South Asian History and Culture

ISSN: 1947-2498 (Print) 1947-2501 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20

The Praiseworthiness of Divine Beauty The

Shaykh al-Hind Mamd al-asan, social justice,
and Deobandiyyat
Jan-Peter Hartung
To cite this article: Jan-Peter Hartung (2016) The Praiseworthiness of Divine Beauty The
Shaykh al-Hind Mamd al-asan, social justice, and Deobandiyyat, South Asian History and
Culture, 7:4, 346-369, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2016.1223719
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2016.1223719

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Date: 10 October 2016, At: 14:22

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, 2016

VOL. 7, NO. 4, 346369
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2016.1223719

The Praiseworthiness of Divine Beauty The Shaykh al-Hind

Mahmd

al-Hasan,

social justice, and Deobandiyyat

Jan-Peter Hartung
SOAS, University of London, London, UK
ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

In this article, two threads of scholarship on the relationship of what shall

be called here the Deoband project and politics are negotiated. Both
these threads frame this relationship in absolute terms: one considers
Deoband as a politically neutral yet rather homogeneous movement for
the reform of religious beliefs and practices, while the other cast it in a
similar monolithic fashion as an anti-colonial champion of social justice.
Against this mutual exclusiveness, it is argued here that a revised understanding of what Deoband constitutes and stands for will help to show
that, although it did not often make a politics explicit, embedded in a
genealogy of the Deoband project as a phenomenon is an activist
iteration of Sufism, one that developed in dialogue between classes in
the stratified semi-urban milieus of the imperial heartland around
Deoband, and South Asian rural peripheries. In the early twentieth
century, this conversation developed into what is idealtypically framed
here as Islamic Pietism.
All this is argued through a survey of the literature surrounding one of
Deobands least-documented, yet possibly most famous, scholars:
Mamd al-asan, commonly known as Shaykh al-Hind. In narrating
Islamic Pietism across Mamd al-asans life, but also his milieu and
the careers of his compatriots, not only a major gap in the historical
research of contemporary South Asian Islam is addressed. More so, it is
highlighted how even renowned individual actors were constituted by
cross-class and multi-scalar networks of thought and agency almost as
much as they disproportionately transformed them.

Islam; Deoband; radical

egalitarianism; anticolonialism; Islamic Pietism;
borderlands

Since the late 1970s, much of the first generation of sustained western scholarship on the scholarly
endeavours that emerged in the wake of the so-called Sepoy-Mutiny of 1857 focused on the
institutions, founding figures and the polemical arguments between the protagonists of these
movements as they attempted to establish their monopoly of definition in religious matters.1 As a
result of that focus, these activities are discussed as if more or less politically neutral. Subsequent
developments in this area were informed by a wider interest in the emergence of various publics
and something approximating an Indo-Muslim middle class in the urban setting of mainly
Northern India.2
These latter works have situated the various scholarly endeavours in a wider spatial context of
diverse social spheres, while also framing them as distinct Muslim responses to larger social,
economic and political issues, triggered by the vacuum in communal authority that the dissolution
CONTACT Jan-Peter Hartung
jh74@soas.ac.uk
The Romanization of non-Latin scripts follow by and large the ALA-LC standard for each respective language. An h struck out
() indicates aspiration of the preceding consonant in Indian languages, to differentiate it from the fricatives of Semitic ones.
Quotation marks indicate emphases and conceptual terms.
2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

347

of the Mughal polity in 1857 created. The focus, however, has remained on the institutional life of
these endeavours, bypassing potential conflict and development of oppositional politics within.
This is in distinct contrast to a parallel, indigenous tradition of scholarship on the same
prominent South Asian scholarly movement that Barbara Metcalfs Islamic Revival in British
India, first published in 1982 and re-issued in 2002, brought into the limelight, namely the one
emanating from the small qaabah town of Deoband about a hundred miles north of Delhi. In his
equally defining Urdu-language official institutional history of Deoband, completed around the
same time as Metcalfs study, Sayyid Mabb Riz v (d. 1399/1979) articulated Deoband as bearing
a distinct ideological orientation that was strongly anti-imperial.
It is argued here, however, that Riz vs History is not only a retrospective self-aggrandizing
gesture. Rather, it caters for perpetuating the illusion of Deoband as a homogenous religious
movement with a distinct uniform world view that oftentimes figures as Deobandiyyat
Deoband-ness. Yet, when situated within larger regional and sociopolitical frameworks, as
attempted in this article, the presumed ideological consistency is broken up, and it is demonstrated that such coherence only exists in single individuals, gradually decreasing in those around
such an individual with growing personal distance.3 This is done here by a study of the sociointellectual constitution and the subsequent activities of Mamd al-asan Deoband (d. 1339/
1920), better known perhaps by the somewhat obligating honorific Shaykh al-Hind, the scholar
who is frequently seen as a leading personality in a foundational period of the Deoband project.4
Specifically, this is a study of his, and Deobands, social backgrounds, his highly elusive career and
his manifest influence through his widespread network of students and associates, as much as it is
a study of the man himself.
It is argued here that Mamd al-asan stood for a religious disposition that resembles certain
structural features of Protestant Christianity since the late seventeenth century and will therefore
be idealtypically framed as Islamic Pietism. It sets out from a theologically grounded notion of
fundamental equity (inf) of all humans qua creation, regardless of their respective economic and
social status in this world, and was thus consonant with orientations to the world that are highly
sensitive to and suspicious of prevalent injustice (ulm). Such an orientation was present both in
the social strata that gave rise in part to Deoband at its core, and in rural populations that
eventually heavily adopted allegiance to the Deobandiyyat propagated by Mamd al-asan and
his personal associates.5
By focusing attention on the sociocultural, intellectual and political phenomena encapsulated
in the personal network of Mamd al-asan, it is argued that the Deoband project, same as he
himself, were products of both normative and subaltern genealogies of religious thought and
practice; and he was able to actively disseminate a kind of oppositional religiosity to which
multiple elite and non-elite strata of Muslim society in North India responded exceptionally
well because it resonated with their own less systematically and traditionally articulated politics.6
This argument is set out by recalling that in Islamicate literatures inherited by the pioneers of
the Deoband project, there already existed normative foundations of a distinct Islamic concept of
equality that figured prominently not least in medieval advice literature. Because of its claim to
universal validity, this normative topos resonated well with other and more contemporary radical
political ideologies, such as Communism, which began to spread in Muslim societies under
colonial rule and was oftentimes quite openly embraced.7 In a next step, these considerations
will be applied to the South Asian context in which the Deoband movement took off, and to the
biography of Mamd al-asan. His early life appears emblematic for a fundamental Pietistic
attitude, shaped by a distinct socio-economic milieu already in existence at the time. Eventually,
he built up a more strategic orientation that would challenge the social, economic and political
status quo, equally against the colonial framework as against the established Muslim elites in
Northern India. This strategic orientation was then attempted to put into practice, culminating in
the activities of Mamd al-asan and his associates during World War I. In conclusion, finally,
these activities will be tied back to a more systematic discussion of the religiously grounded

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J.-P. HARTUNG

framework that revolves around the notions of radical egalitarianism, defining element in what
will be established as an ideal type of Islamic Pietism. It is this very framework, so it is argued
here, that ensured a long-term effect of Mamd al-asans mission among Muslims across the
subcontinent.

Justice by equity the Islamic normative framework

Historically, Muslim scholars inclined to egalitarianism argue usually for what in the theoretical
literature on the matter is conceptualized as non-instrumental equality, that is, a valuation of
equality for its own sake, and not as a means to some independently specifiable goal.8 In the
Islamic context, this notion is derived from the normatively affirmed fact that, from a divine
perspective, all human beings are equal to one another as part of His creation, and all humans
carry thus the potential for salvation to an equal extent. Reference points are the various Qurnic
statements that refer to the insignificance of material possessions (ml) as well as progeny
(awld) and thus genealogical descent for the salvation of each individual believer.9
From such divine injunctions resulted various more philosophical sociopolitical considerations of
an equally normative status that were adopted by later thinkers in other spatial contexts, such as the
example of the early-twentieth century learned Afghan courtier Abd al-Vsi Qandahr (d. 1348/
1928) who built an ethics of anti-hierarchy from the philosophical anthropology of the lkhnid
thinker Nar al-Dn s (d. 672/1274).10 This ethical system, then, which gained exceptional
prominence in wide areas of the early modern Muslim world, including the Indian subcontinent,11
was still widely studied among the early scholars of Deoband and proved to be adaptable to
contemporary circumstances. From the divinely ordained equality of all human beings, and spiced
with elements of the Aristotelian-cum-Avicennan humorism, s derived a model of a just society
in which all of its components are in qualitative as well as quantitative harmony with one another,
and would therefore reflect the harmony of the universe as established by God qua Creation.12
Justice and equity thus became the benchmarks against which the soundness of a society was to be
measured; while the social equilibrium was established as its necessary precondition (shar), the
actual meaning of justice seems to have frequently shifted according to the respective circumstances. Meanwhile, ss allowance of differences in merit and aptitude [istiqq va istidd]13
accommodated enough philosophical space for authority that it was adaptable to endeavours like the
Deoband project, which would emphasize scholarly authority while simultaneously expressing the
idea that generally everyone was capable of being such an authority.
Further, ss expositions belong in his renowned Mirror for Princes, aimed at advising his
patron Nir al-Dn Abd al-Raim ibn Manr (d. 655/1257), governor (mutashim) of East
Iranian Quhistan for the rebellious Nizr-Isml Imm of Alamut, on good governance. As
such, he did not radically question the need of an enlightened head of the Muslim polity
resembling the Platonic philosopher-king that found its way into the Muslim intellectual universe through Ab Nar Muammad al-Frb (d. 339/950)14 , and in this most prominent
Muslim moral philosophers followed suit, all the way up to the dramatic abolition of nominal
Muslim rule in large parts of the world by European colonialism; as we shall see, a popularized
version even provided justification for millenarian tendencies that linked societal elites to subaltern agency in early twentieth century India.
These specific long-standing philosophical tensions of utopian egalitarianism and authority are
important to note at the outset because they pervade and link multiple nodes in the networks of
Mamd al-asan. Of course we must note exposure to countervailing anthropocentric world
views shaped by the European Enlightenment, the Dual Revolution15 of the late eighteenth
century, and the socio-economic upheavals brought by colonialism in North-India in the nineteenth. Alongside these factors, however, genealogies of thought like the above were some of those
within which Muslim thinkers began to reassess the bases of their ethical and sociopolitical
thought, including in the milieus that eventually gave rise to the Deoband project.

