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Theorizing Modernities article

Sovereignty and its Afterlives in Muslim South Asia: A Response


SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (2020)

I want to begin by profusely thanking Josh Lupo and his team at the Contending Modernities program for their time and efforts in organizing this forum, Ebrahim Moosa for penning an incredibly thoughtful and productive introduction, and all discussants—Jonathan Brown, Faisal Devji, Zunaira Komal, Waris Mazhari, Ammar Nasir, and Sohaira Siddiqui—for their extensive intellectual generosity in engaging my book with such depth, brilliance, and insight. Their commentaries are not only a great gift and source of honor; they have also helped me think anew about the book in generative ways. Among the central aspirations of Defending Muḥammad in Modernity is to forge conversations between scholars in Islamic studies, South Asian history, religious studies, and anthropology in addition to generating interest (including critical and normative evaluations) among Muslim traditionalist scholars or the ‘ulamā’, especially in South Asia. Therefore, it is particularly heartening to see that collectively, contributors to this forum encompass all these intellectual profiles. Before I address the excellent points and critiques raised by the contributors, let me very briefly situate and contextualize the book in Western academic studies on Islam and South Asia, and add a word on how that context connects with its main argument. The beginnings of this project lie in my years as a graduate student at Duke University from 2005 to 2012. I entered graduate school during a moment when the field of religious studies was feverishly grappling with the recently published and hugely influential critiques and genealogies of secular power offered by Talal Asad and his students and interlocutors (it still is though perhaps with a more settled view of competing takes and readings). In addition, Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s pioneering work on Deoband, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, that for the first time brought into view South Asian ‘ulamā’ discourses and debates from a perspective that combined intellectual history and religious studies, had also recently emerged. Fifteen years later, in Defending Muḥammad in Modernity I have sought to further and bring into more deliberate dialogue these two streams of scholarship in a manner that might disrupt secular claims about religious traditions. I do this through close readings of a particular tradition of intra-Muslim contest that highlight alternate logics of life unavailable for secular moderation and disciplinary canonization. More specifically, through a close reading of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic, most often approached with a lens saturated with liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, inclusive/exclusive, reformist/non-reformist etc., I try to present an alternate conceptual framing that instead sees this polemic as a reflection of what I call “competing political theologies.” With the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in nineteenth-century South Asia, the pioneers of the Barelvī and Deobandī orientations and their predecessors articulated and avidly fought for two rival visions of the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the practice of everyday life. This in a nutshell is the argument of the book.

Logics of Sovereignty

The contributors to this forum have engaged varied aspects of this argument, while extending its scope and application in variously dazzling ways. Paucity of allotted space will not allow me to address all the points raised by each commentator; I will choose one or two from each and try clubbing them together when appropriate. In her theoretically electric reading of the book, Zunaira Komal asks the difficult question of how the notion of divine sovereignty in modern Muslim reformist discourses might “be understood alongside the sovereignty of the colonial state as well as the declining sovereignty of nineteenth-century Muslims in the subcontinent? Is the understanding of power within Islam similar or different than what the colonial encounter brought?” During the course of researching and writing this book, I wrestled with this question rather avidly. I cannot propose a resolution to this problem except to point out that traditionalist Muslim conceptions of divine sovereignty, its encounter with prophetic authority, and the implications of that encounter for the practice of everyday life cannot be collapsed or reduced to colonial power and conditions. This, of course, is not a gesture, as I stress repeatedly in the book, to retrieve “native agency” from the rubbles of colonial power. And yet, the competing logics of moral argument—centered on the status of divine sovereignty in a world enveloped by the crisis of political sovereignty—that animated the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic entailed a vision of the political that exceeded and provincialized the modern colonial and postcolonial privileging of the state as the centerpiece of politics. In this regard, I appreciate as well as concur with Komal’s astute suggestion that intra-‘ulamā’ debates on matters like the Prophet’s knowledge of the unknown (‘ilm al-ghayb) showcase a vision of the political that while contending with “the temporality of the world” remain “aspirationally open to the temporality of the Elsewhere.” Thus, though indebted to the technological and institutional conditions of colonial power, modern ‘ulamā’ discourses and debates on divine sovereignty point to horizons of politics that also disrupt the alleged universality of that power. This in turn marks their decolonial potential, as Sohaira Siddiqui has wonderfully elaborated in her remarks on this forum.

Paradoxes of Sovereignty

But as much as I am invested in detailing the distinctive logics of sovereignty at work in ‘ulamā’ discourses, capturing the vexing tensions and paradoxes of sovereignty haunting their discursive programs is also central to my concerns, as Faisal Devji has probingly observed in his signature quizzical style. He has also summed up the central paradox of sovereignty, as reflected in competing modern Muslim reformist discourses, rather pointedly: “On the one hand, a sovereignty unavailable to colonized peoples might have been displaced onto God as a kind of compensation. On the other hand, its expulsion from the world of mortals may indicate a deep suspicion of sovereignty and the modern state it represents. Having been stripped of its own political tradition, in other words, new forms of Islamic thought were magnetized by the idea of sovereignty in a way not so very different from anti-colonial nationalism.” Yes, indeed! Extending Devji’s helpful extension and elaboration of my argument here, I should add that it is precisely this tense interplay between the urgency to retrieve divine sovereignty in a world beset by moral corruption and to deny mortal humans responsible for that corruption any hint of popular sovereignty that renders ‘ulamā’ actors discussed in my book at once thoroughly modern and yet defiantly anti-modernist. In other words, even when critiquing spiritual hierarchies (such as in the Prophet’s capacity for intercession or access to knowledge of the unknown), their worldview remains wedded to a strictly hierarchical spiritual economy whereby the ability of the masses to access the vatic capital of God’s sovereign power and the Prophet’s normative guidance hinges on the mediating authority of the ‘ulamā’. At stake in defending Muḥammad in modernity—whether as an exceptional beloved of God endowed with extraordinary powers (the Barelvī view) or as an agent whose perfection depended on the perfection of his humanity (the Deobandī position)—is precisely the regulation of the encounter between divine sovereignty and prophetic charisma in a manner that ultimately amplifies the sovereign authority of the scholarly class. Devji’s intriguing suggestion that “controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return” provides a helpful frame with which one might begin to address a question that both Sohaira Siddiqui and Ammar Nasir raise in different ways: What is one to make of the postcolonial afterlives of these intra-Muslim polemics over prophetic memory and honor that trace their beginnings to the colonial moment? As Siddiqui asks: “[H]ow has the conceptual-ideological problem-space of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic changed [in more recent times]?” Nasir asks a similar question while also advancing the suggestion that perhaps the stability and order provided by the juggernaut of the nineteenth-century colonial state is precisely the reason that many such intra-Muslim and inter-sectarian polemics did not descend to the sort of rabid violence that has often accompanied them in postcolonial contexts like Pakistan.

Postcolonial Ruptures

Let me offer three brief propositions addressing this line of inquiry: (1) The metastasis of violence associated with intra-Muslim doctrinal contestations in settings like Pakistan has perhaps less to do with the weakness of the state (as compared to say the colonial state) than the further intensification of the crisis of sovereignty in popular consciousness and everyday life. The instability of sovereign agency over the contingencies of life is increasingly compensated by the fantastical figure of a Prophet at once incorruptible and yet always vulnerable to injury. The pathological patrolling of prophetic love not only borrows liberally (pun intended) from a distinctly Christian political theology of blasphemy, as Devji in his comments points out; it also signals a rather fascinating interplay of masculine certainty and endemic fragility mapped onto the body of the Prophet. (2) While it is easy to get caught up in the proliferation of intra-Muslim divisions in the postcolonial context, we have also seen the emergence of some curious alliances between otherwise arch rivals. So, for instance, the recent movement and protests over blasphemy in Pakistan have often brought together Barelvī, Deobandī, and Ahl-i Ḥadīth actors in a common program of defying the state and non-state modernist elite. The lines of activity between ‘ulamā’ and more popular preachers and activists have also been often blurred, as seen most dramatically in the rise of the popular outfit Tehrik-i Labayk Ya Rasul Allah (TLYR) that has frequently sucked in ‘ulamā’ actors in their drive to protect prophetic honor even as it cuts into the latter’s’ religious authority in the marketplace of moral persuasion. (3) The space for intra-Muslim disagreement on sensitive theological questions has certainly shrunk; a century and couple decades later, it is almost unthinkable that questions like, “Can God produce another Muhammad?” or “What’s the difference between Muhammad’s and Satan’s knowledge?,” could be discussed and debated as transparently and with the sort of intellectual depth and nuance as they were by nineteenth-century Barelvī and Deobandī pioneers and their predecessors. Indeed, as I elaborate in the book’s postscript, if nothing else, the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic showcases the potential for intellectual fecundity associated with a fierce yet layered and complex polemical encounter. This is not to suggest some sort of a rise and fall model of history that valorizes the ‘ulamā’ of colonial India as occupants of a “golden era” of intellectual valor and sophistication supplanted by the mediocrity of the present. What I am gesturing at rather is an observable constriction in the parameters of doctrinal debate, especially on questions concerning the Prophet.

The Middle Eastern Shadow

Jonathan Brown wonderfully highlights a theme that, while discussed at numerous points in the book, certainly merits much further inquiry and exposition: the relationship between intra- ‘ulamā’ rivalries in modern South Asia and the Muslim intellectual landscape and debates of the Ottoman Middle East. As I detail in the book, the Hanafi assault on Wahhabi thought in Arabia not only colored the polemical ink of South Asian scholars like Aḥmad Razā Khān (d. 1921). Moreover, seeking the endorsement of prominent Arab scholars was also seen as a coveted pursuit by Barelvī and Deobandī pioneers alike (see esp. chapter 9). Brown has also highlighted an instructive irony: “[Aḥmad Razā] Khān’s writings seem to have had little impact on scholarship in the Arab world, certainly not in comparison to Deobandīs like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī [d.1933]. Ironically, if asked about the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen or the mawlid, scholars like [Zāhid] al-Kawtharī [d.1952] and [‘Abdallāh] al-Ghumārī [d.1993] would no doubt take the Barelvī side. But they could read and appreciate the books of Deobandī scholars in blissful removal from the controversies in South Asia.” This observation is pertinent not only to the interaction of Arab and South Asian traditionalism, but in a sense also to the popular reception of these rival groups within South Asia as well. On the one hand, the dominant mode of everyday ritual practice among South Asian Muslims most certainly aligns much greater with the Barelvī worldview. For instance, the Prophet’s birthday celebration today is not only deeply entrenched in the ritual life of the community; establishing it as a heretical innovation seems a task much more socially and doctrinally daunting than it was a century ago. However, despite the ritual entrenchment of the Barelvī orientation, the Deoband school continues to dominate the intellectual and popular terrain of religious knowledge in terms of institutional structures and depth, publishing capacity and output, and outreach to global scholarly audiences, as Brown’s analysis also confirms.

The Work Continues

Brown’s point also connects nicely with a useful and valid critique raised by Waris Mazhari that for all my claims to complicate Deobandī thought, I at times perhaps generalize its intellectual project without having considered prominent Deobandī ‘ulamā’ voices that run contrary to those generalizations. More specifically, Mazhari astutely argues that while I present the early nineteenth-century reformer Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831) and the Deoband school as part of a common reformist program and genealogy, Deobandī heavyweights like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī were in fact deeply critical of what they saw as Ismāʿīl’s acerbic discursive style. Mazhari’s critique not only provides me the opportunity to offer the clarification that my juxtaposition of Ismāʿīl and some of the Deoband pioneers was specific to some among the latter—most notably Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī (d. 1906), Ashraf ‘Alī Thānvī (d. 1943), and Khalīl Aḥmad Sāharanpūrī (d. 1927)—and to specific theological and normative problems. More importantly, it also serves as a useful reminder of the dizzying variety and the unpredictable scholarly trajectories that populate Deobandī and indeed Barelvī discursive universes. On that note, I hope Defending Muḥammad in Modernity and other kindred works that have appeared in the last couple years will inspire and attract more than a few graduate students to dive into the often-perplexing yet hugely rewarding waters of South Asian ‘ulamā’ traditions of knowledge and debate. Our work, indeed, has just begun.

 

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SherAli Tareen
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, and author of Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) that was awarded the 2020 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize. His work centers on Muslim intellectual thought in modern South Asia with a focus on intra-Muslim debates and polemics on crucial questions of law, ethics, and theology. Tareen is also interested in the intersection of secularism and Muslim intellectual thought, Muslim political thought, and Muslim revolutionary politics in the inter-war period. His various articles have appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion, Muslim World, Political Theology, Islamic Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ReOrient, among many others.
Global Currents article

Uyghur Oppression from a Decolonial Perspective


Demonstration in support of human rights for Uyghurs in front of White House, September 25, 2015. Photo Credit: Elvert Barnes. Via Wikimedia Commons.

For Uyghur people to thrive, the principles of pluralism and human dignity need to be promoted in China. This requires that Uyghurs be made visible and allowed to speak in their own voice. It is necessary, therefore, to create a transformative imaginary that promotes dialogical and dialectical processes of real social transformation. Such an imaginary would involve supporting Uyghur subjects in their struggle against forced assimilation and retrieving them from a subordinate position to those in power. In support of this imaginary, academic and intellectual spaces that confront the Uyghur issue need to be created. This requires creating new forms of social understanding from non-Eurocentric perspectives as well as new strategies for creating knowledge that go beyond the colonial and North-centric legacies of the current social sciences. It also requires delving into pluralistic forms of constructive social thinking that are emergent in different places in the “South,” including the Uyghur region. To inhabit the South is not to merely side with those coming from a particular geographical region. It is to metaphorically place oneself on the side of those who suffer from the harms caused by nation- and global-scaled capitalism and colonialism, and against those who would minimize the claims or lives of those who suffer and/or suggest they “get over” it.

