous eras would have been rendered by a jurisconsult (mufti) in a fatwa. In practice, however, most of the teachers—who had been students of the Qur’an only a year or two longer than the current batch of students had—were unable to answer questions such as these and were compelled to report the question to someone with greater religious knowledge than they. On a few occasions since the class began, another kind of student response was the outpouring of emotion when something unusual, special, or moving occurred in the course of the day. This happened,

Al-Huda International

259

for instance, when Farhat Hashmi was heard (on tape) interacting with the Canadian students, asking them questions, and being playful, serious, and caring all at the same time. The online students got to listen and respond on their computers, to an audience consisting of the moderator and themselves. Twice they listened to ‘games’ of musical chairs, in which the students were seated in a circle on the floor, one presumes—as this could not be seen by the online class, only heard. At a signal—the abrupt cessation of a taped Qur’an recitation—one of the teachers asked whoever was left holding a ball (the one who was ‘it’) a question, and if she responded correctly, she stayed in the circle. If not, she had to get up and become a spectator. The questions came at a rapid pace, leaving one no time to think. One had to know the answer. As each question was asked, the online students quickly typed in the answers, thus joining in the game and also competing with one another online. Like the onsite students, they too were fully engaged, ‘on their toes’, as it were, to get the right answer. After a while, Farhat Hashmi could be heard consoling students who had had to leave the circle by saying that there was no shame in being wrong, that this was another way of learning the Qur’an, that there are always winners and losers, and that they were earning a reward in Allah’s sight by their efforts. She thus showed her sensitivity to their public embarrassment. The online students responded warmly by typing in comments expressing their appreciation of her. The next time a similar game was played, the students who did not get the right answer were told to sit inside the circle, rather than outside it. On both occasions, the online students were moved by Farhat Hashmi’s concern for the students and expressed their deep admiration of her. Another memorable occasion occurred when a young male Qur’an reciter (qari’) was invited to address the students in Canada on techniques of recitation. Again, the online students got to listen. This recording was played over the course of two separate classes and was enthusiastically received both times. In the second segment of the talk, the speaker gave his audience some practical tips on what they could do to improve their vocal chords and hence the quality of their oral recitation of the Qur’an. These included the avoidance of certain kinds of food (hot and spicy) and drink (anything acidic or too cold), as well as moderation in the amount they ate (because no one could

260

Scholars of Faith

recite well if they had overeaten—he was quite graphic here) and the practice of yoga to tone the body. The online students responded both with admiration and a sense of dismay that everyday items like tea, coffee, Pepsi, lemon juice, and hot, spicy foods were bad for the voice. Instead, the speaker recommended a regular dose of honey (which is praised in the Qur’an for its intrinsic qualities) in warm water. Contrasting the speaker’s style of recitation with that of others, the online students said that the sound of his recitation was beautiful, unlike some reciters who shouted out the Qur’anic verses in a piercing tone. They wondered about the role of yoga, though, which was associated in their minds with Hinduism and therefore to be avoided. But, responded the online moderator, it was just a kind of breathing exercise and had nothing to do with Hinduism. That day the students were excited and animated. The speaker they were responding to was dynamic, young, and engaging, and very comfortable in his role as public speaker, even before an audience of white-clad, veiled (muhajibba) Al-Huda students. His manner—and theirs—spoke of their full immersion in, and yet their implicit self-distancing from, their Canadian environment. Another animated conversation took place in the context of our lesson on verses 30–4 of Sura al-Nur (Q 24). Verses 30 and 31 command believing men and women to lower their gaze and protect their modesty. The teacher and students were looking closely at a series of PowerPoints relating to verse 31, an unusually long verse addressed specifically to women, and answering questions posed by the teacher. Teacher: When you learned these verses (ayas), how did you feel? Did you feel that there was anything you had to change? [She quoted the part of v. 31 about lowering the gaze.] For men, the command is: not looking at women, not looking at other men, or looking at a forbidden (haram) act. If by chance a man sees a forbidden act, he must look away. Women are also commanded to do the same. But in addition, women are given an extra command. Lower the gaze, guard the private parts. Aya 31 says to women, 1st, to lower the gaze and guard the private parts. 2nd. Women should cover their heads, must not be dressed [provocatively].40 40 According to Shawkat Toorawa, ‘the Qur’an provides little information regarding specific forms of dress, though it is categorical regarding women

Al-Huda International

261

Let’s say, you are watching something on TV, or attending a lecture. Are you going to look around and then look at him continuously? You shouldn’t look at men who are unrelated (na-mahram) continuously. Kids should not do so either. Don’t wear revealing clothes. How can someone make sure in a swimming pool, club, or party that they stay within the limits? Or when you go to the doctor? Does this mean that we cannot wear nice clothes? No. But it means that if we are around a na-mahram, we must put a jilbab or hijab over us. If you wear a flashy jilbab or hijab, then you aren’t within the limits. But they don’t have to be black either. What is the most difficult part? Allah has given us the knowledge, and in Sura Nur he has given us these commands. We have to be strong enough to implement these commands. Is it easy? Maryam: We should check our intentions. For whom are we doing this? Hafsa: Control your [base, desirous] self (nafs). Farah: Seek Allah’s help. Sadia: Make supplication (du‘a) for them [Muslim women who do not wear the hijab], tell them the importance of this in Islam. Farah: Delaying [wearing the hijab] is a tactic of Satan (the shaytan). Teacher: Where should a hijab go up to? The headscarf is so small? Does it fulfil our purpose? No, it should cover the chest. Nur: Should cover neck, head, ears, and over chest.

While the students were discussing these Qur’anic verses, they were watching a succession of PowerPoints on their computer screens. One picture showed a girl in tight jeans and top but wearing a tightly wrapped scarf over her head. Next, there was a picture of a woman with

who should “draw their hooded robes (jalabib) close around themselves.” Yet the Qur’an’s use of clothing imagery in a metaphorical sense is noteworthy’. Shawkat M. Toorawa, ‘Clothing’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 346–7. There is an extensive literature on different forms of veiling, and its political ramifications. See, among others, Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

262

Scholars of Faith

a flowing abaya and headscarf, and a check mark. Further PowerPoints indicated that certain items of external adornment (zeenat), such as shoes, purse, kohl, henna on hands, small ring, nice clothes under the jilbab—were okay. Women were said to be faced with a double problem: (1) disobedience by not covering properly, and (2) to be the cause of disobedience for men by attracting their attention. The PowerPoints also cited two opinions regarding how the verse about protecting one’s modesty should be interpreted: Opinion 1: Covering the entire body except the face and hands, which would eliminate any danger of social dysfunction (fitna). Opinion 2: Covering the entire body, including face and hands, except what was exposed unintentionally. My notes during the class convey something of the flavour of Al-Huda online classes. The students’ eager responses to the lessons were striking. They were astounded and delighted by the Qur’an’s ability to ‘speak’ to them and proud to be, as Al-Huda put it, part of God’s ‘chosen community’. Although they could not have a face-toface discussion, they interacted animatedly by typing in their comments and responses to the teacher’s questions on their computer screens. The topic of the lesson varied from day to day, depending on the verses being studied. In each case, they were related to the realworld situations in which the students lived and students were asked to take a good look at themselves to see if they matched up to God’s commands. This was a multidimensional, everyday undertaking which had to be informed by correct knowledge and intentionality.

Al-Huda’s Many Contexts: Creating a ‘Pious (Muslim) Self ’ Here, There, and Everywhere My use of the term ‘pious self’ is indebted to the work of Saba Mahmood in Politics of Piety (2005). Mahmood’s ethnography of the mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt resonated with me deeply as I read it. Mahmood insists that we take seriously the women’s religious worldview, and that we—by which she refers primarily to Western intellectuals grounded in a secular–liberal, feminist perspective—recognize the parochialism of our assumptions when we look at contemporary Muslim women’s movements.41 41 For a sharply critical view of Saba Mahmood’s work and that of other scholars she labels ‘revivalist’, see Afiya Shehrbano Zia, ‘Faith-Based Politics,

Al-Huda International

263

The Al-Huda women I write about here, like the Egyptian women Mahmood studied, had chosen to study the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet (Hadith) in order to apply the teachings of these foundational Islamic texts to their own lives in the here and now. They focused on certain key concepts, such as fear of God (taqwa, also translated as piety), patience (sabr), and spreading the faith to others, mainly other Muslims (da‘wa). Although their goals did not challenge the patriarchal order and were therefore not what we would recognize as ‘feminist’, yet what they were doing was nonetheless radical, new, and potentially subversive of the existing order.42 In this sense Al-Huda was also political. The very act of learning the Arabic Qur’an directly, interpreting its message, and applying that message to their personal, day-to-day behaviour—without the intermediacy of male authority figures—gave these women personal authority with the people around whom they lived, be they family or friends. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sometimes considerable disputation, conflict, and life-changing decisions resulted from this.43 Paradoxically, while Al-Huda played down the importance of human intermediaries, it nevertheless relied heavily on the mediation of technology in order to spread its message and reach out to a wider audience around the world.44 The organization’s reliance on Enlightened Moderation and the Pakistani Women’s Movement’, Journal of International Women’s Studies (November 2009), 11(1): 225–45. Also see the discussion of Mahmood’s work in Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), which deals with a girls’ madrasa in New Delhi. 42 Mushtaq describes the reasons why Al-Huda has been criticized both by the Pakistani ‘ulama (primarily Deobandis) and by Western-educated, secular, liberal Pakistanis. See Faiza Mushtaq, ‘A Controversial Role Model for Pakistani Women’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) (2010a), 4: paras 29–38. Available at http://samaj.revues.org/index3030.html. 43 Among other stories, I have heard of instances in which Al-Huda women in Pakistan ended up living in a nuclear family arrangement rather than a joint family one because they insisted on observing strict veiling (pardah) in the presence of brothers-in-law in their husband’s parental home. The inconvenience of this led them and their husbands to eventually move out into separate living quarters altogether. 44 I am grateful to Sumathi Ramaswamy for this insight at a South Asian colloquium in the Research Triangle (2011).

264

Scholars of Faith

technology—including everything from the Internet, to PowerPoints, Skype, MP3 players, cassettes, and others—was striking. Mastery of this range of technology was put to work in a variety of ways to further the goals of the organization. Women who were skillful in the use of these tools found many ways to volunteer their time and thereby rise to positions of leadership in the organization. Nevertheless, technology was no more than a tool. Leadership was highly prized in Al-Huda and the leader at the very centre of it all was Farhat Hashmi, known as Ustaza (female teacher) to the students. Her ability to delegate authority to trusted students had allowed others to take up many of the day-to-day teaching and administrative duties of the organization, freeing her up for travel, giving public lectures, and opening new girls’ schools all over the world.45 Online broadcasts of her lectures kept students all over the world connected with her even in her absence. Complementing her leadership, a well-ordered hierarchical structure below her linked all the different parts together, over many continents. In turn, leaders at every level recruited volunteers from among the best students, and new students were attracted throughout the year through personal networks and word-of-mouth recommendations. As Mushtaq points out, the decentralized structure of the organization (like a franchise that can be replicated anywhere) has been a key factor in Al-Huda’s rapid growth and remarkable success.

*** To conclude, the dynamics at play in the Pakistani context of Al-Huda’s onsite classes and that in the online classes based in Canada were clearly different. My sense is that some of the younger students46 were charting a new path for themselves that was different from that

45 Taimiyyah Zubair told me that her mother does not do any fund raising on her travels: ‘At Al-Huda we never do fund-raising, nor do my parents ever travel for this purpose. The maximum we do is inform people about an upcoming project and its cost and how they [can] contribute if they wish to.’ 46 Sometimes the roles are reversed. In one conversation, the UK-based mother of a young woman lamented the fact that her daughter did not wear the veil in public.

Al-Huda International

265

of their immigrant parents, while also distancing themselves visibly (through their voluntary donning of the hijab) from their Western (or other) environments. Thus, the act of wearing the hijab or of praying regularly, fasting during Ramadan, or displaying other signs of Muslim religiosity, assumed different meaning(s) in Toronto or London, for example, than it did in Karachi or Lahore. While potentially oppositional in both contexts, in a non-Muslim context it was a more visible statement of difference than in a Muslim-majority one. Such distancing may also be seen, for instance, when Al-Huda teachers remark on the wasteful expenditures of Canadians on Christmas gifts or expensive tickets to a ball game.47 For the students living in different Western cities, their decision to be part of Al-Huda and its vision for personal change based on study of the Qur’an thus seemed to be an individual choice. At the same time, the online community provided by the Al-Huda class was a powerful source of support and affirmation in a diasporic context. The community of Al-Huda ‘sisters’, ephemerally created in cyberspace, was—by virtue of its being chosen rather than ascribed, based on the shared goal of studying the Qur’an and transforming the self—a means of re-creating the self and of transcending the ascribed relations of family and kinship as well as the non-Muslim environment around the student. For those coming to Al-Huda for the first time, it could be a heady experience, though the heavy demands it made on students’ time tested their resolve. But paradoxically these heavy demands were a source of Al-Huda’s attraction as well, a source of affirmation and pride, and of connection to others in this online community. For students who were married with young children, the family dynamics may be more complicated if their Al-Huda educations led to conflict with husbands or in-laws. Students were repeatedly told to talk to their families about what they were learning in their online classes (this being a form of da‘wa), but not to be arrogant about their knowledge or talk down to those around them. Whatever the specifics of each student’s circumstances, their newfound knowledge of the 47 However, at other times teachers also praised their Christian neighbours and fellow-citizens and directed their criticism towards fellow Muslims instead.

266

Scholars of Faith

Qur’an in Arabic was a source of immense empowerment for every student and a conduit for personal change which undoubtedly had ramifications for changing interpersonal relations and structures of authority. The fact that online students had to negotiate a double set of loyalties—to their families on the one hand, and to their online community on the other—was a source of conflict in some cases, though students did their best to bring spouses and children into the fold of their new community and into greater conformity with their own orthoprax lifestyle.48 Finally, the online classes showed a remarkable shift in the linguistic usage of the Al-Huda movement. The use of vocabulary appeared to have shifted in significant ways from its South Asian context to an Arabized one in the online classes. This shift was evident in the use of language in the two settings. The reliance on English as a language of instruction in the class in which I was a participant–observer, and the increasing Arabization of its vocabulary were marked. Students and teachers did not use Urdu terms to understand aspects of Qur’anic language and grammar. Rather, their language was based on Arabic usage. This appears to me to be a significant change between the Pakistani context and Al-Huda’s online English-language classes.

48 See Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (Durham: Duke University Press 2017), for related observations in the context of South Asian domestic workers in Kuwait; and Attiya Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space: Foreign Resident Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the Arabian Peninsula’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

7 AL-HUDA’S INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS

al-Silafi is credited with having heard traditions from the shaykhs of more than 70 different towns. His shaykhs and those who transmitted on his authority are too numerous to count. … He was unparalleled for being heard for more than eighty years. —Farhat Naseem Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz’, p. 6. In hadith sciences, ‘Ilm al-rijal [the science of men] has great importance. Traditionists were conscious of this at an early date and, over the centuries, produced in every branch of it a considerable amount of material. —Idrees Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitāb Tuḥfat Ḍhawī al-Irab fī Mushkil al-Asmāʼ wa al-Nisab’, Preface

Before I focus on the teachers, students, and the institutional and organizational aspects of Al-Huda, I want to examine the religious and intellectual dimensions of the movement in some detail. The attention of most observers of Al-Huda International is on Farhat Hashmi. However, in this chapter I want to bring in Idrees Zubair’s imprint on the organization. Although Farhat Hashmi comes from a family which had affiliations with the Jama‘at-i Islami, after her study of the Hadith sciences, she became, like her husband, an Ahl-i Hadith follower. Both have PhDs in Islamic Studies from the Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

268

Scholars of Faith

University of Glasgow, Scotland. In this chapter I examine this background in order to understand how it is reflected in the Al-Huda organization that they have jointly founded. The evidence from their scholarly research as well as the books Al-Huda students study—ranging from different editions of the Qur’an to biographies of the Prophet, Hadith collections, and others—point clearly in the direction of an Ahl-i Hadith influence. It therefore becomes important to learn the history of the Ahl-i Hadith movement in South Asia as well as the ways in which it differs from other contemporary Sunni movements.

Farhat Hashmi: The Scholar Faiza Mushtaq writes that Farhat Hashmi was born in Sargodha, Punjab, on 22 December 1957. She was the eldest of 12 siblings. Along with them, she learned the Qur’an at home from her father, Abdur Rehman Hashmi, a homeopathic doctor by profession. Her father was also a member of the Jama‘at-i Islami, and held the position of amir (leader) of the Sargodha branch of the Jama‘at for some time.1 Although Hashmi’s parents were not keen for her to study beyond middle school, Hashmi took the initiative to complete high school,2 and then obtained her BA from the Government College for Women in Sargodha, having studied Arabic, Islamic Studies, and psychology (subjects in which she would retain a lifelong interest). After her BA, Hashmi went to the University of Punjab, Lahore, to do an MA in Arabic. She graduated from there in 1980, and shortly afterwards married Idrees Zubair, a fellow student at the university. In 1983, they both moved to Islamabad, where they got teaching positions at the International Islamic University (IIU). While there, she

1 Faiza Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2010b), p. 171. This entire biographical sketch is based on information from Mushtaq. Taimiyyah Zubair, Farhat Hashmi’s daughter, differs from Mushtaq on the importance of the Jama‘at-i Islami connection in Farhat Hashmi’s youth and student years. 2 This information is based on my personal conversation with Taimiyyah Zubair, 21 May 2014.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

269

would hold dars (informal Islamic lessons), teaching the Qur’an in Urdu translation to other students on campus.3 As Faiza Mushtaq relates it: Hashmi started as a lecturer of Arabic language, moved to the faculty of Islamic Studies (Usul-ul-din) as an assistant professor, and also served as a student advisor in the women’s section of the university. During this time she received a government of Pakistan scholarship for higher studies. … She and Zubair both proceeded to the University of Glasgow.4

The mother of two small daughters at the time (a third daughter was born in Scotland, and a son after the couple’s return to Pakistan), she left them in the care of her parents back in Pakistan and accompanied her husband to Glasgow in the late 1980s. While there, both of them worked towards getting their PhDs on topics related to different aspects of Hadith studies. As Mushtaq notes, ‘The Al-Huda movement literature emphasizes Hashmi’s doctoral degree, and she is widely addressed by her title of “Dr. Farhat Hashmi,” linking her to specialized forms of modern knowledge and the prestige associated with them’.5 By the same token, however, the fact of a PhD degree from a Western university has also been used to discredit her in ‘ulama circles. The well-known Deobandi ‘alim Mawlana Taqi ‘Uthmani, for example, ‘is dismissive of her doctoral education because it was supervised by non-Muslims, based on biased interpretations of Islamic knowledge, and bereft of the character-building, truth-seeking spirit of guidance’.6 Or as another critic said, ‘She has a PhD but she does not have the ijaza [authorization] to 3 Mushtaq writes that Farhat Hashmi was a nazima (head) of the Islami Jama‘at-i Talibat, the student wing of the Jama‘at-i Islami, but according to Taimiyyah Zubair, this is incorrect. Taimiyyah said her mother gave dars in her spare time when she was at the International Islamic University, because she was passionate about studying the Qur’an and passing on her knowledge of it to others. Personal conversation with Taimiyyah Zubair, 21 May 2014. 4 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 172. 5 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 180. 6 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 202–3. Here Mushtaq is citing Mufti Abu Safwan, ed., Maghribi Jiddat Pasandi aur Al-Huda International (Western Modernism and Al-Huda International) (n.p.: Jamhoor Ahl-i Sunnat wal Jamaat, Pakistan, 2003).

270

Scholars of Faith

spread Islam. … Who has given her the authorization?’7 Many ‘ulama see the recourse to Western institutions of higher learning as a form of ‘orientalism’ and a continuation in a different form of ‘the Western ideological domination over Muslims of India since colonial times’.8 However, as Zaman points out, it has become normative for leading Pakistani ‘ulama to seek university degrees themselves, as Mawlana Taqi ‘Uthmani’s intellectual biography illustrates.9 To my knowledge, none of Al-Huda’s critics—nor, indeed, the admirers of Al-Huda or scholars—have actually read Hashmi’s thesis. It is hard to access, being unavailable on the University of Glasgow library website. It seems important, therefore, to sum up the contents of the thesis here, as the scholarship on which it rests should be in no doubt.10 Farhat Hashmi’s research deals with a twelfth-century Hadith scholar named Abu Tahir al-Silafi (d. 1181 ce). Originally from Isfahan, Persia, as a young man al-Silafi travelled widely in the Muslim world—to Baghdad, Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Azerbaijan, Kufa, Alexandria, Armenia, and elsewhere—over an 11-year period, settling eventually in Alexandria, Egypt. During his travels, or rihla, he studied under famous Hadith scholars,11 collecting Hadith from each of them, and writing numerous books. Most of these have remained unpublished and unknown to the scholarly world. Hashmi lists and briefly describes the content of his works, both published and unpublished, indicating where copies of the latter are still to be found. For the most part, they are housed in libraries in Istanbul, Baghdad, Damascus, Rabat, or European cities. The most important of al-Silafi’s published works is a biographical dictionary 7

Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 203. Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 202. 9 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 80–1. 10 As noted in the previous chapter, I am very grateful to Taimiyyah Zubair for making her mother’s PhD thesis available to me electronically. I had tried to obtain a copy from the University of Glasgow, but they do not have it on record. Consequently, I wrote to Dr Hashmi requesting a copy and some time later, in June 2012 my request was granted. 11 Seventeen of his over 600 teachers were women. 8

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

271

called Mu‘jam al-Safar (Biographical Dictionary of [Hadith Scholars Encountered during] Travel), which contains the biographies of a number of contemporary Hadith scholars, many of them of Sicilian or Spanish origin. This book is the subject of two previous PhD dissertations. Hashmi analyses and translates an unpublished work called Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz that is housed at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.12 In this book al-Silafi defends the practice of seeking ijazas (defined as a ‘license [oral or written] given by a scholar to the recipient to transmit or teach a particular text’), and gives brief biographies of a number of Hadith scholars he had met and from whom he received permission to transmit Hadith in the course of his travels.13 Al-Silafi’s text shows clearly that the practice of giving ijazas was controversial. Of the different methods by which Muslim scholars collected Hadith, sama‘a (defined as ‘a method of taking up of Hadith in which the teacher reads and the students listen and memorise’)14 was the oldest and the most prestigious. Closely related to this—in that it was also oral—was the practice of qira’a in which ‘the student reads under the shaykh and the latter listens and approves the reading’.15 In addition to memorization and reading, accuracy of transmission from teacher to student was ensured by the teacher dictating the text orally to his students, and the latter copying it in the teacher’s presence. Avid ‘seekers of knowledge’ like al-Silafi travelled far and wide in order to hear as many Hadith as possible from different teachers, copy them 12 See Farhat Nasim Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz by Abu Tahir Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Silafi al-Isbahani (d. 576/1181) with Introduction, Translation and Notes’ (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1989). 13 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, pp. 141–2. 14 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, p. 145. 15 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, p. 144. A third kind of personal transmission from teacher to student was munawalah, defined as ‘a method of taking up of hadith in which the shaykh hands on his traditions to the recipient without sama‘ or qira’ah’. Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz, p. 143.

272

Scholars of Faith

down, and collect them in books of their own, carefully recording the chain of transmission, or isnad, of each Hadith, which ultimately went back to the Prophet through a number of transmitters. After the canonical collections of al-Bukhari, Muslim, and others became widely accepted in the eleventh century, the oral transmission of Hadiths and Hadith collections became less vital to the Muslim community (as the fear of forgery receded), and the method of written ijazas also came into use.16 Hashmi lists eight kinds of ijazas.17 Some of these, such as the ijaza ‘amma (which is ‘permission given to people in general as, “I give ijazah to the Muslims”, or “to all of my contemporaries”’)18 were accepted by some scholars but rejected by others. Others, such as transmission to an unknown person or to a child, were almost universally condemned. Not all ijazas were suspect, however. Some kinds, in which a teacher certified that a student had mastered a particular book and was able to teach it to others (as in, ‘I give you ijazah to transmit the book of al-Bukhari’),19 were widely accepted by scholars. It is in this context of debate about the growing practice of giving ijazas that al-Silafi’s writings should be understood. Hashmi notes that al-Silafi was a ‘fervent advocate’ of the giving of ijazas, and was most persistent in seeking them from scholars who were reluctant to give them.20 She gives two examples of al-Silafi’s persistence: the first, when he wrote to al-Zamakhshari (d. 1143/44), the famous Persian scholar, asking for his ijaza, and when the latter did not respond, he wrote again the following year. In the second example, he asked Abu Hafs ‘Umar b. Yusuf al-Siqilli (d. 1107/8), a Sicilian scholar, for his ijaza: 16 For a comprehensive history of Hadith transmission, see Jonathan A.C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), Chapter 2. 17 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, pp. 41–2. 18 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, p. 41. 19 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, p. 41. 20 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, p. 49.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

273

The latter was renowned for not wanting to transmit hadith to anyone, and no one had previously been able to obtain his ijazah. However, when al-Silafi found out that he had been the recipient of particular material, he argued with him for a long time until he persuaded him to give his ijazah of what he himself had received either by ijazah or sama‘.21

Once he had obtained the ijazas, al-Silafi was very ‘generous’ in passing them on to ‘other people’. In the second part of the thesis, which consists of an English translation (critical edition) of al-Silafi’s book, one encounters passages which clearly explain the reasons for al-Silafi’s position. Travel was not possible for everyone, he argued. Many could not afford to travel for one reason or another, and therefore face-to-face transmission through sama‘ was ‘a matter of fortune’, only possible for a few. In order to make sure that no sunnas of the Prophet were lost to posterity, other methods must also be used. The Prophet himself had shown the way by writing letters to leaders in distant places through emissaries.22 Furthermore, al-Silafi argued, what mattered most was ‘the transmitter’s knowledge, carefulness and precision, however the transmission takes place, whether by sama‘, munawalah or ijazah, since all these are permissible’.23 As long as the transmitter was reliable, it was unimportant how the Hadith was transmitted. More important was the fact that by transmitting the ‘material by ijazah [through stringent standards]’, the sunna was strengthened and thereby a sound basis was laid for the shari‘a. He suggested that Hadith scholars should indicate how they had learned the Hadith they were transmitting by using phrases such as ‘I heard’ (anba‘ani) or ‘we heard’ (anba‘ana)

21 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, p. 50. 22 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz, pp. 81–3, and 95 (for the phrase, ‘sama‘ is a matter of fortune’, which is repeated elsewhere in the work as well). Al-Silafi also argued, quoting the Qur’an, that Allah did not want to create difficulties for the believer, so they should heed the ‘concession’ made available. Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz’, pp. 81–2. 23 Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz’, p. 82.

274

Scholars of Faith

if they were transmitting ‘from someone whom he [the scholar] has seen and spoken to face to face’, or ‘he wrote to me’ (kataba ilayya) if the Hadith had come from someone through correspondence, and so on.24 This way, the method of transmission would be evident to all, and each person could decide whether to accept the Hadith or not. A further issue that greatly concerned al-Silafi—and Hadith scholars generally—was the nature of the isnad, or chain of transmission, this being another important factor in determining the reliability of the Hadith. Even a Hadith that had been acquired by ijaza had to have a known isnad, for it was ‘the isnad … that connected a scholar to the Prophet and allowed him to act as an authoritative interpreter of Islam’.25 Further complexity was added over time, as books of Hadith were handed down rather than individual Hadith. These too came to have chains of transmission from teacher to student, initially passed on orally but later in writing. By al-Silafi’s time, Hadiths with short chains of transmission, with fewer rather than more transmitters, had become particularly prized. Where initially the desire for short chains sprang from concerns with accuracy and authenticity (if there were fewer transmitters, the chances of error were reduced), over time the reason for wanting short chains was that the number of intermediaries between oneself and the Prophet was smaller and therefore one was closer to the Prophet both in authority and blessing.26 Al-Silafi notes in several of the Hadiths he transmits that they had an ‘elevated’ chain.27 To conclude, Farhat Hashmi’s research on al-Silafi’s book establishes her mastery of a complex Arabic textual tradition. While alSilafi is not well known in scholarly circles today, this unpublished manuscript raises issues that are important in the history of Hadith

24

Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa alMujiz’, p. 84. 25 Brown, Hadith, p. 45. 26 Brown, Hadith, pp. 46–8. 27 ‘Uluw al-sanad, derived from ‘ali, defined as ‘a tradition [in] which the isnad contains relatively fewer authorities’. Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz’, p. 140. For an example of such a mention in al-Silafi’s text, see Hashmi, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz’, p. 92.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

275

studies, especially in its discussion of the method of transmission through ijaza rather than face-to-face interaction between master and student. Hashmi’s scholarship has undoubtedly informed the way she conducts her own classes on the Qur’an and Hadith at Al-Huda. Likewise, her lived experience of being in a Western university with high academic standards, the stringent demands made by academic life on one’s time, and travel to a wide variety of European, Turkish, and Middle Eastern libraries and cities (engaging in a rihla of her own, as suggested in the ‘Introduction’), probably also influenced the way she and her husband organized the institute which they went on to establish in Islamabad after a short period of time.

Idrees Zubair’s Scholarship Idrees Zubair’s thesis, like Farhat Hashmi’s, deals with a medieval Hadith scholar, and the structure of his thesis is similar as well. It is dedicated to his father Abul al-Tayyib Shams al-Haqq, who Zubair describes as his teacher. He was a muhaddith, one who ‘dedicated his life to teaching the Hadith’.28 In the family, a story illustrating his impeccable integrity was told that in his old age two young men came to him asking him for an ijaza for a particular isnad, but he refused to do so because by this time he had become forgetful and could not guarantee that he would remember the chain of transmission (silsila) of the Hadiths correctly.29 Mushtaq notes that Zubair’s father had completed the dars-i nizami syllabus at the Madrasa Dar al-Hadis Rahmaniyah in Multan, Punjab.30 While studying in Glasgow, both Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair were helped by 28 Muhammad Idrees Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitāb Tuḥfat Ḍhawī al-Irab fī Mushkil al-Asmāʼ wa al-Nisab by Abū al-Thanāʼ Maḥmūd b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, known as Ibn Khaṭīb al-Dahshah al-Ḥamawī (734–850/1349– 1431); with Introduction and Notes’ (PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow, 1989). In the Acknowledgements, Zubair thanks Professor John N. Mattock, then chairman of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, under whose supervision he conducted his work. (Professor Mattock was also the thesis supervisor for Farhat Hashmi, as noted in her Acknowledgements.) 29 Reported to me by Taimiyyah Zubair in an informal conversation, 21 May 2014, at Mississauga, Canada. 30 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 172, n7.