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

349

Situating deoband socially: the Ashrf and beyond

Colonial South Asia provided such Muslim deliberations with an extremely complex setting, in
which various forms of social, economic and political inequality were simultaneously at play. First,
there was the traditional Indian institution of the so-called caste system (Skt.: varramadarma)
that secured a stable vertical sociopolitical stratification with strong economic implications. A
modification of this institution is still to be found among South Asian Muslims, often argued
about along ashrf-ajlf lines.16 It seems as if here the popular notion of noble descent (Ar.:
nasab sharf) of the Arab tribal society target of the above indicated various Qurnic statements has found a convenient connection facility in South Asia. The Islamically reformulated
conception of noble descent from the House of the Prophet Muammad (Ar.: ahl al-bayt),
which, in nascent Sh circles, became even charged with superhuman qualities, merged with
originally Hindu notions of (ritual) purity (Skt.: sattva) and ascribed to the descendents of the ahl
al-bayt, the sdt or ashrf, supreme social and, moreover, spiritual status.17 The such established
social stratification on the grounds of descent were joined by a positive appraisal of military and
economic success that has strong roots in the nomadic societies of the Central Asian Turkic and
TurkMongolian people, from where not least the Mughals had originated.18
Various educational projects emerged almost immediately after the deposition of the Mughal
ruler Bahdur Shh afar, following the Uprising of 1857. These reflected consciously on the
social status of those who were pronounced the new vanguard in administering communal affairs
under the new political framework conditions. For Muslims, it seems, the absence of nominal
Muslim rule, which in the medieval advice literature was regarded guarantor of the common
good (malaa),19 weighted particularly heavily. Some, like Sir Sayyid Amad Khn (d. 1315/
1898) and the so-called Aligarh Movement would argue for a continuation of dominance by the
former Mughal elites, albeit in modified form. The educational conceptions developed by Sir
Sayyid and his faithful disciples appealed foremost to an urban clientele willing to adapt to the
colonial set-up in support of their upward mobility: the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College
(MAOC) at Aligarh was to produce what Sir Sayyid had labelled an educated Muslim
gentleman.20
This emerging strata, reaching all the way back to Sir Sayyid, did express an egalitarian ideal,
but in terms of instrumental equality, that is, revolving either around the meritocratic idea of
what John Rawls has called fair equality of opportunity,21 or equality of participation in decisionmaking processes: the underlying principle of democracy.22 Especially for the latter certain
qualifications are required, which Sir Sayyid saw to be most easily acquired by the ashrf as
societal elite, even if he would ideally grant them to all Indian Muslims.
Against such an ashrf-centred understanding of communal leadership stood other communal
projects that had developed in the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising. The first and foremost of these
projects arose at Deoband in the North West of the United Provinces, but competed, for example,
with the Imrat-i Shariyyah in Phulvr near Patna in Bihar.23 Both enterprises maintained strong
ties to the devotional aspect of Muslim piety, Sufism, which was an important element of
communal identity in the more rural areas of the northern subcontinent in which these three
orientations were dominantly rooted. However, the concept of sharfa did play a substantial role
in the justification of the claim to religious authority by yet another of the reformist orientation
rooted in rural space, the so called Barelviyyah.24 Also, the subsidiary of the learned enterprises
was mainly carried by a great number of ashrf, especially from among the landholders.25
However, while the concept of sharfa was thus obviously important, it did certainly not
determine all outcomes. After all, the majority of the Muslims in rural North-India, which
made up the bulk of the clientele of the rapidly spreading network of dn madris affiliated
with either the Deoband or Barayl, belonged to the lower-caste Muslims, the ajlf.26 They are
commonly perceived as being prone to devotional practices which many of the ulam at the
time would view as problematic and scripturally unsustainable transgressions of standard Muslim

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J.-P. HARTUNG

ritual customs.27 Attempts to rectify the religious beliefs and practices of the ajlf on a mass scale
date back to the early 1800s with the ashrf-led and inclined to militancy arqah-yi
Muammadiyyah. This gradually took on a de-political cast as ashrf consolidated their position:
the emergence of the missionary Tablgh Jamat in the 1920s is an example in late colonial
conditions.28
It stands to reason that those economically and socially disadvantaged strata amongst the
Muslims in the subcontinent were even more susceptible to egalitarian arguments than the ashrf
under colonial conditions. For them, not only the instrumental forms of equality with the
prospect of economic and political upward mobility held a great appeal, but given the rigidity
of social stratification along caste lines the non-instrumental forms, too, became increasingly
significant. For their part, though, in the early decades of the twentieth century, many ajlf strata
in various regions showed a readiness to affirmatively engage Marxist and, a little later, Leninist
thought in the urban setting.29 Here, the conditions were shaped by the emergence of structures
suitable for the development of a capitalist mode of production that awoke even the attention of
Marx himself.30
These new forms of social explanation were, in fact, shared across all sorts of divides, including
religious ones, as the plethora of voluntary associations that emerged in response to the waning
influence of traditional sociopolitical elites bear clear testimony. These developments, however,
remain largely confined to the urban spaces that facilitated the emergence of an ever more fully
differentiated public sphere. In the rural areas, meanwhile, traditional modes of contestation by
local actors31 prevailed during the first decades of direct colonial rule over the subcontinent. For
that reason, the pull of the Marxist metanarrative, which pivots explicitly on material dependencies in the social fabric, seems less strong outside the rapidly industrializing metropolises.
Egalitarian rhetoric that sets out rather from metaphysically derived presumptions about the
individual and its place in and relation with the universe appears to have had a better prospect of
successfully spreading the message.32
Foremost in this regard, it is argued here against the prevalent view,33 was the first
generation of graduates from the Dr al-Ulm in Deoband, led by above mentioned
Mamd al-asan, native of Barayl,34 whom the institutions official historiography records
as its very first student.35 Later to be ubiquitously called by the honorific Shaykh al-Hind,
Mamd al-asan must be regarded among the higher echelons of the pantheon of Deoband
grandees; yet he is well known as a staunch anti-colonial activist who created a transnational
secret organization purportedly aimed at the militant overthrow of the Empire. It is, therefore,
remarkable that he has attracted comparatively little attention by academics, though perhaps it
is precisely because he unsettles the imaginary of Deoband as a homogeneously apolitical and
purely religious movement. Another reason for this, however, may be that, unlike many of his
contemporaries, he hardly left any original writing that could directly indicate his individual
intellectual output. Indeed, he is usually portrayed as a prolific orator more than a writer. This
commitment to oral activity may have had an impact on how he was rated in academic circles,
even as it could well be established also as a cornerstone of his clandestine sociopolitical
activism, derived from a normative anthropology revolving around equity, which shaped
Mamd al-asans distinct approach to piety (birr, or taqw). It means, though, that we
must reconstruct him largely indirectly through the writings of his followers, and a look into
his social background. In doing this, ostensible certainties about what constitutes Deoband
will at least be complemented by an alternative perspective.
The first challenge in this concerns the uniform ashrf-centricity of the Deoband project that
numerous scholars have emphasized. While it is certainly not disputed here that the ashrf
continued to enjoy importance, there was much in the early intellectual and social formation of
Deoband and of Mamd al-asan that referenced and sympathized with other segments of
society, too.

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

351

To be sure, there are elite aspects to Mamd al-asans story. He was born six years before
the 1857 Uprisings into a family of religious scholars. His father, l-Fiqr Al ibn Fat Al (d.
1322/1904), renowned as a literary scholar and poet, had studied in imperial Delhi with Mamlk
al-Al Nnawtav (d. 1267/1851), the then Head of the Delhi College and muft-yi aam adr
al-Dn zurdah Dihlav (d. 1285/1868).36 Later scholars, led by Mamd al-asans own student
Ubaydallh Sind (d. 1363/1944), would use such information to establish ideological continuity
between Shh Valyallh and the scholarship that emerged from Deoband.37 Moreover, while
descent from certain status groups was downplayed in the Deoband self-portrayal, Sind, in a
short biographical account on Mamd al-asan, still indicated his teachers Arab origins, from
the Ban Umayya, initially the rival clan to the Prophets Ban Hshim within the tribe of
Quraysh.38 The importance of noble decent still exerted effects in collective consciousness,
perhaps especially for those who, like Sind, had only recently converted to Islam and were
even more sensitive to the social and economic boundaries that pedigree-based caste structures
would sustain.39 Finally, Mamd al-asans upbringing also reinforces views of the persistence of
insular elite networks in the modern era. Carrying on a trans-generational family relationship
Mamd al-asan was trained by the first generation of teachers at the Dr al-Ulm in Deoband
but especially by Mamlk al-Als son Muammad Yaqb Nnawtav (d. 1302/1884), the first
head teacher of the institution.
We cannot be sure, though, if the content of his scholarly activities reinforced elite tendencies;
and to think of it only in those terms would be simplistic. What exactly he studied, and how he
studied it, is little known; in the official historiography of the Dr al-Ulm only Qudr and a
Shar al-Tahdhb are mentioned.40 The first is a concise Arabic compendium of anaf fiqh,
authored by jurist Ab l-usayn Amad ibn Muammad al-Qudr (d. 428/1037) of Baghdad,
and the latter is a pithy Arabic commentary on a logic text, Tahdhb al-Maniq, by Mturdite
theologian Sad al-Dn Taftzn (d. 792/1390) by Abdallh Yazd (d. 1015/1606). Both works
have become standard textbooks in the Deoband syllabus (dars-i nim) for students in South
Asia and beyond; but as argued elsewhere, we may reasonably assume that in Mamd al-asans
time the course of study was still quite loose and dependent on the preferences of each individual
teacher than on an standardized curriculum.41 Therefore, the lack of detailed information on his
education at Deoband is even more regrettable. It might have given us some clearer idea about his
own preferences when Mamd al-asan embarked on teaching in the institution right after he
completed his own formal training. This, along with the absence of a sufficient amount of own
written works contributed certainly to the elusiveness of the scholar, and reduces him in the eyes
of posterity almost entirely to his role as political activist. Such a reduction, in turn, disguises the
strong religious undercurrent of his sociopolitical agenda, the roots of which, again, should be
sought in the environment of the Deoband project as much as anywhere. Thus, reframing
Deobandiyyat as a mutual infusion of individual life experience, politics and religious scholarship, rather than considering them incidental to each other, seems rewarding here; even if the
evidence is such that we may only present tentative suggestions.
Notwithstanding a lack of information on his reading, from the autobiographical accounts of
some of Mamd al-asans early students, among them the already mentioned Ubaydallh
Sind and the later principal of Deobands Dr al-Ulm usayn Amad Madan (d. 1376/1957),
we gain some glimpses of his teaching. Besides the numerous classical Arabic works in the
Sciences of Prophetic adth (ulm al-adth), Qurnic commentary (tafsr) and Theology of
Causation (kalm)42 that were read widely throughout the entire Muslim world, Sind mentions
one text that clearly stands out from the mix: the short ujjat al-Islm of Muammad Qsim
Nnawtav.43 This choice of a text by a contemporary author among the array of rather classical
ones is significant, moreover, so as it indicates Nnawtav as an important intellectual influence
on Mamd al-asan, which may have had important implications further on.