Since post-colonial times have not (yet) come for the Uyghurs, a decolonial approach to the Uyghur issue must start by assuming the colonial nature of the relations between the Chinese nation-state and both the Uyghurs and their homeland. This requires recognizing Chinese colonialism’s proper characteristics and avoiding the universalization of European colonialism as practiced in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as “the only possible colonialism.” The domination of the Uyghurs by the Chinese state is a form of “colonialism” if by colonialism we mean an ancient practice of conquest, usurpation, and subalternization. Such a definition requires that we don’t fall into the “salt water fallacy.” If we analyze the last two and a half centuries up until the present of what today is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, we will see that it is a colonial history. Many Uyghur scholars have pointed this out—though not openly until very recent times. A colonial—Chinese, in this case—extractive logic leads to the confiscation of the potentialities of land and bodies, and reduces the colonized to “subaltern” categories: (1) residents of extremely poor enclaves; (2) undocumented migrants / illegal exiles; (3) enslaved workers; (4) racialized populations; (5) objects of gender discrimination.

The Uyghurs’ territories and resources are appropriated by the dominant class, and impoverished by extensive farming and labor-intensive industries. The urbanization and subsequent gentrification of the Uyghur landscape, jointly with asymmetric resource management and racist segregation, turn huge percentages of Uyghurs into residents of extremely poor enclaves, and exclude them from the formal labor market. This often leads them to emigrate towards other regions/countries looking for better opportunities. However, the state restrictions on their ability to obtain passports and documents force a conspicuous number of Uyghurs to illegally abandon their region, turning them into undocumented migrants/illegal exiles. Although exile can easily be considered a condition that denies dignity and an identity to people, in this case it is practically the only form of survival for excluded people. The totalitarian nationalism of the People’s Republic of China provokes, among other consequences, their urgency to rebuild as people and individuals living in exile. It also requires them to deal with feelings of rejection and isolation once they settle in a foreign land.

The Uyghur Situation Today

Since mid-2017 the Uyghur situation has received more visibility on the international scene. This occurred when intellectuals and activists from both the Uyghur diaspora and within Chinese borders reported that the Chinese Communist Party had opened alleged vocational reeducation camps. Those correctional facilities act as sites where Uyghurs and peoples of other nationalities can be transferred to Chinese and foreign factories as enslaved workers.

The official façade that has enhanced the success of those centers is the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) embrace of the narratives and strategies of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror. It paints this effort as a struggle to contain terrorism within its territory while allegedly modernizing the region and increasing harmony among the 56 nationalities of China. In doing so, the Chinese government legitimizes its own particular state-controlled anti-Muslim forms of racialization, hiding geopolitical and economic interests behind the well-accepted banner of the Global War on Terror. This strategy targets racialized populations and establishes religious and cultural repression over them. However, survivors and their families have started to make their stories public, either openly or anonymously. Among those are the testimonies of women forced to have abortions in the camps. While the official Chinese propaganda celebrates (in a now-deleted tweet from the Chinese embassy to the US) “that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated […], making them no longer baby-making machines,” these strategies in actuality show the gender discrimination that the government promotes and its long-term strategy to commit a genocide against the Uyghur people. Also aiding in more recent international recognition was the subsequent forced disappearance of an increasing number of Uyghurs—and Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other minority nationalities.

Decolonial Studies and the Uyghurs

The suffering of the Uyghur peoples has been carried out as a colonial project—with all the epistemic, metaphysical, and cultural assumptions that such a project entails—which has real world implications such as physical violence and cultural oppression. The support of these real-world catastrophes by the ruling ideologies of colonial powers is telling. It reveals the constructed nature of the ontological—hence, not (only) geographic—South as a dominated subaltern subject. For it is seen by colonial powers—including the Chinese state in this instance—as a problematic segment that must be controlled.

Over the last several decades decolonial studies have become more ubiquitous across multiple disciplines. They have opened new perspectives and new geographies to the social sciences research landscape. Although decolonial discourse originates from dialogues between intellectuals based in Latin America and the Caribbean, it has established links with projects born in other places, for any political proposal founded on the basis of epistemological universalism, as the Chinese statist universal project remains, is an imperial/colonial global design and is to be criticized as such. In the Uyghur case, this clearly appears both in the statist appropriation of Uyghur history that hides Uyghur history within a broader national narrative, and the assimilative “bilingual education” policy that has been imposed on the region. The modular history of the Uyghurs, which is made of routes interweaving shrines and religious places with myths and national history, is dismantled under the weight of official narratives. As this case demonstrates, decolonial studies ought not to rely on one kind decolonial thinking, but rather should facilitate local- and community-based dialogues across similar and different experiences, and it should do so in geographical and/or epistemic places outside of Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, my decolonial proposal is to give voice to a series of actors/subjects that until now have been relegated to the non-scientific field of “memories/folklore.”

In recent years, most of the opposition to the Beijing regime’s oppression of the Uyghurs has come from within the US, both from governmental offices and associations of Uyghurs in the diaspora. This is due to the Chinese Communist Party’s extreme control over all Uyghur activity within the Xinjiang region. The geographic locus of opposition has caused adverse reactions from critical sectors of the global intellectual left, especially diaspora Chinese media collectives. Those criticisms, though rooted in prudent worries, frivolously and programmatically tie intellectuals and activists struggling in favor of Uyghur dignity with neoliberal ideologies hostile to the socialist bastion China represents. To overcome these adverse reactions, then, involves dissociating from this Cold War-generated dualistic and simplistic vision of neoliberalism vs. communism, the US vs. China, and Western democracy vs. Asian autocracy. Our role as intellectuals and activists is to highlight social injustices and offer viable alternatives to their perverse mechanisms.

A scene of the Chinese Campaign against Rebels in the East turkestan, 1828. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Although the Global North/West has a long history in producing and consuming Asia and China symbolically—what has been called Cold War Orientalism—dealing with an empowered and subjecting actor like today’s PRC subverts as it simultaneously recreates Cold War dichotomies and structures. However, China’s very role in the world struggle against imperialism and capitalism—enhanced since the Cold War period with the Bandung Conference—should nowadays be critically scrutinized.

As various authors already pointed out in interviews and op-eds, and as so far shown in this post, the Chinese nation-state has established subalternizing relations with the Uyghur people. I, along with others, see the identity and cultural repression and ethnic genocide as a consequence of official state violence, imposed by the powerful for clear hegemonic—and, hence, economic—reasons. The ethnic repression and genocide are caused by an expanding and evolving Chinese capitalist society. The struggles that have arisen in response to the changes within global capitalism, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and the modifications of the geopolitics of domination that have come with these changes (which have so far been controlled by the US) have led to the establishment of asymmetrical relations—and hence, violent ones. This is the direct consequence of a colonial epistemology which establishes hierarchical ontologies and attempts to invisibilize the subaltern. This creates, then, a North/South domination that reproduces a colonial pattern. This pattern repeats narratives about global “enemies” that have been employed throughout history. It labels groups of peoples as potentially dangerous for global security and welfare, and thus as worthy of being persecuted, oppressed, and made illegal. We can see this pattern in the yellow peril, passing through the kamikaze threat, the cholo gangs, and most recently the Kung-flu. These racial stereotypes have targeted the Chinese, Muslim, Latinx communities and now, the Uyghurs—that is, colonized/subaltern subjects—and legitimized violent and repressive policies against them.

To approach Uyghur studies from a “museistic” perspective—a sort of “theme park” showing purely historiographical, theological, anthropological facets—would mean, in my opinion, to perpetuate an “official,” “partial,” and hence, propagandistic, vision of Uyghur reality, as the official Chinese sources about Xinjiang’s history attempt to do. An approach that can properly address the situation that the Uyghurs face can hardly be inscribed in the sealed compartments of traditional academia. Traditional forms of academia are, after all, complicit in hegemony. In other words, the commitment to “hybrid” and “mestiza” research, which may dignify “other” forms of knowledge seems the only viable way to break with the epistemological tradition of a “North-colonial-nation-state-centric” world system. This form of research can reframe the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of the Uyghurs’ struggle for human dignity.

From a decolonial perspective, it is necessary to (1) recognize the state’s propaganda when analyzing the official history of the territory; (2) identify the socio-environmental and ecological hegemonic strategies taken towards the autochthonous populations; and (3) listen to the subaltern and dignify the “Small Voices of History.”

What has become “conventional” decolonial theory is not sufficient. The challenge I propose here, then, is to promote an Uyghur emancipatory thinking, in which different knowledges may coexist, and in which histories may be counterhegemonically reappropriated. This requires that we acknowledge our permission to narrate without taking away the voices of our subjects. By doing so, we can show how to attain the transformative imaginary mentioned at the beginning of this post: transcending this subject-object duality while traversing the route “from dualities to ecologies.” And that certainly is a difference that matters.

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Chiara Olivieri
Chiara Olivieri graduated with degrees in Sinology Studies (2014) and Islam Studies (2015) at the University of Granada (Spain). She completed a Masters degree in East Asian Studies (2015) and a Specialization Course in Epistemologies of the South (2017). She holds a PhD in Migration Studies with the University of Granada. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Project “Islamophobia in the East of the European Union” at the University of Toronto, and Invited Professor at the University of Granada (UGR) in the MA in East Asian Studies. She is also a member of the Research Group STAND UGR-HUM952. Her current research project's aim is to investigate the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on the human appropriation of materials and energy in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (PRC), and how Islam (which includes laws, customs, and demonstrations) is the element that the PRC instrumentally employs in legitimating its violent and restrictive policies against Uyghur people in order to maintain its power over the territory and its natural resources.
Theorizing Modernities article

Decolonial Islamic Studies and Defending Muḥammad in Modernity


British Colonial Estate in India during the Raj. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In his ground-breaking book, Defending Muḥammad in Modernity, SherAli Tareen masterfully takes the reader through one of the most complex polemics in South Asian Islam between the Deobandīs and the Barelvīs. Tareen notes that while this polemical terrain may not be overlooked within secondary scholarship, it is indeed undertheorized and underappreciated. Instead of engaging deeply with the scholarly arguments articulated by both the Deobandīs and the Barelvīs, the polemic is reduced to a competition between puritan disenchantment (Deobandīs) and mystical enchantment (Barelvīs), one which supports a series of conceptually flawed dichotomies between legal/mystical, reformist/nonreformist, and most problematically, traditional/modern. For Tareen, these flawed classifications of rich intellectual traditions are underpinned by neocolonial attempts to frame Islam in terms of good religion, which is “amenable and useful to neoliberal interests,” and bad religion, which requires “surveillance and discipline” (17). Tareen seeks to challenge these dichotomies, and the logics which undergird them, through a close textual and theological analysis of the debates that stood at the heart of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemics. His analysis reveals that the two groups present competing rationalities of tradition that have at their core opposing conceptions of the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the normative practice of the believing Muslim community. But what are the grounds from which these scholars articulated these competing rationalities of tradition and how might scholars of religion benefit from a more nuanced understanding of these debates?

Tareen notes that the British colonial intrusion ushered in a crisis of sovereignty that forced Deobandī and Barelvī scholars to articulate new political visions that responded to the realities that Muslims faced. But not only did the colonial terrain serve as the catalyst for new political visions, it also fundamentally reshaped the nature of these intellectual debates. Tareen notes that from the pre-colonial to colonial period there were four important shifts: (1) an increased focus on everyday religious practice, (2) a rise in oral and written polemics, (3) a notion of a defined public that was the focus for reform, and (4) a more aggressive reform temperament. Thus, while the majority of Tareen’s substantive chapters explore theological debates on Prophetic intercession, heretical innovation, divine sovereignty, and normative religious practice, the author recognizes that the nature of these debates are informed by a colonial context. Herein lies one of the most important methodological insights that Tareen’s work presents for scholars of religion, especially those interested in the decolonization of the study of religion.

With remarkable subtlety, Tareen impresses upon the reader the distinction between the ability of colonial modernity to affect the nature of intellectual debates and the ability of colonial modernity to affect the content of those debates. To clarify, while colonial modernity served as the catalyst for scholars to answer certain questions about everyday religious practice and political sovereignty, the mode of answering these questions, and the content of the answers were articulated from within the intellectual traditions of the religious communities and these scholars did not adopt a secular or colonial rationality. This difference is crucial to note as insights of decolonial studies are beginning to be taken seriously by scholars of religion. The most foundational insight that decolonial scholars have provided to scholars of religion is that the modern study of religion was, and continues to be, informed by the European colonial/imperial enterprise. This has meant that non-Western religious traditions have been subject to the categories and classifications of Western religious experiences. This is precisely what Tareen himself indicates when he challenges the problematic dichotomies of legal/mystical, reformist/nonreformist, and traditional/modern. A decolonial approach to religious studies, which has recently been discussed on the Contending Modernities website, seeks to: (1) reject Western conceptions of religion, (2) reveal the persistent epistemological legacies present within the study of non-Western religions, and (3) incorporate more intentionally colonial/post-colonial voices. Inspired by the work of Edward Said and Talal Asad, a decolonial approach to the study of religion seeks to simultaneously provincialize the West and carefully bring to the fore the neglected intellectual contributions of the colonized.