276

Scholars of Faith

Shaykh Muhammad Sa‘id al-Badhanjaki, the then director of the Islamic Institute at Manchester, UK, who provided them access to old manuscripts and gave them intellectual and personal guidance,31 and Mahmud Ahmad Ghazi, then director of the Da‘wah Academy in Islamabad. Zubair’s thesis consists of two parts, in the first of which he analyses the life and works of the fourteenth-century Syrian scholar Ibn Khatib al-Dahshah al-Hamawi (750–834 ah/1349–1431 ce),32 and the second of which contains the Arabic text which is the subject of analysis in Part One. The thesis analyses an ‘alphabetical dictionary’ by Ibn Khatib called the Kitāb Tuḥfat Ḍhawī al-Irab fī Mushkil al-Asmāʼ wa alNisab (The Gift of the Possessors of Wisdom, or alternatively, The Gift to those in Need),33 ‘which deals with the vocalization of the names and nisbas [suffix indicating a person’s place of origin] which occur in the three canonical hadith collections, namely the Sahihayn (the two Sahihs) and the Muwatta‘[,] regardless of whether these names occur in the isnads [chains of transmission] or in the matn [subject matter] of these books’.34 Although this work was the subject of an earlier PhD thesis in 1904, Zubair says that many of its conclusions were erroneous because it was based on incomplete access to primary source material. He also writes that early traditionalists recognized the importance of correct vocalization of the Hadith literature, in view of the frequency of mistakes in reading (tashif, defined as ‘the fault of reading a name with the wrong consonant, e.g. Marhum 31 In his Acknowledgements, Zubair writes of al-Badhanjaki’s ‘keen interest in hadith and its sciences’, and refers to him as a teacher and friend. Taimiyyah Zubair also mentioned Farhat Hashmi’s immense personal respect for him as one of her teachers. Informal conversation, 21 May 2014. 32 The Hijri dates for Ibn Khatib given on the title page of Zubair’s thesis appear to be a typographical error, for 734–850 ah would make Ibn Khatib over 100 years old at his death. The Gregorian dates 1349–1431 ce are equivalent to 750–834 ah. On p. 1, Zubair gives Ibn Khatib’s date of birth as 750 ah and on p. 4, he writes that Ibn Khatib was 84 years old when he died in 834 ah. 33 Translation given in Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil al-Asma wa al-Nisab’, p. 14. 34 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil alAsma wa al-Nisab’, Abstract.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

277

and Marjum’, and tahrif, defined as ‘the fault of reading a name with metathesis, e.g. reading Marhum as Mahrum’).35 Ibn Khatib belonged to a well-respected family in Hamah, approximately 130 miles north of Damascus, Syria. His father, Ibn Zahir (d. 770 ah), originally from Fayyum, Egypt, settled in Hamah and became, by royal appointment, the khatib (person who gives the sermon during the Friday congregational prayer) at the Jami‘ al-Dahshah mosque in Hamah. This was a mosque with outstanding architectural features and a major library containing 7,000 volumes.36 After the completion of his elementary education, Ibn Khatib, like contemporary Hadith scholars, travelled ‘extensively’ in Syria and Egypt in order to study and ‘receive’ specific Hadith collections face-to-face from different scholars.37 In time he acquired a scholarly reputation of his own, the result of teaching, issuing fatwas, and becoming an authority in Hadith, fiqh, adab, and nahw (grammar). He was also a cultured man who wrote letters in verse to various scholars. For about 10 years he held the powerful position of qadi (judge) of Hamah, until his ouster when a new ruler came to power in 824 ah (1421 ce).38 He died about 10 years later. Zubair next summarizes the content of 15 of Ibn Khatib’s extant works, many of which are currently located in libraries in Egypt and Hamah. Some of them are ‘devoted to the discussion of tashif [distortions resulting from consonants being read incorrectly, as noted earlier in the chapter] and i‘rab [case endings] … found in various MSS of ahadith from various transmitters’,39 others to unusual words found in the Hadith in the Muwatta‘ and the two Sahihs, and some to the art of calligraphy, among other topics. After this, Zubair comes to the main focus of his study, namely, the Tuhfah. 35 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil Asma wa al-Nisab’, Preface. The definitions are given on p. 18, n. 55. 36 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil Asma wa al-Nisab’, p. 1. 37 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil Asma wa al-Nisab’, p. 2. 38 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil Asma wa al-Nisab’, pp. 2–5. 39 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil Asma wa al-Nisab’, p. 7.

alalalalal-

278

Scholars of Faith

In this book, as noted earlier in the chapter, Ibn Khatib discusses two subjects, that is, the names and the nisbas which occur in the Hadith collections known as Sahihayn (al-Bukhari and Muslim) and the Muwatta‘ of Malik ibn Anas, founder of the Maliki school of law. Incredibly, he ‘compiled the work in 15 days’, which led him to occasionally make some careless errors in copying his material. However, in Zubair’s view these are relatively small in number, considering the scope of the complete work. Zubair compared eight different manuscript editions of the work, housed in libraries in Istanbul, Damascus, London, and Berlin, and prepared an annotated critical edition on the basis of three of these.40 This critical edition—in Arabic, not in English translation—constitutes the bulk of the thesis. While recognizing that the different aspects of Hashmi’s scholarship and that of Zubair are closely related, perhaps we could summarize their respective studies by saying that Hashmi’s work deals primarily with the transmission of Hadith—its many forms and methods, and their respective strengths and weaknesses in the eyes of her subject, al-Silafi—while Zubair’s focuses on the accuracy of transmission of one part of the Hadith, that is, the names of the transmitters and the suffixes indicating their geographical origins, as evidenced in a major alphabetical dictionary by Ibn Khatib. Taken together, their research shows clearly the importance of Hadith studies for them and also illustrates the many difficulties inherent in the process of accurate Hadith transmission, given the enormous volume of material, the possibility of error in both oral and written transmission (though as both authors make clear, oral modes of transmission were regarded as more accurate than written), and the geographic spread of the works of medieval Hadith scholars. Mushtaq throws further light on the matter through her discussion of a slim booklet by Zubair entitled ‘Why Does Hadis Need Protection?’ According to Mushtaq, this book forms the basis for many of Zubair’s lectures at Al-Huda classes. In it, he argues that the Hadith are a necessary complement to the Qur’an, as each is needed to fully understand the other. Furthermore, there can be no contradiction between the one and the other. He also maintains that one cannot 40 Zubair, ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab Tuhfat Ḍhawi al-Irab fi Mushkil alAsma wa al-Nisab’, pp. 20, 25, 32.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

279

selectively pick and choose what one wants from either the Qur’an or the Hadith, but must implement them both in full in one’s daily life (an argument also made by Farhat Hashmi in her Al-Huda lectures, and by other teachers who have followed in her footsteps). Mushtaq writes: Zubair charges that some people even modify or invent ahadis to make religion seem attractive and appeal to people’s emotions to lure them to religion, and criticizes cults of personality around commentators whose followers reverentially collect their arcane and convoluted rulings. Zubair sees concerted efforts going on to undermine the status of hadis, through ridiculing it, fabricating baseless ahadis, and turning it into a contentious issue with which to divide the Muslim community. He responds with a spirited defense of the work of the muhaddisin—scholars who gather, study, and verify traditions attributed to the Prophet—as being exemplary in the quality and rigor of its research. Their method of authenticating a hadis by verifying the authority of its chain of transmitters (sanad) is the only sound one, according to Zubair, no matter how popular or prevalent an unsubstantiated hadis might be. In contrast, he alleges that other branches of Islamic knowledge such as fiqh rely upon weak standards, dubious authorities, and personal biases.41

This lengthy quotation points to the contentious nature of some of the positions taken by Zubair with respect to other Muslim interpretations of the Islamic tradition. In the following section, I turn to the Ahl-i Hadith movement to better understand the arguments being made.

Who Are the Ahl-i Hadith? As noted earlier in the chapter, Farhat Hashmi’s father had been associated with the Jama‘at-i Islami and Idrees Zubair comes from an Ahl-i Hadith background. Mushtaq’s research shows that Hashmi gradually moved away from the Jama‘at-i Islami towards the Ahl-i Hadith perspective.42

41

Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 160. Mushtaq does not give the Urdu title of this booklet. As it is not cited in her bibliography, I was not able to find the publication information. 42 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 172–3. Taimiyyah Zubair told me this had less to do with her father’s influence on her mother

280

Scholars of Faith

Most students at Al-Huda are unaware of these or other South Asian movements by name, particularly if they are second-generation South Asian Muslims living in Europe, Canada, or the US. Instead, Al-Huda guides them on how to be ‘good Muslims’, deliberately eschewing any sectarian identity or label. In other words, students learn about ‘Islam’ as Al-Huda believes it was taught to the Prophet Muhammad through the revelation of the Qur’an. Nevertheless, in view of Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair’s backgrounds I want to explore the ideas that the Ahl-i Hadith espouses, particularly as it is less well known than the Jama‘at-i Islami.43 The Ahl-i Hadith is the older (and smaller) of the two movements, having emerged in the mid- to late-nineteenth century first in Delhi, then in Bihar, Bhopal, Punjab, and elsewhere in South Asia. The Ahl-i Hadith trace their intellectual roots back to Shah Wali Allah (1703–1762), in particular his call for the need for independent juristic reasoning (ijtihad) rather than received opinion according to the four Sunni schools of law (madhhab). Further influences are the teachings of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (1786–1831) and Shah Muhammad Isma‘il Dihlawi (1779–1831), leaders of the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya reformist movement of the early-nineteenth century. In particular, Shah Muhammad Isma‘il’s two books Sirat al-mustaqim (The Straight Path) and Taqwiyat al-iman (Strengthening the Faith), which emphasize the transcendent unity of God (tawhid), are ‘important sources for the Ahl-i Hadith movement’.44 After the 1826–31 jihad in the northwest (in and

than with the latter moving in that direction as a result of her own personal study. Given that Hashmi has studied Hadith in depth for her PhD, this is entirely plausible. Personal conversation, 21 May 2014. 43 On the history of the Jama‘at-i Islami, see in particular Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Also see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), Chapter 4. 44 Claudia Preckel, ‘Ahl-i Hadith’, in Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, vol. 2007–3 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 94. Shah Muhammad Isma‘il was Shah Wali Allah’s grandson. On the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya, see Harlan O. Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India: The Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah, with a Foreword by David Lelyveld (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008).

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

281

around Balakot, which is now in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan),45 against the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) had ended in defeat and the deaths of both Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi and Shah Muhammad Isma‘il,46 some continued the jihad movement in Patna, Bihar, while many became followers of Shah Muhammad Ishaq (1778–1846). He was Shah Wali Allah’s great-grandson and Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s (1746–1824) grandson, spiritual successor (sajjada nishin), and successor as head of the Madrasa Rahimiya in Delhi. One of Shah Muhammad Ishaq’s followers ‘helped found … the Ahl-i Hadith’.47 There is thus a direct connection between Shah Wali Allah’s descendants, the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya, and the Ahl-i Hadith. A third major intellectual influence was the Yemeni scholar Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Shawkani (1759–1834), whose teachings are traceable to the Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm (994–1064) and the Syrian Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328).48 Some of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi’s followers had travelled to Yemen after going on hajj to Mecca prior to the jihad, studied under al-Shawkani, and then returned to India and spread his teachings. However, unlike the Shah Wali Allahi tradition and the Tariqa-i Muhammadiya, which embraced Sufism while distancing themselves from the popular practices associated with it, al-Shawkani is known for his anti-Sufi stance. Like Shah Wali Allah, he was a strong supporter of ijtihad, thereby ‘reinforc[ing] the tendency away from Hanafism and the madhhab-system in general’.49 Al-Shawkani’s influence among Tariqa-i Muhammadiya 45 In addition to Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in NineteenthCentury India, pp. 39–42, the hajj of 1821–3 and the subsequent jihad are also described in Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 60–2. 46 For the reasons for the jihad movement and its course and outcome, see Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India, pp. 40–2. 47 On the historical importance of Shah Wali Allah and his descendants to the Barelwi movement, see ‘Introduction’, section entitled ‘Apples and Oranges? Sufis and Wahhabis?’. Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India, pp. 45–56. The quote is on p. 56. 48 On al-Shawkani, see Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 49 Martin Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity? A Study of the Ahl-i Hadis in Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Century South

282

Scholars of Faith

followers was also spread by Mawlana ‘Abd al-Haqq Banarasi (d. 1870) who had studied with al-Shawkani in San‘a, and later spread his ideas in India, and by two Yemeni students of al-Shawkani who settled in Bhopal, then a princely state in Central India. By the latenineteenth century, Bhopal had become a centre for Ahl-i Hadith views on account of the writings of Nawab Sayyid Siddiq Hasan Khan al-Qannawji (1832–1890), the Ahl-i Hadith leader and husband of the then ruler of Bhopal, Shah Jahan Begum (1838–1901).50 The Ahl-i Hadith insistence on ijtihad means that ‘any legal decision should be supported by a source in either the Qur’an or the sunna of the Prophet’.51 When a layman asks a scholar for an opinion (fatwa), he or she should try and ensure that the opinion is based on either or both of these sources. According to the Ahl-i Hadith, the practice of following the rulings of a single school of law, which in South Asia is largely the Hanafi school (and secondarily also the Shafi‘i school in southwest India), is a reprehensible innovation (bid‘a). By extension, the Ahl-i Hadith do not accept the validity of the practice of analogical reasoning (qiyas) or the consensus of the scholars (ijma‘) either. This is a very contentious issue among the South Asian ‘ulama and has earned the Ahl-i Hadith the derogatory designation of ‘ghair muqallid’, or those who do not follow taqlid.52 They are also called ‘Wahhabi’, a term used by opponents since the nineteenth century to discredit their ideas.53

Asia’, in Gwilym Beckerlegge, ed., Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Movements in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 148. 50 Preckel, ‘Ahl-i Hadith’, p. 94. See also Siobhan Lambert Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); and Barbara Metcalf, ‘Islam and Power in Colonial India: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Princess’, American Historical Review (February 2011), 116(1): 1–30. 51 Preckel, ‘Ahl-i Hadith’, pp. 92–3. 52 This does not mean that the Ahl-i Hadith do not consult the rulings of past jurists or scholars. Rather, they are encouraged to follow these rulings judiciously, choosing the best ones on a case-by-case basis regardless of the law school followed by particular scholars. 53 For a history of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia, see Natana J. DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

283

Apart from the Ahl-i Hadith insistence on ijtihad, they are also distinctive in several other ways. Notably, when they offer the daily prayer (salah), unlike Sunni Muslims in South Asia, they raise their hands up to their ears between each cycle (rak‘a) and say amin out loud.54 In addition, the Ahl-i Hadith, stressing the equality of all believers, hold that the Friday noon-time sermon, which is given at the end of the congregational prayer in large mosques, must also be given at village mosques, and furthermore that it should be in the local vernacular language rather than Arabic, so the audience can understand it.55 Unlike the Hanafi ‘ulama they believe women should be allowed to pray in mosques rather than at home. In marriage, they reject the prohibition of marriage between a higher status woman and a man of lower status (kafa’) and the validity of the triple divorce, whereby a man can divorce his wife in one sitting by repudiating her three consecutive times.56 They also make it easier for a woman to get out of a bad marriage by ‘seeking the mediation of a scholar and forfeiting’ her marriage settlement (mahr), in effect buying herself out of the marriage.57 Metcalf argues that the Ahl-i Hadith were ‘millenarian, a perspective adding urgency to their teachings’.58 According to some scholars, the Ahl-i Hadith’s reformist message based on scriptural knowledge, self-discipline, and emphasis on austerity, simplicity, equality, and hard work, is an illustration of the 54 As Alan M. Guenther notes, the latter practice was the cause of a lawsuit in Banaras in 1885. See Alan M. Guenther, ‘A Colonial Court Defines a Muslim’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Islam in South Asia in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 293–304. 55 Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, p. 149. 56 In 2018, the Supreme Court of India declared the practice of triple talaq to be unconstitutional. The government decision has been controversial among Indian Muslims. While some have welcomed the new law, which bans a practice already banned in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other Muslimmajority countries, others worry about the criminalization of a part of Muslim personal law in India, which is protected by the Indian constitution, and the possible imposition by the government of a uniform civil code in the future. 57 Riexinger, How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, p. 149. 58 Metcalf, ‘Islam and Power in Colonial India’, p. 12. And on p. 24: ‘Siddiq Hasan and the Ahl-i Hadith were millenarian, inclined to think that with the turning of the thirteenth Islamic century, the final days were at hand’.

284

Scholars of Faith

Weberian ‘Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism’ thesis, which is associated with an urban, educated, and merchant population seeking spiritual salvation through faith and good works. However, while their insistence on ensuring that the Qur’an and sunna be followed in legal matters has in practice led the Ahl-i Hadith’s following to be largely urban and educated,59 Riexinger cautions that this is not always so (any more than one can assume that the Barelwis are necessarily rural). In Punjab, ‘it was … in their rural surroundings that the first people converted to their teachings. In certain “Ahl-i Hadis villages”’, the majority of the residents belonged to the Ahl-i Hadith. And indeed it was from certain rural districts in Punjab that many of the first leaders of the movement emerged.60 He also argues that the ‘innerworldly asceticism’ of which Weber wrote might have favoured capital accumulation among the Ahl-i Hadith had they not been prone to a ‘particular kind of conspicuous spending … namely, extensive donations for missionary purposes’.61 Most importantly, though, Riexinger argues that when it comes to religious teachings, the Ahl-i Hadith exhibit contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the requirement that the religious scholar explain his rulings to the layperson, who asks him for an opinion, has the effect of elevating the status of the layperson and giving him or her an active voice in community settings such as voluntary associations (anjumans). However, by the same token, the insistence on giving primacy to the Qur’an and Hadith to the exclusion of the corpus of Hanafi law leads to ‘literalist and anthropomorphist interpretations’ and favours conservative positions on a host of issues, not just religious ones.62 59

See Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, pp. 271–2. Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, p. 150. 61 Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, p. 151. Of course, the donation of money and time for missionary purposes, or da‘wa, has been enormously important in building up the Al-Huda movement to where it is today, in a relatively short period of time. 62 Riexinger ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, pp. 153–5. Riexinger illustrates his argument with two examples, namely, debate over the interpretation of the phrase, ‘thumma istawa ‘ala l-‘arsh’’ (Qur’an 7:54 and elsewhere) (‘then God ascended the throne’) and the question of miracles. He also cites the case of Muhammad Husayn Batalwi and his attitude to secular scientific education. 60

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

285

But given that not everyone in the Ahl-i Hadith movement (or any other movement for that matter) acts mechanistically and in the same manner, Riexinger concludes that one must judge the ‘modernity’ of the Ahl-i Hadith—or lack thereof—by attending to the ‘concrete historical phenomena’ and contexts of events.63

Islamic Sources Cited in Al-Huda Classes In this examination of Al-Huda’s intellectual formation, another aspect that deserves our attention is its use of Islamic sources in the classroom, particularly Hadith and tafsir or Qur’anic exegesis. Given Al-Huda’s inclination towards the Ahl-i Hadith perspective, it is not surprising that teachers refer regularly to the corpus of Hadith literature in Arabic, some of which is also taught by the Sunni ‘ulama of different schools of thought in their madrasas in South Asia. In addition, certain works of tafsir are used regularly. Reference to the Hadith collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, two of the most widely accepted Sunni collections, is interwoven into Al-Huda classes. These books are readily available on Al-Huda’s website without charge and are therefore easily accessible to students. Teachers also refer to Hadiths from the other well-known collections of al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i, Abu Dawud, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Most often, however, reference is made not to a particular book but to the person(s) who related the Hadith. One of the names that crops up frequently during translation classes is that of Ibn ‘Abbas (d. ah 68/686–7  ce), a Medinan Companion (sahaba) who is said to have been either 10 or 15 years old when the Prophet died.64 Ibn ‘Abbas was both a major transmitter of Hadith and an early exegete of great importance—he is described as the ‘father of qur’anic exegesis’ because many of the exegetes in the next generation, that of the Followers (tabi‘un), were his disciples. Their names too are frequently mentioned in translation classes as primary sources, among them Ikrima (d. ah 105/723 ce), al-Hasan al-Basri (d. ah 110/728 ce), and

63

Riexinger, ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity?’, p. 159. Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims, a Textual Analysis (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), p. 212. 64

286

Scholars of Faith

Qatada (d. ah 118/736 ce).65 Like chains of Hadith transmission, works of Qur’anic exegesis also had transmission chains from one generation to the next, exegetes in each successive generation transmitting and adding to the exegesis they had received. In addition to the citation of scholars’ names when translating and explaining verses of the Qur’an, another characteristic practice in Al-Huda classes is that of citing variant opinions on the meaning of specific words and telling students which opinion, in the teacher’s view, is the strongest one in a given context. For example, in explaining Sura 42, verse 23 (al-Shura, Counsel): ‘Say: “I do not ask of you a wage for this, except love for the kinsfolk …”’ (Arberry trans.), Taimiyyah gave five different exegetes’ interpretations of the words ‘love for the kinsfolk’, including those of Ibn ‘Abbas and Ikrima (who interpreted them as ‘affection for my nearness to you, that is, I am your relative’). But she said the strongest interpretation of the phrase, given the context of the verse as a whole, was that it meant ‘I want you to have love for nearness to Allah’, this being al-Hasan al-Basri and Qatada’s interpretation.66 Or again, in Sura 48, verse 29 (al-Fath, The Victory): ‘Their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration’ (Arberry trans.), she said the distinctive mark on the faces of the Prophet’s Companions could be interpreted as being both figurative and literal. In terms of the literal marks on their faces, Ibn ‘Abbas interprets the word as meaning ‘beautiful demeanour’, while alHasan al-Basri interprets it as ‘paleness of the face, tiredness because of staying up at night to pray’.67 In this case, she emphasized that the words ‘their mark’ (seemahum) should not be understood in the literal sense alone, but also figuratively as ‘glowing faces’. When students take tests at the end of each of the 30 parts (juz) of the Qur’an, 1 of the 3 tests is devoted to exegesis.68 The primary sourcebook used for this in Al-Huda classes, as noted in the previous 65 On Ibn ‘Abbas being the Companion who transmitted his exegesis to many of the major exegetes in the generation of the Followers, see Claude Gilliot, ‘Exegesis of the Qur’an: Classical and Medieval’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 102–3. 66 Transcript of class notes taken by me on 15 January 2013; Lesson 253. 67 Transcript of class notes taken by me on 26 February 2013; Lesson 265. 68 The other two deal with translation and grammar.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

287

chapter, is the tafsir of the Syrian scholar Ibn Kathir (1301–1373 ce). Ibn Kathir is considered to be the second major exegete in the history of Qur’anic hermeneutics after al-Tabari (d. 923 ce) in the methodology known as tafsir bi’l-ma’thur, or ‘interpretation according to what has been handed down, that is, the sayings of the prophet and the venerable companions and successors’.69 A student of the Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), Ibn Kathir was greatly influenced by him. McAuliffe explains that in Ibn Kathir’s methodology the first step in tafsir was ‘“to interpret the Qur’an according to the Qur’an”. Letting the Qur’an interpret itself presupposes understanding the Qur’an as a unified body of revelation, one part of which can often clarify another. Ibn Kathir underscores this by noting that, in the Qur’an, what is said succinctly in one place is treated in detail in another place.’70 When this method has been exhausted, the next step is to interpret the Qur’an in light of the ‘prophetic sunna, because the sunna is a “means for laying open the Qur’an and a means of elucidating it”’.71 Having been trained in the Shafi‘i tradition, Ibn Kathir regarded the sunna as having been ‘sent down by inspiration (wahy) as the Qur’an was, although it was not received [through Gabriel] as was the Qur’an’.72 Further steps in the process involve relying on the sayings of the Companions of the Prophet, because they were eye witnesses to events in the Prophet’s life, and beyond them, on the sayings of the Followers (tabi‘un).73 69 R. Marston Speight, ‘The Function of Hadith as Commentary on the Qur’an, as Seen in the Six Authoritative Collections’, in Andrew Rippin, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), p. 66. This method is contrasted with tafsir bi’l ra’y, ‘interpretation by the use of reason’, which many Muslim scholars considered prone to error. See Speight, ‘The Function of Hadith as Commentary on the Qur’an’, pp. 66–7. 70 Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ‘Quranic Hermeneutics’, in Andrew Rippin, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), p. 56. 71 McAuliffe, ‘Quranic Hermeneutics’. Where double quotes are used, McAuliffe is quoting from Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir al-Qur’an al-a‘zim. 72 Farhat Hashmi articulates the same point in one of her lectures, Lecture 1.04f (2005). 73 McAuliffe, ‘Quranic Hermeneutics’, pp. 57–8.

288

Scholars of Faith

According to Waines, a characteristic of Ibn Kathir’s exegesis is his emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God, and a second is his view that ‘divine existence and unity are mirrored in the multiplicity of God’s creation’.74 A simple example of both points (and there are many in the Qur’an) is the phrase al-rabb al-‘alamin or ‘Lord of the worlds’, in the opening chapter, ‘the Fatiha’. Ibn Kathir explains ‘the worlds’ by saying, ‘the word ‘alam is itself a plural word, having no singular form. The ‘alamin are different creations that exist in the heaven and the earth, on land and at sea.’75 In other words, God’s sovereignty encompasses all of creation, including everything in our galaxy and beyond.76 In Farhat Hashmi’s exegesis of this verse to her students, this point is made at length, with the gloss ‘all’ before ‘the worlds’ and extensive references to current scientific data about the planetary system, a point to which I turn in the next section.77 A noticeable feature of Farhat Hashmi’s message to students of Al-Huda, which may be traceable to her study of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathir, is a strong emphasis on the importance of unity and the avoidance of dissension. McAuliffe notes that while Ibn Kathir was open to the idea of using non-Islamic material (al-ahadith al-isra’iliya) in Qur’anic exegesis, he cautioned against exegetical discord over minor matters which benefits no one: ‘The proper course of action is to take into account the various views expressed, ratify the sound, reject the false, and then let the matter drop … “lest contention and debate lengthen into what is useless and you occupy yourself with it to the exclusion of what is more significant”.’78 It is entirely in keeping 74 David Waines, ‘Agriculture and Vegetation’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Quran, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 45a. 75 Shaykh Safiur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri, Tafsir Ibn Kathir (Abridged), vol. 1 (Riyadh: Maktaba Dar-us-Salam, 2003), p. 73. 76 This is a far more expansive interpretation of the phrase than that of Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 207, where Asad translates the phrase as ‘“Lords of the two worlds” (namely, the world of men and the world of jinns ([spirits])’. 77 Farhat Hashmi, Lesson 1.02c–d (2005). By picking this example out of many possible ones, I am not suggesting that this interpretation of the verse is controversial. 78 McAuliffe, ‘Quranic Hermeneutics’, pp. 57–8.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

289

with such a view that Farhat Hashmi decries what she sees as the current division of Muslims in South Asia into numerous denominational groups (firqa) and tells students that Muslims can only be strong if they work together. In the classroom, she strongly encourages students to learn from one another in a number of different ways and to share their knowledge with others.

Al-Huda’s Approach to Science and Everyday Life Also striking when one listens to Farhat Hashmi’s lectures to students is the frequency with which she incorporates references to scientific knowledge, in fields as diverse as medicine, biology, psychology, and so on, and notable developments as reported in contemporary media or aspects of life relating to computer science or communications technology that she relates to her exegesis of the Qur’anic verses at hand. The Qur’anic material is seamlessly integrated with modern science, technology, and the everyday realities of the students.79 As the Urdu lectures I listened to were delivered in Mississauga, Canada, in 2005, she was referring to aspects of life as experienced there at that time. Thus, in one breath her discussion might centre on the roots of the Arabic words being studied and the intricacies of the Arabic language, while in the next her focus could shift to the absurdity of the driver of a car simply following whatever route the car in front was taking in the hope that this would lead her to her destination, because she had no map. Here the student had a vivid image of getting off the highway and taking the wrong exit, going north when she should have gone south. The Qur’anic term ‘the straight path’ (sirat al-mustaqim) was thus perfectly illustrated with a negative example of what happens when one goes in the wrong direction. References to scientific facts abound in Farhat Hashmi’s lectures even when the context does not appear to call for them. Thus, in her exegesis of Qur’an 2 (al-Baqara, The Cow), verses 8 through 16, which deal with the characteristics of people who profess faith in Islam but are in fact opposed to it (in the Prophet’s time, the term, munafiqin, Hypocrites, referred to such a group of people), she focused particularly 79 On Hashmi’s approach to science, see Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, pp. 140–1 and passim.

290

Scholars of Faith

on the phrase ‘in their hearts is a disease’ (fi qulubihim maradun). The root of the problem of deception—which in reality was (and has always been through history, Farhat Hashmi said) self-deception—was that it is a disease of the heart. First she asked her students to ask themselves whether they did any of the things mentioned in these verses. This selfassessment was for themselves, she said; she did not want to know what answers they came up with. Because if they deceived themselves, then how would they be cured? Second, she described the physical properties of the human heart in considerable detail, emphasizing its importance to the maintenance of life, its functions, and the amount of energy it expends in the course of a single day in order to pump blood to all parts of the body, down not just to the hair on one’s body but to each cell.80 Thereafter, she discussed the relationship between the heart and the mind, comparing the heart to a computer’s memory and the brain to its hard drive. Depending on the message sent by the heart to the mind, we activate different parts of our brain, she explained. The brain follows the heart, not the other way around. She mentioned the research of a couple of neurologists whose work shows that there is two-way communication between the heart and the brain.81 For homework, she asked the students to find out about different kinds of heart diseases, their causes, and their remedies. She said that as students of the Qur’an it was their job to know themselves, and this self-knowledge included knowledge of their bodies and the functions 80

Lesson 1.04e–f (2005). In this context, Hashmi also mentioned that the Prophet’s words show that he was a recipient of divine inspiration (wahy) in non-Qur’anic contexts as well as the Qur’anic one. A Hadith from the Prophet, recorded in Bukhari, reports that the Prophet said, ‘There is a piece of flesh in the body, if it becomes good (reformed) the whole body is well, and when it becomes spoilt the whole body is sick’. This is a reference to the heart, Hashmi said. Given that he had no medical knowledge and 1,400 years ago people did not know the scientific facts they do today, this goes to show that the Prophet’s words were inspired by God. 81 Lesson 1.04e–f (2005). The scientists referred to were Dr John and Dr Beatrice Lacey, of the Fels Research Institute in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Dr John Lacey died in June 2004. I find it very interesting that Farhat Hashmi would be referring to the work of a scientist who, having died just a few months before this lecture, probably came to her attention when obituaries in the press described the nature of his research.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

291

performed by different organs. Without physical health, they would not be able to study the Qur’an. It is characteristic of Farhat Hashmi’s pedagogical style that in explaining a set of Qur’anic verses like the ones cited earlier in the chapter, she would bring in information from the fields of science, technology, and psychology, and use them to raise moral and spiritual questions of direct relevance to the students. This approach, I would argue, accounts in large part for the appeal she has for students, in that she is able to show how the Qur’an speaks to all aspects of life and can guide contemporary Muslims through life if they heed its lessons. Farhat Hashmi’s own interest in and embrace of the world of science and technology in the service of a life lived in accordance with the teachings of the Qur’an also shows students that they can be orthoprax Muslims and modern, tech-savvy women at the same time. Indeed, taking this a step further, one might argue that Farhat Hashmi as a practicing Muslim seeks to inform herself as fully as she can of new discoveries and research in the sciences, no matter what their specific discipline, because by so doing she believes she can better understand what the Qur’an says about different subjects, particularly those relating to the natural world. Maurice Bucaille, whose work Hashmi cites approvingly,82 argues not only that the Qur’an contains accurate information about the natural world which predates scientific knowledge by several centuries, but that in order to understand the Qur’an fully, one needs to be a scientist: It is easy to see … how for centuries commentators on the Qur’an (including those writing at the height of Islamic culture) have inevitably made errors of interpretation in the case of certain verses whose exact meaning could not possibly have been grasped. It was not until much later, at a period not far from our own, that it was possible to translate and interpret them correctly. This implies that a thorough linguistic knowledge is not in itself sufficient to understand these verses from the Qur’an. What is needed along with this is a highly diversified knowledge of science.83

82 In Lesson 1.01b (2005), one of her very first lectures, Hashmi mentioned Bucaille’s work The Bible, the Quran, and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge (translated from the French by A.D. Pannell and the author; Indianapolis: n.p., 1979). 83 Bucaille, The Bible, the Quran, and Science, p. 121.