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J.-P. HARTUNG

From Sinds note we glean that, despite information on whether or not he had formally
studied under Nnawtav is fairly ambiguous, Mamd al-asan was exceptionally close to
Nnawtav who is usually addressed by the honorific Shaykh al-Islm:
From among the three whom attained knowledge from him [i.e. Muammad Qsim Nnawtav], it was our
own teacher [shaykhn], the Shaykh al-Hind, who loved his teacher the most. He was the chief inheritor of
his knowledge [marifa], and was one of the most ardent followers of his [ittiban lahu].44

While the hagiographical nature of Sinds account requires some prudent suspicion,45 we may
for now accept this portrayal and come to a closer understanding of Mamd al-asans religious
views through a look at Nnawtav. Like his disciple Mamd al-asan, Nnawtav was not a
sharf, but still had a high-caste linage that traced to the Prophets close companion and father-inlaw, the first Medinese Caliph Ab Bakr (d. 13/634).46 Whether this genealogy is reliable remains
doubtful for now. The nisba iddq, especially in the then United Provinces allows certainly for
an alternative interpretation47 and we may assume that he descended rather from the indigenous
Kyasth caste, which placed his family and himself well to relate to the ajlf-Muslims that would
eventually constitute the core clientele of the later Deoband project.
Trained in the first place by his father Mamlk al-Al in Delhi of the 1840s, he became well
acquainted with the hybrid approach to education of the Delhi College.48 Besides, he also got
noticed by Sir Sayyid Amad Khn, with whom he developed a critical, yet mutually very
respectful relationship.49 Moreover, within the founder generation of scholars at Deoband,
Nnawtav was regarded as less interested in legal and administrative affairs. Instead, he would
rather be known for his public outreach, and not through print: he was known as a preacher and
debater, similar to Mamd al-asan a generation later.50 Others, meanwhile, were similarly
known for their sober, scholarly approach to adth and fiqh, but equally important were those
whose respect was gained for their emotionally deep affection for the divine, and those who
satisfied the demands of popular piety by the distribution of charms and amulets.51 Furthermore,
if Nnawtav and his milieu were not exclusively ashrf-centred in their religious proclivities, there
was an oppositional genealogy at their core, too; one that tied into a cross-regional network that
Mamd al-asan would later engage.
Pivotal in the formation of Nnawtavs religious thought was his close personal and spiritual
relationship with afar Amad Imddallh Frq Tnav of his native Nnawtah (d. 1317/
1899), who, in the course of events in 1857, avoided persecution by emigrating to Mecca and
was therefore subsequently known as Muhjir-i Makk. Little reliable biographical information
exists for him,52 though his khnaqh at Tnah Bhavan had reportedly developed into a hub of
spirituality in the region. Mamlk al-Al, once again, was instrumental in bringing him to
Delhi, where he developed an interest in the esoteric fields of knowledge. This spiritual
orientation prompted him to become the disciple of Nar al-Dn Shfi, a former student of
Shh Muammad Isq Dihlav of the Valyallh family (d. 1262/1845). Nar al-Dn had later
joined the military campaign of the arqah-yi Muammadiyyah movement of his teachers
uncle Shh Isml and his spiritual guide Sayyid Amad ibn Irfn of R Barayl in the
Pashtun tribal areas.53 After the death of both leaders on the battlefield of Blko in
early May 1831, Nar al-Dn became one of the two new heads of the movement, partly because
of his affiliations with the Valyallh family, and began to lead a new surge into the tribal areas
when, in 1840, he passed away at their old stronghold of Sittnah.54
It might be the activist inclination of Imddallhs spiritual guide, which would increasingly
shift its focus from the Sikhs to the British, that he carried on to Tnah Bhavan and cultivated
further among his own ever growing following, including most of the founding personalities of
the Deoband project. With the outbreak of the Uprising in 1857, Imddallh began to utilize the
Sufi network he had created for organizing armed resistance. In May of that year, following a
successful attack on a military convoy at Tnah Bhavans main thoroughfare, he led a contingent
of volunteers into open battle with British forces at Shml, a larger town some twelve miles to the

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

353

south of Tnah Bhavan, but was this time defeated and subsequently had to go into hiding.55
Remarkably, in the later Deoband historiography, an outstanding role in these ventures has been
ascribed to Nnawtav, while, at the same time, reducing the significance of Imddallh in this
regard. In retrospect, this is understandable not only as a self-legitimating move. When
Imddallh emigrated to the Hijaz, he vanished somewhat from the Indian scene, while
Nnawtav and his close associate Rashd Amad Gangoh (d. 1323/1905) remained there to
deal with the repercussions of the failed Uprising on the Muslim communities in the
subcontinent.

Deoband: institutionalizing and deinstitutionalizing piety

The relationship of Mamd al-asans spiritual forerunners to various militant movements may
have already created a fusion of milieu and concrete networks that Mamd al-asan too would
soon adopt. Moreover, an interrelatedness of an ethics la s, as mentioned in the beginning of
this essay, and of anaf jurisprudence and Sufi spiritual approaches, facilitated a discourse on
jihd that incorporated self-reflexive moral, legal and militant aspects. However, with anxieties
and traumas of 1857 still fresh, especially in the early printed collections of formal legal opinions
(fatv) from Deoband, the sections on these and related matters are conspicuously absent.56
Military confrontation with the British had ultimately failed, at least for the time being, and the
establishment of direct colonial rule, including the introduction of tight security measures,
subsequently changed conditions on the ground. Now, in the absence of even nominal Muslim
rule, the emphasis of those who felt responsible for the maintenance of the Islamicity of the
Muslim communities in the subcontinent was put on ensuring the legal viability of Islamic
religious ritual obligations (ibdt) and interpersonal civil transactions (mumalt).
Consequently, the initial mission of the Deoband project was to spread religious education,
especially among those community members of lower social and economic status, to eventually
enable them to increasingly take communal affairs in their own hands. No Muslim sovereign
could claim any longer to safeguard the common good; the power of disposal had therefore to be
reclaimed by the entire community, thus emulating an idealized notion of the anti-territorial
conditions in the early days of Islam. It seems, therefore, fairly consistent that any madrasah that
emerged from positive engagement with the Deoband project was regarded as deputy (nib) of
the Prophet, which was a clear statement regarding their central reference point, especially in
response to the more nation-oriented ashrf-elitism of Aligarh. Mamd al-asan himself made
this point clear when, in late August 1908, he stated that
[i]n India previously knowledge was so scarce that one could hardly find anyone to perform the funeral
prayers [janzah k namz]. Today, however, knowledge is so widespread that every town, in fact, every
qaabah, and indeed perhaps every village has now its own mawlav present.57

The idea, however, was not to install a religious functionary in each local community who would
oversee the religious affairs and especially the shara-conformity of the community members, but
rather to transform the entire community into one of mawlavs. This project would not even stop
at gender divides, although the space of activity for women was seen as somewhat distinct from
that of men.58 In this, material possessions and noble descent were claimed as irrelevant; this is
strongly indicated by the Deoband style of conduct (adab), which was closely modelled on Sufi
patterns already indicated in the exemplary life and writings of Imddallh Muhjir Makk,59 and
which was practiced by the Deoband founders from the beginning.60
Further sustaining such an egalitarian aspiration might be the various Qurnic passages that
emphasize that human equality and disregards social or economic status. Mamd al-asan
engaged in collaborative efforts with his student Shabbr Amad Us mn (d. 1369/1949), later
the driving force behind the establishment of the Jamiyyat-i Ulam-i Islm (JUI) to provide a
comprehensible and timely commentary of the Qurn in Urdu. In it, these passages did not

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receive any exceptional attention. It pays nonetheless to devote some attention to them as well as
the context of the larger project. In Mamd al-asans own words, this work, begun in 1917, was
aimed at enabling the people of Hindustan to understand the Qurn more easily in [their own]
idiom.61
Obvious in almost all the commentaries on verses that relate to human equality is the focus on
the temporality of worldly gains and the contrasting permanence of the hereafter.62 As a
consequence, ones attitude to riches and progeny (ml va awld) becomes a yardstick for
ones fidelity; their mere existence in this world is to be considered only a divinely decreed tests
of faith. The semantically complex Qurnic term fitna is rendered as review (jch) and
examination (imtin),63 words tied to the interrelated Sufi conceptions of self-reckoning
(musaba) and spiritual surveillance (murqaba). This tradition ranges from al-Ghazl (d.
505/1111), via Rm (d. 627/1273), to Imddallh,64 and through him to the first generation of
Deobands. Consequently, the prominent Qurnic verse in this regard, 2 (al-Baqara): 284,
receives a much more expansive commentary by Mamd al-asan and Shabbr Amad
Us mn. Under the caption An Important Reminder (ek ahm tanbh) believers are constantly
to remember that all that exists, material or spiritual, belongs to God who created all things as an
inferior variety of His own perfection. As such the human being, itself part of that creation,
possesses no legitimate power of disposal over things as temporal as this world.65
By providing normative arguments against both possession- and descent-based communal
leadership, when interpreting the Qurnic verses 68 (al-Qalam): 1415 in a way that ascribes the
notion of sharfa to spiritual capital alone,66 it makes the economically and socially disadvantaged
Muslims, the ajlf, a vanguard in the redressing of any kind of deprivation (ulm), in other words,
true shuraf. This hermeneutic exercise was in dialogue with multiple contexts. Products of the
Deoband project would turn out chief promoters of links between spiritual self-reflection, a
suspicion of accumulation and ideas of material as commons instead, as well as a presumption of
the absence of sovereign command over righteous behaviour, more often than not in dialogue
with rural peripheries. Here, there seems to exist a degree of overlap with Gds equally
religiously connoted concept of satygraha, the adherence to the Truth, signifier of an inner
disposition.
Gds satygraha, however, did not necessarily imply active political resistance to prevailing
conditions, and in a purely textual sense, the same might potentially be said for the Deoband
parallel. Thus, the origins of Mamd al-asans political activism would require at least complementary explanations which, to the best of knowledge, appear non-existent. Almost all accounts on
him, be they hagiographical or led by academic enquiry, pass in silence of his motivations,67 and, by
doing so, seem to somewhat suggest a natural nexus between the religious orientation of the second
generation of Deoband scholars and political activism. We may, therefore, ask whether there is any
substance in the alleged apolitical stand of the early Deobands, or whether this notion was a later
political artefact. In the writings of the first generation, an apolitical stance as a dogmatically binding
institutional policy for Deoband and its affiliated seminaries remains fairly absent. It seems this view
originates in the interpretation of Muammad Qsim Nnawtavs son fi Muammad Amad
(d. 1348/1928), Mamd al-asans early classmate68 and his chief opponent during the early years
of the twentieth century.69 As a working hypothesis, therefore, and based on the activities outlined
above of Muammad Qsim Nnawtav and Imddallh Muhjir Makk, we will assume that there
was no dogma of aloofness from political activism. Rather, this was a personal choice of some early
representatives in that movement, which could later be employed for intra-institutional polemics by
the faction led by fi Muammad Amad, head administrator (muhtamim) of the Dr al-Ulm
during Mamd al-asans terms as principal (adr al-mudarrisn) and superintendent (sarparast).
However, the stress of a synonymy of Deobandiyyat with Muammad Qsim Nnawtav by
later protagonists70 suggests that the dispute between the two on the issue of political involvement
was of absolutely crucial importance for the eventual definition of Deoband authenticity. If,
namely, Nnawtav is understood as the epitom of Deobandiyyat, then authenticity can only be

