Filippo Osella, Caroline Osella - Islamic Reform in South Asia-Cambridge University Press (2013) PDF

Islamic Reform
in South Asia
Edited by
Filippo Osella
Caroline Osella
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Islamic reform in South Asia / edited by Filippo Osella, Caroline Osella.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “Discusses contemporary Islamic reformism in South Asia in some of its
diverse historical orientations and geographical expressions”–Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-107-03175-3 (hardback)
1. Islam–South Asia–History. 2. Islamic renewal–South Asia. I. Osella, Filippo. II.
Osella, Caroline.
BP63.A37I87 2012
297.0954’09051–dc23
2012017167
ISBN 978-1-107-03175-3 Hardback
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Contents
List of Contributors
v
Introduction â•… xi
Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella
Part I: Reformist Journeys

1. The Equivocal History of a Muslim Reformation 3
Faisal Devji
2. Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia 26
Francis Robinson
3. Reform Sufism in South Asia 51
Pnina Werbner
4. Breathing in India, c. 1890 79
Nile Green
Part II: Debating Reform

5. The Enemy Within: Madrasa and Muslim Identity in
North India 117
Arshad Alam
6. Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala, South India 139
7. Piety as Politics Amongst Muslim Women in Contemporary
Sri Lanka 171
Farzana Haniffa
8. The Changing Perspectives of Three Muslim Men on the
Question of Saint Worship over a 10-Year Period in Gujarat,
Western India 202
Edward Simpson

9. Women, Politics and Islamism in Northern Pakistan 230
Magnus Marsden
iv / Contents
10. Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform: Stories from

the Muslim ‘Ghetto’ 255
Rubina Jasani
Part III: Everyday Politics of Reform
11. Reading the Qur’an in Bangladesh: The Politics of ‘Belief ’
Among Islamist Women 283
Maimuna Huq
12. Cracks in the ‘Mightiest Fortress’: Jamaat-e-Islami’s Changing
Discourse on Women 317
Irfan Ahmad
13. Islamic Feminism in India: Indian Muslim Women Activists
and the Reform of Muslim Personal Law 346
Sylvia Vatuk
14. Disputing Contraception: Muslim Reform, Secular Change
and Fertility 383
Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey
Part IV: Reform, State and Market

15. Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space: Foreign Resident
Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the Arabian Peninsula 421
Attiya Ahmad
16. Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh: Women, Democracy and the
Transformation of Islamist Politics 445
Elora Shehabuddin
17. Secularism Beyond the State: The ‘State’ and the ‘Market’
in Islamist Imagination 472
Humeira Iqtidar
Index 504
List of Contributors
Attiya Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The George

Washington University, USA. Her research focuses on the interrelation
between the feminization of transnational labour migration and Islamic
reform movements in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. She is
currently revising her book manuscript ‘Gendered Transformations and the
Limits of Conversion: Da’wa, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant
Women in Kuwait’ for publication.
Irfan Ahmad is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Politics at School
of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. Earlier he
taught at the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and University
College Utrecht, Netherlands. He is the author of Islamism and Democracy
in India: The Transformation of the Jamaat-e-Islami (2009) which was short-
listed for the 2011 International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Prize
for the best study in the field of Social Sciences. His numerous articles
have appeared in leading journals such as Anthropological Theory, Citizenship
Studies Global Networks, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, Philosophy
and Social Criticism and Modern Asian Studies. He is a contributor to the The
Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic Political Thought. He sits on the editorial
committee of South Asia and is an Associate Editor of Islam and Christian-
Muslim Relations (both from Routledge). Currently, he is working on his
new book on theory and practice of critique in Islamic tradition and
modernity.
Arshad Alam is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru
Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. His interests span issues of Muslim
identity, education and politics. His ethnography of an Indian madrasa, Inside
a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India, has been published
recently (2011).
Faisal Devji is Reader in Modern South Asian History at the University
of Oxford. He is the author of two books, Landscapes of the Jihad (2005) and
The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (2008). His forthcoming book is titled The
Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence.
Nile Green is Professor of South Asian history at University of California,
Los Angeles, USA. His research focuses on the history of Islam and the
Muslim communities of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and the Indian
vi / List of Contributors
Ocean. His books include Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints,
Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (2006); Religion, Language and Power
(edited with Mary Searle-Chatterjee, 2008); Islam and the Army in Colonial
India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (2009); Bombay Islam:The Religious
Economy of the West Indian Ocean (2011); Afghanistan in Ink: Literature between
Diaspora and Nation (edited with Nushin Arbabzadah, 2012); Sufism: A
Global History (2012) and Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern
India (2012).
Farzana Haniffa is Senior Lecturer at Department of Sociology, University
of Colombo. Her research and activist interests for the past ten years have
concentrated on the politics of Muslim communities in Sri Lanka. She has
published on the Islamic piety movements in Sri Lanka as well as on the
history of Muslims’ complex involvement in electoral politics. Her most
recent project involves an investigation into the expulsion of Muslims from
the Northern Province of Sri Lanka by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam in October 1990. In 2009, she initiated a Citizens’ Commission to
inquire and report on these issues.
Maimuna Huq is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Islamic
World Studies at the University of South Carolina. She has conducted
extensive ethnographic research on women in Islamist movements in
Bangladesh. Her publications include articles in journals such as Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute and Modern Asian Studies. She is a contributor
to the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Culture, Islam in South Asia and New
Media in the Muslim World. One of her current research projects focuses on
the global dynamics of formal Muslim religious education in Bangladesh.
Humeira Iqtidar is Lecturer in Politics at King’s College, London. She
is the author of Secularizing Islamists? Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-ud-dawa in
Urban Pakistan (2011). Her research explores the contours of social and
political theory within South Asian and predominantly Muslim contexts
and she is particularly interested in the shifting demarcations of state and
market, society and economy, secularism and secularization.
Rubina Jasani is Lecturer at the Humanitarianism Conflict Response
Institute (HCRI), University of Manchester. Her areas of interest are
Anthropology of Violence and Reconstruction, Medical Anthropology
with special focus on social suffering and mental illness and the study of
lived Islam in South Asia and the UK. Her doctoral work examined moral
and material ‘reconstruction’ of life after an episode of ethnic violence
List of Contributors / vii
in Gujarat, Western India in 2002. Since completing her PhD, she has
conducted research on ethnicity and mental health in Britain. This work
considers the role of ethnicity and culture in explanatory models of mental
illness, and unpacks the notion of ‘institutional racism’ in the context of
subjective experiences of compulsory detention under the mental health
act.
Patricia Jeffery is Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.
Her research in rural north India since 1982 has focused on gender politics,
childbearing, social demography, and education. Recently she has co-edited
(with Radhika Chopra) Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (2005)
and co-authored (with Roger Jeffery) Confronting Saffron Demography (2006).
In 2009–10 she was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior
Research Fellowship and Leverhulme Research Fellowship for work on a
book about social, economic and demographic change in western Uttar
Pradesh and she is co-investigator in the ESRC funded project on Rural
Change and Anthropological Knowledge in Post-Colonial India.
Roger Jeffery is Professor of Sociology of South Asia at the University
of Edinburgh. His work has focused on public health policy, social
demography, education and pharmaceuticals regulation with fieldwork in
rural north India. He has been the Edinburgh Principal Investigator on
several large research projects since 2005, including ‘Biomedical and Health
Experimentation in South Asia’ (2010–12) and ‘Tracing Pharmaceuticals
in South Asia’ (2006–09). His most recent books are Change and Diversity:
Economics, Politics and Society in Contemporary India (edited with Anthony
Heath 2010) and Degrees without Freedom (with Craig Jeffrey and Patricia
Jeffery, 2008).
Craig Jeffrey is Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford and University Professor
in Development Geography, Oxford. He has also taught at the University
of Edinburgh and the University of Washington. His recent books include
India Today: Economy, Society and Politics (with Stuart Corbridge and John
Harriss, 2012); Timepass:Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (2011);
Degrees Without Freedom: Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North
India (with Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery, 2008) and Telling Young Lives:
Portraits in Global Youth (with Jane Dyson, 2008).
Magnus Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology of South and
Central Asia at SOAS, University of London. He has conducted ethnographic
fieldwork in connected regions of Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and
viii / List of Contributors
completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was also a

Junior Research Fellow. He is the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious
Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (2005) and Fragments of the Afghan
Frontier (with Benjamin Hopkins, 2011).
Caroline Osella is Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, London. She teaches
ethnography of South Asia, theory in anthropology, migration/diaspora and
issues in sex/gender. She is currently working on a book which considers
processes of gender identification and disidentification among south Indian
women by thinking back across her 20 years of fieldwork in Kerala and Gulf
with various Malayali communities. Her current research work concerns
the senses and performance practices in environments of super-diversity;
her next research project is likely to approach issues of faith practice and
religious transmission among mothers living in plural societies.
Filippo Osella is Reader in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His
publications include Social Mobility in Kerala (with Caroline Osella, 2000)
and Men and Masculinity in South India (with Caroline Osella, 2007); and
two edited collections, Islam, Politics and Anthropology (with Ben Soares,
2010) and Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia (with
Katy Gardner, 2004). Currently, he is working on a book manuscript on
relationships between economic and religious practice amongst South
Indian Muslims, and he is co-investigator on an ESRC/DfID-funded
research project on contemporary charity and philanthropy in Sri Lanka.
Francis Robinson is Professor of the History of South Asia at Royal
Holloway, University of London. His main interests focus on religious
change in the Muslim world since 1800 and learned and holy men. His
recent publications include The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of
India, Iran and Central Asia (2007); Islam, South Asia and the West (2007) and
Islam in the Age of Western Domination (edited, 2010). His forthcoming works
include ‘Strategies of Authority in Muslim South Asia since 1800’, Modern
Asian Studies; Islam in Modern South Asia and Jamal: The Life of Maulana Jamal
Mian Farangi Mahalli.
Edward Simpson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is the author of Muslim Society
and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh (2006); Struggling with
History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (edited with
Kai Kresse, 2007); The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (edited
with Aparna Kapadia, 2010). He has recently published Society and History
List of Contributors / ix
of Gujarat since 1800: A Select Bibliography of English and European language

Sources (2011) and is currently working on a book about natural disasters
in South Asia.
Elora Shehabuddin is Associate Professor of Humanities and Political
Science at Rice University. She is the author of two books, Reshaping the
Holy: Democracy, Development and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (2008) and
Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (1992).
In 2006, she was selected as a Carnegie Scholar for a comparative study of
gender and Islamist politics. She is an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia
of Women and Islamic Cultures and a guest co-editor of a special issue of
the journal Feminist Economics on ‘Gender and Economics in Muslim
Communities.’ She is currently working on a book tentatively titled
‘Apostles of Progress: Feminism, Empire, and Muslim Women’.
Sylvia Vatuk is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, USA. She has had many years of ethnographic field
research experience in India, first among upper-caste Hindus in a medium-
sized north Indian city and later among south Indian Muslims in Hyderabad
and Chennai. Her research has focused on issues of kinship, marriage and
the family, with particular emphasis on women and gender, aging and
intergenerational relations and gift exchange. Her extensive publications
include Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India. For
the past decade she has been exploring legal-anthropological questions
around the application of Muslim family law to followers of that religion
in India.
Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele
University, and author of ‘The Manchester Migration Trilogy’, including
The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis
(1990/2002), Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims (2002) and
Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (2003). In 2008
she edited Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and
Vernacular Perspectives, and is the editor of several theoretical collections
on hybridity, multiculturalism, migration and citizenship. She is currently
researching and writing a book on the Manual Workers Union and other
public service unions in Botswana.
Introduction
Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella*
T he authors in this volume discuss contemporary Islamic reformism in

South Asia in some of its diverse historical orientations and geographical
expressions, bringing us contemporary ethnographic perspectives against
which to assess claims about processes of reform and about trends such as
‘Islamism’ and ‘global Islam’.
The very use of terminology and categories is itself fraught with the
dangers of bringing together what is actually substantially different under
the same banner. While our authors have often found it necessary, perhaps
for the sake of comparison or to help orient readers, to take on terms such
as ‘reformist’ or ‘Islamist’, they are not using these as terms which imply
identity—or even connection—between the groups so named, nor are they
reifying such categories. In using such terms as shorthand to help identify
specific projects, we are following broad definitions here in which ‘Islamic
modernism’ refers to projects of change aiming to re-order Muslims’
lifeworlds and institutional structures in dialogue with those produced under
colonial and post-colonial modernity; ‘reformism’ refers to projects whose
specific focus is the bringing into line of religious beliefs and practices with
what are held to be the core foundations of Islam, by avoiding and purging
out innovation, accretion and the intrusion of ‘local custom’; and where
‘Islamism’ is a stronger position, which insists upon Islam as the heart of all
institutions, practice and subjectivity—a privileging of Islam as the frame
of reference by which to negotiate every issue of life; ‘orthodoxy’ is an
interesting term, and is used in this collection ethnographically, according
* We thank Edward Simpson, Benjamin Soares, Leila Zaki, John Mitchell, Kostas Retsikas, Magnus
Marsden, Simon Coleman, Irfan Ahmad and Francis Robinson for commenting on this Introduction.
Responsibility for the ideas expressed herein remains ours alone.
xii / Introduction
to its specific meaning in contexts in which individual authors work—in

some ethnographic locales the term may be used to refer to the orthodoxy
of Islamist reform, while in others it is used to disparage those who do not
heed the call for renewal and reform.
‘Reformism’ is particularly troublesome as a term, in that it covers
broad trends stretching back at least 200 years, and encompassing a variety
of positions which lay more or less stress upon specific aspects of processes
of renewal; still, it is useful in helping us to insist upon recognition of the
differences between projects named as—and such contemporary obsessions
about—‘political Islam’, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, ‘revivalism,’ and so on.
Authors here generally follow local usage in the ways in which they describe
the movements discussed (thus, Kerala’s Mujahid movement claims itself as
part of a broader Islahi—renewal—trend and is identified here as ‘reformist’).1
But while broad terms are used, what the papers are actually involved in doing
is addressing the issues of how specific groups deal with particular concerns.
Thus, not, ‘What do reformists think about secular education?’, but, ‘What do
Kerala’s Mujahids in the 2000s think? How has this shifted from the position
taken in the 1940s? How does it differ from the contemporary position
of opposing groups? And how is it informed by the wider socio-political
climate of Kerala?’ The essays here powerfully demonstrate the historical
and geographical specificity of reform projects, and act as a challenge to
discourse structured through popular mainstream perspectives (such as ‘clash
of civilizations’), where such embeddedness is ignored.
With the terms ‘reform’ and ‘reformism’, then, we are not implying
a Weberian teleology of modernization, and concomitant processes of
rationalization and disenchantment that, spurred by a middle class vanguard,
would lead to an inevitable turn towards scriptural Islam and the abandonment
of ‘superstitions’. Taking ‘modernity’ here as a folk category—entailing an
ambivalent relation with ‘tradition’ and an orientation towards ‘progress’ in
the present and future (following Osella and Osella 2006), we refer instead
to the outcomes of complex articulations and intersections between long-
term processes of religious renewal and the specific configurations of the
political and economy shaping social relations in colonial and post-colonial
South Asia. So, the apparent ‘protestantization’ of Islam taking shape in
nineteenth century India is as much the upshot of debates concerning
religious practice animating Islam throughout its history (Robinson, this
1
We do not find any of our authors here discussing Islamism in terms of salafism; while individual papers
discuss the deeply problematic term wah’habism.
Introduction / xiii
volume), as it is a reaction to public critiques of Muslims and Islam moved

by Christian missionaries and colonial administration (Green 2011; Reetz
2006). Transformations thus engendered—by no means limited to South
Asian Islam (see for example Chatterjee 1993; Osella and Osella 2001; Van
der Veer 2001)—are neither linear and predictable, nor circumscribed to
self-styled ‘reformists’, as testified, for instance, by a generalized enthusiastic
adoption of new means of communication (Green 2011), a concern about
(religious and secular) education (Robinson 2001; Zaman 1999), demands for
greater individual responsibility (Sanyal 1996) and wider interrogations about
relationships between Muslim self and non-Muslim other. ‘Customary’
Islam—the realm of devotional practices broadly associated to sufism and
veneration of saints—does not simply wither away to the advantage of a
rationalized, or disenchanted Islam, but, as argued by Nile Green, from the
nineteenth century onwards we witness a ‘pluralization of types of Islam
available, each of which was perpetuated and sustained through its particular
appeal to different sections of the population’ (2011:43). While there might
be difficulties in maintaining a close fit between religious practice and class
status—middle-class Pakistanis, for instance, continue to approach living sufi
saints and to shift between orientations and practices (Ewing 1997; Werbner
2003)—sufism and the veneration of Muslim saints have not disappeared
with the advent of modernity. To the contrary, some have proved adept at
engaging with the demands of modern life and with engendering reform
(see for example Ewing 1997; Green 2011; McGilvray 2011; Rozario 2011;
Werbner 2003).
Insisting on the particular histories of specific reformist trajectories, as
this volume does, has further import, in that it unsettles the well-rehearsed
argument that religion and politics are, for Muslims, fused and inseparable.
Recent research strongly suggests that impulses towards the ‘Islamization’ of
the state are not simply self-generated within Islam itself, but emerge within
the context of wider political events and debates. While Humeira Iqtidar
(2010) and Elora Shehabuddin (2008) have charted connections between
Islamist organizations and left-wing politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh
respectively, Irfan Ahmad (2009a) has argued that it was the very conditions
of the colonial state in India, with its unprecedented reach into the lives of
colonial subjects, which propelled Maududi, the founder of the Jama’at-e-
Islami, to theorize the need for an Islamic state. All three of these authors
stress that reformism, in some of its organized forms, has proved open to
substantial transformations, allowing wider socio-political processes to shift
its strategies and goals, including moves towards participation in secular
democratic processes (Ahmad 2009b).
xiv / Introduction
The articles are written at a time when employees of Euro-American

state agencies appear at academic conferences whenever ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslims’
are discussed and when academics themselves have been asked to contribute
directly to the so-called war on terror, for instance by spying on their Muslim
students or by embedding an explicit critique of radicalism into Islamic
Studies degree programmes. Academics have been called upon to produce
research that would help governments and security agencies to discern
‘good Muslims’ from ‘bad Muslims’ and research funding has been diverted
towards this (see Houtman 2006; Keenan 2006, 2007; cf. Appadurai 2006;
Devji 2005; Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002; Mamdani 2004). What we
notice of these programmes is that they generally entail a malicious refusal
to acknowledge the role of Western governments’ aggressive foreign policy
in producing the very thing which these governments most fear. This is part
of a wider reluctance to address an issue which is animating debates among
Muslims in South Asia and beyond: the role of Western ‘neo-colonialism’ or
‘neo-imperialism’ (in the terms commonly used by Indian Muslims) in what
appears to many as to be deliberate—and overtly Islamophobic—attempts
to undermine Muslim religion, society and culture (see for example Morey
and Yaqin 2011).
In many calls for research, reformism, Islamism and radicalism are
pulled together and presented as though generated exclusively from within
Islam itself, perhaps as an inevitable expression of a religious tradition which
is essentially inimical—and militantly opposed—to modernity (see for
example Giddens 1999: 4–5). But not all Muslims are charged with being
non-modern, conservative or opposed to ‘the West’ in the same way: the
discourse framing calls for research presents us with a scenario in which we
can (and must) identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims. (A January 2012 search of
the UK social science funding agency the ESRC using keywords ‘Islam’ and
‘radicalization’ threw up thirty funded projects.) It is here that we discern
an unfortunate overlap between anti-terror rhetorics and a long tradition of
sociological research on Islam.
In South Asia as elsewhere (see for example Otayek and Soares 2007)
much ethnographic work celebrates sufi-inspired forms of Islam as tolerant,
plural, authentic, and so on, against a maligned Other of reformist Islam.
The latter is often regarded as a threat to what are argued to be culturally
specific forms of South Asian popular Islam (see for example Ahmad 1981
and the following debate between Robinson 1983, 1986; Minault 1984 and
Das 1984; see also Roy 2005). Reform is understood to embody practices
Introduction / xv
which are either alien to the majority of South Asian Muslims, or altogether
external to South Asian traditions (see for example Gaborieu 19892). Islamic
reformism here appears almost as a mirror image of Hindu fundamentalism:
polarizing identities and disrupting inclusiveness and religious toleration,
but, unlike its Hindu counterpart, sinisterly not home-grown. It is of little
surprise, then, if anthropologists and sociologists have paid little attention to
the complex relationships and debates between ‘reformists’ and ‘traditionalists’
(for notable exceptions see Alam 2010; Blank 2001; Ewing 1997; Gardner
1995; Green 2011; Hansen 1999; Marsden 2005; Simpson 2006; Van der
Veer 1992; Verkaaik 2004). Instead they have concentrated mostly on the
study of popular religious practices—in particular, sufism and saints’ shrine
worship (Roy 2005; see for example essays in edited collections by Ahmad
1981; Ahmad and Reilfeld 2004; Troll 1989; Waseem 2003; Werbner and
Basu 1998; see also Bayly 1992; Bertocci 2006; Ewing 1997;Werbner 2003).
A recurrent theme in these studies is a putative opposition between sufism’s
syncretism or hybridity (cf. Assayag 2004; Van der Veer 1994 for attempts
to move beyond syncretism), or what is more generally claimed as sufism’s
cultural sensitivity and pluralism (Werbner 2003; cf. Ewing 1997; Mayaram
1997) positioned against what are characterized as the essentialist and
purifying logics of Islamic reformism (see Anjum 2007 for a critical review
of these tendencies in anthropology).
This opposition between (good, authentic) sufi-inspired popular
practices and (bad, inauthentic) reformism is extremely unhelpful—if not
altogether wrong—on a number of counts.3 First, it naively suggests a
tension between ‘little’ (read popular) and ‘great’ (read ashraf for scriptural)
traditions—a theory long discredited with reference to Hinduism (see
e.g. Fuller 1992: 24–28) and Christianity (see e.g. Stewart 1991). Such a
dichotomy does not bear relation to South Asian Muslims’—‘traditionalists’
and ‘reformists’ alike—close appeals to scriptural traditions to guide
practice. Second, it assumes ‘reformism’ and ‘traditionalism’ to be substantial
categories, rather than provisional categories which are always being
produced discursively—and rhetorically—in the context of public debates
2
Cf. debates, following Geertz (1960), between Hefner (1985),Woodward (1988), Bowen (1989), Beatty
(1996) and Howell (2001) on Indonesian ‘syncretism’.
3
While the ‘bad’ Muslims (Islamists) are the same across the academic and state configurations, the
‘good’ Muslim in the sociological record—the sufi-inspired follower of ‘syncretic’ practice and local
‘custom’—is quite different from what would be the ‘good’ Muslim for Western governments. We will
return to this point.
xvi / Introduction
(Asad 1986; Soares 2005; Eickelman and Piscatori 1996; Eickelman and
Salvatore 2004). Of course, in public debate between groups, Muslims
themselves use such antinomian labelling as a political tool. But in practice
we find—unsurprisingly—doctrinal continuities, overlaps and category-
blurring between sufism and Islamic ‘reformism’ (see, for example, Metcalf
1982 and 2009; Sanyal 1996; Reetz 2006; Green 2005; cf. Kresse 2007).
The papers here also confirm that ideological positions are negotiated by
and between ulema (religious scholars) and ordinary Muslims alike and are
constantly subject to modifications. It is most helpful to keep in mind the
idea of Islam as a discursive tradition (Asad 1986; Zaman 2002). Third, it
insists on the particularism of certain practices which, in fact, are not at
all particular to South Asian ‘popular’ Islam and are in no way specifically
South Asian, but are found right across Muslim societies (see for example
Das 1984; Manger 1998; Otayek and Soares 2007). Fourth, it attributes
such practices with fluidity, negotiation and openness, while reformism is
characterized as closed, rigid and dogmatic. Several papers in this collection
show how reformism—with its stress on ijtihad (independent reasoning), and
reasoned interpretation and discussion—tends to open up rather than close
down debate and can sometimes produce new and unexpected possibilities
of interpretation (see for example Ahmad 2009b).
Finally, academic upholding of an ideologically weighted opposition
between ‘syncretic sufism’ and ‘reformism’ plays into the hands of those
political forces who argue that reformism is a recent and external addition to
South Asian Islam which needs to be purged back out or denounced as false
consciousness. Without insinuating that academics ‘are manipulating ideas
to serve extra-academic interests’ (Das 1984: 299), we note nevertheless a
worrying tendency in the way substantially different traditions of reformism
are all lumped together into one reified category which is then all too
often inaccurately shorthanded as ‘wah’habism’4 and branded as extremist if
not altogether demonized as terrorist.5 In the Indian context, we are faced
on the one hand with the alleged foreignness of reformism; and on the
4
This move is, of course, not new: as early as 1857, Muslims accused of being the ringleaders of insurgency
were routinely branded by colonial power as dangerous ‘wah’habis’ (Robinson 1993; Hermansen 2000;
Ansari 2005).
5
See Faisal Devji’s critique of attempts to draw connections between Islamism,‘wah’habism’ and terrorism
(2005), and G.P. Makris’ discussion of how terminology tends to be either ‘emotionally loaded’ or
‘based on questionable socio-political assumptions’ (2007: 193). See also Ayesha Jalal’s discussion of
transformations of notions of jihad in South Asia (2008)
Introduction / xvii
other, with reformist insistence on the purification of un-Islamic elements