292

Scholars of Faith

If Hashmi accepts this argument, as she seems on the evidence of her exegesis to do, then it follows that modern scientific knowledge should be eagerly sought by the student of the Qur’an. Thus, to return to her exegesis of the phrase ‘Lord of the worlds’ (rabb al-‘alamin) referred to earlier, she began by asking students whether the word ‘alamin reminded them of another word they knew. When they replied, ‘ilm (knowledge), she asked, what is the connection between ‘alam, the world, and ‘ilm, knowledge? The answer, she told them, is that everything in the world is God-given—the trees, the plants, the animals— and a blessing from God, and so when you look around you, you get knowledge of God. They are a means of conveying knowledge of God. In a subsequent lecture, Hashmi spoke at length about the meaning of the word ‘rabb’, lord, saying it means owner, sovereign, and creator, and that God is sovereign over all the worlds, not just the Earth, not just our galaxy, but the entire universe, which goes far beyond this galaxy. A student then gave a PowerPoint presentation in English, in which she mentioned a vast array of scientific facts and statistics to show how unimaginably vast the universe is, and by comparison, how very small an individual on Earth is.84 At the end of the lecture Hashmi told students to visualize a lord who was sovereign over the vastness of the universe at one end of the spectrum and subatomic particles at the other end. This, she said, is what they should understand by the phrase ‘Lord of the worlds’. This is the lord before whom they must submit in a spirit of awe and fear, but also of love and trust because God is extremely merciful (rahim). The Al-Huda view of science and the Qur’an must be placed in historical context for them to be better understood. Ahmad Dallal points out that there is a noticeable difference between the attitude to science of the classical exegetes of the Qur’an and of those of the modern era.85 While all the classical exegetes, like the modern ones, agree that ‘the Qur’an … encourages the acquisition of scientific knowledge and urges humans to reflect on the natural phenomena 84

In a different lecture, Hashmi vividly illustrated how small humans are by referring to aerial photographs of individual streets and houses on each street, as seen on Google Earth. 85 Ahmad Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 542a.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

293

as signs of God’s creation’,86 there are many differences between them. Citing the work of al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and al-Suyuti (d. 1505), for example, Dallal writes that although both scholars held that ‘the Qur’an is a comprehensive source of knowledge, including scientific knowledge’,87 ‘neither [of them] proceeds to correlate the qur’anic text to science, in a systematic interpretive exercise. Moreover, there are no instances in which these two or other exegetes claim authority in scientific subjects on account of their knowledge of the Qur’an.’88 Likewise, Dallal finds that Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) studied the science of astronomy not to establish correspondence between scientific verities and the Qur’an, but simply to reflect and hence to reinforce belief in the creator of the awe-inspiring universe. This kind of reflection in the service of belief does not produce knowledge about the natural order. .. According to this logic, everything in nature, however explained, as well as all scientific discoveries and facts, irrespective of their certainty, serve as proofs for the existence of the maker. And this is the fundamental reason why the scientific and unscientific could appear side by side in the commentaries on the Qur’an.89

However, with the onset of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, the political context changed dramatically and it became important for Muslims to counter European claims to superiority by showing that the Qur’an was in harmony with science. Among the first thinkers to argue for the compatibility between science and Islam was the famous nineteenth-century scholar and activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897). In India, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) also made similar arguments in writings in which he compared the word of God (the Qur’an) and the work of God (the natural world). However, his position that where there is an apparent contradiction between the two, the latter takes precedence and the former should be interpreted allegorically was condemned by many traditionalist ‘ulama. Since then, there has been a further development in Qur’anic exegesis, as in the work of Maurice Bucaille cited earlier, in which it is argued 86 87 88 89

Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, p. 542a. Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, p. 542b. Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, p. 543a. Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, p. 552a and 552b.

294

Scholars of Faith

that the Qur’an anticipated many scientific discoveries by over 1,000 years.90 Dallal concludes, ‘In insisting on the possibility of multiple scientific explanations of the natural phenomena, classical Qur’an commentators were able to guard the autonomy of qur’anic, religious knowledge not through the co-optation of science but by assigning it to a separate and autonomous realm of its own’.91 In Al-Huda’s view of the matter, however, the Qur’an is the ultimate touchstone (mayyar) for all aspects of life, regardless of their subject matter. Where science appears to say something in contradistinction to the Qur’an, as in the currently hotly debated subjects of evolution and gay rights, Al-Huda takes the view that Muslims should be guided by what the Qur’an says on the matter. Furthermore, it maintains a strictly literal interpretation of the relevant verses on these disputed questions.

Political Implications Having examined Al-Huda’s intellectual perspective in some detail, we must ask what implications this has for social and political change. Does Al-Huda take a stand on social and political issues in Pakistan and elsewhere? If so, what form do its politics take? And how does its own institutional reach among Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere influence the larger political landscape in Pakistan and in the world at large? There are no easy answers to these questions, as Al-Huda has adopted a deliberately apolitical stance in its classes. But at the same time, its position, following from its emphasis on da‘wa, is that one must be actively engaged in the world. To illustrate with an example, a teacher commenting on the Qur’anic phrase ‘enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong’ (‘amr b’il-ma‘ruf wa anha ‘an al-munkar) (Q 31:17), noted that the verse has both an individual and a social message. This verse is part of an address by the prophet Luqman to his son. The prophet adopts an affectionate tone, addressing him as ‘Ya bunaiya’, 90

Dallal lays out the arguments on this subject of several twentieth-century thinkers other than Bucaille. See Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, pp. 553–7. 91 Dallal, ‘Science and the Qur’an’, p. 557b.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

295

‘O my little son’. He tells him he should ‘establish prayer’—an individual duty—and ‘enjoin what is right [and] forbid what is wrong’—a social one—and then he returns once more to action at the individual level, saying, ‘and be patient over what befalls you’. The teacher analysed this verse by saying: We see that ‘establish prayer’ (aqim al-salat) is at a personal level and ‘enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong’ (‘amr b’il-ma‘ruf wa anha ‘an al-munkar) is related to communal societal life. This is necessary because a person cannot live in society selfishly. If you want to be a productive member of society, you have to be selfless, you have to think about others. … You also need patience when you encounter other people’s harms, when they hurt you, when they annoy you. … Some people will accept, they will believe and will become your friends but others will not believe, so [they] will taunt you.92

The thrust of this exegesis is that it is not enough to be a good Muslim, but one must go further. If one does not go further, it would mean that ‘They are only concerned with themselves—as long as I am doing good everything is good. It’s all good, it’s all fine—but it is not! Thus if you are clean and your house is dirty, then after some time, the dirt will come back to you.’93 The instruction to enjoin the good and forbid evil is, in this interpretation, that of proselytization or da‘wa, that is, taking the message of Islam to non-Muslims or non-practicing Muslims. The teacher said it would be ‘selfish’ not to do this, and even though it is difficult to face social hostility, one can do it by cultivating sabr, ‘patience’. The forms that this da‘wa might take will vary depending on the particular expertise of the individual. Since in this verse Luqman was addressing his young son, it doesn’t have to wait until one is an adult with knowledge and expertise, but it can start in childhood: a child will do it at his level, the youth will do it at their level, the older people will do it at their level, the scholars will do it at their levels and the intellectuals will do it at their level, but nonetheless each and every person has to do this because it is every person’s responsibility. Enjoining good and forbidding evil is coming right after aqim al-salat [establishing the prayer]. 92 93

Lesson 213, 7 March 2012. Lesson 213, 7 March 2012.

296

Scholars of Faith

This emphasizes the importance of spreading the good to others—in other words, of doing da‘wa. Al-Huda was founded in 1994 in Islamabad and has grown tremendously since then. It occupies public space in Pakistan by virtue of its size, the scope of its activities, its command of media, and the class status of its students and audience. The fact that it has opened up a new religious space for Muslim women, neither traditionalist nor secular, is the source both of its popularity among its students and of the opposition that it has faced in Pakistan from the ‘ulama and from some among the secular public. Moreover, its growth has taken place against the larger context of post-9/11 politics in Pakistan and the escalation of violence in the country, as explored by many scholars and briefly touched upon in Chapter 6.94 All this inserts it into the political arena. As Mushtaq notes, ‘the regulatory powers of the modern nation state extend to the most intimate spheres of life, which means that all social spaces are political’.95 There are two South Asian Muslim organizations with which Al-Huda can be compared today. The first is the Jama‘at-i Islami. One of the commonalities between the two is what Iqtidar characterizes as the ‘objectification’ of religion. She writes: I understand this objectification to include the attempted subjection of religious practices and beliefs to the structures of a homogenizing logic insofar as an attempt is made at erasing…contradictions, but more critically to a conscious engagement with the many aspects of religious praxis. Thus, transcendence is not erased but consciously sought through a modeling of subjectivities, behaviors, and praxis.96

Iqtidar explains that the ‘objectification’ of religion involves the conscious thinking-through of questions about religious identity and conduct at the individual level, something to be problematized rather 94 For an excellent recent exploration of these issues, see Zaman, Islam in Pakistan. 95 Faiza Mushtaq, ‘Moral Purity and Social Reform: The Case of a Women’s Religious Education Movement in Pakistan’ (unpublished paper, 2006). 96 Humeira Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘atud-Da‘wa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). This links up with the objectification of education, on which see Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

297

than taken for granted.97 In addition, both the Jama‘at-i Islami and Al-Huda emphasize an unmediated understanding of the Qur’an and Hadith, unlike the South Asian ‘ulama, who are for the most part Hanafi Sunnis. Iqtidar also suggests that movements such as the Jama‘at-i Islami and Jama‘at al-Da‘wa—and I would add, perhaps Al-Huda as well—attract women followers because membership in them actually increases women’s options and life trajectories, giving them access to careers within the framework of strict adherence to the rules of female seclusion and a greater pool of marriage partners than they would otherwise have had. In this she echoes Mahmood’s work on women in the mosque movement in Egypt. Iqtidar argues that in the long run, the rationalization and functionalization of religion that the Jama‘at-i Islami is facilitating in Pakistan will change the nature of Pakistan’s religious and political landscape.98 Al-Huda also bears similarities with the Tablighi Jama‘at. The name of the latter refers to tabligh or ‘calling’ people to Islam, or in the case of those who were born Muslim, encouraging them to become ‘better’ Muslims, a goal akin to da‘wa. The Tablighi Jama‘at, which arose in the 1940s just prior to the birth of the independent nationstates of India and Pakistan, is said to be one of the largest Muslim organizations in the world today. And like Al-Huda, it too has deliberately eschewed any involvement in politics. Darakhshan Khan’s work on women of the Tablighi Jama‘at throws light on the democratizing aspects of the Tabligh’s decoupling of piety from a madrasa education, and of its de-emphasis on ritual: The Tablighi Jamat, the most tenacious reform movement to have emerged [in the twentieth century], was also the most successful in forging [a] partnership [between men and women] by replacing scriptural authority with piety. The only company that mattered for the Jamat was the company of a pious Muslim who was willing to spend time teaching and learning from other Muslims. The biggest beneficiaries of this shift were the women who could become religious dais without enrolling in a madrasa.99

97

Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists?, pp. 1, 6, 22–3, 126, and passim. But whether it will ultimately secularize society, as she argues in the book, is I think open to question. 99 Darakhshan Khan, ‘In Good Company: Reformist Piety and Women’s Da‘wat in the Tablighi Jamat’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (2018), 35(3): 1–25. The quote appears on p. 18. 98

298

Scholars of Faith

Metcalf had earlier pointed out that the frequent absence of Tablighi men from the home transformed Tablighi ideas of masculinity, as while on the road, men were obliged to perform domestic chores such as cleaning and cooking for themselves and for the group.100 All these factors have a bearing on the political implications of the Al-Huda movement in the future. Given its transnational dimensions, which has meant that in many cases it is operating in an environment in which its members are part of a small religious minority—and often a beleaguered one—I believe it is likely to continue on its present politically quietist path. Judging from studies of Al-Huda in Pakistan, the Persian Gulf,101 and my own observations of its online classes in North America, so far Al-Huda’s activities have taken place at the level of social and personal, rather than political, change.102

Al-Huda: Scholarly and Reformist I have explored three distinct intellectual strands in this chapter—the Western, as represented by the PhD degrees obtained by both Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair in the late 1980s, the Ahl-i Hadith, and the Jama‘at-i Islami—and indicated the influence particularly of the Ahl-i 100

Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Tablighi Jama‘at and Women’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, ed., Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama‘at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 101 Attiya Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space: Foreign Resident Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the Arabian Peninsula’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 102 Al-Huda has had a quietist presence and influence in North America, below the national radar, though here too politics have not been absent, as I noted in the ‘Introduction’. If I had to characterize Al-Huda in terms of other worldwide Muslim organizations, I would cite the Muslim Brotherhood as kindred spirits. The latter has an active women’s wing and plays a major role in social service activities, as Al-Huda does to some degree. When there was an earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 which killed 80,000 people, Al-Huda was involved in the relief efforts, though it also earned considerable condemnation in light of Hashmi’s comment that the victims had invited God’s wrath by being ‘immoral’ Muslims. See Ahmad, Transforming Faith, p. 196.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

299

Hadith on Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair’s thinking. Their Ahl-i Hadith background causes them to place strong emphasis on direct knowledge of the two primary religious sources of the Qur’an and Hadith. This in turn implies knowledge of Arabic; study of Islamic history, particularly the life of the Prophet (sira); and the ability to discern context and intent in order to understand the underlying principle behind certain verses or statements in the primary sources which might on their surface appear contradictory. This reliance on ijtihad rather than taqlid is widely shared across different Islamist groups, including the Jama‘at-i Islami (as well as the Muslim Brotherhood in the wider Muslim world). The question remains, what influence did Hashmi’s and Zubair’s engagement in the scholarly discourse of a Western university, namely, the University of Glasgow, have on their intellectual formation? In both cases, the major contribution to the field of Hadith studies made by their theses is their reconstruction or translation of a critical edition of the texts they chose to study. Zubair studied eight different manuscript editions and used three in order to reconstruct the critical edition of Ibn Khatib’s text, while Hashmi appears to have used just one. The careful attention to words and the implications of different readings of the same word in different contexts, evident in their scholarship, has been a central feature of the teaching methodology of Al-Huda Qur’an classes. They also explore—both in their scholarship and in Al-Huda—differences arising from variant readings of a word (a frequent subject of debate) or even where one pauses in a sentence. As scholars, both Zubair and Hashmi note that although the subjects they examine have been studied previously, in their view these studies fell short on academic grounds. Moreover, both of them emphasize the importance of Hadith studies to the academic study of Islam. In these respects, Hashmi and Zubair’s outlook is clearly scholarly rather than faith-centred, and these features are also evident in the work they have done at Al-Huda. Yet I would argue that faith is more important to their work than scholarship in the Western academic sense. In Al-Huda classes, Farhat Hashmi and other teachers repeatedly emphasized the importance of Al-Huda students becoming exemplary ‘embodiment[s] of Islamic teachings’ whose lives would be worthy of emulation by Muslims

300

Scholars of Faith

today.103 As Hashmi put it in one of her lectures, they should be a ‘living tabligh’ or, like the Prophet, a ‘walking Qur’an’ (chalta phirta qur’an) to those around them, whose personal conduct brings others into the fold of Islam rather than turning them away because their behaviour is deemed blameworthy.104 Rather than seeing Hashmi and Zubair as academic scholars, I see them primarily as religious activists and educational reformers who have enlarged their intellectual horizons through study, international travel, and long years of residence abroad. In my view, they have undertaken three important reforms in Muslim religious education: contrary to the traditional madrasa syllabus, they have made the study of the Qur’an, and secondarily the Hadith, the central focus of their syllabus and introduced other subjects in a supporting role; they have directed their attention primarily towards women; and they have reached out to the secular, Western-educated middle- and upper-middle classes in Pakistan and the South Asian diaspora who are not normally exposed to a madrasa education and curriculum. By speaking in a modern idiom, they have attracted the attention of middle-class, urban, educated Muslims both in Pakistan and in the South Asian diaspora, people who were never attracted to the maslaki identity politics of the ‘ulama. In so doing, they are bringing about tangible change on the ground, especially in Pakistani cities. This leads me to the next chapter, which examines how Al-Huda ideals are inculcated into students, and how students live out their lives in light of their very modern Al-Huda Qur’anic educations.

103 See Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘The Past in the Present: Instruction, Pleasure, and Blessing in Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya’s Aap Biitii’, in Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004b), p. 70. 104 Lesson 1.01a (2005), Lesson 1.07c (2005).

8 AL-HUDA ONSITE AND ONLINE Teacher-Learners and Students in North America

[The difference between studying and not studying] the Qur’an is like looking at the world with one’s glasses on or off. If we look at it without glasses on, some things look right but some things look different from what they really are. … When you acquire knowledge of the Qur’an, you put on such glasses that the true nature of everything begins to become apparent to you. And then you put everything in its proper place. —Farhat Hashmi to her students on the first day of class, 2005 We are Muslims … so we never stop learning till we die. —Farhat Hashmi, 2005

How concretely does social change occur at the level of the everyday among a geographically dispersed set of Muslim women studying the Qur’an? In this chapter, I try to answer this question by looking closely at both teachers and students, including teachers who a few years ago were Al-Huda students. I refer to these teachers as teacher-learners to indicate that their study of the Qur’an and related subjects is ongoing, even after they begin to teach students of their own. They are in a different place on the full arc of the Al-Huda learning experience compared to their students, because many are taking more advanced courses in related fields in addition to teaching. The chapter begins with Dr Farhat Hashmi and her daughter Taimiyyah in Canada, Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

302

Scholars of Faith

paying attention to both the content of their teaching and the connections they make between the Qur’an and their everyday lives as well as the lives of the students they teach. Farhat Hashmi’s relationship with her students, I argue, can be understood as a form of ‘cultural translation’, a term which seems particularly appropriate in view of Al-Huda’s focus on translating the Qur’an from Arabic into Urdu and English so as to make it understood. As Asad points out, a key task for the person ‘translating from other cultures’ (referring to the cultural anthropologist studying an alien culture) is that he or she ‘look for coherence in discourses’.1 It is by articulating the ways in which the Qur’an has internal coherence as a moral teaching and source of guidance,2 it may be argued, that Farhat Hashmi makes the Qur’an meaningful to her students. However, unlike the anthropologist who ‘is waiting to read about another mode of life … [but] not to learn to live a new mode of life’,3 in Al-Huda’s case the purpose of the act of cultural translation is precisely that, to bring about personal—and ultimately social—transformation as a result of students’ deepening understanding of the coherence of the Qur’an. As with textual translation, the act of cultural translation is also an act of interpretation. Farhat Hashmi makes the Qur’an meaningful to her students by ‘translating’ it and the seventh-century Arabian context in which it is embedded into a twenty-first century transcontinental one that ‘makes sense’ to students and appears ‘logical’ in a matter-of-fact, self-evident, and unambiguous way. For those who 1 Talal Asad, ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 155–6. 2 For arguments for the coherence of the Qur’an both as a text and as a moral guide for behaviour, see, for example, Neal Robinson, Discovering the Quran: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text (Washington, DC: George Washington Press, 2003); Carl W. Ernst, How to Read the Qur’an: A New Guide, with Select Translations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 93. 3 Emphasis in original. Asad, ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, p. 159.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

303

accept her interpretation, it becomes a call to action. In effect, she tells them, ‘This is God’s clear message to us in the Qur’an. Will you heed it or will you choose to walk away?’ Because she relates the Qur’an to the everyday world in which she and her students live, she becomes a role model they can hope to emulate in their own lives. Hierarchical relations between the two sides are balanced in some respects by egalitarian ones because all are bound by their mutual submission to the same rules and standards of conduct based on the Qur’anic text. Generational differences are thereby to some extent elided. On the other hand, Farhat Hashmi’s mastery of Arabic and of the classical sources of the Qur’an and Hadith, and her ability to interpret them in novel ways, give her voice immense authority. Moreover, students of Al-Huda are persuaded of the validity of her arguments in large part by her personal example, seeing in her an embodiment of the values she preaches. As I noted earlier, this teacher told me, ‘What she is on the outside, she is also on the inside’. This is a key point to which I will return later in the chapter. Because this study focuses on the online experience, I turn next to the translation (in both its literal and figurative senses) of Taimiyyah Zubair, who has stepped into her mother’s shoes as the teacher of the English-language classes. Basing herself largely on her mother’s (and in Hadith classes, on her father’s) lectures, Taimiyyah presents a more contemporary face to students in Mississauga, Canada, and secondarily to the online students who listen to her recorded lectures. Viewing Hashmi’s and other teachers’ lectures through a narrative lens, I also want to highlight the stories teachers and students tell about themselves. How do they see themselves in relation to others? What is their model of behaviour and how do they aspire to achieve it? What obstacles do they face? What is the social context of their everyday lives? And looking at teaching and learning through a performative frame, how do teachers and students enact their roles and who is the target audience for which each set of actors performs? How does this influence the message being conveyed by the teacher and the way it is received by her students? At the end of this chapter I focus on other teachers and students, and on some of the organizational aspects of the online classes. Specifically, I explore the pivotal role of the Al-Huda Testing Center in Hurst, Texas, in making the online classes work, and focus on the

304

Scholars of Faith

contributions of the North America Regional Coordinator, Shazia Nawaz, and her circle of examiners, who are also Qur’an and Hadith teachers in their own right.

Farhat Hashmi as Teacher: Challenging Students to Become ‘Rabbani’, ‘Servants of God’ Although I have never met Dr Farhat Hashmi in person, like many others I have heard a number of her taped lectures and listened to them carefully. I have listened in particular to her 2005 lectures on the first part (juz) of the Qur’an, delivered to a class of female students in Mississauga, Canada. Although this is admittedly a small part of a very large corpus of orally delivered lectures available in a variety of electronic formats (for MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, and a number of others), it allows me to draw some valuable lessons on the content and style of her teaching, and on the relationships she builds with her students through person-to-person interaction and online interaction. The lectures follow a methodical structure: word-for-word translation from Arabic to Urdu of a given number of Qur’anic verses; discussion of basic grammatical principles, especially the root letters of individual words being studied; and most importantly, exegesis (tafsir) of the Qur’an. Within this format, Farhat Hashmi brings in an array of topics including history, psychology, science, religious and social etiquette, and advice on time management and interpersonal skills, among others, peppering her lecture throughout with Qur’anic and Hadith references in fluent Arabic. The style is erudite but personal, making constant connections between the verses being studied and the lives of the students before her. Her address to her students combines respect for the effort they are making with constant admonition to expect more of themselves, to push themselves harder, to remember that what they are doing is not for the sake of winning her approval but for earning a place in heaven in the afterlife by seeking to please God. The goal is, in a word, to become ‘rabbani’, a servant of God, with every fibre of their beings, at every waking moment. This is the goal she has set for herself and that she embodies for many of her students as they get to know her better. If the tone and focus of her lectures are oriented towards personal self-improvement, they are also concerned with the Muslim

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

305

community in general, particularly the divisiveness and sectarianism she deplores, among Muslims and among religious leaders, the ‘ulama. The need for Muslim unity is a strong theme in her lectures. If Muslims would stop wasting their energy arguing about the need to follow this or that group, she says, and give all their energy to following God, they would be strong and Islam would be respected by others. These kinds of remarks are made in a generalized way and seek to make the point that the Qur’an (and Hadith) should be the only touchstone for correct action and belief in a Muslim’s daily life. An example of this is Farhat Hashmi’s discussion of the three ‘broken letters’ (huruf muqata’at) at the start of Sura al-Baqara (Q 2:1). Hashmi said that according to some people these letters represent God (Allah), the angel Gabriel, and the Prophet Muhammad. But the person to whom these verses were revealed, that is, the Prophet, never explained these letters in this way. They were left unexplained and we must leave it at that, as something only God knows. Should we think we know better, or the Prophet? Elsewhere, commenting on the verse ‘And do not confound the truth with vanity, and do not conceal the truth wittingly’ (Q 2:42), she compared the Jewish scholars who were being addressed in this verse to Muslim scholars today who ‘mix up truth with falsehood by engaging in idolatry (shirk). … What people think about Islam is born of ignorance. If people don’t teach them [the truth], then how will the ignorant learn?’4 At the outset of the course in 2005, Farhat Hashmi told students that they must learn to engage in self-assessment. Until they knew their own positive and negative attributes, they would never be able to move forward. She reiterated this theme often, tying it in with the goal of being ‘God-conscious’ (having taqwa). To be conscious, one has to be awake, she told her students.5 Being a believer therefore means you are awake, that is, conscious of the fact that everything you do in your life is a means to attaining either heaven or hell. People are motivated by both love and fear. If you are told that there will be an earthquake in the middle of the night, for example, would you go to sleep peacefully, saying it has nothing to do with you? No, you would not. You would be

4 5

Lessons 1.02a and 1.09f (2005). Lesson 1.01a–f (2005).

306

Scholars of Faith

frantically planning what to do to remove your family and yourself out of harm’s way. You would not be able to sleep a wink. That’s how it should be with fear of God, but unfortunately these days, no one fears God. They fear other people, or the loss of their wealth and property, but not what they should be afraid of, namely, the accounting to God after their deaths. Illustrating this principle perfectly with a homework exercise one day, she asked the students to write down things that they knew they should be doing but did not do (this was in the context of a discussion of people who know what God wants of them but still do not obey; the maghdub at the end of the Fatiha, Q 1:7). The next day, when the subject of the homework came up she reminded the students of what she had asked them to do and hoped that they had done it. However, to their surprise (I imagine), she said that she did not want them to read their answers out loud to her or to tell her what they had written. This was their own matter, something for which they would have to account to God and it was up to them to watch themselves so they would not make the same mistakes again. And with that, she moved on to the next topic.6 An important aspect of students taking responsibility for their own learning is the management of personal time so that they can meet their obligations to their families while also making time for the demanding study schedule that Al-Huda courses require. A student explained that she had signed up for the online course because she lived too far away to drive to the Al-Huda centre in Mississauga. However, because she was studying at home, her family took her responsibilities towards her course very lightly, making it necessary for her to initiate a number of changes in her lifestyle at home. She listed the following changes she had made since she became an online student: The first thing I did was to promise myself that the class time is my time to study, so I will not pick up the phone, and that’s what I have been doing. Let the answering machine take the calls. 2nd. I started cooking on weekends, preparing the food in advance and freezing it. My husband loves food, so I didn’t want him to feel like I was neglecting him. 6

Lesson 1.01e–f (2005).

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

307

3rdly. Doing the laundry in the evenings, that helps in folding it right away when taking it out of the dryer, because no one else will do it for you. So why not do it then and there right away? 4th. When I drop my son to school, I run to the grocery shop and do the groceries. I should add that I have exactly 30 minutes to do the grocery before the class starts. A good idea is to make a list of the things you need to buy, that helps in saving the precious minutes.

At this point Farhat Hashmi, who was playing the student’s voice on tape, interjected and addressed her Mississauga students in Urdu: Why does so much time get wasted in the store? Because we start out without any planning. After going quite far in one direction, we remember, Oh, that thing got missed out in that store, let me turn the car around. When we get there, we remember, Oh there was something else that I should have got from there [where I was before]. Then we set out on another route. When we start out without planning, it’s a big ‘time waster’. Before leaving the house, first think, What do I have to get, and where is it available? If you don’t know, then ask someone. And go to the exact place where that thing is, go to that shelf where it is, don’t look left or right, and pick up the thing you need, and return [home] if you have something more in your life than just looking at shops in town.

Then the tape resumed: No. 5. When my son is at the madrasa for the Qur’an, I stay in the masjid (mosque) and do my homework. Mostly it is looking for references in the Qur’an, etc. At our masjid we have this lady who is very good in tajwid (recitation of the Qur’an). So she listens to my lesson every Tuesday. I know it’s just once a week, but I guess having one day is better than having none. So it’s a good idea to find someone who can listen to your lesson, because over the Internet no one can listen to us and correct our mistakes. No. 6. Try and do your homework late at night when everyone is asleep or at fajr time (dawn). I have taken this course full time and it demands far more than what I have mentioned and I know everyone’s family is different and their demands are different. And they too are not used to us doing something other than taking care [of them], cooking, and cleaning for them. So don’t dishearten or give up and keep on trying. It’s my experience that Allah helps whoever seeks His help. So inshaAllah we WILL be okay! I hope my letter could make a difference and I too am looking forward for ideas of how the other sisters are managing their lives.