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assured by the closest possible proximity to and subsequent emulation of him. In this light, the
dispute between Mamd al-asan and fi Muammad Amad translates into one between the
son and the adept, who were fiercely competing over the ownership of the embodiment of
Deobandiyyat.
fi Muammad Amad would very much work towards a harmonious and mutually tolerant
relation with the political establishment for which the British colonial administration would
eventually bestow him with the honorific Shams al-ulam.71 Mamd al-asan and his inner
circle, consisting mainly of former students, however, went the opposite way and emphasized the
other spiritual lineage, one present in Deobands genetic code. It was through his initiative that
the Deoband movement became more pronounced in serving the community beyond just safeguarding the normative Islamic tradition in the absence of Muslim political rule. His chief
executor in this appears to have been his aforementioned student Ubaydallh Sind; and
outward networking more generally seems to have been a conscious technology that Mamd
al-asan employed. Sind was instrumental in establishing and running the Jamiyyat al-Anr
in October 1909, a Deoband alumni organization, designed not least to further a pragmatic
rapprochement between them and the graduates of Sir Sayyids MAOC at Aligarh.72 And, after he
was forced to retreat from the intrigues at Deoband in 1913, he set up the increasingly successful
Narat-i Marif-i Qurniyyah madrasah in Old Delhis Fatpr Mosque.73
The spatial arrangement of this institution is remarkable: first, while being situated in the very
capital of the British Raj, its location in the old Mughal residence of Shhjahnbd proper clearly
indicated a frame of reference that could well do without any collaboration of whatever kind or
extent with the colonial establishment. Second, and perhaps in repudiation of the emergence of
administratively supported power structures in Deoband itself,74 epitomized in some of fi
Muammad Amads otherwise difficult to explain activities,75 the madrasah emulated the more
egalitarian classical tradition of teaching Islamic contents in the corner of a religious functional
building a mosque, shrine or khnaqh. It was foremost the Narat-i Marif-i Qurniyyah
where activist and anti-colonial sentiments mingled, were stirred up, and, in response, attracted
the concerned attention of the colonial administration. As late as 1918, it was explicitly mentioned
in the report of the Sedition Committee, led by judge Sir Sidney A. T. Rowlatt (d. 1945), which
then fed directly into the Act No. XI/1919 of the Imperial Legislative Council, The Anarchical and
Revolutionary Crimes Act more commonly known as the Rowlatt Act.76

War time activism

Rowlatts retrospective assessment was most certainly influenced by the fact that by then Mamd
al-asan and his inner circle had already been cast as political rebels. Responsible for this was
their activities during the early years of World War I, which resulted in their conviction to
imprisonment between 1916 and 1920 in the Citadel of Gozo on Malta on behalf of the British
Crown. It is this agency network of close associates which tied Mamd al-asan into other more
locally confined pre-existing networks in the rural peripheries of colonial Northern India. This, in
fact, is the phenomenon that constitutes what we know as Mamd al-asan, one that could
legitimately be framed as Deobandiyyat.
The outbreak of the war forced Indian Muslim soldiers to fight as members of the British
army against their Muslim brethren of nations at war with the kingdom most saliently the
Ottoman Turks, which ultimately served Mamd al-asan and his companions as the trigger
for intensified activism. The gravity of the situation called for the mass mobilization of
Muslims in the Raj for an eventual armed uprising against their current Christian overlords,
and Mamd al-asan oriented the mobilization efforts towards the rural and difficult to
control areas in the West, where he could rely on the support of local Sufi dignitaries who
were circuitously linked to him through numerous of his students. Ubaydallh Sind was
again to play a leading role here, first by rallying support in rural Sindh, then in Southern and

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Eastern Afghanistan, where he went in 1915 on behalf of Mamd al-asan. Another agent, in
this regard, was Faz l-i Vad of the Turangzy, better known as the jj hib of Turangzy
(d. 1356/1937), whom Mamd al-asan utilized to rally support for an impending uprising in
his native place in the Frontier area.77 Those efforts would eventually be continued by further
students and associates of Mamd al-asan in the Frontier region, for instance, by Uzayr
Gul Kkkhel (d. 1410/1989), who joined his entourage to Mecca,78 or his students Faz l-i
Mamd Makhf (d. 1365/1946), Faz l-i Rabb of Hazarah and Abd al-Ram Popalzy
(d. 1363/1944),79 who would eventually join the explicitly non-violent social movement of
the Khud Khidmatgr, led by Khn Abd al-Ghaffr Khn (d. 1408/1988).80 Finally, as a
most instrumental agent within this activist network, spanning across the Frontier region and
tying it to Deoband in the United Provinces, Sayf al-Ramn Kbl (d. 1369/1950) deserves to
be mentioned, who, before relocating back to the Frontier, taught for a spell at Ubaydallh
Sinds Narat-i Marif-i Qurniyyah in Delhi.81
All these actors around Mamd al-asan who hail from the more rural areas at the
peripheries of the crown colony were highly instrumental in linking the socio-religious infrastructure in their respective home regions to the religious framework that emerged from
Deoband. By doing so, they succeeded in introducing the latter into culturally rather distinct
environments. The jj hib of Turangzy, for instance, established a link to the increasingly
influential Sufi tradition of Najm al-Dn Akhndzdah (d. ~1321/1903), the then ib of
addah near Jallbd. The latter in turn had risen to transregional prominence through his
succession to the ib of Svat Akhnd Abd al-Ghaffr better known as Sayyido Bb (killed
1285/1878) founder of an independent polity in Svat that, in spiritual continuation of the jihd
led by Sayyid Amad Barelv and Shh Isml Dihlav (both killed 1246/1831), was run on Islamic
precepts.82 This way, Turangzys activities led to a top-down approach to the reinforcement of
Islamic piety, while others around him as well as Mamd al-asan, such as those who would
eventually join the Khud Khidmatgr movement, spread the same sociopolitical message in a
more grassroots manner. In the following, the such established link between Deoband represented by the religiously sustained sociopolitical message of Mamd al-asan and various
layers in the culturally distinct environment of the Frontier region were further cemented by less
governance-oriented activisms of native associates of the Shaykh al-Hind.
Sind, in turn, had close contacts to leading Sufi figures in Sindh, notably to Rashdallh Shh
Rshid (d. 1340/1922) and his son Rashd al-Dn of Goh Pr Jhano, north of Hyderabad, and
their circles. Already in 1901, the companion of Mamd al-asan had established a madrasah in
the very same place, thus linking his own institutional affiliation to Deoband with that of the
regional Sufi prs.83
The recruitment of support in both regions, the Frontier and Sindh, followed a compelling
logic. While the colonial establishment has been well aware of the fact that, other than in
ethnically and religiously more heterogeneous areas in the subcontinent, the prs formed the
chief representatives of the local communities and had consistently attempted to co-opt leading
Sufi personalities through a system of awarding official honours to them,84 it seems to have
missed the point that their real power base remained in their local communities. Those, in turn,
were often regarded as unruly and lawless,85 and therefore required on occasion what Ansari calls
intimidatory action.86 This frequently resulted in more concerted subversive action, with the
support of the prs, who fell back on their roles as the nodes of communities of their own murdn
once they were unable to rely on colonial power and money.87 It is precisely this so-called
unruliness and lawlessness the persistence of anti-hierarchic ontologies and their rising reinforcement through cycles of imperial violence88 that may make the rural population in both
areas more susceptible to egalitarianist messages. These were initially directed against political,
economic and social authorities, be they traditional ones or those mediated by the colonial
framework.89 However, egalitarian ideas would soon gain momentum, and express a radical

