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Affection and Aversion: Ambivalences Among Muslim Intellectual Elites in Contemporary South Asia Jan-Peter Hartung South Asia Research 2001 21: 189 DOI: 10.1177/026272800102100203 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sar.sagepub.com/content/21/2/189.citation

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AFFECTION AND AVERSION: AMBIVALENCES AMONG MUSLIM INTELLECTUAL ELITES IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA Jan-Peter

Hartung

A recent article

by Michael Roberts emphasises the necessity of understanding prehistory, in order to thoroughly comprehend the transformations that occurred under colonialism Similarly, the understanding of contemporary history requires historical contextualisation, i.e., it is necessary to take into account colonial as well as pre-colonial history as prerequisite for the present. This requirement seems to have been widely recognised in current Islamic Studies in the last few years, as the works of Reinhard Schulze and Jamal Malik, for instancq, indicate.2 But historical contextualisation is only one side of the coin. A thorough compre,hension of cultural phenomena, in the widest possible sense, requires other contextualisations as well, e.g., spatial and social, to mention just two. In order to meet these requirements for the analysis of contemporary colonial

Muslim societies in South Asia better, this article pursues two main aims. The first is essentially methodological: the article is concerned with a critical discussion of prevailing typologies for structuring the analysis of contemporary Muslim societies, and argues that these typologies are too inflexible to do justice to the dynamic character of society. An endeavour has been made to offer an alternative typology which will be illustrated by one example from the South Asian context. Second, the article suggests that contemporary Muslim societies in South Asia cannot be thoroughly analysed within the South Asian context alone; issues debated among Muslim intellectual 61ites in contemporary South’ Asia are not restricted to their local context, but are discussed within a transnational framework also.’ Thus, both spatially-defined cultural frames of reference are interrelated; that is to say, an issue debated in one context shapes the debate in the other context, and vice versa. Bearing in mind this wider scope of the topic, it becomes apparent that such studies cannot be undertaken within the spectrum, and with the tools, of a single discipline. This article should therefore be understood as a plea for an even

1 Cf. Michael Roberts, ’Submerging the People? Post-Orientalism and the Construction of Communalism’ in Georg Berkemer et al ., eds, Explorations in the History of South Asia: in Honour of Dietmar Rothermund , New Delhi, 2001, pp. 311-23. Essays 2 Cf. e.g., Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Islamischen Weltliga, Leiden, 1990; Jamal Malik, ’Muslim Societies in British India’ in Berkemer et ., al eds, Explorations in the History of South Asia, pp. 257-76. 3 On the complex terms of ’transnationalism’ and ’translocalism’, cf. Luis E. Guarnizo, ’The Locations of Transnationalism’ in Luis E. Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith, eds, Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, 1998, pp. 15-20.

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190

approach: social phenomena in all their complexity can multifocal view that combines the analysis of social with the examination of the contents of discourse.

stronger interdisciplinary

only

be

perceived by

structures

a

The Problem Muslim societies were exposed to drastic changes from the late eighteenth century onwards for a variety of reasons. In the Middle East these changes were set off mainly in the course of cultural contact with the Europeans, whereas the situation in South Asia was more complex. An additional factor, along with the advance of the British, was the breakdown of the centralist Mughal empire into regional principalities which increasingly had to deal with the minority status of Muslims. Diverging interests of the respective rulers, and an ongoing threat to their power by other religio-political movements, such as Shivaji’s advance from Maharashtra, and the Sikh movement under Ranjit Singh in greater Punjab, seem to have weakened the normative ideal of a united umma, at least in the view of Muslim intellectual elites. The so-called Wahllibi uproars in 1831-35, and the ’Mutiny’ in 1857 brought further changes to the Muslim communities in South Asia. Different strategies emerged from the analysis of the revolt and its bloody suppression by the British. All had one thing in common, however: they blamed the moral decline of the Muslim communities ~in India, which they held responsible for the failing of the uprisings, as well as the Muslims’ weak position in colonial society. As a consequence of this internal critique, religious reform movements increasingly emerged in post-Mutiny British India. Despite the diversity of these movements, they pursued, although perhaps unintentionally, one common aim: to create a modem and self-confident Muslim, by means of a reformed system of education. This, they hoped, would reunite the Muslim communities of South Asia. One important example is the traditionalist school of Deoband, which considers itself to belong to the direct succession of the eighteenth century reformer Shah Wali-allah of Delhi (d. 1’~62).4 Another is the even more traditionalist movement of the Ahl-i Hadith. initiated and administered by Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan Qannawji (d. 1890), the Nawab of Bhopal, and formatively influenced by Sayyid Nazir Husayn of Delhi (d. 1902) and Husayn b. Muhsin al-Yamani (d. 1909). They too fell back upon thoughts of Shah Wali-allah and, beyond that, upon the ideas of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi ’ash-Shahid’ (killed 1831), as well as upon the works of the Yemenite judge (qfi4i) Muhammad b. ’Ali ash-Shawkani (d. 1832). In opposition to these two strongly Hadi_th-centred movements, the popular and integrationist movement of the Barelwtya emerged, founded by Ahmad Riza Khan (d. 1921) in Bareilly at around 1885, and the famous Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, established under the decisive overall control of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898). Last but not least, mention must be made of the Nadwat al-‘Ulama’ (hereafter ’Nadwa’) which had its base in Lucknow and was founded in 1893. The 4