308

Scholars of Faith

Farhat Hashmi interjected here to say, ‘The main thing is that you have to make yourself do the work’. This student went on to explain that she had three young children, ‘an 11-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 15-month-old. My seven-year-old daughter is mentally impaired, and also unable to talk.’ Despite these difficulties, she had managed to continue with her studies while also looking after her husband and children.7 Her inspirational story well exemplified the quality of taqwa as well as the practical time management skills which Hashmi was urging students to cultivate. This multidimensional, three-way conversation offers a fascinating window into the way digital media are transforming traditional classroom learning. In the aforementioned example, we see several modes of communication occurring simultaneously. The online student sent her message to Farhat Hashmi by email; a student at the Al-Huda centre in Mississauga read the email out loud to Hashmi and the onsite students during class. This class—with the email message included—was taped and made available via electronic media such as iPods or laptops to future online students who wished to listen to Hashmi’s exegesis of the verses in question. The student’s experience has thus been incorporated into the body of Hashmi’s lesson, to encourage others to soldier on in the difficult road on which they have embarked. Turning now to Hashmi’s teaching style and manner of exegesis, I would like to quote from one of her lectures (translating from the Urdu). The Qur’anic verses being discussed in the exegesis read: ‘He leads none astray save the ungodly such as break the covenant of God after its solemn binding, and such as cut what God has commanded should be joined, and such as do corruption in the land—they shall be the losers’ (Q 2:26–27, Arberry trans.).8 Hashmi explained that the immediate reference here was to the Hypocrites (those who had

7

Lesson 1.13a (2005). These verses were also the subject of one of the classroom ethnographies at the Jami‘a Nur girls’ madrasa that form part of Chapter 3. In her exegesis, the madrasa teacher told the students that the verse referred to people breaking off social relations (rishta torna) that should not be broken. The overall interpretations of the verse by the madrasa teacher and Hashmi were in many respects similar. 8

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

309

accepted Islam during the Prophet’s lifetime but were secretly trying to undermine the Muslim cause by allying with the Jews of Medina and the Quraysh in Mecca): Every created being, every human being, is in a silent bond with his or her creator. We can’t separate ourselves from our creator. … When God created us, he asked us, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ and [we] all answered, ‘Yes, you are our Lord.’ (This was the verbal bond, on top of the silent bond.) And then we came to the earth. And God started sending us messengers. And the messengers started reminding us of our promise, and we read ‘La illah ilallah’ (there is no God but God). We accepted it. And after accepting it, we broke it as if there were no connection between us and God. We had promised that whatever you ask us to do, we will do. That’s what ‘la illah il-allah’ means. It means we will worship you. So when after saying they’ll do it, they don’t, then what are they doing? They are breaking their promise. After confirming it. But if instead of obeying God we start obeying our desires (nafs), isn’t that breaking our promise? ‘And they cut that which God has asked them to keep joined.’ What is it that God has asked them to keep joined? First the connection with God. They live their lives as if God doesn’t exist. They don’t ask what does God want of me, but what do I want? And the second thing they cut is relationships. They create misunderstandings between human beings.9

Somewhat later in her lecture, she returned to the subject of relationships between people: There are some relationships which you can walk away from if you want. But there are others from which you cannot walk away. These are blood relations. You have to do the utmost good (ihsan) with them. Blood relations should be maintained no matter how justified one is in thinking that the other party is in the wrong. In particular, one should never cut off one’s relations with one’s parents. But beyond this, one should also maintain good relations with one’s siblings, their families, as well as the siblings of one’s parents and those siblings’ families. Visit those who are close to you. Talk on the telephone with those who are more distant relations, especially those with whom you are angry. Women are the ones in particular who teach their children these things. This work is the mother’s more than the father’s. This is our work, yours and mine. We should create good feelings in our children for their relatives. The mother has more power to create

9

Lesson 1.07e (2005).

310

Scholars of Faith

good feelings in the children, more power and more responsibility than the father. As homework, sit down with your children and talk to them. Do they know who their aunts (khala, phuphi) and uncles (mamu, phupha), and grandparents (dada, dadi, nana, nani) are? If you have stepbrothers and stepsisters, they should know about them too. Pick up the phone and call your more distant relatives. And don’t poison your children’s minds against any of them, no matter how bad your relations are with them. When they grow up they’ll find out for themselves. Some mothers keep their children so closely attached to themselves that they alienate their children even from their father. This is wrong, no matter what the father may have done. This is how divisions start, in the family.10

Remarkably, two days later Hashmi returned to the subject of the homework, saying that she had received an email response from one of the online students which she wanted to share with the class. The response was in English and was read by the same Al-Huda student who had read the email about time management. It read: I wanted to share with you and with Madam Farhat Hashmi, the feelings I had after the homework which we had been given on Thursday. She wanted each of us to call or get in touch with someone who had been forgotten due to whatever reasons. So here I was thinking about my husband’s older brother who had not been talking to us since [the] last sixteen years or I can say, since I got married. It was a very touchy subject to discuss with my husband initially [and] to make him understand what we have done. But I prayed and made du‘a for this to work and with Allah’s blessing I explained [to] him what Allah’s orders are towards us humans and how Allah doesn’t like fasiqs [sinners]. I am so proud to be his wife. I also can’t thank Allah enough for being blessed with such a husband. He right away picked up the phone and found out where his older brother was living. We found out that he is in Houston, and so he called him and luckily his brother picked up the phone. His brother was sick and was missing him very badly. After listening to my husband’s voice he couldn’t say a word. Both expressed their feelings not with complaints but with tears instead. He said that he wanted to call but since he was the older one and the person to be blamed, he never had the guts to face his younger brother. Both talked for a long time and didn’t want to get off the phone. He also talked to me and the kids and showered us with his du‘as. Me and my

10

Lesson 1.07f (2005).

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

311

husband are very thankful for the homework we have been given. We both also want to thank our teachers who are guiding us to choose a righteous path to have a fruitful life here and in the hereafter. Jazakallah khairan for your efforts and may Allah bless our teachers. Amin.11

These exchanges between Hashmi and her students, including online ones whom she hasn’t actually met, illustrate her ability to connect with them through the Qur’an and begin the process of bringing about change in personal behaviour in response to what she interprets to be the Qur’an’s teachings. This exchange took place early on in the history of online classes offered by Al-Huda. Since then these classes have multiplied manifold under the leadership of a younger generation of teachers who have studied under Hashmi, or have taken Al-Huda classes in Pakistan, Canada, or as online students in different parts of the world. A key interpretive method of Hashmi’s is to insist that the verses be read in both their historical context and in terms of their message to the believer in the here and now. As she put it in discussing verses that refer to the Children of Israel (Bani Isra’il) in Sura 2, these verses are not just ‘for them, they are for us too’. In other words, they are addressed to Muslims today; they have a relevance beyond their immediate seventh-century context and audience. Although Hashmi is not unique in making this connection by any means, her pedagogical style, and especially her foregrounding of women’s role in bringing about change in society, are different from the way the Qur’an is taught in South Asian madrasas by the ‘ulama (though, as my ethnography of Jami‘a Nur in the first half of this book explores, the Qur’an forms a surprisingly small part of the madrasa syllabus),12 and indeed in other parts of the Muslim world as well.13

11

Lesson 1.09f (2005). Also see Waris Mazhari, ‘Hindustani Madaris Islamiyya: Nisab o Nizam-e Ta‘lim, Imkanat o Masail, Ek Jaiza’ (PhD thesis, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 2013), Chapter 3, for his argument that madrasas in South Asia do not focus sufficiently on teaching the Qur’an and spend far too much time on jurisprudence or fiqh. 13 See for Africa, Corinne Fortier, ‘Orality and the Transmission of Qur’anic Knowledge in Mauritania’, in Robert Launay, ed., Islamic Education in Africa: Writing Boards and Blackboards (Bloomingdale: Indiana University 12

312

Scholars of Faith

The first point to be made about Hashmi’s exegesis is an obvious one, namely, that at the heart of her faith and practice is absolute belief in one God (monotheism; tawhid), who is seen as creator (khaliq), owner (malik), and planner (mudabbir) of all that happens in creation, both human and non-human. All Hashmi’s actions are grounded in this basic concept. Many of the arguments between her (and the Ahl-i Hadith more generally) and the South Asian ‘ulama spring from her view that they have compromised the principles of monotheism in one way or another and thereby introduced innovations (bid‘at) in their practice of Islam.14 For Hashmi, being a Muslim requires that one acknowledge one’s dependence on God through daily prayer (when one talks to God directly, as she puts it) and in other ways as required by God, in the hope of earning a place in heaven after death. But in addition, it requires that one make choices in life that conform with belief in monotheism—and this is where her exegesis of the Qur’an leads her to take an agentive view of how a Muslim should live in the world, in that one must act in the world in order to implement God’s will. I argue as well that for Hashmi, Muslim women are at the centre—rather than at the margins—of the possibility of bringing about social change because of their role as mothers, as wives, and as caregivers. In the exegesis earlier, Hashmi pointed out that women are the ones, rather than men, who can influence how their children view the extended family network, and it is women rather than men who can heal rifts in the family when they occur. The online student’s response was the perfect illustration of her point. As Hashmi commented, she could have chosen to do nothing, since after all the dispute had taken place in her husband’s family, not her own. But with God’s help, she had brought her husband and

Press, 2016); Dale Eickelmann, ‘The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1978), 20(4): 485–516; and Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991). Qur’an recitation among Indonesian women is a well-developed art and skill, which has been documented among others by Anne K. Rasmussen, Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Gade, Perfection Makes Practice. 14 For detailed exploration of this issue, see Chapter 7.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

313

his brother together in order to carry out God’s command that their relationship not be severed. This example also shows how women can be agents of change while upholding values that are shared by the wider society, in this case by preserving family unity. However, the choices that Hashmi encourages women to make do not always bring about harmony in the family. Sadaf Ahmad documents a number of cases of family conflict in Islamabad, Pakistan, as a result of Al-Huda students donning a hijab (headscarf), abaya (cloak), and niqab (face and head covering), garments which are not traditionally South Asian, and by insisting on being veiled in the presence not only of unrelated men but also of certain male relatives in the extended family.15 Today there are so many Al-Huda students dressed in this way that the hijab, abaya, and niqab have become ‘naturalized in society, so that women who may not be affiliated with the school … may decide to adopt [them as well]’.16 This picture is challenged by some Al-Huda women, however. One woman I met said that Hashmi cares deeply about keeping the family together (as my earlier examples taken from Hashmi’s 2005 lectures also show), and she knows that change does not occur overnight. When necessary the rule that a woman cover her face in the presence of her brother-in-law can be relaxed as long as she covers her hair and does not wear makeup. ‘When people are unkind, one should respond by looking out for their welfare and being gentle. In time the other person will have a change of heart and realize that you are not doing any harm, only good.’17 This teacher did not deny that Al-Huda students and teachers try to change their own personal behaviour in a number of ways and that they try to influence their families to make certain changes. She herself had prevailed upon her parents not to visit saints’ tombs or to offer supplications (du‘a) when there. While her father had been easily convinced, she said, it had taken her mother five years to bring herself to stop these practices. 15

Sadaf Ahmad, Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), Chapter 6. 16 Ahmad, Transforming Faith, pp. 155–6. 17 Notes from a personal conversation with students at the Al-Huda Testing Center, 7 August 2013.

314

Scholars of Faith

In different ways, then, as Stuart Hall comments, these women are ‘engaged in an “ideological struggle” that involves attempts to “win some new set of meanings for an existing term, of disarticulating it from its place in a signifying structure”.’18 And as Starrett says, the modernity of their endeavour lies in their objectification and functionalization of Islamic education.19 What makes the Al-Huda discourse so persuasive that women are willing to brave the disapproval of their families20 in order to transform their personal lives in such profound ways? Why does Hashmi’s argument that God ‘wants’ Muslim women to dress in this way in public places make them eager to comply? As many scholars have documented from around the world, the upsurge of Muslim women’s piety movements is a global phenomenon today and Al-Huda must therefore be placed in this wider context.21 However, turning to Al-Huda specifically, I would argue that the free choice of students to fall in line with the lifestyle changes that Hashmi encourages them to make is based on her ability to be morally persuasive. Like a ‘good’ patron in Indian politics who is perceived to exercise ‘legitimate’ influence for the good of the people through advice, persuasion, and his own moral example—in contrast to a ‘bad’ patron who is seen to exercise ‘undue’ influence through various 18

Stuart Hall, ‘Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates’. Critical Studies in Mass Communication (1985), 2(2): 91–114. The quote appears on p. 112. Quoted in Ahmad, Transforming Faith, p. 171. 19 Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 9. 20 Sadaf Ahmad documents numerous examples of intra-family conflict. See, in particular, Transforming Faith, pp. 177–9. 21 To cite just a few examples: in Egypt, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); in Yemen, Anne Meneley, ‘Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks’, Cultural Anthropology (2007), 22(2): 214–43; in Sri Lanka, Farzana Haniffa, ‘Piety as Politics amongst Muslim Women in Contemporary Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies (2008), 42(2/3): 347–75; in Bangladesh, Maimuna Huq, ‘Reading the Qur’an in Bangladesh: The Politics of “Belief” among Bangladeshi Women’, Modern Asian Studies (2008), 42(2/3): 457–88.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

315

forms of intimidation22—Hashmi is persuasive because she leads by example. Thus I would argue that Farhat Hashmi’s moral leadership is a lot more important than Al-Huda’s organizational structure,23 or tactical factors that enabled Al-Huda students in Islamabad to gradually become more comfortable with veiling practices.24 While these are definitely important, the key factor is Hashmi’s personal example. An Al-Huda teacher who first took the one-year diploma course with Hashmi in Islamabad in the late 1990s and is now in a leadership position in the United States, told me that what she most admired in Farhat Hashmi was that whatever she preached to her students, whatever ideals she asked them to live by, she herself followed them even more faithfully than she asked them to. What she was ‘on the outside’, she was also ‘on the inside’. This is a powerful testimonial to Hashmi’s moral leadership; indeed, without it, I doubt Al-Huda would have achieved the degree of success it has. Likewise, Mushtaq also records the impressions of Hashmi on those who have known her personally: the qualities they highlight include her dedication, humility, ability to connect with her students as if she knew them, and her knowledge and passion for teaching the Qur’an.25 Comparing Hashmi’s lectures to her students in 2005 with those she gave to students in Islamabad26 in 1999, I see significant changes in style—though the content is consistent—with some variations 22

David Gilmartin, ‘The Paradox of Patronage and the People’s Sovereignty’, in Anastasia Piliavsky, ed., Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014b), pp. 130–1, 138, and passim. 23 Faiza Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2010b). 24 Ahmad, Transforming Faith, pp. 156–9. 25 The Al-Huda website (alhuda.pk.com) also records a number of people’s comments about how listening to Farhat Hashmi’s lectures on cassette while on their way to and from work, for example, gradually changed the way they lived, to bring their lives in greater conformity with Qur’anic values. 26 These recorded lectures do not say where they were given, or who the audience was. Only the date is given. However, internal evidence suggests that they were given to educated women, which makes it likely that the audience consisted of Al-Huda students. They were most likely given in Islamabad, which is where the main Al-Huda centre in Pakistan is located.

316

Scholars of Faith

related to the changed context. In 1999, commenting on the verse ‘Take forcefully what We have given you, and remember what is in it; haply you shall be godfearing’ (Qur’an 2:63; Arberry trans.),27 Hashmi talked at length about the importance of reading the Qur’an directly oneself rather than relying on others to do so, and of following its dictates thoroughly: According to the Qur’an, the ignorant are those who do not know the Book. This is the criterion. Not the way it is today, where an educated person is one who has an FA, a BA, etc., even if he or she doesn’t know what’s in the Qur’an. Many people today are adding things to din and telling people that this is your din. The result is that din becomes difficult, and people leave the din and go far away. If you just give fatwas, saying this is forbidden (haram), that is forbidden, then people think that Islam is just about forbidding everything, but they never know what the reason is for the command. If you, the educated people, read the Qur’an, then you can begin to change this state of affairs. Let me give you an example. Excuse me but I will give you an example. These things may not be to the liking of some people, but I will talk of some things that are not part of din. When a person dies, the dead man’s family feed people on the first Thursday (jum-i rat). What a great injustice (zulm) it is to engage in this practice. It reduces religion to a matter of eating and sending out invitation cards, and collecting together. It doesn’t tell you to do this anywhere in the Qur’an or in any of the Hadith collections. Then after three days you must do this, after seven days do this, then on the fortieth day, and then on the death anniversary (barsi). It doesn’t help anyone, neither the family, nor the dead person. But those who tell you to do it are eating and drinking. The religious people (din wale log) are telling you to do this. Seventy per cent of the people can’t read and write. The people are sick. They don’t have money to pay the fees. There are no books. There are no school buildings. The population is ignorant. And our community (qaum) is wasting all its money in this way. And those crazy people (diwana) who, like me, criticize these customs are called Wahhabi—I don’t know where this name came from—in order to silence them, so that they may keep eating and the cooking pots don’t become empty. These customs are not a part of din. Where did Allah tell you to do this, where did

27 This verse precedes the story of how some of the Children of Israel broke the Sabbath and then reluctantly sacrificed a golden calf after asking a number of questions (Q 2:65–73).

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

317

the Prophet tell you to do it? Where is the proof of this? You can make up whatever customs you want.

Six years later, in Mississauga, Canada, Hashmi’s style of delivery was very different. It was more personal, more closely tied to the Qur’anic verses at hand, and made frequent cross-references to other Qur’anic verses to make the point that the Qur’an comments on itself.28 In 1999, the oratory was frequently of the fire and brimstone variety, delivered at a very rapid pace, and seeming at times to be read from a written text. In 2005, Hashmi made a direct connection with the students by referring to their lives and the ways in which they should make them more God-centred. Her comments on how people distort the meaning of the Qur’an to suit their own purposes were also more general: Hold on to what is in this book firmly, so that you may be saved. Again, I repeat to you, you must first look at the verses of the Qur’an in context. So here the discussion relates to the Bani Isra’il. Second, we must apply it to ourselves. We must take its message and remember it. I had told you two meanings of dhikr. First, to remember something that you had forgotten, and second, to keep it in your mind all the time, to remember it constantly. Keep it present, don’t lose it. So the meaning is, O Bani Isra’il, fulfil the promise that you had made when We lifted the Mount Tur over you, hold it firmly, take it, because if you don’t you will be punished for forgetting your promise.29

Somewhat later, Hashmi referred to how the ‘ulama and others change the meaning of religious obligations: Some people change God’s command. For example, they will read ‘Kul hua Allah’ (‘He is God, One’, Arberry trans.; Q 112:1) three times and they will say they’ve read the Qur’an. Is that what God meant when He said we should read the Qur’an? What else do they do? They do many things to interpret God’s command in ways that please them, and they pretend that they are following religion (din). This is the worst kind of deception (dhoka). For example, when the matter of the veil (hijab) comes up, they say, ‘The veil of the heart is enough’ (dil ka parda kafi hai), whereas what is required is ‘the veil of the eyes’ (ankh ka parda). In the Qur’an, ‘the veil of the heart’ is referred to as a sign of neglect (ghaflat). What else do they do? 28 29

See Chapter 7 for discussion of this issue. Lesson 1.12d (2005).

318

Scholars of Faith

They change some prophetic practices (sunnat). Instead of giving women their inheritance, they give them a dowry (jahez) and say that they’ve done their duty. What else? Instead of giving money for the sacrifice (kurbani), a sunnat that has been going on since Abraham’s time, they spend the money on something else. You can spend your money the way you want all year long, but when the time comes to spend it in a particular way, that’s what you have to do. What other example is there? They say that just as there is profit in trade, so the money made from interest (sud) is the same. That’s also profit. To engage in dishonesty in this way with din, or to change the meaning of din according to one’s desires, and to think this is a sign of how smart one is, is a sign of their stupidity. No one can deceive (‘give dhoka to’) God.

Reviewing her lectures on different Qur’anic verses, we see how Hashmi foregrounds women’s ability to bring about change in society. In 1999, she told her audience that educated women like themselves could potentially loosen the hold of the ‘ulama on society by studying the Qur’an and finding out for themselves why certain things are forbidden, rather than taking the ‘ulama’s word for it and thinking that Islam is a religion that forbids everything, without any reason. In her class to the students in Canada, as pointed out earlier, she put women at the centre of potential change in family relationships, if they acted on God’s message of not to sever that which God has commanded be joined. Hashmi offered a stinging rebuke of certain social practices—death rituals in the first case, and a range of practices such as not veiling, denying a woman her right to an inheritance, refusing to spend money on the ritual sacrifice at the end of the month of pilgrimage (hajj), or wrongfully engaging in interest-bearing loans, in the second. These examples illustrate how wide-ranging is Hashmi’s exegesis of the Qur’an, or to put it differently, how all aspects of social life are viewed through the lens of the Qur’anic text. This, as she says often—together with the prophetic traditions, or Hadith—is the only true touchstone (mayyar) for action in the world. However, it is clear from Hashmi’s condemnation of the ‘ulama, on the grounds that they have introduced unacceptable innovations in religion (bid‘a), that there are others who do not share her views. Hashmi refers to herself rhetorically in 1999 as a ‘Wahhabi’, a pejorative term used by many of the ‘ulama for the Ahl-i Hadith and other groups. Likewise, in lectures given in Canada, she refers to others’

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

319

view that women who veil in public the way she does are ‘extremists, terrorists’. The divisiveness of these issues in an intra-Muslim context thereby becomes clear: Al-Huda students must choose which voices they will listen to, those of other Muslims around them—in their families, in mosques, in a variety of public arenas—or the word of God, as they hear it unfolding before them in their Al-Huda classes. The stylistic differences between the 1999 lecture and the one in 2005 are striking. In 1999, she addressed her audience collectively, her words flowing rapidly, switching back and forth from the historical context to the present one in a way that was sometimes confusing. In the 2005 classes, her pace, while still fast, was more measured, the address was more personal, and the tone was more conversational. We see this, for instance, when she asked students if they could think of examples of religious innovations from their everyday experience. Although she seemed to answer her own questions, there was more give and take, more involvement from the audience by the simple fact of asking questions and listening to their responses. Asking questions of her audience seems, in fact, to have become a hallmark of Hashmi’s teaching style. Also interesting is the fact that Hashmi’s 2005 lectures are characterized by a great deal of affect.30 The focus of her exegesis is on inner personal transformation as the key to outward changes in behaviour. Like a Sufi master addressing his disciples—but also in significant ways differing from the classic image of the Sufi master whose disciples owed him absolute obedience31—she speaks frequently of the importance of the heart. In her exegesis of Qur’an 2:10 (‘In their hearts is a sickness, and God has increased their sickness’) and 2:74 (‘Then your hearts hardened thereafter and are like stones, or even yet harder’), she described the person whose heart has become

30

On the importance of affect in Qur’nic education, see Gade, Perfection Makes Practice, pp. 131–43 and passim. 31 The well-known adage that the Sufi disciple must be so completely devoted to his master that he is like a dead body in the hands of the undertaker would likely be repudiated by Hashmi. See, for example, Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 103.

320

Scholars of Faith

hard, worse than a stone, because even stones bow down before God and allow water to flow between them, water that swells into rivers. How do we know when our hearts have become hard? she asked her students. Ask yourselves three questions: Do you enjoy being part of religious gatherings (mehfil) where the Qur’an is being discussed or do you long to be somewhere else? Do you enjoy listening to the Qur’an being recited? Does it stir your heart or are you indifferent to it? And third, do you enjoy being alone with God in prayer or do you constantly seek human company so that you are not alone?32 If they answered these questions honestly and faced up to them, they could begin to diagnose their spiritual sickness of the heart and embark on the work of reform. In Hashmi’s interaction with her students, there is a fine balance between giving due respect and deference to her as an authority figure and requiring that students be active thinkers, listeners, and learners. On the one hand she demands of her students that they make full use of their faculties, that they ask questions, that they use their intelligence (‘aql). Yet at the same time, she demands strict conformity to high standards of etiquette, discipline, and respect for her authority as a teacher, and especially for the Qur’an that is at the centre of their joint endeavours.33 She can be heard on tape upbraiding students for perceived breaches of etiquette, including mildly disruptive behaviour such as talking in class, asking a question at the wrong time, being silent when spoken to, not paying attention in class, and so on. In this sense, there is not much difference between the deference expected of madrasa students for their teachers and in Hashmi’s interactions with students. While she opens up the classroom space to discussion of personal matters in a way that I did not observe at Jami‘a Nur, such discussion occurs in an overall context of tight control of the parameters of legitimate discourse. This was illustrated by the fact that both the personal testimonials received from online students, which were selected for being read aloud by a student in the classroom, were highly respectful of Hashmi’s authority. There was no challenge therein. Rather, they bore witness to the truth-value of arguments Hashmi was making about the need to use personal time 32 33

Lesson 1.13d–e (2005). Lessons 1.01–1.10 (2005).

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

321

wisely and to maintain and nurture family relationships rather than allow them to be severed. This said, Hashmi is very good at delegating authority to others, and has in fact stepped away from the hands-on intensive teaching that she did in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. That role is now performed by younger Al-Huda teachers, among them her daughter Taimiyyah in Canada.

Al-Huda at Mississauga, Canada The Al-Huda Institute at Mississauga is located on a quiet street in the Toronto suburb. It sits on a large property, a white, two-storey corner building with a wide driveway and large staircase leading to a glassfronted entrance (Figure 8.1). There is some parking space behind the building, though both the building and the parking lot are full to capacity and the facility, once considered spacious, is now becoming too small for the number of people who use it. Inside, there is a lobby in the front, with a bookshop and several small offices leading off the reception area on one side. Upstairs there are classrooms (Figure 8.2) and a conference room and library, and downstairs a kitchen and a large

Figure 8.1

Entrance to Al-Huda Institute, Mississauga, Canada

Source: Reproduced with permission from Al-Huda.

322

Figure 8.2

Scholars of Faith

Classroom in Al-Huda Institute, Mississauga, Canada

Source: Reproduced with permission from Al-Huda.

gym that has multiple uses as a prayer hall, play area for children, dining room, and even some classrooms cordoned off from the rest of the gym space where small boys are taught by male instructors. The building is well lit and airy, and teachers and staff move about briskly. Muffled conversations in muted voices can be heard in the hallways. The women radiate a sense of purpose, gravitas, and amiable sociability.34 Taimiyyah Zubair, the third daughter of Idrees Zubair and Farhat Hashmi, moved to Mississauga in 2004. Born in Scotland in 1986, she completed her O Levels in Islamabad and then took the Qur’an class with her mother and some other students, completing it in a year. She was 15 at the time. She recalls that they studied from Monday through Saturday, from early morning until 6.00 in the evening. It was very intensive and thorough. After that her mother began teaching a Ramadan class in Karachi (similar to the Fahm al-Qur’an course today), which later grew into a full-time one-year course. The English 34 This description is based on two visits to the Institute, in 2012 and 2014. It is possible that the observations I make here no longer reflect current realities on the ground.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

323

Qur’an classes in Mississauga started in 2005 in response to public demand and need. The initial impetus for the class came from two non-South Asian students who did not understand Urdu; both were recent converts and one of them was African American. They used to manage by looking at the notes of one of the students who wrote in English. In view of the inadequacy of the resources available to them, Taimiyyah began teaching English classes, first to a small number of students, then gradually to more and more. Now, the number of students was greater than she could handle.35 When I met her in 2014, she was teaching a weekend Qur’an class (Taleem al-Qur’an English) on Saturdays and Sundays, which took place in the gym. Student demand was so great that as many as 300 enrolled but after that lack of space and staff dictated that others had to be turned away. Prior to this, Taimiyyah had been teaching the word-for-word translation in the weekly Taleem al-Qur’an English class. This class covered the same ground, but during Saturdays and Sundays. One Sunday, I was a participant–observer in the gym. The students sat in neat rows on white sheets spread out over the fully carpeted gym floor, their short narrow desks in front of them. They faced the white qibla wall, which marks the direction of prayer. The wall contained a simple unadorned niche and a number of bookshelves along its length filled with Hadith and other books. Above the bookshelves was a large projection screen onto which teachers projected words or images that pertained to the lesson at hand. There were also five large clocks, each of which indicated one of the five canonical prayer times, ranging from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. Two other clocks on the wall running along the length of the gym indicated the local time. This wall had a number of large windows, clear above and tinted below, which let in plenty of light while shielding students from outside view. In front of the gym, by the qibla wall, there was a large wooden desk on which was seated a student-teacher working on a laptop through which she controlled the images being projected on the screen. At the back of the gym there were several rows of chairs for older students who were unable to sit on the floor like the younger ones. Some, who were not yet full-time students, were dressed in 35 The information in this paragraph is based on a personal conversation with Taimiyyah Zubair, 24 May 2014.