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357

impeachment of all prevalent authorities, measured against the benchmark of a morality derived
from Mamd al-asans embodied notion of Deobandiyyat.
The scholar himself would emerge as a role model in this regard: his was a service to God and
to the community, not one to satisfy his own vanities. Indicative of this attitude is his most sincere
(ba mamiyyat se) refusal of the title Shaykh al-Islm that was offered to him only a few
months before his death by leading members of the Khilfat Committee,90 something that
contemporaries, such as Abd al-Br Farang Maall (d. 1344/1926) and Ab l-Kalm zd
(d. 1377/1958), were likely to have been much less inclined to do. After all, this title was not a
mere honorific, but signified the position of the highest legal authority for the Muslims in India,
regardless their respective adherence to particular legal traditions, and therefore almost synonymous with the office of an Imm al-Hind. Mamd al-asan, who allegedly received the purely
honorific Shaykh al-Hind at the same occasion,91 might have been well aware of the potential of
such an ultimate leadership position for abuse by an individual; to give his poor health as a reason
for him turning down the offer to become Shaykh al-Islm appears thus rather as a convenient
pretext. His career evidenced no desire to speak down to the Muslims of India, would subsequently be remembered for his networks grassroots tactics in bringing about a challenge to
existing power structures. Might it be this to which the honorific Shaykh al-Hind refers?
As the epitom of these tactics we may consider the activities of Mamd al-asan and his
companions, who were more often than not his own students, around 19131915, which
eventually led to his arrest and imprisonment in Malta on the count of conspiracy against the
British crown. Inseparably linked to these events is also Mamd al-asans uncompromising
stand against the colonial power even at the risk of alienating himself from other distinguished
Muslim scholars. The radical avowal for principles rooted in an egalitarian understanding of Islam
that, more often than not, is tied rather to a firm conviction in the utopia of salvation than a
pragmatic appraisal of social, economic and political realities. The telos appears to be a common
component of all egalitarian ideologies, be they religiously sustained, or based on Marxist or
related models of history. Notions of struggle, suffering, and sacrifice for the cause belong here,
too, and Mamd al-asans last decade of his life became their exemplary embodiment, a true
representative of an ideally conceived Muslim umma, united by faith in a community of shared
values.
Of course, such a normatively shaped perception does not leave much space for the acknowledgement of particularistic interests, originating more often than not from a desire for gains in
this world. Prominent in this regard were the Arab nationalist movements directed against what
was increasingly perceived as an Ottoman colonial presence in their lands, especially after the
Young Turk Revolution of 1908.92 With the outbreak of World War I, the OttomanArab conflict
was used by the various war parties to shift the balance of power and Muslims were forced to take
sides. For Mamd al-asan, his faith did not permit any doubt that support was exclusively due
to the Ottoman sultan, widely acknowledged as reigning caliph in the succession to the Prophet
Muammad, and, thus, Commander of the Faithful (amr al-muminn). To refuse this support,
in such extraordinary circumstances, where loyalties were required to be emphatically affirmed,
would contravene important Qurnic injunctions. This included 4 (al-Nis):59, where it is
stipulated to first obey God, then His Messenger and finally those put in command from
among you (wa-l l-amr minkum). For Mamd al-asan, obedience to those who have been
appointed for whatever purpose was a necessity, unless such command stood in clear contradiction to the decrees of God and the Prophet.93 Britains declaration of war to the Ottoman
Empire on 5 November 1914 was seen as exactly that, while the declaration of defensive jihd
(cihd-i muaddes beyn-nmesi) by the Ottoman sultan Memed V Red (r. 19091918) about
one week later, and its subsequent endorsement in a fatv by the then ey l-Islm rgpl
Muaf ayri Efendi (d. 1339/1921) served as its counterweight.94 The text of the fatv provided
legal backup to the call upon all Muslims to take up the fight against the enemies of the caliph,
threatening those who did not oblige with eternal purgatory. For Mamd al-asan and his

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companions, there was never a question whether or not to obey those in command from among
you, especially as this presented an opportunity for a counter-alliance against the Empire in India.
The annual ajj of 1915 provided them with a convenient cover to travel to the Hijaz in avoidance
of imminent persecution by the colonial authorities and to organize from there. While the party
set out for Mecca, Ubaydallh Sind split off in the direction of Kabul, to rally support for the
jihd as instructed by Mamd al-asan.
Meanwhile, on arrival in the Hijaz, the party around Mamd al-asan saw itself confronted
with the fact that the political establishment here, led by the then-Sharf of Mecca usayn ibn Al
al-Hshim (d. 1350/1931), was about to seize the moment to rid themselves off the Ottoman rule,
a purpose for which they would ally themselves with any of the wartime enemies of the Ottomans
and most especially the British. While Mamd al-asan sought to contact Ottoman officials in
the Hijaz in order to coordinate their efforts in the jihd against Britain, he was also approached
by leading representatives of the Sharf and asked to publicly support their cause. In this regard,
the anafite muft of Mecca Abdallh ibn Abd al-Ramn Sirj (d. 1352/1933), who later
became Prime Minister of the Emirate of Transjordan, asked the Indian scholar to sign a
declaration of support to the Sharf in what would soon become an open revolt, and of
condemning the Ottoman participation in the war as an ally of the enemies of Britain.
Allegedly, for no reason other than Mamd al-asans refusal to endorse this document, the
Sharf ordered his arrest and handed him over to British agents in the Hijaz.95
The British had intercepted a few communications from Ubaydallh Sind to Mamd al-asan,
which were convenient in building a case against the detainees, held so far in Mecca. Apparently, in a
few of those letters, written on small pieces of silk and sewn into an envoys garment, Ubaydallh
outlined the utopia of an interim Government of India after the eventual removal of British colonial
rule, and a somewhat fantastical scheme of restructuring the entire Muslim world, a projected society
called The Divine Army (al-jund al-rabbniyya).96 For the British, this all constituted a clear case of
subversion of their imperial war efforts, and Mamd al-asan and four of his companions were
subsequently tried and sentenced to imprisonment in Malta as prisoners of war,97 where they
remained well beyond the duration of the war itself. Ubaydallh avoided arrest by staying on in
Afghanistan for a total of seven years, then travelled to the Soviet Union, the new Turkish Republic
and to the Hijaz, not returning to India before 1939.98
Moving now to a different social sphere, Sind established contacts with the court of the
Afghan emir abballh Khn (assassinated 1337/1919) and his successor, the future king
Amnallh Khn (r. 19191926),99 Mamd al-asans students from the Pashtun Belt rallied
for active resistance against the British among the common population in that area, emphasizing
radical egalitarianism as the main driver in opposing all those who would impair with the
religiously grounded framework of communal authority and, by implication, a morality of
equality. Sinds efforts came to little fruitation, mainly because of complex yet fragile internal
power constellations in the court at Kabul100; the grassroots agitation of people like the jj ib
of Turangzy, Sayf al-Ramn Kbl, Faz l-i Mamd Makhf or Abd al-Ram Popalzy,
yielded results which so far have, to some surprise, received comparatively little attention in the
scholarship on the anti-colonial struggle in British India.101
Often, and not least down to the much later autobiographical account of usayn Amad
Madan, learned activists throughout the region have predominantly been considered mere
communication switchboards between the scattered remains of the jihd movement of the
1820s in the area and the Afghan ruler to the West.102 It seems more likely that Mamd
al-asans rally for armed jihd against the wartime enemies of the Ottomans took place at
various societal levels and locally and translocally alike. The eventual material support of activities
in the Pashtun Belt euphemistically labelled Yghistn, that is, literally, the Lands of Enmity
by the Afghan king Amnallh Khn, however, was less the result of Ubaydallh Sinds
successful quest in Kabul than of incisive changes in the political relations between Afghanistan
and the British Empire the moment that Amnallh proclaimed Afghanistans independence from

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359

British influence. The benefit in this context was certainly mutual, yet the Afghan king withdrew
his support of the mujhidn of the tribal belt in the very moment that the British acknowledged
Afghanistans independence in the Treaty of Rawalpindi on 8 August 1919, while Amnallh in
turn confirmed the Durrand Line controversially established in 1893 as national border.103 Yet
again, the common people of the region have had to suffer the consequences of ever shifting
interests of the urban political elites. What resulted from here was a solidification of deeply
ingrained suspicion of the khn- and malik-ethics in the area that would contribute to the periodic
emergence of anti-elitist and often militant movements of whom the libn of the late 1990s can
well be conceptualized as only a more recent example.104
While it is often concluded that the activities of Mamd al-asan and his associates in the
Hijaz, in Afghanistan and in Sindh around the outbreak of World War I were by and large
unsuccessful,105 a closer investigation into the long-term effects of their endeavours seems
certainly in place. After all, especially in the more peripheral rural areas of the subcontinent, be
it the Pashtun and Baluch tribal areas, Sindh or rural Bengal,106 Mamd al-asans message of
deep suspicion into established configurations of power and a normatively grounded Islamic
morality constituted the only viable benchmark for their approval or disapproval.

Conclusions: framing Islamic Pietism and reframing Deobandiyyat

Islamic Pietism
Setting out from viewing the activities of Mamd al-asan and those in his circle, as set out
above, in conjunction with the orientation towards piety that became increasingly institutionalized in the Deoband project, we may now be able to legitimately establish an ideal typical notion
of Islamic Pietism as sociopolitical activism sustained by a strong piety. Because ideal types, as
conceptual tools, are ultimately rooted in empirical observation of historically unique
configurations,107 there is no denial that the structural paradigm here is constituted by
Protestant Christian radical Pietism. This popular movement for the verification of personal
beliefs and practices, strongly rooted in later Christian mysticism and apocalyptic ideas, emerged
in response to the deep discomfiture that the Thirty Years War has caused in large parts of the
population of the war-ridden lands.108
Similarly, the interpretation of Islam advocated by Mamd al-asan and his two spiritual
forerunners Imddallh Muhjir-i Makk and Muammad Qsim Nnawtav, that is to say, the
dominant one of the early Deobands, in the aftermath of the traumatic developments following
the 1857 Uprising was very much modelled on Sufi beliefs and devotional practices that focussed
entirely on introspection. Other than the rationalistic inclination of the mainly urban ashrf of
Aligarh, which aimed at living up to, and eventually participating in shaping the dominant
discourses of the time, the early Deobands joined hands with Christian critics of Enlightenment
furthered intellectualism. This was strengthened and elaborated through Mamd al-asans
actor-centric network, which reinvigorated the traffic of periphery and centre.
While personalities like Sir Sayyid reacted to the various academically disguised Western
polemics against Islam with a similarly rational argument,109 the deep piety of the early
Deobands required no ultimate justification of Gods existence and all that derives from here,
that is, creation, prophethood, revelation and the like. Same as Christian Pietists, God for them is
self-evident, an exhilarating sensation, a revelation of the heart; all discussion with non-believers
becomes thus superfluous. Moreover, the spiritual capital acquired this way could well be utilized
against economic and political capital: while the latter forms are not condemned as such, their
worldliness would relegate them to a somewhat subordinate importance. As such, only pious
thoughts and deeds would eventually yield the desired outcome; intellectual pursuit, in turn,
would prove futile; the title of a Deoband collection of legal opinions on that and related matters
from 1888 The Victory of Pieties (Nurat al-Ibrr) is indicative in this regard.110