(innovations/local adaptations) from practice. This leaves contemporary
Indian Muslims, who cannot but be aware of reformist discourse, in an
impossible double-bind: faced with a choice between being charged as ‘bad
Muslims’ if they ignore the call to reform or as ‘bad Indians’ if they choose
to follow reform. Mis-characterizations of popular Islam as essentially
localized and containing hangovers from pre-conversion eras also allow
Hindu revivalist organizations to argue that, deep down, popular Islam
contains strong Hindu elements and that, hence, Indian Muslims can (and
should) eventually be won back to Hinduism.
The ethnographic articles in this volume move away from facile—
and obviously dangerous—generalizations, opting instead to build up on
a historiography of South Asian Islam which has explored sensitively and
extensively the emergence of various strands of reformism in the context
of the specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century
British India. However, while historians have focused on formal or organized
Islamic reform movements (see for example Metcalf 1982; Robinson 2001;
Sikand 2002; Troll 1978; for a comprehensive overview see Reetz 2006),
less attention has been paid either to regional or informal Islamic reformism
(see for example Simpson 2006 for coastal Gujarat; Miller 1992 for Kerala)
or to popular responses to the activities and appeals of the reformist ulema
(Jones 2008; cf. Mayaram 1997; Minault 1998). The volume as a whole
works to show how debates between ‘reformist’ and ‘traditionalist’ Muslims
produce shifts in practice and work to redefine the focus of ‘reform’ and
‘anti-reform’ alike, while reminding us that, even if Muslims themselves
work with a sharp binary between ‘reform’ and its other(s), this opposition
is a political device and practice is always far more complex, as people
reason, negotiate, compromise and shift over time.
Several contributors to this volume are also in critical engagement
with recent studies which, apparently stressing the uniqueness to Muslim
experience,might over-privilege the coherence and disciplinary power of
contemporary piety movements (in particular, Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood
2004 but see also Brenner 1996; Deeb 2006; Henkel 2007; for critiques
see Schielke 2009, 2010; Simon 2009). Magnus Marsden explores ways in
which outspoken Chitrali women use their eloquence—in a context where
positive value is attributed to plain speaking—to challenge both reformist
and traditionalist orthodoxy. Marsden draws our attention to both the
scepticism and disenchantment of some with the region’s Islamicization and
xviii / Introduction
the ways in which the ‘men of piety’ find themselves moderating their self-
presentation. Maimuna Huq considers the tension amongst Bangladeshi
Jama’at-e-Islami university-going women activists between a simple
reproduction versus a creative interpretation of the organization’s own vision
of Islam. In both Marsden and Huq’s papers, as also (and very carefully and
self-consciously so) amongst the Muslim feminists discussed by Sylvia Vatuk,
ijtihad—promoted in reformist discourse—fosters critical stances. Edward
Simpson and Rubina Jasani, writing about very different Indian Gujarati
Muslim communities, both stress the complex and contingent nature of
people’s engagement with (reformist and not) Islam. While Jasani describes
pragmatism and scepticism, Simpson offers us a study of the same three men
over 10 years, which clearly shows the shifts in their opinions and practices
and the ways in which wider factors impinge upon the latter. This leads
Simpson to warn against privileging religion as the principal—or perhaps
unique—foundation for Muslim identity and practice.
Muslim/Islamic exceptionalism is also contested in Francis Robinson’s
contribution, where he reminds us that South Asian Muslims’ reformism—
in all its forms—expresses one historically specific engagement with
modernity. Robinson reminds us that reform is not recent, having roots in the
deep Islamic past and already existing in formalized form in the eighteenth
century. Pnina Werbner’s contribution meanwhile uses ethnography to
unsettle assumptions that Sufism can be assimilated to ‘traditionalism’
and pitted against impulses towards reform and revival, by giving us a
nuanced account of the modern and flourishing contemporary Naqshbandi
movement of the saint Zindapir (d. 1999), a sufi order which builds upon
Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi’s (d. 1625) programme for the transformation
of self and society, a framework which has flowed through and outwards
from the Punjab and Sindh from the sixteenth century to date. Nile Green
and the Osellas consider the wider modern context that underpins the
emergence and development of contemporary styles of reformism. Green
is concerned with tracing the import of colonial shifts towards a novel
discourse on breathing, meditation and the body. ‘Reform’ produced the
Yogi and the Sufi both as authentic indigenes and as representatives of
newly communalized communities.The Osellas discuss the rich trajectories
of Kerala’s reformism, which encompass a history of links to the Arab world;
1920s and 1930s agitations to break with the nineteenth century colonial
past; Kerala’s famed 1950s post-independence social activism; and a pan-
Indian post-1980s religious revivalism. As these essays make clear, reform
Introduction / xix
and the production of Muslim identities alike clearly emerge as deeply

embedded in local histories and political formations, and in critical tension
with Islamic reformism’s universalistic orientation.
Faisal Devji troubles smooth narratives of displacement and change,
by tracing complex threads at play in post-reform worlds. He uses careful
consideration of the Aligarh Movement and of two Urdu novels to alert
us to the presence of the other within the same, and to the conditions of
possibility for the emergence of nostalgia for the world lost. He suggests
some ways in which these desires continue to call to certain subjects, and
are enacted through aestheticized acts of consumption and in indirect forms
such as poetry or non-verbal interactions. Devji also sensitises us to the
ways in which gendering and social class need to be held account of—in
more subtle ways than the usual manner of acknowledging ‘location’—
by showing us that the double imperative to speak and to be silent about
the past is played out upon the bodies of and worlds of Muslim women.
There is also always potentially a multiple audience for any debate: the
self, which is the object of reform; the ‘unreformed’ Muslim; alternative
styles of reformism (for example,Tablighi versus Jama’at-e-Islami); the non-
Muslim other; those in power (for example, the state, potential funders,
imperial power). Many essays explore the fact that while an imagined ‘global
Islam’ may act as one referent for specific projects of reform, actual lived
relationships with other local communities are equally salient. Arshad Alam
discusses the narrow orientation of two north Indian madrasas, concerned
primarily to train students in reproducing sectarian differences between
Barelwis and Deobandis. Non-Muslims are here presented as peripheral—
even irrelevant—to reformists’ concerns. Farzana Haniffa makes her focus
the relations between non-Muslims and reformist Muslims in Sri Lanka.
Here, as in India, Muslim experience of being consistently marginalized as
an alien other (cf. Hansen 2007) can accelerate reformists’ urges to draw
close to the imagined community of the global umma. Such processes of
repudiation, abjection and attempts at recuperation may have unintended
political consequences. Haniffa explores how processes of crafting the
self-consciously pious Muslim female subject are working to recast the
ethnic identity of ‘Muslim’ in a manner which produces it as exclusive
of ethnic others. Attiya Ahmad’s essay on South Asian female residents in
the Gulf states and their involvement in Islamic study circles returns us to
the ambivalence which Simpson and Devji have explored, by reminding
us of the inevitably dialogic nature of the self. She also notes that the
xx / Introduction
eschatological sensibility and concern of pious reformist women is still—

despite Mahmood’s work being widely read—not being taken properly
into account in analysis, which generally prefers to look elsewhere and
to seek instrumental or sociological ‘explanations’ (a point also made in
Sadaf Ahmad’s recent careful ethnography of Pakistan’s Al-Huda women’s
movement, 2009). Yet this does not lead her to isolate ‘religiosity’, as she also
directs us towards concerns in these women’s lives such as the precariousness
of living in diaspora.
If reformism is not a disembedded universal, nor is it endowed with the
unfettered agency so evidently dreaded by its many critical commentators.
Elora Shehabuddin discusses the interesting process by which one of
the apparently most ideologically robust of reformist organizations—the
Jama’at-e-Islami—in practice makes compromises, shifts position and offers
pragmatic concessions which take it away from its own avowed policy
fundamentals (all this, too, in the Muslim majority nation of Bangladesh).
Irfan Ahmad also studies Jama’at-e-Islami (here, in India) and shows us how
the founder Maududi’s original thoughts on women are not unequivocally
antifeminist. While Maududi is, Ahmad argues, ‘neopatriarchal’, he also, for
the first time, considers women as individuals and opens up Islamist activism
to them. This paves a pathway for later Jama’ at activists to make some
radical ideological moves and for the movement as a whole to shift position
on ‘women’s issues’ over time. Ahmad argues strongly that Islam has no
essence, hence that non-patriarchal readings of Islam are plausible, and adds
that to impose a blanket label of ‘right-wing’ on all Islamist movements is
misleading. We are also reminded by Humeira Iqtidar that political action
directed towards the transformation of the state might no longer be the
sole referent for supporters and militants of Islamist organizations such as
Jama’at-e-Islami. In present-day Pakistan, Iqtidar argues, the neo-liberal
rolling back of the state and a growing disaffection with both politics and
the state machinery have created the conditions for the emergence of novel
Islamic subjectivities produced by everyday engagements with the market
and with processes of capital accumulation.
Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey reiterate the claim
that we cannot assume slavish conservatism among ulema or followers,
focusing on one issue which has been the subject of enormous anti-Muslim
polemics: contraception. They argue that ‘Islamic doctrine’ and clerical
pronouncements alone provide a poor basis for interpreting Muslims’
fertility behaviour in contemporary India, while also showing that the ulema
Introduction / xxi
do not propose rigid or unchanging demands on Muslims, but negotiate and

shift position in their practices of reasoned interpretation. Indeed, reformist
ulema pronouncements may sometimes urge ordinary Muslims themselves
to be less uncompromising. Sylvia Vatuk returns us to a focus on that
emerging phenomenon of a new breed of Muslim women ‘scholar activists’
who are, she shows, seriously and critically studying the foundational texts
of their religion in order to challenge received wisdom. In calling for reform
of India’s Muslim Personal Law, they prefer the authority of the Qur’an
rather than either the Indian Constitution or the ‘human rights’ discourse
which guides Indian secular feminists’ campaigns for women’s rights (cf.
Menski 2003). We are then once more pointed towards the multi-vocal and
complex nature of Islamic debate, and also reminded, as we engage with
Vatuk, Ahmad and Shehabuddin in this volume, that women’s relationships
to Islam do not, as Bautista (2008) reminds us, necessarily follow the
‘Egyptian piety model’. Much less do they conform to the imagined
homogenised un-hyphenated ‘Muslim woman’ of discourse, as identified by
Cooke (2007), but are enormously varied, with some significant arenas of
female religious engagement—for example the domestic—still waiting to
be brought into the discussion (Peshkova 2009). Meanwhile, we note that
the question of the ways in which projects of Islamic reform work upon
men as gendered subjects, re-shaping masculinities, remains another open
and interesting strand for future research (Samuel 2011).
Finally, we turn to discuss this volume in the context of Mahmood’s
critique of knee-jerk secularism (secularity), and the ways in which it acts
in wider society and among academics alike as a disciplining mechanism
prescribing the limits of ‘religion’, the preferred aesthetics of religiosity and,
indeed, the very existence of a stand-alone category cordoned off as ‘the
religious’ (Mahmood 2006). Academic secularism insists upon a narrow
understanding of ‘proper religion’ or ‘religion in its proper place’ as a
privatized and interiorized question of spiritual connection. It is no surprise,
then, if academics have shown an approving bias for South Asian mystic
sufi styles of devotionalism and an anxiety about reformist, and especially
Islamist religiosity and projects of public engagement. Our position here
is to urge a more nuanced approach towards all forms of reformism and
to their reception in practice. Without privileging religiosity over other
experiences of the everyday—eventually reducing complex social relations
and subjectivities always and necessarily to specific religious orientations
xxii / Introduction
and practices (Gilsenan 1990; Schielke 2009; Soares and Osella 2009)—we
would hope for academic commentators on South Asian Islam to make a
reflexive turn which would press them to avoid romanticizing an imagined
‘local’ and to stop framing their understandings in terms of moral or
aesthetic judgements, while also refraining from assuming instrumentalism
or pragmatism, rather than allowing for sincerity and giving due weight
to Muslims’ projects of piety and self-transformation (cf Das 2010). Such
moves also resonates with what Julius Bautista (2008) identifies as a potential
within studies of Islam for scholars from outside the Western liberal
tradition to liberate themselves from academic dependency. Bautista notes
that Mahmood’s most interesting legacy may be her work towards what
Chakrabarty called for as the ‘provincializing of Europe’ and the ways in
which she thereby “embeds Islamic thinking as a source of metatheoretical
insight” (p. 82). We wait with interest the possible emergence of new forms
of scholarship given heart by such possibilities.
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PART I
Reformist Journeys
1
The Equivocal History of a Muslim
Reformation
Faisal Devji
B y the middle of the nineteenth century many of India’s thinkers were

occupied with a single task: to understand and assimilate the modernity
they thought had made British rule possible. Until late in the century these
efforts were made in the name of religion, with Hindu and Muslim groups
founded to reform their respective faiths, and this meant that the idea of
modernity had no secular history in India. In this essay I want to look at
the way in which Muslim intellectuals who were part of the influential
Aligarh Movement came to think about their society as something that
had to be reformed and made modern (Lelyveld 1978). Named after the
town in northern India that housed its most prominent institution, the
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, later Aligarh Muslim University,
the Aligarh Movement was also primarily a North Indian phenomenon,
but one whose intellectual influence extended much beyond the borders
of India. This movement was founded by a group of men who belonged
to a class of professional or salaried gentry, known as the shurafa, which had
furnished administrators to pre-colonial states and now attempted to do
the same for colonial India. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a minor aristocrat, was
the founder and acknowledged leader of the Aligarh group, which called
itself a party or school in English, and a movement or tahrik in Urdu, and
whose important activities, the college apart, comprised the Muhammadan
4 / Islamic Reform in South Asia
Educational Conference and voluminous writings, including a journal, the

Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq or Refinement of Morals.1
The Aligarh Movement’s efforts to modernize Muslim lives by rejecting
‘superstition’ and inculcating English education and Victorian forms of
organization have received ample scholarly attention, though what I am
concerned with here is their deeply ambivalent character, which has been
little studied. For instance, long-standing attempts by reformist intellectuals
to purify the Urdu language and its literature of ‘contrived’, ‘exaggerated’
and ‘unnatural’ forms of expression did end up changing linguistic usage,
but at the same time and incongruously preserved much of the literary
tradition because these men continued writing in the old way themselves.2
Why the ambivalence of this simultaneous repudiation and preservation? In
this essay I will look at the way in which Indian reformers sought to create
a ‘modern’ Muslim society while at the same time taking pleasure in the
very tradition they so vehemently criticized. Focusing on two important
Urdu novels of the nineteenth century that dealt with the themes of history
and modernity, I will argue that Islam’s reformation was accomplished by
gendering the ‘bad’ past in a series of complex ways. On the one hand,
such a past had to be experienced and enjoyed by compelling women to
speak out from within it. And on the other, this tradition had to be given
up for modernity by forcing women to remain silent about it. It will be my
contention that this dual gendering of the past produces its own form of
pleasure as nostalgia, something that shadows the project of Muslim reform
and even makes it possible as the ambivalent ‘preservation’ of a rejected
tradition.
While many of the practices recommended by the Aligarh Movement
for their modernity were common to reformers across religious lines all
over India, the Muslim guise they took in the north of the country bore
a distinctively historical stamp. The past that was rejected by Aligarh’s
gentlemen continued to haunt their modernity in the form of nostalgia.
And this evocation of a lost past was so powerful that it came to characterize
the whole of Urdu culture, in the process giving rise to an aesthetic of loss
and melancholy that is today understood and enjoyed in music, film and
literature by consumers who share neither the religion nor the language of
1
I have written about Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s notion of modernity in Devji (2007).
2
For the politics of Urdu’s literary reform, see Pritchett (1994).
The Equivocal History of a Muslim Reformation / 5
northern India’s Muslims. In some ways, then, the nostalgia for a vanished
history remains by far the most powerful element in the Muslim culture
of this region, if only as a sign of its own suppression by Aligarh’s reform
movement. Although commentators and scholars have noted the aesthetic
force of this melancholy since the nineteenth century, they more often than
not interpreted it literally, as a consequence of the decline of Muslim power
and its aristocratic culture in India. And while there might well be some
truth in such a literalist reading of the phenomenon, I would like to argue
that this deeply entrenched form of nostalgia serves instead as a trope by
which to conceive and enjoy modernity.The novels I shall go on to analyse,
therefore, do not simply take up inherited patterns of literary melancholy,
but rather transform them into distinctive forms of nostalgia that have little
to do with a lost past and everything to do with the founding of a modern
Muslim society.
The Prostitution of History

First published in 1899 and in print ever since, Mirza Muhammad Hadi
Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada made the courtesan into a sign of the Muslim past.
She is a figure who continues to be invoked as a sign of this past in literature,
music, film and popular culture in general all over South Asia. Umrao Jan,
the novel’s eponymous heroine, is a retired and reformed courtesan from
Lucknow, the brilliant capital of a Muslim kingdom annexed by the British
shortly before the Indian Mutiny. She has lived through the events of 1857
and was uniquely placed, says Mirza Ruswa, to observe the great historical
changes of her time, having associated with and performed for the grandees
of the realm (Ruswa 1989: 36). The novel is her autobiography as told to
Ruswa. But there is something curious both in the fact that Umrao, as
woman and courtesan, is considered a good witness to history, and that her
narrative can only be heard through Ruswa. Insofar as traditional histories
were made up of witness reports, that is to say insofar as they could not
construct the past by evidence other than witness reports, Umrao’s role as
witness to history is perfectly plausible. But what exactly is she witness to? Is
it a history apart from herself, or her own autobiography? The answer is by
no means clear, for Umrao Jan’s story, while it is certainly meant to conjure
up a whole past to which she is not central, at the same time expresses itself
in terms of an autobiography and not the traditional witness report that had
provided the main source of history writing in the past. Indeed Umrao’s
narrative has to be read through in order to grasp a past that it can only
represent, in the sense of being representative of it.The verse that begins the
novel’s first chapter illustrates this:
Lutf hay kawn si kahani men?

Ap biti kahun ke jag biti? (ibid: 38)
In what kind of story does pleasure lie?
Should I relate my experiences or those of the world?
And this indicates a problematization of the old history as witness

reports, or as a critique of certain witness reports by others, because the
witness herself is here subordinated to her history as its object. Perhaps as a
woman or courtesan, that is to say as someone traditional or even archaic,
Umrao becomes a guardian of the past as secret, a secret that can only be
revealed to and by Ruswa as male writer. Finally, it is Mirza Ruswa who
is the historian here, while Umrao Jan herself ends up as objectified as the
history she narrates; a past that can no longer be something witnessed, but
instead only something elicited through and not by witnessing. In fact this
mediation, this prostitution of her past, constitutes Umrao’s only function,
as the couplet that ends the book makes clear:
Marne ke din qarib hain shayad ke ay hayat

Tujh se tabiat apni bahut sir ho gai (ibid.: 268)
The days for dying are perhaps nearby, for, O life
My disposition has been sated by you.
Now although Mirza Ruswa might be the story’s historian, his position
as the novel’s author has always been ambiguous in that he never made it
clear if Umrao Jan was an actual character whose narrative he recorded,
or simply a creation of his imagination. Indeed Ruswa encouraged this
ambiguity in his book, which is written as a true story. And this raises the
question of who can narrate the history of this new past that is objective
and not bound to witness reports.Who is Umrao Jan after all? A woman; but
not only a woman, a courtesan, someone who is of the masculine world but
not male; someone ambiguous. We might say that a courtesan can become
witness to history and as history only because the notion of an objective
past shakes up old ideas of authority or renders them ambivalent. Precisely
because of her structural ambiguity Umrao Jan is able both to witness an
autonomous or objective past, and to represent it in the sense of being its

site of representation, the only place where all the worlds of the past met,
even if only sexually. Umrao Jan’s unique position as narrator, a position
to which Mirza Ruswa attributes his history’s importance and novelty, lies
entirely in the fact that as a prostitute she embodies a place that unites the
most diverse historical experiences into a witnessing that is simultaneously,
and perhaps voyeuristically, witnessed as history.
When the past is represented in and by the memoirs of a courtesan,
what meaning do historical narration and reading have? Or to put it
another way, what implications do the narrator’s position as prostitute and
her audience’s position as voyeurs have for historical experience generally?
Is narration a prostitution of the past, in both senses of the phrase? Is reading
history erotic, or is it the same as reading pornographically? Odd questions,
no doubt, but ones the novel might be made to answer. The novel, not as
Umrao’s magnificent depiction of a passing age, which has established her
story in the first rank of Urdu literature, but as her motivation to narrate
it (an explanation which prefaces the autobiography proper) and her
reflections on this narrative (which conclude the novel). The novel begins
with a couplet that sets a recurring theme in the book:
Ham ko bhi kya kya maze ki dastanen yad thin

Lekin ab tamhid-e zikr-e dard-e matam ho gayen (ibid: 15)
I too used to remember such delightful stories
But they have become the beginning of a narration
of the pain of mourning
Taken alone this verse is quite innocuous, a typical example of the

Urdu lyric’s shift from superficial happiness to a philosophical sorrow. But
its thematic context in the novel, and unusual reference to narration rather
than experience, indicates a different purpose. On the one hand this couplet
may mark a difference between the realistic historical novel and a type
of prose fiction, the dastan, which had preceded it. On the other hand it
might be distinguishing between types of historical narration, with Umrao’s
factual, skeptical, eminently modern history turning all previous narratives
into mere stories. Indeed, such an emphasis on a new kind of truth is
present throughout the novel and reformist writing in general. The only
difference between our verse and the brave new world of reformed history
is its identification of truth or realism with a suffering that makes the stories
of the past delightful in comparison. The reformation’s historians were all

prey to nostalgia, but they seldom made the tragic connection between
the inevitable pain of a colonial present and the irrecoverable stories of
the past. This is why the gap between historical ideal and everyday reality
rarely inspired them to irony, while for Ruswa historical narrative is nothing
but ironic. So he follows his opening couplet with an account of how
Umrao’s autobiography came to be written, an account he calls, ironically,
shan-e nuzul, or occasion of revelation, the technical term for the historical
background of quranic verses. Ruswa’s use of the phrase is at once serious
(it evokes the reformist historicization of the Quran in particular) and ironic
(in its application to the fictional narrative of a prostitute).
Umrao Jan is persuaded to relate her autobiography at a poetic
gathering, where her verses are taken to be unintended appeals for narrative
expression. Her first couplet is the last verse of a lyric she cannot remember:
Kis ko sunaen hal-e dil-e zar ay Ada