324

Scholars of Faith

colourful clothes, not in the student uniform. The lesson being taught that Sunday consisted of ayahs 25–49 of Sura Hud (Q 11:25–49).36 Taimiyyah stood in front of the desk facing the students, speaking in a clear voice that carried very well throughout the large hall. Dressed, like the students, in a black abaya—though she wore a large blue headscarf, unlike their white ones—she was reading off an iPad in her hand, and a microphone was clipped to the inside of her robe. There were no trailing wires, and she therefore had full mobility. She walked back and forth in front of the students, and at one point even joined them in one of the front rows, watching while a group of seven or eight students staged a short performance illustrating a verse in the lesson. The students listened attentively and took notes throughout, occasionally answering a question posed by Taimiyyah. At no point did any of them raise their hands to speak—likely a result as much of the speed of the lesson as of their shyness in speaking before a large crowd. However, some students did speak up during and after a group presentation about how hearing works in the human body, in reference to the frequent phrase in the Qur’an, ‘Will you not hear?’ The leader of the group made seven young women stand in a row. Each was carrying a placard slung around her neck bearing terms such as ‘inner ear’, ‘muscle’, ‘outer ear’, ‘cochlea’, and finally ‘brain’. The one with ‘brain’ was at the end of the row, and the leader directed each person to make motions with her hands and body to show the way that part of the ear responds to sound. They were thus making different kinds of movements, and the audience periodically broke into laughter. Taimiyyah had moved into one of the student rows meanwhile, to get a better view of the performance. The group leader explained in simple terms how sound moves from one part of the ear to the other, and also what happens if one or other part of this complex mechanism is impaired. She said that these days it is possible to buy a replacement for some of the parts but it costs thousands of dollars and does not work as well as the natural ears we all have. So God has given us a big gift for free, and we should look after it. One should 36 Lesson 118, 25 May 2014. The lesson numbers are the same as those in the flagship year-long Taleem al-Qur’an course, whether in Urdu or in English.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

325

never turn the volume of an audio equipment to its full capacity, but only up to 60 per cent. Beyond that, it would start to damage one’s ear. Then she asked students for comments, and a few girls spoke up softly, making brief comments about the value of listening. One student said it’s important to listen carefully before speaking. Taimiyyah, now at the front of the hall again, took this up, saying how important it was to first listen, and then speak. Then a woman walked up to a small enclosure on one side of the hall, where she could not be seen by the other students, and said she had something to say. She had suffered from hearing loss for many years and wanted to tell her story, but she did not want the students to see her. Many years ago she had had a blockage that had prevented her from hearing. For this she underwent a long and complicated surgery, although the doctor only gave it a 30 per cent chance of success. But she took the risk, and after several hours of surgery she was able to hear—but now everything was so loud and hurt her so much that she could not stand it. So three weeks later she underwent another round of surgery. Since then she has been able to hear, but her hearing is very sensitive and loud noises hurt her. She was very emotional as she described her trials over the years. Another woman came up to her and the two hugged each other closely. Later, when the class was over, Taimiyyah spoke some words of comfort to her. Her personal testimony had borne powerful witness to the message which the group performance had sought to convey. Taimiyyah is a very knowledgeable, hard-working, and highly dedicated teacher of word-for-word translation of the Qur’an from Arabic into English and an avid student of tafsir. In her translation lessons, which follow the path charted by her parents, she frequently points out the different ways in which particular words or phrases have been read and interpreted, and also cites the opinions of different exegetes. A simple example is provided by the verse describing the splitting of the moon (al-Qamar, Q 54:1) which Taimiyyah said has been interpreted in two ways: the stronger of the two opinions, supported by the fact that the past tense is used, is that it was a miracle of the Prophet Muhammad, while the second opinion is that it will occur on the Day of Judgment.37 By contrast, an ambiguous verse such as ‘by the even 37 Lesson 274, 1 April 2013. The references in this paragraph, and their corresponding dates, are from the Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English course

326

Scholars of Faith

and the odd’ (Al-Fajr, Q 89:3; Arberry trans.) has been interpreted in at least 36 different ways, she told the class, and she gave them some of the opinions.38 In keeping with the Al-Huda principle that one’s teaching style should be suited to the language and knowledge base of the students being addressed, sometimes Taimiyyah draws on examples from everyday life to vividly convey an image invoked by the verses being studied. Thus, describing the crumbling of the mountains on the Day of Judgment (Al-Waqi‘a, Q 56:5) to a fine powder, she said it would be like grinding something in a blender or food processor.39 Likewise, she explained the word tabaqat (layers) in the verse ‘[He] who created seven heavens one upon another’ (Al-Mulk, Q 67:3; Arberry trans.) by evoking the image of plates stacked one on top of the other.40 And in the very next verse, ‘Thou seest not in the creation of the All-Merciful any imperfection [tafawut]’, she explained the word ‘imperfection’ by evoking the harmony a woman seeks when she designs the interior of her home so that ‘everything goes together, it matches’.41 At other times a verse led to a discussion of real-life situations in a person’s life. Thus, the word ‘Hadith’ in the verse ‘Hast thou received the story [Hadith] of Moses?’ (Al-Nazi‘at, Q 79:15; Arberry trans.) prompted an extended discussion of how one’s understanding of the same verse changes depending on one’s life situation. Taimiyyah said that after she had her first child, her understanding of the Qur’an changed.42 Taimiyyah exemplifies the role of teacher-learner. Over the years she has studied a number of Al-Huda and other courses after completing the Taleem al-Qur’an class in Islamabad. She is also an avid reader when not fulfilling administrative and teaching duties at the Al-Huda centre, or domestic roles at home. Having mastered Arabic grammar and word-for-word translation and analysis, which she has taught since 2005, her scholarly interests have turned, not surprisingly, to

that I was part of during 2009–13. The lessons were from a pre-recorded tape played on the date specified for the online students of that class. 38 Lesson 307, 16 September 2013. 39 Lesson 276, 15 April 2013. 40 Lesson 290, 3 June 2013. 41 Lesson 290, 3 June 2013. 42 Lesson 302, 26 August 2013.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

327

exegesis (tafsir), one of the most important of the Qur’anic sciences.43 She told me that ‘the internalization of the Qur’an takes place at this level. People who admire the language of the Qur’an are only looking at its surface. Yes, it’s beautiful, but that’s only the first step. It doesn’t further one’s understanding of its meaning, which is what tafsir does.’44 And there are many different kinds of tafsir. Some focus on the language of the Qur’an, such as the tafsir of al-Zamakhshari (d. 1144), the Mu‘tazili scholar. Her mother and she refer to this tafsir, among others, though they have differences with him on some issues, given his Mu‘tazili views.45 Some focus on the views of different scholars, such as Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200).46 Another kind of tafsir looks at what laws can be derived from the verses of the Qur’an. She herself was not very interested in this, because the Qur’an is so much more than a lawbook.47 The mufassir who Taimiyyah said had affected her deeply was Shaykh ibn Uthaymin al-Tamimi (1929–2000), an influential Saudi scholar (‘alim) whose opinions are considered definitive by many Salafis today.48 A student of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Baz in Riyadh, he

43 See Claude Gilliot, ‘Exegesis of the Qur’an: Classical and Medieval’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 99–124; and Rotraud Wielandt, ‘Exegesis of the Qur’an: Early Modern and Contemporary’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 124–42. 44 Notes from personal conversation, 25 May 2014. 45 On al-Zamakhshari, see Anthony H. Johns, ‘Air and Wind’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 53, among other articles in the Encyclopaedia. 46 On Ibn al-Jawzi, see Leah Kinburg, ‘Ambiguous’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 71, among other articles in the Encyclopaedia. 47 In contrast, Mawdudi’s tafsir, the Tafhim al-Qur’an, is greatly interested in such matters. See Charles J. Adams, ‘Abu’l A‘la Mawdudi’s Tafhim alQur’an’, in Andrew Rippen, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), pp. 315–16. 48 A native of Unayza, a regional town in the al-Qasim region, northwest of Riyadh, he was educated at the Riyadh Educational Institute and the Faculty of Shariah in Riyadh. When his shaykh died, he succeeded him as imam of the al-Jami‘ al-Kabir mosque in Unayza in 1947. He was the imam there until his death over 50 years later. During this time, he also taught at

328

Scholars of Faith

had an illustrious career as a teacher and author of numerous books,49 including a commentary on Ibn Taymiyya’s exegesis of the Qur’an.50

Al-Huda Online Testing Center, Hurst, Texas Turning now to the centre of the online classes in Hurst, Texas, we encounter some remarkable women—teacher-learners again—who have made it possible for students all over the world to benefit from the classes taking place in the Al-Huda Institute in Mississauga, Canada. The person who started it all, Shazia Nawaz, was 24 when she became a student of Farhat Hashmi in Islamabad in 1998–9, in the fifth and last batch of students before Hashmi moved to Karachi. Later Shazia also moved to Karachi, as an Al-Huda staff member, staying in the hostel along with 24 other women. She helped Hashmi’s children with their maths and English homework and became close to Hashmi’s family. She described these two years as the best years of her life.51 After her marriage in 2003, she moved to Arizona and later to Dallas. While she was in Arizona, she began to teach lessons on PalTalk,52 and later broadcast an online course from Arizona to Lahore. This course had 100 students. It was the precursor to the Qur’an online classes to come. Hashmi came to Canada in January 2005. That year, she had 400 students. Shazia Nawaz wanted to listen to Hashmi herself but was too far away to do so in person. So she took the initiative to get the Al-Huda online classes up and running despite the widespread scepticism of the leaders of Al-Huda that they could be made to work, given that everybody would be in different time zones.53 The Taleem al-Qur’an online

the Educational Institute of Unayza, among other places. See al-‘Allamah ‘Abdul Muhsin al-‘Abbad al-Badr, The Life of Imam Muhammad bin Salih al‘Uthaymin (Mecca: Makkah Publishing, 2013). 49 al-Badr, The Life of Imam Muhammad bin Salih al-‘Uthaymin, pp. 16–23. 50 Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymin, An Explanation of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah’s Introduction to the Principles of Tafsir (Birmingham: Al-Hidaayah Publishing, 2013). 51 Notes from my telephone conversation with Shazia Nawaz, 24 August 2011. 52 For more on PalTalk, see Chapter 6. 53 Information based on my personal conversation with Taimiyyah Zubair, 21 May 2014.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

329

courses were initially slow to take off due to lack of teachers and trained volunteers. But by 2009 there were enough trained volunteers to help run the classes. At first, evening and weekend classes were added for students who had registered in advanced courses but were far behind the existing students, who were almost halfway through the year-long course. So they studied on weekends or evenings—in addition to taking the regular daytime classes—to make up the lessons they had missed. A hundred and ninety students joined the weekend class, and 90 joined the evening class. This was when the online classes were expanded. In 2011, Shazia and her band of volunteers were managing 29 online classes altogether from the Hurst centre. Most were in Urdu, though some were in English. Some classes had as many as 50–70 students, while others were much smaller, with only 5–10. To get a better idea of what the work entailed, in 2013 I visited Shazia Nawaz at her office in Hurst. The Al-Huda Testing Center consisted of a suite of rooms in a single-storey building in a suburb of Dallas, close to the airport. Inside, there were cubicles for different volunteers, a kitchen, a small conference room, and an L-shaped space as you entered that served as a classroom with chairs and a blackboard. Shazia Nawaz had a spacious office. Five volunteers, Shazia, and I sat around the conference table and they told me about themselves and their work. Maryam,54 a young woman of Pakistani origin, was living in Dallas with her husband and children when she took the Al-Huda online Urdu class in 2005. She took the intensive 18-month certificate course. That year, tafsir classes were taught by Farhat Hashmi and streamed live online, and were a big draw for the online students. Maryam said that the classes helped her a lot as a mother, as she was able to give her children a good upbringing based on Qur’anic teachings. Since then she had taken a number of other Al-Huda courses, and when we met her, she was in charge of grading the Urdu tests. This was an important role, as the number of Urdu speakers outnumbered that of students taking English classes. Contrary to my expectations that there were only two language groups (Urdu and English), the situation was in fact more complex as there was in addition a hybrid group which was fluent in spoken Urdu but read English more fluently than 54 A pseudonym, not the volunteer’s real name. All the volunteers’ names in this section have been changed to preserve their anonymity.

330

Scholars of Faith

Urdu. The students in this group took notes in English, although they were enrolled in Urdu classes. Finally, there was also a small group of students from India and Bangladesh whose languages of instruction were Gujarati, Hindi, or Bengali. Volunteers translated the tests into these languages (or hired an outside person, if none of them knew the required languages well enough). In 2013, only a handful of the students belonged to this last group. The volunteer sitting next to Maryam, Asiya, was an older woman with a degree in computer engineering and many years of experience working in the industry. She first learned of Al-Huda through her husband, who was a doctor. They had grown-up children. When she heard Hashmi deliver a lecture in which she challenged the women in her audience to ‘serve Allah’ after having ‘served the dunya [the world]’ for so many years, Asiya enrolled in the course, excited at the prospect of studying the Qur’an in original Arabic. Originally, because the students were already four months into the course, she was Shazia Nawaz’s student, studying seven juz with her. But once she had caught up with the others, she joined the regular online class. During our conversation, she explained that she was now coordinating the English-language online tests. Asiya’s neighbour at the conference table that day was Hafsa. Hafsa, who was born in the US, had lived in California for many years before moving to Texas. She smiled easily. While still in California, she asked her husband for permission to go to Mississauga and study the Taleem al-Qur’an class from Hashmi. He agreed, and she and her mother left together to study with Hashmi. She was one of the ‘hybrids’ whom Shazia Nawaz had spoken of earlier. She took the Urdu language class taught by Hashmi but took notes in English. She and her mother completed the course in two years. Meanwhile, her husband had moved to Cleveland to be closer to her, and he would commute to Mississauga on weekends to see her and her mother. After the course was over, they decided to buy a house in Dallas, as housing prices there were lower than in California. A number of her husband’s friends moved too. She had four children, the oldest of them a teenager, and volunteered at the centre once a week. In one day, she would correct between 15 and 20 tests. Next to Hafsa was Safiya, a young woman, married, with children. She had a computer science degree from Kansas, and like Asiya,

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

331

many years of experience working in the corporate world, in her case in information technology (IT). In 2001 she got laid off from her job—which, in retrospect, she said was the best thing that could have happened to her. She ‘told Allah to take her where He would’, and after she found out about the Al-Huda course she never looked back. Since completing the course, she had applied her computer skills to keeping the Al-Huda website updated. Periodically she took refresher courses to keep abreast of changes in the field of computer technology. She taught condensed courses to kids (one of her former students was sitting next to her). She said she and the other students had to keep learning in order to apply their skills to the Al-Huda course materials. Now she was in charge of grading tests, like the others in the group. The last person was a 19-year-old girl named Fauzia, who was in college studying towards a business degree. She also worked at the centre part-time, twice or thrice a week. Fauzia’s work consisted of data entry, as all the test grades had to be entered into the computer database before they could be mailed back to the students. In one week she could enter up to 500 student grades. She was also in charge of accounts, which involved a lot of responsibility. Initially she had taken some short classes (Dawra-i Qur’an) with a friend of hers at someone’s house. Then she went on to take other classes and had helped to make visual study aids and materials that would be interesting to younger people. Initially she had a hard time reading Urdu and Arabic, but now she was quite fluent and was able to write Urdu comfortably. In this way, Al-Huda had helped her develop her language skills. She said Al-Huda was like her second home and she loved it there. What does the Al-Huda Testing Center do? What is its role in Al-Huda online classes? To give the reader some idea of the work it does, a small incident from the online experience of which I was a part may be helpful. Starting in early 2010, my class, which had started in December 2009,55 regularly took tests on the material we were studying. All the students would receive an email attachment of the test from the Bengaluru, India-based course-in-charge once half a juz had been completed. Students were given a deadline for the submission 55

Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English course; see Appendix 8.1 at the end of this chapter for a list of online classes offered during 2011, 2012, and 2013.

332

Scholars of Faith

of tests. Failure to complete the test on time invited a small monetary fine, which rose incrementally as time passed, though it was capped at three weeks (after three weeks, the fine did not increase any further). The translation tests were closed book and the tafsir assignment, given at the end of each juz, was open book. Students were on an honour system, there being no way Al-Huda could supervise them in the online environment. We were given a time limit and told not to open the test until we thought we were ready to take it. Given that the course was new to us and all the students were anxious to do well, we were eagerly awaiting the receipt of our graded tests through the mail (‘snail’ mail, not email).56 However, months passed before any of the graded tests came back, and then too just a few. By the second half of 2010, the number of tests completed was already considerably greater than the number returned to students. In June 2010, responding to students’ periodic enquiries about the matter, the testing centre sent a long email explaining the enormity of the volunteers’ workload as well as teething troubles encountered at the beginning of 2010 when the testing process started. Apart from an unanticipated forced move by the testing centre from one location to another in February, which caused a month’s delay, the email explained that when the volunteers began their work, ‘there were lots of surprises waiting for us Subhanallah’.57 Chief among these was that because almost all the courses (then over 15 in all) had course IDs that began with ‘TQ’ (for Taleem al-Qur’an), the volunteers had difficulty placing the tests in the correct courses when students carelessly misidentified their course title or failed to write their full names at the top as required. This was especially challenging when the material that the students were being tested on was the same in different courses. As there were more than 600 tests to be graded by this time, it took the volunteers a whole month to make an accurate list of students’ names in each course and match the tests to the students. Only then could

56 The online classes were still so new that the testing centre had not yet worked out a definitive system for the receipt of graded tests. We went to a system of online uploading of tests for a while, then returned to the use of snail mail. 57 Email from Shazia Nawaz, ‘Reasons for Delay in Posting Exams Back’, 15 June 2010.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

333

the  grading begin. Even after the grading was done, new problems arose as the volunteers found that the mailing addresses they had on record for many students were incomplete. The email concluded by saying that after several months, the testing centre had developed a multiple-stage checking process: 1. Sorting the tests received into their respective courses, making answer ‘keys’ for the questions, and putting the tests and keys in packages for the ‘checking team’. 2. The checking team graded the tests using the keys provided, and if necessary revised the key. 3. The checking team then returned the tests, which went to the ‘re-checking team’. This team rechecked the graded tests and calculated the student’s total grade. 4. The volunteers noted which questions students repeatedly answered incorrectly, whether in translation or ‘fahm’ (understanding, exegesis) assignments, and reported their findings to the ‘course in-charges’. 5. After rechecking, all the tests were given to the regional coordinator for ‘final approval’. 6. An additional grade was added for students’ participation in group discussions (which occurred once a week), and a final grade for each student was entered on a grade sheet. 7. Address labels were made, each test was folded and put into a white envelope, and the tests were mailed after making a record of this final step.58

As is apparent from this email, there was a clear hierarchy of functions and roles at the Al-Huda Testing Center, ranging from the regional coordinator at the top, to the course in-charges (one per course), group in-charges (responsible for specific parts of the daily teaching schedule), and volunteers working in the office or grading tests at home. The thoroughness of the work being done, most of it on volunteer basis, spoke volumes about the high morale, motivation, and dedication of all involved. The efficiency with which it was done was evidence once again of the ‘hybrid’ bureaucratic structure of Al-Huda as a whole, modelled on both an educational institution and a corporate one.59 Unlike many schools or contemporary offices, 58

Email from Nawaz, ‘Reasons for Delay in Posting Exams Back’, 15 June

2010. 59

See Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, Chapter 3.

334

Scholars of Faith

however, there was much greater transparency and sense of common purpose at Al-Huda.

*** In this chapter I have looked closely at a range of teachers, students, and volunteers at different Al-Huda teaching sites, including the online one. Two key points that emerge from this examination are: the continuous nature of the learning experience for students at Al-Huda and the way in which course material—the Qur’anic text that is at the heart of it all—is ‘translated’ into action. The word must become embodied action in the world for Al-Huda’s purpose to be fulfilled. I have tried to encapsulate the concept of continuous learning by using the term ‘teacher-learner’, for many students who complete the 18-month diploma course go on to enrol in other Al-Huda courses to deepen their knowledge and love of the Qur’an by continuous exposure and study. Simultaneously they might volunteer in some capacity at an Al-Huda centre if they are within driving distance of one or start a small study circle of their own at home with the aid of recorded lectures, visual materials available on YouTube and other media, and traditional written texts. In the next chapter I turn to students’ and teachers’ narratives, drawn largely from people I came to know, meet, or correspond with over the four years that I was an active listener and online student.

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

335

APPENDIX 8.1

As of 2013, the following Al-Huda courses were being offered online on different days of the week: A8.1

Al-Huda online courses, 2011–13

Course Name

Days

Time

Abbreviation

Taleem al-Qur’an Diploma Course Urdu 2011

Tuesdays and Wednesdays

9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. EST

TDCU

Taleem al-Qur’an Diploma Weekends Urdu 2012

Saturdays and Sundays

9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. EST

TQWD

Taleem al-Qur’an Fridays 2010

Fridays

5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. EST

TQCF

Taleem al-Qur’an Mondays 2012

Mondays

1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EST

TQCP–1

Taleem al-Qur’an Course Mondays 2011

Mondays

11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. EST

TQCP–2

Saut al-Qur’an Course Sundays

Sundays

9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. EST

SQEC

Taleem al-Qur’an Diploma Course Urdu 2010

9:30 a.m. to 2:00 Tuesdays, p.m. EST Wednesdays, and Thursdays

TQMU

Taleem al-Qur’an Diploma Course UK

Tuesdays and Wednesdays

9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (UK time)

TQUK

Taleem al-Qur’an Certificate Course

Mondays and Tuesdays

5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. EST

TQCE

Taleem al-Qur’an Diploma Urdu Course 2013

Wednesdays 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 and Thursdays p.m. EST

Urdu Quran Courses

TQMD

336

Scholars of Faith

Course Name

Days

Time

Abbreviation

Taleem al-Qur’an Diploma Urdu: UAE Timings 2013

Mondays and Tuesdays

9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.UAE Time

TQMD

Qur’an Evening Certificate Course Urdu

Tuesdays and Wednesdays

6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. EST

AQCE

Taleem al-Qur’an Certificate Course English: Weekdays 2011

Tuesdays and Wednesdays

10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST

TCCE

Taleem al-Qur’an English Course Weekends 2012

Saturdays and Sundays

9:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. EST

TWCE

Taleem al-Qur’an English Diploma Course 2012

Mondays through Thursdays

8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. EST

TQE-5 Live from Canada

Taleem al-Qur’an Evening English Course

Wednesdays 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 and Thursdays p.m. EST

TQEE

Taleem al-Qur’an Weekend English Course

Saturdays

9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. EST

TQWE

Saut al-Qur’an Weekend English Course

Saturdays/ Sundays

10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. EST

SQEC

Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English Course

Mondays and Tuesdays

12:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST

TQME

Taleem al-Qur’an English Conference Call Wednesday Course

Wednesdays

5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. EST

CCW

Taleem al-Qur’an English Conference Call Friday Course

Fridays

5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. EST

CCF

English Quran Courses

Al-Huda Onsite and Online

337

Course Name

Days

Time

Abbreviation

Fehm al-Qur’an and Seerah Course: Saturdays

Saturdays

9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST

AFQS

Qur’an Certificate Evening Course English 2013

Wednesdays 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 and Thursdays p.m. EST

AQEE

Urdu Hadith Courses Taleem al-Hadith Morning Urdu Course 2012

Thursdays

10:00 a.m. to 2:00 AHM p.m. EST/10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. UAE Time

Sahih Bukhari Friday Evening

Fridays

7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST

HBE

Sahih Bukhari Thursday Morning

Thursdays

10:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. EST

HBU

Sahih Bukhari Wednesday Morning, UAE Timings

Wednesdays

9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. UAE Time

HBU

Taleem al-Hadith Weekdays Urdu

9:00 a.m. to 3:00 Tuesdays, p.m. EST Wednesdays, and Thursdays

THB4 Live from Canada

Taleem al-Hadith English Advanced Course: Bukhari 2012

Fridays

11:15 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST

THBLive from Canada

Taleem al-Hadith Morning English Course

Mondays

10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. EST

AHME

Hifz and Riyad us-Saliheen

Mondays

10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST

HFRS

Da‘wa-e-Shaafi Tazkiya Course

Thursdays

Morning Session TDS 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST Evening Session 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST

English Hadith Courses

Short Courses

338

Scholars of Faith

Course Name

Days

Time

Abbreviation

Seerah an-Nabavi s.a.w. Course

Fridays

Morning Session 11:00 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. EST Evening Session 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST

AHSC

Islamic Creed Course

Thursdays

10:15 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. EST

IAQ

Fiqh al-Quloob

Tuesdays

10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST

FQH

9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. UAE Time

TDS

Fridays Da‘wa-e-Shaafi and Tajweed Course, UAE Time Advanced Courses Advanced Tahfeez Al-Qur’an Course

Fridays

12:45 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EST

HFZ

Advanced Course: Ruh ul-Bayan Weekend Urdu

Saturdays and Sundays

9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. EST

ADWE

Advanced Course: Ruh ul-Bayan Weekdays Urdu

9:30 a.m. to 1:30 Tuesdays, p.m. EST Wednesdays, and Thursdays

ADVM

Advanced Tahfeez Al-Qur’an Course

Fridays

12:45 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EST

AHQ

Advanced Tahfeez Al-Qur’an Course: Juz 29

Thursdays

12:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. EST

HFZ

Hifdh Courses

Note: s.a.w: sallallahu alaihi wasallam (may Allah’s peace be upon him); HIFDH: classes on Qur’an memorization. Source: Al-Huda Testing Center, Hurst, Texas, 2013.

9 STUDENT NARRATIVES Personal Transformations and Reorientations

Lut was the only messenger who was sent to a people not his own—he was an immigrant. —Al-Huda teacher to Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English online class, 4 July 2011 You will write books, you will die, your efforts will be forgotten. What’s the point of working for the dunya? The only thing that endures is the akhira, and that’s what I have dedicated myself to in my life. —My conversation with an Al-Huda teacher, July 2012

For most Muslims the story of Lot in the Qur’an is an illustration of the punishment visited upon those who disobey God’s commands.1 This is also how Al-Huda interprets the story. However, as with many verses in the Qur’an, Al-Huda teachers draw more than a single lesson from it. In studying the story of Lot in Sura al-Hijr (Q 15), verses 51–77 in class, the teacher pointed out, for example, that when the angels told Lot to take his family (all except his wife) to safety in the middle of the night because God was going to destroy the city in the 1 However, see Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (New York: NYU Press, 2013), especially Chapter 1, for other ways of interpreting the story of Lot and his community.

Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

340

Scholars of Faith

morning, they told him to walk at the back, behind the others. The teaching to be drawn from this, she said, was that when a teacher is with younger students, she should walk at the end of the line in order to protect them.2 Another teaching—from another verse in this lesson—is that one should not look back when running away from danger, because it would slow one down. Instead one should get away as fast as one can. And last but not least, the fact that Lot’s people were distributed over five cities, one of which had 400,000 people, and that none of them were saved other than Lot and his two daughters,3 shows that one should not be afraid of acting on that which one knows to be right just because one is in the minority. As the teacher concluded: ‘So what lesson is there in this for us? When you convey the message to people, will they accept? No. Should you give up? No. You should just keep going. Don’t be misled that because you are in a minority, you’re wrong. Here, Lut and his daughters were in a minority, yet they were right.’4 This is just one example of Qur’anic exegesis in which Al-Huda teachers relate an exemplary story to the students’ day-to-day lived experience. The use of the words ‘immigrant’ and ‘minority’ was striking in this lesson, given that most of the online students’ parents—or they themselves—had migrated to North America, Europe, or other parts of the world from South Asia. They were therefore intimately familiar with the experience of being bilingual and bicultural members of an ethnic and religious minority in the cities and countries in which they lived. In the present chapter I bring in a number of students’ narratives—which have been overshadowed thus far by the discussion of authority figures such as Farhat Hashmi and other Al-Huda teachers—in order to hear their voices. These narratives are drawn from one-on-one conversations I had with Al-Huda women in a variety of places ranging from Mississauga, Canada; to Hurst, Texas; to Bengaluru, India, in addition to online communication with some 2

Lesson 133, 4 July 2011. These details are not in the Qur’anic verses being referenced but are drawn from Jewish and Christian traditions included in the exegetical literature. See Heribert Busse, ‘Lot’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 231–2. 4 Lesson 133, 4 July 2011, my notes. 3

Student Narratives

341

fellow students in the class I was in. Since a number of people were uneasy about being identified in the book even by a pseudonym, the narratives are organized thematically. In this chapter, I present excerpts of a class discussion about the daily prayer (salah) drawn from my field notes.5 This is followed by the section ‘Students Narrate Their Lives’, in which students in different life stages talk about education and employment in the United States, their experience of immigration from South Asia, family–work balance, and family relationships. The chapter ends with Jasmine Zine’s analysis, a Canadian scholar who speaks from a self-declared ‘critical faith-centered’ perspective, about the issues addressed by the Al-Huda student narratives.

Students Ask Questions On a day in mid-January 2013, when we were on the 25th part (juz) of the Qur’an, just nine months away from finishing the three-and-ahalf-year Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English (TQME) course, students had a lot of questions about some details of the daily prayer. The class, Fiqh of Salah, was one of a handful that had been gradually added to the students’ list of classes over time; it followed the translation and exegesis lessons for the day. Of a practical nature, this class taught students the rules of prayer; after the book on which it was based was finished, similar short classes over the next few months dealt with the rules of purification, tithing (zakat), fasting, and so on. On this day, students were confused about the ‘prostration of forgetfulness’ (sujud al-sahw), the need for which arises when the worshiper is in doubt as to how many cycles of prayer (rak‘a; pl. raka‘at) she has prayed.6 Students asked one another: 1st student: What did she ask us to write? I missed it. 2nd student: If we missed any rak‘a, we have to repeat that prayer. Not sure. Please confirm it? 5 I acknowledge with thanks the help I received from a fellow student who wishes to remain anonymous. This student’s class notes, which she generously shared over a lengthy period, were an enormous aid to me. 6 Muhammad Zulfiqar, Prayer According to the Sunnah (Riyadh: Darussalam, 2006), pp. 343–6.

342

Scholars of Faith

3rd student: Repeat the rak‘a, that’s what I got. 2nd student: Doing the prostration of forgetfulness (sajda sahw) in some specific conditions, not in all conditions.7

Much later, as I was trying to make sense of this conversation and understand its significance, I asked my friend Safiya,8 also an online student in the class, whether the matter had any practical application. Was this an arcane rule that students had to master, or did they actually practise it? She responded: Unfortunately the answer is yes, it can happen in every salah, especially when the person is tired, has a lot of things on their mind, etc. It requires a lot of concentration during the salah to overcome the mind from not straying to thinking about other things. The fact is that as soon as a person starts praying the thoughts seem to wander so much to other things. Things you may have forgotten about during your life can spring up all of a sudden in your mind, a promise you may have made to someone, new ideas, things that you were supposed to do and didn’t do, all spring up at that moment. Although in TQME we have memorized the meaning of the Qur’an, it is still a lot of effort to focus on the meanings in the salah. In fact, the only thing that helps you focus in the salah is if you are concentrating on the meaning of what you are reciting. Sadly, I personally have been in this situation where I have had to do sajdah sahw, as I have been unsure about the number of raka‘at I have read.9

To return to the students’ conversation, a few moments later they were discussing different categories of voluntary prayer and the right times to do them: 1st student: Can somebody tell me what is the 2nd nafil after witr? Is that 2nd nafil considered as tahajjud?10 7 The transcription of the conversation is not exact, but accurately reflects, in my own reconstruction, what was stated. The same is true of the student conversation reported later in the chapter. 8 A pseudonym. All students’ names and some teachers’ names in this chapter have been changed to preserve their anonymity. 9 Email from Safiya to me, 19 January 2015. 10 Nafil: General term for supererogatory prayer, does not replace the five obligatory daily prayers, but can be added to them on a voluntary basis; witr:

Student Narratives

343

4th student: I think there is no nafil after witr. Witr has to be prayed after nafil. If you think you will not wake up for witr, pray it and then sleep. But if you wake up in the night and you want to pray nafil, it is okay. … Can anyone write the definition of qunut11 she gave? 1st student: In ‘isha 4 sunnah, 4 fard, 2 sunnah, 2 nafil, 3 witr, and 2 nafil. Taught to us in India. So if no prayer is offered after witr, then what is 2nd nafil? 3rd student: [Anwering 1st student’s request for a definition] It is the name of the du‘a offered at a specific time while praying. 4th student: In India they say so many things. My mom told me 2 raka‘at of witr is the lock and one rak‘a of witr is the key. It locks all our prayers. I do not know if this is written anywhere. Moderator: I will send you all the recording, inshaAllah.

The students’ level of engagement with the technical aspects of the different kinds of voluntary prayer, most of which are offered at night, was remarkable. Despite the fact that they were unclear about the finer details of voluntary prayer, their three years of Qur’an study were evident in the very questions they were asking. Students’ interactions with one another, in which they readily tried to help their classmates, as also the willingness of the moderator to help them by sending the whole class the recording of the lesson so that they could review the material afterwards, illustrated the spirit of cooperation between the online students and teachers and administrators. Clearly, relationships of trust, friendship, and community had been built up as a result of their shared devotion to the Qur’an over the period of study. The comment by one of the students that a piece of wisdom passed on to her by her mother, may or may not have been accurate because her mother was from India (‘In India they say so many things. … I do not know if this is written anywhere’), also illustrated the sense of

lit., odd number; voluntary prayer that should be done either last thing at night or first thing in the morning, before the dawn prayer; tahajjud: voluntary night prayer offered by the Prophet, for which he would wake up his wife Ai‘sha. It is referred to in Qur’an 17:79 as a recommended practise. 11 Qunut: a supplication (du‘a) that can be offered after the salah; recommended when a calamity has occurred.

