Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire
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MUSLIM COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE AGE OF EmPIRE MUSLIM COSMOPOLITANISM in the AGE OF EmPIRE Seema Alavi Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Alavi, Seema. Muslim cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire / Seema Alavi. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 73533- 0 1. Cosmopolitanism—âslamic countries. 2. Cosmopolitanism—ândia.â. Title. JZ1308.A4115 2015 297.092'254— dc23â 2014030725 For my parents, Roshan and Shariq Alavi CONTENTS Preface ix Map: Muslim networks in the nineteenth century xiii Introductionâ 1 1 Muslim Reformists and the Transition to English Rule 32 2 The Making of the “Indian Arab” and the Tale of Sayyid Fadl 93 3 Rahmatullah Kairanwi and the Muslim Cosmopolis 169 4 Haji Imdadullah Makki in Mecca 222 5 Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan and the Muslim Cosmopolis 267 6 Maulana Jafer Thanesri and the Muslim Ecumene 331 Conclusion 368 Abbreviations 409 Notes 411 Acknowledgments 473 Index 475 PREFACE I first became familiar with the Arabic script as a child in the north Indian city of Lucknow. Although I could not read Arabic, I learned to read the script, because I was taught to read the Koran by rote. My teacher was a maulvi who came home every morning to read the Koran with me. In the evenings I studied Persian and Urdu, written in the nastaliq script, from my grandmother. My afternoons were spent in the local Catholic missionary school, where I learned English from an Irish nun. Lucknow is the modern capital of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Indians today associate Lucknow with the courtly culture of Awadh. The city, which is situated by the River Gomti and boasts elegant architecture from a past era, also played an important role in the violence that ensued during the uprising of 1857, an important event that shaped the lives of the men whose stories I will draw on in the following pages. Hindi, written in the devanagari script, is the state language in Uttar Pradesh, and I learned that too. As I moved from one culture to another, from the sounds and cadences of one language to another, from the shapes of one writing system to another, in the course of a single day there seemed to be no apparent contradictions. I registered the differences. But they were collec- tively an integral part of my little world. ix PREFACE One of my childhood frustrations was that I could never make my cultural world fit into the territorial and political contours of nation- states as marked in geographical maps. My childhood world was both wildly cosmopolitan and disappointingly parochial. Although I was multilingual, my ability to move from one place to another was rather limited. I was no globe- trotting jetsetter— nor, really, were most Indians during the 1960s, a time when international tourism was within the reach only of the elite few. Was life experi- enced similarly by Indian Muslims in an earlier time? This book is an attempt to understand the cultural world of Indian Muslims in the Age of Empire. I have tried to place Indian Muslims in the interconnected and vast Asian continent that was both carved up and sewn together by the Western Empire. Moving beyond bina- ries such as nationalism and imperialism, the Muslim umma and the European empire, Islam and Christianity, or simply the East and the West, I want to show how the cultural universe of Muslims was actually shaped. British, Ottoman, and imperial networks encour- aged the creation of a pan-Âslamic global public sphere. I call this the new Muslim cosmopolis. Forged at the crossroad of empires, the Muslim cosmopolis had a scripture- oriented core and a politically reformist shell inspired by Ottoman tanzimat— the administrative and constitutional reforms introduced between 1839 and 1876 to modernize the empire. European imperial tools— steamships, the telegraph, the printing press— made the quick circulation of ideas within the Muslim cosmopolis possible. At the heart of the imperial assemblage that framed Indian Muslim lives stood the key figure— the individual. In this book, I have consciously shifted our focus away from hazy state policies and administrations and foregrounded the individual. The trajectories of the five lives we will follow reveal that pan-Âslamism depended more on imperial networks than on the caliph. The book traces pan-Âslamic networks forged by émigrés who made use of earlier merchant and Naqshbandi Sufi routes that linked the Ottoman world to Mughal India. It shows how these early modern