Awargi men hamne zamane ki sayr ki (ibid: 18)
To whom should I relate the state of my sorrowing heart, O Ada?
I toured the age in a state of shiftlessness
While the appeal to narration is clear here, it is expressed in the typical

manner of the lyric; what is unusual is the idea of touring or contemplating
(sayr) the age (zamana).The traditional poetic locations for touring were the
city, the wilderness, the garden and the world, which is to say physical places.
The age is not only something abstract, it is also historically distinct; indeed
distinct ages were made into the objects of history for the first time by the
reformers in place of the ruler or dynasty. Umrao Jan’s history, therefore, is
that of a new entity, and the manner of apprehending this history is touring,
a curiously passive, neutral attitude. History, in other words, is something
alien that is passively represented. This too is a departure from traditional
historiography, one that implies a new kind of subjectivity.
Umrao Jan cannot remember the rest of her poem, or history, and the
task of the gathering is to make her recall this past as an erotic secret. History,
we might say, is here a reaction to loss, the alienating loss of something as
large and distinct as a whole age. Soon the courtesan remembers the lyric’s
first couplet:
Kabe men ja ke bhul gaya rah dayr ki

Iman bach gaya mere mawla ne khayr ki (ibid: 19)
Having gone to the Kaba I forgot the road to the temple
My faith was saved, my Lord did good
In the mystical tradition of the lyric the Kaba represents sterile Muslim
legalism, while the temple stands for the allure of idolatry. Normally, then,
the poet forsakes the Kaba for the temple. Umrao’s reversal of this order
implies that forgetting the alluring past at least has the advantage of saving
faith in the staid virtues of the present. Given the gathering’s task of historical
remembrance, however, this advantage, which prevents narrative, cannot
survive, and Umrao is forced by her audience to overcome her scruples and
recite. She begins with a hemistich that sets the mood for another erotic
poem, and for her whole history:
Shab-e furqat basar nahin hoti (ibid.: 20)

The night of separation never ends
The theme of loss here is not new, but we have seen how it is radicalized
by application to the age. Having thus established the mood, Umrao recites
the lyric, whose last couplet is:
Ay Ada ham kabhi na manenge

Dil ko dil ki khabar nahin hoti (ibid.: 21)
O Ada we’ll never agree
Heart has no knowledge of heart.
This verse, as Mirza Ruswa points out, has two meanings. On the one
hand it could be read as ‘we’ll never agree that a heart has no knowledge of
(one’s own or another’s) heart’; and on the other hand, ‘we’ll never agree:
a heart has no knowledge of a heart.’ In either case it raises a problem of
knowledge, and given the tenor of Umrao’s previous utterances, might we
say this couplet deals with the issue of historical knowledge? How can
Umrao know her lost or forgotten history? How can we? The historical
character of this problem is underlined when one of the participants at the
gathering guesses that the couplet tells of Umrao’s own experience. The
courtesan responds to this suggestion in the fashion of traditional poetics,

which does not accept personal expression:
Whatever the personal experience, I have expressed a poetic

subject (shairana mazmun). (Ruswa 1989: 21)
Umrao Jan is again denying the history she has hinted at and will
soon begin to narrate, a history she cannot even think in the context of
traditional aesthetics, and which has to be forced out of her as something
completely new. After the gathering disbands, Umrao Jan, Mirza Ruswa
and their host, a certain Munshi Sahib, sit down to dinner. The munshi asks
Umrao to recite her couplet about touring the age once again, and when
she does so, says:
There is no doubt that your history (halat) must be very

interesting. I’ve been thinking that ever since you read this end-
verse. If you relate your past experiences (sarguzasht) they won’t
be without grace. (ibid.: 36)
This request, Mirza Ruswa is quick to tell us, does not indicate the
traditional desire for a story, but represents a properly historical inquiry:
Our Munshi Sahib had a great fondness for stories and tales (qissa
kahani) from his youth. Apart from the Thousand and One Nights
and the story of Amir Hamza, he had read all the volumes of the
Bustan-e Khayal. There was not a novel that he had not seen. But
after living for some days in Lucknow, when the excellence of the
true discourse of the eloquent was revealed (to him), the flimsy
stories, poetic language, and horrible, uselessly passionate speeches
of most novelists ceased to appeal to him. The conversation of
Lucknow’s spirited people had pleased him greatly.This end-verse
of Umrao Jan’s had (therefore) given birth to that idea in his heart
which has been indicated above. (ibid.: 36)
Umrao puts up a good deal of resistance to the munshi’s idea, which

derives from a theory of the spoken word as authentic historical content,
but is at last forced to tell her story over the course of a few days. And Mirza
Ruswa tells us that he surreptitiously transcribed her narrative, showing
her the manuscript only after she had finished. She was furious, he says,
but at last had to accept the written history as a fait accompli. What Umrao’s
anger at the writing of her history means, Ruswa explains at the end of the
book. At this point he finishes his preface by reiterating the novel’s claim to
represent a true history, and in doing so becomes the first author in Urdu to
write a novel as history, to invent a true illusion:
I have no doubt that whatever has been related in this life-story

is true to the word, but this is my personal opinion. Readers have
the permission to assume what they will. (ibid: 37)
This challenge is to be taken seriously, for Mirza Ruswa himself treats

Umrao Jan like a primary source, cross-examining her about dates and
interrogating her about hidden motives. The new history is recalcitrant
and has to be forced into being. Umrao Jan’s autobiography deals with
the passing away of an age, and the great symbol of this loss is the Indian
Mutiny. Yet the events of 1857 do not mark the kind of break that is
simply imposed from the outside, a sort of supernatural visitation, as it had
previously appeared in literature. In line with reformist historiography, Mirza
Ruswa absorbs the Mutiny into history and so transforms it. 1857 loses its
millennial character and gets fitted into a typology of social revolution,
while history ceases to be a record of interrupted order and appropriates
revolution as a constituting element. Umrao Jan’s life is ironic because it is
for the most part an attempt to follow traditional ideals and an old set of
rules in a new time. Such an experience of living in another time or behind
the times was not available in the old regime, but it marks the whole new
way of genteel Muslim existence. So the courtesan’s life never fulfils its
expectations. Lovers trained in the old school are no longer available (ibid.:
86–87), and even when a rare one is found he cannot operate within the
old culture, because at his first meeting with Umrao he is interrupted by
a rich commoner who pours scorn on the old courtesy and claims her for
himself (ibid.: 97–100). Umrao Jan sees the old world collapse about her
as such adventurers invade the citadels of aristocratic chivalry, destroying
its aesthetic of seduction with a culture of money that preserved its erotic
only as commodity, Umrao herself becoming a commodity as prostitute.
An important couplet signals the end of Umrao’s life as tragic irony and the
beginning of her reflections on it:
Na puchh nama-e amal ki dil avezi

Tamam umr ka qissa likha hua paya (ibid.: 251)
Do not ask of the enchantment of life’s record
I found my life’s whole story already written out
This verse brings us back to the issue of written history, which is to say
the uses of narrative. Umrao tells Ruswa that after reading his manuscript
she was filled with such anger that she nearly tore it up. Had she not been
disgraced enough as a prostitute, that she should also have to endure the
curses of unknown readers in the future? She views this written history as a
kind of exploitation of self or prostitution of experience. In a way the whole
novel can be seen as an effort to force Umrao to prostitute herself, if only by
revealing her past for the pleasure of men. But then something unexpected
happens to resolve this anger:
Suddenly last night around twelve o’clock my eyes opened. As

usual I was alone in the room. The maids and manservant were
all sleeping downstairs, and the lamp by my head was alight. At
first I tossed and turned for a long time. I wanted to sleep but
sleep didn’t come at any cost. Finally I rose, stuck a betel-roll into
my mouth, called the maid to fill the water-pipe, and lay down
on the bed. I began to smoke. I had the desire to look at a book.
There were plenty of storybooks in the shelf above my head. I
picked them up one by one, turning the pages, but I’d read them
all several times already. Since I couldn’t get up an interest, I
closed them up and put them away. Finally my hand fell on this
very manuscript. Intense anger. I’d seriously resolved to tear it up
and was about to do so when I realized that someone seemed to
be whispering something in my ear: ‘Well Umrao, suppose you
tear it up and throw it away, burn it even, what’s the point? Who
can destroy the events of your life that have been written down,
classified, and glossed by the angels at the command of God the
Just and Mighty?’ At this hidden voice my hands and feet began
to tremble. The manuscript nearly dropped from my hand, but I
managed to save it. The idea of tearing it up had completely left
my heart. I felt I should put it back from where I’d lifted it.Then
once more, just like that, and without reason, I began to read it.
When I’d finished the first sheet I turned the page and read a
few lines more. This time I found my life-story so interesting
that the more I read the more I wanted to continue. I’d never
had such pleasure reading other stories, because while reading

them I always knew that these were all made-up talk; really there
was no foundation to them. It is this thought that makes stories
pleasureless. I have experienced all the events of my life that you
have described, and now it was as if they were before my eyes.
Each event appeared to be set down authentically, and as a result
all kinds of impressions passed through my heart and mind that
are very difficult to describe. If someone had seen me in this
state he would have had no doubt that I was insane. Sometimes I
would burst out laughing uncontrollably, sometimes tears would
start dropping down. It was a strange feeling in other words.You
had said to correct as I read, but I had no sense left to do so.
While reading, dawn came. Now I performed my ablutions, said
my prayers, and then slept for a while. Waking up at about eight
in the morning, I washed and began to read. By nightfall I’d read
the entire manuscript. (ibid: 251–53)
In this remarkable passage Umrao Jan finally overcomes her objections

to historical narrative by realizing its inevitability and even finding a certain
therapeutic pleasure in it. This pleasure consists in consuming her own
history as an alien object, one that was no longer in her control, so that
while she is the author both of her life and of its narration, Umrao is unable
to describe the feelings which its reading elicits from her, and is incapable of
correcting it. Such a reification of experience into a sort of fetish results in
an obsession with history, with the new history as loss that renders all other
narratives pleasureless. After having alienated her experience as history and
re-experienced it as such, Umrao Jan becomes unusually philosophical.
While telling her story she rarely engaged in any analysis and had to be
prodded by Mirza Ruswa to reflect upon people’s behaviour and motivation;
now that she had re-experienced her life as a unified history, however, she
was able to draw guidance from it in the form of sociological rules about
love and prostitution. This wisdom differs from any traditional knowledge-
born-of-experience precisely in its sociological character, consisting of laws
extracted from life viewed as an alien and coherent datum. Prior to this the
wisdom of experience had been presented in books of ethics, which is to
say texts dealing with proper behaviour and not sociological knowledge,
and as maxims or axiomatic aphorisms, not laws.
Umrao shifts from aphorism to law directly after reading Mirza Ruswa’s
manuscript. Once she is able to review the events of her life as a coherent set
of data, Umrao Jan is struck by its reliance on fate (taqdir) and fortune (bakht).
While it is true, she says, that powerlessness and ignorance are conducive to
such a dependence, this is not inevitable, for she has seen some men alter the
effects even of natural calamities, while others simply use fate and fortune
as excuses for their own evil deeds or shortcomings (ibid: 253–54). Such a
reliance is due more to an unthinking belief in aphorisms, for instance the
theme of the revolving heavens in Persian poetry, and the false maxims of
old people, whose complaints about the ill-fortune of the present are due
simply to their decrepitude and idealization of the past (ibid.: 254). But this
belief in fate and fortune had a strictly historical cause as well:
This kind of talk had a certain meaning in the past, because at

that time, quite by chance, things would be transformed within
the hour. (ibid.: 261)
It was because traditional rulers were not bound by any law, that their
behaviour had often been capricious; but the English government was based
on the rule of law and so ‘in this age fate has no force, whatever happens
does so according to principles (tadbir)’ (ibid.: 263). Umrao Jan, therefore,
ties her new historical knowledge to imperialism. The fact that she does
so in a typically colonial way should not bother us, because what counts is
the connection itself. The new history of the reformers is a way of dealing
with the loss and disempowerment of a colonial present by creating a new
identity and a new politics under the iron law of the British. Umrao Jan Ada
being a particularly insightful examination of how this process might occur
on a personal level, and occur as prostitution and pleasure to boot.
Madness in the Family

Deputy-collector Nazir Ahmad’s celebrated novel Tawbat un-Nasuh, Nasuh’s
Repentance, first published in 1877, provides perhaps the fullest account of
Aligarh’s problematic attempt to reform the Muslim family and domestic
relations in general. It concerns a gentleman’s renunciation of decadent
aristocratic practices following his infection with the cholera during an
epidemic then sweeping Delhi. In his fevered state, Nasuh dreams about
meeting his deceased father, who is suffering the torments reserved for
sinners in the afterlife, and is made to see the error of his own irreligious ways.
Following a miraculous recovery, Nasuh embarks upon the reformation of

his wife Fahmida, his daughters Naima and Hamida, and his three sons
Kalim, Alim and Salim. It is in this struggle that the reformation’s ideology
and the obstacles facing it are revealed.
To begin with, the legitimacy of Nasuh’s reform is itself put in doubt
by the book’s radical heteroglossia. The dramatic experience that justified
it, while seen by Nasuh as miraculous and providential, is continuously
degraded by others into a result of illness that indicates the need for
more treatment (Ahmad 1987: 46). And Nazir Ahmad’s discourse, in thus
rendering ambiguous the origins of Muslim reform, casts the validity of its
whole career in doubt. It is as if his utilitarian defence of the reformation is
in search of a more absolute or metaphysical sanction, but cannot quite be
convinced by Nasuh’s dream. Indeed this relentless rationalism drives the
author himself to allow for the possibility of a mistake in Nasuh’s experience:
The doctor who was treating him had given him a soporific. He
fell asleep and his scattered thoughts came to stand before him
as a dream. (ibid.: 23)
The whole paraphernalia of providence, then, the cholera epidemic

as a punishment, Nasuh’s illness as a trial, and his dream as the necessarily
a priori certitude that drives a painful process of reform, is here made
ambivalent despite itself. The novel opens up a space where the author’s
didacticism can be turned into its opposite, where moral certitude can
give way to meaninglessness. And it is in fact this very meaninglessness
that Nasuh’s certainty is meant to fight, for he values reformation because
it gives direction to a life without meaning, a life which would otherwise
be like a watch without a regulator, a woman without a husband, a patient
without a doctor (ibid.: 248). Reform here is therefore seen as the response
to a peculiarly modern, regulative crisis, a crisis not only of morals but of
political meaning as well.
The anxiety of Muslim reform, and the crisis which justified it, are
brought home in a discussion regarding the character of Nasuh’s certitude.
What if this certainty is false? Nazir Ahmad has to deal with this possibility
in an effort to manage the hypothetical counter-narrative of those who
had to be reformed. He does this by investing Nasuh’s position with all the
weight of patriarchal tradition and leading it to a final victory:
That man who is the oldest in this house is in the position of

an emperor, and the house’s other inhabitants are, like subjects,
commanded by him. [. . .] The most dangerous fault I see in my
domestic kingdom is this, that I and my subjects, which is to say
you people, are ready and fitted out for rebellion and mutiny
against the Emperor of the two worlds. (ibid: 146–47)
But here again the very force of Nasuh’s certainty, which rejects
compromise as fatal, turns against itself in his rebel son Kalim’s comment:
If to think oneself an emperor isn’t madness then what is it?

(ibid.: 51)
And indeed the shadow of madness dogs Nasuh’s reform, revealing the
insecurity of his certainty in the novel’s relativism. However, the curious
ambivalence of Nazir Ahmad’s text does not signify, I think, intellectual
uncertainty, but the difficulty of containing counter-narrative, an incapacity
that renders the reformist text remarkably vulnerable to reversal, and to
madness. For instance, Nasuh’s method of managing women, children and
menials, through education, simply reinforces his crisis-struck conception
of reform, whose very extremism raises the spectre of madness. So Nazir
Ahmad tells us that Tawbat un-Nasuh was written to instruct people in the
duty (farz) of raising children (tarbiyat-e awlad) (ibid.: 21), a duty which
has been corrupted to such an extent that Muslim men are helpless before
their dependents (ibid.: 24). And so, like children themselves, they have to
be taught control in a learning (talim) which starts, according to the English
adage, from the home outward (ibid.).
Now the author makes a distinction here between tarbiyat, the nurturing
or upbringing of children, and talim, a methodical, even bookish learning,
which he reserves for the instruction of parents. What does this distinction
mean? Talim here refers to a ‘how to’ method whose rules are known by
its students, while tarbiyat is experienced by its students as natural. But it
is not really natural, for Nazir Ahmad has codified tarbiyat in a way that
retains its nurturing aspect only as a facade. Thus he says that tarbiyat is not
just about raising children, teaching them a livelihood, and marrying them
off, but about improving their morals, reforming their characters, righting
their habits, and setting their imaginations on the truth (ibid.: 21). At first
glance there does not seem to be much difference between this prescription
and the ethics, adab or akhlaq, which had always informed tarbiyat. While
this ethics might have been considered natural, however Nazir Ahmad’s
tarbiyat constitutes the special antidote to a crisis. More than this, it is seen,
I have said, to be a facade of naturalism that is taught by trickery. So Nasuh
nurtures his dependents by a calculated strategy, plotting with his wife as
to when exactly harshness or gentleness should be applied to the children
as enemies (ibid: 66), and synchronizing his actions with hers so that their
offspring might not be able to use one parent against the other (ibid.: 76).
We might say that the old ethics has broken down here not only
because of tarbiyat’s new crisis-character, but also because it is now confined
to domestic space as a kind of fortress of Islam. In other words adab or akhlaq
lose their natural, universal character when they are cut off from a talim
now largely reserved for the public and manifested in colonial education.
As Nazir Ahmad’s contemporary, the anti-reformist poet Akbar Illahabadi
puts it:
Talim-o tarbiyat ka hay ikhtilaf har ja

Jo ‘course’ ek ka hay woh awr ka nahin hay (Illahabadi 1990: 20)
Talim and Tarbiyat diverge everywhere
The ‘course’ of one is not that of the other
This division of public talim and private tarbiyat affects the parents’
learning as well, by situating it on the boundary between the Muslim inside
and the colonial outside as the former’s guardian. Indeed parental talim,
which paradoxically belongs in but reacts against the colonial public world,
ends up creating tarbiyat as something natural, traditional and defensive. As a
result it is itself cut off from a traditional concept of learning continuous with
tarbiyat and ethics, becoming yet another mask of crisis, one that imposes
an alien order and teleology on life. Or as Akbar Illahabadi describes it in
a couplet:
Zindagi awr qiyamat men ‘relation’ samjho

Is ko ‘college’ or usse ‘convocation’ samjho (ibid.: 102)
Understand the relation between life and resurrection
Know this as college and that as convocation.
Thus Nasuh’s instruction is no longer a universal and natural means to

an end, but rather a fragmented private value, one that transforms farz or
obligation into duty in the colonial sense. So he tells his wife:
Even if we don’t succeed we have to try, for it is trying that itself

has value. (Ahmad 1987: 64)
In fact this duty, as expounded above to Nasuh’s wife, is tragic,

something complete in itself even when faced with failure. Now such a
tragic conception is not lacking in pre-modern Muslim thought, but its
extension to a fragmented or private teaching betrays, I think, a specifically
colonial heritage as well. And it is this that makes Nasuh say to his wife:
This state is for you a state of trial. Faith and children are two
(separate) things, and it is a most unfortunate fact that a union
of the two does not seem possible: because our children are
enemies of religion and faith. If we incline toward the children,
then religion and faith abscond; and if we protect faith, then
children abscond. So you have the choice to take whichever you
want. (ibid: 97)
Is there not a hint of madness in this sacrifice? How do Nasuh’s

dependents respond to this education? His wife and younger children
accept it, but the two oldest, Naima and Kalim, prove more resistant. The
former sees in it a destruction of true gentility, sharafat, which isolates her
from friends and coerces her into a pietism she abhors:
Neither has the earth remained nor the sky. […] There is neither
that laughter nor that interest. Not that conversation, not that
fun, not that laughter. A kind of unhappiness is spread about the
house, otherwise not a month ago the neighbourhood’s women
used to be here all day. One would be singing a song, another
telling a story. Our neighbour Ajuba is such a hearty soul that she
would set us laughing uncontrollably by coming up with new
caricatures every day. Now nobody comes in the house even to
spit. (ibid.: 157–58)
For the reformed Muslim man this scene probably evoked disapproval,
even fear, because the Muslim gentry conceived of female gatherings in
terms of moral corruption. Indeed their criticism of polygamy and the
harem might have been due more to anxieties about feminine congregation
than to any monogamous scruples, whether Europe-derived or not. But
Naima realizes the oppressiveness that such a gendered morality could lead
to:
I know that for women a lot of prayer and fasting is unnecessary.