344

Scholars of Faith

in-group solidarity among the students, resulting from their knowledge of the Arabic Qur’an studied in Al-Huda classes. Most importantly, as Safiya’s response to my question about the prostration of forgetfulness showed, this short exchange provided evidence of the students’ understanding that now that they were ‘people of the Qur’an’ (ahl al-Qur’an), as their teacher put it, they had the responsibility of putting their knowledge into practice in their personal lives. This was what made it so important that they understand the rulings on prayer, fasting, and other matters. They had to learn how to do everything correctly, teach their children to do likewise, and become quiet agents of change in their families and communities. What are the implications of such personal change? In this chapter I relate the personal stories of different students to wider issues of social change, particularly in the context of South Asian Muslim diasporic immigration to the non-Muslim West.

Students Narrate Their Lives Education and Employment in the United States Sauda is in her mid-thirties. Both her parents are doctors—her father a well-known paediatrician in a major South Indian city and her mother a gynaecologist in the same hospital as her father. Her father is a professor, so it’s a teaching hospital. When she was about six, her father secured a job in Saudi Arabia and the three of them lived there for seven years. They lived in Mecca. The family is not devout but on weekends they would go to the Ka‘aba and pray. Those memories made a deep impression on her. Her parents wanted her to study in an Indian school. This was only available in Jeddah, about 50 miles away. So every day for six or seven years, she would travel in the school bus over 100 miles to go to school and come back home. She left home at about 5 a.m. Eventually, the family came back to India and Sauda went to a fouryear technical residential college, graduating with very high marks. She is a very ambitious person, she said. She had set her heart on going to the United States, and got admission to a graduate IT programme at a major public university in the Midwest. She went on her own, in the late 1990s. It was very hard at first. She had never

Student Narratives

345

been exposed to snow before and suffered physically from it. She got eczema and her skin would peel and break out in painful sores. She went to the doctor. They put her on steroids and eventually she got better. But she was left with a huge medical bill of about USD 1,000 which she had to pay off through student teaching jobs. Her mother pleaded with her to come back, but she wouldn’t give up. She met a number of Muslim women from different parts of the world when she was a graduate student, and it was this experience which first turned her towards greater orthopraxy. She lived with several other Muslim women: two Palestinians, one Turk, and one American convert, as well as one non-Muslim woman. What impressed her was that they were educated and practising. She had previously associated religiosity with people who were not highly educated. She completed her master’s degree and got a series of high-paid IT jobs in different US cities. She was working in California when her parents arranged her marriage to a man from South India. She continued her professional career for a while but decided to give it up to join her husband in Ohio. It was then that she chanced upon the online Al-Huda classes and began a new kind of education, starting from scratch. She herself would not have used the word ‘chanced’, though, as in her view nothing ever happens by chance. It is all part of God’s plan for us. Unlike Sauda, however, some Al-Huda students have chosen to postpone college altogether in order to devote themselves full-time to their religious studies and/or teaching. This was the case with two women I know in Canada, both of whom have taken several Al-Huda courses over the years and are now in leadership positions in the organization. One of them is married and has children, while the other, who is younger, is unmarried. Both said they would like to pursue college down the road. With mounting responsibilities at Al-Huda, however, the older woman is unlikely to get the opportunity to pursue undergraduate or graduate studies in the foreseeable future.

The Experience of Immigration from South Asia Faiza was one of my online classmates whom I got to know quite well, as we ‘met’ in a group setting fairly regularly via Skype for about

346

Scholars of Faith

two years. Faiza took a leadership role in our group when the regular teacher was unable to lead the group, and she shared her experiences with the group on a regular basis in the context of issues that arose in relation to specific lessons. Faiza lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her family was originally from Kanpur, India, but she grew up in Kuwait. When we were in the group together, her parents were still in Kuwait. In Kuwait she studied at an Indian school where there were children from many different nationalities. In fact, responding to my telling her that I was from Delhi and a Hindu, she said she used to know how to read and write Hindi till the seventh grade. During the first Gulf War (1991) when Faiza was still in Kuwait with her parents, she happened to visit India. Due to the war they could not go back to Kuwait for a whole year. So she and her family stayed in Kanpur all that time. It gave her an opportunity to see what life was like in India. She did not seem to have had any prior experience of living in India. She came to the US to study, and got married in 2000. A year later, she and her husband decided to go on hajj in order to get this religious obligation ‘out of the way’, as it were. She decided to wear the hijab before going on hajj. She is familiar with the pattern of women coming back from hajj and deciding to wear the hijab after they return. It’s something that gets commented on in the Muslim community— ‘Oh, she just came back from hajj, and that’s why she’s wearing the hijab now’. She did not want that to be said of her, so she decided to wear it before going. She has worn it regularly ever since, unlike her mother in Kuwait who only wears it occasionally. Her parents had not expected her to wear the hijab. Another online classmate whom I got to know well lives in the United Kingdom (UK). Later we were also in an Arabic grammar class together. Since then she has taken a Hadith class while also working in the evenings at Heathrow Airport and bringing up three children. Layla was born in Pakistan in the late 1970s; when she was six or seven her father got a business opportunity in Libya, so the whole family went there. But because schools were not too good in Libya, Layla’s father sent her and her four siblings to a boarding school in Malta, where they were taught by nuns. A couple of years later their father took them out of the boarding school, and the whole family went on a two-month tour of London, Austria, Germany, and back to

Student Narratives

347

London. After that they went to Pakistan to visit relatives. Finally, they returned to London, where they settled permanently. She was nine at the time and has lived in the UK ever since. When I knew her she was in her late forties and was married with three children. Another classmate, who had settled in Canada, was an older student with grown children. Hafsa came to Montreal in 1972 as a bride just two weeks after her marriage. She was originally from Chennai, India. Her husband died very young, at the age of 47, from renal cancer. She had eight children, four boys and four girls. The youngest, a daughter, was just five years old when her husband died. She brought them up all by herself, and never worked outside the home. She home schooled two of her children for eight years. She said the schools caused children to go astray, especially when there was no male authority figure around. The three youngest children were still living at home with her: two sons were in college (about 20–1 years of age), and a daughter had finished college. Hafsa wanted to have her married soon. The sons were studying anaesthiology and English, respectively. The one doing English would likely become a teacher. The daughter was taking an online class at the Sharia Academy, run by the American Open Academy. She would get a Sharia certificate when she finished.

Family–Work Balance Many of the young women I met or came to know at Al-Huda had worked in IT-related jobs in the US; others had worked in the travel industry or in healthcare. Over time, however, several chose to prioritize their educations or teaching at Al-Huda, finding this more meaningful and personally fulfilling than their professional lives. As I related in the previous chapter, one young woman I met in Dallas, Texas, had been laid off from her IT job and was happy that she had, as it allowed her to devote herself full-time to Al-Huda. Others opted to balance the two and continued to work, either for financial reasons or because they enjoyed what they saw as ways of serving and helping others. Sauda, whose educational career we followed earlier, was a highly successful IT employee in the US prior to her marriage. She worked with Intel and other companies, living in Michigan, California, and

348

Scholars of Faith

Kentucky in pursuit of her career. After she moved to Ohio to join her husband, however, she stopped working. Once she was at home, she wanted to pursue her interest in learning the Qur’an but she needed a teacher she could relate to. There was only one other Muslim in that Ohio town. Someone had told her about PalTalk, so she went online. As she was about to log off, she saw that one of the PalTalk rooms had 80 students in it. So she went to check. When she entered the room, she found that it was the first day of the Taleem al-Qur’an Morning English class and that Farhat Hashmi was speaking live. The next day she logged on again and heard Hashmi discuss the Fatiha. She says this was how she found the teacher she had been looking for. Thereafter, she completed the part-time Urdu Taleem al-Qur’an course. In 2007, she also enrolled in the Taleem al-Qur’an English class for eight months. She prepared very extensive notes for that, which later helped her when she began to teach adult students. Looking back in 2012 from her vantage point in India where she was engaged in Al-Huda activities as an onsite and online teacher much of the week, she had no regrets about having given up her professional career. When it happened, though, it felt like a big letdown to have worked so hard to get to that point and to have had to give it up and become a homemaker. But now she saw all worldly accomplishments as ultimately pointless. To me she said, ‘You will write books, you will die, your efforts will be forgotten. What’s the point of working for worldly purposes (the dunya)? The only thing that endures is the afterlife (the akhira).’ And that was what she had dedicated her life to since she became an Al-Huda online student. The dunya had ceased to have any meaning for her. She did not watch TV, go to the movies, or go shopping for pleasure. None of that mattered. She took care of her family, including obligations to extended family, but other than that all that mattered was her work for the Taleem al-Qur’an classes and the students she taught in the city in which she lived.

Family Relationships The one story I want to tell in ending this section is that of Layla, whom we read about earlier. As a child she and her siblings had lived in Libya, studied in Malta, travelled throughout Europe, spent time with relatives in Pakistan, and when she was about nine, settled in

Student Narratives

349

London, UK, with their parents. Since then she and her siblings had made London their home, and now they were raising their families there. Layla was in her late forties when I got to know her. She had not been particularly religious as a child, she said, and did not know very much about Islam. Both the constant travel when she was young and the lack of Islamic schools in London had contributed to this. Her interest grew gradually as she entered her twenties. After she got married and had children, she felt that if she did not learn she would not be able to teach her children.12 She had a friend who was part of a study circle and initially went along with her reluctantly. But then, she said, ‘I became hooked into going regularly, it was like I was thirsty for knowledge’. She enrolled her children in an Islamic Saturday school, and studied with them as well: ‘They learned about Islam, how to read and write Arabic and how to recite the Qur’an. I too … started attending Saturday school as well as the circle once a week.’ She went on hajj, which she described as ‘an absolutely brilliant experience though there were parts of it which were very hard’. Professionally, she had a pharmacy degree and worked part-time at the airport. She loved her work, as it brought her in touch with ‘lots of different people’, and gave her a sense of satisfaction, knowing that she was able to help someone who was worried or upset. The Saturday classes and study circle made Layla eager to learn the Qur’an in Arabic. She wanted to go deeper. This was how she came to join Al-Huda’s Taleem al-Qur’an class, around 2010. The strenuous study schedule, however, severely tested her, initially causing tension with her husband and children: My biggest struggle was balancing my time doing my studies and spending time with my family and friends. It was very hard at times and my children did suffer, as I couldn’t spend that much time with them. Prior to the course I spent time with them helping with their homework, helping them study. …I must admit initially … my husband and my family weren’t that understanding; they blamed me if anything went wrong. For example, when I became really ill or when my middle daughter didn’t do so well in her exams, I was blamed for not resting or spending time with the children. 12

On changing levels of religiosity as one moves through the lifecycle, see David Kloos, Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority & Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

350

Scholars of Faith

About halfway into the course, Layla had to undergo thyroid surgery, ‘which led to numerous complications’. She lost her voice for over six months. Ever since then her Qur’an recitation had suffered, as her voice broke and she got breathless frequently. Layla was a very dedicated student through all her troubles, and gradually her husband and children became more supportive. Her husband bought her all the technological aids she needed to study, including an iPad, iPhone, and iPod, and cordless headphones so she could listen to taped lectures while doing housework or cooking in the kitchen. And he helped her with her chores and took care of her. When we last spoke after the course was over, Layla was taking other Al-Huda online classes: Sahih Bukhari (Hadith), Arabic grammar, and Qur’an recitation (hifz). When I asked her what she thought were the greatest lessons she had learned at Al-Huda, she said: My biggest lesson during this course [has been] patience. … Allah especially tested me with patience during the course as my children suffered with severe eczema, asthma and then my youngest daughter was diagnosed with diabetes. Soon after [that] I was very ill, such that [I] couldn’t even type or write my lectures as my hands were so shaky. The next lesson I learned is of gratitude to Allah as this course is the best thing that has happened to me and I am truly grateful that now I can understand the words of Allah (s.w.t.). … I am now a calmer, more patient person with a desire to please my family and everyone else around me. I try to show my Islam to those around me in the manner I carry myself, the way I walk, the way I talk, the way I try to behave such that people know what Islam is truly about, just by looking at me! (Don’t know if I am good at it.)

I had known Layla as a very conscientious student who took copious notes on every lesson, and was always willing to share her knowledge and answer any questions I had about the lessons at hand. At the time I had no idea that it was so hard for her to write or to talk during her illness and slow recovery. Our online communication hid this aspect of her struggle from others in the class. Her story of personal struggle, perseverance, family support, and increased involvement in a life of piety was exemplary of what Al-Huda hopes to achieve.

Precarity and ‘Gendered Islamophobia’ In the ‘Introduction’, I noted that the two case studies in this book are linked by the context of precarity, a notion articulated by Attiya

Student Narratives

351

Ahmad in her study of South Asian domestic workers in Kuwait and secondarily in her observations of Al-Huda women who attended study circles (halaqa). I found this analytical concept very helpful in understanding the dynamics of the madrasa students in small-town Shahjahanpur and of the immigrant diaspora in which Al-Huda online classes take place. As Ahmad writes in her ethnography, upper-middle-class women like Auntie Noor experienced precarity in a different register from the domestic workers. For Auntie Noor, the halaqa helped stem her anxieties arising from lifecycle changes in her family, especially as her son pondered his options between seeking employment in the US or in Malaysia.13 As Auntie Noor put it, she felt God would hold her accountable on Judgment Day for the advice she gave to her son. She felt responsible. She ‘woke up … with such a strong feeling [she] could hardly breathe. … Will Allah accept?’14 Ahmad’s ethnography also shows that Auntie Noor distinguished her ‘reformist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ religious practice from the ‘quietly traditional’ Sufi-inflected form of Islam practiced by her parents (which she felt was ‘misguided and mistaken’).15 In order to better understand the narratives of the Al-Huda students presented in this chapter, I also take inspiration from Jasmin Zine’s study of Islamic schools in Canada.16 Zine uses the term ‘gendered Islamophobia’ to characterize the environment in which her subjects found themselves and to explain why many students and parents chose to attend an Islamic school rather than the secular public school. When she was young she had felt disengaged as a ‘minority student growing up in the Canadian school system’, and had ‘experienced a sense of invisibility by not being represented in the school culture or curriculum’.17 The parent of two school-age children, she had sent them to an Islamic school at elementary-school level and later to public school. 13

See Attiya Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space: Foreign Resident Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the Arabian Peninsula’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 14 Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space’, p. 423. 15 Ahmad, ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space’, pp. 425, 432. 16 Jasmin Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools: Unravelling the Politics of Faith, Gender, Knowledge, and Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 17 Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 9.

352

Scholars of Faith

Zine’s work is an ethnography of four Islamic schools in the Toronto area. She writes from a ‘critical faith-centred vantage point’, which she spells out in terms of seven key principles.18 Linking her work to that of theorists of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and poststructural feminism, she examines the way Muslim girls’ identities are constructed in response to pervasive Islamophobia in the post-9/11 environment in Canada. Her interviews with a number of Muslim schoolgirls who wore the veil revealed their ‘experiences of racism, xenophobia, and gendered Islamophobia [when] journeying to and from school’, especially if they had to travel by public bus.19 While ‘the girls were at the nexus of multiple sites of oppression based on race, ethnicity, gender, and religion, they felt that their Islamic identity marked by their hijab was the most salient factor of discrimination’.20 For these reasons they felt safer and more accepted in the Islamic school. Boys too reported feeling more comfortable when they were around other Muslim boys in the Islamic school. Contrariwise, Zine observes that socialization patterns in Islamic schools do not permit their students any choice in matters pertaining to dress and other codes of conduct. She argues:

18 Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, pp. 53–67 and passim. These principles are: (1) a principle of holism, that is, spiritual aspects of identity are connected to its physical and intellectual aspects; (2) historically and culturally situated analyses of religion and spirituality must be incorporated into the analysis of social, historical, and personal factors; (3) religious and spiritual worldviews continue to shape social, cultural, and political development today; (4) religion and spirituality should occupy a central place in the academic study of economics, politics, and other disciplines; (5) religious and spiritual identities are sometimes sites of oppression, connected to discrimination based on race, class, gender, and so on; (6) religion and spirituality can be sites of resistance to injustice; and (7) not all knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge from divine sources must be incorporated into research and knowledge production of a secular nature. 19 Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, pp. 164–7. 20 Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 167. The evidence for this lay in the fact that the same girl who had been stared at and made to feel uncomfortable when she wore an abaya was hardly noticed when she wore a salwar kameez, the South Asian tunic and loose trousers.

Student Narratives

353

The canonical discourse of what I term the ‘pious Muslim girl’ was a salient archetype for young Muslim women to model themselves upon. This discourse is rooted in largely conservative and patriarchal views of Muslim women’s identity. The result is an overemphasis on extrinsic shows of faith, such as the dress code, which is regulated more in accordance with conservative cultural norms than with Islamic injunctions.21

Zine also differs from Mahmood’s argument that interiority is constituted after the adoption of outward piety: ‘we cannot underestimate the way that socialization into religiously defined notions of piety, modesty, and appropriate gendered behaviors are inculcated at an early age within the pedagogy of the home and school’.22 In fact, Zine goes further. She believes the overpolicing of boundaries between boys and girls, the undue scrutiny of the whereabouts of girls at all times (and less so in the case of boys), the ‘cloistering’ of girls in school,23 and so on, have negative consequences for girls. They end up disempowering them and ‘hypersexualizing all gender interactions, which is counter to Islamic ideals’.24 As a result, Canadian Muslim girls were caught between two paradigms: gendered Islamophobia on the one hand and the narrow ‘dogmas espoused by certain sectors of [the Muslim] community’ on the other.25 Zine favours creating a different kind of space, one that ‘present[s] students with alternative possibilities for resistance and change that would decentre some of the patriarchal norms that were uncritically accepted by the community’.26 Zine believes that Muslim girls and women can become positive agents of change by working from within the Islamic discursive realm rather than by critiquing it from the outside. In her view, this is already happening in some communities where female students are ‘seeking to transform the narrow and inequitable parameters of the gendered social space available to them’ from the perspective of a faith-centred and emancipatory epistemology.27

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 190. Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 191. Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 214. Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 209. Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 226. Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 226. Zine, Canadian Islamic Schools, p. 227.

354

Scholars of Faith

*** The Al-Huda students whose narratives I have presented in this chapter, like the students described by Zine, are living in an environment which subjects them to contrary pressures, many of them negative. Being for the most part older than the school-goers Zine studied, they are likely first-generation or second-generation immigrants to Canada, North America, and Europe. As my interlocutors indicated, they came to Al-Huda with anxieties and stress in their personal lives. These included the loss of a husband and having to raise several children by oneself, social isolation after a job loss in the IT industry and having to adjust to living in a new city without any kin or friends, and the experience of immigration to an environment where, especially after 9/11, they were ‘outsiders’ in multiple senses of the word. Many were searching for community and overall meaning. Given the possibilities that opened up in the information age, online classes offer an avenue for community building that could not have been imagined even 20 years ago. Many of the people who told me their stories learned of Al-Huda online classes through word of mouth, through friends or family members. Once they had explored the site and heard Farhat Hashmi’s lectures, they were captivated by the new worlds that Al-Huda classes opened up to them. It gave them knowledge of and pride in their religious tradition through study of the Qur’an in an entirely new way, one that affirmed their Muslim identities at a time when all around them, they were being bombarded with negative, Islamophobic messages in the media and in society at large. Al-Huda online classes challenged them to find time for religious study in the midst of their busy lives taking care of husbands and children, and in some cases paid jobs, and gave them a sense of purpose that had been lacking before. Yet, as some of the narratives clearly indicate, the students’ orthoprax lifestyles after joining Al-Huda created new problems. Many found that their husbands or other family members were not supportive. The task of personal transformation thus had to become a community endeavour for it to be successful. As their teacher had told them, it was not enough for them to become personally pious. They had to take others along with them, starting with members of their own families. They had to do da‘wa.

CONCLUSION Why Now?

Since the phenomenon of new [religious] education for women derives from the tension between the religious world and the modern secular world, this education will not resolve that tension but will instead organize it in a new and different way. —Tamar El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 50

Women from non-Muslim religious traditions have been engaged in goals of pious self-(trans)formation similar to the efforts of the Barelwi girls at the Jami‘a Nur madrasa in Shahjahanpur, India, and the young women taking the online classes offered by Al-Huda in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. The picture I have tried to paint here is not exclusive to the Muslim world. Tamar El-Or describes the pursuit of intensive Judaic studies in the early 1990s by some women of the religious Zionist movement in Israel.1 Having undertaken three years of participant observation at a women’s seminary at Bar-Ilan University in the town of Ramat-Gan, Tel Aviv district, El-Or believes the ‘demand to know, to know more, to discover new texts, to attain the ability to read, decode, interpret, and criticize these texts, and the less vocal desire to observe religious rituals such as the public 1

Tamar El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More: Literacy and Identity among Young Orthodox Women in Israel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). Scholars of Faith. Usha Sanyal, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190120801.001.0001.

356

Scholars of Faith

reading of the Torah and public prayer’ is ‘revolutionary’. Although the students she observed would not have characterized their pursuit of religious knowledge in this way, El-Or believes ‘[t]he pursuit of Torah knowledge by religious women … actually establishes a new and different social situation’.2 El-Or examines the broader implications for change through a variety of lenses, letting us hear the voices of students and teachers inside the classroom and during after hours, in one-on-one conversations with them. Efrat, a student, tells El-Or that she does not want to ‘change frameworks’, that ‘the boys are the rabbis, and the girls can only be a rabbi’s wife—that’s the way it is’.3 But that does not prevent her from wanting to study Judaic texts, because doing so allows her to be a ‘complex person. … [C]omplexity is succeeding in being a religious woman all the way without being a fanatic, that is what being modern is to me—combining it all. … In my study I find the guidelines for what I do in the afternoon.’4 What Efrat does in the afternoon, that is, at home, where she performs the roles of a wife and a mother, is thus intimately connected to her religious studies. In an examination of gender issues, El-Or shows how the students reject their teacher’s representation of essentialist motherhood, demanding more: ‘They demand expansion and sharing—an expansion of their identity beyond the role of mother so that it can include the mother as worker, believer, learner, and participant; and a parceling out of the work of motherhood so that many others, who are not necessarily childbearing mothers, can participate in it.’5 Ideally, if not always in practice, ‘the laundry can wait’,6 and husbands should help them with housework and child care. Despite pushback—which El-Or demonstrates in students’ interactions with different teachers (the ‘gatekeepers of participation’) in the classroom—the key to El-Or’s analysis is the concept of widening participation. In a section entitled ‘Literacy as Participation’, El-Or explains that by using the concept of participation, the anthropologist 2 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 50. All the quotations in this paragraph are from p. 50. 3 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 96. 4 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, pp. 98–9. 5 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 199. 6 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 97.

Conclusion

357

can sidestep the binaries of ‘those who know versus those who do not know. … Learning as participation emphasizes the knowing person, not knowledge itself’.7 It also emphasizes the process rather than the end result, and the local contexts in which the process unfolds, bit by bit. Furthermore, when women’s participation in religious learning expands beyond the classroom into the home with the creation of women’s study groups, the public sphere itself is changed: It is no longer a male public that leads a central religious activity in which there are no roles for women, girls, or small children. Instead, a new public has been created. There are, on the one hand, men who have been abandoned by a public that cannot halachically [under Jewish religious law] participate, and on the other hand a public of women that has chosen to act on its own, surrounded by girls watching their mothers read from the Torah, and thinking about their own bat mitzvah ceremonies.8

This echoes Winkelmann’s point that by the very act of studying in a madrasa and traversing public space in order to access the madrasa from their homes, Muslim girls are participating in the public sphere.9 Winkelmann refers to the Habermasian notion of the public sphere and to the madrasa she studied as a ‘counter-public’, a concept she discusses in light of several studies. I do not refer to the madrasa Jami‘a Nur in these terms, given that it is not a site where oppositional discourses are articulated, but rather one in which a habitus of pious orthoprax behavior is inculcated in and nurtured by Muslim girls whose agency is expressed, in Saba Mahmood’s felicitous term, by a ‘willingness to be taught’.10 Several scholars who write about South Asian Muslims and education, particularly Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey; Winkelmann; and most recently, Borker11 have noted that girls’ madrasas are becoming more 7 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 280. The concept is based on Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 8 El-Or, Next Year I Will Know More, p. 265. 9 Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’, pp. 100–2. 10 Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory’, pp. 202–36. 11 Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural

358

Scholars of Faith

popular while boys’ madrasas are shrinking in size and popularity. Masooda Bano, who in 2007–8 studied madrasas in Pakistan at both the macro and micro levels, comparing them with madrasas in India and Bangladesh, argues that madrasa education is a ‘rational’ choice for parents and students for a variety of reasons.12 With regard to girls’ madrasas, she believes female madrasa students have a ‘genuine desire’ to learn about Islamic beliefs, and they are empowered by living away from their families in a residential madrasa, meeting other women from different parts of the country, and having an ‘authoritative voice’ when they return to their homes and communities.13 My analysis of Jami‘a Nur and its students has highlighted the madrasa’s civilizing mission in terms of teaching its students adab in religious and social terms. The madrasa caters to poor workingclass families in the west Uttar Pradesh (UP) region and is in many respects a means of upward mobility for the student on account of her education and knowledge of shari‘a. Its role is similar to that of the madrasas studied by Winkelmann and Borker, despite the maslaki differences between them. (Jami‘a Nur is Barelwi in orientation, while the other two are affiliated with the Tablighi Jama‘at.) I have argued, using the concept of being ‘naram’ delineated by Attiya Ahmad,14 that graduates have to balance their idealism and enthusiasm for teaching others, including siblings, how to practice Islam ‘correctly’ in light of their madrasa education, with the gendered expectation that they will adjust to societal norms regarding age and gender. They have to learn to balance their knowledge with their gendered duties towards parents, in-laws, and husband. Thus, if their education gives them agency on the one hand, this agency is circumscribed by social norms on the other.

Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’, Modern Asian Studies (2004), 38(1): 1–53; Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: ISIM Press, 2005b); Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). 12 Masooda Bano, The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 13 Bano, The Rational Believer, p. 144. 14 Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

Conclusion

359

Al-Huda students in North America and elsewhere in the South Asian diaspora occupy a place of social privilege compared to the madrasa students at Jami‘a Nur. Nevertheless, they too have to know how to balance societal expectations in order to be successful. Al-Huda has attracted considerable media and scholarly attention, in part due to its success in attracting upper-class Pakistani women in the 1990s and middle-class women from the South Asian diaspora in the West since the early 2000s. In Pakistan it has been the target of both religious and secular critics. Religious scholars, the ‘ulama, have questioned Al-Huda founder Farhat Hashmi’s authority to teach the Qur’an and its exegesis in view of the fact that she is not a madrasa graduate but has a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Glasgow. On the other hand, secular Pakistanis have been troubled by the personal transformation of thousands of upper-class Pakistani women who, after studying at Al-Huda schools, have become observant Muslims who wear the niqab in public and frown upon mixedgender parties and the consumption of alcohol, among other things. Clearly, Al-Huda has created a new and controversial public space for orthoprax Muslim women in Pakistan, especially in urban areas.

*** Why now? This is a question I asked myself at the beginning of this study and it has stayed with me throughout my research. The answers are multiple: the post-9/11 context in South Asia and the West created a crisis for Muslims the world over. They were being held collectively responsible for the actions of a few. But the trend had begun long before, in the 1970s and 1980s, in the context of the geopolitics of Egyptian Nasserism and the rise of Palestinian secular nationalism, with their attendant failures, and the rise of religio-political Islamism in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As Zaman’s study of Islam in Pakistan makes clear,15 the political context in Pakistan between the 1970s and the early 2000s was influenced by both external and internal factors. In terms of developments in the wider Muslim world, the most important were the 15

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

360

Scholars of Faith

Iranian Revolution and the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which culminated in the Soviet withdrawal of 1989, Taliban rule between 1996 and late 2001, and American-led political interventions in Afghanistan which led to a massive influx of Afghan refugees in north-western Pakistan. Additionally, pressures came from the domestic Pakistani politics of growing Islamization by the Bhutto and Zia governments—evidenced in a number of state initiatives, including the 1974 constitutional amendment defining Ahmadis as non-Muslims, the passing of the Hudood Ordinance in 1979, the collection of zakat dues by the state (which angered the Pakistani Shi‘a who renewed their demands for the application of Ja‘fari rather than Hanafi Sunni law to themselves), and the proposed Shariat Bill of 1990. Some have argued that collectively these forces led Pakistan to define itself as being part of the Middle East rather than South Asia in ways it had not done before, allying itself more closely to the Saudi regime than in the past.16 In this larger national context, we have to situate developments pertaining to Pakistani women. Faiza Mushtaq shows the growth of a leadership void between the ‘ulama on the one hand and westernized middle-class Pakistanis on the other. Starting in the 1970s, the ‘ulama responded to changes in Pakistani society, especially their perception of its growing secularization and Westernization, by increasing their focus on girls’ education and founding new girls’ madrasas. According to studies by Shaheed and Farooq, by the early 2000s, girls’ madrasas in Pakistan accounted for about 10 per cent of the total.17 However, urban middle-class Pakistani women were not attracted to 16 S. Akbar Zaidi, ‘South Asia? West Asia? Pakistan: Location, Identity’, Economic & Political Weekly (2009), XLIV(10): 36–9. 17 Muhammad Farooq, ‘Disciplining the Feminism: Girls’ Madrasa Education in Pakistan’. The Historian (2005), 3: 64–88; Farida Shaheed, Imagined Citizenship: Women, State & Politics in Pakistan (Lahore: Shirkat Gah Women’s Resource Centre, 2002a); Farida Shaheed, ‘Women’s Experiences of Identity, Religion and Activism in Pakistan’, pp. 343–90, in S.M. Naseem and Khalid Nadvi, eds, The Post-Colonial State and Social Transformation in India and Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002b). Cited in Faiza Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2010b), p. 97.

Conclusion

361

this educational path. Nor were liberal Western-style feminist movements such as the All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) and the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) able to fill the leadership void, as they had no following among women from Islamist organizations such as the Jama‘at-i Islami or among rural women or poor urban women.18 Mushtaq argues that the ‘legacy of the 1980s Zia era [had] created a legitimate social space for a movement like Al-Huda to flourish’, and in the early 1990s Al-Huda stepped into this void and quickly became a successful social movement by selectively utilizing elements from state-led institutions, secular–liberal feminist women’s organizations, and the vision of the reformist ‘ulama.19 The Indian national context is, of course, quite different. In the early 1990s, the socioeconomic conditions of Indian Muslims visà-vis Hindus and other religious communities—which had already been bad, as measured by a number of different metrics—worsened due to the liberalization of the economy, when the government withdrew its expenditures on public education and forced local communities to invest private resources to make up for the shortfall. Further, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 set in motion growing distrust and vicious, spiralling violence between Hindus and Muslims nationwide, culminating in 2002 in the death of thousands of Muslims in the Gujarat riots. Apart from the Sachar Committee Report of 2006, which documented the Muslim plight in India along multiple dimensions, other studies since then have given us further corroborating data. Thus, Basant and Shariff’s Handbook of Muslims in India notes the low literacy rates of Muslims, the low workforce participation rates of Muslim women, and the stubbornly high poverty rate of Muslims (27%), compared to Scheduled Castes

18

Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 101. Mushtaq cites Ayesha Jalal, ‘The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State of Pakistan’, in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 77–114; in this context, agreeing with her that the All-Pakistan Women’s Association and Women’s Action Forum women were compromised by the ‘convenience of subservience’ to the state because of their privileged social position under the prevailing system. See Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p. 102. 19 Mushtaq, ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority’, p.105.

