Sufism and Revivalism in South Asia: Mawlana Ashraf 'Ali Thanvi Of

Sufism and Revivalism in South Asia SufismBlackwellOxford,MUWOThe0027-49091478-1913©XXXOriginal TS heufism2009 MuslimMuslim andHartfordUKArticle Publishing RWorldWevivalismorld Seminary Ltd in South Asia and Revivalism in South Asia: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi of Deoband and Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan of Bareilly and their paradigms of Islamic revivalism Fuad S. Naeem Georgetown University Washington, D.C. uch modern scholarship concerned with the Islamic world in the modern period has relatively neglected the continuing significance Mand presence of the ‘Ulama’ in Muslim societies. A similar neglect is visible in acknowledging the presence and significance of Sufis in modern Muslim societies. There are many reasons for this neglect. While many of the most important ‘Ulama’ and Sufis of the classical period (roughly to 1300 CE in most treatments) have been canonized as ‘great men’ central to the formation and development of the Islamic intellectual and cultural traditions, most later figures have not met with the same fortune, despite their continuing influence in Muslim societies. A chief reason for this was that the texts of the classical period were largely seen and studied by the Orientalist tradition as definitive of Islam and Islamic civilization as a whole. Later Islamic history was often © 2009 Hartford Seminary. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 USA. 435 The Muslim World • Volume 99 • July 2009 seen through the lens of the popular thesis of perpetual Muslim decline over the last several centuries. Later Muslim history became the provenance of colonial officials and, later, diplomatic and political historians, all of whom were not primarily interested in Muslim intellectual and cultural productions. The preference for change over continuity in modern scholarship has been another factor in the neglect of the ‘Ulama’ and Sufis of the later period.1 A preference for originality over ‘tradition’ led to an overemphasis on modernist figures, on the one hand, and Islamist or ‘fundamentalist’ figures and movements, on the other, often combined with a tacit supposition that the ‘Ulama’ and Sufis represented ‘medieval’ discourses that would not long survive the triumph of modernity. Despite a shift away from the paradigm of perpetual progress and the frameworks of classicist Orientalism in the last few decades, a general neglect of the ‘Ulama’ and Sufis in modern Muslim societies has been endemic to scholarship on the modern Muslim world, although this is beginning to change. In the case of South Asia, the development of the twin nationalisms of united India and the two-nation theory, realized respectively in the current nation-states of India and Pakistan, has also contributed to the sidelining of the ‘Ulama’ and the Sufis, as they have not been assigned important roles in the nationalist narratives of the two states. This is partly due to various forms of modernist presumptions that took them as irrelevant to modernity and its concerns and partly to nationalist canonizations of political and military figures above scholars and mystics. More recently, studies on the ‘Ulama’ and Sufis in the modern period are beginning to proliferate as their importance in modern Islamic societies comes to light.2 Part of this renewed interest has come from a challenging of assumptions related to viewing tradition as static and monolithic; some now see tradition as a dynamic category which interweaves continuity and change (for example, Marilyn Waldman, drawing on the work of Marshall Hodgson,3 has identified tradition as a modality of change4 and one can similarly see change as an intrinsic mode of tradition) and which contains multiple competing discourses that interact at various levels with each other and with other discursive practices, including those associated with the modern world.5 A proper mapping of the Muslim intellectual landscape in the modern period is possible only by fully locating and understanding the place and influence of the ‘traditional’ discourses of the ‘Ulama’ and the Sufis. Key to my argument is the significance of a development in the Islamic world of the later period that has been understressed: the overlapping of the functions and discourses of the ‘Ulama’ and the Sufis into a synthesis where they are devolved into a single person who is both fully an “alim and fully a Sufi, using these discourses for mutual illumination and support. This “alim-Sufi amalgam, an increasingly pervasive orientation in post-classical 436 © 2009 Hartford Seminary. Sufism and Revivalism in South Asia Islamic history, is central to understanding Islamic revivalism in the modern period. The term revivalism, the way that I will use it, functions as an analogue to terms in Muslim languages such as ‘tajdid,’ renewal, and ‘islah,’ rectification, both signifying the reassertion and reformulation in a new situation, and sometimes new form, of ideas and practices essential to the traditions which are under threat. The terms in their original connotations thereby suggest both continuity and