This decolonial turn in the study of religion, and more specifically, Islamic Studies, is a welcome one that will likely usher in new frameworks and methods that will stimulate the field for years to come. However, as previously neglected voices and frameworks are incorporated into Islamic Studies, scholars of religion will have to play close attention to the ways in which colonial modernity impacted these intellectual frameworks both in terms of their nature and in terms of their content. In the case of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic, Tareen reveals to the reader the possibility of colonial modernity fundamentally shaping the nature of debates, while the content of these debates remains squarely theological and reflective of intra-Muslim intellectual engagement. Tareen also provides scholars of religion with a blueprint on how to write works that are deeply engaged in the theology and hermeneutics of these debates without losing sight of their socio-political context. But, the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic that Tareen delves into is just one element of a complex and rich colonial intellectual environment. And as other scholars of South Asian Islam will readily note, there were intellectual frameworks articulated by Muslims living under colonial rule that were shaped both in terms of the nature of their framework, and the content of it, by colonial modernity. How do scholars of religion study the thought of these individuals without falling into another dichotomous trap between colonial collaborator versus anti-colonial resistor?

In case of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic, Tareen reveals to the reader the possibility of colonial modernity fundamentally shaping the nature of debates, while the content of these debates remains squarely theological and reflective of intra-Muslim intellectual engagement.

A question, left unresolved for the readers, is the contemporary nature and content of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic. As one of Tareen’s intellectual progenitor’s, David Scott, argues, scholarly attention in the postcolonial period should not merely focus on new answers that are articulated, but also the new questions that are being asked. What Scott aims to critique is how postcolonialism continues to “bear the distinctive traces of anticolonialism’s conceptual preoccupation” (6). He argues that different temporal periods reveal different “conceptual-ideological problem-spaces” that generate a new set of questions and demands (7). For him, the postcolonial conceptual-ideological problem-space must be different from the anticolonial one. Returning then to Tareen’s arguments, he acknowledges that colonial modernity and the crisis of sovereignty within the Muslim community contributed to the nature of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic but did not fundamentally alter its content. But the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic was not one that simply existed during colonial modernity. In the past decades, it has migrated from the colonial period, through anticolonial movements, and has settled as part of everyday religious discourse in postcolonial times. Through this migration, how has the conceptual-ideological problem space of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic changed? In what ways has its nature and content been affected by the new terrains it has been forced to inhabit? And what does this reveal about another oft-invoked dichotomy, that of rupture versus continuity?

Scholars who carefully engage with Tareen’s book will quickly realize that beyond providing accessible insight into a rich and complicated theological debate that continues to wage on, the book contributes in important methodological ways to religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian Islam, and the newly burgeoning turn to decolonialize religious studies. In the final chapter of Tareen’s book, “Listening to the Internal ‘Other,’” he ends on the biographical note that throughout the book he has attempted to “listen eagerly and sympathetically to what one might call an internal ‘other.’” He emphasizes that the process of listening attentively is not for the express purpose of agreement, but to “learn from it sympathetically and with humility” (387). It seems that the heart of a decolonial turn in Religious Studies and Islamic Studies, as Tareen poetically notes, necessitates grounding in an intellectual humility that is not simply willing to listen attentively to the “internal other” but moves a step further to listen to the historically “external other” as well.

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Sohaira Siddiqui
Sohaira Siddiqui is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. She is the author of Law and Politics Under the 'Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (Brill, 2019). She has also published numerous articles in Islamic Law and Society, Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Middle East Law and Governance. Her work focuses on the relationship between law, theology and political thought in classical Islam; Islamic law during British colonization; Islamic law in contemporary Muslim societies; and secularism and modernity in relation to Muslims in the West. She has held fellowships at Cambridge University, Tubingen University, and Harvard Law School.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Formation of Religious Identities in Modern Islam: Recounting a Story from Nineteenth-Century South Asia


Shrine to Salim Chisti, a Sufi Mystic. Photo Credit: Flickr User Soham Banerjee.

The Historical Context of the Debate

Intra-Muslim polemical debates have remained a persistent feature of Islamic intellectual life since the inception of Islam. In early Islam, these debates pivoted mostly around theological questions concerning the concept of God, such as the interrelation of God’s knowledge with human agency, the anthropomorphic expressions found in the Qur’an for the person of God, and the boundaries that demarcate belief from unbelief.

A significant shift took place in nineteenth-century South Asia when the person of the Prophet became the center of theological debates. A new set of contentions came to center-stage, opening up new avenues of theological wrangling. These new modalities of contestation are exemplified by questions like: Does or does not the Prophet have access to knowledge of the unknown (‘ilm al-ghayb)? Was his physical essence similar to or different from ordinary humans? Is his physical presence subject to human spatio-temporal constraints? Does he have the capacity of being simultaneously present at several places? Is he or is he not privileged with divine powers of intervention in the fate of human beings? Is it possible for God to create another being possessing the same stature as that of the Prophet? These trajectories and questions of contention in Muslim theology curiously mirror early Christian theological debates about Jesus’s divinity, with the caveat that they intensified in Islam at a much later period.

To be sure, even in the premodern period, the temptation to assign divine aura to the person of the Prophet found expressions in the extravagant imagination of the laity. However, these popular temptations rarely found their way to the scholarly theological domain explicitly; they instead had to be channeled through esoteric ontologies conceived mainly by mystic thinkers. These ontologies imagined the world as populated by a hierarchy of sub-divine entities that culminated in the person of the Prophet. These entities were believed to possess specially bestowed divine powers. This belief inspired a popular culture in which visiting the shrines of famous Sufi saints and invoking their intervention in human affairs became a common practice among the masses. But these Sufi practices did not pass unquestioned, and were subjected to a long and intense counter tradition of criticism and reform, often executed by Sufi scholars themselves. For instance, prominent Muslim reformers from the early Mughal era voiced their censure of what they considered deviations in the beliefs and practices of the common people.

From the sixteenth century onwards, these reformist tendencies received additional impetus from newly opened Indo-Hijaz scholarly connections. As Aziz Ahmad points out, these connections redirected intra-cultural intellectual affinities from Iran to Hijaz, and were facilitated by the maritime colonial presence in the Arabian ocean (which became the main route that South Asian pilgrims would use to reach Makkah). Scholars like Sheikh Abdul Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī (d.1642), Sheikh Aḥmad Sirhindī (d.1624) and Shāh Walīyullāh (d.1762) vehemently criticized several creeds and practices, though never severing their attachment with the dominant Sufi tradition. Shāh Walīyullāh, for example, likened those who visited the shrines and prostrated before the graves asking for the favors of the saints with the polytheists of Arabia. He even ventured to assert that if one wanted to catch a glimpse of the (polytheistic) belief system that the Qur’an had so vigorously criticized, one should look no further than popular Sufism prevalent in Muslim India in his time. So clearly, the critique of widespread Sufi practices is not an invention of the colonial period but a feature found copiously in the religious imaginary of precolonial early modern Muslim scholars, in South Asia and indeed elsewhere.

But the loss of Muslim political power at the hands of British colonialism engendered a crisis of identity and set the stage for unprecedented normative battles, in terms of content and intensity. The ensuing chaos presented a prime opportunity for British colonizers to play a decisive role in reshaping the political and cultural landscape of South Asia. This process was accompanied by an intensification of already existing tensions and fissures within South Asian Islam. By the end of the eighteenth century, the printing press had created a new public space in which religious preaching could be directed to larger numbers of common people. Intricate theological debates could now be contested in the public sphere and a fertile ground was irrigated for the formulation of new political theologies that corresponded with new normative projects and imaginaries.

In this context, what transpired in the early nineteenth century in Northwestern India was but a next stage of an ongoing reform movement. Critical shifts in the political and social order enabled an enthusiastic reformer like Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d.1831) to launch and execute a public movement that challenged the doctrinal legitimacy of long running beliefs and practices in the public sphere while also laboring to purge from South Asian Islam the stain of accrued heresies and deviations. Shāh Isma‘il’s movement was the catalyst that unleashed the struggle for defining religious identities anew in South Asian Islam. The move he made was astute and, in terms of its effects, devastating for the popular Sufi narrative. He took as his point of departure the vigorous reassertion of divine sovereignty in a way that negated the Prophetic persona and authority as held in the religious imagination of the masses. As the Prophet stood at the apogee of the hierarchical order on which the entire ontology of Islamic mysticism hinged, divesting him of a unique cosmological status in the divine providential schema would cause the entire edifice of that ontology to crumble. With this purpose in mind, Ismāʿīl consciously chose to punctuate divine sovereignty and emphasize the Prophet’s completely subordinate status in the cosmological scheme in provocative, and at times even crass idioms that were bound to invite charges of blasphemy. In fact, some controversial phrases of his well-known tract, Taqwīyat al-Īmān (Strengthening of the Faith) (analyzed by Tareen in part 1 of his book) have been acknowledged even by prominent Deobandi scholars as inappropriate and ill-suited. For example, Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933) has been quoted by Sayyid Aḥmad Raz̤ā Bijnaurī as saying:

“I am not much pleased with Taqwīyat al-Īmān. Perhaps it was written in view of the needs of a specific moment. In fact, a committee of five persons . . . were given the task of reviewing the words and phrases of Taqwīyat al-Īmān and was even authorized to make changes. The committee became divided. . . . One group held that the wording chosen was inappropriate. The other was of the opinion that it [the doctrine of tawhīd] must be stated in a very explicit and unequivocal language and that without using pungent expressions, the intended message would not be communicated clearly. . . . I am not pleased with these phrases because they have engendered a lot of controversy. . . . I have also been informed that Mawlānā Qāsim Nānautvī held the same opinion, even though he had a profound affection for Shāh Ismāʿīl.” (Aḥmad Raz̤ā Bijnaurī, Malfuzat Muhaddith Kashmiri, 177–78)

In any case, Shāh Ismāʿīl’s over-charged enthusiasm for doctrinal reform, premised on deflating any supernatural associations with the Prophet, ironically and inadvertently provided the occasion for a hitherto latent Muḥammadology to find an articulate expression in the style of an explicit creed. The ineffable notion of Haqīqat-i Muhammadiyya or Muhammadan Reality that had so far been considered to be accessible only to those possessing higher cognitive and gnostic abilities was now made to undergo a far-reaching process of profanation. A normative expectation central to the Sufi tradition, that privileged mystical knowledge is not revealed to the simple-minded common people, was thus left in tatters with the ruthless attack of Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl and his likes.

Tareen’s Intervention

It is this story of transformation that SherAli Tareen’s recent book, Defending Muhammad in Modernity recounts and explores primarily for a Western audience. His objectives in writing this book are manifold. He wants to correct the misreading of the Barelvī-Deobandī divide in terms of law versus spirituality, or the mystical versus the legal traditions. As he rightly argues, both of these groups of towering modern South Asian Muslim scholars, the Barelvīs and the Deobandīs, steadfastly adhere to the Sufi spiritual tradition and propounding Sufi modes of piety constitutes an integral part of their reform programs. Tareen also brings to light important features of the reform agenda that the Barelvī ‘ulamā’ (traditionally educated Muslim scholars) sought to introduce in the popular Sufi culture while preserving the hierarchical ontology without which institutional Sufism would have no attraction for the laity. In this, the Deobandīs took a middle ground between them and the Wahhābīs or Salafīs who rejected Sufism as totally alien to Islam.

Courtyard of Jamia Naeemia, a Barelvī madrasa in Lahore, Pakistan. Photo by Josh Lupo.

Another primary objective of Tareen’s endeavor is to expose the inadequacy of analytical categories derived from dominant secular liberal frameworks in the study of intra-Muslim debates and divisions. Because of its self-imposed blinkers, Tareen argues, liberal secular approaches to religion and Islam fail to see what lies at the heart of such intra-Muslim debates. In the present case, for example, what is often regarded as the manifestation of a perennial legal/Sufi tension in Islam is, in fact, a face-off between two opposing political theologies that adhere to, and take inspiration from, the same canonical sources and traditions of Islamic law and Sufi spirituality. Tareen’s critique of and disappointment with dominant secular liberal paradigms in the study of religion, especially Islam, is a recurrent theme throughout the book. This critique finds its sharpest expression in Tareen’s skewering of historian of South Asian Islam, Ayesha Jalal, who in her book on Jihad in South Asia Partisans of Allah conceptualized Sayyid Ahmad (d.1831) and Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s jihad against the Sikh regime in Punjab and tribal chiefs of the Muslim Northwestern Frontier Province as an instance of privileging “religion as demarcator of difference” over “religion as faith.” Jalal valorizes the latter as it belongs to what she terms the realm of private inner experience, but finds the former distasteful as in her view it is preoccupied with the external world of public ritual performance and the exercise of violence for the establishment and maintenance of political power. Tareen quarrels with this binary division between the purity of privatized spiritual religion and the impurity of publicly performed material religion stained by violence and politics as the product of what he calls a “liberal secular theology.” This is just one example of several instances throughout the book where contemporary scholars of South Asia and Islam are keenly taken to task for their explicit or implicit attachments to secular conceptual and political frameworks.

But one common secular liberal assumption that Tareen challenges in the “Postscript” that particularly caught my attention was this: that religious polemics by nature are seen as perpetually susceptible to descent into violence and thus as a perennial threat to the peace and order of society. For Tareen, the fact that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was fought out with much intensity and eagerness in the nineteenth century without turning into a physically violent conflict mitigates against this secular assumption. In this context, he finds the decision by the Government of the Punjab in Pakistan a few years ago to ban the polemicist literature comprising dozens of texts written by Deobandī, Barelvī, Shīʿa, and Salafī scholars a shallow act that represents the modern state’s propensity to control and manage the boundaries of religion and religious discourse in society for its own designs and power.