362

Scholars of Faith

and Tribes (22%), with the least decline on all social parameters of poverty of all the social categories.20 Although national statistics such as these help us understand the big picture, it is also helpful to attend to mobilization at the local level. Jaffrelot’s study of Hindu nationalism gives us some useful clues to the engagement of ordinary citizens in Hindu nationalist activities at the local level. In the following quotation, reference is to the events preceding the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992: Women played their part in the Rath Yatra, many of them donating their mangalsutras (sacred marriage necklace) in the name of Ram. … women often outnumbered men at BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] meetings, especially in Uttar Pradesh. … [According to Sarkar, participation in the women’s wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtrasevika Samiti] enable[d] a specific and socially crucial group of middle class women in moving out of their homebound existence, to reclaim public spaces and even to acquire a political identity, and [gave] them access to serious intellectual cogitation.21

Furthermore, young men were attracted to the movement for different reasons: ‘It is significant that the Ram of the Hindu nationalists shares many things in common with stereotypical heroes of Hindi popular cinema. For urban youths, these films often provide role models which enable them to sublimate their daily lives. Most … such youths are unemployed and … devoid of self-esteem.’22 Mobilization of Hindus at a mass level in the 1990s led to the disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims at multiple levels of national life, as reported by the Sachar Committee. I noted in the ‘Introduction’, in 2016 a Barelwi Muslim writer lamented the new litmus test of Indian nationalism, which required legislators to publicly proclaim the slogan ‘Hail to Mother India’ (Bharat mata ki jai).23 20 Rakesh Basant and Abusaleh Shariff, eds, Handbook of Muslims in India: Empirical and Policy Perspectives (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), Chapter 9. 21 Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 426–7. 22 Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, p. 428. 23 Mufti Muhammad Salim Barelwi, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai Bolne ka Qaziyya Ashuddhi Tahrik ki ek Nai Shakal’, Mahnama A‘la Hazrat (June 2016): 17–23.

Conclusion

363

This—together with rising rates of overall male and female literacy not only in UP but throughout India since the 1970s24—is the context for the contemporary ‘feminization of madrasa enrolments’ in India, as reported by agencies of the Government of India.25 Although we do not have verifiable data documenting the national upsurge in Muslim girls’ education in India, whether secular or religious, a number of qualitative studies at the local level suggest that this is indeed a trend. In west UP, the Jefferys have shown that girls are more likely to attend a madrasa than boys and to complete the course all the way through.26 Hasan and Menon’s conversations with teachers in five Indian cities—Kolkata, Delhi, Aligarh, Hyderabad, and Calicut—show a growth in interest in Muslim girls’ education in each of these cities, across the class spectrum.27 Justin Jones has recently written about all-women’s shari‘a courts in a number of Indian cities, ranging from Mumbai to Jaipur to Kolkata.28 My data fit into this larger picture, as I observed the difference between the Barelwi boys’ madrasa, where enrolments were either flat or falling, and the adjacent girls’ madrasa, where they were rising every year. In a related social dynamic, Darakhshan Khan’s research on Tablighi women also points to changing domestic roles between husbands and wives, with wives seeking to reduce the time they spend in the kitchen and participate more actively in women’s study circles. Although it is an uphill battle for women to create opportunities allowing them to do so, given the demands on their time in the domestic sphere, there has been a growth in such study circles among Tablighi women. At the same time, Khan also examines the long-term trend towards companionate marriage among South Asian Muslim families starting in the nineteenth century.29 Metcalf’s work on Tablighi 24

As shown in the statistics presented in Chapter 1. Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood, p. 41. 26 Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey, ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication’. 27 Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, Educating Muslim Girls: A Comparison of Five Indian Cities (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005). 28 Justin Jones, ‘“Where Only Women May Judge”: Developing GenderJust Islamic Laws in India’s All-female “Shari‘ah Courts”’, Islamic Law and Society (2018): 1–30. 29 Darakshan Khan, ‘Fashioning the Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity in Colonial India’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016); 25

364

Scholars of Faith

women highlights the domestic roles fulfilled by Tablighi men when the women are away from home on preaching tours.30 What these qualitative studies have in common is that they document local initiatives undertaken by Muslim citizens in their private capacity to bring about social change. As Hasan and Menon write, ‘In all states, civil society initiatives have played a crucial role in educational expansion’.31 Despite persistent problems, there has been a shift in attitudes towards Muslim girls’ education, with parents being more willing than before to educate their daughters, daughters showing an eagerness to learn, and grooms favouring educated rather than uneducated brides. Jones describes it as a trend in favour of the ‘democratization of religious knowledge’ among Indian Muslims.32

*** What is the benefit of comparing ‘apples’ and ‘oranges’, as I characterized the two very different South Asian case studies that are the subject of this volume? By putting these two ethnographies side by side, I have sought to highlight the many ways in which the goals of the students of Al-Huda and the madrasa students at Jami‘a Nur are similar rather than different. The sources we—as students of South Asian Islam—read and are guided by lead us to focus on interdenominational differences and conflicts rather than the commonalities between them. This book by no means denies these realities, but it urges us to consider what they have in common. While many of the Al-Huda women I discuss are middle-class, college-educated, and English-speaking women living in a Western diasporic context, and the Barelwi madrasa students are from working-class Indian families whose parents’ educational levels and standards of living are low,

Darakshan Khan, ‘In Good Company: Reformist Piety and Women’s Da‘wat in the Tablighi Jamat’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (2018), 35(3): 1–25. 30 Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Tablighi Jama‘at and Women’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, ed., Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama‘at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 31 Hasan and Menon, Educating Muslim Girls, p. 31. 32 Jones, ‘“Where Only Women May Judge”’, p. 17.

Conclusion

365

the goals the students have set for themselves, of learning about the Islamic textual tradition and living orthoprax lives in light of this tradition, have much in common. As I noted at the outset, both groups of women share a worldview grounded in belief in an afterlife based on moral choices made in the here and now. How one lives one’s life today will lead ineluctably to reward or punishment in the hereafter; the moral choices one makes in the course of one’s life therefore assume an importance far beyond one’s immediate mundane context. The central argument of this study is that both the madrasa and the Al-Huda online Qur’an classes are very modern South Asian educational phenomena, outward differences between them notwithstanding. I use the term ‘modern’ in Hefner’s sense of being characterized by the rationalization, functionalization, as well as the objectification of Islam in the educational curriculum.33 One sees these processes at work in the way students absorb the lessons of the formal curriculum, and beyond this, in the ways in which they imagine themselves as moral agents of change, guided by the scriptural texts they study, seeking to connect their growing knowledge of ‘Islam’ to the realities of their families and local communities. The tension between these realities, judged to be wanting in relation to the imagined life of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generation of Muslims in seventhcentury Arabia, the ideal to which they aspire, animates their everyday lives.34 As Gade has noted, the sought-for transformation links the individual with her community. Individual reform is visualized as a starting point that will lead to community transformation.35 While the students of neither of my case studies sought to connect their individual and community-level efforts to change at the national level, 33 Robert W. Hefner, ‘Introduction: The Culture, Politics, and Future of Muslim Education’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 34 On the tensions between ‘modernity’ and ‘religion’, see David Gilmartin, ‘Introduction’, in Civilization and Modernity: Narrating the Creation of Pakistan (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2014a). 35 Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 268, discussing the failure of the Foucauldian concept of ‘technology of the self’ to take account of community-wide transformation.

366

Scholars of Faith

an acceleration of local initiatives of the kinds documented here has the potential for wider political change at the national and global levels in the future, in ways we cannot predict. To return to the modernity of the educational institutions described in this book, another aspect of their situation that merits comment is not only their growing occupation of public space, but their creation of a new kind of ‘intermediate’ space, partaking of both public and private characteristics. Jami‘a Nur enabled students to meet girls from other parts of India; while there, they also interacted with male teachers, using intermediate forms of veiling such as the nose-piece. All this enlarged their vision of the world, making them aware of the wider Islamic community (umma) through the discipline of the madrasa. The act of appropriation of the Islamic tradition, or simply of ‘Islam’, is yet another aspect of the modernity of the educational institutions documented in this book. Once at the madrasa, students learned of the rights they did not know they had as Muslim women. Thus, a student told me that a Muslim girl had the right to refuse a marriage proposal if she did not like it, even if she did no more than shake her head in a ‘no’. This knowledge gave madrasa students like her tremendous pride in being Muslim women. This sense of ownership of the Islamic tradition validates, in my view, Mahmood’s argument that Muslim women’s turn to ‘Islam’ in the contemporary world is a source of empowerment. Al-Huda students also expressed their pride of discovery of what ‘Islam’ is or says in ways that reflect their appropriation of the Islamic tradition. Thus, an Al-Huda student told me that as a child her parents had taught her that one should not open the door to one’s parents’ bedroom without knocking. It was a message she had assumed to be based on Western notions of privacy. How surprised she was, she said, that when she began to study the Qur’an, she learned that this message was conveyed in a Qur’anic verse! This was an Islamic teaching going back to the seventh century, she discovered, not a more recent Western one. Likewise, Al-Huda students told me that the ritual of wudu’ which must be performed before starting one’s prayer if one has broken wudu’ since the previous prayer, is conducive to mental health because at the heart of this ritual is the exposure of one’s face and limbs to flowing water. The therapeutic qualities of flowing water, they said, have been proven by Western scientific research.

Conclusion

367

We might view this turn towards appropriation as an act of mirroring. Around the world many Muslim women are dealing with ‘gendered Islamophobia’, to use the term coined by Zine, by deliberately returning to their Islamic roots and re-interpreting the Islamic tradition in ways that provide a counterargument to the image of Islam as a misogynistic faith tradition. The act of appropriation is a powerful means of self-affirmation and assertion of self-control, both in relation to the wider non-Muslim environment in which they live and also, more immediately, in relation to the westernized or ‘lax’ lifestyles of their own family members. Whether we are talking about students at a small-town madrasa like Jami‘a Nur or a worldwide organization like Al-Huda, the implications of Muslim women’s religious education for social change have to be understood through the nexus between women’s education, the domestic realm, and the community at large. I hope that the comparative framework of this study opens up new questions and encourages us to discard binaries such as those between Sufis and Wahhabis, or rural Muslims and urban ones. I also hope that it allows us to see fluidities and connections in the way South Asian Muslims actually live out their lives in a context characterized by interconnectedness, disjunctures, precarity, and cultural constraints on Muslim women, regardless of social class or geographical location.

GLOSSARY

adab adab o akhlaq ahkam aitiraz ajalin musamma akhara akhirat akhlaq amal anjuman ashraf ‘asr ‘ata bai‘at-i-tabarruk balagha Barelwis/Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at be-rah bid‘a dam dar al-harb dar al-Islam dargah

etiquette, proper behaviour good character religious duties censure a specified period of time wrestling arena the afterlife morality action association nobility (of birth or character) late afternoon prayer gift honorary initiation discourse one of the major Sunni denominations in South Asia; often contrasted with Deobandis misguided reprehensible innovation literally, breath abode of war abode of Islam literally, ‘court’; a Sufi shrine

Glossary

dars dars-i nizami da‘wa din dini ta‘lim du‘a dunya durud fajr fasiqin fatwa faza’il fiqh Hadith hajj hakimiya halal halaqa hamd haqq/huquq haram hijri

ihtiram ijma‘ ijtihad

‘ilm ‘ilm-i ghayb iman imtina’-i nazir

369

informal Islamic lessons course of studies taught in South Asian madrasas proselytization (also see tabligh) religion religious knowledge personal prayer the world prayer calling down God’s blessings on the Prophet dawn prayer, the first of the five daily prayers disobedient opinion of a Muslim jurist practical virtues Islamic jurisprudence traditions of the Prophet pilgrimage to Mecca God’s sovereignty permitted (usually with regard to food), the opposite of haram study circle praise of God right(s) forbidden relating to the hijra or emigration of Muslims from Mecca to Medina in 622 ce; Muslim calendar (ah, after hijra) reverence, respect consensus of the scholars exertion, effort; in Islamic law, independent judgment based on interpretation of the Qur’an and Hadith religious knowledge knowledge of the unseen religious faith [theoretical] impossibility of an exact equivalent [to the Prophet]

370

insaniyat ‘isha ‘ishq-i rasul islah karen isnad jahannam jahiliya jannat juz kafir khitabat khul‘ madhhab madrasa maghrib mahr mahram makharij masa’il maslak ma’sum milad al-nabi minbar mujaddid mukhalif murid murshid (also, pir) mushaf mushrik/mushrikin mutala‘a-i ‘amm muwahhidun nabi

Glossary

humanity night prayer love of the Prophet reform yourselves chain of transmission (of Hadith) hell the time of ignorance (of Islam), a reference to pre-Islamic Arabia heaven the thirtieth part of the Qur’an unbeliever public speech or address divorce at the instance of the wife school of law (Sunni: Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi‘i; Shi‘i: Ja‘fari) Muslim seminary evening prayer Muslim woman’s marriage portion a male family member forbidden to a girl in marriage articulation of sound theoretical legal issues South Asian Sunni school of thought, denomination sinless birth anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad Prophet’s pulpit reformer/renewer opponent Sufi disciple Sufi master copy of the Qur’an (in Arabic) one who associates partners with God; polytheist general study Unitarians Prophet

Glossary

nafl nafs na-guzir namaz naram na‘t niqab nisba pardah piri muridi qari’ qazi qibla qiyam qiyas rihla ruhani ruhaniyat ruqyah shahada shajara shari‘a sharif/sharafat sira sunna Sunni tabligh tafsir taharat

371

supererogatory prayer breath; soul; also base self or worldly desires inescapable daily canonical prayer, same as Ar. salat/ salah soft, malleable, adaptive; qualities associated with South Asian feminine ideals verse in praise of the Prophet Muhammad veil a personal name denoting one’s connection to a place veil, female seclusion practices Sufi discipleship Qur’an reciter judge direction of prayer, that is, direction of the Ka‘ba in Mecca standing in honour of the Prophet analogical reasoning travel for the sake of acquiring religious knowledge spiritual spirituality Qur’anic healing testament of faith in the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad spiritual genealogical tree the body of Islamic law nobility of birth/behaviour biography of the Prophet Muhammad the way of the Prophet one who follows the way or path of the Prophet calling someone to Islam; proselytization, similar to da‘wa exegesis of the Qur’an ritual purity

372

tajdid tajwid taqlid taqrir taqwa tariqa tasawwuf tawhid tazadd ‘ulama (sing., ‘alim) ummatan wasatan umra

‘urs usul-i fiqh wahdat al-wujud wahdat al-shuhud wudu’ zeenat zenana

zikr-i wiladat

Glossary

religious renewal Qur’an recitation literally ‘imitation’, following one of the four Sunni law schools speech on a particular topic fear of God, piety Sufi order Sufism monotheism maslak-related differences scholars of Islamic knowledge middle nation the lesser pilgrimage, which may be performed at any time during the year and requires no ritual activity outside the Ka‘ba in Mecca literally, marriage; here, the death anniversary of a Sufi saint principles of jurisprudence unity of being unity of perception ritual ablutions before the canonical prayer external adornment women’s quarters in a house or palace, as distinguished from the men’s quarters or mardana recalling circumstances relating to the Prophet Muhammad’s birth

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Charles J. 2013. ‘Abu’l A’la Mawdudi’s Tafhim al-Qur’an’, in Andrew Rippen, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an, pp. 307–23. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Ahmad, Attiya. 2013. ‘Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space: Foreign Resident Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the Arabian Peninsula’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia, pp. 421–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmad, Imtiaz. 2015. ‘Is There Caste among Muslims in India?’, Eastern Anthropologist, 68(1): 1–14. Ahmad, Irfan. 2010. Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———. 2013. ‘Cracks in the “Mightiest Fortress”: Jamaat-e-Islami’s Changing Discourse on Women’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia, pp. 317–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahmad, Sadaf. 2009. Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press. Alam, Arshad. 2011. Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India. Delhi: Routledge. Al-Badr, ‘Abdul Muhsin Al-‘Abbad. 2013. The Life of Imam Muhammad bin Salih al-‘Uthaymin. Mecca: Makkah Publishing.

374

Bibliography

Ali, Kamran. 2013. ‘Afterword’, in Usha Sanyal, David Gilmartin, and Sandria B. Freitag, eds, Muslim Voices: Community and the Self in South Asia, pp. 275–92. Delhi: Yoda Press. Alter, Joseph S. 2011. Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India. Delhi: Penguin. Al-Uthaymin, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih. 2013. An Explanation of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah’s Introduction to the Principles of Tafsir. Birmingham: Al-Hidaayah Publishing. Appadurai, Arjun. 2004. ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, in Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, eds, Culture and Public Action, pp. 59–84. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, pp. 141–64. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2009 [1986]. ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, Qui Parle (Spring/Summer), 17(2): 20. A‘zami, ‘Abd al-Mustafa. 1995. Jannati Zewar. Delhi: Anjum Book Depot. A‘zami, Muhammad ‘Ali Sher. 2007. ‘Mawlana ‘Abd al-Mustafa A‘zami Alai al-Rahmat: Sawanih Khaka’, Mahnama-i Nur (November): 40–2. Delhi: Jama Masjid. Bano, Masooda. 2012. The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in Madrasas of Pakistan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Barelwi, Mufti Muhammad Salim. 2016. ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai Bolne ka Qaziyya Ashuddhi Tahrik ki ek Nai Shakal’, Mahnama A‘la Hazrat (June): 17–23. Barkati, Mawlana Mufti Muhammad Khalil Khan Qadiri. n.d. Sunni Bihishti Zewar, Kamil, Khwatin ke Liai, Zindagi ke Tamam Masa’il ka Majmua. Delhi: Maktaba Jam-i Nur. Barkati, Mufti Ahmad Miyan. 1985. ‘Mufti-e Azam-i Sindh: Khalil al-‘Ulama Allama Mufti Muhammad Khalil Khan Qadiri’. Hyderabad, Sindh: Mufti Khalil Khan Academy. Basant, Rakesh and Abusaleh Shariff. eds. 2014. Handbook of Muslims in India: Empirical and Policy Perspectives. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Benei, Veronique. 2008. Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Blunt, E.A.H. 1911. Census of India.

Bibliography

375

Borker, Hem. 2018. Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brown, Daniel. 2017. A New Introduction to Islam, 3rd edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Brown, Jonathan A.C. 2009. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Oxford: Oneworld. Bucaille, Maurice (trans. A.D. Panell and the author). 1979. The Bible, the Quran, and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge. Indianapolis: n.p. Buehler, Arthur F. 2012. ‘Trends of Ashrafization in India’, in Morimoto Kazuo, ed., Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The Living Links to the Prophet, pp. 231–46. Abingdon: Routledge. Busse, Heribert. 2013. ‘Lot’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 3, pp. 231–2. Leiden: Brill. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Census of India. 2011. Chapter 6. Available at http://censusindia.gov.in/2011prov-results/data_files/mp/07Literacy.pdf (accessed on 30 September 2011). Chopra, Radhika and Patricia Jeffery in collaboration with Helmut Reifeld. eds. 2005. Educational Regimes in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage. Currie, P.M. 1989. The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-din Chishti of Ajmer. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dallal, Ahmad. 2004. ‘Science and the Qur’an’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 4, pp. 540–58. Leiden: Brill. DeLong-Bas, Natana J. 2004. Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. New York: Oxford University Press. Devji, Faisal. 1991. ‘Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900’, South Asia, 14(1): 141–53. Eickelman, Dale. 1978. ‘The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20(4): 485–516. El-Or, Tamar. 2002. Next Year I Will Know More: Literacy and Identity among Young Orthodox Women in Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Ernst, Carl W. 2011. How to Read the Qur’an: A New Guide, with Select Translations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando. 2015. ‘Rediscovering the “Everyday” Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Divide’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(2): 59–88. Farah, Sumbul. 2012. ‘Aqeeda, Adab and Aitraaz: Modalities of “Being” Barelwi’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 46(3): 259–81.

376

Bibliography

———. 2016. ‘Piety and Politics in Local Level Islam: A Case Study of Barelwi Khanqahs’. PhD dissertation. University of Delhi. Farooq, Muhammad. 2005. ‘Disciplining the Feminism: Girls’ Madrasa Education in Pakistan’. The Historian 3: 64–88. Fleuckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. 2006. In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fortier, Corinne. 2016. ‘Orality and the Transmission of Qur’anic Knowledge in Mauritania’, in Robert Launay, ed., Islamic Education in Africa: Writing Boards and Blackboards, pp. 61–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 109–25. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gade, Anna M. 2004. Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Gayer, Laurent and Christophe Jaffrelot. eds. 2012. Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation. New Delhi: HarperCollins India. Gilliot, Claude. 2002. ‘Exegesis of the Qur’an: Classical and Medieval’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 2, pp. 99–124. Leiden: Brill. Gilmartin, David. 2005. ‘A Networked Civilization?’, in miriam cooke and Bruce Lawrence, eds, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop, pp. 51–68. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2014a. ‘Introduction’, in Civilization and Modernity: Narrating the Creation of Pakistan, pp. ix–xl. Delhi: Yoda Press. ———. 2014b. ‘The Paradox of Patronage and the People’s Sovereignty’, in Anastasia Piliavsky, ed., Patronage as Politics in South Asia, pp. 125–53. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Green, Nile. 2011. Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guenther, Alan M. 2009. ‘A Colonial Court Defines a Muslim’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Islam in South Asia in Practice, pp. 293–304. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gupta, Latika. 2015. Education, Poverty and Gender: Schooling Muslim Girls in India. Delhi: Routledge. Haig, G.A. 1943. Final Settlement Report of the Shahjahanpur District. Allahabad: Superintendent, Printing and Stationery, United Provinces, India. Hall, Stuart. 1985. ‘Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates’. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2(2): 91–114.

Bibliography

377

———. 1992. ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew, eds, Modernity and Its Futures, pp. 273–323. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haniffa, Farzana. 2008. ‘Piety as Politics amongst Muslim Women in Contemporary Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies, 42(2/3): 347–75. Hardy, Peter. 1972. The Muslims of British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartung, Jan-Peter. 2006. ‘The Nadwat al-Ulama: Chief Patron of Madrasa Education in India and a Turntable to the Arab World’, in Jan-Peter Hartung and Helmut Reifeld, eds, Islamic Education, Diversity, and National Identity, pp. 135–57. Delhi: Sage. Hasan, Zoya and Ritu Menon. 2005. Educating Muslim Girls: A Comparison of Five Indian Cities. Delhi: Women Unlimited. Hashmi, Farhat Nasim. 1989. ‘A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Wajiz fi Dhikr al-Mujaz wa al-Mujiz by Abu Tahir Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Silafi alIsbahani (d. 576/1181) with Introduction, Translation and Notes’. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Haykel, Bernard. 2003. Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hefner, Robert W. 2007. ‘Introduction: The Culture, Politics, and Future of Muslim Education’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, pp. 1–39. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hefner, Robert W. and Muhammad Qasim Zaman. eds. 2007. Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hermansen, Marcia. 2017. ‘Milad/Mawlid: Celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday’, in Edward E. Curtis IV, ed., The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction, pp. 123–39. New York: NYU Press. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hunter, W.W. 1907. Imperial Gazetteer of India. Huq, Maimuna. 2008. ‘Reading the Qur’an in Bangladesh: The Politics of “Belief” among Islamist Women’, Modern Asian Studies, 42(2/3): 457–88. Ibrahim, Farhana and Edward Simpson. 2008. ‘Mohmedhusain: Words, Tabloids and the Compulsions of the Ahl-e-Hadis’, in Mukulika Banerjee, ed., Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India, pp. 40–55. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Iqtidar, Humeira. 2011. Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘atud-Da‘wa in Urban Pakistan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1996. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

378

Bibliography

Jalal, Ayesha. 1991. ‘The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State of Pakistan’, in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State, pp. 77–114. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jeffery, Patricia and Roger Jeffery. 1994. ‘Killing My Heart’s Desire: Education and Female Autonomy in Rural North India’, in Nita Kumar, ed., Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, pp. 125–71. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Jeffery, Patricia, Roger Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey. 2004. ‘Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: “A Girls’ Islamic Course” and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh’, Modern Asian Studies, 38(1): 1–53. ———. 2008. ‘Aisha, the Madrasa Teacher’, in Mukulika Banerjee, ed., Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India, pp. 56–68. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Jeffrey, Craig, Patricia Jeffery, and Roger Jeffery. 2008. Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johns, Anthony H. 2001. ‘Air and Wind’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1, pp. 51–5. Leiden: Brill. Jones, Justin. 2012. Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. ‘“Where Only Women May Judge”: Developing Gender-Just Islamic Laws in India’s All-Female “Shari‘ah Courts”’, Islamic Law and Society: 1–30. Katihari, Mawlana Al-i Mustafa Misbah. 1996. Introduction to Bahar-i Shari‘at, vol. 1, reprint. Ghosi, UP: Jami‘a Mujadiyya Rizviyya. Khan, Ahmad Raza. 1986. Iqamat al-Qiyama a‘la Tawhin al-Qiyama li-Nabi (Performing [the Ritual of ] Standing Up Despite the Calumny of those Who Refuse to Stand for the Prophet). Karachi: Barkati Publishers. Khan, Darakhshan H. 2016. ‘Fashioning the Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity in Colonial India’. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. ———. 2018. ‘In Good Company: Reformist Piety and Women’s Da‘wat in the Tablighi Jamat’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 35(3): 1–25. Khan, Naveeda. 2012. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Durham: Duke University Press. Khan, Shah Mahmud ‘Ali. 2014. Sar-zamin-i Shahjahanpur ke ‘Ulama-i Fuhul, Huffaz, o Qura‘. Shahjahanpur: n.p. Kinburg, Leah. 2001. ‘Ambiguous’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1, pp. 70–7. Leiden: Brill. Kloos, David. 2018. Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority & Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kloos, David and Daan Beekers. eds. 2018. Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion. New York: Berghahn.

Bibliography

379

Komaki, Sachiyo. 2013. ‘The Name of the Gift: Sacred Exchange, Social Practice and Sayyad Category in North India’, Talasaki City University Economics, 15(4): 39–48. Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. 2013. Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. New York: NYU Press. Kumar, Nita. 2000. Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras. Delhi: Sage. ———. 2007. The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity: Essays on Education in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017 [1988]. The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lal, Ruby. 2005. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan. 2007. Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal. Abingdon: Routledge. Lapidus, Ira M. 1984. ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, pp. 38–49. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. 1999. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lelyveld, David. 1978. Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Maghen, Ze’ev. 2005. Virtues of the Flesh: Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence. Leiden: Brill. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology, 16(2): 202–36. ———. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Malik, Jamal. ed. 2008. Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? London: Routledge. Maqsood, Ammara. ‘A “Rational” Islam: “Rationality,” Teaching Tools, and Qur’an Schools in Lahore, Pakistan. Unpublished paper.’ Mazhari, Waris. 2005. ‘Reforming Madrasa Curriculum’, in Akhtarul Wasey, ed., Madrasas in India: Trying to Be Relevant, pp. 37–49. Delhi: Global Media Publications. ———. 2013. ‘Hindustani Madaris Islamiyya: Nisab o Nizam-e Ta‘lim, Imkanat o Masail, Ek Jaiza’. PhD thesis, Jami‘a Millia Islamia.

380

Bibliography

McAuliffe, Jane Dammen. 2013. ‘Quranic Hermeneutics’, in Andrew Rippin, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an, pp. 46–62. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Meneley, Anne. 2007. ‘Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks’, Cultural Anthropology, 22(2): 214–43. Mernissi, Fatema. 1991. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ———. 2001. Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. New York: Washington Square Press. Messick, Brinkley. 1993. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Metcalf, Barbara D. 1982. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1984a. ‘Introduction’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, pp. 1–20. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1984b. ‘Islamic Reform and Islamic Women: Mawlana Thanawi’s Jewelry of Paradise’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, pp. 184–95. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. ed. 1984c. Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1990. Perfecting Women: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, a Partial Translation with Commentary. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. ed. 1996. Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. ‘Tablighi Jama‘at and Women’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, ed., Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama‘at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal, pp. 44–58. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2004a. Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004b. ‘The Past in the Present: Instruction, Pleasure, and Blessing in Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya’s Aap Biitii’, in Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan, pp. 67–95. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. ‘Madrasas and Minorities in Secular India’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, pp. 87–106. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and India’s Freedom. London: Oneworld.

Bibliography

381

———. 2011. ‘Islam and Power in Colonial India: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Princess’, American Historical Review, 116(1) (February): 1–30. Millie, Julian. 2017. ‘Da‘wa, Modern Practices’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2017–1, pp. 50–4. Leiden: Brill. Minault, Gail. 1981a. ‘Introduction: The Extended Family as Metaphor and the Expansion of Women’s Realm’, in Gail Minault, ed., The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, pp. 3–18. Delhi: Chanakya Publications. ———. 1981b. ‘Sisterhood or Separatism? The All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference and the Nationalist Movement’, in Gail Minault, ed., The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, pp. 83–108. Delhi: Chanakya Publications. ———. 1999. Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Moosa, Ebrahim. 2015. What Is a Madrasa? Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Motzki, Harald. 2001. ‘Bridewealth’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1, pp. 258–9. Leiden: Brill. Mubarakpuri, Safiur-Rahman. 1998. When the Moon Split: A Biography of Prophet Muhammad. Riyadh: Darussalam. Mumtas Begum, A.L. 2006. ‘Muslim Women in Malabar: Study in Social and Cultural Change’. Department of History thesis, University of Calicut. Available at shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/15747/8/08_ chapter%204.pdf (accessed on 6 August 2015). Mushtaq, Faiza. 2006. ‘Moral Purity and Social Reform: The Case of a Women’s Religious Education Movement in Pakistan’. Unpublished paper. ———. 2010a. ‘A Controversial Role Model for Pakistani Women’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), no. 4. Available at http:// samaj.revues.org/index3030.html. ———. 2010b. ‘New Claimants to Religious Authority: A Movement for Women’s Islamic Education, Moral Reform and Innovative Traditionalism’. PhD dissertation, Northwestern University. Naim, C.M. 1984. ‘Prize-Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahabad Government Gazette Notification’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, pp. 290–314. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1987. ‘How Bibi Ashraf Learned to Read and Write’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 6: 99–115. ———. 1995. ‘Urdu Education in India: Some Observations’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 10: 153–9.