Their worship is only this: that they should see to the housework.
Watch over the children.When do they get the time from (such)
domestic chores to pray? For men, of course, there are no cares
of cooking, no fighting of children: they can worship as much as
they please. (ibid.: 163–64)
Nazir Ahmad, naturally, counters Naima’s complaint of too much work

by referring to men’s jobs in the public world, and goes on to dismiss her
position altogether as an ignorant traditionalism which has to be forced
into enlightenment. In fact every reformer rejected women’s arguments as
being superstitious and old-fashioned. Could it be, then, that women could
only resist their own reformation through tradition? It is this that leads to
apparently paradoxical situations where women argue against reform by
holding to a masculine position of gender inequality:
Naima: You can say what you like there will never be equality
between woman and man. God certainly must have granted
some kind of ease to women.
Saliha: The reason?
Naima: Why, can women bear difficulty? (ibid: 164)
Mirza Ruswa’s novel Umrao Jan Ada offers a more sustained criticism of
the reformation’s feminine ideal: not from a standpoint of women’s rights,
however, but by an aestheticization of their former paganness. Thus, he calls
the much-criticized ritual of women’s obscenities at weddings innocent
(Ruswa 1989: 75), saying that there was something peculiar about the
worship of reformed women (ibid.). But Ruswa destroys the force of this
criticism in his next sentence: ‘I’m not some reformer of the community to
concern myself with these things’ (ibid.: 76).
Perhaps it is his very refusal to take responsibility for criticism that
allows Ruswa to lash out at the reformed Muslim woman, making her out
to be a sort of suffering fool:
Don’t you understand even this much, that those poor things who
are imprisoned for their whole lives within four walls endure a
thousand difficulties? In good times there are always companions
(for their husbands), but during bad periods (only) these helpless
ones render (them) support. […] Why shouldn’t they take pride in
all this? It is because of this pride that they look upon bad women
with immense dislike and consider them extremely degraded.
God forgives sins that have been repented of, but these women
never forgive […] and this, too, is a kind of virtue for them because
in such a state they don’t blame their men but make the evil-doing
women out to be culprits. What greater proof than this can there
be of their love? (ibid.: 224)
The courtesan Umrao Jan, however, who is here being addressed, rejects
even this saving grace of the new woman by casting doubts on the notion
of love. Men, she says, fall in love easily and superficially because they are
foolish and can afford, as men, to be driven by their passions. Women, on
the other hand, are calculating, slow to love, and not passionate because
their weakness leads them to prefer security to love. This is why older, well-
established men can hold more of an attraction for them than youth and
beauty (Ahmad 1987: 259). Given this cynical view of gender relations,
Umrao’s summing-up of the female condition is unsurprising:
I have no doubt of the fact that a woman’s life lies only in (her)
youth. If life ended together with youth, how good that would
be! But this doesn’t happen. (ibid.: 257)
Umrao Jan Ada contains one of the boldest literary criticisms of the
condition of women in general, but it is a criticism aestheticized in the
figure of the courtesan and so ends in nothing. In fact, Ruswa’s attitude is
one of weary resignation, something which allowed his novel to be set aside
in the matter of reform. Criticism is only possible when it is not serious,
when the following ironic comment by Umrao can only be seen and valued
in terms of her exotic status as courtesan:
If God wishes He can punish me, burn me; I cannot be made to

sit stifled in a veil. But I pray for those who are veiled. May God
preserve their wifely kingdom and may their veiling last as long
as this world. (ibid.: 267)
If the new woman, in reformist texts, resisted reformist discourse by

retreating into patriarchal tradition, the youth did so by clinging on to
the old decadent culture of the aristocracy. So Kalim boasts, ‘I don’t know
which are the arts of the nobility that I am not capable of ’ (ibid.: 139).
Reformers, however, saw in this culture not only something inherently
corrupt (indeed they blamed it for the colonization of India), but considered
its cultivation dangerously unrealistic as well. Kalim, for instance, is shown
destroying himself in the pursuit of this nostalgic, pre-colonial ideal. When
his father’s admonitions become unendurable, Kalim leaves Delhi for
Dawlatabad, a fictitious princely state whose young ruler was gathering
worthlessly cultured companions about him in an effort to make his court
like the Lucknow of old (ibid.: 230). But he arrives too late, for the British
Resident has already deposed the prince and put the affairs of state in the
hands of a committee with no need for aesthetes (ibid.: 231). Kalim then
joins the local army, is wounded ingloriously and dies after repenting of
his sins. This rather extreme end, which for Nasuh underlines the tragic
character of reformist duty, seems to be necessary precisely because of the
powerful seductiveness of aristocratic ideals. These must be destroyed so
thoroughly that the very pathos of their extinction is endured as a value.
Thus, after Kalim leaves home, a grieving Nasuh has his mock-aristocratic
rooms opened and destroys their contents, even burning his son’s books
(ibid: 188–89). Is there not a touch of madness here as well?
Yet aristocratic culture was not dangerous simply as a set of ideals. It
threatened the reformers because it was an emphatically public culture, one
that rejected the private character of colonial Muslim society. And Kalim
realizes that it is this life, lived in a public where colonial and native existed
in an uneasy balance, that Nasuh disapproves of:
Now one hears this new talk, of course, to sit in line at the
mosque, not to play, not to meet any friends or acquaintances, not
to go to the market, not to participate in festivals and spectacles.
(ibid.: 139)
In fact the reformers’ anxiety to rescue their offspring from the bad
influences of the outside led them to deny the aristocratic character
of public life, calling it not merely disreputable but menial as well. The
familiarities and contacts of a life not conducted in public institutions were
deemed common. So Kalim is told by his converted brother, Alim, ‘sharif
by name and with the habits of ruffians. Called a good man and with the
disposition of commoners’ (ibid.: 122). And it is this question of rank that
finally determines and makes sense of the Muslim community and its piety.
After all, Nasuh’s youngest son Salim is won over from the sinful influences
of the outside by a simple argument:
But he (Salim’s friend) is the son of a common man (bazari admi)

and you are the son of a very honourable man. (ibid.: 83)
The commoner as menial occupies a curious position in reformist

debate. As long as they knew their place, menials posed no threat to the
reformist elite. And even if they proved rebellious, this difference could be
used as a foil for modern values. But if commoners, too, were reformed, the
distinctiveness of this modernity was put in doubt and its rhetoric of Muslim
equality questioned. Indeed, it was exactly the gentrifying commoner who
presented a threat in reformist narrative, but one that could not be voiced
given its declared egalitarianism and claim to represent all Muslims. This is
why Nazir Ahmad has to displace the very utterance of the problem onto the
disreputable Kalim. Nasuh’s eldest son complains about his father’s religiosity
not as such but because it brings him into the company of commoners at
the mosque, whose imam or leader is a weaver, and whose congregation
is composed of barbers and wayfarers. What is more, this leader has the
affrontery to salute gentlemen only with a religiously required greeting,
using this pretext to omit the customary bows and courtesies. All of which,
says Kalim, makes him feel so ashamed that he has changed his path to
avoid seeing Nasuh in such common company (ibid: 120). Can common
folk become gentlemen by praying? Assuredly not, claims Kalim ironically,
quoting the following couplet:
Zinhar, az an qawm nabashi ke fareband

Haq ra basujudi-o nabi ra badurudi (ibid.: 121)
Beware not to be part of that deceitful group
Prostrate to God and pray for the Prophet
Now, given Kalim’s supposedly common character, and Nasuh’s

exclusiveness, this outburst on his part is distinctly odd, as is the fact that
Nasuh contradicts not a whit of it. In fact the menial as Muslim is made to
stand as an unresolved problem in the novel and reformist texts in general.
And this problem, let me add, was by no means hypothetical, for apparently
following the lead of the gentry, reform became a paying proposition for all
sorts of Muslims from the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Muslim reformation was created in an effort to manage women,
children and menials through a strategy of divide and rule. Women were
separated from each other with the gradual disappearance of the harem and
women’s culture, indeed of a distinct women’s quarter itself in the colonial
bungalow. In this way they were separated from their children as well, boys
who no longer spent their formative years in a self-contained zenana, and who
were sent off to European-style schools, often, and deliberately, as boarders.
Indeed, reformed Muslim culture might have increased vastly the paternal
role in the domestic life of children. As for menials, women and children
were separated from them by means of an education that taught them on
which side of the fence plebeians belonged, and made it possible for them to
manage their own affairs. Reformers urged women not to rely excessively on
servants, pointing out how education would enable them to run their own
households with more thrift.With these developments, domestic space as the
site of seraglio intrigue was replaced by the family unit.
Conclusion
Distinctive about the Aligarh Movement’s literary production was the oft-
expressed nostalgia for a past that its reformers had themselves rejected.
Rather than seeing in such melancholy the consequences of a real loss,
however, I have argued that it represents the way in which modern Islam
is both created and enjoyed, by dwelling upon the very world it repudiates.
Indeed, nostalgia of this kind is possible only for those who have already left
the past it mourns, and does not signify some incomplete modernization
of aristocratic Muslim culture. This is why it can be sold and consumed as
an aesthetic commodity by all kinds of people, who to this day might enjoy
watching a mujra or courtesan’s dance and listening to melancholy ghazals
or lyrics replete with images of sadness, abandonment and loss. In some
ways, of course, this nostalgia does have a historical reality, representing as
it does the lives of those who fell victim to the reformers, and in particular
women, youths and aristocrats. It is almost as if the new patriarchal family
created by the reformers could only maintain itself by mourning all those
domestic as well as public modes of intimacy that it had replaced. We
have seen that such reformist practices and institutions did not establish
themselves without resistance or criticism, but the inevitable dismantling

of pre-modern domestic space allowed these to be aestheticized. In Umrao
Jan Ada, for example, we see the fate of resistance and criticism in the new
familial patriarchy: their transformation into nostalgia. So in the following
dialogue on the subject of alcohol, the evil habit that brought courtesans and
gentlemen together in an intimacy that had nothing to do with domestic
life is spoken of as an almost obsessive memory, and in fact only enjoyed as
such:
Umrao: Don’t speak of it now.
Ruswa: Why, have you become virtuous?
Umrao: For some time now.
Ruswa: In truth what a bad thing it is. My own state is this:
Bad tawba ke bhi hay dil men yeh hasrat baqi
De ke qasmen koi ek jam pila de ham ko
After my repentance too this desire remains in my heart
Someone should with oaths have me drink a cup
Umrao: Oh, what a couplet you’ve recited! Mirza sahib, I’m
here to compel you with oaths, its up to you whether or not to
drink.
Ruswa:You, too, accompany me.
Umrao: God forgive me!
Ruswa: God forgive me!
[…]
Umrao: . . . Allah, let this subject drop.
Ruswa: Let it drop.
Umrao: Let it not come up again even in joking.
Ab na ham munh lagaenge us ko
Yad ai to khayr yad ai
I shan’t bring it to my lips again
If I remember it, very well, I remember it. (Ruswa 1989: 70–71)
Finally, this is how the gentry managed the seduction and threat, both
of their poetic past and of their prosaic present: by nostalgia as a memory
that unsettled the virtuous history of Islam with its distinctive pleasure.
References
Ahmad, Nazir. 1987. Tawbat un-Nasuh. New Delhi: Maktaba Jamia.
Devji, Faisal. 2007. ‘Apologetic Modernity’. Modern Intellectual History, 4(1):
61–76.
Illahabadi, Akbar. 1990. Intekhab-e Akbar Illahabadi. New Delhi: Maktaba
Jamia.
Lelyveld, D. 1978. Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India.
Pritchett, Frances W. 1994. Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ruswa, Mirza Muhammad Hadi. 1989. Umrao Jan Ada. New Delhi: Maktaba
Jamia.
2
Islamic Reform and Modernities
in South Asia
Francis Robinson*
Introduction
F rom the beginning of the Islamic era, Muslim societies have experienced
periods of renewal (tajdid). Since the eighteenth century, Muslim
societies across the world have been subject to a prolonged and increasingly
deeply felt process of renewal. This has been expressed in different ways
in different contexts. Amongst political elites with immediate concerns to
answer the challenges of the West, it has meant attempts to reshape Islamic
knowledge and institutions in the light of Western models, a process
described as Islamic modernism. Amongst ‘ulama and sufis, whose social
base might lie in urban, commercial or tribal communities, it has meant
‘the reorganisation of communities... [or] the reform of individual behavior
in terms of fundamental religious principles’, a development known as
reformism (Lapidus 2002: 457). These processes have been expressed in
movements as different as the Iranian constitutional revolution, the jihads
of West Africa, and the great drives to spread reformed Islamic knowledge
in India and Indonesia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the
process of renewal mutated to develop a new strand, which claimed that
revelation had the right to control all human experiences and that state
power must be sought to achieve this end. This is known to many as
*
This essay draws on attempts to consider aspects of Islamic reform and modernity over the past twenty
years. See Robinson (1985, 1997, 2000, 2004).
Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia / 27
Islamic fundamentalism, but is usually better understood as Islamism. For

the majority of Muslims today, Islamic renewal in some shape or other has
helped to mould the inner and outer realities of their lives.
This great movement of religious change in the Muslim world coincided
with a Western engagement with that world of growing intensity. It should
be clear, of course, that the movement of reform precedes the Western
presence, its roots lying deep in the Islamic past, and being represented
classically in the eighteenth century by the teaching of Muhammad ibn
‘Abd al-Wahhab in Arabia and Shah Wali Allah in India. Nevertheless, from
the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western imperial powers surged
across the Muslim world so that by 1920 only Central Arabia, the Yemen,
Anatolia, Afghanistan and Iran were free from formal Western control.
The process of decolonization that spanned the period from the mid-
twentieth century to the 1990s made little difference. The end of formal
political control, more often than not, left elites in Muslim societies with
strong external allegiances, which, for a period, were made to serve the
Cold War rivalries of the Great Powers, and throughout played their part
in submitting their societies, to a greater or less extent, to the influence
of global economic forces. Thus, over 200 years, the old ways of getting
and spending of nomadic and agrarian societies were supplanted by those
of industrializing ones, often driven by global capitalism. The old social
hierarchies, which brought order to many a locality, gave way to new classes.
The old knowledge, hallowed from the Islamic past, was challenged by new
knowledge from what often seemed to be a Godless West. Powerful material
symbols of these changes were the new Western-style cities, with broad
boulevards, apartment blocks and shopping streets, with banks and cinemas
and, perhaps, an Opera House, which grew up alongside the old Islamic
cities, often walled cities with a Sultan’s palace, a Friday Mosque, a Grand
Bazaar, sinuous lanes and gated quarters.
It was in this context of change, of the increasingly rapid erosion of old
ways and cherished values, that the process of renewal took place. If the drive
came from the inner compulsion of Muslims to make their faith live to the
best possible effect, it was shaped in constant interaction with the changing
material world in which it existed. Moreover, while Islamic reform often
defined itself, in part at least, through its opposition to Western cultural and
political hegemony, at the same time it made use, where appropriate, of
Western knowledge and technology to drive forward its purposes and came
to be fashioned in part by its interaction with it.
There were, associated with the workings of Islamic reform in these

circumstances, changes that, taking into account the Western experience
and noting the trajectories of Western social science, might be associated
with modernity—admittedly, always a relative concept. They were: (a) the
ending of the total authority of the past as Muslims sought new ways of
making revelation and tradition relevant to the present; (b) the new emphasis
on human will as Muslims realized that in a world without political power
it is only through their will that they could create an Islamic society on
earth; (c) the transformation of the self, achieved through willed activity,
leading to self-reflectiveness, self-affirmation and growing individualism;
(d) the rationalization of Islam from scripturalism through to its formation
into an ideology; (e) and finally a process of secularization involving a
disenchantment of the world, which arguably has been followed by a ‘re-
enchantment’.
These changes will be considered primarily in the context of the
working of Islamic reform in South Asia. The focus will be on those in
the tradition of Shah Wali Allah; some mention will be made of Sayyid
Ahmad Khan and his modernist strand, but the main concern will be
with the Deoband School, the Ahl-i Hadith, the Ahl-i Qur’an and the
Tablighi Jama‘at. Attention will be paid to the evolution of reform into the
Islamism of Mawlana Mawdudi’s Jama‘at-i Islami. Moreover, the insights
of that extraordinarily perceptive poet-philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal,
who was admired by Muslims as different as Mawdudi, Sayyid Abul ‘Ali
Hasan Nadwi and Ayat Allah Khumayni, will be kept firmly in view. This
is by no means a comprehensive list of those figures engaged in reform
more generally; significant individuals such as Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian,
Inayat Allah Mashriqi, Shibli Nu‘mani and the remarkable Abul Kalam
Azad are left out. Particular attention is paid to those in the Wali Allah
tradition, however, because they embrace a religious change, aspects of a
‘protestant reformation’ perhaps, which arguably helped to drive a broader
set of changes in the Muslim world that we might associate with modernity.
This position is adopted on the grounds that there is value in taking a
Weberian perspective, while at the same time being prepared to recognize
its limitations.
Let us identify the key aspects of reform in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century India. First, it is crucial to remember the colonial context. British
rule brutally removed much of the financial and institutional support for
Islamic society. This helped to create a general anxiety about how a Muslim
society might be sustained without power. Specifically, it meant that ‘ulama,

who had once received land grants and jobs in government, now turned to
society at large to sustain them in their role.They would survive only if they
provided services society wanted.
The theme of emphasising tawhid (the unity of God) and condemning
shirk (actions that compromised the unity of God) ran through all the
movements of the time. There was a running attack on all sufi customs
that, following Ibn ‘Arabi, suggested that God might be immanent rather
than purely transcendent, which was expressed most frequently and forcibly
in attacks on any practices that suggested that sufi saints might be able to
intercede for man with God. At their most extreme, these attacks aimed
to wipe out Sufism altogether.1 By the same token, there were assaults on
indigenous customs that had come to be incorporated into Islamic practice,
for instance, following the Hindu custom of not marrying widows.
A major concern of all reformers was to review the knowledge handed
down from the past to see what should be used to enable them to operate
effectively in the present. At one level, that of the Deoband School, it meant
no more than a shift in emphasis in the madrasa curriculum from theology
and philosophy, and the triumphs of medieval Persian scholarship, to the
Qur’an and Hadith and those subjects that made these central messages of
Islam socially useful. ‘Ulama in this tradition firmly followed the precedent
of medieval scholarship in these fields, that is, observed taqlid. At another
more exacting level, ‘ulama circumvented medieval scholarship and the
schools of law to exercise ijtihad (independent reasoning), on the Qur’an
and Hadith, if they were Ahl-i Hadith, or on just the Qur’an, if they were
Ahl-i Qur’an. As the stream of reform flowed into ever more challenging
contexts from an Islamic point of view, the demand for ijtihad became even
stronger. It was used, after the mode of the Ahl-i Hadith, by both Islamic
modernists and Mawdudi’s Islamists.
A major concern of all movements was to spread knowledge of their
reforming message as widely as possible. All to a greater or lesser extent
founded madrasas or other educational institutions. The Deoband madrasa,
founded in 1867, and supported by public subscription alone was the model.
By 1967, it claimed to have founded more than 8,000 madrasas in its image.
1
It should be noted, however, that some sufis adjusted their practices not just to take account of reform but
also to embrace its transformative processes. Chapter 4 by Nile Green in this volume is a good example
of the former. The classic study of reform led by a sufi and his Naqshbandi followers is Mardin (1989).
From these institutions came the teachers and scholars who provided the
knowledge and the guidance to enable Muslim society not just to survive
but also to entrench itself further. One important development at Deoband
was the establishment of a Dar al-Ifta ready to receive questions and to issue
fatawa all over India. A key development in supporting this self-sustaining
community of Muslims was the introduction of print and the translation
of the Qur’an and large numbers of important texts into the regional
languages of India. The reforming ‘ulama were amongst the very first to
use the printing press; rightly, they saw it as the means to fashion and to
consolidate their constituency outside the bounds of colonial rule (Metcalf
1982: 46–260). Reform, moreover, reached beyond the world of the literate.
From the 1920s, it was carried forward by the Tabligh-i Jama‘at, or preaching
society, in which the devout set aside a period each year to work in teams
that transmitted the reforming message orally to small town and village
communities (Masud 2000; Sikand 2002). The Tabligh-i Jama‘at is said now
to be the most widely followed society in the Muslim world. Thus, the
reformers created a broad constituency for reform in Indo-Muslim society
at large, and amongst the literate, a growing body of Muslims who, without
the constraints of a madrasa education, reflect upon the sources of their faith
and interpret them for themselves.
The impact of the growing availability of knowledge of how to be a
Muslim was only enhanced by the way in which the reforming movement
made it clear that there was no intercession for man with God. Muslims
were personally responsible for the way in which they put His guidance to
them into practice on earth. Thus, the leading Deobandi reformer, Ashraf
‘Ali Thanwi, in his guide for women (but also men) in the tradition, Bihishti
Zewar (The Jewels of Paradise), which is said to be the most widely published
Muslim publication on the subcontinent after the Qur’an, paints a horrific
picture of the Day of Judgement and the fate that will befall on those who
have not striven hard enough to follow God’s guidance. To help believers
avoid this fate, he instructs them in regular self-examination, morning and
evening, to ensure purity of intentions and to avoid wrongdoing.2 Thus,
those in the Deobandi way, which was at the heart of India’s reforming
movement, were made powerfully conscious that they must act to sustain
Islamic society on earth, if they were to be saved.
2
This is done in book VII titled: On Comportment and Character, Reward and Punishment in Metcalf (1990:
177–23).
Emphasis on personal responsibility before God, as well as on the need

to act on earth to achieve salvation, ran through the many manifestations
of reform in India.3 It was a central issue for Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898),
who hailed from the reformist tradition but, in his development of the
principles of Islamic modernism, travelled far beyond it: ‘I regard it as my
duty to do all I can, right or wrong’, he said of his striving to realise his faith
on earth, ‘to defend my religion and to show the people the true, shining
countenance of Islam. This is what my conscience dictates and unless I do
its bidding, I am a sinner before God’. 4 This sense of personal responsibility
was, if anything, even more enhanced in Muhammad Ilyas (d. 1944), the
founder of the Tablighi Jama‘at. He was oppressed by fear of Judgement and
by whether he was doing enough to meet God’s high standards. ‘I find no
comparison between my anxiety, my effort and my voice’, he wrote, ‘and
the responsibility of Tabligh God has placed upon my shoulders. If he shows
mercy, He is forgiving, merciful, and if He does justice, there is no escape
for me from the consequences of my guilt’ (Nadwi 1979: 108).5 Barbara
Metcalf has cast doubt on the levels of anxiety amongst Islamic reformers
(Metcalf 1999). But anxiety does seem to be abundantly present amongst
its leaders, at least (Metcalf 1982: 2690; Robinson 1997: 4–6). It is reflected,
moreover, into life in general. In his autobiography, the nephew of Ilyas,
Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi, shows himself to be constantly aware
of time, concerned about punctuality, worried about wasting resources (on
marriages for instance), punctilious in all money matters and delights in the
story of a colleague who kept a note of the minutes taken up by visitors
when he was teaching in the madrasa so that he could repay an appropriate
amount from his salary at the end of the month. His is witness to a life lived
anxiously in the sight of God (Kandhlawi 1993).
The sense of personal responsibility and the centrality of action on
earth to the Muslim life were expressed most completely by the sensitive
and remarkable thinker, Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938). For Iqbal, man was
chosen by God, but was equally free to choose whether he followed God’s
guidance or not. Man realized himself in the creative work of shaping and
re-shaping the world. The reality of the individual was expressed most
3
Haniffa emphasises the indissoluble connection between piety and social action. See Chapter 7 by
Farzana Haniffa in this volume.
4
Speech of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, quoted in Hali (1979: 172).
5
Huq (Chapter 11) emphasises the seriousness with which a contemporary women’s Islamic student
organization in Bangladesh takes the Day of Judgement.
explicitly in action. ‘The final act’, he declares in the closing sentences of

his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, ‘is not an intellectual act, but
a vital act which deepens the whole being of the ego and sharpens his will
into creative assurance that the world is not just something to be seen and
known through concepts, but to be made and remade by continuous action’
(Iqbal 1954: 154). Man was the prime mover in God’s creation. As the
prime mover, man was God’s representative on earth, his vice-regent, the
Khilafat Allah.Thus, Iqbal draws the Qur’anic reference to Adam as his vice-
regent, or successor, on earth, which had been much discussed by medieval
commentators on the Qur’an, and not least among them, Ibn Taymiyya and
Ibn ‘Arabi, into the modern politico-Islamic discourse of South Asia. In
doing so, he both emphasises the enormous responsibility of each individual
human being in the trust he or she has received from God and encapsulates
that relationship in the concept of the caliphate of each individual human
being.6 The idea was further taken by Mawlana Mawdudi who added his
considerable weight for its acceptance (Maudoodi 1979: xviii).7 Indeed, the
idea is present in much of the movement of reform in the Shia as well as the
Sunni world (Robinson 2004: 54–56).
Taken together, these key aspects of reform come close to that mix
of aspects of ‘Protestantism’ that Eisenstadt argued some years ago gave
it transformative potential. They were its ‘strong combination of “this-
worldliness” and transcendentalism’, its ‘strong emphasis on individual
activism and responsibility’ and ‘the direct relationship of the individual to
the sacred and the sacred tradition’, which in South Asia becomes stronger,
the closer the reform moves into the modes of the Ahl-i Hadith and the
Islamists (Eisenstadt 1974: 10).
Let us turn to those new facets of Muslim life and thought that seem
to spring, in part at least, from the religious changes of reform and represent
aspects of what we might associate with modernity.
The Assault on the Authority of the Past

There is the assault on the authority of the past.While never forgetting that
Islam expresses itself in different ways in different contexts, we may assert
6
For a discussion of this, see Robinson (2004: 54).
7
For a disquisition on the role of man as God’s trustee on earth, see pp. 29–30.
that a pervasive feature of Muslim societies has been what Bill Graham has
termed the isnad paradigm (Graham 1993). At the heart of this, of course, is
the system for the transmission of Hadith in which the authority of a tradition
lies in the isnad or chain of individual transmitters from the Prophet, or his
companions, down to the most recent receiver. The defining elements of
the paradigm are that authority is derived from linkage to the origins of
the tradition through an unbroken chain of personal transmission. Central
is the belief that truth does not reside in documents, however authentic,
ancient or well preserved, but in ‘authentic human beings and their personal
connections with one another’. Authoritative transmission of knowledge
through time was by people both learned and righteous, the person-to-
person transmission of ‘the golden chain of sincere Muslims’. This was a
model that expanded to embrace sufis, the Shia and the descendants of the
Prophet in general. It was also a model that applied to all forms of learning.
So when a pupil had finally demonstrated his mastery, say, of Suyuti’s Jalalayn,
he would be given an ijaza or permission to teach that would have all the
names of those who had transmitted the book going back to Suyuti himself
(ibid.: 511–22). Should he wish, he could consult the tazkirahs, or collective
biographies, and see how many like him had received the central messages
of Islamic knowledge from their teachers and transmitted it to their pupils.
It was thus that authoritative knowledge was passed to the present.
Reform assaulted this authority from the past in two main ways.
Firstly, there was the jettisoning by the reformers of much of the medieval
scholarship of the Islamic world. If the Deobandis cut out much of the
great Persianate traditions of scholarship in ma‘qulat, the rational sciences,
the Ahl-i Hadith, the Ahl-i Qur’an, the modernists and the Islamists cut out
the great traditions of Islamic scholarship altogether. In their concern to
make contact with the Qur’an and Hadith afresh, in making them relevant
to the modern world, they cast aside a thousand years of intellectual effort
in fashioning a Muslim society, and the authority that came with direct
connection to that effort.
Secondly, there was reform’s vigorous support for the adoption of print.
From the very beginning, print was the weapon of reform. Amongst the first
printed works in Urdu were two tracts of the 1820s, the Sirat al-Mustaqim
and the Taqwiyat al-Iman of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (d. 1831), who led a
jihad on the Northwest Frontier. During the nineteenth century, religious
titles formed the largest category of Urdu books. The town of Deoband
was renowned for the numbers of its bookshops. Certainly, reformers
insisted that readers should only consult religious books in the company
of an ‘alim, a learned man, so that the possibility of proper understanding
and authoritative transmission could be maintained. But, in practice, anyone
could now read the sources and, as they came to be translated into Indian
languages, read the great textbooks of the past and decide, without the
benefit of a great sheaf of ijazas, what they meant for Islam in the present
(Robinson 2000: 80–81).
It is difficult for us, so profoundly moulded by our ‘modern’ experi-
ence, to grasp the psychological impact, indeed the pain, of jettisoning
so much of the past, the especial connectedness this gave to the work of
fashioning the community through time and the authority that came with
it. This, moreover, was just one amongst a series of challenges to Muslim
civilizational authority at the time, to be seen alongside that of Western
science to theology, Western biomedicine to Unani Tibb, that of Western
literary forms to Muslim ones, that of Western manufactured goods to the
output of Muslim craftsmen and that of Western powers to remnants of
Muslim might. Arguably, all was brought to a head in the outpouring of
emotions that accompanied the ending of the Turkish Khilafat between
1919 and 1923, the breaking symbolically of the continuous chain of
leadership of the Muslim community back to the Prophet, an event that
resonated at a deep psychological level. Akbar Ilahabadi, summed it all up:
The minstrel, and the music, and the melody have all changed.
Our very sleep has changed; the tale we used hear is no longer
told.
Spring comes with new adornments; the nightingales in the
garden sing a different song.
Nature’s every effect has undergone revolution.
Another kind of rain falls from the sky; another kind of grain
grows in the field. (Russell and Islam 1974: 9)
In the outcome, the revolution was not quite so complete as Akbar

suggests. The old style of authority rooted in connectedness to the past
has remained in the ‘ulama of the Deobandi tradition, as in those of the
followers of Ahmad Rida Khan Barelwi (d. 1921). But the breaking of the
continuous link with the past has enabled new forms of religious authority
to emerge, an authority that could be made and remade in each generation,
and make use of the new resources of the times—a very modern kind of
authority. Arguably, Mawlana Mawdudi was representative of this new form.