While Tareen’s main contention carries weight, a question that still warrants further probing is this: How are we to then understand the relationship between the often violent contestations over South Asian Muslim identity today that pit against each other actors and groups of varied stripes and the colonial context of these contestations that Tareen examines in his book? A mere glance at the religious and ideological landscape of contemporary South Asia reveals the preponderance of a political consciousness grounded in perceiving a particular “other” as an existential threat whose elimination or marginalization would guarantee the survival and prosperity of one’s own identity. Political theologies based on the identification of certain groups or narratives as the enemy was arguably pioneered in the South Asian context by the sixteenth-century scholar, Sheikh Aḥmad al-Fārūqī al-Sirhindī who, against the backdrop of rising Shīʿa political power, declared that Shīʿītes ought to be considered as outside the fold of Islam. In the British era, the same sledgehammer of identity formation was laid down by Barelvī scholars against adherents of all competing Muslim groups, particularly the Deobandīs. The emergence of naturalists, Aḥmadīs, and Munkirīn-i ḥadīth (those who deny or severely restrict the legislative authority of the Prophet) provided additional targets for all the extant religious groups to protect and assert their identity through the “othering” of internal and external “others.”

To play the devil’s advocate, what if one wagered that these clashes of identity did not turn physically violent in the nineteenth century, as Tareen claims in the Postscript to his book, because of the general stability and order made possible by the presence of the colonial state and its power? For otherwise, what explains the descent into rabid intra-Muslim violence in the postcolonial period, especially in settings like Pakistan. Are the violent denunciations of minority groups and subsequent attacks on the Shīʿas, Aḥmadīs, and Christians the product of unhinged power games aimed at the acquisition of political power in a contested normative battlefield? South Asian Islam, one might argue, still has to come to terms with the new political and cultural realities of the postcolonial context and to find a way in which different religious identities can coexist without undermining the underlying fabric of society, for that is what provides the state the opportunity to monopolize religious discourse in the public sphere.

Defending Muḥammad in Modernity provides a long awaited and much needed call to action for scholars and historians of South Asian Islam in particular and modern Islam more broadly to turn their gaze to such critical inquiries. To what extent will Tareen’s scholarship succeed in reorienting the discourse on South Asian ‘ulamā’ in the Western academy I am not in a position to tell or prognosticate. What I can say with confidence though is that his work can play a crucial role in providing indigenous South Asian scholarship in India and Pakistan a new theoretical lens through which to approach and understand its own history and tradition in a more sophisticated and nuanced manner.

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to thank SherAli Tareen, Ebrahim Moosa, and Josh Lupo for their feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this piece.

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Ammar Khan Nasir
Muhammad Ammar Khan currently teaches Arabic and Islamic Studies at GIFT University in Gujranwala, Pakistan and edits a monthly Islamic magazine, Al-Sharīʿah. Prior to teaching at GIFT University, he taught various subjects of the Dars-e Nizami course at Madrasa Nusrat al-Uloom from 1996 to 2006. His body of written work is largely in Urdu. His first work, Imām Abū Ḥanīfa wa-ʿamal biʾl-ḥadīth (Imam Abu Hanifa and Adherence of Hadith) appeared in print in 1996. In 2007, he academically reviewed the recommendations of the Council of Islamic Ideology, Government of Pakistan, regarding Islamic Punishments. His research on the issue was later compiled and published by Al-Mawrid, a Foundation for Islamic Research and Education in Lahore, titled Ḥudūd-o Taʿzīrāt: chand aham mabāḥith (Discussions on Islamic Penal Code). His other works include Masjid Aqṣā kī tārīkh awr haqq-i tawalliyāt (History of the Sacred Mosque in Jerusalem and the Question of its Guardianship) and Jihād – Aik Muṭālaʿa (A Critical Study of Theological Understandings of Jihad). The work on Masjid Aqsa is especially related to the subject of religion and conflict transformation as it tries to hammer out a workable solution to the thorniest religious conflicts of the present-day world. His research articles on a variety of religious issues appear regularly in the Monthly Ishrāq, Lahore, and Monthly Al-Sharīʿah, Gujranwala. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Decolonizing the Study of South Asian Islam: Reflections on Defending Muḥammad in Modernity


Dare Jadid Darul Uloom Deoband. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Translated by SherAli Tareen

See the original Urdu text here.

The Context of the Argument

The modern colonial era, marked by political and moral uncertainty, generated several new conundrums for South Asian Muslims, all centered on the following two critical questions: Who are we? What is our identity? These were questions of religious and cultural identity that became especially pressing with the fall of the Mughal empire and the ascendance of British colonialism. These new conditions reignited the debate over Muslim/non-Muslim relations and the boundaries of religious identity and difference, a debate that had remained on the back burner since the reign of the Mughal emperor Jalāl al-Dīn Akbar (d.1605). In addition, intra-Muslim contestations, which had simmered even in the precolonial period, congealed and metastasized in the colonial era. Some of these intra-Muslim contestations pivoted on the question of how one ought to align the normative imaginary and application of Muslim politics with the new conditions and requirements of the modern period. This is the intellectual and political context of the Deobandī-Barelvī polemic that is explored in SherAli Tareen’s book Defending Muḥammad in Modernity through the conceptual lens of the interaction between sovereignty, theology, morality, and ritual practice. More specifically, this book examines the encounters and relations between these rival groups of Muslim scholars and the ensuing formations of religious and moral identities among South Asian Muslims.

Throughout Muslim history, debates and contestations on religious identity have erupted in especially acute terms during moments of political decline and turmoil. A similar situation was seen in colonial South Asia. As prominent historian Francis Robinson has argued, there were two major factors that compelled South Asian Muslim scholars to debate the boundaries of their religious identity: (1) the activities and agility of Christian missionaries, and (2) the rise of Hindu revivalist movements. These developments, coupled with the antagonism of the British towards South Asian Muslims, gave rise to rival Muslim reform movements in the 19th century, the pioneers of the two most prominent of which, the Deobandīs and the Barelvīs, form the focus of Tareen’s study.

The centerpiece of this book, on which all its other discussions converge, focuses on the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and ritual practice as seen in the thought of prominent Muslim reformist scholars in 19th century South Asia. Their efforts to carve and refashion the religious identities of South Asian Muslims represented articulations of what Tareen calls “competing political theologies.” In other words, discourses on prophetic authority, morality, social order, normative laws, and ritual practice ultimately coalesced around the theme of political theology (See Part 1 of the book). According to Tareen, these seemingly theological discussions and debates were in fact interwoven with political currents and aspirations. Throughout the book, he interrogates the mutual imbrication and entanglement of theology and politics.

Painting representing Jalāl al-Dīn Akbar around 1557 CE. Source: Vincent A. Smith: Akbar the Great Mogul, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917). Via Wikiemdia Commons.

On this count, it is useful to note that for much of South Asian Muslim history, politics has dominated religion. What I mean by this is that theological interpretation often followed from political conditions. For instance, the stipulation of Quraysh lineage [prophetic lineage] as a precondition for the mantle of the caliphate, or for that matter the concept of united nationalism. These are two among many other examples whereby political conditions and exigencies informed the formulation of religious and theological ideas in the South Asian context. Despite pressure of the ‘ulamā’, successive Muslim political rulers in South Asia such as ‘Alāuddīn Khiljī (d. 1316) and Jalāl al-Dīn Akbar (d. 1605) resisted the dominance of religious concerns over political calculations and expediency. Aurangzeb ‘Ālamgīr (d. 1707) did depart from this tendency, which was one of the reasons for the decline of the Mughal empire. Yet, despite the inherently dominating nature of politics, religion and politics operated largely in cooperative harmony for most of Muslim history, with no obvious dichotomy or contradiction. The only exception to such concordance was seen either in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century [that saw the fall of Baghdad] or during the Western colonial invasions of the 17thand 18th centuries. Both these moments of political uncertainty generated for Muslim intellectual thought new vexing questions of faith, law, morality, tradition, and culture. Similarly, in the early 19th century context of colonial Muslim South Asia, the major question that came to occupy the center stage was this: With the erasure of Muslim political sovereignty, how is one to preserve and practically manifest [through ritual practice] divine sovereignty? Further, how should one approach the relationship between God, the Prophet, and the community during these new conditions of colonial modernity? And how can one protect Muslim culture and its markers of distinction in the era of colonialism?

Tareen’s book examines the epistemological and theological debates engendered by these questions, while offering new perspectives on, and theorizations of, those debates, establishing in turn their relevance and significance for the contemporary period. Tareen’s project is important because it offers a critical corrective to the general perception in South Asia that views the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic as an arcane fruitless intra-Muslim squabble belonging to a period of Muslim political and moral decline. Tareen is absolutely correct in claiming that this debate was not a superficial ideological dispute but rather the reflection of two competing rationalities [of tradition and reform] that have henceforth not received adequate attention in scholarship. He argues that the political transformation of colonial modernity in the 19th century inaugurated unprecedented transformations in Muslim intellectual thought that in turn have deeply imprinted the texture of Muslim religious identities in South Asia until today. The two key terms coined by Tareen in this regard, “competing political theologies” and “competing rationalities of tradition and reform,” are of crucial significance. These categories provide the conceptual bedrock for grasping the significance of the intra-Muslim debates that anchor the book. I find the framing Tareen suggests and advances at once novel and creative in the study of modern South Asian Islam. They pave the way for the formulation of new intellectual horizons and directions.

Tareen’s Contribution to the Field

The first two sections of the book traverse the early and late 19th centuries. In the first section titled “Competing Political Theologies,” Tareen engages a fierce polemic between the prominent scholars Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831) and Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d.1861) that again highlights the enmeshment of theology and politics in debates on the status of divine sovereignty in modernity. These debates concerned problems like prophetic intercession, prophetic love, and God’s capacity to lie or produce another Muḥammad. On the other hand, the second section, “Competing Normativities,” addresses contestations on matters of ritual practice and theology, such as the Prophet’s birthday celebration and his knowledge of the unknown, as they took on a group-centered orientation in the late 19th century, and pitted the pioneers of the Deoband and Barelvī schools against one another. Collectively, these two sections enable the reader to appreciate the ideological foundations that not only divided these two groups of scholars, but also the normative underpinnings that brought them together. The third section “Intra-Deobandī Tensions” focuses on Ḥājī Imdādullah Muhājir Makkī’s (d. 1899) epistle Resolution to the Seven Controversies (Faysala-yi Haft Mas’ala) (335–75). Tareen shows that the contents of this epistle, through which Imdādullah sought to resolve the polemic between the Deobandī and non-Deobandī ‘ulamā’, who were followed by Aḥmad Razā Khān and his followers and were recognized later as Barelvī (until this time, the ‘ulamā’ who were opposed to the pioneers of the Deobandī school were not recognized as Barelvī) generated subtle but important divisions among the pioneers of Deoband themselves (to whom Imdādullah was their revered Sufi master). In a sense, Imdādullah demonstrated that the [epistemic] borders of the Deoband school touched the Barelvī school and vice versa, thus undermining the assumption of inherently oppositional identities. Both these movements, despite all their bitter disagreements, were steadfast followers of the same unquestionable legal tradition. And both believed in a common discursive foundation for how the relationship between individual experience and spirituality must unfold. Tareen’s book explicates this point very convincingly by critiquing the common tendency to approach the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic through the prism of the law-Sufism binary that is in turn a product of the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary, especially as seen in the popular works of think tanks and political institutions in the West.

Tareen questions this popular tendency by demonstrating that both these outfits were in fact standard bearers of religious reform. Where they differed was on what reform meant to them: for the Deobandīs, widespread ritual practices that were a product of the indigenous Indic milieu did not belong to the normative Islamic tradition, where, on the other hand, the Barelvīs approached Islamic normativity through a much broader canvass that allowed the continuity of such ritual practices concurrent with the work of religious reform. Moreover, while the Deobandīs advocated transformative reform eager to block any form of corruption from entering and thus polluting everyday life, the Barelvīs preferred selective reform over wholesale transformation. They specifically focused on the corruptions that had accrued on entrenched ritual practices rather than outlawing those practices altogether. Also, in the Barelvī worldview, the temporal reference of normativity was not restricted to any specific time period in history; each successive generation contributed to the formation and maintenance of communal norms in accordance with local habits and practices. But despite these subtle disagreements, the central objectives and societal role of these two schools mirror in a manner that frustrates any binary framings of their relationship or conflict.

Madani chattar, dedicated to Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madanī. Monument designed by Ar. Jishnu Kumar Das. Sylhet, Bangladesh. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Therefore, and this is a fascinating point, the third major Muslim reformist group in modern South Asia, the non-conformist Ahl-i Hadīth, considers the Barelvīs and Deobandīs as essentially the same. On the other hand, the Barelvīs consider the Deobandīs and Ahl-i Hadīth as extremist Wahhabis. Thus, Deoband serves as a bridge and conduit between the other two groups. On Deoband, Tareen makes an arresting point: namely that the Deoband movement at its core is marked by an amalgamation of diverse and often competing viewpoints, a feature that its opponents often cast as a sign of contradiction. In fact, it is this very quality of the Deoband school that has allowed it to adapt and respond to varied and shifting political conditions, even embracing at times the ideas of united nationalism and secularism. This Deobandī characteristic of intellectual flexibility and expansiveness is derived from and heir to the thought and legacy of the 18th century polymath Shāh Walīyullāh (d. 1762). Here I disagree with Tareen, who presents Deoband pioneers as the intellectual successors of Walīyullāh’s grandson Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, ignoring in the process major Deoband scholars like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933) and Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madanī (d. 1957) who were in fact quite critical of Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl. More accurately, the advancement of  Ismāʿīl’s reform agenda hinged on reenergizing divine sovereignty constituted only one aspect of a much broader and multivalent Deobandī discursive terrain also populated by scholars with very different points of doctrinal emphasis, like prophetic love, etc.