382

Bibliography

Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza. 1994. The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nayyar, A.H. and Ahmed Salim, compilers. Unpublished. ‘The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistani Urdu, English, Social Studies and Civics’, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s 2002 Report’. Islamabad [2002–3]. Nizami, Moin Ahmad. 2017. Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam: The Chishti–Sabris in 18th–19th Century North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ong, Walter J. 2002 [1982]. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Pande, Kailash Narain (state editor). 1988. Gazetteer of India, Uttar Pradesh, District Shahjahanpur. Allahabad: Government of Uttar Pradesh. Pearson, Harlan O. 2008. Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India: The Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah, with a Foreword by David Lelyveld. Delhi: Yoda Press. Pemberton, Kelley. 2002. ‘Islamic and Islamicizing Discourses: Ritual Performance, Didactic Texts, and the Reformist Challenge in the South Asian Sufi Milieu’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 17: 55–83. Pernau, Margrit. 2013. Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in NineteenthCentury Delhi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Power, Carla. 2015. If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran. New York: Holt. Preckel, Claudia. 2007. ‘Ahl-i Hadith’, in Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopedia of Islam Three, vol. 2007–3, pp. 92–7. Leiden: Brill. Qadhi, Abu Ammaar Yaasir. n.d. Du‘a, the Weapon of the Believer: A Treatise on the Status and Etiquette of Du‘a in Islam. n.p.: Al-Hidaya. Qadri, Mawlana Ghulam Ahmad. 2010. Sharh Kalam-i Raza fi Na‘t al-Mustafa, al-Ma‘ruf Sharh Hada’iq-i Bakhshish. Delhi: Adabi Duniya. Rajagopal, Arvind. 2011. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raman, Bhavani. 2011. ‘Disciplining the Senses, Schooling the Mind: Inhabiting Virtue in the Tamil Tinnai School’, in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, eds, Ethical Life in South Asia, pp. 43–60. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham: Duke University Press. Rasheed, Ghulam Dastgir. 1965. ‘The Development of Na‘tia Poetry in Persian Literature’, in Islamic Culture, 39: 53–69.

Bibliography

383

Rasmussen, Anne K. 2010. Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reetz, Dietrich. 2006. Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900–1947. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Riexinger, Martin. 2008. ‘How Favourable Is Puritan Islam to Modernity? A Study of the Ahl-i Hadis in Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Century South Asia’, in Gwilym Beckerlegge, ed., Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Movements in South Asia, pp. 147–65. New York: Oxford University Press. Ring, Laura A. 2006. Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Robinson, Francis. 1984. ‘The “Ulama” of Farangi Mahall and Their Adab’, in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, pp. 152–83. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––. 2000. ‘Islam and the Impact of Print in South Asia’, in Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, pp. 66–104. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. ‘Knowledge, Its Transmission, and the Making of Muslim Societies’, in Islam, South Asia, and the West, pp. 19–58. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. ‘Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia, pp. 26–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Neal. 2003. Discovering the Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text, 2nd edn. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Roff, William R. 2009a. ‘Islamic Movements: One or Many?’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia, pp. 52–72. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. ———. 2009b. ‘Islam Obscured? Some Reflections on Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia, pp. 3–32. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. ———. 2009c. ‘Onomastics, and Taxonomies of Belonging in the Malay Muslim World’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia, pp. 33–51. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. ———. 2009d. ‘Whence Cometh the Law? Dog Saliva in Kelantan, 1937’, in Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia, pp. 249–66. Singapore: National University of Singapore. Rubin, Uri. 1995. The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims, a Textual Analysis. Princeton: Darwin Press. Sachar Committee Report. 2006. ‘Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India: A Report’, by Justice Rajinder Sachar and six members (Saiyid Hamid, Dr. T.K. Oomen, M.A. Basith, Dr. Rakesh

384

Bibliography

Basant, Dr. Akhtar Majeed, and Dr. Abusaleh Shariff), November. Available at http://minorityaffairs.gov.in/sachar (accessed on 6 September 2012). Sanyal, Usha. 1996. ‘Are Wahhabis Kafirs? Ahmad Riza Khan and His Sword of the Haramayn’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick, and David S. Powers, eds, Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas, pp. 204–13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. ‘Generational Changes in the Leadership of the Ahl-e Sunnat Movement in North India during the Twentieth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 32(3): 635–56. ———. 2007. ‘Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi’, in Marc Gaborieau, Gudrun Kramer, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2007–1, pp. 71–5. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2008. ‘Ahl-i Sunnat Madrasas: The Madrasa Manzar-i Islam, Bareilly, and the Jamia Ashrafiyya, Mubarakpur’, in Jamal Malik, ed., Madrasa Education in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, pp. 23–44. New York: Routledge. ———. 2010. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Mawlana Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1880–1920, new edn. Delhi: Yoda Press. ———. 2011. ‘Barelwis’, in Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (EI3), 2011–1, pp. 94–9. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2013. ‘Changing Concepts of the Person in Two Ahl-i Sunnat/Barelwi Texts for Women: The Sunni Bihishti Zewar and the Jannati Zewar’, in Usha Sanyal, David Gilmartin, and Sandria B. Freitag, eds, Muslim Voices: Community and the Self in South Asia, pp. 205–35. Delhi: Yoda Press. Sanyal, Usha and Sumbul Farah. 2019. ‘Discipline and Nurture: Living in a Girls’ Madrasa, Living in Community’, Modern Asian Studies, 53(2): 411–50. Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ––––—. 1987. And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety. Lahore: Vanguard Books. Scott, David and Charles Hirschkind. eds. 2006. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2007. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shaheed, Farida. 2002a. Imagined Citizenship: Women, State & Politics in Pakistan. Lahore: Shirkat Gah Women’s Resource Centre. ———. 2002b. ‘Women’s Experiences of Identity, Religion and Activism in Pakistan’, in S.M. Naseem and Khalid Nadvi, eds, The Post-Colonial State and Social Transformation in India and Pakistan, pp. 343–90. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

385

Sikand, Yoginder. 2005. Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India. Delhi: Penguin. Speight, R. Marston. 2013. ‘The Function of Hadith as Commentary on the Qur’an, as Seen in the Six Authoritative Collections’, in Andrew Rippin, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an, pp. 63–81. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Starrett, Gregory. 1998. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stern, Jessica. 2000. ‘Pakistan’s Jihad Culture’, Foreign Affairs (November/ December). Storey, John. 1999. Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life. London: Arnold. Talbot, Cynthia. 2016. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past 1200–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toorawa, Shawkat M. 2001. ‘Clothing’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1, pp. 346–7. Leiden: Brill. van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vatuk, Sylvia. 2001. ‘“Where Will She Go? What Will She Do?” Paternalism toward Women in the Administration of Muslim Personal Law in Contemporary India’, in Gerald James Larson, ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment, pp. 226–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. ‘Dr. Zakira Ghouse: A Memoir’, in Mukulika Banerjee, ed., Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India, pp. 109–27. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Vaughier-Chatterjee, Anne. 2005. ‘Plural Society and Schooling: UrduMedium Schools in Delhi’, in Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery, eds, in collaboration with Helmut Reifeld, Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, pp. 99–118. New Delhi: Sage. Waines, David. 2001. ‘Agriculture and Vegetation’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1, pp. 40–50. Leiden: Brill. Weiss, Anita M. 2014. Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Werbner, Pnina. 2003. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. ‘Reform Sufism in South Asia’, in Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, eds, Islamic Reform in South Asia, pp. 51–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Sarah C. 2010. ‘Domains of Contestation: Women’s Empowerment and Islam in Bangladesh’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 33: 334–44.

386

Bibliography

Wielandt, Rotraud. 2002. ‘Exegesis of the Qur’an: Early Modern and Contemporary’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 2, pp. 124–42. Leiden: Brill. Winkelmann, Mareike Jule. 2005a. ‘Everyday Life in a Girls’ Madrasah in Delhi’, in Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery, eds, in collaboration with Helmut Reifeld, Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, pp. 160–77. New Delhi: Sage. ———. 2005b. ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India. Amsterdam: ISIM Press. Zaidi, S. Akbar. 2009. ‘South Asia? West Asia? Pakistan: Location, Identity’, Economic & Political Weekly, XLIV(10): 36–9. Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. 2002. The ‘Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. ‘Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, pp. 61–86. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2018. Islam in Pakistan: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zeghal, Malika. 2007. ‘The “Recentering” of Religious Knowledge and Discourse: The Case of al-Azhar in Twentieth-Century Egypt’, in Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, pp. 107–30. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zia, Afiya Shehrbano. 2009. ‘Faith-Based Politics, Enlightened Moderation and the Pakistani Women’s Movement’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11(1): 225–45. Zine, Jasmin. 2008. Canadian Islamic Schools: Unravelling the Politics of Faith, Gender, Knowledge, and Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Zubair, Muhammad Idrees. 1989. ‘A Critical Edition of Kitāb Tuḥfat Ḍhawī al-Irab fī Mushkil al-Asmāʼ wa al-Nisab by Abū al-Thanāʼ Maḥmūd b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, known as Ibn Khaṭīb al-Dahshah al-Ḥamawī (734–850/1349–1431); with Introduction and Notes’. PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow. Zulfiqar, Muhammad. 2006. Prayer According to the Sunnah. Riyadh: Darussalam.

INDEX

Abu Ji, 100–4, 113, 114–5, 118, 190 adab, 24–5, 37, 44, 45, 47, 57n11, 73, 74, 75, 122, 124–7, 156, 163, 165, 178n12, 180, 207, 225, 233, 277, 358 fluidity, of 24–5 as informal madrasa syllabus, 74 as means of performing identity, 24–5 advice literature for women, 10, 57, 132, 165. See also Bihishti Zewar; Jannati Zewar agency, female, 16, 18, 76, 357, 358 docility, as form of, 76 and piety, 18 and self-discipline, 18 See also Mahmood, Saba Ahl-i Hadith, 7, 15, 25, 33–6, 48, 56n9, 60, 64, 161, 176n9, 179, 234, 240–1, 250n35, 251, 267–8, 279–85, 298–9, 312, 318 Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at, 6, 10, 11n30, 28, 30, 50, 64, 121n33, 131, 149n12, 177, 186n29, 269n6. See also Barelwi(s)

Ahmad, Attiya, 19, 20n45, 40, 41–2, 49, 115, 126n44, 209, 211, 230–2, 266n48, 298n101, 350–1, 358 on cyclical and recursive nature of change, 20 and concept of precarity, 40–1, 115, 350–1, 351n13 on South Asian ideal for women being ‘naram’, 20, 358 Ahmad, Irfan, 4, 55n4, 65n36, 69, 241n10 Ahmad, Sadaf, 238, 239, 313, 314n20 Ahmad Raza Khan Barelwi, 10, 25n58, 27, 29, 30, 32–3, 37n86, 47, 50, 99, 104–7, 109n15, 110, 121, 173, 174, 177–8, 180, 182, 186, 187, 207 as A‘la Hazrat, 37n86, 104, 177 Karoron Durud (poem), 182 Salam (poem), 180 akhara, 99, 186–7 Akhtar Raza Khan Barelwi (‘Azhari Miyan’), 105–6 Alam, Arshad, 55n4, 72n50, 110n17, 160, 169n3, 211n2

388

Index

Al-Huda International, 6–7, 11, 21, 37–9, 48, 234, 237–66 and active learning style, 257, 258–9 Ahl-i Hadith perspective of, 15, 279–85, 298–9 Al-Huda International Institute, Mississauga, Canada, 13, 14, 306, 308, 321–8 Al-Huda Testing Center in Hurst, Texas, 49, 303, 328–34 at Bengaluru, India, 13 and da‘wa, 26, 36–9, 46, 49 and definition of its ‘Others’, 7, 38 and discussion of food regulations, 258, 259–60 and discourse, 22, 302, 314 family relationships in, 17, 49, 122, 263n43, 265, 313, 350 franchise structure of, 15, 264 and importance of du‘as, 35 leaders/leadership in, 26, 36, 39, 264, 311, 315, 328 online classes for women, 11, 13, 37, 48, 49, 137, 138n6, 240, 247–62, 264–5, 285–9 list of (2013), 335–8 Pakistani context for, 240–7 as piety movement, 14, 17, 37, 46, 239–40, 262–4 politics of, 263, 294–8 and rejection of religious extremism, 13–15 and science, 35, 289–94 and self-definition, 7, 36 and conservative stance on women in society, 260–2, 306 students of, 12, 16, 21, 25–7, 33, 37, 49, 155n20, 255–7, 265–6, 288, 301, 303, 364

teacher-learners, 49, 301, 326, 328, 334 teachers/volunteers of, 22, 26, 36, 237, 247, 253, 256–7, 265, 315, 321, 339, 340 and time management, 17, 27, 306–8, 310 and use of technology, 22, 240, 242, 254, 263–4, 289, 308 Amjad ‘Ali A‘zami, Mawlana, 11, 186, 187n32 and Bahar-i Shari‘at (book), 11 anjuman(s), 284 weekly, at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, 47, 109, 169, 170–88, 284 as rite of incorporation, 181–5 Ansari(s), 72, 187. See also Kumar, Nita Appadurai, Arjun, and ‘capacity to aspire’, 12, 42n95, 220n15 Asad, Talal, 16n40, 23, 288n76, 302 on cultural translation, 302 on definition of ‘Islamic tradition’, 23 on importance of practice, 23 on ritual, 23 Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, Mawlana, 10–11, 56, 57, 58n15, 73, 89, 125–6, 132. See also Bihishti Zewar Barelwi(s), 6, 7, 10–13, 21, 24–5, 27–34, 36, 37–9, 43, 47, 55n4, 64, 78, 96, 104, 105, 109, 110, 125n40, 132, 160–1, 162, 177, 178–80, 182, 183–7, 202, 205, 208, 210, 234, 241, 244, 284 differences with Deobandis, 132, 161, 178–9, 187 and ‘love of the Prophet’, 28, 109, 161, 177, 184 madrasa for girls, 11, 21

Index

politics of, in Bareilly, 98 as ‘reformist’, 30–3 self-image of as ‘Sunni’ Muslims, 161 as Sufis, 30, 31 Barelwiyat as identity, 24 ethics, 24 as performance, 24–5 Benei, Veronique, 168–9, 207 Bihishti Zewar (book), 10, 57, 73, 77, 89, 125–6, 132. See also Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, Mawlana body/embodiment, 15–21, 76n63, 168–9, 204, 299, 303 disciplining of, 75, 156n23, 204, 360n17 Borker, Hem, 6, 12n31, 18–19, 42–3, 65, 71n49, 75n60, 79–80, 127–8, 220n16, 222, 263n41, 357, 358, 363n25 critique of Saba Mahmood by, 18–19 Butler, Judith, and precarity, 40 Deoband/i, 2–4, 7, 8, 10, 24, 32, 33, 47, 55, 56, 64, 71, 73, 77, 78, 97–9, 110, 125n40, 132, 133, 160, 161, 176n9, 178, 185n25, 186, 187, 203, 228, 234, 241, 244, 245n25, 263n42, 269, 270n9, 281n45 and Jam‘iyat al-‘Ulama-i Hind, 2 differences with Barelwis. See Barelwis, differences with Deobandis Hadith commentaries of, 3 ‘ulama of Dar al-‘Ulum, 2–3, 32, 55, 56 da‘wa, 26, 36–9, 44, 46, 49, 156, 179, 237, 263, 265, 284n61, 294, 295–6, 297, 354

389

death, 40, 57, 107, 139, 281, 361 and the afterlife, Muslim belief in, 17, 139, 306, 312, 339 of family members, 103n6, 114, 118–9, 123, 316 fear of, 118–9 rituals, 318 anniversary of Sufi saint, 25, 30 as teacher, 118–9, 139 discourse, Islamic, 5, 6, 8n20, 21–4, 31, 46, 65n36, 79, 126n44, 160, 184, 187, 208, 211–2, 225, 228, 302, 314, 320, 353, 357 and coherence in, 302 and counter discourses, 76 and Western, 299 du‘a(s), 35–6, 38, 47, 67, 136, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170–88, 251, 261, 310, 313, 343 efficacy of, in Al-Huda’s perspective, 35–6, 251, 261, 310, 343 at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, 47, 136, 141, 164, 165, 169, 170, 172–5, 177, 180–1 as rite of incorporation, 175, 177, 180–1 education, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 18, 20, 39, 41–3, 46–50, 53–80, 96, 114, 117, 126–8, 137–62, 168–9, 180, 189, 188–208, 209–34, 244–6, 341, 344–5, 347, 355, 361. See also Islamic education; madrasa(s) history of, for Muslim girls, 55–61. See also Minault, Gail at Islamic Public School for Girls, Shahjahanpur, 130–1, 188–205, 224, 227, 233 at a Jewish seminary for girls, 355–7

390

Index

in Pakistan, 8, 244–7, 360–1. See also Al-Huda International and problems of Indian, 42, 203–5. See also Kumar, Nita and rates of literacy in UP, 54, 61–3 and nationalism, 168–9 Eickelman, Dale, 133n4, 153, 312n13 everyday life, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15–24, 25, 31, 40, 41, 49, 73, 107, 145, 148, 161, 170, 173, 202, 209, 210, 210, 218, 253–4, 256, 289–94, 301, 302–3, 319, 326, 365 applying Qur’anic teachings in, 253–4, 260, 301, 302–3, 326, 365 as locus of personal ethics, 16–17, 148, 161, 202, 210, 212, 218, 365 performance of identities in, 24–7, 210, 212, 218 precarity of, 42–4 and processual nature of change, 20, 41–2 Farah, Sumbul, 20–1, 24–5, 47, 48n108, 105, 106, 107, 111n18, 180n19, 208, 209–20, 222, 224, 25, 226, 229, 261 interviews of Jami‘a Nur graduates by, 20, 209–19, 225–6, 229 Farrukhabad district, UP, 46, 99, 101, 118 fiqh, 81, 82, 85, 89–91, 147–50, 341 of taharat, 147–50 teaching of, at Jami‘a Nur, 12 Foucault, Michel, 74–5, 223n22 Gade, Anna, 39n87, 155, 156n22, 302n2, 312n13, 319n30, 365

and escalating practice of Qur’an recitation, 155 Gilmartin, David, 242, 314n22, 365n34 Gupta, Latika, 202, 204, 220, 227 habitus, 45, 148, 208, 222, 230–4, 357 Hadith, 3, 12, 15, 22, 26, 28, 34, 35, 39, 48, 50, 68, 74–6, 79, 81, 85, 88–90, 98, 103, 133, 134, 136, 149–55, 160–5, 175, 183, 184, 205, 206, 224, 225, 241, 250, 253, 254, 263, 267–79, 284, 285–6, 297, 299, 300, 303, 304, 305, 316, 318, 323, 326 study of at Jami‘a Nur, 98, 103, 133, 134, 136, 149–55, 160–4, 175, 183, 184, 205, 206, 224, 225 at Al-Huda, 7, 12, 241, 250, 253, 254, 263, 267–70, 285–7, 297, 299, 300, 303–5, 316, 318, 323, 326, 337, 346, 350 by Farhat Hashmi, 270–5, 299 by Idrees Zubair, 275–9, 299 Haji Imdadullah, 32 hajj, 21, 81, 113, 281, 318, 346, 349 Hashmi, Farhat, 6, 7, 8, 15, 21, 22, 33, 35n79, 48, 49, 238, 243, 247, 251, 253, 259, 264, 267, 268–75, 279, 280, 287n72, 288–91, 298–9, 301–3, 304–21, 322, 328, 329, 340, 348, 354, 359 biography of, 268–75 Deobandi ‘ulama question religious authority of, 7, 269, 359

Index

as cofounder of Al-Huda International, 7, 21, 33, 238, 240, 241, 246, 359 moral leadership of, 314–5 PhD scholarship of, 267, 268–75 rhetoric of, 288–308, 315–20 taped lectures of, 22 as teacher, 308–15 travels of, as rihla, 21 use of language by, 6, 49 Hazrat, 103–4, 224 Hefner, Robert, 3n3, 4–5, 7, 245n25, 270n9, 365 Hirschkind, Charles, 9, 10n26, 23n51, 26, 155, 207 and ‘ethical listening’, 26, 155 Islamic education, 4–5, 7, 8, 18, 23, 39, 42–3, 47, 49, 50, 64–80, 126, 127–8, 132, 136–50, 158–9, 162, 189, 209, 212, 220–34, 297, 300, 314, 358–9, 364–5. See also madrasa(s) in Canada, 351–3. See also Al-Huda International family support for, 220–30 feminization of, 78, 127–8, 357–8, 363 functionalization of, 4–6, 39, 314 and influence on students’ home life, 20–1, 48, 209, 212–29, 233–4, 367 at Jami‘a Nur, 114, 117, 121, 122, 132, 137–47, 158–9, 189, 220–32, 358 modernity of, criteria defining, 4–5, 366 objectification of, 5, 39, 296n96, 314 Jama‘at-i Islami, 4, 46, 48, 64, 69, 70, 77, 234, 240, 241–2, 244, 246,

391

251, 267, 268, 279, 280, 296–7, 298, 299, 361 as Islamist organization, 4 in India, 4, 69, 70, 78. See also Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur in Pakistan, 4 Jami‘a Ashrafiya, Mubarakpur, 109–10, 160, 161, 178, 185–6, 187 as akhara, 186–7 Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, 47, 64, 77, 96–129, 130–2, 137, 147, 148, 162, 166–7, 189, 205–8, 233–4, 308n8, 311, 320, 355, 358, 359, 364, 367. See also Islamic education; madrasa(s) and adab and tajdid, 124–7 Barelwi identity of, 108–10, 147, 160, 178–85, 187–8, 203, 358 classes and pedagogy at, 130–62 ‘core families’ at, 100–4 lack of corporal punishment at, 223 role of memorization at, 150–6 students at, 156–60, 168, 210–22, 225, 227, 228, 232 Sufi networks of founder, Sayyid Sahib, 104–5, 107, 108–10 syllabus at, 163–5 teachers at, 121–4, 157, 166, 192, 227 use of space in, 117–18, 120, 134, 157–8, 170–1, 223, 366 wardens at, 110–20 Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, 64–76, 77–8 syllabus at, 81–6 Jannati Zewar (book), 10, 11n30, 77, 132, 133, 134, 149n12, 165, 174. See also advice literature for women; Bihishti Zewar; Sunni Bihishti Zewar

392

Index

Jones, Justin, 64n30, 116n28, 128, 363, 364 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 14, 361n18 Khan, Darakhshan, 59n18, 217, 221, 297, 363 Kloos, David, 18n42, 19, 20n47, 31, 126n43, 349n12 Kumar, Nita, 55n4, 72n52, 117n29, 203–5 literacy, 54, 61–3, 126, 128, 133, 154, 199, 356–7, 361, 363 rates in UP, 61–3, 128 madrasa(s) as agents of personal (trans) formation, 12, 17–18, 22, 23, 74, 172–85, 202–3, 365 boys’, in India, 53–4, 68, 74, 127, 178 civilizing mission of, 75, 208, 230, 358 girls’, in India, 4, 7, 11, 12, 46, 53–4, 60–61, 64–80, 81–6, 96–129, 132–79, 178, 229, 358 as ‘modern’ institutions, 4, 5, 8, 12, 19, 68, 69, 77, 106, 314, 365, 366 in Pakistan, 3, 7, 8, 358, 360 as ‘public-private’/hybrid space, 8, 117–20, 223–5, 366 as ‘total’ institution, 74, 223 See also Islamic education Madrasa Manzar-i Islam, Bareilly, 97, 106, 186n29, 187, 212 Madrasatul Niswan, Delhi, 64–76, 77–8, 87–95 class composition of students at, 71

‘core families’ at, 72 limited physical space at, 75 syllabus at, 87–95 Mahmood, Saba, 18, 76, 239, 247, 263, 297, 357, 366 critiqued for emphasis on female piety, 18, 353 and Politics of Piety (book), 18, 239–40, 262–3 maslak(s) differences between, 46, 48, 98, 99, 234, 358 as sources of identity, 28, 36, 76, 77, 160, 162, 177–9, 203, 207, 234, 300 Mawdudi, Mawlana Abul A‘la, 4, 69, 70, 77, 84, 85, 241–2, 327n47 Mazhari, Mawlana Waris, 55, 109n15, 311n12 Metcalf, Barbara, 2, 3n3, 7, 10n28, 11n29, 45n101, 57, 78n66, 79n68, 283, 284n59, 298, 300n103 and concept of adab, 45, 125–6 on Tablighi Jama‘at women, 363–4 Messick, Brinkley, 154–5, 186n26, 206n58 Minault, Gail, 56–60, 61n23, 112, 122n35, 128n51, 222–3, 224 and concept of sharafat, 58–9, 112 Secluded Scholars (book), 56–60, 169 Moosa, Ebrahim, 55, 56n7, 148, 225 Mushtaq, Faiza, 7n17, 238, 239–40, 268, 269, 296n95, 315n23, 345–6, 360 on Al-Huda as ‘hybrid’ institution, 240 Muslim(s) as a ‘middle nation’, 6

Index

reformers on girls’ education, 58–60 religious movements or organizations, 2–3 South Asian, 2–3, 11, 13, 234, 283, 367 Sunni, 2, 27, 28, 45, 78, 96, 147, 175, 182, 186, 210, 234, 283 Mustafa Raza Khan Barelwi (‘Mufti-i A‘zam’), 47, 105, 106 Nadwat al-‘Ulama, Lucknow, 56, 64, 73 na‘t, 19, 22, 25, 47, 173, 177–9, 181, 207, 219 Ong, Walter, 22, 23n49, 154 orthoprax/orthopraxy, 1, 12, 49, 129, 159, 202, 266, 291, 345, 354, 357, 359, 365 and attentiveness to prayer schedules, 17 pardah, 6, 57, 58, 59, 74, 79, 84, 126, 158, 159, 198, 218, 223, 225 ‘in reverse’, 224 Phupha, 104, 120, 310 Prophet Muhammad, the, 6, 17, 19, 22, 25, 28–30, 34, 37–8, 39, 44, 67, 110, 139, 186, 239, 249, 280, 305, 325, 365 in Barelwi discourse, 25 sunna of, 17, 28, 30, 39, 98, 99, 225, 273, 282, 284, 287 Qur’an, the, 6–7, 9–10, 11, 14, 16–18, 21, 22, 26, 28, 33–6, 38, 44, 46 internalization of teachings of, 17, 39, 184, 238, 327

393

interpretation of, 10, 17, 26, 28–9, 35, 36, 213, 252, 263, 284, 286–7, 293, 294, 311 and science, 6, 35, 76, 293, 289, 291–4, 327 recitation (tajwid) of, 9, 25, 26, 39, 47, 103, 133, 153, 155, 163–5, 224, 248, 249–50, 259, 307, 350 rules of adab surrounding study of, 207 taught in Arabic, 11, 12, 238, 266, 249–50 reform/ers, Muslim, 30, 56, 58–60, 124–7, 234, 240, 300 reformism, Sufi, 30–3 Riexinger, Martin, 34–5, 56n9, 60n22, 283–5 Robinson, Francis, 5, 125n40 Sachar Committee Report, 2006, 46, 63, 361 Sayyid Ehsan Miyan (‘Sayyid Sahib’), 46, 97–105, 107, 108, 110–2, 114–24, 127, 130, 132, 138, 140–4, 146–7, 161, 175, 178, 187, 190, 194, 205, 210, 211, 218, 222, 224, 228, 229, 232 educational vision of, 47, 98, 118–9 Kannauj background of, 100–4 praised by Deobandi scholar, 98–9 schools founded by, 97, 108, 130, 132 Sufi networks of, 99 Sayyids, 97n1, 121, 161 Shahjahanpur, UP, 13, 20, 21, 46, 61, 64, 80, 96, 98–99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 112, 113, 114, 116, 127,

394

Index

130, 132, 135, 187–8, 190, 194, 210, 214, 351, 355 shari‘a/shari‘at, 30, 58, 96, 105, 116, 127, 128, 154, 159, 213, 225, 230, 233, 243, 273, 258, 363 interpretation of, 5, 125 sharif/sharafat, 58–9, 112, 114 Shi‘a/Shi‘i, 6, 110, 161, 176, 179, 234, 244, 360 Starrett, Gregory, 5, 9, 19, 39, 314n19 Subhan Raza Khan Barelwi (‘Subhani Miyan’), 106, 107 Sufis/Sufism, 2, 7, 24, 27–37, 45, 47, 50, 98, 99–100, 102, 104, 105, 107–10, 119, 122, 125, 126, 147, 180, 241, 281, 367 Al-Huda’s attitude towards, 7 Sunni Bihishti Zewar (book), 10, 11n30, 77, 133, 134, 147, 148, 149, 151, 160, 165, 207, 218. See also advice literature for women; Bihishti Zewar; Jannati Zewar syllabus, 47, 53, 55, 68–70, 73–4, 191, 204, 300 dars-i nizami, 12, 68, 69, 76, 78, 124, 132, 275 different for boys’ and girls’ madrasas, 59–60, 78 at Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, Shahjahanpur, 77, 78 at Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur, 69 at Madrasatul Niswan, Delhi, 78 tabligh, 36, 46, 71, 179, 297, 300 Tablighi Jama‘at, 59n18, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 77, 79, 148, 162, 240, 242n13, 297, 298n100, 358, 364n30 taharat, 47, 135, 136, 147–50, 175 Taqi ‘Uthmani, Mawlana, 7, 269 education of, 8, 270

and questioning of Hashmi’s religious authority, 7 taqrir, 47, 179, 213, 219, 225, 229 ‘ulama, 1, 2–3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 32, 46, 50, 55, 58, 79, 98, 105, 107, 116, 125, 126, 127, 133, 139, 148, 186, 243, 244, 245, 269, 270, 282, 283, 285, 293, 296, 297, 300, 305, 311, 312, 317, 318, 359, 360, 361 at al-Azhar, Cairo, 8–9 fracturing of authority of, 5, 7 in India, 2–3, 56, 73, 98, 107, 187–8 in Pakistan, 8, 263n42, 270, 296, 300, 360 South Asian, during colonial rule, 2–3, 58, 186, 282, 297, 312 Vatuk, Sylvia, 115 Wahhabi(s), 6, 24, 27–37, 50, 108–10, 161, 228, 282, 316, 318, 367 as term of abuse, 282, 318 Winkelmann, Mareike, 46n107, 64n31, 104n7, 148n8, 211n2, 240n7 and ‘core families’, concept of, 47, 72, 104 See also Madrasatul Niswan Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, 3, 5n8, 8, 244n23, 245n25, 270n9, 359n15 Zubair, Idrees, 15, 33, 48, 238, 250, 267, 268, 275–9, 280, 298, 299, 322 Zubair, Taimiyyah, 49, 238n1, 243, 251, 252, 253, 256n39, 264n45, 268n1, 269n3, 270n10, 275n29, 276n31, 279n42, 303, 322–7

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Usha Sanyal is visiting assistant professor at Wingate University, North Carolina, USA. Her previous research focused on the history of the Barelwi or Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at movement in British India. She is the author of Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1880–1920 (2010), which has also been published in Urdu; Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the Prophet (2005); and numerous articles about South Asian Muslims both in the past and contemporaneously. Sanyal has co-edited the book Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia: The Cultural Politics of Women’s Food Practices (with Nita Kumar [2020]).