Cf. Qari Muhammad, ’Muqaddima’ in Sayyid Mahbub Rizwi, Tārī kh -i Dār al-’Ulūm , Deoband, 1976-77, Vol. I , pp. 12-16, 92-94. Deoband

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191

Nadwa was meant to act as a parent organisation for the newly established religious educational institutions, with the object of harmonising their diverging positions for a pragmatic purpose:5 to revitalise the great cultural and political heritage of Islam in direct confrontation with the threatening cultural dominance of the British and the Hindus and, in this way, to generate a new Muslim self-consciousness. Apart from other structural changes in the South Asian society, these religious educational institutions and movements were responsible for the emergence of new functional elites in the ongoing process of Muslim selfaffirmation, and the development of a new Muslim self-confidence. Furthermore, at the beginning of the twentieth century, other movements developed which appeared to be detached from the traditional upholders and administrators of religious knowledge, i.e., the Muslim scholars l’ ulam£’). This division becomes obvious and even more serious because of the numerous polemical and heseriographical works written and circulated by both sides. One prominent example of such a movement is the Jama’at-i lsl5m!, founded in 1941, and ideologically based on the works of the Indo-Muslim thinker Sayyid Abu I-A’la Mawdudi (1903-1979). It makes sense, in many respects, to investigate more thoroughly the relationship between these new functional elites, for whom Mawdudi serves as the example par excellence, and the leading representatives of Muslim scholarship in contemporary South Asia. On the one hand, this relation seems to point to a fundamental problem in contemporary Islam in general, and thus its analysis for the South Asian context might provide a comparative framework for investigations in other local contexts. On the other hand, this examination can provide empirical data to assist the current efforts of mainly Western scholars to find improved and more suitable typologies for describing the structure and function of Muslim societies. It goes without saying that much more detailed work has to be done to develop more differentiated analytic categories, especially for the case I am concerned with in this article, namely the relations between Muslim intellectual 61ites in the twentieth century. What Reinhard Schulze called the dichotomy of ’ulainj’ and intellectuals (mufakkii-dn) which is supposed to be . rooted in the eighteenth century,’ is much more complicated in the instance I am concerned with. Because of the fact that Mawdudi obtained a formal theological education from eminent Deoband scholars in Delhi’s Fatihpuri Masjid during the years 1914 and 1926,’ and received from them his authoritative teaching permissions (ijazat), he 5

of the Ahl-i , th monographs about the emergence of all these i Had institutions have been written in Western languages. Cf. David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, Princeton, 1978; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900, Princeton, 1982; Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870-1920, Delhi, 1996; Jamal Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien. und Tendenzen am Beispiel von Lucknow, Leiden, 1997. Entwicklungsgeschichte 6 Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert, p. 17 and passim. 7 Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, New York, 1996, p 18; Jamal Malik, ’Islamic Institutions and Infrastructure in a jah Sh d b n ’ in Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft, eds, a jah and Old Delhi. Tradition and Colonial Change, Stuttgart, Sh d b n With the

exception

movements and

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However, most authors have placed Vali Reza Nasr, in his monograph on Mawdudi, tried to explain the breaking-off of a considerable number of ’ulatnd’ with Mawdudi and his religio-political organisation Jamd’at-i lsldmi, he threw light on the reproach of some of those ’ularnd’ who accused Mawdudi of pursuing unacceptable innovations in theological matters (bid’a) and sectarianism (ta6q), still within the framework of traditional scholarship.9 Despite the fact that this approach is based on polemical sources, it is not sufficient to explain why this ambivalence can also be found in the works of recognised religious scholars, such as the former head of the Nadwat al- ’Ulamä’, Mawlana Sayyid Abu 1-Hasan ’Ali alHasani Nadwi, commonly known as ’Ali Miyan (1913-99). It might be possible to come closer to a solution to this typological problem by adopting the typology of M. S. Agwani. He postulates the existence of a quietist and activist faction within the traditional Islamic scholarship from the ninth century onwards. JO According to Agwani, this factionalism attained a new intensity in the subcontinent from the eighteenth century on, resulting from diverging interpretations of the works of Shah Wali-allah. This approach offers the possibility for understanding the internal break in a historical continuum, and therefore makes possible its compartmentalisation into ’modem’ and ’traditional’, in the conventional sense of the terms, unnecessary, at least for the question I am concerned with. Younger institutions that appear in a traditional image, such as the D5r all ’ulüm in Deoband, and its affiliates, or the institutions in Lucknow, result from modem developments, but nevertheless settle among themselves the internal discourse between ’quietists’ and ‘activists’.&dquo; It is this very momentum that suggests a much more differentiated typology than the one Agwani tries to establish, to distinguish the anti-colonial and reform-oriented Islamic scholarship from its predecessors from the eighteenth century onwards. Schulze adopts the term Salafiya which had been used as an epigraph in the logo of the journal al- ’Urwa al- Wu thqi by its editors, namely the Muslim scholar and reformer of Persian Sayyid Jamal ad-din al-Afghani (d. 1897), and the Cairene Muhammad ’Abduh (d. 1905) who in turn was al-Afghani’s pupil and

formally has

to be

him among the

placed

among the ‘r.tlama’.