He had been educated outside the madrasa system and vigorously attacked
the ‘ulama for their attachment to old forms of authority. Indeed, his only
claim to authority derived from Islamic tradition was his assertion that he
was a mujaddid, a renewer of the faith, in the mould of al-Ghazali (d. 1111),
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) or Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). Otherwise,
Mawdudi’s authority was derived from the following: his character—a man
of principle, self-reliant, dedicated and courageous, quite unmoved when
condemned to death by the Pakistani authorities in 1953; his style—his
aristocratic manners and his beautiful Urdu, deploying reason rather than
rhetoric; and his life in which he defined himself in opposition to traditional
authority—‘I recognize no king or ruler above me’, he declared, ‘nor do I
bow before any government; nor do I view any law as binding on me. . . nor
do I accept any tradition or custom’ (Nasr 1996: 138).8 Thus, the reformers,
the Deobandis apart, drove a coach and horses through the old authority
resting on a connectedness to a ‘sacred’ past and created new forms, future-
oriented forms, which could be regularly remoulded with the materials
then available.
The New Emphasis on Human Will

The second outcome of reformism was the new emphasis on human will.
In the absence of Muslim power, it was the will of each individual Muslim,
which was to fashion an Islamic society. Knowledge of the central messages
of the faith was made accessible and widely spread, and it was the individual
human conscience, working with this knowledge, which now had sole
responsibility to ensure rightly guided behaviour. Thus, reformed Islam was
a willed faith, a ‘protestant’ faith, a faith of conscience and conviction.
In the reformed world, the will of women was emphasized no less than
that of men. Indeed, under colonial rule, the responsibility for fashioning
a Muslim society fell particularly heavily on women. As non-Muslims
dominated public space, women moved from their earlier position of being
threats to the proper conduct of Muslim society to being the mistresses
of private Islamic space, key transmitters of Islamic values and symbols of
Muslim identity. It was for this reason that Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi wrote Bihishti
8
For a general discussion of Mawdudi’s authority, see Nasr (1996: 126–38).
Zewar for women so that with the learning of a ‘mawlwi’, as he put it, they
could play their parts in asserting tawhid and in fashioning an Islamic society
(Metcalf 1990: 1–38). It was for this reason, too, that Mawdudi insisted
that women should acquire the same level of Islamic knowledge as men,
as well as examine their consciences in the same way. This said, their task
was to be the rulers of domestic space, sealed off from all those elements
of kufr that polluted public space. ‘The harim’, he declared, ‘is the strongest
fortress of Islamic civilization, which was built for the reasons that, if it [that
civilization] ever suffered a reverse it [that civilization] may then take refuge
in it’ (cited in Devji 1994: 35–36).
The new emphasis on human will heightened ideas of human
instrumentality in the world. Indeed, it runs through all the manifestations
of reform, often laced with a sense of urgency. The very life of Sayyid
Ahmad Khan is testament to his belief that he, as an individual, must take
action for the good of the community and of Islam (Graham 1909; Hali
1979). Reformers from Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi to Mawdudi emphasized that if
a man knew what he should do, he must do it. Knowing meant doing.They
were depicted as terrified by the thought that they might not be doing
enough to be saved. Thus, Hasan Ahmad Madani, principal of Deoband in
the mid-twentieth century, would weep at the thought of his shortcomings.
And, of course, no one laid as much emphasis on the Muslim as a man of
action as Iqbal. Man as the prime mover in God’s creation would by his
repeated effort bring the world closer and closer to being a Qur’anic society.
Thus, the reforming vision empowered Muslims on earth (Robinson 1997:
9). Thus, too, that most sensitive observer, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in his
Islam in Modern History (1957) referred to the extraordinary energy that
had coursed through the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, talking of ‘dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake,
and at a level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism . . .’
(Smith 1957: 89).9
Women, too, have felt empowered, although almost invariably it has
been at the cost of enduring the tensions generated between their desire
and capacity to act, on the one hand, and the demands of patriarchy and
the symbolic requirements of community on the other. Historically, these
9
In harmony with Smith’s insight, Haniffa (Chapter 7) emphasises how the women’s piety movement
in Sri Lanka has made its Muslims into ‘a highly energized force of some magnitude within Sri Lanka’s
polity’.
tensions have been most acute amongst women from well-off families,
but as time has gone by, they should, in all likelihood, have become more
widely spread. In his recent book, Yoginder Sikand has surveyed some of
the women’s madrasas that have grown up in India since independence.
They range from madrasas in the Deobandi tradition through those of the
Jama‘ati Islami to those of the Mujahids, an Ahl-i Hadith-style group in
Kerala. The outcomes were different in different reforming traditions and
environments. Deobandi women’s madrasas in north and central India,
while insisting on strict purdah and patriarchal control, do enable women
to become both teachers in girls’ madrasas in India and abroad and to
set up their own madrasas (Sikand 2005: 218–21). In the case of the less
conservative Jama‘at-i Islami madrasas, girls study traditional and modern
subjects, including English. The aim is that they should become religious
authorities in their own right as well as teachers, founders of madrasas
or even practitioners of Unani Medicine (ibid.: 221–22). In the Mujahid
madrasas of Kerala, the empowerment of women has gone much further.
The senior Mujahid leader, ‘Abd al-Qadir, made it clear that women
could be the teachers of men. In fact, Mujahid women work outside the
home alongside men, including being elected to local councils, the main
restriction being that they should not be left alone with a man. ‘Islam’,
declared Zohra Bi, a leading figure in Mujahid education, ‘is wrongly
thought of as a religion of women’s oppression. Through our work in the
college, we want to show that Islam actually empowers Muslim women to
work for the community at large’ (ibid.: 136).
Transformation of the Self

A third outcome of reformism was a crucial transformation of the self, which,
under the guidance of Charles Taylor and others, we have come to associate
with modernity. This transformation involves in part an inward turn, the
growth of self-consciousness and reflectiveness, which Taylor argues is an
important part of the constitution of the modern self (Taylor 1989: 111),
and in part the affirmation of ordinary life, which Taylor asserts ‘although not
uncontested and frequently appearing in secularized form, has become one of
the most powerful ideas in modern civilization’ (ibid.: 14).
We have noted that self-examination was a key aspect of Islamic reform;
a willed Islam had to be a self-conscious one. This stimulated an inward
turn and the growth of a reflective habit. Muslims had to ask themselves
regularly if they had done all in their power to submit to God and to carry
out His will in the world. In book VII of Bihishti Zewar, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi
has a charming way of illustrating the process of regular self-examination to
ensure purity of intention and avoidance of wrongdoing. He suggests to the
believer that she sets aside a little time in the morning and the evening to
speak to her lower self, her nafs, as follows:
O Self, you must recognize that in this world you are like a trader.
Your stock-in-trade is your life. Its profit is to acquire well-being
for ever, that is, salvation in the afterlife. This is indeed a profit!
If you waste your life and do not gain your salvation, you suffer
losses that reach to your stock-in-trade. That stock-in-trade is
so precious that each hour—indeed, each breath—is valuable
beyond limit.
O Self, recognize God’s kindness that death has not yet come.
O Self, do not fall into the deception that Almighty God will
surely forgive you. (Metcalf 1990: 234)10
This theme of self-consciousness and self-examination is to be found

in many religious thinkers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
whether we look at Muhammad Ilyas and Mawdudi or Sayyid Ahmad
Khan and Iqbal. In Reformation Europe, the process was accompanied by
the emergence of the spiritual diary (see, for instance,Webster 1996: 35–36).
Something similar, though not directly comparable, exists from the India
of Islamic reform. There is, for instance, Mawlana Mahomed Ali’s semi-
spiritual My Life a Fragment, which was written while he was interned
during World War I, or Dr Syed Mahmud’s record of his spiritual reflections
while in jail after the non-cooperation movement (Ali and Iqbal 1942).11
There is also a great deal of correspondence with sufis, which often contains
processes of self-examination.
With such evidence for the reflective habit, alongside the widespread
exhortation to examine the self, it is arguable that the development of
Islamic reform helped to open up an interior landscape. While in the
past, the reflective believer, the mystic, might have meditated on the signs
10
Chapter 7 by Haniffa and Chapter 11 by Huq are both excellent studies of projects designed to
construct a new Islamic self-hood amongst women.
11
Syed Mahmud’s spiritual reflections may be found in the ‘Farangi Mahall Papers’, Karachi.
of God, the new type of reflective believer reflected on the self and the
shortcomings of the self. Now the inner landscape became a crucial site
where the battle of the pious for the good took place. Doubtless, there had
been Muslims in the past, in particular times and in particular contexts,
for whom this had been so. Who can forget the anguished reflections of
the great eleventh-century scholar, al-Ghazali, in his autobiography, The
Deliverance from Error (Watt 1994)? Nevertheless, the importance of Islamic
reform was that self-consciousness and self-examination were encouraged
to become widespread. Moreover, once the window on the inner landscape
had been thrown open by reform, it could stay open for purely secular
purposes (Robinson 1997: 12–13).
With the inward turn, there also came the affirmation of the things of
the self, the ordinary things of daily life. We can see this process at work
in the new trends that emerge in the biographies of the Prophet, whose
number increase greatly in the twentieth century. Increasingly, Muhammad
is depicted not as the ‘perfect man’ of the Sufi tradition, but as the perfect
person. Less attention, as Cantwell Smith has pointed out, is given to his
intelligence, political sagacity and capacity to harness the new social forces
in his society and much more to his qualities as a good middle-class family
man: his sense of duty and his loving nature, and his qualities as a good
citizen, his consideration for others and in particular those who are less
fortunate (Smith 1946: 64–67; see also Dey 1999). The transition is also
mirrored in changes that take place in biographical writing generally; the
concern is less with what the individual might have contributed to Islamic
civilization and more on his life in his time and his human qualities. Even
in the writings of the ‘ulama, it is possible to see them responding to the
humanistic preferences of their times and depicting much more rounded
lives to support their didactic purpose. Another dimension of this process
was the growing discussion of family and domestic issues, and particularly
women, in public space. This discourse was begun by men such as Nazir
Ahmad, Hali and Mumtaz ‘Ali in the late nineteenth century, but in the
twentieth century, it was increasingly taken up by women, and not least by
the tens of women who aired their views in those remarkable journals, Ismat
and Tehzib unNiswan. All matters were discussed in public, from education,
diet and dress to love marriages, divorce and sources of women’s inferiority.
The writing is often assertive in style, demanding that women be given
respect. Alongside these developments, there came the rise of the short story
and the novel, which indicated the new value being given to understanding
human character and the many ways of being human. The themes—family
life, relationships, feelings, sex—often shocking in their day, which were
taken up by leading practitioners such as Manto and Ismat Chughtai,
indicate the new areas in which Muslims were finding meaning. Of course,
not all of these striking changes can, by any means, be laid at the door of
Islamic reform; the influence of the West and developments in wider Indian
society all had their part to play. Nevertheless, such was the importance of
these profoundly human matters that religious thinkers could not afford to
ignore them (Robinson 1997: 10–11). ‘The Islamic pattern of life’, declared
the religious philosopher Syed Vahiduddin, ‘finds expression in religious and
moral acts, in prayer, in love, in forgiveness, in seemingly mundane activities
such as sex and domestic life, which should be radiated by the glow of the
world beyond’ (Troll 1986: 153).
Rationalization
Rationalization of religious belief and practice was a further outcome of
Islamic reform. In using the term, however, it is not given the full weight
of the Weberian concept in which areas of modern life, from politics to
religion to economics, become increasingly marked by the impact of
science, technology and bureaucracy, though there is much of value in the
rationalising trajectory.
By emphasizing the development of a scriptural faith focussed on
the Qur’an and Hadith, by attacking local custom around which many
superstitions revolved and by attacking all idea of intercession at Sufi shrines,
indeed at times by attacking Sufism itself, Islamic reform rationalized belief
and practice. Print was ever the handmaid, as it made available the Qur’an in
forms that believers could read, as well as it produced guides that specifically
stated what practices should be followed and what customs abandoned.12
Reforming ‘ulama used their organizations developed through the Deoband
madrasa and its political wing, the Jamiyat al-‘Ulama-i Hind, to put pressure
on the colonial state to remove all elements of custom from the personal
law. Thus, between 1918 and 1920, reforming ‘ulama successfully pressed
the state to remove Hindu custom that persisted in law governing Muslims
in the Punjab, Memons in Western India and Mapillas in Kerala. Then from
12
Book VI of Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, for instance, specifically discusses the whole issue of custom;
Metcalf (1990: 89–161).
the 1920s, the Jamiyat waged a campaign to impose shari‘a law over custom
in the personal law throughout India, a rationalising campaign crowned
with success in the Shariat Application Act of 1937. Through this work of
rationalization, which began to reorient Muslims from local cults towards
widely shared practices and symbols, Islamic reform helped to prepare
Muslims for the world of the modern political party and the modern state.
Side by side with this there went the reification of Islam.The reforming
impulse, in which submitting to God became an act of will rather than an
unquestioning following of the folkways of the faith, drove the development,
although some responsibility must be attributed to the impact of the colonial
state. Men and women consciously embraced a particular set of beliefs and
practice that they identified with ‘true’ Islam, and abandoned others that
could not be so identified.13 But this reification process stemmed in part,
too, from two additional influences: the distancing impact of print that
enabled Muslims to stand apart from their faith, analyse and conceptualize
it, and their growing consciousness, which was especially strong in India,
that they were living alongside other faiths, at times real competitors, which
were also reified, or being so. For the first time, in the late nineteenth
century, Muslims begin to use the term ‘Islam’ not just to describe their
relationship to God but also to describe an ideal religious pattern, or a
mundane religious system, or even just Islamic civilization. Thus, it appears
in the title of the poet Hali’s masterwork, Musaddas, Madd-o jazr-i Islam, of
1879, or Amir Ali’s Spirit of Islam of 1891. It does not appear in the title
of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi’s Bishishti Zewar, although the contents of the book
are very much the forerunners of the host of how-to-be-a-proper-believer
books that have followed, for instance, Mawdudi’s Towards Understanding
Islam of 1940, Muhammad Hamidullah’s Introduction to Islam of 1959 or
Manzoor Nomani’s What Islam is of 1964 (Robinson 2000: 91). In the latter
part of the twentieth century, along with mass education, this reification
of Islam in Muslim consciousness has become widespread (Eickelman and
Piscatori 1996: 37–45).
The final stage in the reification of Islam, but arguably also in its
rationalization, was its conceptualization as a system. This was the particular
achievement of Mawdudi, growing out of his concern to establish an
Islamic vision of life to set against that of the West, and which was to be
13
‘At every turn’, Haniffa records, ‘I was told by members of Al-Muslimaat that they were Muslims by
choice as well as by birth’ (Haniffa, Chapter 7).
protected against the West. He describes Islam as a nizam, a system, which

was comprehensive, complete and covered all aspects of human existence.
These aspects, moreover, were integrated as the human body was integrated
into one homogeneous whole. God in another image was the great engineer
in his workshop; he had created the world and in the shari‘a had given man
a complete set of principles on which to conduct himself in that place. ‘It is
his explicit Will’, Mawdudi states,
that the universe—this grand workshop with its multifarious

activities—should go on functioning smoothly and graciously so
that man—the prize of creation—should make the best and most
productive use of all his powers and resources, of everything that
has been harnessed for him in the earth and in the high heavens.
. . .The Shari’ah is meant to guide the steps of man in this respect.
(Maududi 1980: 108)
This vision of Islam as a system, which may also be seen as an ideology,

meant that the shari‘a must be united to power on earth. Mawdudi described
the pursuit of power, by which he meant capturing the machinery of the
modern state, as a jihad obligatory on all his followers. In fact, he was not
particularly effective in politics. But he did set a standard against which the
conduct of the first thirty years of government in Pakistan might be set, and
a model that General Zia ul-Haq tried to introduce into the country from
February 1979.
Secularization
Finally, let us turn to the relationship between Islamic reform and
secularization.This is, of course, a much disputed concept. For the founding
fathers of sociology, as science and technology increasingly controlled and
explained the social and physical world, and as the modern state grew
to provide security within it, religion was to become more and more
marginalized. On the other hand, strong critics of the concept have emerged
amongst sociologists, arguing that religion remains an important force in
modern societies, though often expressed in new forms (Giddens 2001:
545). The impact of Islamic reform supports the latter view.
At one level, we can see Weber’s secularization at work.We see his process
of disenchantment of the world, or using his term entzauberung, the driving
of magic out of things: the attack on all ideas of intercession for man with
God, the rationalization of belief and practice and the emphasis on action
on earth to achieve salvation. We can also see a further process associated
with disenchantment, which is a fragmentation of human understandings
of the world, though this outcome owes as much to the impact of the West
as to Islamic reform. We can see it, for instance, in the way in which the
Muslim modernists make Western science the measure of Islamic belief,
and that in which Muslim socialists, progressive writers and their ilk, come
to think in terms of a Godless world (Robinson 1999: 236–37). This said,
while noting how Islamic reform would seem to have driven matters down
a Weberian secularizing path, we should also note that, as in the West, this
has not resulted in a complete eradication of magic. Deobandi ‘ulama at the
heart of the reforming process prepared amulets for followers to use in case
of illness (Kandhlawi 1993: 314–16,Vol. 2).14
One criticism of a focus on disenchantment in Weberian thought is that
it is a trajectory derived from the European Christian experience. Arguably,
the process of secularization should be considered in Islamic terms, indeed,
as Weber might have done in terms of the unique developmental history of
Islam, that is in terms of its development as a rationalization of world views.
In this light, it has been suggested that, as Islam has always had a considerable
interest in this world, being more concerned with how men behave than
in what they believe, the developmental criterion must rest with Muslim
behaviour. The shari‘a, ideally the distilled essence of the Qur’an and the
Life of the Prophet, which offers guidance for every aspect of human life,
represents the criterion. So Muslim society is Islamic to the extent that it
follows the shari‘a and Muslim states are Islamic to the extent that they
support the shari‘a. Here, we have a possible criterion of secularization in
Muslim societies and states.
If we apply this criterion to India, on the one hand, we can reasonably
argue that Islamic reform led to scriptural knowledge becoming more
widespread and more widely followed than before. On the other hand, the
pressure brought by Islamic reformers on the state led to the shari‘a, at least
in its personal law aspects, being more completely imposed by the state
than before. Of course, if this trajectory is taken through into the history
of Pakistan, it is possible to see a continuing expansion of the realm of the
shari‘a and an Islamization of the state. Alongside this theme stands the ideal
14
Marsden (2005: 241) makes a similar point about reform-minded Muslims in Chitral.
created by Mawdudi and his Islamist followers of an ideological system in

which the shari‘a is asserted over all of human life and backed by all the
authority of the modern state. We conclude by noting a paradox. If we
take the Weberian trajectory of disenchantment, we can see Islamic reform
driving magic out of the Indo-Muslim world, to some degree at least. But,
if we take the developmental approach, arguably the pressure of reform on
society and on the state, in British India and Pakistan at least, has led to
greater levels of shari‘a application/Islamization than ever before (Robinson
1999: 239–41).
Before concluding, we need to note the broader context in which religious
reform amongst South Asian Muslims was taking place. In the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, there were across the Muslim world moves towards
this-worldly faith, or forms of Islamic ‘Protestantism’, expressed in varying
ways (Robinson 2004: 54–58). Similar processes were also taking place at
the same time amongst other South Asians; the faith of Hindus, Sikhs and
Buddhists were all acquiring this-worldly ‘protestant’ forms, which were in
time to develop fundamentalist dimensions (Robinson 2003).
So where does this leave the relationship between Islamic reform and
modernity? Much as the vision and brio of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism is to be admired, and although the impact of Islamic
reform is full of Weberian echoes, there is no evidence for the emergence of
some quasi-Calvinistic group, whose this-worldly moral energy and ascetic
self-discipline have stimulated a continued capitalist development, not even
among the Ahl-i Hadith.15 This is said, moreover, in spite of the success
of Islamic reform among the Muslim merchant classes. Arguably Weber’s
friend, the religious historian Ernst Troeltsch, gives us helpful direction when
he argues that Protestantism had a unique role in fashioning the modern
religious spirit: this ‘religion of personal conviction and conscience’, he
declared, ‘is the form of religion which is homogeneous with and adopted
to modern individualistic civilisation, without, however, possessing in detail
any very close connexions with the creations of the latter’ (Troeltsch 1986:
100).16 Ernest Gellner, in considering some thirty years ago the impact of
Islamic reform in North Africa came to a similar conclusion: ‘the severe
15
For a sceptical approach to Islamic ‘Protestantism’ as a preparation for modernity, see Riexinger 2008.
16
Troeltsch put this argument to the ninth conference of German historians at Stuttgart in April 1906
when he gave the lecture that Weber had been supposed to give on the meaning of Protestantism for
the rise of the modern world.
discipline of puritan Islam’, he declared, far from being incompatible with

