Mirrors for Ulama: Kabul at the Crossroads of Eastern and Western Islamic Reformism by Elham Bakhtary A.B. in History, June 2007, University of California Davis M.A. in History, May 2010, San Francisco State University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 19, 2019 Dissertation directed by Benjamin Hopkins Associate Professor of History and International Affairs The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Elham Bakhtary has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of April 5, 2019. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Mirrors for Ulama: Kabul at the Crossroads of Eastern and Western Islamic Reformism Elham Bakhtary Dissertation Research Committee: Benjamin Hopkins, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, Dissertation Director Dane Kennedy, Professor of History and International Affairs, Committee Member Dina Khoury, Professor of History and International Affairs, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2019 by Elham Bakhtary All rights reserved iii Dedication Bismillah-i Rahman-i Rahim I dedidcate this dissertation to my parents and the sacrifices they made for me. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Benjamin Hopkins for the time and dedication he gave me on this project. It takes a great deal of patience to work with me and I am fortunate to have an advisor as professional and understanding as him. It has also been my pleasure to work with professors Dane Kennedy and Dina Khoury. Their courses were the foundation on which this project was built. Their insight and expertise were integral to my completion of the dissertation and I am incredibly thankful for them always having an open door for my numerous inquiries. I thank Dr. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi for his continued assistance throughout my young academic career. Although never directly his student, Dr. Hanifi has generously given me incredible advice, direction, and opportunities to develop and disseminate my research. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Joel Blecher for aiding this project on such short notice. There were a number of other external isntitutions and experts that helped this project come together as well. I would like to thank the Council on Library and Information Resources for the generous Mellon/Library of Congress Dissertation Fellowship. Without this support, I would not have had the time and technology to properly analyze the sources of this dissertation. Many thanks to the staff of the Preservation Research and Testing Division at the Library of Congress, particularly Dr. Fenella France, Amanda Jones, Meghan Wilson, and Chris Bolser, for aiding my analysis of the documents with state-of- the-art technology. I also have deep gratitude for the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress, especially for Hirad Dinavari. This project would not have been possible without his untiring assistance, support, and friendship. I cannot forget the British v Libray's role in this project as well, particularly Muhammad Isa Waley's assistance in locating materials from Amir Shayr Ali's reign. I would finally like to thank the professors that encouraged my pursuit of a doctorate. If it were not for some brief votes of confidence by professors Keith Watenpaugh and Eva Sheppard Wolf, I would not be submitting this dissertation. Many thanks to professors Christopher Chekuri and Wali Ahmadi for their reassurances during my difficult periods of graduate study. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Dr. Terrence Elliott for encouraging my early hunger for new knowledge and fresh perspectives. vi Abstract of Dissertation Mirrors for Ulama: Kabul at the Crossroads of Eastern and Western Islamic Reformism This dissertation engages the question of statecraft in two spaces of neglected comparison: the Middle East and South Asia. Despite a growing body of scholarship on Islamic reformist statecraft, its histories in the Middle East and South Asia have been hitherto studied separately. Furthermore, Afghanistan has been left out of these discussions, being treated as a "margin" to both geographic zones rather than a critical link between them. The dissertation addresses this discrepancy by centering Afghanistan on a printed discourse of Islamic reformism that stretched from Tunisia to Bengal in the nineteenth century. It argues that the court of the Afghan ruler Amir Shayr Ali Khan (r. 1863-1878) was an intellectual magnet that drew in the trends of western and eastern Islamic reformism and synthesized them to produce unique publications suited to the Amir's political aims. Utilizing the methods of traditional source criticism and discourse analysis, this dissertation demonstrates that although Tunisian and Indian reformists sought liberal and egalitarian political orders, the Amir appropriated their writings and rhetorical methods and reconfigured them to legitimize his construction of an autocratic central state. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a new approach to the study of Islamic reformism, one that recognizes that the productions of new thought about statecraft in various parts of the Islamic world were not isolated phenomena. Instead, these ideas traversed traditionally-conceived geographic and linguistic boundaries and so-called "margins," such as Afghanistan, were links in the itineraries of these movements of thought. vii Table of Contents Dedication...........................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................v Abstract of Dissertation ....................................................................................................vii Glossary of Terms .............................................................................................................ix Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Dating .............................................................xii Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Reformism and Opposition in the Islamic World ...........................................14 Chapter 2: The Arena of Print ...........................................................................................48 Chapter 3: Inspirational Heretics ......................................................................................89 Chapter 4: Discovering the Jadid in the Qadim ..............................................................136 Chapter 5: A Case of Courtly Appropriation ..................................................................171 Chapter 6: Romanticism and Reality ..............................................................................202 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................244 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................253 viii Glossary of Arabic and Persian Terms ʿadl = justice amīr al-mu'minīn = 'commander of the faithful'; Muslim ruler barakat = ability to intercede between God and Muslims bast = asylum afforded by religious buildings bayʿat = oath of loyalty bidʿah (pl. bidʿāt) = 'innovations'; in the Afghan context, bidʿāt was often the label for punishments that transgressed the sharia dāk khānah = messenger house employing both runners and ponies dawlat = 'turn'; in Islamic political philosophy, it alternatively referred to both the ruling house and the divine replacement of one ruling house by another dīn = religion farangistān = Europe fiqh = Islamic jurisprudence ḥākim = governor ḥukm = ruling ḥurriyah = freedom ijāzāt = certificate or diploma of Islamic sciences ijmaʿ = Islamic scholarly consensus ijtihād = Islamic rational adjudication istiṣlāḥ = Islamic jurisprudential method of finding rulings based on their ability to produce an intended benefit (maṣlaḥah) of the sharia jāhiliyah (adj. jāhilī) = pre-Islamic Arabia juhhāl = ignorant commoners ix kāfir (pl. kuffār) = one who practices kufr; a common label for non-Muslim khān mullā khān = 'chief mulla'; a title for Afghanistan's chief justice of sharia khān-i ʿulūm = 'chief of sciences'; alternative title for Afghanistan's chief justice of sharia khānah jangī = 'house fighting'; warfare between members of the same family for the throne khilāfat = 'caliphate'; government kufr = 'concealment'; commonly used to refer to any belief that rejects true Islam, including heresy maṣlaḥah (see istiṣlāḥ) majlis (pl. majālis) = consultative assembly maẕhab = Islamic legal school of thought miyan = descendant of a respectable pīr muftī = Islamic jurisconsult muhtamim = editor muqaddimah = prolegomenon or preliminary discussion in a book mushābahah (see tashabbuh) naṣīḥat = friendly admonishment nifāq = disunity niẓām-i jadīd (adj. niẓāmī) = 'new order'; common name for an army in the nineteenth- century Islamic world designed along the lines of a European model pādshāh = ruler paltan (pl. palātun) = regular regiments pīr = Sufi master qānūn = 'canon'; decree of an Islamic ruler qāz̤ ī = Islamic judge x qiyās = Islamic legal analogy quwāʿid (sing. qāʿidah) = military formations raʿāyā