Critiquing “Political Theology”

In sum, Defending Muhammad in Modernity has opened several new avenues of inquiry and presented fresh perspectives on the rationality of Muslim political theologies in South Asia. This is perhaps the first book to have shown and established the theoretical and political relevance and importance to the contemporary world of Muslim intellectual debates and discourses that are too often understood as inscrutable relics of a bygone past. But for all its merits, there are some shortcomings of this book that must also be highlighted. First, Tareen seems to present the intra-‘ulamā’ dispute over the theological questions of God’s capacity to lie or that God can produce a second instantiation of the Prophet Muḥammad as products of the modern South Asian context whereas these debates boast a much longer premodern genealogy, as seen for instance in the debates between the Ash‘arites and the Mu‘tazilis that do not receive much attention in this book. Moreover, the pivotal contribution of Deoband’s founder Qāsim Nānautvī (d.1877) to this twin debate, as found in his text Taḥzīr al-Nās, has also been ignored. Second, one of the leading assumptions of this book is that the Barelvī-Deobandī disagreement over the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and every day ritual practices was a product of and a reaction to the new conditions of colonialism. Tareen’s theoretical apparatus impinges on excavating the latent political imaginaries and logics that inform seemingly theological debates, what he calls political theology. But in so doing, he perhaps does not adequately engage the entanglement of religion and politics within Muslim thought and normativity. For instance, in classical Muslim thought, leading prayers (imāmat-i sughra) is considered a prelude to political leadership (imāmat-i kubra). Religion and politics are intimately conjoined. Now, I am critical of this view. Moreover, in the modern period, this classical worldview has also been forcefully challenged by Muslim scholars, one of whom is the Egyptian reformer ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq (d. 1966). But despite the transformations inaugurated by colonialism, the theoretical and ideological attraction of this conjoined view of religion and politics remained intact. The point I am getting at is this: why must we employ Western frameworks and categories of analysis like political theology to examine indigenous theological discourses and debates? For instance, yes, from the standpoint of the theory of political theology, Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s critique of ritual practices as a way to restore divine sovereignty could be read as a response to the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in modern South Asia. Or Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī considering the possibility of another Prophet Muḥammad unfathomable could be interpreted as a defense of the Prophet’s political authority. But this theoretical framework will not find much acceptance among the traditionalist Muslim intellectual circles of South Asia for it will be seen as imposing political meanings and aspirations onto explicitly theological debates. In other words, the conclusions that Tareen draws from his reading of these intra-Muslim debates are a product of the theoretical framework that he deploys to study them. But what if these debates were considered on their own terms apart from analytical frameworks wedded to Western academia? Perhaps such an exercise might generate competing and contrasting conclusions.

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Waris Mazhari
Dr. Waris Mazhari PhD (Jamia Millia Islamia, 2013) is presently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Hamdard in New Delhi. For the past twenty years, he has been with the Darul Uloom Deoband Old Boys Organization as an editor of its Urdu monthly journal Tarjuman-e-Darul Uloom. Dr. Mazhari served as Research Associate for Virtual Dialogues, an initiative at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, from August 2011 to July 2013. The monthly magazine Communalism Combat dedicated a special issue to his writings on peace, non-violence, and interfaith dialogue, under the theme Rediscovering the Tolerant Tradition in Islam in May 2010. Dr. Mazhari is a prolific writer with countless articles and multiple books under his name. Among these is Hindustani Madaris ka Talimi Nezam Aur Us me Islah ki Zarurat: Ek Jaeza (The Educational System in Indian Madrasas and the Need for Reforms: An Analytical Study), a work that discusses the need for reform in the madrasa curriculum, published in Urdu in 2014. His chief interests are in the areas of interfaith dialogue, peace and social harmony, the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam, and reform in Indian madrasas. Many of his articles have been translated into other languages.
Global Currents article

Whose People? The Oppression of Uyghurs and the Idea of the Muslim World


A Uyghur Rights Protest in San Francisco in April 2008. Photo by Jack Fitzsimmons.

On August 31st, 2020 a chartered flight flew from Israel to the United Arab Emirates for the first time, carrying a team of Israeli and American diplomats, including President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. In response to this move towards the normalization of relations with Israel, Iran’s top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the Emiratis had committed “treachery against the Muslim world.” In a series of tweets, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decried Khameini’s reading of the event and added, “And if you’re looking for those betraying Islam @Khamenei_ir, China is seeking to destroy the Uyghurs. Looking forward to your public callout for the CCP’s horrific treatment of those Muslims.”

This rhetorical move, familiar from the Cold War-era, is generally referred to as “Whataboutism.” When called to account for a condemned policy, a state’s spokesperson brings up abuses associated with the accusing state and its allies. Whataboutism is not new or surprising, but what I find of interest here is which states are considered accountable for another state’s crimes. Muslim-majority states have been expected to condemn the oppression of Uyghurs, with the largest attention paid to those believed to have the greatest political power. These public callouts demonstrate how normative ideas about “the Muslim World” and monolithic ideas about Islam in politics continue to prevail at multiple discursive levels despite vast evidence of the heterogeneity of the politics of Muslim-majority countries.

Since the events in Xinjiang became common knowledge, various state spokespersons and international representatives have been asked to comment, to condemn, and to act. First, of course, were the largest and most powerful entities in the world, the United States and the European Union. James Millward has written an excellent column about the U.S. response in The Guardian, discussing how loud “anti-Chinese posturing” has precluded a multifaceted, targeted, diplomatic search for solutions. Similarly, Human Rights Watch has described the public EU responses as continuing to just “tick the box marked ‘raised concerns’.”

At the same time, the revelations about the oppression of Uyghurs immediately spawned articles in the Western press, looking for, decrying, and explaining (or “Westplaining”?) responses from “the Muslim world.” Contrasting the muted commentary on the events in Xinjiang from specific Muslim-majority countries and from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to the same entities’ strident statements about the plight of Palestinians and the Rohingya Muslims, such articles gave legitimate political and economic reasons for each country’s response, while simultaneously doubling down on mistaken assumptions about Islam as a unifying, political force.

Muslim-majority countries, often simply referred to as “Muslim countries,” have been expected to respond to the oppression of Muslims across state boundaries in a way that is not expected from Christian-majority countries. (The latter are also rarely referred to as “Christian countries.”) The large Muslim-majority states of the world, especially Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey, were called to task loudly in the international arena for not responding to the events forcefully enough. Out of these three, Turkey was the only one to eventually speak out. These different responses tell us a great deal about the imbrications of human rights, politics, and the constructed nature of state identities. They also help us gauge the state of democracy in each country and aid us in deconstructing the idea of a unified Muslim world.

In his book The Idea of the Muslim World, Cemil Aydın argues that while “the Muslim world”—a political entity unified by religious identity—does not exist in any real sense, the political mobilization of the idea has proven powerful in specific instances.

Historically, various countries have been identified as the putative center of the so-called Muslim world. For example, President Obama gave his famous address to “the Muslim world” in Cairo, Egypt, home to the historical Al-Azhar University. Recently, however, multiple articles (here, here, and here) have pointed to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as being locked in a struggle for the symbolic and cultural leadership of this imagined community.

Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan pictured with President Xi Jinping of China at a Belt and Road international forum. Photo from the Russian Presidential Press and Information Office. Via Wikimedia Commons

While backing China’s Xinjiang policy, Saudi U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi has also claimed, “Nobody can be more concerned about the status of Muslims anywhere in the world than Saudi Arabia.” Iranian representatives have been similarly quiet on the subject, despite the country’s own claims to moral leadership over Muslims everywhere. Because of business and trade ties, along with the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement, the Iranian economy has become even more dependent on China and Russia. It is also safe to say that the Iranian regime broadly shares China’s stance regarding “rights talk.” Like China, it sees international human rights pressure as unwelcome meddling in its internal affairs and as a violation of its national sovereignty. These factors largely explain Iran’s muted response. The Turkish case, on the other hand, has perhaps been the most interesting. Turkey, too, is dependent on Chinese funds and Chinese disavowal in rights-based interventionist rhetoric. In 2018, when the Turkish economy was suffering from U.S.-imposed sanctions, China gave the country a $3.6 billion loan. Similarly, China has been quiet on civil rights abuses associated with Turkey’s crackdown on dissidents after the failed coup attempt of 2016.

Turkey, however, also has very close cultural and linguistic ties with the Uyghurs. Ankara’s official stance is that the Uyghur people are the Turks’ close kin. Every primary school child learns to recognize the Uyghurs as relatives who contributed greatly to Turkish/Turkic history and culture. Our languages are mutually intelligible and the modern Turkish word for “civilized” (uygar) is said to come from “uyghur,” as the Uyghurs were the first Turkic political entity to switch to non-nomadic life. In addition, the world’s largest community of Uyghur exiles (about 12 million strong) resides in Istanbul and is quite active in their efforts to support the Uyghur cause in China. Thus, it was no surprise that the events in Xinjiang drew the attention of both devout and non-devout Turks early on.

However, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose words—we are told—carry some weight with Muslims across the world, had not spoken about the oppression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China until early 2019 when local politics forced his hand.

The reports of the death of renowned Uyghur poet Abdurehim Heyit in detention appear to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Although Heyit was later proven to be alive, on February 9, 2020 the Turkish government issued a stern statement denouncing China for “violating the fundamental human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” This made Turkey a significant exception among Muslim-majority countries and showed the role religious and ethnic ties can play in complicating realpolitik.

However, even in this case, politics played a much larger role than popularly acknowledged—specifically local politics. Given the sympathies of the population, rival parties had begun exploiting the Erdogan government’s silence, organizing massive protests, and attempting to launch parliamentary investigations into China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. However authoritarian, Erdogan and his party AKP are dependent on votes and could only prioritize foreign policy and trade ties over electoral politics for so long.

It behooves us to examine which states are being called to condemn the actions of which states, why they are being called to do so, and by whom they are being called. Instead of assuming a normative Muslim unity embodied in the idea of “the Muslim world,” it is helpful to see the mobilizations and the limits of this concept. In fact, despite its strongly worded public statement, there have been many reports of the Turkish government collaborating with China in arresting, detaining, and deporting Uyghur activists. In specific danger, it seems, are activists who advocate for the independence of what they are calling “East Turkestan” and any exile with even the most tenuous connection to Syria.

Muslim disunity is the true reality of our world. What is unusual is when acts of condemnation occur in spite of the political and economic pressures that push in the opposite direction. Even in the case of Turkey, a country that has built its identity on Uyghur history and culture, politics drove recognition even more than vice versa.

In response to the deportation of a family member, one Uyghur exile said, “It’s so difficult for me to accept that Turkey did this . . . Turkey, the land that is like our home, where the people are like our own.” Ultimately, however, the failure to condemn international human rights abuse despite cultural, linguistic, and religious ties with its victims is not unusual. As Aydın’s book and the Syrian conflict confirm, Muslim disunity is the true reality of our world. What is unusual is when acts of condemnation occur in spite of the political and economic pressures that push in the opposite direction. Even in the case of Turkey, a country that has built its identity on Uyghur history and culture, politics drove recognition even more than vice versa.

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Perin Gürel
Perin E. Gürel is associate professor of American Studies and concurrent assistant professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017), explores how Turkish debates over “westernization” have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second book project on the impact of U.S. political discourses on Turkey-Iran relations from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Gürel is also faculty fellow for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. 
Theorizing Modernities article

“Holding on to God’s Rope”: Knotting the Adventure of Trace in Tradition


A Jalalabad man makes a “charpoy,” used commonly as a bed or chair. Photo Credit: Canada in Afghanistan, 2010.

Why are Sufis imagined as apolitical? Why are the theological and the political realms purportedly opposed? Why does Islamic reform provoke deep anxieties of force and violence? Why are madrassas thought to be hotbeds of religious insurgency? SherAli Tareen’s new book Defending Muḥammad in Modernity reveals these questions for what they are: a function of secular translation in which a modern notion of “the political” is wielded against Islam to secure the global secular politics of religion. Islam is, after all, an entity, as Gil Anidjar has argued, which has historically been phobically imagined by the West as the enemy. Indeed, Islam becomes the very ground through which Europe-as-Christian launches itself into Europe-as-political. Here Islam features as a figure of a certain kind of “beyond” of politics in which the political itself is “put under question from a certain outside” (49). Islam emerges, not simply as a theological enemy or even a political enemy, but as an enemy to the very notion of the political itself in the modern world. An exemplary enemy of the capacity to be political as such.

Against the tyranny of such a modern notion of the political, Tareen’s book is a comprehensive interrogation of how various competing imaginaries, in their attempts to cohere the boundaries of Islam, reveal Muslim ethico-moral-political commitments. These 19th century debates between South Asian Barelvī and Deobandī ‘ulamā’ show that questions related to God’s sovereignty, the Prophet’s authority, heretic innovation, food and contamination, prayer gatherings, death-associated rituals, and so on, reveal how ceaseless contestation that aspires to make a tradition cohere “enables a shared form of life” (13). Tareen disrupts discourses that identify Barelvīs with a Sufi tendency in Islam and Deobandīs with a legalistic reform-driven tendency, and instead shows that Sufis were no less interested in reform or the juridical totality of sharīʿa, and that Deobandī scholars were also major Sufi masters. Tareen, thus, labors against the insistence upon translating this “form of life” into religious versus political or mystical versus orthodox. Following Talal Asad, the insistence on these binaries risks instrumentalizing the “ambivalences and gridlocks that exist in our collective” (11)—a reduction in which “the native’s point of view” becomes “merely information to be translated for a purpose entirely foreign to it.” (9)

Against this neat excision of indeterminacy and opaqueness from a form of life, the contestations between these ‘ulamā’ reveal deep investments in the question of what constitutes the ethico-moral-political life of a community. By this Tareen does not simplistically mean that “religion” is “political,” a claim which returns the secular political to us in a redoubled way, using a logic of substitution rather than bringing into question the founding possibility that launches one into the binary. Derrida labels this “the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself” (282). Rather, grappling with the history of Western political theology, I wish to foreground a question resonant in Tareen’s book: Is Islamic political theology simply Islamic “political theology”?

