Excerpt of "Defending Muḥammad in Modernity"

DEFENDING

MUH AMMAD

Ë™ IN MODERNITY

SHERALI TAREEN

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright Š 2019 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

Foreword, by Margrit Pernau Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction

p a rt o n e ch a p ter on e

ch a p te r two ch a p ter three ch a p te r fo u r ch a p ter five p a rt two ch a p ter si x

ch a p ter sev en

ch a p ter ei gh t

ch a p te r n in e

ch a p te r te n ch a p te r e le ven

xi

xxi 1

Competing Political Theologies

Thinking the Question of Sovereignty in Early Colonial India

000

Reenergizing Sovereignty

000

The Promise and Perils of Moral Reform Salvational Politics Intercessory Wars

000 000

000

Competing Normativities

Reforming Religion in the Shadow of Colonial Power

Law, Sovereignty, and the Boundaries of Normative Practice

Forbidding Piety to Restore Sovereignty: The Mawlid and Its Discontents

000 000 000

Retaining Goodness: Reform as the Preservation of Original Forms

000

Knowing the Unknown: Contesting the Sovereign Gift of Knowledge

000

Convergences

000

viii

C on ten ts

p a rt th re e c h a p ter twel ve

Intra-Deobandı̄ Tensions

Internal Disagreements

000

Listening to the Internal “Other”

000

Epilogue p os ts cri p t a p p en d ix

Suggestions for Teaching This Book

Glossary

000 000 000

Notes

000

Index

000

Bibliography

000

Introduction In September 2006, ‘Ābid ‘Alī, an eighty-year-old man from the village of Aharaullah, around twelve miles from the town of Murādābad in North India, retook his marriage vows with his seventy-five-year-old wife of many decades, Asgerī ‘Alī. A few weeks earlier, their marriage had been annulled because they, along with two hundred other people, were declared non-Muslim by a local Muslim cleric, ‘Abdul Manān Karīmī. Karīmī made this radical pronouncement after he was informed about the circumstances in which these people had offered funeral prayers for a recently deceased elderly man in their village. There was nothing objectionable about participating in funeral prayers. However, in Karīmī’s view, these villagers had committed a grave sin by offering funeral prayers that were led by a cleric from a rival doctrinal orientation.1 Karīmī and the two hundred villagers he had cast outside the fold of Islam belonged to what is known as the Barelvī orientation of Sunnī Islam. Abū Hāfiz Muḥammad, the cleric who had led the funeral prayers, was affiliated with the archrival Deobandī orientation. On the day of the funeral, because the local prayer leader was away, Muḥammad had stepped in as a substitute. For Karīmī, praying behind a Deobandī cleric had rendered the faith of the villagers invalid. And with that, the marriages of the couples among them had dissolved. Karīmī stipulated that the only way for them to get back together was to repent, profess their faith again, and then enter a new marriage contract. As he put it, “Repent, proclaim the testimony of faith, and get remarried” (Tawba karo, kalima parho, awr nikāḥ parhwāo). That is precisely what happened. In a public spectacle, over a hundred couples were remarried. A jubilant Karīmī trumpeted, “These weddings were free of any pomp or celebrations.

Only the requirement of the presence of two witnesses was fulfilled.”2 1

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A few years after this rather bizarre episode in North India, another unconnected chain of events again brought the Barelvī-Deobandī rivalry into sharp focus, this time across the border in Pakistan. This next narrative further amplifies and clarifies the stakes and vectors of this ongoing rivalry.

On January 10, 2011, the antiterrorism court of Pakistan sentenced Muḥammad Shafī‘, a local prayer leader (imām) from the town of Muzaffargarh, and his son Muḥammad Aslam to life in prison on charges of blasphemy. They were originally arrested in April 2010 after being accused of removing a poster from their family-owned grocery store that advertised an event to commemorate Prophet Muḥammad’s birthday.

According to the organizers of this event, who had also filed the case in court, Shafī‘ and Aslam had torn down the poster and trampled it under their feet.3 The father and son were charged under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy law. In theory, the law prohibits blasphemy against any recognized religion. In practice, however, it is mostly applied against individuals found guilty of insulting the Prophet. The penalty can range from punitive fines to the death sentence.