modernization might be ‘compatible with, or positively favourable to
modern social organisation’ (Gellner 1981: 70).17
In the arguments already surveyed, there is plentiful evidence of the
way in which Islamic reform both opened the way to modernity and then
worked with it. Islamic reform destroyed much of the authority of the past,
making possible a more creative engagement with the present. It emphasized
human will, preparing the way for the modern understanding of undiluted
human instrumentality in the world. It set off transformations of the self that
we associate with modernity, the emergence of an internal landscape and the
affirmation of the ordinary things of life. It helped set off a rationalization
and reification of Islam, which, amongst other things, prepared Muslims to
engage with a broad-based political identity and conceive of their faith as
an entity, even a system. And finally, it set going processes that offered both
a disenchanted world and one in which paradoxically the transcendent was
reasserted, indeed, the world itself was re-enchanted.
This, then, is the relationship between Islamic reform and modernity
in South Asia, one of preparing the way and then engagement with the
worldwide forces of modernity, shaping them to its particular purposes.This
said, should not the Islamist insistence on reasserting the transcendent over
all creation give us pause for thought? This is, after all, not the outcome of
the modernizing process that the founding fathers of sociology anticipated.
Now, it is a commonplace of modern scholarship on Islamism, or any
other form of religious fundamentalism, that it is a profoundly modern
phenomenon, being fashioned by modernity, as it strives to shape it—
protesting against the outcomes of Enlightenment rationalism, what Bruce
Lawrence terms ‘the heresies of the modern age’ (Lawrence 1990). It seeks
to assert the moral community, the transcendent and moral absolutes, in
order to confront the uncertainties, as well as relativisms of the time. It raises
the question of whether modernity should necessarily be dominated by
Enlightenment rationalism.
In an excellent recent work, Roxanne Euben has juxtaposed the critique
of the nature and limits of modern rationalism by a series of Western social
theorists (Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Alisdair MacIntyre, Richard
Neuhaus, Robert Bellah and Daniel Bell) with that of Sayyid Qutb, who
was with Mawdudi, the most influential Islamist thinker of the twentieth
17
Twenty years later, the argument is put much more forcibly by Lapidus (2002: 817–22).
century. She notes that, although coming from different angles of vision, all
see in modernity ‘a crisis due to rupture with tradition, the dual rejection of
theology and teleology inaugurated by Enlightenment rationalism and the
subsequent diminishment of meaning in authority, morality and community
. . .’ (Euben 1999: 124). Turning to Qutb, she finds similar anxieties, similar
analysis.Where, of course, he differs from the Western theorists is in insisting
on divine sovereignty as the answer to the crises of authority, morality and
community (ibid.: 45–92, 154–67).
These arguments proposed in relation to Qutb could be applied no
less to Mawdudi. Thus, Islamism, which is the current end point of Islamic
reform, is not only a profoundly modern phenomenon but also offers an
answer to widely shared modern anxieties. Research devoted to Islamism
in West Asia has demonstrated its modernizing impact (see, for instance,
Abdo 2000; Adelkhah 1998; Utvik 2003, 2006; White 2002). Articles in
this volume reveal similar possibilities for South Asia. Indeed, if we accept
that the Islamist concern to build a moral community, to reassert the
transcendent and to re-enchant the world is one possible answer to the
problems of modernity, it is arguable that Islamic reform not only helped
to prepare the way for modernity but also in its Islamist form has become
a modernizing force in its own right. As Haniffa (Chapter 7) states, ‘The
promise that feminism ... holds for transforming women’s lives does not
necessarily require a secular framework within which to flourish’.18
This leads us to a final reflection. It is clear that there is no one
modernity, as once Western modernization theorists vainly believed, but
many or multiple modernities. Different societies fashion their modernities
as arguably do different individuals. The reforming traditions of Muslim
South Asia, from Shah Wali Allah to the Islamists of the present, are powerful
strands amongst Muslim modernities. But they form only one set of strands
amongst Muslim modernities, just as those modernities are a larger set of
strands amongst those fashioned by humankind in general (Chaudhuri
2008; Eisenstadt 2000).
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3
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Pnina Werbner
+PVTQFWEVKQP
I n the Introduction to the hagiography of the reform Naqshbandi Sufi

saint, Zindapir, the ‘Living Saint’, who died in his lodge near Kohat,
Pakistan, in 1999, poet and devoted khalifa (vicegerent) of Zindapir Rab
Nawaz writes:
Contemporary Muslim students (talib) who study in religious

schools, the vast portion of their life passes in studying formal
[religious] sciences.They remain denied those sciences that allow
for the purification of the soul and cleansing of the heart. This is
the very reason why the majority of ‘ulama expend their entire
efforts in polemical disputation and conflict, and in becoming
orators from whom other than sedition and corruption, no
positive outcome is attained. In religious seminaries, words
remain but meaning is lacking. Traditionally people used to
reach meanings through the acquisition of knowledge, from
which they attained the recognition of the holy essence (zat) of
the Messenger of Allah. For the ‘ulama of today, and in today’s
madrassahs, this language (baat) is no longer there. Refinement
of the soul, ascetic discipline and struggle, contemplation by
way of the ‘illuminating lights’, and the highway that is mystical
knowledge of the divine essence and attributes, of true principles,

are totally ignored. (Rab Nawaz n.d.: 8)1
On the other hand students of secular science, Rab Nawaz comments, are
equally misled, believing that ‘religious edicts and practices are meaningless
and futile’:
Religion in their eyes stabs like a thorn and to escape from its
tradition and obligations is their paramount duty. They believe
today’s savoury2 progress to be authentic and real progress;
thought of the Afterlife and Judgement Day does not appear
to them even in a dream. Their whole life is spent in worldly
superficialities and carnal pleasures. [until] finally, they depart
the world wanting, with hearts burdened by hundreds of
regrets. In this irremediable era, should a man of felicity (sahib-i
sa’adat) desire attainment of the true unity of God (tawhid)
and distinction, then he must seek out the companionship and
fellowship of the People of God (i Allah) and acquire faiz (divine
light)3 and blessings (barkat); otherwise through the study of their
sayings and practice, he can match his exterior (zahir) and hidden
(batin) [self] with them.
The contours of reform Sufism in South Asia, of matching the ‘interior’

with the ‘exterior’, are evident in this passage. Unlike the formal knowledge
acquired from either the learned clerics or secular scientists, it opens the
way to a ‘deeper’ religion beyond the open text.4
1
Rab Nawaz’s hagiography of Zindapir has been translated by Jon Hamidi. I am grateful to Jon and to
the British Academy for the generous funding it provided for this translation, and to the descendents
and followers of Zindapir for allowing and encouraging it. Research on Zindapir’s Sufi cult was
supported by the ESRC and Leverhulme Trust from 1988 to 2000.
2
As opposed to sweet, in contrast to ‘halawat’ (sweetness) mentioned previously.
3
Buehler (1998) translates faiz as ‘effulgence’; others translate it by analogy with the Christian idea as
‘grace’. It differs from baraka, the saint’s power of generative fecundity, proliferation and procreation.
4
The dual concepts of zahir and batin are fundamental to Sufi mysticism, which seeks to reach esoteric
knowledge beyond the text and the ‘created’ world, which is regarded as illusory. I discuss this contrast
further below in relation to Sirhindi and Sufi theosophy.
4GHQTO5WſUOKP5QWVJ#UKC53
The opposition between the open text of the Shari’a5 and hidden
mystical knowledge was posited by the eponymous Sufi reformist of South
Asia, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi. I begin this essay with a brief discussion of his
central reformist message. To further disentangle what is meant by reform
Sufism as theory and practice, I then review a scholarly debate on whether
there occurred from the eighteenth century onwards a radical historical
break, a new phase in Sufi worship, less contemplative and more activist.
While this debate focuses on mystical theosophy, I argue for the need to
recognize Sufi renewal through movement in space and the colonization of
new territories for Islam. In the second part of the essay I turn to the specific
case of a practising Naqshbandi reform Sufi saint in Pakistan in order to
illustrate reform Sufism’s defence of ritual practices (‘amal), worship (ibadah)
and the veneration at saint’s shrines as being in conformity with orthodox
theological standards, against accusations of unlawful innovation (bida’) and
idolatry (shirk). In the third part I return to the issue of mystical ascetic
practice and belief, as seen through the eyes of a Naqshbandi khalifa who
draws on Sirhindi’s writings, in order to show how reform Sufism integrates
the body into a holistic neo-platonic theory of cosmic renewal.
My case study of a living Naqshbandi saint and his closest deputies
(khalifas) in contemporary Pakistan discloses the way reform Sufism,
expressed in ideas and ritual practices of sobriety, shari’a, ascetism and
inclusiveness, embodies saintly charisma, grounded in an elaborate
cosmology of transcendence.6 At the same time, communal rituals sustain
the formation of a Sufi tariqa, a saintly trans/regional cult or order (tariqa).
In the case analysed the saint’s cult extended during his lifetime throughout
Pakistan and even beyond it, with ritual worship focused on Ghamkol Sharif,
5
The Shari’a, the ‘straight path’, is broadly defined as the religious laws of Islam, including Koran, Sunna
(sayings and events in the life of the Prophet Muhammad, known as hadith) and, secondarily, the legal
corpus that developed, including the four Schools of Law (madhabs) and ongoing interpretations. Thus
Eickelman and Piscatori (1996: 26) argue that ‘Emendations and additions to a purportedly invariant
and complete Islamic law (shari’a) have occurred throughout Islamic history, particularly since the
mid-nineteenth century.’ Shari’a is thus the path of orthodoxy in Islam, by which is meant the current
acceptable definition of Islamic legal understandings and theology. As I show below, Sirhindi had his
own more specific understanding of Shari’a.
6
The issue of embodied ascetic practices has been taken up in relation to women’s pietist reform
movements in Egypt (Mahmood 2005) and Pakistan (Ahmad 2009). As I explain below, in Sufi ascetic
bodily practice the process effects an opposite transformation to that analysed by Mahmood: for
pietists work on the body leads to spiritual elevation and ‘submission’ to God but the body remains
earthbound; for Sufis, work on the soul leads to bodily transformation, in which the body comes to
be suffused with divine light and subsists beyond death. See my discussion below.
the sacred centre of the cult. Against simplistic stereotypes of Sufism as

‘traditionalist’,‘syncretic’,‘contemplative’ or ‘popular’, appealing primarily to
the superstitious, uneducated masses, I show that reform Sufism is Islamically
orthodox and attractive to Pakistani elites as well as the rural masses by
virtue of the moral and spiritual qualities it embodies and promotes. 7
Paradoxically, while centred on a world renouncer, I argue that reform
Sufism fosters inworldly ascetic practices that have an elective affinity, as
Weber argued in the case of the early Protestants, with worldly success.8
Second, while being apparently authoritarian and hierarchical, reform
Sufism, like Sufism more generally, thrives in modern, democratic contexts,
and this despite its often critical stance vis-à-vis the state.The extensive Sufi
networks that have developed around reform saints’ lodges in South Asia
are organizations that foster peaceful inter-ethnic and intercultural relations
among diverse groups of followers in the name of an inclusive God. Hence,
most major new Sufi orders in South Asia, including even some Chishtiyya
orders which allow what some regard as deviant devotional singing, are
those that have followed reformist traditions in building up their orders’
geographically dispersed networks.
Throughout the paper I echo other contributions to this volume in
arguing that despite their polemical critiques and mutual vilification of
one another, divisions among Muslim reformist movements are in many
senses ambiguous and fluid.9 There are, nevertheless, I propose, discernable
differences between reform Sufis and more scripturally oriented reformists
with regard to practice, even though eschatological notions of death and
rebirth blur differences between them. Exceptional in this regard are Saudi
Wahhabis and South Asian Ahl-i-Hadith, and it is also possible, I propose,
to delineate a specific constellation of belief and practice that typify Sufi
reform cults and make them distinct from other Sufi cults in South Asia.
7
Orthodoxy here refers to adherence to the ‘straight path’ of the Shari’a (see ftn. 5). The distinction
made is between ba-shar and bi-shar Sufi orders, orthodox and heterodox (see Frembgen 2008). The
Urdu word for orthodoxy is έ΍αΥ΍ϝωϕ̵Ω‫—؟‬Rasikh-ul-Aqeeda or Saheeh-ul-Aqeeda (‘right conviction’).
Orthodox is also translated in Urdu as Taqleed Pasand (preferring imitation).
8
In the case of disciples of the reform saint I studied, the saint inculcates in followers the moral virtues
of frugality, obedience, sobriety and respect which are particularly suited for successful promotion in
the bureaucratic contexts in which most of the disciples work (the army, the police, large factories,
government ministries, etc.).
9
See, for example, the Introduction, and the chapters by Edward Simpson and Irfan Ahmad.
'CTN[5QWVJ#UKCP5Wſ4GHQTO/QXGOGPVU
In South Asia, the influence of reform Sufism is linked specifically to Shaykh
Ahmad Sirhindi’s revision of Ibn ‘Arabi’s theosophy10 and the prominent
role Naqshbandi Sufis have played in the reform movement (Weismann
2007). Given, however, the influence that Naqshbandi figures have equally
played within reformist anti-Sufi movements in South Asia,11 the need is, I
propose, to disclose the fine doctrinal and ritual resemblances and differences
between anti-Sufi and Sufi reformists—especially with regard to the Sufi
ontology of an ‘economy of light’ and of life after death —of the Prophet
and God’s auliya (‘friends’, i.e. the saints)—as these are embodied in Sufi
ritual and organizational practice.
Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, the foundational figure in the early Sufi reform
movement, was born in the Punjab in 1564 (d. 1625). His fame as a scholar
led to an invitation to the Moghul court of Akbar in Agra where he stayed an
unspecified time before being initiated in Delhi into the Naqshbandi order
in 1599–1600 AD. He became a leading pir (Friedmann 1971: xiii), writing
numerous letters which set out his views (the Maktubat), and which include a
series attacking the ‘heretical’ Hindu-Muslim syncretism promoted by Akbar
(ibid.).12 Against that, he forcefully affirmed the ‘complete compatibility of
his mystical insights with the Shari’ah’ (ibid.: 24). Indeed, he was ‘convinced
that the Shari’ah should be the touchstone of Sufi experience’ (ibid.). Shari’a
was, however, defined by Sirhindi in Sufi terms as having an outward (zahir)
form and an inner (batin) essence (ibid.: 45). Only those who reach beyond
the formal (i.e. textual) text to its essence will enjoy paradise, he argued, by
comprehending the ambiguous verses of the Qur’an. It is solely through
essence that Sufis can reach the supreme mystical stage (ibid.) and hence
paradise (jannat). As I show in more detail below, in Sirhindi’s revision of
10
Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), an Andalusian Muslim philosopher buried in Damascus, developed an elaborate
theosophy of the mystic’s journey through ascending mystical spheres in order to reach ultimately
to unification with God (see Corbin 1969; Schimmel 1975). His theory of the Sufi ‘imagination’ is
foundational for all subsequent Sufi theosophical speculation, even in the case of those, like Sirhindi,
who oppose him.
11
Most prominently, the founder of the Deobandi movement, Shah Walliyu’llah, was a Naqshbandi.
Nadwat al Ulama was founded in Kanpur in 1892 by followers of the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi master,
Fadl al-Rahman Ganj Muradabadi, and later by Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali al-Nadwi (d. 1999) (Weismann
2007: 149). Abul Ala Maududi was born to a Chishti family and towards the end of his life began
initiating disciples.
12
He was imprisoned for a year for his outspoken criticisms.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s theosophy, the ultimate mystical achievement, wahdat a-wujud

(‘unity of existence’ in God), is replaced by wahdat a-Shuhud, the ‘witnessing’
of God, following which the mystic returns (‘descends’) back to the world
to guide others on the true path.
Sirhindi’s advocacy of Islamic orthodoxy, i.e. strict adherence to Islamic
law, in conjunction with mystical practice, has remained a central defining
feature of reform Sufism.The mystic begins his journey with shari’a. Shari‘a
and tariqa (the Sufi way) form aspects of a single synthesis, although Sirhindi
‘clearly valued the inner, essential aspect of the shari‘a above its outward or
formal one’ (Lizzio 2006: 40). The ‘reformist’ aspect of Sirhindi’s message,
contained in his voluminous published letters, is encapsulated in his theory
of recurrent, cyclical Islamic renewal. He himself claimed to be the renewer
of the millennium (muaddid-i alf-i thani).13
Along with shari’a, reform Sufis in the Naqshbandi tradition stress
sobriety. As Buehler has argued,
[t]he Prophetic sobriety exemplified by Abu Bakr represented

the mode of an advanced spiritual guide. It was the sobriety
of a Sufi who, having subdued his carnal nature, experienced
intoxication, and traversed various stages of the Path, returned
to the world outwardly behaving like any ordinary pious person.
He had become extraordinarily ordinary. Sobriety, in addition, fit
conveniently with the Naqshbandi emphasis on strict adherence
to Islamic law and on imitating the way of the Prophet. (Buehler
1998: 92–93)
Sirhindi’s seventeenth century reformist message anticipated the

revivalist movements which swept across the Hijaz and North Africa in
the nineteenth century,14 as well as the Chishti revivalist movement of the
same and later period in South Asia (see Gilmartin 1979).These movements
transcended localized cults in setting new standards of religious excellence
and a new ideology of ritual practice. In renewing the stress on the shari’a
13
For an authoritative analyses of Sirhindi’s thought see, in addition to Friedmann (1971), Ahmad (1969:
40–42), Rahman (1968), Subhan (1960: 286–95) and ter Haar (1992). For the role of the Naqshbandi
in the reform movement following Sirhindi see Weismann (2007: 55 and passim).
14
For detailed historical and ethnographic accounts of these see, for example, Clancy-Smith (1990,
1994); Cornell (1998); Evans-Pritchard (1949); Sedgwick (2005); and Trimingham (1971: 105–27).
and on the austere practices of fasting and prayer, and in reformulating the
relationship between Sufi saint and follower, the impact of these movements
was profound and far-reaching.
In many senses, however, the movements may be regarded as part of a
continuous process of renewal and not as radically unique events. Sufi cults
are continuously revived through the periodic rise of new regional cults
focused upon a holy man who ventures beyond the current boundaries of
the established Islamic world and who founds a new centre, generating a
regional organization around it in the course of time (see Werbner 2003).
What reform movements share with ascendant local Sufi regional cults is,
above all, a renewal through movement in space. This makes sense organizationally
as well. Old shrines become enmeshed in endemic succession disputes
which dissipate the power of the centre and of the current holders of
saintly title. Such disputes challenge the moral authority of the centre and
its trustees (see Gilmartin 1984; Gilsenan 1982: 240–41; Jeffery 1981). The
shrine retains its sacred power but the present gaddi nishin (shrine guardians)
cannot fully recapture its organizational authority.15
6JG0GQ5Wſ4CFKECN$TGCM6JGUKUCPFKVU%TKVKEU
The rise of Sufi reform movements in the Hijaz in the nineteenth century
led some scholars to theorize the historical emergence of an entirely new
type of Sufism. Those supporting this thesis argued that ‘neo-Sufi’ reform
movements reconceptualized Sufi theosophy, above all by denying its
hierarchies of saints and saintly spheres of being (wilayat).16 Thus, Fazlur
Rahman proposed that neo-Sufi movements rejected the medieval tariqas,
the brotherhoods, as essentially ‘aberrant’, with Sufism affirmed as ‘purified
by a recourse to the inner, spiritual life of the Prophet’ (1979). The Sanusi,
an offshoot of the Idrisi order, ‘rejected the idea of a union with God and
postulated instead a union with the spirit of the Prophet Muhammad as
the only possible and legitimate goal for the Sufi’ (ibid.). In moral terms,
Rahman proposes, Al Sanusi espoused peace and forbade excessive love of
worldly goods (ibid.: 208). Indeed, he says, ‘the whole tone of the reform-
struggle and its programme is in terms of moral positivism and social weal
rather than in terms of other-worldly spirituality’ (ibid.: 209).
15
For an example, see Edward Simpson (Chapter 8).
16
I discuss these below.
Echoing Rahman, Trimingham argued similarly that the Egyptian

Shaykh Ahmad ibn Idris, based in the Hijaz, responded to the Wahhabi
anti-Sufi challenge by seeking to ‘preserve the inner (batini) aspects of Islam,
rejected completely by the Wahhabis, along with full acceptance of the
zahiri aspect, and vigorously condemned the accretions which had debased
the orders’ (Trimingham 1971: 106). Like Rahman, Trimingham believes
that rather than chains of authorities or mystical union with God, the
neo-Sufis privileged ‘union with the spirit of the Prophet.’ The new orders’
stress was ‘liturgical and ethical’ rather than ‘esoteric’, but at the same time
they were expansionist, ‘moved by a missionary fervour to augment their
membership’(ibid).
This theorizing of a radical ideological and ethical break between old
and new Sufism has been challenged, however, by a number of scholars.
Most prominently, O’Fahey and Radtke (1993) have argued that the
‘clichéd consensus’ about the rise of neo-Sufism disregards the writings of
Sufis like Al Sanusi or Ibn Idris themselves.The need is ‘for a greater degree
of scholarly convergence between text and context,’ they say (ibid.: 54). In
the Middle East founders of new Sufi orders were, like Sirhindi in South
Asia, ‘highly educated and articulate men’ (ibid.).17 Far from introducing a
kind of ‘Sufi Wahhabism’ privileging Hadith studies and the relation with
the Prophet, or rejecting the murshid-murid relationship between master and
disciple, nineteenth century Sufi reformers, they say, continued practices such
as zikr (‘remembrance’ or recitation of God’s name) and sama’ (devotional
musical gatherings); the Sufi reformers assumed ‘unquestioningly the need
for a spiritual master’ (ibid.: 59) whose disciples must obey the Shaykh in all
things, even beyond the grave (ibid.); against Wahhabism, Sufi knowledge
was of the inner truth of Hadith that comes only from God (ibid.: 61).
O’Fahey and Radtke also deny as ‘nonsensical’ the cliché that neo-Sufis
movements supposedly subscribed exclusively to the ‘Muhammadan way’,
tariqa muhammadiyya, beyond the divisions between named Sufi orders, or
that they denied the mystic’s ultimate aim of union with God (ibid.: 70).
For Sufi reformers the ‘visualization’ of the Prophet, imitatio Muhammadi,
17
In his survey of early Moroccan awliya Cornell found that a high proportion had advanced education
and 22 per cent were fuqaha (Cornell 1998: 106 and chapter 4 more generally).This was also true of the
nineteenth century reformer saints who wrote extensively (see, for example, Knut 1995 and Sedgwick
2005) and even in the twentieth century (Lings 1971). As I explain in this article, the same was not
necessarily true of South Asian practising reform Sufis.
remained, they say, as for all Sufis, merely a stage in the ‘annihilation’ of the
self (fana) on the way to reaching God (ibid.).18
Sufi reformers were divided fundamentally from Saudi Wahhabis
over the ontological status of Muhammad after his death (ibid.: 71), an
issue I return to below. Nor did they reject Ibn ‘Arabi’s theosophy. What
was new about these movements, O’Fahey and Radtke argue, was their
expansion into unexplored regions in the Sudan, Somalia, Cyrenaica and
the Central Sahara, and the creation of networks of lodges throughout these
areas. Rahman’s analysis, according to Mark Sedgwick, stemmed from his
‘reformist agenda’: he regarded earlier forms of Sufism as pervaded by
‘spiritual hypnotism’, ‘orgiastic rituals’, ‘superstitions’, ‘exploitation’ and
‘charlatanism’; against that, most researchers today recognize that placing
Sufism in opposition to orthodoxy is unjustified (Sedgwick 2005: 28).
Chih sums up several of the key defining features of reform Sufis in
Egypt which, as we shall see, are shared with their South Asian counterparts:
they refrain, she notes, from ‘extravagant claims concerning sainthood
(walaya), divine grace (baraka) and supernatural powers (karamat)’ (Chih
2007: 25).Yet this very self-abnegation by the saint of his charismatic power,
continuously extolled by his followers, leads if anything, in my observation,
to a magnification of a saint’s charisma.
One further point needs to be made that is peculiar to South Asia.
The rise of reform movements such as the Deobandis, led by religious
scholars, which was initiated by the eighteenth century Sufi and scholar
Shah Waliu’llah, himself a Naqshbandi (see Metcalf 1982: 37–45), and the
subsequent rise of the more radical Ahl-i-Hadith movement, influenced by
Ibn Tammiya and the Wahhabi movement in the Hijaz, generated a counter-
movement of religious scholars in defence of Sufism and Sufi practices
(ibid.: 296–314).These ‘ulama, known collectively as Barelvis, were educated
in their own religious seminaries (Malik 1998).19 They were not saints or
mystics although some aspired to be so. Thus, a division-of-labour emerged
in South Asia between learned scholars in the Sufi tradition and saintly
world-renouncers; this contrasts with the Middle Eastern Sufi reform trend
18
Visualization of the Sufi master (tasawwur-e-shaikh), followed by visualization of the Prophet are key
mystical techniques of self ‘annihilation’ which I discuss further below (see also Werbner 2003).
19
Green (2011: 19–20) calls the Barelvis a ‘counter-reformist’ movement. Soares (2005: 185) also uses
this term in the case of Mali.
in which scholarship, mysticism and sainthood were often combined in the