mufakkirun ~ But when Seyyed

origin

1993, p. 62. Malik points

out that the Fātihpūrī Masjid has been a centre of the Ahl-i , th i Had least since 1857. In this context, it has to be stressed that a thorough analysis of the relation between the school of Deoband, and the movement of the Ahl-i Had th has not yet i been undertaken. 8 M oreover, I wonder whether the use of this category makes any sense at all. Accordingly, if the category is used, it should at least be done very carefully. But see Julien Benda, La Trahison de Clercs, Paris, 1973; Dietz Bering, Die Intellektuellen: Geschichte eines , Schimpfwortes Stuttgart, 1978. 9 Cf. Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, p. 110 and passim. Cf. M. S. Agwani, Islamic Fundamentalism in India, Chandigarh, 1986, pp. 2-15. 10 " Cf. Jamal Malik, ’Islam in Südasien’ in Albrecht Noth and Jürgen Paul, eds, Der islamische Orient. Grundzüge seiner Geschichte, Würzburg, 1998, pp. 520-23; Malik, Islamischer Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, pp. 513-20. at

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for many years.12 This term is used to express a new quality of the discourse within the ’l11amä’, i.e., the orientation towards an ideological aim which consists of a reference to the Muhammadan umma, as it was constituted by the ’pious forefathers’ (as-salaf as-s~lih). 13 But what has been typical for the Salafiya was to prove the eternal validity of Islam in confrontation with Western modernity. Here, the movement stands in clear opposition to the strictly script-oriented and spatially confined religious movement of the Wahhabiya, for instance, which emerged around the same time in the Najd-region of today’s Saudi Arabia. Within the Salafiya one can again recognise a quietist and an activist stream. 14 Both trends go back to the heritage of their respective predecessors, as an indirect recourse to Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111), on the one hand, and a direct reference to Taqi d-din b. Taymiya (d. 1328), on the other, exemplifies.’S However, both also show clear integrationist tendencies. Thus, the activist Salafiya constitutes the link between Salafi scholars and the intellectuals who gradually started to dominate this particular trend. In opposition to this, the quietist Salafiya obviously integrates certain trends and elements of Sufism (tasa4vwuf}, as the example of Abu 1-Hasan ’Ali Nadwi clearly shows. 16 Nadwi’s personality is considered to be paradigmatic for post-Partition Islamic scholarship in India. Bom as the second son of the traditionalist historiographer Mawlana Hakim ’Abd al-Hayy al-Hasani (d. 1923), &dquo; who had been

companion

12

J ahrhundert p. 47, n. 107. Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. , Henri Laoust, ’Les Réformisme Orthodoxe des ’Salafiya’ et les Charactères Généraux de son Orientation Actuelle’, Revue des Études Islamiques , Vol. 6, No. 2, 1932, p. 12; Ali Merad, s.v., ’Islāh’, Encyclopedia of Islam, second edn, Leiden, 1990, pp. 141-63. 13

It seems to be much more convenient to name these two trends within the Salafīya the , because it points much way I did, compared to Schulze’s terms Salafīya and Neo-Salafīya better to the diverging methodological and intentional approaches of both groupings. Already the prefix ’neo-’ implies a trend which lies chronologically before the current one, from which the ’neo’-trend wants to stand out. (One may recall in this context the naming of different epochs in the history of art!) However, Schulze’s use of the two terms Salafīya and Neo-Salafīya connote two chronologically parallel-running trends which, moreover, interact in certain ways. 15 For instance, the parallels between al-Ghazali’s classification of the sciences in his the curriculum of the m a D r u al-’Ul in Deoband are , Book 1, Ch. 3, Ihyā’ ’Ulūm ad-Dīn m Deoband, Vol. 2, pp. 261-308. Ibn Taymiya’s u obvious. Cf. Rizwi, a i r T k h-i D r al-Ul a Kitāb as-Sīyāsat arī’a , Beirut, 1988 is of special importance sh fī Isl a S h ar-Rā’ī wa Ra’īya ā be found in significant modem theoretical works on the in our context. Its essence Islamic state, for example, Mawdudi’s a Kh f il at wa , yat Delhi, 1997 or, although i k u Mul mat-i Isl u a i y m embedded in a Sh ’ite world-view, Ruhollah Musawi Khumayni, Huk i a Ashraf, 1389/1970. y a Wil at-i Najaf-i , h i Faq 16 Jamal Malik, ’Der Rat der Islamgelehrten zwischen nationaler Integration und Islamismus’ in C. Weiss, ed., Religion - Gesellschaft - Gewalt: Hindu-Moslem-Konflikte in Südasien , Frankfurt/M, 1995, p. 171; Abu l-Hasan ’Ali Nadwi, Tazkīya wa Ahsān yā Tasawwuf wa , Lucknow, 1989. k u Sul 17 In this respect, one may recall Abd al-Hayy’s opus magnum, Nuzhat alawātir wa Kh miwa , a al-Mas zir 8 vols, Haidarabad, 1947-68. On the importance of this a n-Naw Bahjat ’ influential work, cf. Malik, Islamischer Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, pp. 65-69. 14