change. This, I believe, roughly corresponds to the understanding of these terms as used in the discourses of the ‘Ulama’ and Sufis (as opposed to the rather different understanding of islah in Islamic movement and Salafi literature, often stressing reconstructed ‘pure’ forms of Islamic practice against customary and traditional practices). It can be argued that the vast majority of movements of Islamic revival came from figures who personified the “alim-Sufi combine. Even when this is acknowledged, the significance of Sufi discourses and practices in these orientations and movements is often either not well-understood or downplayed in favor of a scripturalist or legalist emphasis. I would like to consider two of the most important and influential late nineteenth and early twentieth century figures of Indian Islam that are an embodiment of the “alim-Sufi amalgam and have been at the forefront of movements of Islamic revival in South Asia: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (1865–1943) and Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi (1856–1921). Both of these figures are understudied and this is even more glaring as regards the Sufi dimensions of their discourses.6 By examining their investment in Sufi discourses, we can see how significant the influence of Sufism was for Islamic revivalism in Muslim India. Moreover, I believe similar examples can be found in many other areas of the Islamic world where Islamic revivalism has been spearheaded by figures deeply immersed in and informed by Sufi discourses.7 Thanvi and Ahmad Raza have been seen by their followers and by scholars as opponents, but without denying the significance of their disagreements, it must be stressed that structurally, their roles and importance for Sufism and revivalism in Muslim India have, as we shall see, many commonalities. In addition to many smaller common points of reference, they can both be seen as the founts of communities of discourse and practice that fuse Sufism and revivalism. Two works loom large when one speaks of ‘Ulama’ and their roles and significance in Muslim South Asia: Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revivalism in British India 8 and Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s The “Ulama” in Contemporary Islam9. Both works, though different in their approach and conclusions, have greatly enriched the discourse on the ‘Ulama’ in the modern period. Metcalf’s thesis revolves around the process of interiorization that occurred among the Indian Muslim elite in response to the challenge of colonialism and modernity. Metcalf’s argument has been interpreted as implying that after the disastrous © 2009 Hartford Seminary. 437 The Muslim World • Volume 99 • July 2009 aftermath of the uprising of 1857, the ‘Ulama’ undertook an “inward turn” focusing on cultivating a perfect Islamic life and practice instead of involving themselves with the external exigencies of British rule and impending modernity. Zaman critiqued this view stressing the continuing participation of the ‘Ulama’ in the public sphere, in British India as well as the nation-states of Pakistan and India as part of a continuous strategy to engage with the modern world. Part of this seeming contradiction comes from the fact that Metcalf focuses on the early period until 1900 in her treatment of the Deobandi ‘Ulama’, when there may have been less visible participation in the larger public space of British India, while Zaman begins in the early twentieth century and pushes his argument into the present, when the ‘Ulama’ have been increasingly engaged in a large variety of activities in the public domain.10 This issue, which has further dimensions, may be illuminated by a consideration of the significance of the relationship between Sufism and revivalism in the lives and discourses of the ‘Ulama’, as exemplified in Thanvi and in rival Barelvi mode, in Ahmad Raza. Whereas Metcalf stresses the importance of Sufism for the Deobandi ‘Ulama’ as part of their turn inward but does not explain how this enabled them then to turn outward and play the often very active role they did in the public domain, Zaman, for his part, almost completely ignores the significance of Sufism in their discourses or their revivalist activities.11 I would like to use a cue based on Plato’s Republic interpreted through the lens of ethical philosopher and psychologist Jonathan Lear to shed light on a manner of stating the relationship between Sufism and revivalism that situates them in a dialectical process and demonstrates how the turn inward and outward actively complement and re-enforce each other, instead of harboring a contradiction due to a supposed opposition. Lear reads the relationship in the Republic between the psyche and the polis as better understood not by an analogy between microcosm and macrocosm, as it is often interpreted, but as a dialectic of internalization and externalization.12 The psyche, or in Sufi parlance, nafs, the soul or self, internalizes what it receives from the outward and then, in turn, externalizes that into the polis, or society, and the process keeps repeating itself.

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