The Logic of Encounter

To get past the sleight of hand (religion is political), which reinstalls the modern academic as arbitrator and sovereign decider, Tareen suggests another ethics, one of listening to a multivocal tradition: a reading that practices humility and attention in reckoning with an internal otherness. He sets up the book’s challenge as one of an openness to the unknown, echoing a sentiment that Stefania Pandolfo elsewhere has called a “vision of blindness” in which “the mastery of the plot must be surrendered, and exchanged for trust in the guidance of the Other” (15). Indeed tradition, as Tareen notes via Talal Asad, is about a story of encounter not communication. The logic of encounter insists that one give up the fantasy of transparent meaning, and submit to a radical alterity which admits that one has always already been inhabited by the discourse of the Other. Such an ethical orientation to history writing, as Omnia El Shakry has suggested, might even allow a secular discipline to begin “encountering [its] own disappearance” in the process (174).

If not within the binaries of religion/politics, mystic/reformist, belief/knowledge, how then is one to speak intelligibly of the meaningful category of Islam? If the historian should not be a sovereign decider of Islam, taking a god’s eye view between various polemics to decide where orthodoxy lies, it would also be misleading to claim that any exploratory practice a Muslim engages in with the goal of it being Islamic is an Islamic practice. How then to speak of Islam—especially in a time structured by a deathly paranoia against Islam, or as Freud has termed, our “times of war and death”? Why turn to the past?

The Gift in Inheritance and Tradition

Tareen takes his cue from Asad’s genealogical method to interrogate the Islamic discursive tradition, though he does it “through a route different than that of offering another genealogical critique of the secular. Instead [the book] has tried to shift inquiry from secular colonial regimes of ‘religion making’ to critical conjunctures of authoritative native discourses and debates on the boundaries of religion” (380). Exploring these Barelvī-Deobandī debates about the boundaries and limits of Islam allows Tareen to remind us of David Scott’s famous lesson: “Tradition is not merely an inheritance” available for simple recovery (115; Tareen, 382). Indeed, one might add that inheritance is never simple to begin with as Freud has demonstrated for us through an analysis of the inheritance of the unconscious (35). More than an Oedipal drama that would allow a tracing back to origins, an inheritance is collective, a layer upon unconscious layer of the lacuna of the unknown, around which human attempts at meaning circumambulate. All inheritance, then, is of the order of the gift and remains mysterious as to its origins. And a true gift, à la Derrida, is precisely what cannot be recognized as gift (29). A gift, already something forgetful or unconcerned of its origins, outside the logic of economy and exchange, is without expectation or possibility of return. Perhaps it is possible to conceptualize the inheritance of tradition in this mode of a gift. It is a task, and one that requires a different kind of work than mere recovery. To retrain the eye on the unpast of the importance of the polemics that Tareen highlights is vital, especially in a moment of reductionist discourse about good/bad Islam. In fact, the task of the critical historian then is not the recovery of an authentic indigenous debate but to deal with the unpastness of the past, the unsettled question of tradition, and as Walter Benjamin poignantly framed it, “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255).

“Ramadan Mubarak!” Prayer beads. Photo Credit: Steve Evans, 2010.

Staying with this “adventure of the trace” (292), giving up a search for a decidable finite origin, Tareen’s book instead demonstrates how moral reasoning for both Barelvīs and Deobandīs revolved around the lacuna of the unknowable—the knowledge of al Ghayb, mutually agreed upon to be possessed only by the Divine. The debates, however, centered on identifying the capacity of others, especially God’s beloved, the Prophet, to be gifted knowledge of al Ghayb. These questions had less to do with an uncomplicated inheritance than with the reliability of possible custodians and guides of such an inheritance. The questions that were fiercely argued over were the capacity for gift receiving, the status of the receiver in question, the matter of whether status is linked to receiving or not, the capacity also for gift giving (whether rewards for prayers could be gifted to the dead), and so on. At the heart of these debates were competing imaginaries of what knowledge is and of the hierarchy of such a knowledge—a question that necessitates a distinction between the conceptual use of hierarchies as opposed to binaries.[1] This recognition of hierarchical power in Islam provides an important counter to the simplistic celebration of the purported (though never-possible) egalitarian subject of modern power. Submitted thus to the absolute alterity of the Divine, in this conception of heteronomous ethics, the subject secures agency through submission to the Unknown.[2]

The Gap in Power and Politics

How might this notion of Divine sovereignty be understood alongside the sovereignty of the colonial state as well as the declining sovereignty of 19th century Muslims in the subcontinent? Is the understanding of power within Islam similar or different than what the colonial encounter brought? Tareen argues that Islam’s encounter with colonial secularism is to be understood not through a logic of capture but rather one of haunting: “While haunted by colonial power, the grammar of that hauntology was distinctive and particular” (161). He is careful to note that he is not interested here in a project of recovery of indigenous thought or native agency. But attention to the particularity of the grammar of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic allows an understanding of sovereignty as these ‘ulamā’ imagined it through the sharīʿa, one that was not overdetermined by the colonial context and tied neither to the idea of a nation-state nor to the idea of a caliphal state. By this Tareen does not mean that Barelvīs or Deobandīs were not interested in “the political” as it manifests in state form. Rather, salient is the fact that the state was just one manifestation of power and politics for these ‘ulamā’. I take the example here of one reformer, Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, who distinguished between what he called siyāsat-i īmānī (politics of salvation) and siyāsat-i sulṭānī (imperial politics). While salvational politics was concerned with moral cultivation central to community life, the “driving force of imperial politics was the commanding ego-self (nafs-i ammāra)” (107). The more a leader gave in to the ego-self, the more corrupt and distant from salvational politics the political order became. In both conceptions of politics, power was imagined as a continuous struggle between the desiring self and the Divine Other, a continuous internal battle of the nafs (variously translated as soul/ego/psyche) which was to be cultivated toward more ethical frontiers through a moral community life. Further, considerations of both these forms of the political were not unconnected to Muslims’ declining power in the colonial encounter, which haunted the debates about the ethical risk inherent to a desiring subjectivity as well as competing understandings of temporality, corruption, and decline of tradition. Tareen’s analysis shows a reckoning of the political which contended with the temporality of the world, but remained aspirationally open to the temporality of the Elsewhere.

Such a notion of politics reckons with the full extent of ambiguity as a productive force within the sharīʿa, giving rise to multiple heated debates around claims on the normative. Which is not to say Tareen is suggesting we adopt “openness,” “fluidity,” or “complexity” in relation to Islam—all categories vested with liberal aspirations of making Islam compatible to modern secular values of the good. Rather, we can understand that the sharīʿa, for these ‘ulamā’, was framed around a core of an Absolutely Other unknowable Divine, around which disputation and contestation make claims on the normative. As Rajbir Singh Judge too has argued, the goal in sharīʿa is not to close the constitutive “gap” between past authority and present application, “but to wallow in its opening” (180). In the absence of a centralizing authority (such as the Roman Catholic Church) in Islam, no final word could be produced on a locatable orthodoxy. Instead, Islam emerges as a tradition that coheres itself via authoritative discourses that compete to interpret what the normative model of sharīʿa is, organized around an unknowable kernel of al Ghayb, the Unknown, of which only the Divine maintains full knowledge. The subject of this heteronomous law is imagined as engaged in a repetitive struggle, “holding on to God’s rope” (Tareen, 188). And yet, we should not forget that the final word could be produced, and was repeatedly, by the arbitration of British colonial law, which alternatively banned, allowed, or “protected” Deobandī ‘ulamā’ at times, and Barelvī at others. “Defending Muḥammad” as a practice embedded in the Islamic discursive tradition takes on a different force when the defense must be produced in modernity when decision is possible. Tareen thus presents the problem of modern sovereignty as precisely one that wishes to foreclose any indeterminacy and opaqueness inherent to a form of life.

The Impossibility of Arbitration

Masjid sweeper at the Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad’s Old City. Photo Credit: Meena Kadri, 2012.

A fuller examination of similarities and differences in contestation of boundaries of Islam and the boundaries of the modern state, its law, and the ability to enact exception remains to be undertaken. However, to continue questioning down this road, the task of the critical historian must be, as Omnia El Shakry has argued, not of endless historicization but of how one might contemplate one’s own psychic stakes in one’s objects of study and ethically encircle the distance from the radical unknowability of our deathly enjoyments in our catastrophic times.[3] This caution is no less relevant for the ethnographer, for as Jeanne Favret-Saada has famously argued, one cannot be both participant and mere observer at the same time; the only players of a game are those “caught” within it, spoken through and possessed by the full force of language at all times. There is no outside/neutral position from which to arbitrate, mix and match different Deobandī or Barelvī ideas to arrive at a Sufi or reformist Islam—a position that would be deeply trapped in the modern secular notion of choice. Giving up the secular fantasy of neutral “outside-the-game” arbitrating ground necessitates that one lose the role of sovereign decider and contemplate the impossibility of producing a final answer. To understand how 19th century Muslims related to what they did not know, how they imagined reforming the community, experienced anxieties over the loss of public markers of Islam, were possessed by a vivid gastronomic imagination of the threat of contagion living in proximity to unbelief, and negotiated curtailed futures in a moment of colonial onslaught one must ask not whether these actors were interested in politics or simply mired in debates of internal reform (again questions that cannot be unlinked). Rather, we must ask how we might turn the question back to ourselves to ask about the founding mystification that produces this binaristic interrogation that then intensifies in our current moment of a global war on Islam. Even as Tareen’s interlocuters attempt to “defend” Muḥammad in the encounter with modernity, their central challenge to the reader emerges as one of continuously calling into question the settled nature of the terms themselves with which one might translate this form of life.

[1] Distinguishing between the conceptual use of hierarchies as opposed to binaries, Tareen shows that the modern academic’s suspicion of all power has perhaps neglected to fully interrogate the productive force of Foucault’s famous lesson on the cultivation of ethical subjectivities being a function of hierarchical power.

[2] Here, Tareen is building on Saba Mahmood’s renowned work on the false equation of submission to lack of agency. See, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2011.

[3] Omnia El Shakry, “History and Lesser Death,” eds. Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott, and Gary Wilder. “Theses on Theory and History” in History of the Present (2018). See also, Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press, 2017.

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Zunaira Komal
Zunaira Komal is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at University of California, Davis. Her research, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, examines military psychiatry’s epistemic engagements with war, Qur’ānic rūḥānī ʿilāj, and armed struggle in (Azad) Kashmir.
Theorizing Modernities article

Prophet Motive


Pakistan Monument, Islamabad. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A masterful study of the polemics over Muḥammad’s status that have been occurring for more than a century in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, SherAli Tareen’s book accomplishes a number of important tasks. It demonstrates the wrongheadedness of framing this debate in terms of a conflict between tradition and modernity, or mystical and clerical forms of Islam. It repudiates accounts that understand the issue either as a meaningless conflict about ritual matters or a purely instrumental battle over power, influence, and resources. And it shows us that this polemical tradition is founded in a genuine argument, whose philosophical and juridical implications are meaningful even for those outside its purview.

What I want to do in this brief blog post is explore one of the implications of this debate, that having to do with what Tareen envisages as the simultaneous appropriation and expulsion of sovereignty by Muslims debating Muḥammad’s status. He describes this paradox in the following way. The coming of colonialism to South Asia not only diminished the power and authority of Muslim rulers, but also allowed religious specialists in these regions unprecedented freedom in the newly secular conditions of European empires. They responded to this freedom by purging Islam of its historical links with monarchy and the entire language of political thought associated with it. Yet this excision was accompanied by new Islamic actors accepting a European notion of sovereignty which, however, they reserved only for God.

Impossible Sovereignty

What does it mean to replace the traditional forms and vocabulary of Muslim politics with a modern category like sovereignty, while at the same time forbidding its use among human beings only so that it can be placed at the very heart of Islam? On the one hand, a sovereignty unavailable to colonized peoples might in this way have been displaced onto God as a kind of compensation. On the other hand, its expulsion from the world of mortals may indicate a deep suspicion of sovereignty and the modern state it represents. Having been stripped of its own political tradition, in other words, new forms of Islamic thought were magnetized by the idea of sovereignty in a way not so very different from anti-colonial nationalism.

Since engaging a politics defined by sovereignty was unavoidable despite their fear of it, Islamic thinkers seem to have instituted it as a kind of taboo that came to define their debates and even the public controversies such debates sometimes gave rise to. The anxiety produced by this taboo finds its site of manifestation in the person of Muḥammad, who is, after all, the most important intermediary between the worlds of God and men. Like the fanciful accounts of medieval Europeans about the Prophet’s coffin magnetically suspended between the floor and ceiling of his tomb in Medina, Muḥammad occupies an impossible position in modern Islamic thought.

Tareen’s book describes the battles over Muḥammad’s difficult positioning between divine sovereignty and mortal sinfulness. And while he is concerned chiefly with the polemics of Barelvī and Deobandī writers, we can add to these the violent criticism levelled at Ahmadi and other Muslims for allegedly denying Muḥammad’s prophetic finality, and even the murderous controversies over “blasphemy” and insults supposedly directed at him. I enclose the term “blasphemy” in scare quotes because, as we shall see, it is used in these debates as a borrowing from Christianity and mostly in European languages. Despite the presence of comparable terms in Islamic history, what is interesting about modern controversies over Muḥammad is that they rarely deploy such theological terms. It is because he occupies such an ambiguous position between the sovereignty of God and that of men, in other words, that Muḥammad serves as a lightning rod for Muslim outrage. By contrast the act of blaspheming God rarely, if ever, becomes the subject of such debate and passion.

Controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as a theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return. All three iterations of Pakistan’s constitution, for example, reserve sovereignty for God as a result of a compromise its drafters made with Muslim religious groups led by the Islamist intellectual Mawdūdī. But I would argue that precisely because it was not vested in any institution by these constitutions, sovereignty returned to Pakistani politics in the form of the coup d’état as an exception that served as a counterpart of the miracle in theology. For even in negative form it remains central to modern Islamic thought.

Depoliticized Islam

Like his contemporary, Carl Schmitt, Mawdūdī recognized sovereignty as a theological concept. Unlike Schmitt, however, he wanted to reserve it for God because human beings were incapable of exercizing the absolute power that the modern theory of sovereignty demanded. Rather than offering too much power to human beings, in other words, sovereignty was dangerous because no mortal institution could match up to its truly theological demands. It was their incapacity to exercize such absolute power that led to injustice, whose violence arose in the gap between sovereignty’s theological purity and its all too human reality. By reserving sovereignty for God, then, it could be expelled from human society.

Controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return.

Mawdūdī’s interpretation of the dispute between God’s sovereignty and Muḥammad’s humanity took this debate in a new political direction. Drawing from the deep suspicion of modern statehood among many anti-colonial thinkers, for whom the state was inextricably linked with imperialism, he focussed on what we may call social self-governance instead. Like Gandhi, whom he had admired in the early part of his career, Mawdūdī sought to reconceive politics in more or less anarchist terms. Whereas Gandhi did so by fragmenting and distributing sovereignty, however, Mawdūdī sought to expel it altogether by founding a self-governing society on the basis of a pre-given and unchanging Islamic law.

Now the sacred law had itself become autonomous as a result of the collapse of pre-colonial polities, and it was held to define Islam by colonial scholars and administrators who wanted to delegitimize traditional forms of kingly authority. In this sense, law in Islam performed the role that caste did in Hinduism, which is to say as a principle of depoliticization. Both caste and law, however, could be re-politicized in an anarchistic way, as Gandhi and to some degree Mawdūdī tried to do. The latter, for instance, was careful to deprive the state of all power over the sacred law, which had to be interpreted by authorities outside its control.

Defined by the law as a social force meant to restrict the sovereign impulses of both state and citizen, Islam has been deprived of a political vocabulary. The “Islamic state,” which Mawdūdī was a pioneer in theorizing, is meant to be subordinated to a law representing not just the views of individual Muslims but their very reality as a society. In the Leninist theory that both Gandhi and Mawdūdī cited, the state had to be captured for the dictatorship of the proletariat, only to be dissolved into what Lenin called the bureaucratic “administration of objects” once all class enemies were destroyed. Gandhi wanted to begin where Lenin ended, with the withering away of the state, while Mawdūdī wanted law to limit this state from the outside.

But Mawdūdī feared losing control of the society he wanted to triumph over the state and its principle of sovereignty. This led him to construe the law that was meant to represent the social against the political as a conservative and undemocratic force. In effect, he sought to forestall sovereign violence by foreclosing the possibility of new legislation, which was reduced to mere governance as fidelity to a preordained law. In this way, an anarchist vision of politics was eventually turned into a neoliberal one, where the regulation of society is conceived as a marketplace. This market had already come, indeed, to shape controversies about Muḥammad in the depoliticized arena of colonial Islam well before the emergence of neoliberalism in the wake of the Second World War. 

A Market for Hurt Sentiments

The first modern controversies over insults to Muḥammad are likely to have been the Bombay riots of 1851 and 1874. Occurring between Muslims and Parsis rather than Hindus, one involved an unflattering image and the other a prurient account of Muḥammad in Gujarati newspapers published by Parsi proprietors. As would become the case with subsequent protests over alleged insults to the Prophet, these provocations were neither part of any pre-existing and polemical debate between religious groups nor of the Christian missionary activity that also entailed engaging Muslims in theological argument. They were addressed instead to a generic public constituting a market for information and entertainment.

But Mawdūdī feared losing control of the society he wanted to triumph over the state and its principle of sovereignty. This led him to construe the law that was meant to represent the social against the political as a conservative and undemocratic force.

These insults, then, were so offensive in part because they surfaced as news and rumour with no direct address or even purpose, asking neither for the acquiescence nor opposition of Muslims themselves. Because they seemed to lack theological purpose and meaning, it is not surprising that conspiracies were manufactured to explain them. And this meaninglessness was, of course, defined by the anonymous market and its public that had turned Muḥammad into a what we would today call a human-interest story for a profit-making enterprise. Those representing the new capitalist class among Indians, Parsis, and other readers of Bombay’s Gujarati press were targeted for attack by Muslims. The latter did not themselves speak Gujarati and belonged to laboring, artisanal, and service classes, and were also sometimes joined in their rioting and looting by low-caste Hindus.

While in Tareen’s framing these offended Muslims may be said to follow the Barelvī line in refusing Muḥammad’s humanization, what is interesting about their outrage was the fact that it refused theological expression. They appealed, rather, to a protectionist logic that was defined by the market, and called for its freedoms of production and circulation to be restricted. These limitations were understood in terms of forgery and libel, with only the colonial state and non-Muslim critics applying theological categories like blasphemy to the protests. The offended Muslims themselves also deployed the language that went into the making of the Indian Penal Code. This code replaced the Christian sin of blasphemy with the secular one of hurt sentiments from which the religious prejudices of Hindus and Muslims should be protected.

Fascinating about these details is how they have continued to define Muslim offense not only in contemporary India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but more globally as well, for example, in the Rushdie Affair of 1989. In almost every instance of protest, the theological vocabulary of blasphemy used has explicitly been taken from Christianity and deployed mostly in European languages for non-Muslim audiences. In languages like Urdu the chief terms used are secular ones, including the “hurt sentiments” mentioned in the Indian Penal Code, and other words like “insult” and “impudence.” Theological notions only make an appearance when Muslims think in Christian terms. This was the case during the protests over The Satanic Verses, where Muslims asked for their sanctities to be included within Britain’s blasphemy law, which until then had been reserved for Anglicans alone. The law was eventually abolished in the 1990s to avoid including apparently more excitable non-Christian religions. Subsequently, the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif tried to drum up support for an international provision against blasphemy modelled on the one in Irish law.

Just as sovereignty had to be expelled from politics to be ensconced at the heart of Islamic theology, in other words, Muslim protests have expelled blasphemy to lodge it in the deepest recesses of Christian theology. Whatever Islamic scholars might say, then, the popular language of Muslim offense in which they increasingly participate possesses little if any theological character. Indeed, its prosaic arguments derive from a market logic that bears no apparent relationship to the violence in which it sometimes results. It is as if such violence takes its meaning from the very absence of a theological vocabulary, and even as its wordless replacement by the ritual practice of sacrifice. But what does all of this mean as far as Tareen’s book is concerned?

On the one hand, a sovereignty reserved for God keeps returning to the world of men in murderous controversies over insults directed against the Prophet. This suggests that modern Islamic thought is incapable either of deploying or renouncing the political principle that defines the state. And on the other hand, the law and theology meant to take the place of sovereignty and its politics in social life keeps disappearing, only to be brought back by these same controversies in the form of a violence that can only give itself the Christian name of blasphemy. The social self-governance in which Islam was supposed to manifest itself has been turned into the struggle to regulate a market whose limits are tested by what can be produced and circulated about Muḥammad.

 

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Faisal Devji
Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Theology and the Ironies of History


Reading SherAli Tareen’s magnificent Defending Muḥammad in Modernity (Winner of the 2020 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize) one is left contemplating how the ideas of visionary figures can set the complex agenda of future trends and institutions. Take the well-known scholar and political activist Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831), a scion of the influential Walīyullāh family, and a key figure in Tareen’s work. His rigorist theological vision was adopted by some of the founders of the Deoband school, and they outlawed the widely practiced ritual and ceremony of commemorating the Prophet. Paradoxically, the spiritual mentor of the founders of Deoband, Hājī Imdadullāh (d.1899), much to the chagrin of some of his disciples, approved of this ritual, known as the mīlād, as Tareen explains, albeit with some stipulations. Ismāʿīl and Imdādullāh subtly and deliberately re-shaped the discursive practices of Muslims in South Asia, especially those that directly impinged on the relations between institutions, namely, what became known as the Deobandī school and their rivals the Barelvī school of thought. These schools argued over the ritual of mīlād and other doctrinal issues that Tareen discusses in detail. “Once a vision becomes an institution,” the influential German writer Siegfried Kracauer writes, “clouds of dust gather about it, blurring its contours and contents. The history of ideas is a history of misunderstandings” (7).

The jury is still out as to how one should name and frame the nature of these theological shifts which left long shadows on Islam as practiced on the subcontinent. But few doubts arise that their ideas were impacted by the changing political and cultural landscape of colonial India, a phenomenon that multiple participants in this symposium have noted. This harvest of reflections, with each contributor’s unique appreciation, is possibly the best gift to Tareen, who explores, describes, and analyzes the micro-histories of discrete theological debates in colonial India so that his readers can get a sense of what was at stake in these debates in the past and what ramifications they continue to have in the present. Most theological disputes have an afterlife, and some of these intricate and subtle debates about the authority of Islam’s messenger and prophet still percolate in the hearts and minds of the faithful to this very day.

Political Theology

As Tareen himself explains, political theology forms the golden thread in his book. In his contribution, Waris Mazhari acknowledges that religion and politics in Muslim history were intimately connected but he rejects what he labels as the “Western” category of “political theology” as less useful. In my view, the deep roots of “political theology” in Islamic thought can be found in the work of medieval Muslim scholars, which is often unacknowledged in critical scholarship. For instance, Muḥammad Aʿlā al-Tahānawī (died approximately 1707), the outstanding encyclopedist in Mughal India, writes that governance or politics (siyāsa) is “the cultivation of the good in humanity by guiding them to the path of salvation in this life and the next” (1:993–94). The nexus between humans, the world, and attaining God’s salvation is evident in this definition which today enjoys the moniker of political theology. In Tahānawī’s all-inclusive and comprehensive notion of the political, prophets exercise governance over the souls and the bodies of all people. As to the learned, who are fondly remembered in the tradition as “the true heirs of the prophets,” per the premodern prescription their jurisdiction is limited to the nurturing of the souls of the elites. As to the multitude, the discipline and governance of all people in this schema takes place via a regime of regulation by the show of power and of force for the maintenance of order. Even more interesting is that medieval Muslim political philosophy conceptualized the discipline of the self as the “governance of the souls” (siyāsa nafsīya) and the regulation of the realms of subsistence or economics, communal existence, and welfare as the “governance of the corporeal body” (siyāsa badanīya). Disciplining the subjectivities of the people was the task of the scholars, while regulating the public sphere was the task of the political rulers. All of this was part of this Islamic tradition centuries before Michel Foucault made us aware of the technologies of the self.

Most theological disputes have an afterlife, and some of these intricate and subtle debates about the authority of Islam’s messenger and prophet still percolate in the hearts and minds of the faithful to this very day.

Tahānawī explains that two common forms of theological and philosophical politics prevailed among Muslims. One was a politics of justice, also named “a regime of Norms/Sharīʿa” (al-siyāsa al-sharʿīya), which was drawn from the teachings of the prophets, as also articulated by the work of the philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950). The other was a regime regulated by political philosophy and wisdom (al-siyāsa al-madanīya or al-ḥikma al-siyāsīya) where the rule of the monarch, Sulṭān, or other similar kind of ruler prevailed. Politics as a regime of governance is central to order, justice, and the protection of the realm against all enemies. Early Muslim political theorists viewed the regime of law and political philosophy as part of a mutually reinforcing continuum.

A feature of the composite political theology described above has as its desideratum the need to sustain an empire in harmony with early and premodern Islamic predecessors. Key features of these predecessors were hierarchy and a variety of distinctions, for example, between those who are free vs slave, male vs female, and between different forms of political subject positions and professions. In modern times, the heirs to this vocabulary of Muslim political theology often adopt it uncritically without due attention to the conditions of a different time and altered aspirations. In other words, not frequently practiced is a critical engagement with histories and concepts for their more effective use in the present.

Contextual Theology

It appears that someone like Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, whose thought Tareen’s documents in detail, partially sought a more egalitarian promise in the God of the Qurʾān. While undoubtedly portrayed as a monarch (malik), the God of the Qurʾān is nonetheless also one who does not act in an aristocratic fashion in the same way as earthly monarchs. Shāh Ismāʿīl’s God hears the prayers of the lowly leather-worker as well as the rich landowner without any need for any human intercession and intermediary. Thus, he leveraged the image of God as the fountain of mercy and sovereign authority who is available at the request of all creatures. His desire to reduce the aristocratic elements of political theology to one more in line with the impulse of the pre-imperial Muslim caliphate, which was more egalitarian in its impulses, is unmistakable.

A postage stamp commemorating Aḥmad Razā Khān Barelvī in India. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Alert to the context and the work of Shāh Ismāʿīl, Zunaira Komal provides a reading of Tareen via Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida. For the latter, tradition can also be viewed as an “encounter” and a “gift” even though it might be a mysterious one in its origins. If Tareen’s reading is centered around the contestation over tradition in one sense, then Komal reminds us that the past has multiple echoes as “the unpastness of the past, the unsettled question of tradition.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin, she pushes us to grapple with traditions in such a way that we might “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (128).