and

can

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194

the second head (na.zim) of the Nadwa, Nadwi’s family history is mingled with the institution’s efforts to negotiate between the different branches of reformist Muslim scholarship in the subcontinent. He grew up in an atmosphere of the Indian intellectual 61ites’ newly developed awareness towards the colonial power. In his extensive autobiography, Kdrwdn-i Zindagi, Nadwi recalls the Khilafat movement of 1919-21 as one of the early major influences on his life and ideas At that time, the transformation process of Muslim communities, at least in South Asia and the Middle East, entered into a new stagt, as far as the role of formally educated religious 61ites for the community was concerned. The growing tension among as well as what is now called ’communalism’ different religious communities the impact of Western political thought on indigenous ideas of state and governance and the evolving nationalism in the late 1930s and early 1940s marked the early period of Nadwi’s life. It was also during that period that the impact of Deobandi scholarship, manifest mainly in teacher-pupil relations, apparently left indelible marks on him. Although politically very active, influential teachers like Husayn Ahmad Madani (d. 1957) or Ahmad ’Ali Lahawri (d. 1962) opted for an opposite attitude towards the upcoming idea of an ethnic Muslim state in South Asia. 19 Nadwi’s position, moreover, represents in a striking way the dilemma of Muslims in the Indian Union after the partition in 1947. A considerable number of eminent Muslim thinkers, among them Mawdudi, migrated to Pakistan and established a discourse of their own, primarily concerned with the question of a constitution for the first nominal Muslim nation-state.2&dquo; On the other hand, those intellectual 61ites among the Indian Muslims, who remained in the Indian Union faced a dilemma: the demand for integration into a nominal secular polity counterbalanced by the danger of losing a religious and cultural identity, being a de t~cto minority.2’ Bearing this in mind, it becomes obvious that the boundaries between activist and quietist Salafiya are not fixed but, for pragmatic reasons, rather fluid. This can be seen not only in the example of Nadwi, but also in the lives and works of such eminent Muslim thinkers as Husayn Ahmad Madani or AbulKalam Azad (d. 1958).22 Such a position, which may appear ambivalent and contradictory to us, can be illustrated by the controversy surrounding Mawdudi that took place within Islamic circles in South Asia and in a transnational context -

-

simultaneously. 18

Abu 1-Hasan ’Ali Nadwi, a r K n -i w

, Lucknow, 1983, i Zindag

Vol. 1, pp. 70-73 and

. passim Cf. Peter Hardy, Partners in Freedom - and True Muslims. The Political Thought of Some 19 Muslim Scholars in British India, 1912-1947 , Lund, 1971, pp. 20, 31-41; Ziya-ul-Hasan The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan , London, 1963, pp. 67-121. Faruqi, 20 On this ongoing debate Jan-Peter Hartung, ’Gottesstaat versus Kemalismus. Eine islamische Reaktion auf Musarrafs Putsch in Pakistan’, Religion - Staat - Gesellschaft, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000, pp. 75-94. 21 Hardy, Partners in Freedom, pp. 19-42. 22 Ian Henderson Douglas, Abul Kalam Azad: An Intellectual and Religious Biography, ed. Gail Minault and Christian Troll, Delhi, 1988; Husayn Ahmad Madani, Naq sh -i Hay , 2 t a vols, Deoband,1372/1953.

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195

The South Asian Context The criticism which quietist

’ularnd’

theological positions that determine, in

towards Mawdudi refers to

interpretation of religion (din), Chär BunyddY Istilahen, Risdlat-i

be derived from his treatises Qur’an 16 and Khildfat wa Muliïkïyat.23 The active role, however, of a considerable number of exactly these quietist ’ulamj’, who shared Mawdudi’s way of thinking as well as participated in the activities of the early Jamd’at-i Isläm¡24 and, over and above that, their admiration of other historical personalities of the activist Salafiya 2-’ appear to be in sharp contradiction to the above-mentioned criticism. After all, this criticism had consequences of a political dimension: it culminated in a f3tw/ campaign of Deobandi Salafis and Barelwis against Mawdudi and the Jama’ati Isldmi in 1952. They went so far as to accuse Mawdudi of ’giving unorthodox Qur’anic and hadith interpretations, departing from the norms of Hanafi law, issuing unorthodox religious verdicts, belittling the importance of the Prophet, insulting the companions of the Prophet, indulging in Wahhabism, sympathizing with the Ahmadis, having Mahdiist ’pretensions, and, in some cases, demonstrating as

it

expressed

essence, his

can

Dufyat,

Khariji tendencies.’ 26 How these points of critique, as stated by Nasr, can really be derived from Mawdudi’s works would require a thorough analysis of the polemical and heseriographical writings of his adversaries such as we do not yet possess. For this reason, I am not able to deal ~in detail with the complexity of the debate with the Deobandis, for instance. Instead, I will concentrate on some major criticisms by Nadwi of Mawdudi’s interpretation of dogmatic contents, as an example for the ambivalent relationship between the activist and the quietist Salafiya. Despite Nadwi’s split with the Jamä’at-i Isldmi, and with its spiritual father in 1943, he did not present his internal criticism until 1978, when the first edition of his book Asr-i Hadir men Din ki Tathim wa Tashtih was published. 27 23

Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, pp. 116-19; Jamal Malik, ’Muslimische Gesellschaften in Südasien’ in Bernd Rill, ed., Aktuelle Profile der Islamischen Welt, Munich, 1998, pp. 307-11. 24 Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama ’at-i Islami of Pakistan , a 1947, Lahore, 1997, ’at-i m a : i a 1941 t Isl Berkeley, 1994, p. 23; Sayyid As’ad Gilani, Jam i awr ’Ulam d u ’-i Kar a m: Ek Tajziya, a n Mawd a pp. 173, 408-15; Iqbal Ahmad Nadwi, Mawl K r n -i w Zindag Vol. 1, pp. 241-47. Lahore, 1996, pp. 23-26; ’Ali Nadwi, a , i 25 Examples for this, although from today’s perspective surprisingly, are the Deobandi Mawlana Muhammad Manzur Nu’mani (d. 1995) and Abu 1-Hasan ’Ali Nadwi. Both have been influenced to a certain extent by the works of the already mentioned Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi ’ash-Shahid’ and Jamal ad-din al-Afghani, and have been members of the constituting a ’at in 1942-43, and became ’at-i Isl a mi. However, they left the Jam a assembly of the Jam ulam ’ ’ . Cf. two of the fiercest critics of Mawdudi from among the quietist-salafit a th Mer a ik d u es i Rif i Sarguzasht warab a n Mawd Muhammad Manzur Nu’mani, Mawl qat k a a Mawqif Mer , Lucknow, 1998. 26 Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, p. 118. 27 Cf. Malik, ’Der Rat der Islamgelehrten’, p. 160; ibid., ’Muslimische Gesellschaften in Südasien’, pp. 307-11.

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196

There is

a

tension in the

positions referring

to the

relationship

between

theory

and

.hand, and knowledge and belief on the other. Given the level on practice which this controversy is held, there is no way to bring about a formal-logical solution to the conflict. It is clearly a conflict of world-views and can, therefore, only be solved in a rhetorical way. To put this in the words of one of the first on

the

one

world-views: ’Which philosophy one chooses depends on what kind of man one iS.,2X The dispute between Nadwi and Mawdudi culminates in their respective concepts of Islam: to Mawdudi, it is a force that shapes society, and arises from a hierarchical relation between God and many whereas to Nadwi, it is ’rather an internalised message of God for man’ ~&dquo; that arises from a partnership based on almost equal rights. Obviously, Nadwi refers to a paradigm of knowledge of tasawwuf, the aim of which is not the belief in God (7’man), but the knowledge fi-om God highest (ma ’rifa). The unio mystica that is achieved by means of the purification of the soul of every individual (tazktya) is the prerequisite for mastering all the problems in the world, according to his view. ~ ’ This paradigm of knowledge is shared by one of the most influential contemporary quietist movements, the Tabri2vi Jamd’at, with which Nadwi had closest affinities all his life. z Even if Mawdudi seems not to have disliked tasawwuf as much as ,hits polemics might lead us to believe, 33 for him the Islamic social system, based on the _shari ‘a, constitutes the indispensible prerequisite for a deeper understanding of God and religion, within the meaning of tajawwufi

European theorists of

in reality, the term for true love towards God and the God’s blessing be upon him and salvation that is, for lshq messenger And the prerequisite for ’ishq is that no one deviates from God’s commands, and the normative conduct of His messenger - God’s blessings be upon him and salvation by an inch. Therefore, Islamic tasawwuf is nothing else than shari’a.34

Tasawwuf is,

-

.

-

The meaning of the notion of _shari ‘a is another point of controversy, as to whether it refers to different points of view on history, development or transition. Nadwi, 28

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Versuch einer neuen Darstellung , Hamburg, 1984, p. 17, translation mine. (1797) Einleitung 29 Hartung, ’Gottesstaat versus Kemalismus’, pp 80-90. 30 Malik, ’Der Rat der Islamgelehrten’, p. 160, translation mine. 31 Cf. Abul-Hasan ’Alī Nadwi, ’Asr-i Hādir Men Dīn kī Tafhīm

der Wissenschaftslehre .

wa

rīh, Lucknow, sh Ta

1980, pp. 73-105. 32 Cf. Muhammad Khalid Masud, ed., Travellers in Faith: Studies of the i ’at as a a gh Jam Tabl Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal, Leiden, 2000, pp. 12, 80, 122-24. 33 A good insight into Mawdudi’s ambivalent position towards tasawwuf , including the i order, is provided in ’Asim Nu’mani, Tasawwuf awr affiliation of his family to the Chisht Ta’mīr-i sīrat Mawlānā Mawdūī kī tahrīron kī Rōshnī Mēn , Delhi, 1979. 34 Abu l-A’l a Mawdudi, Ris lat-i D a , 1932, Delhi, 1997, p. 156. t a y n i