case of founding saints.20
Within the reformist milieu of debate and contestation that arose in
late nineteenth century British India (Metcalf 1982: 232–34; Reetz 2006),
the attack on institutionalized Sufism focused primarily on practice. There
appeared to be far less difference in the beliefs of the reformers and their
opponents—the defenders of Sufi practice—regarding the ontological
premises of mystical Islam. It was relatively easy, then, for the saintly founders
of new orders to discard ‘offensive’ practices although they did retain,
despite anti-Sufi reformist criticism, key Sufi organizing rituals crucial
for the expansion and perpetuation of their regional cults. These rituals
remained, as before, essentially embedded in eschatological premises about
life after death and the mystical journey of the soul.To explain this further, I
turn now to the case of a living Sufi Refomist saint before considering the
detailed critique by the reformists of Sufi practice.
<KPFCRKT6JG.KXKPI5CKPV
For the secular observer as for the Muslim reformist, the obsequious
prostration of supplicants at the tombs of dead saints, or disciples’ obeisant
kissing of a living saint’s hands and the edges of his gown, summon up a
world of magic and superstition. It is a world that seems utterly remote from
the imaginary universes, ideal symbols and abstract qualities described in the
works of famous Sufis.
To bridge the apparent gap between ritual custom and abstract theosophy
we need to bear in mind that the persona of a saint, alive or dead, his very
body, is believed by Sufi followers to be suffused with divine light and to
irradiate divine sanctity. So powerful is this embodiment that merely to
touch anything that has come into contact with the saint is to absorb some
of his magical potency. In South Asia great saints like Zindapir often stand
in danger of being mobbed by crowds of devotees and must be protected
from the intense love that their followers feel for them. It is this feature of
charismatic embodiment which provides a clue to the integral relationship
between Sufi theosophy and the apparently superstitious practices at saints’
shrines.
20
See ftn. 16.
Zindapir was, above all, an army saint.21 His career started as a tailor
contractor in the British and then Pakistani army where his early circle of
companions was forged. The majority of his disciples were, or had been,
soldiers. Others were members of the police force or worked in large
government departments and factories. Many had subsequently become
labour migrants to Britain and the Gulf or had risen to prominence in civilian
life. His following highlights the attraction of Sufi saints in the reformist
tradition to workers in modern bureaucratic contexts. The fact that they
are pir-bhai (fraternal Sufi ‘brothers’) as well as comrades-in-arms served
to deepen relations of amity between murids (disciples). The camaraderie
they forged in one context seemed to spill over into the other to create
multiple relations of enduring obligation and trust. The fraternity of co-
membership in a single Sufi order countered formal relations of hierarchy in
bureaucratic and military settings and enabled disciples to exert autonomous
moral reasoning vis-à-vis superiors, as Ewing too has argued (Ewing 1993).
While stressing hierarchy and the total authority of the saint, then, in reality,
reform Sufism appears thus to encourage autonomous decision-making and
individuality in secular daily life. As others too have pointed out, disciples
can access jobs in the modern sector through connections forged at the
lodge with government officials and managers in large firms, mediated
through the saint and his khalifas, and this is a further pragmatic aspect of
membership in the order.
The regional cult founded by Zindapir falls clearly within the reformist
tradition, one which emerged as we have seen as early as the seventeenth
century among Naqshbandi Sufi followers. In line with strict Naqshbandi
practice, during his lifetime Zindapir prohibited the playing of instrumental
music, radio and television (including its ownership) at the lodge, although
he did allow the singing of praise poems to the Prophet (n’at), and of loud,
melodic forms of zikr, which became over time the hallmark of the order.
Protecting himself against accusations of claims to mercenary charlatanism,
there were no collection boxes at the lodge. In line too with his reformist
inclinations, he did not allow his picture to be taken for fear, he said, that
it would become an object of worship, though pictures did surface after
his death. He reprimanded ‘ulama who praised him rather than Allah. His
followers were asked not to extol his karamat. In his eyes, the true miracles
21
For a full account of Zindapir see my monograph (Werbner 2003).
he had performed were those of building the darbar (lodge), nestled in the
valley, and especially the free provision of food to all wayfarers at the langar,
the free kitchen whose food nurtured the multitudes who came to seek his
blessings. In line with the order’s strict adherence to shari’a, his instructions
to supplicants invariably included the injunction to say the five daily prayers.
He himself barely spoke about the Sufi mystical journey, to the frustration
of his close khalifas like Hajji Karim, whose mystical theory I present below.
Yet he was a visibly practising ascetic who ate very little, no meat or other
luxuries, and reputedly never slept. Repeatedly, he stresses his credo of
world renunciation as captured by the aphorism: ‘The world and religion
[dunya te din] are like two sisters. If you marry one, you cannot marry the
other; to which he would add: ‘If you turn your back to the world you will
face God’ (dunya ki taraf pith kare ton khuda ki taraf mun hota hey). His stress
was thus on ethics and morality.
Such self-consciousness, restraint and ascetism, the taming of desire and
stress upon shari’a, are not to be taken, however, as a sign of Sufi ‘decline’,
or the diminution of faith in the perfection of the shaikh and his powers of
intercession. Nowhere did I encounter an apologetic double-consciousness
in the face of modernity of the kind that Ewing (1997) reports from
her fieldwork among Sufi saints and followers. On the contrary, feelings
of love and devotion expressed by both ordinary and modern, educated
murids (disciples) and khulafa (vicegerents, deputies, emissaries), for Zindapir
were so intense that these murids found it inconceivable that anyone who
encountered the shaikh would not, like them, be totally overwhelmed by his
extraordinary spirituality.
In a series of morality tales, Zindapir repeatedly mocked ‘ulama and
politicians alike for their mendacity and their false attempts to claim powers
belonging to God alone (Werbner 2003: 87–92, 95–98). His closeness
to Allah, even beyond the Prophet was signalled by his inclusiveness: he
welcomed foreigners, Christians and members of other faiths, as had his
murshid, Baba Qasim, the saint of Mohra Sharif at Muree, at the foothills of
the Himalayas.
One of the least understood features of Sufism in South Asia is why
it remains attractive to apparently Westernized, high ranking civil servants,
army officers, politicians, businessmen and professionals, as well as to large
numbers of relatively uneducated villagers. Sufism, at least reform Sufism,
appears to appeal to the educated and powerful, as well as the vast mass of
low ranking followers.
This continued elite attraction to Sufi orders stems, I found, from a

peculiar understanding of worldly success and predestination in Sufi Islam.
A key role of the saint is believed to be his ability to act as mediator for
his disciples with God on the Day of Judgement, asking forgiveness for
them and thus assuring that they go to jannat, paradise. Disciples are, in
other words, dependent upon the saint not only for blessings in the world,
but for eternal salvation. This leads to the further belief that worldly
achievements are divine rewards for obeying the edicts and instructions of
the saint regarding religious observance and daily practice, which include
the multiple repetition of specific religious litanies (wazifa) allocated by him
alone. As bringer of divine blessing, he is believed to be able to change the
course of nature, to sway the will of God, and thus to affect the predestined
movement of the universe. This assumption is at the root of the repeated
stories by disciples about the miracles performed by the shaykh, despite
the saint’s objection to the telling of such narratives. Hence if, after their
initiation, disciples succeed in their businesses, in arranging marriages for
their children, in obtaining job promotions, in passing examinations or tests,
in finding work as labour migrants—in short, in any of their endeavours,
they interpret this as a sign of God’s blessing conferred upon them via
their saint. The saint’s own accumulation of wealth is similarly regarded.
Discipleship thus constitutes a legitimation of personal worldly success.22
$GVYGGPBid’aCPFShirk
The objection to notions of saintly intercession is one of the main
accusations levelled against Sufi practice by scriptural reformists along with
their objection to devotional rituals at the lodge. The claim is that these
rituals constitute bid’a, unlawful innovation, not mentioned in the scriptures,
and that furthermore, the practices are shirk, making the saint a ‘partner’
with God and thus challenging the monotheistic principle of tawhid, the
singularity and unity of God. Sufis deny these accusations, arguing that their
devotions are directed toward God alone via His chosen ‘friends’, the awliya
or saints.
Sufi rituals, in general, as practised at Zindapir’s lodge, are relatively
simple: animal sacrifice, food or money offerings, langar (blessed food
distributed to lodge visitors), zikr (the repetitive remembrance of God’s
22
For a more extensive discussion of this point, and the paradox of individuality of the otherworldly saint
by contrast to other reformist movements, see Werbner (1996).
name or of Qur’anic verses), blessing, collective prayer and supplication

(du‘a). These rituals, it should be noted, all have a powerful ethical dimension;
they contain notions of Godly and saintly nurture, care and generosity. It is,
in fact, a common Muslim practice to ask a virtuous person to pray on one’s
behalf, or for mourners to pray on behalf of the dead in order to speed their
passage to paradise. Healing rituals include dam, the ‘blowing’ of a Qur’anic
verse on an afflicted persons and tawiz, the handing out of amulets written
with Qur’anic verses or magic squares, neither of which are unIslamic and
are often practised by Deobandis as well.The exorcism of jinns or evil spirits
does not in itself deviate from the Qur’an, which mentions the existence
of jinns. Zindapir was careful, however, not to physically ‘beat’ the afflicting
jinn out of a person as is common in many Sufi lodges in South Asia.
Instead he ‘talked’ to the jinns and persuaded them to leave the person.They
became his followers, I was told, living in the mountains and enjoying the
sukun, the healing tranquility, of the lodge (see Werbner 2003: chapter 10).
None of the rituals performed at the lodge, Zindapir’s followers argued,
deviate from Islamic orthodoxy, the ‘straight path’ of the shari’a. It is above
all Sufi communal rituals that are regarded by the scriptural reformists as
illegitimate accretions: celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday and ritual
processing in urban areas; prostration at the shrine or grave of a saint, and
the washing and laying of dupattas (cloths) or flowers on it. Also somewhat
suspect is bai’at, the oath of allegiance entered into by a disciple (murid) with
his guide and Shaykh (murshid), although Deobandis and Tablighi in the
nineteenth century took bai’at from leading Deobandis in large numbers
(Metcalf 1982: 80; Reetz 2006: 126–28). Claims to saintly karamat, miracles,
are disapproved of by the reformists, though again, were widely attributed
to Deobandi shaikhs and regarded as emanting from God (ibid.: 176–77).
Above all scripturalist reformists object to the ‘urs, the culminating event
in the annual cycle of a saint’s lodge,23 a religious festival commemorating
the ‘wedding’ or unification of the saint with God at the moment of his
mortal death (e.g. Metcalf 1982: 153, 157, 273). The ‘urs encompasses many
of the smaller ritual acts of offering, sacrifice and supplication associated
with worship at a lodge. The ‘urs is, scholars agree, the major organizing
ritual of a Sufi order, gathering together the saint’s khalifas (vicegerents) and
murids (disciples),‘ulama (clerics), poets, nat or qawwali devotional singers
23
This is known widely as mawlid in the Middle East and ‘arus in Bangladesh (see Landell Mills 1998).
Whatever their appellation, such festivals are invariably celebrated annually for departing saints.
and the masses. ‘Urs rituals are occasions to initiate new members and to
renew and revitalise followers’ connection with the saint, each other, and
Allah. During the ‘urs, departed saints in the silsila (chain of saints leading to
the founder of the lodge), it is believed, gather to attend the congregation.
Having sacrificed hundreds of animals and fed thousands of pilgrims who
have travelled great distances, the culminating ritual act of the ‘urs is the
du’a, the supplication by the saint to God on behalf of the community.24
Older and specialist shrines develop over time elaborate rituals
performed during the ‘urs, and these may last for several weeks. It is perhaps
such elaborations that have incurred the wrath of the reformers. At the
shrine of Nagore Sharif in Tamil Nadu, for example, the kanduri festival, as
it is known, lasts 14 days and includes mendicants’ processions with flags,
musical pipes and other paraphernalia, an illuminated chariot, model boats,
an elaborate ship model, cannon firing, fireworks, processions of long-
haired malang faqirs and Hindu merchant groups, western musical bands,
the installation of a ‘ritual saint’, a play of lemon throwing, sandalwood
smearing, ritual blessing and miraculous water drinking by the sea (Saheb
1998). All these would undoubtedly be defined as bida’ by the reformists.
During the increasingly popular contemporary‘urs at the shrine of Lal
Shahbaz Qalandar in Sindh, there is intoxication, music, quantities of mehndi
smeared from large pots, singing, dohl drumming, ecstatic dancing, mingling
of the sexes, and cannabis smoking—‘an archaic, magical and yet palpably
physical world in which I became acquainted with an Islam marked by
trust, tolerance and a feeling of togetherness; of trances and a Dionysian
spirituality—a joyful counter-culture in contrast to that of a rather cheerless
appearing orthodox Islam’ (Frembgen 2011: 3). The event lasts a full two
weeks, with pre-‘urs rituals performed in earlier months.25
24
For a detailed discussion of the ‘urs as the hub of a Sufi order see Werbner (2003: chapter 9); see also in
particular Reeves (1990) on the ritual and organizational complexity of a mawlid at a famous shrine in
upper Egypt, which gathers a massive crowd of close to a million devotees from many related branch
orders, and Gilsenan (1973).
25
The mingling of Sunni, Shi’a and Hindus at the ‘urs was historically widespread. Green (2011: 68–78)
describes the carnivalesque entertainment and cosmopolitan atmosphere at such festivals in nineteenth
century Bombay and its vicinity which attracted ‘Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and others’. Even though, as
he points out, one may ‘question whether the social differences between these pilgrims did ever melt
away in a Turnerian experience of “comunitas”’ (ibid.: 72) such shrine festivals undoubtedly provide a
cosmopolitan framing which counters a tendency towards sectarian Sunni-Shi’a violence and religious
communalism in South Asia (see Freitag 1989 and the discussion in Werbner and Basu 1998: 19–20).
Frembgen’s comment cannot be taken, then, simply as a ‘romanticising’ of Sufi inclusiveness, particu-
At the shrine of Bava Gor in South Gujarat studied by Basu, rituals of

ordeal are performed for three Sidi saints, including rites of exorcism and
spirit possession. At the ‘urs, Sidi gather to perform trance dances through
which they experience a state of ecstatic love for the saints (Basu 1998).
Shi’as, Sunnis and Hindus mingle at all these shrines. This too would be
regarded by the reformists as bida’.
As well as novel ritual practices, the ‘urs in most of the older shrines
in South Asia draw vast crowds to their colourful bazaars, selling abundant
food and drink and blaring filmi music; dancing girls and prostitutes are
reputed to contribute to the ‘sinful’, carnivalesque atmosphere surrounding
the ‘urs. When orthodox Auquf Departments in the Ministries of Religious
Affairs of both India and Pakistan take over these shrines, they are quick
to ‘purify’ them, while also depriving the local shrine descendants—often
whole villages—of a lucrative source of income deriving from pilgrims.26
6JG2TQDNGOQH+PVGTEGUUKQPCPFShirk
1PVQNQIKGUQH.KHGCHVGT&GCVJ
If the customs at some of the older Sufi shrines in South Asia may be
regarded as unlawful innovations, bida’, to what extent are the central rituals
of the ‘urs, and its very raison d’être, also shirk? The answer to this question is
by no means self-evident: there is no clear opposition, as there is between
Catholicism and Protestantism, between Sufis and scriptural reformists in
South Asia with regard to the key issue of intercession. Reetz remarks that
‘even among the more radical reform groups, there was no agreement on
what would undermine monism. … The accusation of ‘associationism’
(shirk) was levelled indiscriminately against others, while for their own
group scholars justified respect or worship of symbols other than Allah’
(Reetz 2006: 104). Indeed, on closer inspection many of the scriptural
reformists subscribe to the same ontological and eschatological premises as
do reform Sufi followers of mystical path.
larly so since Shi’a in Pakistan whose saint is buried at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar have been
subject to violent sectarianism since the Iranian revolution.
26
This is discussed by Phillipon (2013) in relation to the Mian Mir shrine in Lahore.
The nineteenth century Deobandis, unlike the Saudi Wahhabis27 or their

Hanafi counterparts in South Asia, the Ahl-i-Hadith,‘believed in the physical
survival of prophets and saints after their death and in the immortality of
their bodies as well as their souls’ (Ahmad 1969: 107). Barelvis believed that
the ‘Prophet was himself light, present and observant (hazir o nazir) in all
places. As light he had no shadow. He was human but his humanity was of a
different order from that of other men’ (Metcalf 1982: 301; see also Ahmed
1993: 127). Even for Ahl-i-Hadith the Prophet is insan-i-kamil, the perfect
man, to be emulated to the finest detail. According to Qasim Nanotawi, a
prominent Deobandi, the Prophet did not die at all, though others dispute
this.28 The Prophet continues to appear in ‘true dreams’, even to Salafi
Islamists such as Al Qaida and Taliban leaders (Edgar 2011).29 He remains
thus an active agent influencing the course of events in the world. Only in
the case of Wahhabis ‘The dead, including the Prophet, were declared to
have entered barzakh, where they awaited the day of Resurrection without
being able to help the living through any form of intercession’ (Peskes 1999:
159). For Wahhabi and Ahl-i-Hadith followers, the relationship to God is
unmediated and direct.These extreme scripturalists deny even the evidence
from the scriptures of mediated appeal to God, for example the fact that the
Prophet prayed for rain on behalf of the community (Kugle 2007: 277–78).
So too the Koran, while repeatedly asserting that on the Day of Judgement,
‘no soul shall have power (to do) aught for another: For the command,
that Day, will be (wholly) with Allah’ (82: 18–19), also says repeatedly that
27
‘Wahhabi’ is often used as a term of vilification in South Asia by Barelvis in particular to imply that
a person has placed him or herself beyond the pale of the true Muslim community, the ‘Ahl-e Sunna
wa Jamaat’. My reference here, however, is specifically to Saudi Hanbali Wahhabis, followers of the
doctrine of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792 AD), who rejected entirely any notions of in-
tercession including even prayer (du’a) on behalf of the community or the marking of graves, which
he regarded as idols (see Kugle 2007: 271–92).The South Asian Hanafi Ahl-i-Hadith are influenced by
his thinking (Metcalf 1982: 277–78).
28
Jamal Malik, Personal communication, referring to Zubair Al Zia: hayat al-Nabi, pp. 15–16, 17–18. Bar-
bara Metcalf writes (personal communication) that ‘Husain Ahmad Madani in his booklet on India as
a kind of holy land for Muslims, written in the early 1940s, argues that the graves of the holy men are
like radio towers, emitting baraka until the day of judgement—a reason for not supporting the demand
for Pakistan. Malik adds that ‘I don’t know about Maududi/Ahl-i-Hadith on this but I think this at-
titude is pretty standard.’ It is ironic that among the few Muslims who do not believe the Prophet is an
active agent in the world are the Salafiyya, who copy him unto the smallest detail
29
‘Islamist’ refers broadly to Islamic movements espousing political Islam. While Al Qaeda have been
described as Salafi jihadists, Osama Bin Laden constructed his persona in the classic image of a Sufi
world renouncer (Devji 2005: 42–44). Other contemporary Salafis (who aim to recreate the age of the
Prophet in all its minute details) are non-violent.
‘They will have no power of intercession, save him who hath made a covenant
with his Lord’ (19: 85–87; emphasis added); in other words, that the power of
intercession is granted to chosen persons by God alone.30 Barelvi ‘ulama and
Sufi reformists rely on this latter idea, namely that God’s ‘friends’ (awliya) and
the Prophet are granted the power of intercession, to justify Sufi practices
and belief in intercession on the Day of Judgement.
It is worth I think exploring in greater depth the epistemology and
ontology behind Sufi practice and notions of intercession as arising from
the ontological state of life after death. Once accepted, these mystical ideas
makes perfect sense of so-called ‘popular’ devotions at saints’ tombs and the
centrality of the ‘urs. My discussion refers back to the debate outlined at the
outset of this essay on neo-Sufism and the extent to which the rise of this
movement was associated with the rejection of saintly mediation. The central
place accorded in Sufi Islam to ascetism as the source of charismatic power
can be placed within a broad genealogy of theorizing of ritual embodiment
in anthropology, though the directionality of transformation, as we shall
see—from body/cosmos to self denial to cosmic body—is perhaps unique
to mystical traditions.31
Sufi theosophy is entirely devoted to describing and authenticating
the transformation of the persona of the saint through Sufi practice. This
ritual passage is postulated to be as much physical as it is spiritual, and it
occurs as a mystic ‘kills’ his carnal soul and reaches closer and closer towards
sacred intimacy with God. I was instructed in the mystic’s journey by Hajji
Karim, a khalifa of Zindapir who deeply aspired to reach the heights of
mystical revelation. Despairing of experiencing these revelations first-
hand, he sought knowledge in the Maktubat of Sirhindi (n.d.)32 and other
Naqshbandi texts. I have selected some passages from a longer account (see
Werbner 2003: chapter 9) to convey the complexity of Sufi thought in the
Naqshbandi tradition that leads to the notion of living agency after physical
death. Hajji Karim told me:
30
For the full range of quotations on intercession from the Koran and Hadith, see http://www.answer-
ing-islam.de/Quran/Contra/intercession.html (accessed 12 August 2011).
31
Kugle (2007: 11–14), for example, traces a genealogy of the theoretical discussion of ritual embodiment
in anthropology from Mauss and Douglas to Bourdieu, who developed Mauss’s notion of ‘habitus’.
More recently, Foucault’s theorizing of technologies of bodily practice in ancient Greece has inspired
an interest in pietist Muslim self-discipline (Mahmood 2005).
32
I am uncertain what version of the Maktubat he used.
‘It is generally believed that a human being is made of four, ‘unsar,