The court verdict against Shafī‘ and Aslam was delivered six days after the much-publicized assassination of Salmān Tāseer, then the governor of the province of Punjab. Tāseer was shot dead by his own bodyguard, a man named Mumtāz Qādrī who was driven to crime because he believed the governor had committed a sin in opposing the blasphemy law.4 Following this high-profile assassination, several politicians, lawyers, and human rights activists in Pakistan decried the blasphemy law as unjust legislation that incited sectarian/interreligious violence and that was used primarily as a pretext to settle personal vendettas. Joining this chorus of protests against the law was ‘Ārif Ghurmānī, the defense counsel for Shafī‘ and Aslam.

Ghurmānī claimed his clients had been unfairly prosecuted. In his view, his clients were victims of “intra-faith rivalries” among Sunnī Muslims. Ghurmānī said, “Both (the accusers and the accused) are Muslims. The case is the result of differences between Deobandī and Barelvī sects of Sunnī Muslims. . . . Shafī‘ is a practicing Muslim, he is the Imām of a mosque and he had recently returned from pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. . . . I am defending them because I am convinced they are not guilty of blasphemy.”5 His clients belonged to the Deobandī orientation.

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The “intra-faith rivalries” between the Deobandī and Barelvī sects of Sunnī Islam that Ghurmānī referred to represent a vexing yet important set of polemics between prominent Muslim scholars that date back to late nineteenth-century North India. Much like the controversy generated by Shafī‘’s alleged defilement of an advertisement for the Prophet’s birthday celebration, this nineteenth-century debate animated opposing imaginaries of prophetic authority in South Asian Islam. It brought into view an ethical conundrum that has captured the imagination of Muslims for several centuries: How should a community honor the Prophet’s memory and normative example?

This book is the first comprehensive study of the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy, a polemical battle that has shaped South Asian Islam and Muslim identity in singularly profound ways. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. However, its specter continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world.6 The logics, archives, and terrain of this controversy have indelibly informed the critical question of what counts as Islam and what counts as a normative Muslim identity in the modern world, in South Asia and indeed globally.

As the two narratives with which I began show, the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic is not merely a matter of academic score settling. Rather, the terms and stakes of this debate pervade the everyday performance of Islam and shadow conversations ranging from defining blasphemy to organizing the choreography of a community’s moral and devotional life.

Too often, however, in both popular and academic discourses, the BarelvīDeobandī controversy is approached through the framework of potent yet facile binaries like legal/mystical, puritan/populist, exclusivist/inclusivst, and reformist/traditional. Of these connected binaries, perhaps the one most commonly advanced as an explanation for the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy is the first. This debate is most often read, as I will demonstrate over the course of this Introduction, as the manifestation of a perennial divide between the mystical and legal traditions in Islam, or between Islamic law and Sufism. Through a close interrogation of the internal logics of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic, this book illustrates the conceptual poverty and distortion of such binary constructions and explanations. These binaries are symptomatic of the liberal secular attempt

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to canonize the limits of life and religion, an attempt that is always destined to fail. They are conceptually simplistic and politically noisome and insidious.

As an alternative, I argue for a conceptual approach that views rival narratives on the boundaries of religion as competing rationalities of tradition and reform. The protagonists who articulate these rationalities seek to strategically control the limits of tradition. They strive to deflate the capacity of rival discourses to speak authoritatively about what should and should not count as religion. This operation involves mobilizing certain strategic practices of exclusion. For instance, such practices include demonstrating the logical incoherence of opposing arguments, showing their inconsistency with previous authoritative arguments, injuring the credibility of actors who articulate those rival arguments, and most importantly, offering alternative and contrasting programs of the normative.

The contested terrain in which such opposing discursive strategies battle for supremacy is never available for division into disciplinary binaries. Instead, it demands a practice of thinking (theory) that closely navigates the conflicting logics through which the parameters of a discursive tradition are fought out. It is precisely such an approach that this book attempts to employ. By examining competing nineteenth-century Indian Muslim rationalities of tradition and reform, it documents ways in which the limits of Islam in modern South Asia were articulated, brought into central view, and contested.7

Competing Political Theologies

More specifically, this book argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemics centered on competing political theologies. By political theology I mean the intimate interlocking of theological discourses and political and social imaginaries. At the heart of these polemics were the question of how one should imagine divine sovereignty and its relationship to Prophet Muḥammad’s authority during the colonial moment when Indian Muslims had lost their political sovereignty.8 Competing understandings of the relationship between God and his Prophet generated contrasting visions of what the ritual and everyday lives of the masses should look

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like. Put differently, the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic articulated opposing conceptions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and everyday ritual practice. At stake in it was the question of how one should understand the encounter between God, the Prophet, and the community during a moment of immense moral and political anxiety. This nexus between theology, law, and everyday practice is the conceptual thread binding this book, and I propose it as a way to interrogate traditions of intra-Muslim debate and argument.