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197

apparently, regards world history and the law that builds its basis (shari ‘a) as a dynamic process in a Hegelian sense.35 Accordingly, out of their inherent aspiration for highest perfection, history and law change permanently. In contrast, Mawdudi needs a static concept of nature (as the essence of Creation) and law, in order to be able to always refer to the two normative sources of Islam, the Qur’an and the prophetic Sunna: After all, the sl7aN’a is a constant shal’a. Its rules do not relate to the customs or the fashion of any particular people or time, but they are based on the foundations of nature on which man has been born. If nature does not change at any time and under any condition, so, too, the rules on which (nature) lies have to be permanent at every time and under every condition

The Transnational Context The dispute between Mawdudi and Nadwi can be understood as being absolutely paradigmatic, for it shows the embedding of both personalities in a transnational context, although this spatial category should be considered to be an ideal, typical one. Nadwi, as a leading representative of the Nadwat al-’Ulamd’, has for a long time been connected with particular religious scholars and scholarly organisations in Egypt and the Hijaz,&dquo; as his first travel to Saudi Arabia in 1947 proves. Through contact with certain Salafi scholars from the Hijdz, he got to know Sayyid Qutb (executed 1966) and his writings around this time .38 It seems that through this particular relation, Nadwi came to have direct and intense contacts with the activist

35 Nadwi, ’Asr-i Hādir’, p. 17 and passim . lat-i i a 36 Mawdudi, Ris , t a y n D p. 184. 37 It may be assumed that informal connections between Islamic scholars of different local the earliest times on. A connecting momentum has in the first place been Mecca ), hajj and the visit to al-Madina. Cf. the contributions of ( Abderrahmane El Moudden and Barbara D. Metcalf in Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds, Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, Berkeley, 1990, pp. 69-107. From the late nineteenth century on, these connections reached a qualitatively new dimension, due to the efforts to transnationalise learned communities, ay Sh al’ mainly for political reasons. In South Asia, pioneers in this respect have been kh Hind’ Mahmud al-Hasan b. Dhu 1-Fiqar (d. 1920) of the Deobandis, his disciple ’Ubayd-allah Sindhi (d. 1944), Abul-Kalam Azad, and, at the time of the Khilafat movement (1919-24), also thinkers such as Muhammad Shah lqbal (d. 1938), and the ’Ali brothers Muhammad (d. 1931) and Shawkat (d. 1938); cf. Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses, New York, 1986, pp. 59-61. An account on that 1947 travel is offered by Nadwi, a K r n , i -i Vol. Zindag w 1, pp. 326-51; also Abul-Hasan ’Ali al-Hasani an-Nadwi, i sh ī, Beirut, 1403/1983, for an even more detailed akkirāt Sā’ih f dh Mu S arq h al-’Arab account of Nadwi’ssecond and obviously much more important travel to the Hij z and other a Middle Eastern countries in 1951. Cf. Nadwi, Mu 38 , Lucknow, 1980, Vol. 3, pp. 23gh irā , pp. 107-9; ibid., Purānē Ch akkirāt dh 38.

origin existed from the pilgrimage to

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Salafiya in the Arabic-speaking world. 39 Nevertheless, this relationship was characterised by the same ambivalences as was his relationship with Mawdudi. 411 The material available to me does not provide any real hints to explain how Mawdudi came to have access to Arab organisations. On the one hand, he- started to travel outside South Asia, and lecture abroad frequently from 1956 on;41 on the other hand, it might be that Nadwi contributed greatly to making Mawdudi known among the activist Salafiya.42 Moreover, as delegates of their respective countries, both participated in the ’Second General Islamic Conference of Jerusalem’ (alMu’tamar at-Isidmi al- ’Amm li I-Quds) in Damascus which, by that time, was heavily dominated by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Jam ‘iyat al-Ikhwan alMuslimin), and thus became a transnation al platform of the activist Salafiya.43 From the 1960s onwards, Nadwi and Mawdudi have finally been acknowledged as the major representatives of the respective factions within the Indian Salafiya. As a result, both became members even officials’- of a number of the same transnational bodies: -

I ) Nadwi was one of the founding members of the Supreme Constitutive Council of the Islamic University of al-Madina (Jami’at al-Isldmiyat li 1 Madina al-Munawwara) which was founded in 1961, at the instigation of the Saudi Arabian king Sa’ud b. ’Abd al-’Aziz, as the Hijazi equivalent to the Egyptian al-Azhar University. At that time, Mawdudi was consulted solely on an informal level, but became a full member in 1963. 44 2) Both Nadwi and Mawdudi became members of the Constitutive

Assembly (al-Majlis at-Ta’sisi) of the World Muslim League (Rabitat al‘Alam al-lslami) which had gathered between the 18 and 20 May 1962 in Mecca. The aim of this meeting was declared to be as follows:

39

Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert , p. 322 passim; Gudrun Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik: Reflexion zeitgenössischer Muslime zu Islam, Menschenrechten , und Demokratie Baden-Baden, 1999, pp. 223-26. 40 The mutuality of Nadwi and Sayyid Qutb at an early stage of their relationship might be characterised by the prefaces Sayyid Qutb wrote for two of Nadwi’s most eminent Arabic asira lwritings. Cf. Sayyid Qutb, ’al-Muqaddima’ in Abu 1-Hasan ’Ali an-Nadwi, a dh Kh M lam bi-Inhit a ’ , Cairo, 1994, pp. 10-14; ibid., ’al-Muqaddima’ in an-Nadwi, n i t al-Muslim a Beirut, 1417/1996, pp. 3-4. The tension which dominates their Qissas later relation has been incorporated in all of Nadwi’s treatises on Mawdudi. 41 Khurshid Ahmad et al., Mawlana Mawdudi: An Introduction to his Life and Thought, u l-A’l a Delhi, 1992, p. 52; Chawdhri ’Abd-ar Rahim ’Abd, Mufakkir-i Islam: Sayyid Ab , Lahore, 1971, pp. 287-94. i d u Mawd 42 Ibid. , p. 17; Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, New Haven, 1990, pp. 21-28. 43 Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert , pp. 113-21. 44 . 283; ’Abd, Mufakkir-i Isl ., pp. 113-58, 280, n Ibid m, pp. 293-96; Ahmad, Mawlana a Mawdudi, p. 17.

i an-Nab n a y , l li-l-Atf

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In the presence of the dangers that the Islamic world is facing, the conference recommends the foundation of an Islamic League, which would be expected to organise the mutual cooperation of the Islamic countries in different political, economical and cultural

fields. 41 Within the

Ribitat a1- ’Ãlam

al-Isl£nf ~vhich understands itself as the of all the Islamic associations, Nadwi and Mawdudi number of committees together:

parent organisation acted in

a

3) Both belonged to the founding members of the Islamic Academy on the of Islam (Majma’Isldrni ’ald MabdTl’ al-lsldm) founded in 1973.

Principles

The purpose of this institution was to create a common and binding ’new Islamic standard of law’ . 4‘’ However, Mawdudi withdrew from active politics in the same year, and conferred his duty as leader (amir) of the Jamd’at-i lsldmi upon his successor Miyan Tufayl Muhammad (b. 1914). course of the coordination of the propagation work (da’’wa), as of the central issues of the Rdbita, the Supreme World Council of Mosques (al-Majlis al-A’ld al-’ Alamili I-Masdjid) was brought into being in 1975. Nadwi and Miyan Tufayl Muhammad, who plead continually for Mawdudi’s positions and therefore has to be mentioned, belonged to the members of this council ever since its.foundation.

4) In the one

5) Last but not least, Nadwi, as well as Mawdudi, used the journalistic possibilities offered by the Rdbita for portraying their respective viewpoints. The journals World Muslim League (Singapore), and Maja11at Ribitat al- ’l4Jan al Islaml (Mecca) must be mentioned in this context. For reasons that one can only guess, Mawdudi tended to use these platforms to a

lesser

extent.

Nadwi carried his criticism

openly

towards

Mawdudi’s

theological

positions into these transnational bodies, as well, His treatise ‘As_ 1’-1 Hadir men Din ki Thflfm wa Tasliiih was translated into Arabic soon after its first Urdu edition, and circulated among the Arab intellectual and religious dlites, as at- Tafsir as-Sïyäsï 1ï I-Isldm ti Mir’dt Kitabat aJ-Ustidh Abu 1-A ‘la al-Mawdüdï wa s1?-Sh afiis Sayyid Qutb. Another example I would like to draw upon here is a memorial speech delivered to the delegates of the ’Supreme Seminary for Mission and Islamic Thinking of the Nadwat al-’Ulam,~’ in Lucknow, on the occasion of Mawdudi’s death in 1979. Most of the speech was published verbatim in the weekly newspaper

, p. 190, 45 Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert Schulze, 46

translation mine.

Ibid. , p. 292.

