THEODORE P. WRIGHT JR. the CHANGING ROLE of the SADAT in INDIA and PAKISTAN the South Asian History of the Descendants of the Pr
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THEODORE P. WRIGHT JR. THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE SADAT IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN he South Asian history of the descendants of the Prophet is an ex T treme example of the tension between the ideal of Islamic egalita rism among all believers and the actual hereditary hierarchy among vari ous groups of Muslims. Reuben Levy1 translates a surah of the Qur'an as saying, "O ye folk, verily we have created you male and female ... Verily the most honorable of you in the sight of Allah is the most pious of you" and a !J,adi! that "there are no genealogies in Islam", forbidding the pre Islamic Arabic boasting over ancestry. But, he cautions, "so intangible an element in social organisation as pride of ancestry was not to be de stroyed by edict at one stroke". Equality even among all Arabs - and the Prophet could scarcely have had in mind any broader application of the rule at the time - was not conceded by the representatives of the old order without a bitter struggle. "Far from destroying the regard paid to heredi tary greatness, the effect of the Prophet's own success was not to create a new object of veneration . Henceforward kinship with him was re garded as the touchstone of true nobility and even the slight degree of re lationship to him implied by membership of his tribe, the Quraysh, was regarded as a patent of high distinction". Once Islam was adopted by peoples beyond the confines of Arabia, the Bedouin tribesmen regarded themselves as superior to the new foreign converts who became mawiili or clients. The Influence of the Siidiit or Syeds, 2 he adds, is perhaps strongest in Iran where the traditional rever ence for the Prophet's daughter Fatimah, son-in-law, 'Ali and their sons, al-J:Iasan and al-J:Iusayn, is emphasized by the Si'ah sect. As is to be expected, the further from Arabia Islam spread, the smaller the proportion of descendants of the Prophet and other Arabs was among the population of Muslims. In South Asia, aside from a few such "Than gals" among the early Arab merchant immigrants and their descendants in Kerala, 3 most Arabs and Persians arrived in India in the wake of Muslim conquerors through the north-west mountain passes, invaders who were 1-Levy, R., The Social Structure ofIslam, Cambridge, 1965, p. 55-56. 2 - Properly transliterated Sayyid but commonly Syed in South Asia. Only technical and Arabic terms are here transliterated, excluding adjectives, names of people, politi cal parties, places, etc. 3 - Miller, R., Mappilla Muslims ofKera/a, Bombay, 1976, p. 42. OM, n.s. XVIII (LXXIX), 2, 1999 650 THEODORE P. WRIGHT JR. themselves not Arab (except in Sind), but recently converted Turkish, Afghan or Mongol tribesmen. Naturally, these warriors assumed high so cial, political and economic status compared to the converts to Islam made from among their Hindu subjects although they recognized their own social inferiority to all Arabs. Consequently, the term asriif or noble which Middle East experts and Islamicists tend to equate with Arab descended, was expanded in South Asia to include all foreign-origin Mus lims, the more recent the better,4 who sharply distinguish themselves from the agltVor common Hindustanis. 5 Much of the conversion of Hindus, it is now argued, was accom plished not by force, as is the familiar Western stereotype about the spread of Islam, but by sufi mystics who sometimes even preceded the Muslim armies and appealed to the lower caste Hindus and ex-Buddhists with promises of better treatment in egalitarian Islam. 6 Although the au thority and charisma of the sufi saints came from their personal piety, it also helped if they could claim descent from the Prophet, 7 so there was a strong incentive for them or their descendants to manufacture family trees, sagarah, to prove this.8 Among the sufipir's disciples (murid), the 4 - Curiously opposite to the United States where until recently the earlier the arrival of one's European ancestors, the greater the social prestige c. g. the Mayflower De scendants, the Holland Society, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. 5 - lmtiaz Ahmad denies the very existence of the pejorative term, agliif, in "The Ashraf-Ajlaf Dichotomy in Muslim Social Structure in India", in: Indian Economic and Social Histo,y Re,•iew, 111, 3 (1966), p. 268-278, but it is widely employed by most other authorities. 6 - Nizami, Kh.A., Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India during the I 3th Cent111y, Bombay, 1961, p. 320-322, citing Arnold, T.W., The Preaching of Islam, London, 1913, although this is questioned by Richard Eaton in his Sujis of Bijapur /330-17000; Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India, Princeton, 1978, p. 31. For a balanced view, sec Rizvi, S.A.A., "Islamic Prosclytisation (Seventh to Sixteenth Cen turies)", in: Oddic, G.A. (ed.), Religion in South Asia; Religious Conversion and Re vival Movements in South Asia in Medieval and Modem Times, Delhi, 1977, p. 13-33. 7 - Mujecb, M., The Indian Muslims, London, 1967, p. 212. Riazul Islam points out in "South Asian sufis and their Social Linkage", in: Culture Interaction in South Asia, Tirmizi, S.A.I. (ed.), New Delhi, 1993, p. 91, that "without exception they all came from socially venerable families: Shaikh Muinuddin Chishti, Sh. Qutb ud Din Bak htiar Kaki, Shaikh Nizamuddin Awliya, Shaikh Nasiruddin Chiragh, Makhdum-i Ja haniyan of Uchch, Sayyid Gcsudaraz and Sayyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani were all of Sayyid Descent". Simon Digby adds "or other ashra/' in "The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of Authority in Medieval India", in: Islam et Societe en Asie du Sud, Ga boricau, M. (ed.), Paris, 1986, p. 57-77. 8 - Misra, S.C., Muslim Communities in Gujarat, Bombay, 1964, p. 120. lmtiaz Ahmad, "Endogamy and Status Mobility among the Siddique Sheikhs of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh", in his edited volume: Caste and Social Stratifict1tion among the Mus lims, Delhi, 1973, p. 178. This was particularly easy in Pakistan after partition when refugees could plausibly argue that they had lost their iagt1rah in the course of flight from India. For non-Syed, East Punjabi refugees entitled Shah, this was facilitated by .