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In this very context, one may also locate the radical re-conceptualization of the concept of
khilfa, historically understood rather as succession to the Prophet Muammad in the political
and spiritual leadership of the entire Muslim community, as emerges prominently from
Ubaydallh Sinds commentary of the Qurn, dictated during his stay in Mecca in the late
1920s, that is, almost a decade after the death of the Shaykh al-Hind. In his interpretation of
verse 24 (al-Nr): 55, in correlation with related verses such as 2 (al-Baqara): 30, the possessive
suffix in the term la-yastakhlifannahum provided for an unambiguous understanding of the
concept of khilfa as something that God bestowed on all those who believe and work righteous
deeds.111
This emphasis on qualified activity, as a benchmark for the participation in the khilfat allh,
establishes also this world as its sphere, analogous to the Christian Pietistic theme of the labourer
in the vineyard of the Lord (following Matthew 20: 116).112 It defines the world not in political
and economic terms, but as a social configuration of busy equals, grouped around a first among
them, as is well expressed in the Christian Pietistic metaphor of the beehive.113 Active community service without any constraint in regard to variant social, political and economical status is
being called for; the community, in turn, is not defined in either geopolitical or ethnic criteria, but
by the firm adherence to a metaphysical principle that provided humanity with a binding
interpretative framework as well as with a resulting moral code. Salvation, so the understanding
of Christian Pietists as well as their Muslim counterparts, is thus entirely dependent on faith;
worship in turn not confined to cultic rituals alone, but reaches out to all areas of human life, very
much understood as mutual assistance out of compassion (Lat.: caritas ab misericordia).114 It is
this notion which constitutes alternative sociopolitical frameworks that claim higher validity, but
which as the case under review impressively illustrates also carry the potential to clash
violently with the very efficacious power constellations on the ground. After all, the carriers of
these powers could equally claim superior validity, based not on a metaphysically derived
legitimization, but on the empiricist understanding of facticity.
The conflict became thus, besides various concrete social, economic and political trajectories,
one between two diametrically opposed world views: against a systemic understanding of the
world and humanitys place and scope in it, which was derived from the self-revelation of a
metaphysical entity, stood one that was based on a rational cost-benefit calculation of each and
every individual, rooted in a euphoric endorsement of human freedom of choice.115
Such a Pietistic orientation may explain why Mamd al-asan did not produce a substantial
literary output. His most well-known and widely circulated work, Adillah-yi Kmilah, consisted of
a polemical defence of the anafite approach to fiqh, directed mainly to the learned adversaries of
the Ahl-i ads and certainly not suited for a wider readership.116 His second and more expansive
work, Jahd al-Muqill f Tanzh al-Muizz wal-Muzill, however, has greater bearings on the matters
at hand here, as it contains a defence of the viewpoints of Shh Isml Dihlav and Sayyid Amad
Barelv on various theological matters.117 One of those was the question of the possibility of a peer
to the Prophet (imkn al-nar), a matter that was virulently discussed in the 1820s, and the
opposing view eventually embraced by the Barelvs who competed with the Deobands over the
following in rural North India.118
Against the philosophically sustained argument that the seal of prophecy (khatm al-nubuwwa)
constitutes an essential criteria of the concept Prophet Muammad and can therefore not have an
identical peer, Mamd al-asan defended at length the position of the leaders of the arqah-yi
Muammadiyyah that God cannot, and must not, be attempted to be rationally predicted by man.
What the Muslim Pietists demanded was no less than that humanity would humble itself in the face of
Gods nature as absolutely incomprehensible beyond the revelation and strengthening unconditional
faith against sharpening ones intellectual capacities. Indeed, in the Jahd al-Muqill, we possess at least
one text that simultaneously establishes a link and shows disjunctures between Mamd al-asan and
the localities his network engaged. With his Pietistic proclivities and his sociopolitical activism, his
students and associates mobilized the scattered remnants of the North Indian mujhidn associated

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

361

with the arqah-yi Muammadiyyah in the 1820s. On the other hand, the more general antiterritorial utopianism contained in Islamic Pietism as an approach, rather than a text, accommodated
prophetic millenarianism among those tribes that rejected the overly prescriptive arqah the first
time around.119
Islamic Pietism may not have always involved systematic radical egalitarianism as practice,
but building on both ethical and Sufi premises it did posit that the inequalities of actual social and
political structures are human-induced perversion of the divine arrangements of creation: by
definition good, just and beautiful. These constitute the only benchmark against which, from a
Pietistic perspective, all mundane matters are to be evaluated and, if necessary, redressed with all
available means. By implication, the upright believer cannot and must not accept the validity of
world views, Muslim or otherwise, that place Divine sovereignty in doubt. In this regard, each
and every believer needs to employ a general suspicion into all human pursuit and is called upon
to constantly scrutinize reality against the normative benchmark, a perpetual task that seems to
comply with the exhortation noted above, diffused through Mamd al-asans network, to
Dissect all Systems (fakka kull nimn) that has been put into his mouth.120 Indeed, dissecting,
probing and soul-searching of the contingent realities are cornerstones of the Sufi-inspired
Islamic Pietism, matched against the necessarily permanent, stable and perfect in every regard,
which, because of its reliability, is worthy of praise mamd, as epitomized in the name of
Mamd al-asan.
Deobandiyyat
The Pietistic disposition of the Shaykh al-Hind and his decision to forsake the word of books in
favour of actively propagating this message points finally to a new understanding of the Deoband
project that stands in contrast to its so far prevalent conceptualization as more or less monolithic
educational movement.
In this pursuit, the considerations of some of its leading representatives about the nature of
Deobandiyyat are quite illustrative. Those personages namely stressed that Deoband does
not so much refer to an institutional framework, but a certain inner disposition, reflected in
the activities. For the former principal of the Dr al-Ulm at Deoband Qr Muammad
ayyib (d. 1403/1983), for example, it was Muammad Qsim Nnawtav, one of the two
founding figures of the seminary, who would be the most perfect embodiment of that
disposition, which is truly reflected in the term Deobandiyyat. Similarly, only recently the
principal of Londons Dr al-Ulm, Muft Umar Frq hailed the influential contemporary
jurist Muft Muammad Taq Us mn from Karachi (b. 1362/1943) as epitom of
Deobandiyyat, stressing that, while the institutional framework certainly belongs to
Deoband, the full meaning of it can only be comprehended by a certain personal disposition
which in the past has been exemplarily embodied by selecting individual associated with the
institutional framework of Deoband.121
It is argued here that Mamd al-asans importance is predominantly derived from his
embodiment of Islamic Pietism which, in turn, is expressed in activisms that are based on a
notion of radical egalitarianism, rooted in the religiously grounded concepts of justice and
equity. As such, he appears to have followed Nnawtav on as epitom of Deobandiyyat, and
thus as a role model to be emulated. Key, in order to sustain such an image, is its extensive
recognition: Mamd al-asan can therefore not be properly considered all by himself, but only
in association with his vast band of followers. As such, he constituted a dominant node in a
widespread actornetwork; yet, at the same time, would allow for other such networks to exist at
the same time.122 His early adversary fi Muammad Amad, the son of Nnawtav, would
then constitute a similar node in a network of followers that aimed at establishing their respective
monopoly of definition of a Deobandiyyat that would not require to turn an emphasis on piety
into sociopolitical activism.

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J.-P. HARTUNG

Notes
1.
2.
3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

21.
22.
23.

24.
25.
26.

See, for instance, Metcalf, Islamic Revival; eadem, Madani; Sanyal, Devotional Islam; eadem, Ahmad Riza
Barelwi; Zaman, Ulama.
See, for instance, the contributions of Peter van der Veer, Muhammad Qasim Zaman and Brian J. Didier in
Savatore and Eickelman, Public Islam; Pernau, Brger mit Turban; Stark, Associational Culture.
In fact, leading scholars in this fold, such as the late principal of the Dr al-Ulm at Deoband, Qr
Muammad ayyib, have very much hinted in that direction: see ayyib, Ulam-i Deoband, 95118, esp.
100. I wish to thank Zeeshan Ahmad for bringing this final work of Qr Muammad ayyib to my
attention.
Despite the acknowledgement of Mamd al-asan as the one who was later to become the schools
most famous teacher (Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 92), no study of him exists to date. The series Makers of
the Muslim World of Oxford-based Oneworld publishers, for example, which contains a monograph on
Mamd al-asans two contemporary Deoband scholars Ashraf Al Tnav (by Muhammad Qasim
Zaman, 2007) and usayn Amad Madan (by Barbara D. Metcalf, 2008), did so far not bestow such
honour to the Shaykh al-Hind. This present essay is therefore only a first attempt towards closing this
research gap.
For Qr Muammad ayyib, these two notions are crucial in his attempt to establish Deobandiyyat, not as
a distinct scholarly orientation in competitive coexistence with other alternatives, but, in fact, as the epitom
of Sunni Islam. See idem, Ulam-i Deoband, 95118.
See the contributions by Caron and Dasgupta to this special issue (RSAC 7/2 [2016], 135154 and 175190),
both of which focus on how subaltern agency shaped better-studied genealogies of politics and with which
this paper sits therefore in dialogue.
The compatibility of the Islamically grounded notion of equality and Communist ideologies explains the
emergence of the idea of an Islamic socialism, as a third way between socialism and capitalist liberalism, as
was theoretically sustained by so diverse thinkers as Bahavetdin Visev (d. 1893) and Mirsid Soltangaliev
(executed 1940) in Tatarstan, Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn (d. 1897) in Egypt, later Al Sharat (d. 1977) and
Jall l-i Amad (d. 1969) in Iran, or Muammar al-Ghadhdhf (killed in 2011) of Libya.
Arneson, Egalitarianism, 2f. More detailed on the philosophical concept of non-instrumental equality, see
Cupit, Three Ways to Value Equality, 129f.
See Qurn 2 (al-Baqara): 247, 8 (al-Anfl): 28, 18 (al-Kahf): 47, 23 (al-Muminn): 55f, 26 (al-Shuar): 88f,
34 (Saba): 37, 63 (al-Munfiqn): 9 and 64 (al-Taghbun): 15, 68 (al-Qalam): 14f.
See Caron, Cultural Histories, 50 n.47.
See Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism, 79 and 161f; also Alam, Languages, 4954 et passim.
See s, Akhlq-i Nir, 305: The first condition for justice [muaddalat] is that he [i.e. the ruler, pdishh]
should keep the different groups of people [anf-i khalq] corresponded with one another, for just as equable
mixture [amzijah-yi mutadil] results from the mixture of the four elements [chahr unur], so equable
social associations [ijtimt-i mutadil] are formed from the four [social] classes [chahr inf].
Ibid.
See al-Frb, al-Madna al-Fila, 129; also Hartung, Enacting the Rule of Islam, 301307.
For this notion, which encompasses the political revolutions in Europe since 1789 and the industrial
revolutions, see Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution.
See Ahmad, Ashraf-Ajlaf Dichotomy; also the frequently cited works of Norwegian social anthropologist
Fredrik Barth (b. 1928) on the Pashtuns of Svat from the late 1950s.
See Buehler, Trends of Ashrfization, 232, 236238.
See Golden, History of the Turkic Peoples, 146149, 189229, 283306 et passim; on the TurkMongolian
progenitor of the Mughals, see Manz, Tamerlane.
See Hartung, Enacting the Rule of Islam.
Lelyveld, Aligarhs First Generation, 93. For the strong entrenchment of the Aligarh Movement in the
ashrf-culture of Muslim North India, see Khn, Asbb-i Baghvat, 128f and 141f; Ahmed, Present State, 9,
21 and 3234; Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 43101. For a graphic reaction against this modernist recasting of
the notion of ashrf from a Deoband perspective, see Ludiynav, Asan al-Fatv, I: 7f.
Rawls, Theory of Justice, 63; see also idem, Justice as Fairness, 11, 42f et passim.
See Khn, Asbb-i Baghvat, 132140; Ahmed, Present State.
On the founding phase of the Deoband movement, the standard work remains Metcalf, Islamic Revival; on
the Barelv movement, Sanyal, Devotional Islam. On the Imrat-i Shariyyah, see Hartung, Viele Wege, 383
385; Zaman, South Asian Islam, 6164.
See Sanyal, Devotional Islam, 97165.
See, for example, Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 235260; Alam, Understanding Deoband Locally, 187.
It is somewhat unfortunate that the conceptualization of Deoband as an almost exclusively ashrf-centred
enterprise by Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 238248, has so far remained unchallenged in scholarship on the