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Akb bar al-’Alarn al-Islami (Mecca).47 This newspaper, edited since 1966 by the Rdbita, became ’the official newspaper of the League’ in the early 1970s. ~ Therefore there is considerable significance in the fact that Nadwi’s speech was published in it which gives us some sense of the respective positions of both thinkers in the transnational context. At the beginning of his speech, Nadwi, in contrast to most Muslim analysts of crises from the late nineteenth century on, still laid emphasis on the fact that the major merit of Mawdudi’s endeavour was his constant and systematic search for the normative foundations of a society which could serve as an alternative to those of the Western colonial powers. In doing so, according to Nadwi, Mawdudi became one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. Nadwi also mentioned their personal relationship, and pointed out their ’differences in the way of understanding and representing some truths and religious particularities, their opinion on Islamic history, on the necessity of educating and purifying the individual SOUI.,49 In pointing out these differences, he applied his criticism of Mawdudi’s viewpoints in Qur’an ki Char Bunyädi I$tilälJ., e{1 and the Risalat Diniyät, as elaborated in ’Asr-i Hadir men Din ki Tathim wa Tashri{1. In addition to that, he refers to Mawdudi’s reaction to this criticism, as set forth in a letter from January 1979 the last letter Nadwi was to receive from Mawdudi.5° Nadwi repeated here, albeit in a more conciliatory tone, some of the views he expressed in ‘Asr Hddir men Din ki Tafhim wa Tashdh: the existence of a dynamic world process that manifests itself in ’the transition from the good to the best, and from the useful to the most useful’ ,5 as well as the absolute necessity of the purification of the soul of every single individual, as the prerequisite for Islam. He seems to have been equally concerned with the recognition of authoritative opinions developed throughout history, something Mawdudi rejected in his letter. According to the latter, only the normative sources of Islam, i.e., Qur’an and Sunna, have always been interpreted directly and without mediation. This is the foundation on which Mawdudi’s entire system of thought rests. 52 As a consequence, he has no other choice but to reject any scholarly authority other than the Prophet Muhammad himself. -

Conclusion

By and large, education has been a crucial element when it comes to creating an Islamic identity. Indeed, transmission of knowledge is the core of the cultural life of most Muslim communities. Changes in the subjects of education are closely connected with social processes. In fact, the reform of the educational canon often 47

Cf. Abu-l Hasan ’Ali an-Nadwi, ’Fadīlat al-ust dh Abū l-Hasan ’Alī al-Hasanī an-Nadwī a Yur Faqid al-Fikr al-Isl : a th i aykh m a kh al-’Alam m A r a ’, b i d u , i a No. 653, al-Isl sh al-Mawd a S 1399/1979, p. 15. , p. 257, translation mine. 48 Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert Nadwi, ’Fadīlat ’, 49 dh p. 15. al-Ustā 50 This letter is fully reproduced in Nadwi, Pur e, n a gh Vol. 2, p. 317. a ir Ch 51 Nadwi, ’Fadīlat al-Ustā dh ’. p. 15. 52 Hartung, ’Gottesstaat versus Kemalismus’, pp. 84-90.

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leads to the emergence of new social groups and their split from the community. Conversely, under certain circumstances social processes might, in turn, cause new interpretations of religious education. For this reason, activities in the field of Islamic education are always embedded in a religious and political context. On the one hand, the different attempts to reform the system of religious

education among the Muslims of South Asia, brought about a class of new intellectuals (mufakwtfn) who were ’Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect’, according to Macaulay’s well-known view. 53 On the other hand, traditionalist movements emerged which sought to harmonise, albeit in different ways, the Muslims’ everyday life with the implications of the normative sources of Islam. Besides, we encounter with other groups of ’educated’ people: the traditional upholders and administrators of religious knowledge, the ’ulamj’, and the Sufis (mutasawwifa), as well as other highly hybrid groups. The members of these hybrid groups are formally initiated into one group of scholars or Sufis, but have similarities with the so-called intellectuals with regard to their occupation and their points of view. Although the discourse of Islamic education is dominated by the traditional religious disciplines in a narrow sense (law [fiqh] and its methodology [usul al-fiqh], the teaching and exegesis of Qur’arz, Hadith, and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad [sira], as well as counter-theology [kalam], and Sufism), it also includes modem disciplines still in religious terms such as history, in a modem, almost Rankean sense, natural sciences, and so on. With these additional disciplines, new fields of discourse have arisen from the wider scope of Islamic education, changing the contents of education, its modes of communication, language, methods of transmission, as well as institutions, and other forms of social organisation. The different protagonists of this discourse take their respective postitions from their own educational and socialI background. Although the dynamics of these developments may lead to a certain rapproachment of the different groups, these groups cannot entirely leave aside the positions determined by the criteria that constitute their own group in the first place. An example would be the long-lasting controversy between the Deobandis and the Barelwis, and the dispute between the personified in the example of the dispute quietist and the activist Salafiya between Nadwi and Mawdudi. The importance of both Nadwi and Mawdudi for the Muslim communities cannot be underestimated. in contemporary South Asia and even beyond it The constant reference of Muslim intellectual elites to the two of them indicates as integrative figures for South that both acted albeit for a different clientele Asian Muslims. The relevance of Mawdudi becomes evident from the references made to him and his works by numerous politico-religious organisations in all parts of the Islamic world, such as the Hizb-i Islam! of Afghanistan.54 The number of letters of condolence for Nadwi’s recent death, from all over the world, came from -

-

-

-

-

-

-

53

Thomas B. Macaulay, ’Minute on Indian Education’ in John Clive, ed., Thomas Babington Selected Prose, Chicago, 1972, p. 249. Macaulay: 54 Website of Hizb-i m , i a ’Political Framework of Islam’, .

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Muslims and non-Muslims equally, and is importance and relevance of his works.55

only

one

vivid

expression

Cf. Majallat al-Ba’ 55 th al-Isl , Vol. 45, No. 4-6, 1420-21/2000, pp. 98-145. i m a

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of the