Muslim connections intensified due to the support they received from European empires. The dependence on the British and Ottoman Empires lent an intellectually and politically reformist hue to this x PREFACE book’s Naqshbandi Sufi protagonists. The book elaborates on the successes of individuals as they made imperial borders porous in an age when international law hardened political boundaries. In the chapters that follow, the spotlight is on the underbelly of empires where Muslim cosmopolitans were most active. From this unusual location, Indian Muslims questioned the straitjackets of religious and territorial identities that British rule tried to impose upon them. At the same time, individual actors exploited British imperial net- works to build pan-Âslamic connections that would one day outlast the empire itself. What did it mean for Indian Muslims to be part of this new global Muslim community? This is a question that is rarely answered in the current literature, which tends to emphasize an unending clash between nationalism and pan-Âslamism in Muslim South Asia. Those who did not participate in the overdetermined clash, such as the five Muslim men whose careersI follow, fell off the pages of his- tory. History did not seem to be able to make sense of such charac- ters. This, then, is the story of what happens offstage, off the page, where a new Muslim network was born in the aftermath of 1857— buttressed by European empires, yet resolutely opposed to them. xi RUSSIA BOSPHORUS STRAIT M Istanbul E D BLACK I T SEA E R R A SEA OF A N E MARMARA S E ARAL A N SEA S N E A A I SEA OF P Lebanon SYRIA S JAPAN A Damascus C Cairo Baghdad CENTRAL ASIA PERSIA NORTH-WEST P AFGHANISTAN FRONTIER E R R Sittana S E Medina I Lahore SUDAN A D N Deoband Jeddah PUNJAB G Ambala Muzaffarnagar ULF S Mecca Meerut E Delhi Aligarh AWADH A SINDH Agra Muscat Rae Bareilly Karachi Hyderabad Patna PACIFIC Bhopal OCEAN DHOFAR Calcutta YEMEN Surat Aden Bombay Gulf of Aden ARABIAN Haiderabad BAY SEA OF BENGAL Andaman KERALA/ Islands MALABAR Provinces ACHEH 0 800 1600 INDIAN OCEAN Kilometres INDONESIA Muslim networks in the nineteenth century INTRODUCTION Soon after the mutiny- rebellion of 1857 that shook British rule in India, Haji Imdadullah Makki, the Muslim holy man from north India, took refuge in the house of his disciple Rai Abdullah Khan, a zamindar in the Ambala district. Wanted for his role in the 1857 unrest, he was on the run from the British police, who were hot on his trail with an arrest warrant. As he sat hiding in a small shed next to Rai Sahib’s horse stable, the police zeroed in on him. On the pre- text of buying a horse, they ordered that they be let into the stable and the adjoining shed. Rai Sahib shuddered as he envisaged the penal consequences he would face if the holy man were discovered in his house. But when the door was unlocked, all that the police found there were a prayer mat spread out on the bed and a water pot with water for drinking and ablutions. There was no trace of Haji Imdadullah Makki. Rai Sahib was visibly moved by this supernat- ural deed of his revered guest. The police made some inquiries and left, apologizing for the inconvenience they had caused Rai Sahib. When a much- relieved Rai Sahib reentered the shed, he found Haji Imdadullah sitting on his prayer mat, completing the last recitation of his prayers.1 A few days after this incident, Imdadullah bid a tearful adieu to his disciples and fellow scholars and started on his journey to Mecca, 1 INTRODUCTION where he wanted to seek permanent refuge. From the Punjab, via Pak Patan, Hyderabad, and Sindh, in western India, he reached the port of Karachi. Here he boarded a ship to escape to Mecca.2 In the 1860s, his fellow scholar Maulana Jaffer Thanesri, also convicted of supplying money and men to the 1857 rebels, was not as lucky. He was convicted, arrested, and deported to the penal colony in the Andaman Islands. He described his journey to the Andamans as follows: After two days we were made to board a pedal boat on the river Sindhu, 5 Kos from Multan. We sat in rows with our shackles and handcuffs . .âand reached Kotarsi. From here we boarded a train to Karachi . .â fter a week in Karachi we got into a sailing boat called Baglah to go to Bombay. The first thing that struck us was the sea and a range of ships.3 According to Thanesri, the port at Bombay was like a “jungle of ships.”4 He noted: The ship that carted us from Bombay to the Andamans was owned by the English . .âits entire staff of orderlies and offi- cers were white. And none of them understood Hindustani. The only interlocutor was one Anglophone convict called Motilal Babu.