A major theme of this book is the question of how the loss of political sovereignty generates conditions that intensify debates over divine sovereignty and its interaction with the everyday life of a community.

With the onset of British colonialism, as centuries of Muslim rule over large parts of the Indian subcontinent came to an end, nothing seemed more urgent to the Muslim scholarly elite than securing the boundaries of faith from internal and external threats. This book tells how two rival groups comprising the most prominent and prolific nineteenth-century Indian Muslim scholars pursued this pressing task. This book deals more with the colonial context of the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy than with its postcolonial afterlives. This decision was not made to undermine the significance of recent developments, and it does not reflect a search for origins. Rather, it rests on the conviction that only through a sustained and careful consideration of the colonial context can the controversy’s postcolonial ramifications be adequately understood and appreciated.9 Through a close interrogation of the texts, actors, and narratives that populated the beginnings of this polemic, I provide a detailed example of how the boundaries of Islam as a discursive tradition are contested in conditions of colonial modernity.

The Big Picture

The emphasis of this book is on two contrasting movements and visions of Islam in South Asia, with beginnings in the early nineteenth century.

The architects of these rival reformist traditions were distinguished scholars whose lives and intellectual strivings have deeply imprinted South Asia’s Muslim heritage. Despite their vigorous disagreements, they held

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much in common. They were often connected through common scholarly genealogies, textual reference points and reading practices, and a shared geography (that of Delhi and northern India). Experts in the Muslim humanities, these scholars also occupied the common institutional space of the madrasas, Muslim seminaries where salvational knowledge, ethics, and piety are cultivated.

Most Muslim scholars (‘ulamā’/sing. ‘ālim) in South Asia, including the nineteenth-century actors whose thought this book will engage, were and are trained in what is known as the Niẓāmī curriculum (dars-i niẓāmī).

This rigorous (often six-year) curriculum brings together different aspects of the Muslim humanities (including Qur’an exegesis, Ḥadīth studies, law, jurisprudence, and logic), with varying emphases depending on a madrasa’s normative orientation. It is named after the famous seventeenth-century South Asian Muslim scholar Mulla Niẓāmudīn (d. 1677).

When viewed from the vantage point of the present, the competing Muslim intellectual traditions described in this book also hold in common the predictably stereotypical ways in which they are often viewed from the outside. In Western, Muslim-majority, and non-Western, Muslimminority contexts alike, the madrasas, and their custodians, the ‘ulamā’, are often seen at best as experts of an arcane tradition irrelevant to the modern moment. At worst they are seen as agents of puritan obscurantism that stokes fundamentalism and militancy.10 Madrasaphobia is a global phenomenon that brings together diverse and otherwise incompatible bedfellows from across ideological spectrums and time zones, from powerful Western neoimperial think tanks, to Zionist and Christian nationalists, to many liberals, modernists, and at times even Islamists within Muslim-majority countries. While such caricatured representations of madrasas and the ‘ulamā’ boast a long history, they took on unprecedented prominence and intensity in the post-9/11 era, when madrasas became almost synonymous with the Taliban and terror. There is an entire cottage industry populated by self-professed experts who have made careers in the business of denigrating and dehumanizing madrasas and their scholars.

While this is a specialist scholarly book on a rather complicated intraMuslim dispute, offering a corrective to this pathological narrative about South Asian Muslim scholars and their discursive universe is certainly

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among its major aspirations. To be clear, the point is not to glorify or romanticize madrasas either. As many scholars attached to them will be the first to admit, one could be critical of many aspects of madrasa traditions of knowledge, especially with regard to questions of gender justice and the treatment of religious minorities.11 However, to develop a more complex and nuanced picture of South Asian Muslim scholarly traditions, it is imperative to bring into view the depth, details, and ambiguities of their internal disputes. That is exactly what this book seeks to do by sketching an intimate portrait of arguably the longest-running and most intellectually dense polemical encounter among ‘ulamā’ in modern South Asian Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy. And through a close reading of this controversy, I aim to provide a detailed picture of an important and sizable fragment of the intellectual landscape of Islam in modern South Asia. So what precisely was this debate about, and who are the central characters that shaped it? I next turn to these questions as a way to further clarify and elaborate the purpose and argument of this project.