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

27.
28.

29.
30.
31.

32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.

38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.

50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.

363

matter. Compare, for example, Buehler, Trends of Ashrfization, 239. The matter, however, appears much
more complex than the emerging black-and-white image and one would need to look much closer into
individual dispositions of the various actors involved here.
See Alam, Understanding Deoband Locally, 178182, 186189 and 193.
On the rqah-yi Muammadiyyah, see Hartung, Viele Wege, 111116 and 216222; on the emergence of
the Tablgh Jamat in the Mevat region to the south of Delhi today however well within the city limits
see Mayaram, Resisting Regimes.
See Hartung, System of Life, 4649; more detailed are Adhikari, Documents; and Ansari, Emergence of
Socialist Thought.
See Marx and Engels, Werke, IX: 127133 (Die britische Herrschaft in Indien; 25 June 1853) and 220226
(Die knftigen Ergebnisse der britischen Herrschaft in Indien; 8 August 1853).
This statement is by no means intended to suggest that the rural areas were essentially stagnant conservatories of tradition. In comparison, however, its economic development and the related structural changes in
the increasingly fragmented society paled considerably in view of those kinds of developments in the
metropolises of British India, as works on capitalist developments in India, such as those of Ravi Ahuja
on colonial Madras, suggest.
See numerous of the other contributions RASC 7/2 and 7/4.
See, for instance, Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 252.
See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II, 34; Us mn, Tafsr-i Us mn, I, 8.
See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II, 33.
See al-asan, Nuzhat al-Khawir, VIII, 152158; on the two named teachers, see ibid., VII: 246f and 534;
also Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 7478.
See Sind, Shh Valyallh, 181189 et passim. Sind went as far as establishing the notion of a Party of
Valyallh (izb-i Valyallh) that began with the eighteenth-century Delhite scholar himself, and was
continued through Mamlk al-Al and the founderfigures of Deoband, all the way to Mamd al-asan.
See ibid., 188, where the nisba al-Umaw was added to the name of the scholar.
On Sinds biography, see Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II, 6567; Hartung, Viele Wege, 245249 and 254f.
See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II, 34.
On the increasing formalization of the content of instruction in Indian dn madris, see Hartung, Religious
Education in Transition, 231242.
The convincing translation of kalm as theology of causation has been adopted from Eichner, Post-Avicennian
Philosophical Tradition, 7.
See Sind, Shh Valyallh, 188.
Ibid.
For a careful assessment of the usefulness of hagiographies for historical research, see Paul, Hagiographische
Texte.
See Tnav, Muammad Qsim Nnawtav, 29.
See Ahmad, The Ashraf-Ajlaf Dichotomy, 274f.
See, for example, Pernau, Brger mit Turban, 109117.
Sir Sayyid, in his obituary for Nnawtav, published in the bilingual Aligarh Institute Gazette 14
(24 April 1880), 467f, hailed him as follows: People thought that after Mawlav [Muammad] Isq
[Dihlav, a grandson of Shh Valyallh] there would be no one like him, bearing all of his qualities
[tamm ift]. However, the late Mawlav Muammad Qsim, through his perfect piety, faith, austerity
and simplicity [kaml nk awr dnvr awr taqv awr var awr maskn se], has proved that God Almighty
did procure another person with these qualities, perhaps even superior than him as far as these issues are
concerned. At this time and age everybody would agree that he had no match he might perhaps not
have been as knowledgeable [malmt ilm me] as Shh Abd al-Azz [ibn Shh Valyallh], but in other
aspects he was greater than him. If in matters of humility, piety, and virtuousness [sdah mizj] he was not
superior to Mawlav Isq, then he was certainly not inferior either.
Tnav, Arv-i S als ah, 166220. Of course, we need again to realize the hagiographical nature of this
work when considering the reliability of this account.
See Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 139, who bases her exposition here largely on Tnavs Arv-i S als ah, cited
here as an edition by uhr al-asan Kasawl (Sahranpr 31370/1950).
Even information on his educational background differs greatly. Compare, for example, al-asan, Nuzhat
al-Khawir, VIII, 79f, and Muammad Riz Us mn in Makk, Kulliyt-i Imddiyyah, 2.
See Khn, s r al-andd, 559; al-asan, Nuzhat al-Khawir, VII, 551f
See Ahmad, Wahhabi Movement, 7883.
See Merah, Takirat al-Rashd, I, 7379; Gln, Savni-i Qsim, II, 134163; al-asan, Nuzhat al-Khawir,
VIII, 80.
See, for example, Imddallhs versified treatise on the Greater jihd, the Jihd-i Akbar, in Makk, Kulliyt-i
Imddiyyah, 106127. For the contrast of early with later Deoband fatv collections, which again contain a

364

57.
58.
59.
60.
61.

62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.

70.
71.

72.
73.
74.

75.

76.
77.

78.
79.
80.
81.

J.-P. HARTUNG

Kitb al-Jihd, compare Gangoh, Fatv-yi Rashdiyyah, with latter, for example, the one of Abd al-aqq
ibn jj Gul of Akoah Khaak (d. 1409/1988): Afghn, Fatv-yi aqqniyyah, V, 285355.
Mamd al-asan in Kndalav, Trkh-i Mahir, I, 119.
On this, see Winkelmann, From Behind the Curtain, 46; since then, the theme has been repeatedly revived in
various publications on Muslim education in India.
See Makk, Kulliyt-i Imddiyyah, 9297 (Irshd-i Murshid).
See Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 167f.
Mamd al-asan in Us mn, Tafsr-i Us mn, I, 12. It needs to be mentioned that the full degree of
Mamd al-asans involvement in this translation-cum-exegetical effort remains unclear from the literature consulted here.
See ibid., for example, II: 449 (on 18: 48) and 647 (on 23: 56).
See ibid., III: 708f.
See al-Ghazl, Iy Ulm al-Dn, IV, 384409; Makk, Kulliyt-i Imddiyyah, 2934, 4244, 5154 (all
from his Z iy al-Qulb).
See Us mn, Tafsr-i Us mn, I, 241.
See ibid., III: 748.
See, for example, Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, I, 152; Us mn, Tafsr-i Us mn, I, 8; Shaykh, Mawln
Mamd-i asan, 2126 et passim; Minault, Khilafat Movement, 2532 et passim.
See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II, 56.
See Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, I, 141143; also Minault, Khilafat Movement, 2731, who stresses that [f]actionalism
based on loyalties to these two figures was an important factor in events at Deoband during the next fifteen years
(p. 27). Interestingly, the official history of the institution by its former chief archivist Sayyid Mabb Riz v
remains silent on any personal rivalry between the scholars, perhaps out of various conventions that apply to this
kind of literature.
See ayyib, Ulam-i Deoband, 100.
See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II: 57f. Sir Sayyid Amad Khn lamented in 1858 that one factor in the
Uprising 1 year earlier was the discontinuation of the Mughal practice of awarding titles and other honours
in exchange for loyalty (see Khn, Asbb-i Baghvat, 142f). Considering this, the bestowal of this title to
fi Muammad Amad (see N.A.I. New Delhi, Home Dept. 1916, Political D, no. 46) may be interpreted
as part of a British policy aimed at redressing the situation. If so, may we consider this an indication of
ambivalent loyalty? This would make sense of Riz vs statement that because of the desire to maintain the
independence [urriyat] of this scholarly orientation [maslak] he did not like to have received a title from
the government, and [he therefore] returned the title after some time. See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II:
58 (trans. JPH).
See Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, I, 143, II: 161; Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, I, 221f, II: 65.
See Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, II, 154157, 161f; Lighr, Sarguasht-i Kbul, 21, Minault, Khilafat Movement,
2830.
Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 92, makes a valuable point by stressing that the seminary at Deoband was indeed
emulating the British bureaucratic style for educational institutions, [] conceived of as a distinct institution, not relegated to a wing of a mosque or home and dependent on the parent institution.
Among these activities belongs an infamous fatv allegedly issued by fi Muammad Amad in 1913, in
which he declared Ubaydallh Sind an unbeliever and caused thus the confidant of Mamd al-asan to
leave Deoband. See Minault, Khilafat Movement, 29, whose statement is based first and foremost on
document N.A.I. New Delhi, Home Dept. 1918, Political B, nos. 92102, which contains this information
as provided by akm Nurat usayn of Delhi (d. 1336/1918) during his imprisonment in Malta to the civil
servant and scholar Sir Richard Burn (d. 1947) on 14 December 1917 (on Nurat usayn and the
circumstances of his interviews with Burn, see Madan, Safarnmah, 7678). The time gap of five years,
as well as the fact that Nurat usayn must have received this information himself only second-hand,
indicates the need for further ideally primary textual evidence.
See Sedition Committee, Report, 177; also Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, I, 143, II: 156f.
See Mihr, Sarguzasht-i Mujhidn, 532; bir, Takirah, 221236, esp. 222; Khan, Ubayd Allah Sindhis
Mission, 24f; Haroon, Frontiers of Faith, 98104 et passim. Mihr and especially bir indicate that Turangzy
was first introduced to the activist ideas of Deobands like Mamd al-asan during his time as a student at
a madrasah just outside Peshavar by one Tj Muammad from Mardan, the schools principal.
See Madan, Safarnmah, for example, 63, 88, 182 and 194 (here, misprinted as Azz Gul). For a detailed
biographical study of Uzayr Gul, see Shah, Maulana Ozair Gul.
On Popalzy, see Gln, Takirah-yi Ulam, I, 258266; also Marwat, Maulana Abdul Rahim Popalzai;
Caron, Cultural Histories, 152157 and 169f.
See Khn, p Bt, 2731 and 94. Also, see Qadir, Reforming the Pukhtuns, 58, 84, 91 and 95.
See Riz v, Trkh-i Dr al-Ulm, II, 6971. For his involvement in the Narat-i Marif-i Qurniyyah, see
Papers regarding recent activities among Wahabis, 1916, BL London, IOC L/PS/11/111.