We will recall that it was the sect called the Khārijites who seized onto a memory of the nascent (primitive) political impulse at the founding of Islam, roughly three decades after the Prophet died. The Khārijites invoked God’s sovereignty above human claims at a moment when they sensed the danger of internecine conflict. Political legitimacy for the Khārijites was centered on the preservation of divine sovereignty as framed in their clarion call that “only God’s command shall prevail” (lā ḥukm illā lillāh) in all disputes and circumstances. But over time Islamdom’s political theology shifted, grew, and adopted greater complexity as multiple empires rose, evolved, and fragmented. Sunnī juridical theologians paraphrased a Qurʾānic verse that “obedience (dīn) was only due to God” and insisted on the regime of law as a sign of legitimacy of the political order.

Hermeneutical Shifts

Tareen’s nineteenth-century Muslim reformers in South Asia, and those elsewhere in the Muslim world began to rework the regime of norms or laws into their projects of reform, but often neglected rich medieval political philosophy and the lush conceptual vocabularies that were coupled with it. Instead, these reformers energized their discursive tradition and practice by pairing it strictly to scriptural sources—the Qurʾān and the Sunna (prophetic norms drawn from a copious archive of ḥadīth). In the process, the historical memory of the tradition was substituted by a surfeit of confidence and reliance on the norms of scriptural authenticity. With the emphasis on pristine origins, this reformist tradition was bound to clash with existing interpretative frameworks that were embedded in historical experiences that privileged the will of the community and the authority of tradition equally.

Divine sovereignty in this redesigned or reformed tradition was weaponized as a means to alter the hearts, minds, and the worlds of the believers. The stand-off between Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1861) and Shāh Ismāʿīl in the nineteenth century, and Aḥmad Razā Khān (d. 1921) and the Deobandīs in the twentieth, are both instances of an internal clash within the Sunni Muslim community. Unfortunately, because of the heat of polemics, no mechanism for discursive reconciliation or brokering was possible.

These scorching debates prevailed in the post-colonial periods, as Sohaira Siddiqui points out in her response. She rightly observes that the “problem space” of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemics also have a contemporary manifestation not only in South Asia but even in regions where these Muslim sub-traditions have traveled.

Like Siddiqui, Faisal Devji also reflects on how Tareen’s argument helps us in addressing issues in different contexts. He notes that in the twentieth century the refurbished concept of divine sovereignty became an instrument of ideological state-formation. Such a notion, he claims, has been institutionalized via constitutions and legislative processes. Pakistan and Egypt are two examples of how the concept of divine sovereignty gets embedded into nation-state political orders. Baptized by revised politico-theological concepts, one observes how the legislatures, courts, politicians, and political activists all deploy God’s sovereignty as a war cry to contest, topple, and challenge governments; restrain or ban speech about religion; and mount campaigns against alleged offenses denoted as blasphemy. By purging vast sections of the archive of historical Muslim political theology, Devji suggests the result is “new Islamic actors accepting a European notion of sovereignty which, however, they reserved only for God.” I agree with Devji as to how European notions of sovereignty are patched on to modern Islamic practices. My readings of the premodern literature suggest that notions of sovereignty were meshed into authoritative discourses and symbolic imaginaries. And sovereign-authority was often fragmented and distributed, and perhaps functioned more like rhizomes—sometimes you saw it and at other times it was concealed.

Jonathan Brown is curious as to why these intra-Muslim theological contestations reached such fury in South Asia. Perhaps a comparative study which looked to the slightly earlier period in West Africa could help illuminate the developments in South Asia. Developments in the Sokoto Caliphate under Osman dan Fodio and his heirs might provide one entry point here. In his essay, Brown notes some of the uncanny resemblances in the theological developments in South Asia in the nineteenth century and Arabia in the eighteenth century, but then himself correctly discounts the comparison because he claims that there were crucial differences between the two contexts. Even if it is hazardous to speculate, I would proffer that Shāh Ismāʿīl and his colleagues were a minority in a diminished Mughal empire, where the anxiety of loss and dissolution of Muslim fortunes weighed heavily on their conscience, a point that Mazhari confirms. This might have led them to assess their situation as dire, and thus in need of an exceptional response at multiple levels. The reaction to some of their proposals too was unusually intense.

Afterlife of Theological Polemics

But as Ammar Khan Nasir points out, even amongst those Deobandīs who were devoted and supportive of the reformist cause of Shāh Ismaʿīl there were reservations and discomfort at the latter’s rhetoric of reform. This is a sentiment voiced by a later Deobandī, Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933), who considered himself a supporter of this reform. Curiously, it seems that the judicious among the Deobandīs were unable to reduce the polemical heat in the twentieth century between themselves and their rivals, the Barelvī sect. This would have required them to both voice critical dissent in some matters that they found objectionable in the writings of the reformers, while nonetheless still support the overall reform project. Perhaps the heat and din of polemical exchanges and vested political interests rendered such potential stillborn. For when the stakes are high even the most constructive critique can be viewed as outright rejection.

Darul Uloom Deoband. Deoband, India. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The larger question Nasir poses is whether or not knowledge of the multitude of Muslim sectarian struggles on the subcontinent which date back to the seventeenth century can be edificatory. Historical awareness, he implies, might help imagine new possibilities in the present. He points out that theologians prescribed theologies that caused rifts and divisions that persist to this day among the Muslims of South Asia. He wonders if South Asian Islam can find a formula whereby different religious identities can coexist in ways that disallow the state to own the monopoly over religion. This remains a relevant question. Countless experiences around the world show that the defenders of God’s sanctity and Muḥammad’s dignity often wrap their own personas in the mantle of infallibility and privilege their opinions and thus raise the stakes. Proclamations of sovereignty quickly unravel into pithy slogans and the theological tinder emitted can turn into a conversation-stopper which makes it difficult to pursue any meaningful discussion on myriads of issues concerning law and theology.

We are grateful to SherAli Tareen for providing us with an opportunity to think through a multitude of questions involving God, humans, and the world in South Asia. He has raised many issues for us to continuously ponder. Since many of the ideas Tareen raised are still alive and kicking among the faithful, so to speak, we can therefore be content that over time there might be different permutations of this debate in uncharted waters. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity can also be framed as “contesting” deeply held theological concepts centered on the Prophet of Islam. Central issues debated in this book and their history show that there are conceptual caesuras or interruptions that have allowed the controversy to go on after it reached its peak. Doctrines of a tradition—and Islam is no exception—continue to undergo adjustment and reframing to ever-changing conditions. Reinterpreting a doctrine might at times lead away from a tradition. History has repeatedly shown that no dogma is immune to innovation and new possibilities.

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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Theorizing Modernities article

Rejoining the Ottoman and South Asian Worlds


Deoband students going to class. Author’s photo.

This book lands like an obelisk at the intersection of several fields. It joins the philological rigor of classical Islamic studies with the theoretical framing of religious studies and the contextual nous of South Asian studies. It will likely be a new point of departure for conversations around Islam in early modern and modern South Asia. And it plants a sturdy post in the region, extending the discursive tent of the Arabo-Ottoman-centric study of Islamic thought to include influential participants long ruefully omitted.

One could reflect on this book in many ways. I would be content merely to list its virtues and accomplishments were more engagement not asked of me. And yet at this I hesitate, well aware of the daunting expertise needed to comment on the universe of the Deobandīu/Barelvī dispute, an imposing knot that draws together equally the long diachronic cords of Islam’s theological dispute over divine sovereignty and the rich threads of cultural and political contestation in British India.

Perhaps one insight I could offer would be a memory of my own befuddlement, born of an Arabo-Ottoman bias. I remember reading the Taqwiyat al-īmān of the Indian-born Shāh Ismāʿīl al-Shahīd (d. 1831), a text that anchors Tareen’s book, almost fifteen years ago. I was very interested in the topic of the 18th-century movements of revival and reform in the Islamic world, often conceived of as Proto-Salafi, and the text clearly fit right in. Shāh Ismāʿīl’s disapproval of conspicuous markers of social hierarchy and his fierce rejection of saintly intercession could have come from the pen of the Najdi Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792) in Saudi Arabia or the books of Ibn al-Amīr al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 1768) in Yemen. And yet the relatively short text quickly escaped my comprehension. Shāh Ismāʿīl began speaking of intercession of different sorts, deploying the analogy of petitioning a vizier, of a sultan’s love and permission. It made little sense to me. It seemed very foreign.

Intra-Sunni arguments over seemingly obscure points of theology, whether the nature of God’s speech in the ninth century or whether the Prophet is present during prayer in the twentieth, reach such volume and ferocity that historians often assume that they must have been debates over politics or society by other means. A point clearly and convincingly made in Defending Muḥammad is that assuming that theological dispute and—for the lack of a better word—politics are isomorphic does disservice to the weight and intermingling of both. Muslims had been debating whether and how a human being can intercede with God on behalf of another for over a millennium. And Muslim scholars had been wringing their hands at what various types of rulers and states meant for the public manifestation of Islam—and competing for influence among both the masses below them and the ruling elite above—for equally long. What Tareen demonstrates is that understanding Shāh Ismāʿīl’s text, as well as the many rebuttals it prompted, means reading it through the court idiom of the Mughal twilight. But, crucially, this political idiom was synchronous to this theological discourse, not causal (124 ff., 146, 148, 155).

Succumbing to the Atlantic-world habit of assuming a bifurcation of politics and religion is one danger aptly pointed out by Tareen. His book makes it equally clear that one cannot read the landscape of Islamic thought and practice in British India through a lens ground to catch binaries like tradition/reform, law/mysticism, Arab/indigenous, extremist/tolerant, Salafi/Madhhabi-Sufi. Many of these binaries seem better suited to the study of Islam in the modern Ottoman Middle East, though Indira Falk Gesink (2009) and Leor Halevi (2019) among others have revealed the error of over-reliance on such framing.

Perhaps the appeal of the Salafi/Madhhabi-Sufi binary is so appealing in the Ottoman-Middle-East context because ʿulamā’ participants in prominent debates raging there since the early twentieth century have so explicitly acknowledged this divide, if not always by those terms. As Tareen explains, the thunderous Deobandī/Barelvī battle has occurred within one side of that binary: neither Deobandīs nor Barelvīs are “Salafis” by any stretch (despite Barelvī invectives against their allegedly ‘Wahhābī’ foes). Both camps are admitted and recognized devotees to the Ḥanafī school of law and the non-controversial strain of India’s Sufi heritage.

Dar al-Ulum Deoband Rashid Mosque. Author’s photo.

Hence it could be the Ottoman Middle East’s most vehement enemy of Salafism—and a scholar who breathed to defend Abū Ḥanīfa against any and all foes—Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952), who first widely promoted the Hadith scholarship and theological polemics of Deoband grandees like Khalīl Aḥmad Sahāranpūrī (d. 1927), Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933), and Ashraf ʿAlī Thānvī (d. 1943) in the Arabic-speaking world.[1] This praise was echoed by another bane of Salafism in the Arabophone world, the Moroccan traditionalist polymath ʿAbdallāh bin al-Ṣiddīq al-Ghumārī (d. 1993).[2]  Die-hard opponents of Salafis, al-Kawtharī and al-Ghumārī were delighted by the tremendous accomplishments in Hadith scholarship by these Deobandī giants. And they appreciated their rebuttals of the Aḥmadī movement. In one book, al-Ghumārī notes approvingly of three of Aḥmad Riḍā Khān’s (d. 1921) books on the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen.[3] But Khān’s writings seem to have had little impact on scholarship in the Arab world, certainly not in comparison to Deobandīs like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī. Ironically, if asked about the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen or the mawlid, scholars like al-Kawtharī and al-Ghumārī would no doubt take the Barelvī side. But they could read and appreciate the books of Deobandi scholars in blissful removal from the controversies in South Asia. Even today, ulama in the Arab world remain mostly unaware of—or uninterested in—the Deobandī/Barelvī debate.

Why has a debate that seems so voraciously consuming in South Asia not spread elsewhere, touching as it does on the enduring controversies of divine sovereignty and the Prophet’s relationship to it (large South Asian diaspora communities excepted)? Ironically, the answer might comfort Shāh Ismāʿīl al-Shahīd, the founders of Deoband, and Aḥmad Riḍā Khān alike. Tareen assiduously lays out how all these great scholars sought to preserve what they saw as the religious, communal, and sometimes even political hallmarks (shaʿā’ir) of Islam and Muslim practice. They wanted the Muslim community to survive, vigorous and uncorrupted, though they disagreed on how that vigor should be protected and what the most dangerous forms of corruption were. It may be that the Deobandī/Barelvī debate, which, Tareen reminds us, takes place between two parties who agree on far more than they disagree and compete for adherents in the same population, has remained at such a stunning volume for so long because the universe of South Asian Islam has been nurtured so richly. That one can enter this dispute on the streets of Durban or Leicester, that Cape Town has Barelvī mosques and Deobandī Dār al-ʿUlūms, testifies to the powerful infrastructure of clerisy and learning, and even more to the passions stoked by all these reformers. This is a rowdy but unbroken spirit.

 

 

[1] See Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Maqālāt al-Kawtharī, 68, 271.

[2] ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ṣiddīq al-Ghumārī, Sabīl al-tawfīq fī tarjamat ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ṣiddīq (Cairo: al-Dār al-Bayḍā’, 1990), 59.

[3] Al-Ghumārī, Afḍal maqūl fī manāqib afḍal rasūl (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1425/2005), 70 ff.

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Jonathan Brown
Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000 and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (Brill, 2007); Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009; expanded edition 2017); Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities' Bridging Cultures Muslim Journeys Bookshelf; Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014), which was named one of the top books on religion in 2014 by the Independent; and Slavery and Islam (Oneworld, 2019). He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari. He is also the Director of Research at the Yaqeen Institute.