Competing Rationalities of Tradition and Reform

Throughout this book I present and explain two competing rationalities of tradition and reform advanced by two rival factions of the Indian Muslim scholarly elite. One was a group of scholars whose conception of tradition pivoted on securing the absolute exceptionality of divine sovereignty.

To achieve this task, they articulated an imaginary of Prophet Muḥammad that emphasized his humanity and his subservience to the sovereign divine. They also assailed ritual practices and everyday habits that in their view undermined divine sovereignty or elevated the Prophet in a way that cast doubt on his humanity. One of the chief architects of this reform project was the early nineteenth-century Indian Muslim thinker Shāh Muḥammad Ismā‘īl (d. 1831). His reformist agenda was carried forward in the latter half of the century by the pioneers of the Deoband school, an Islamic seminary and normative orientation established in the North Indian town of Deoband in 1866.

Another group of influential North Indian Muslim scholars sharply challenged this movement of reform. They counterargued that divine

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sovereignty was inseparable from the authority of the Prophet as the most charismatic and most beloved of God’s creation. In their view, divine and prophetic exceptionality were not opposed but rather mutually constitutive and reinforcing. Moreover, they argued that undermining the distinguished status of the Prophet by portraying him as a mere human who also happened to be a recipient of divine revelation was anathema.

As a corollary, these scholars vigorously defended rituals and everyday practices that served to venerate the Prophet’s memory and charisma.

The polymath thinker Aḥmad Razā Khān spearheaded this counter-reformist movement. He was the founder of the Barelvī school, another ideological group that flourished in late nineteenth-century North India.

The Barelvī ideology was named after the town of Bareillī in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Khān was born. The Barelvī school was in many ways the intellectual heir of the nineteenth-century scholar Fazl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1861), who had vigorously opposed Shāh Muḥammad Ismā‘īl.

At the core of this book is the task of describing the normative aspirations and conflicts that defined the intellectual lives of these scholars, who were fluent and wrote interchangeably in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.

I will have occasion to introduce these scholars in more detail as this book unfolds. For now, it will suffice to mention that they were among the most prolific, widely followed, and contentious figures in modern South Asian Islam who were at once prominent jurists and Sufi masters. Their rival programs of reform contributed to one of the most abrasive and intensely fought polemical battles in the narrative of modern Islam. Their dispute has produced several oral and written polemics, rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, juridical and theological pronouncements of unbelief (takfīr), and traditions of storytelling that valorize some scholars and caricature their rivals.

Before proceeding, I should clarify my use of the term BarelvīDeobandī polemic throughout this book. This book engages both early and late nineteenth-century contexts with some important forays into the eighteenth century as well. So when I speak of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic, I have in mind this longer context, even though the Barelvī and Deobandī orientations emerged in the late nineteenth century. I do not mean to endorse a teleological narrative that views the emergence of these groups as inevitable. Rather, I employ this term as a compact heu-

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ristic device to describe a debate on the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and ritual practice, beginning in the early nineteenth century and taking on a group-oriented character in the latter part of the century.

The discursive space of this debate is occupied by a myriad of interconnected questions. For instance, how was a community required to organize its life in a way that demonstrated its subservience to a sovereign divine? What was the nature of the Prophet’s authority as a mediator between God and humans, in his capacity as an intercessor on the Day of Judgment? What kind of knowledge did the Prophet possess; did he have access to knowledge of the unknown (‘ilm al-ghayb)? What was the normative status of rituals, devotional practices, and everyday habits that lacked a precedent from the practice of the Prophet and his Companions? Under what conditions did such practices become heretical?

How was that decided? Another contentious question that drove this controversy had to do with God’s capacity to lie or contravene a promise (imkān-i kizb; Ar. kidhb) or to produce another Prophet Muḥammad (imkān-i naẓīr). These questions were situated at the interstices of law, theology, and everyday practice in Islam. To repeat my argument: the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy was animated by competing political theologies, each of which generated competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.