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

82.
83.
84.
85.

86.
87.

88.
89.
90.
91.

92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.

102.
103.
104.

105.
106.

107.
108.

365

On Abd al-Ghaffr Akhnd and Najm al-Dn Akhndzdah, although mainly based on much later hagiographical material, such as Gln, Takirah-yi Ulam, I, 149157, see Haroon, Frontiers of Faith, 3953.
See Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power, 79f.
See ibid., 3656.
Indicative in this regard is the so-called Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, tabled by the lawyer Sir James
Fitzjames Stephen (d. 1894) and passed and enforced by the then Viceroy Sir Richard S. Bourke (d. 1872), in
which various rural and pastoral-nomadic groups especially in the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and
Baluchistan were branded criminal and, besides others, subjected to restriction of movement up to
internment in specially designed settlements, along with hard manual labour.
Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power, 59.
A case, in point, here is the rebellions of the urr of Sindh in the 1890s (see ibid., 5876). They were the
adepts of the Pr Pago of Pr Jo Goh, the leading Sufi institution in the province since the early nineteenth
century, whose name resulted from them being declared free from responsibilities towards the British by
ibghatallh Shh I, the first Pr Pago (d. 1276/1831), when he joined the jihd of Sayyid Amad Barelv
and Shh Isml Dihlav. Moreover, the name is also reminiscent of the former Umayyad commander urr
ibn Yazd al-Tamm, who, for religious reasons, changed his allegiance to the imm al-usayn ibn Al
immediately before the Battle of Kerbala and was subsequently killed in action on 10 Muarram 61/
10 October 680.
See Caron Sufism and Liberation.
For either forms of authority, see Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power, and Qadir, Reforming the Pukhtuns.
See Malbd, ikr-i zd, 3436, esp. 35, where Mamd al-asans decline of the offer is quoted. For a
rather liberal translation of this passage, see Minault, Khilafat Movement, 104.
See Metcalf, Madani, 78. This claim, which I could not find anywhere else, lacks a reference. Madan,
Naqsh-i ayt, II: 555558, as well as Malbd, ikr-i zd, both retrospective accounts, remain
silent on this. Moreover, we do not have any substantial indication what this honorific in fact entails,
other than being a general sign of respect.
See Ochsenwald, Ironic Origins.
See Us mn, Tafsr-i Us mn, I, 413.
For the text of the beyn-nme and the fetv, both published in five languages including Urdu, see Cerde-yi
Ilmiye 1:7 (1333/1914), 432480.
See Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, II, 252f; idem, Safarnmah, 7982. Since the actual document seems not to be
extant, its genre, and thus its intended degree of authority, is hard to ascertain.
See Lighr, Sarguasht-i Kbul, 253257; Sedition Committee, Report, 178f. The projected organization is
also referred to in various materials as jund allh or izb allh.
See Jeddah Agency. Papers: Silk Letter Case. The National Archives London, Public Record Office, Foreign
Office 686/149, 202208.
See Khan, Ubayd Allah Sindhis Mission, 146208.
See Lighr, Sarguasht-i Kbul, 5660 and 188253.
See Khan, Ubayd Allah Sindhis Mission, 7478 and 107129.
Haroon, Frontiers of Faith, 97124, bases much of her argument on colonial archival materials, which
presents us with a rather lopsided image of the developments in the region. A much more balanced account,
which also considers materials from around the circles of the mujhidn themselves, provides Rauf, The
British Empire, 414437.
See Madan, Naqsh-i ayt, II, 132, cited also in Rauf, The British Empire, 417.
See Haroon, Frontiers of Faith, 104115.
In this regard, one may want to think of the founding myth of this movement, when Mull Muammad
Umar (d. 2013) was said to have conducted in early 1994 a successful armed rescue operation of two girls
from his village of Sangsar who had been abducted by a local warlord (khn) and sexually abused. This
oppressive and religiously unsustainable practice of playing [sexually] with boys (bachchah-bz) by Afghan
political and economic elites is said to have been a main driver for the establishment of the libn. See, for
example, Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, 5765.
See, for instance, Kramer, Islam Assembled, 60f; Metcalf, Madani, 25.
The legacy of Mamd al-asan in rural Bengal is very much tied to the personality of Abd al-mid
Bhshn (Bengali: bdl Hmid Bhn; d. 1976), who spent from 1907 to 1909 at the Dr al-Ulm in
Deoband where presumably he was also taught and influenced by Mamd al-asan.
Weber, Die Objektivitt, 193 (trans. E. Shils).
See Brecht, Gbler and Lehmann, Geschichte Des Pietismus, esp. I, 110, 113240, 391438, and IV: 1948. First
attempt to make the concept of Pietism applicable to the Islamic context is to be found in Reinhard Schulzes
provocative essay on the autochthonous Islamic enlightenment (see Schulze, Das islamische achtzehnte
Jahrhundert) and, more sustained, by Hofheinz, Illumination and Enlightenment Revisited, 1419.

366

109.

110.
111.
112.

113.

114.

115.

116.
117.
118.

119.
120.

121.

122.

J.-P. HARTUNG

See here, for example, the various responses by Sir Sayyid or Sayyid Amr Al (d. 1347/1928) to the various
works of Alois Sprenger (d. 1893) and William Muir (d. 1905) on the Qurn, the Prophet Muammad and
early Muslim history, where both Muslim scholars attempt to provide rational and text-based
counterarguments.
See Ldiynav, Nurat al-Ibrr.
Qurn 24 (al-Nr): 55: alladhna aman minkum wa-amil al-lit . See al-Sind, Ilhm al-Ramn, I:
298300.
See Brecht, Gbler, and Lehmann, Geschichte Des Pietismus, IV, 495f, where this slogan, along with citizen
of the kingdom of God, is highlighted as a dominant figure of speech in eighteenth-century
Wuerttembergian Pietism.
For a graphic example, see the highly popular journal Der Bienenstock: Eine Sittenschrift, der Religion,
Vernunft und Tugend gewidmet (Hamburg and Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Spieringks Wittwe, 1756), published by Johann Dietrich Leyding (d. 1781).
This is already explicitly clear in the founding manifesto of Protestant Pietism, Philipp Jacob Speners
(d. 1705), Pia desiderata, oder Hertzliches Verlangen/Nach Gottgeflliger Besserung der wahren
Evangelischen Kirchen/samt einigen dahin einfltigen abzweckenden Christlichen Vorschlgen [sic]
(Frankfurt/M.: Johann David Zunners, 1676).
We again see socio-intellectual parallels in Central Europe, where North German Pietistic poet and writer
Matthias Claudius (d. 1815) lamented that whoever proclaims human liberty and preaches human rights
without reserve and limitation, rattles and shakes those oh so benevolent, wisely and arduously knotted
ties; he unearths once again the bovarism and self-will etc. from the covert; moreover, he unsettles the
beautiful emotions of love, faith and reliance in man, takes his heart out of his body and makes him into a
withered and know-all braincase without joy for himself and others. Claudius, Werke, 36 (ber die Neue
Politick [sic], 1789; trans. JPH). Such view would similarly be held by the Methodists, as the representation of
Protestant Christian Pietism in the anglophone world.
See Deoband, Adillah-yi Kmilah; Metcalf, Islamic Revival, 212f.
See Deoband, Jahd al-Muqill, I, 2f et passim.
For a discussion of this controversy in the 1830s, see Hartung, Abused Rationality, 142144. For an
indication of the adoption of the view advocated by Faz l-i aqq Khayrbd (d. 1278/1861) against Shh
Isml by the Barelvs, see Khn, usm al-aramayn, 56f.
On this argument, see Qadir, Sayyid Ahmad Barailvi, 136160.
See Bahar, Religious and Philosophical Basis, 51. Bahar translates this line as Destroy every existing structure,
which suggests a somewhat alternative interpretation of the implications of the Arabic slogan, provided in a quite
problematic spelling as Fukka Kulle Nesamin. Moreover, the veracity of this slogan as one of Mamd alasans cannot be ensured; the reference provided by Bahar is a chapter on Abd al-mid Bhshns political
background (Bhnr Rjntir Paabhmi) by Bhshns own associate rfanl Bri in an edited volume by
Hsn bdl Kim, Majlm Jananet Muln Bhn (Dhaka: Islmik Fundean Baglade, 1988).
See VN-20160129-WA000.mp3, mins. 159-243. URL: http://athkaryafkary.com/wordpress01/?
feed = rss2 (accessed 4 February 2016). Thanks, go again to Zeeshan Ahmad Chaudri for bringing this to
my attention.
This revised perspective could serve well to overcome more static views on the Deoband project, and solve
the dilemma that results from the establishment of various intellectual lineages within an ideally unified idea
of Deoband, as suggested by Nasr, The Rise of Sunni Militancy, 169179 and criticized by Zaman, Ulama,
133f.

Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to everybody who has undertaken a critical reading of this essay in several of its metamorphoses
and has thus helped to significantly improve the consistency of the argument. Yet special thanks need to go out to
James Caron for his unfettered and active support during the review process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

367

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