This book is called Defending Muḥammad in Modernity because the intra-Muslim conflict it details centered on competing imaginaries of Prophet Muḥammad. What image of the Prophet should anchor a Muslim’s normative orientation and everyday life? This question, at the kernel of the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy, assumed unprecedented urgency in the modern colonial moment. The condition of being colonized generated tremendous anxiety as well as anticipation about the aspiration of constructing an ideal Muslim public. And the contrasting images of Muḥammad made visible in the Barelvī-Deobandī controversy mapped onto divergent notions of an ideal Muslim subject and public. Muḥammad represented the hermeneutical key through which reform was imagined. Muḥammad was at stake in this polemic.

Almost all points of contention discussed in this book focus on Muḥammad: his capacity to intercede (on the Day of Judgment), transgressions against his normative model through heretical innovation, the status

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of his knowledge of the unknown, and the possibility of God producing another Muḥammad. In a certain sense then, this book is an account of how major Muslim scholars of modern South Asia wrestled with Muḥammad in modernity, proffering contrasting images of his character and persona in the arena of Muslim normativity. While harboring vigorous disagreement, all the Prophet’s Indian men who drive the narrative of this book were in fierce agreement about the importance of mobilizing, managing, and defending their vision of “normative Muḥammad” as a vehicle for religious reform. The pioneers of the Deobandī and Barelvī movements were not alone in their zealous contestation of what Muḥammad represented in modernity. Rather, as Kecia Ali has importantly argued, in the nineteenth century the search for the authentic and historically verifiable Muḥammad also “came to dominate Western approaches to Muhammad’s life.” “Their preoccupations intersected with those of Muslim religious thinkers, traditional scholars, and Western educated reformers,” Ali helpfully adds.12 The originators of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic have passed on.

But even today, almost two hundred years later, the questions and debates that captured the imagination of these nineteenth-century actors continue to generate passionate reactions. In both contemporary India and Pakistan, the stakes and arguments of this polemical encounter permeate not only Muslim institutions of learning, as the work of Arshad Alam shows, but also sites of everyday life such as neighborhoods, mosques, and public libraries, as Naveeda Khan has ably documented.13 The onset of the digital age has further amplified the intensity and the geographic scope of the controversy. On various websites and in various polemical chat rooms — populated by both indigenous and diaspora South Asian Muslims from such places as the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa — rival ideologies and opinions are incessantly discussed, debated, dissected, and repudiated.14 Far from having faded away over the years, this controversy has only gone viral.

This book is the first sustained study of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic — its key moments, arguments, narratives, and ambiguities — that considers the entire swath of the nineteenth century as well as important precedents from the late eighteenth century. My sources include previously unexplored manuscript and print sources in Arabic, Persian,

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and Urdu, including polemical texts, reform literature, collections of sermons and letters, narrative histories, texts on law and theology, collections of legal opinions (fatāwā), and biographies. In addition to providing a close reading of legal and theological arguments, I have striven to draw vivid portraits of eminent South Asian Muslim scholars so as to bring to life the sensibilities, anxieties, and tensions that pervaded their intellectual lives and journeys. This project takes up a number of connected yet somewhat disparate conceptual themes and concerns. Thus I have drawn on a rather eclectic theoretical tool kit ranging from works in political theology, secularism studies, ritual studies, legal theory, and narrative theory. Throughout this book I have sought to contrapuntally engage the thought of South Asian Muslim scholars with Western philosophical and literary discourses. I have tried to do so in a manner that might clarify the depth, stakes, and particularities of the former while also connecting Muslim texts and contexts with questions and conversations in religious studies and the broader humanities. In a certain sense, then, this book represents a conversation between particular fragments of the Muslim and Western humanities, conducted in a fashion that will hopefully shed some productive light on both.

Conceptual Architecture

Conceptually, this work interrogates authoritative discourses invested in strategically controlling the boundaries of religion. Authoritative discourse, as described by Talal Asad, is “discourse which seeks continually to preempt the space of radically opposed utterances and so prevent them from being uttered.”15 This book exhibits the tactics and strategies through which rival custodians of tradition assembled their religious authority by seeking to preempt each other’s space and capability to act as a rightful custodian. Their religious authority — their claim to represent authenticity — depended on the existence and conditions of their polemical encounter. Their entanglement in this contingent encounter, with unpredictable consequences, was what made possible their capacity to act and speak authoritatively as demarcators of tradition and its limits. As Asad famously put it, “An encounter, not a communication, lies at the heart of authority.”16