elements, fire, water, air and clay, but in fact, he is made of 10 elements.
The other six are nafs [vital soul/spirit], qalb [heart], ruh [eternal soul], sirr
[secret thing], khafi [‘silence’, more secret], and akhfa [the most secret].33
These 10 elements originate in the universe. A human being is the essence,
concentration, encapsulation, of all these elements. He reflects in miniature
the whole universe, the ‘great universe’,‘alam-e-kabir, the macrocosm.We see
ourselves and think we are nothing. But each human being contains within
him powers which, if opened up, enable a man to see the whole universe
created by God. A human being is an ‘alam-e-saghir, a ‘small universe’—
he mirrors the whole universe within him. He is a picture [image] of
God’s creation. A person can leave the world of appearances, of ephemeral
creations [i.e. the empirical world of the senses], if he knows the way; and
he can reach out to the eternal world.’
‘A human being is designed so that in his chest are spaces for the entry
of divine lights. We call these spaces lata’if. A latifa (sing.) is something very
fine. The lata’if are located on the body (see figure 1): the first, latifa-el-Admi
[of Adam], is located just under the heart; the second, latifa-el Ibrahimi, is the
ruh which is located on the right side of the chest, under the right breast; the
third, the latifa of Moses, sirr, is located just above the heart; the fourth latifa,
of Jesus, khafi, is located on the right, above the breast, above the ruh, the fifth
latifa, that of Muhammad (P.B.U.H.), akhfa, is located at the centre. Prophecy
is at the top, sainthood at the bottom [i.e. the lata’if are ranked with akhfa
being the most superior]. The sixth latifa, the nafs, is located in our tariqa,
Naqshbandiyya, at the centre of the forehead. The seventh and final latifa,
latifa qalbia, is composed of the four elements: air, water, fire and clay.’
‘This latifa may start anywhere in the body and flow outwards to clean
the whole body. These are the seven treasures in the human body. The first
five lata’if parallel the eternal world, ‘alam-e-amr, while the nafs and the four
elements parallel the ephemeral world of creations, ‘alam-e-khalq.’
‘In the middle of the circle of possibilities is an arch, the ‘arsh-e-mu’allah,
the throne where God sits (though of course, He does not really sit, He has
no body). The ‘arsh-e-mu’allah is the division between the two worlds. The
33
Buehler (1998: 105–07) translates these as Soul (nafs), Heart (qalb), Spirit (ruh), Mystery (sirr), Arcanum
(khafi) and Super-Arcanum (akhfa). I prefer to translate ruh as ‘soul’ since the ruh bears strong similarities
to the Christian soul that survives after a person’s death. In Christianity there is no concept equivalent
to nafs, which is both the breath of life and the desiring, active ego of an individual.
human heart, qalab, reflects this division in ‘alam-e-saghir, the small universe,
that of a human being. Mirroring the ‘arsh-e-mu’allah, the qalab separates
between the five (superior) chest lights and the other five lata’if. It divides
‘alam-e-saghir, a human being, as the arsh-e-mu’ allah divides ‘alam-e-kabir.’
Qalbiya
All my senses
four elements
NAFS
Holy Spirit
AKHFA
Most
Hidden
KHAFI SIRR
Hidden Secret
RUH QALB
Soul Heart
Figure 1 The seven bodily lights
‘In order to achieve the first stage of knowledge on the Sufi path a
person seeks annihilation in his Sufi shaikh. We call this stage fana fi’l-shaikh.
Through fana fi’l-shaikh the small universe is revealed. Once a man sees
this sphere, the circle of possibilities is revealed to him. But Sufis do not
simply want to study God’s creations; they wish to study God Himself,
His power and creativity. In order to do so they must move beyond this
circle, they must break out of ‘alam-e-amr into the third sphere. To do so
a person must seek annihilation in the Prophet, fana fi’l-rasul. The third
sphere, located above and beyond the universe, is the sphere of the shadows
of God’s attributes. There are five dominions: they are, in ascending order,
the dominions of Adam, Abraham and Noah, Moses, Jesus, and finally, the
wilayat muhammadiya, that of the Prophet Muhammad. Through continuous
Sufi (ascetic) practice a person can finally achieve knowledge of this third
sphere. The divine lights coming from heaven have different colours: green
(akhfa), black (khafi), white (sirr), red (ruh) and yellow (qalb).’
Figure 2 Journey of the soul
It is impossible here to spell out in detail the whole journey of the soul,
besides making the point that in Hajji Karim’s rendition of Naqshbandi Sufi
theory the system comes to be highly elaborated through the principles of

repetition and accretion. The movement from sphere to sphere or, in the
later stages, between sub-spheres within a single sphere, may be visualized
as the ascent of a mountain. The climber aims for the mountain peak but
when it has been scaled it turns out to have been only a lower peak, a
plateau. In the distance the climber can see the rising peak of the mountain
still to be scaled, and so on.
The journey of the soul is in principle never complete. The final stage of
Muhammad is the stage of pure love. Sirhindi says that when he completed
this journey it clearly appeared that if he took one step further he would
step into pure non-existence. The unbreachable chasm separating God and
Man in Sufi thought generally, however, and Sirhindi’s in particular creates
the potential for almost infinite elaboration of spheres and sub-spheres,
ranked realities and origins of origins, shadows and names of shadows. Hajji
Karim continued by explicating the ethical dimensions of the Sufi journey
and embodied transformation:
‘The challenge in Sufism is to overcome the arrogance of the soul,
gharur takabar, which is equivalent to thinking the soul, the self, is God. The
nafs is where all evil things grow. The heart [qalb] is where all good things
grow. It is the first to reach out to God. Nafs belongs to Sufiya only. When
a person points to himself, saying “I” or “me”, in ‘Arabic “ana”, in Urdu
“men”, that is the nafs. In Sufism one must break the ana, fight the nafs,
know that one is made by God. A person who comes into the world thinks
he is everything. The nafs is pride, arrogance, vanity. The ruh is related to
air, sirr to water, khafi to fire and akhfa to clay. The four elements are the
curtain between a human being and God’s zat. According to the Mujaddid-i
Alf-i Thani [i.e. Sirhindi], the nafs is a curtain between the person and God’s
attributes. When this curtain is removed then everything is done for the
sake of Allah. After that what remains are not human curtains but only
curtains of divine light. God Himself can never be seen.’
‘The difference between a shaykh and an ordinary man is that the shaykh
is a person who has taken his ruh out of this world before he dies. When a
great pir dies his soul goes to the stage it reached during his lifetime, even
further. It can see the zat, God’s being, although there are different stages,
many curtains, within this dominion. In our tariqa one of the highest ranked
saints is the ghaus, the sustainer, but the most elevated rank [mansab] is that
of qayummiyid—the qayyum is a supreme saint in the hierarchy of saints.
Our saint celebrates the day he achieved his rank [in the ‘urs]. No one really
knows what rank he has reached.’
‘In the final stage of the journey of the soul, baqa bi’l-lah, the soul lives
forever. The nafs is finally transformed as the soul of a human being is taken
out of the shadow to reach the attributes. It comes back to earth linked
both to God and to people, to human beings.This is nafs mutma‘inna. At this
point the saint has a new body, he lives forever. Sufis are alive in the grave and their
bodies are left untouched in the earth. Their souls are active, they can hear and see
what is happening, they can help people after their death. They do not die. Instead
of dying they are transferred from one world to another, they have wasal
kar gae [met with God], parda kar gae [gone behind the curtain]. They reach
out to heaven even while still alive so they cannot die. Their souls can leave
their bodies at will. But according to the Shari’at, they are not allowed to
reveal that they have these powers. Only the prophets are allowed to reveal
their powers.Yet all the prophets and saints are able to help people after their
death. This is a secret thing.’ (Hajji Karim, emphasis added)
In this cosmic journey, if love is mentioned, it is within an economy
of light or divine grace in which it refers to a physiological, cognitive and
ontological state of being suffused or nurtured by light emanating from
God. Light is thus the key operator of the system: levels and intensities of
light refer to levels of achieved gnosis. Light is transferred via the different
spheres of being to the person.34
In the final analysis, the charisma of a Sufi saint, including a reformist
saint, derives in the eyes of followers from his asceticism, which is seen
to effect a bodily ritual transformation, suffusing the saint with light and
making him a conduit to God’s blessings in the world.
%QPENWUKQP
Zindapir was a Sufi saint in the classical sense of the word: his stress on
sobriety and orthodoxy did not lead him to a denial of his status as pir or of
the importance of the ‘urs and all the rituals associated with it. Despite his
disclaimers, stories of his karamat circulated widely. The sacred mythology
of his rise to sainthood combined miraculous signs from God with morality
34
Thus Corbin (1969: 191) argues: ‘Light is the agent of the cosmogony, because it is the agent of Rev-
elation, that is to say, of knowledge.’
tales. He was uniformly admired, even by the educated and wealthy, for
his evident ascetism, world renunciation, generosity and dedication to his
followers. He was a ‘man of God’, perceived to be so even by politicians
and ‘ulama. Even while still living, he could see into the hearts of men and
women wherever in the world they happened to be.35 During his lifetime
he had built up his extensive order and the lodge through voluntary labour
and the devotion of his murids and khalifa. After his death in 1999, the ‘urs
continued under the supervision of his son and grandson. No doubt, over
time new rituals will be introduced that might arouse the wrath of strict
reformists. So far, however, the lodge has been spared by even the strict
scripturalist Taliban despite their large concentrations in its vicinity.
4GHGTGPEGU
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4
Breathing in India, c. 1890
Nile Green*
And so to the physical exercises.When the Englishman comes to this stage in Yoga he
is completely and entirely disarmed.1
From Breathing to Writing: Meditation in the

Colonial Public Sphere
A s one of the last bastions of the universal, breathing appears to have

withstood the assault of relativism over the past century. 2 With the
cultures of its variously modified forms regarded as separable from, and even
irrelevant to, the universal essence of breath, respiration has been widely
accepted as an ideologically neutral sphere of human activity. In the course
of the twentieth century this assumed universality enabled distinctive Asian
cultures of breathing (Yoga, Tai Chi) to be translated into European and
American environments that proved otherwise less hospitable to the moral
and political structures that had sustained these practices in their original
contexts (ascetic renunciation, Chinese warfare). In short, breathing has
seemed neither to require nor reflect a context. Yet like any other human
*
I am extremely grateful to Francis Robinson, David Arnold, Elizabeth de Michelis, Anindita Ghosh,
Joseph S. Alter, David Gilmartin, Ali Abbas and my anonymous readers for their engagement with this
essay.
1
See (Sunita 1969: 22).
2
I have been heartened in undertaking this historiographical venture through the studies in which Alain
Corbin has attempted to map a ‘history of the senses’. See in particular Corbin (1994).
activity, breathing always has a context and is indeed in its various forms
(fast, shallow, hard, weak) perhaps the most subtly contingent of all human
activities.3 This contingency is still more the case with regard to the
deliberate modifications of breathing found in systems of meditation, for
breath control and meditation are no less shaped by history than any other
form of physical culture. Given that contingency forms the traditional basis
of historical analysis, it is from these initial observations that we may begin
to recover a sense for the physical intimacy of a past whose body politics
have constituted the history of breathing.
The contexts and cultures of breathing with which we are concerned in
this essay are those of the forms of meditation promoted in colonial South
Asia, a period which witnessed the formulation of a novel discourse on
breathing, meditation and the body whose historicity is rarely recognized.
Having their intellectual origins in theological notions of the universal,
studies of Indian ‘mysticism’ have generally failed to recognize the political
dimensions to the physical and psychological acts of conditioning and
control that comprise the full variety of Indian meditation systems.4
Discussions of religion in South Asia have often failed to historicize these
practices, in many cases assuming a simple continuity over long periods of
time between, for example, Vedic references to Yoga and the famous Yoga
practitioners of the colonial period and beyond.5 In contrast to this tendency,
this essay attempts to contextualize Indian meditation by examining the
place of its components of breath control and physical conditioning in the
wider Indian ecumene of late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Since
Yoga has often been seen as the pre-eminent Indian form of meditation, we
also draw attention to comparable Indo-Muslim traditions of meditation
from the same period. In India’s increasingly communalized colonial
public sphere, it is argued that Yogis and Sufis articulated rival forms of
physical culture and religious identity in response to the wider crisis
facing precolonial Indian lifeworlds (cf. Orsini 2002). The promotion of
these distinctly Hindu and Muslim body practices is seen to represent a
shared movement towards the indigenization of physical culture in the face
3
On the history of medical understandings of breathing, see Proctor (1995).
4
The most influential example is Eliade (1958). However, universalist assumptions about the means and
ends of meditation have been most influentially reflected in twentieth century definitions of zen as
universal a priori experience, standing outside the usual ideological trappings of ‘religion’. The political
genealogy of these formulations is unearthed in Sharf (1993).
5
Recent exceptions are Alter (2004) and de Michelis (2004).
Breathing in India / 81
of colonial British modes of personal conditioning, from table manners to

military service and cricket.‘Reform’ was in this sense not merely an intellectual
process of doctrinal dispute, but a means of reconditioning the physical body
into atavistically new ways of being, both private and public. In deportment
as in appearance, the Yogi and Sufi symbolized an Indian authenticity at the
very moment that they absorbed elements of a colonial discourse on
the essentially traditional character of the ‘authentic’ Indian. Here we see
the complexity of the oppositional stance to imperial cultural hegemony
that Francis Robinson identifies as characteristic of Indo Islamic reform in
his essay in this volume.
For all this, the Yogi and Sufi ideologues of the colonial era were in no
sense the silent and passive statuary of an India construed as the House of
Wonders. In contrast, we aim to show that through their participation in
the new vernacular public sphere of print, Sufis and Yogis formed important
agents of social change whose connections to modernity were disguised
through the widespread colonial figuration of the ‘fakir’ as the embodiment
of tradition. Since the public nature of the politicizing of breathing
techniques and other methods of control of the body is evident from the
large number of printed manuals addressing such practices, vernacular print
culture plays a central role in our analysis. Yet as an exploratory essay in
the history of breathing, we also hope to demonstrate something of the
multiple and changing meanings of breath and their connection to wider
debates about identity, politics and the proper behaviour of the body in
South Asia. 6
Older scholarly paradigms interpreting meditation primarily in terms
of ‘mysticism’ have been largely incapable of recognizing the rhetoric
of meditation. For Sufi and Yogi meditation form not only a practice of
the body but also a discourse on physical culture. Rather than ‘liberating’
the practitioner into the solipsism of pure private experience, in colonial
India both Sufi and Yogi modes of meditation formed attempts to connect
the physical person to new ideologies promoted by a series of ‘reformist’
groups. In stressing the association between meditation and unmediated
‘spiritual’ experience, the mystical paradigm fails to recognize that in Yogi
or Sufi contexts experience was in fact highly mediated, either through
6
My formulation of this project has been helped by a number of works on the ‘history of manners’,
in particular Elias (1978). With regard to theoretical discussion of the religious body, I have especially
benefited from the essays in Bell (1992) and Coakley (1997).
the authority of the living shaykh or guru or else through the mediation
of writing. From meditation manuals through etiquette guides and other
apparently innocuous genres of instrumental writing, textual practices
help us not only map changes in physical culture but also reckon with
the agency of such constitutive texts in the new printed ecumene. For
the new ideologies of the body that emerged during the high colonial
era within which meditation must be located were so effective due to the
normalization of writing through the mass medium of print.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, previously occult spheres
of Sufi and Yogi knowledge that had been based on traditions of face-to-
face initiation and instruction were gradually re-constituted as traditionalist
and indeed indigenist wings of the growing colonial public sphere.
Throughout the following pages this meditational discourse on the body
is placed among a wider series of printed vernacular works on Muslim and
Hindu physical culture. Given the sense of timelessness in which scholarly
discussions of meditation have often taken place, it is important to recognize
the transformations of Indian physical culture initiated by the technology of
printing through shifting the primary context of meditation from the realm
of personal mediation to the textual realm of the mediation of writing.
For in both Sufi and Yogi domains, precolonial traditions of meditation
were based on oral forms of instruction that also encompassed the spoken
commentaries that mediated admission to written works.7 Here access to
the knowledge and power granted by manipulation of the physical (and
subtle) body was based upon the relationship between master and disciple
(guru/shishya, murshid/murid). In the printed marketplace, what was once
mediated by living teachers and surrounded by the empowering rhetoric
of secrecy that had long underwritten the association between meditation
and magic suddenly became public property. From the closely guarded
meditation of personal initiation, here were forms of meditational practice
that were accessible to the vernacular-reading general public and its
companion listening groups. Although still described as such, Sufi doctrines
were no longer ‘secrets’ (asrar) in any socially meaningful sense, not least
due to the publication and translation projects of European Orientalists.8
7
In the words of one precolonial Tantric work, ‘The fool who, overpowered by greed, acts after having
looked up [the matter] in a written book, without having obtained it from the guru’s mouth, he also
will be certainly destroyed’ (cited in Heehs 2002: 194).
8
For a discussion of the social ramifications of ‘secret’ religious knowledge in colonial India, see Urban
(2003).
Whether with regard to Sufi manuals, Yoga treatises, Tantras or even works
on magic, the arrival of print transformed the nature of this knowledge
as social capital. The most fitting examples are to be found in the new
Indian genre of the printed ‘do-it-yourself ’ guide to meditation, which in
contrast to more traditional works on either Sufi or Yoga practice effectively
replaced the living master with the book. Print, then, stood at the centre of
the transformation of an earlier ecumene in which the symbolic capital of
certain forms of knowledge had been guarded through the social barriers
presented by traditions of secrecy and controlled initiation. Here, then, is the
emphasis on self-transformation and the individual will that is described in
Francis Robinson’s contribution to this volume.
While the nature of this knowledge was transformed by its entry into
print, and while a case can be made for the profiteering instincts of print
capitalism undermining social institutions whose guarded knowledge was
heedlessly disseminated, this was also a situation that a new generation of
Muslim and Hindu public preceptors sought to mould to their advantage.
For at the same time that inexpensive print technology undermined the
need for a living master’s presence, it also opened up the possibility of large-
scale publicity for those religious ideologues willing to embrace it. Given
the fact of colonial censorship, it is perhaps also worth considering the
role of such ‘mystical’ texts as a form of concealed politics operating in
the unrestricted colonial sphere of ‘religious affairs’. And as is well known,
the circles of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Swami Vivekananda and the Christian
missionary organizations that surrounded them took to printing on a hugely
ambitious scale.
The following pages examine the roles of a series of lesser-known
lithographic men in the cultural politics of colonial meditation.
Print Culture and the Meditational Marketplace

With the final dissolution of Muslim power in nineteenth century, North
India had come a re-evaluation of Muslim norms of comportment that
placed Islamicate tahzib (‘etiquette’) and adab (‘propriety’) into a new set of
relations with neo-Hindu as well as British systems of physical comportment
and bodily conditioning. In spite of the intransigent and repetitive rhetoric of
Indian meditation manuals, this changing context would radically shift their
meaning; as, correspondingly, did their relation as books in the marketplace
to other books offering instruction in alternative ways of controlling the
body. Although Muslim writers had been producing works on meditational

practice for centuries, works either printed or produced during the late
colonial period had special significance due to their attempts to access a
public sphere in which the behaviour of Indian bodies was increasingly
contested.9 The radical potential of print—homogenizing, proselytizing,
entering domestic space—was quickly recognized by Sufi writers of the
period who regarded themselves as sources of public authority. Print was
able to transform the teachings of these often obscure and provincial holy
men into models of emulation for not only their direct initiates but also for
a far larger fellowship of unseen readers. In the same way that colonial India
witnessed Sufi meditation move from the more closed sphere of manuscript
and oral instruction to the open access of the printed and purchasable text,
the doctrines of Yoga similarly shifted from a circumscribed realm of initiatic
and caste membership to the printed public sphere. Yoga practices thus
mirrored their Sufi counterparts in being offered to a much wider public
than had previously been the case, partly in reflection of the missionary
impetus of Hindu and Muslim reform movements. The emphasis placed
on Yoga by a whole series of Hindu public preceptors—particularly Swami
Vivekananda (1863–1902) and Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950)—brought
Yoga a prominence that it had never before enjoyed, a prominence that was
closely connected to the colonial experience in its early export overseas no
less than in its Bengali epicentre. The neglected vernacular works discussed
in this essay further disseminated this new Yoga in the print marketplace of
small town North India.
Like their Muslim counterparts, colonial Yogi writings posited
transcendent moral and ethereal goals for the bodily practices they
promoted. In this way they connected physical discipline and bodily purity
to a wider vision of social progress and political independence based on
an indigenous physical culture sanctioned through reference to antique
‘scriptural’ precedents. As time passed and as European scientific knowledge
increasingly encroached on the Yogi Gedankenwelt, the physical benefits of
Yoga came increasingly to the fore, with a whole range of scientific and
pseudo-scientific evaluations of Yoga eventually marginalizing most of
what Yoga had meant to its classical proponents writing centuries earlier in
Sanskrit (Alter 2004). Whatever the antiquating rhetoric of its proponents,
9
Several earlier Indian manuals have been studied in detail. See Davis (2005); Ernst (1999) and
Hermansen (1988). For a study of an important colonial-era text, see Kugle (2003).
the physicalist and ‘scientific’ neo-Yoga of modern times is a direct product

of the cultural negotiations of late colonial India. But at the same time, there
continued an older discourse in which Yoga and other forms of meditation
were articulated primarily in terms of practical (albeit none the less physical)
ends whose realization stood in stark contrast to the more limited modernist
works as Jagannath Prashad’s Yogriti ba taswir (‘Yoga with Illustrations’, 1910),
here the ultimate goal of breath control was seen as rendering the physical
body capable of surviving for thousands of years.10
Many common features may be observed across the range of early Sufi
and Yogi printed works on meditation practice, whose composition seems
in many cases to have been inspired by commercial as much as ideological
reasons. The fact that such works as Shiv Brit Lal Varman’s Yog ke ‘amali
sabaq (‘Practical Lessons in Yoga’) were printed in the Perso-Arabic rather
than the Devanagari script is a reminder of the continuity of ‘Hindustani’
cosmopolitanism through the early decades of the twentieth century
(Varman n.d.). Indeed, as knowledge of a range of meditation techniques
moved into the public sphere from their older location within specialized
subcultures, a whole series of Urdu works on Yoga were published during
this period. A work such as Jagannath Prashad’s Urdu Yogriti ba taswir offered
its purchasers practical instruction in Yoga, its etchings demonstrating
correct posture alongside instructions on the mastery of respiration and
carefully tabulated programmes of the correct number of minutes to hold
the breath (PrashƗd 1910: 90–96, 111–20). In a lithographic equivalent of
small print, its section of qualifications and exceptions provides glimpses of
the changing contexts of meditation: readers were warned not to practise
breath control while suffering from headaches or feeling physically unwell,
and under no circumstances to practise Yoga in moving train carriages (ibid.:
101–02).
In their practical orientation, eschewing the old ways of face-to-face
initiation and learning, works such as the Yogriti ba taswir had numerous Sufi
counterparts. In the literary expression of the religiously plural readership
that made up the North Indian marketplace, some of these Sufi works
included sections on the techniques of Yoga. Among the most interesting
of the colonial Sufi works that discuss Yoga practices is the Asrar-e-darwesh
‘This is the final level of meditation(ye- a-khir daraja sama-dh ka- hai)’ (Prasha-d 1910: 120). Such ideas
10
clearly drew on older traditions associated with Nath and Siddha Yogis. See Briggs (1938).
(‘The Dervish’s Secrets’) of Sufi Sa‘adat ‘Ali (‘AlƯ 1898). In addition to

describing a number of familiar Sufi meditational practices (zikr, riyazat),
the author also included a section devoted to a respectful elucidation of the
techniques of the Yogis and the purpose of their various postures (ibid.: 44–
66, 186–92). Like the more instrumentalist sections of licit magic that made
Muhammad Ghaws’ sixteenth century Jawahir-e-khamsa so popular in print
during this period, the Asrar-e-darwesh was a deeply pragmatic work whose
position in the marketplace was analogous to that of the new practical Yoga
manuals discussed below that promised to yield vast powers from correct
breathing. Printed in pocket-size format, the Asrar-e-darwesh seems to have
been written as a guidebook for those wishing to set themselves up as Sufi
masters in their own right, but who wished to avoid the trouble of initiation
and gradual training at a pace dictated by a living master. Consequently,
the Asrar-e-darwesh consists of descriptions of a series of practices—largely
prayers, visualization techniques and breathing exercises—that could be
employed for specific and for the most part worldly ends. This was not a
Sufism of metaphysical theory, but rather its social expression as medicine,
prognostication and amulet-making, all of which could of course be adapted
for profit-making enterprises. However, for present purposes what is most
interesting about the Asrar-e-darwesh is the section it contains on breathing
techniques, a section underpinned (as in the Yoga works of the period) by a
short theoretical excursus on the connections between breath and the wider
universe. Much more minimal and convenient than the often complex and
time-consuming exercises of traditional Sufi and Yogi practice, these were
a series of simple breathing techniques that could accompany very specific
circumstances. In effect, dangerous or otherwise risky activities should be
met by breathing through different nostrils or towards different parts of the
body. The many and varied situations in which the power of breath could
be so employed included the purchase of a horse, elephant or camel; the
receipt of a gift gold jewellery or of new clothes (presumably to avoid mal
de ojo); and the search for lost property. Accompanied by simple instructions
to breathe in certain directions or through one or the other nostril, the
numerous other eventualities in which the reader was advised to resort to
the power of breath ranged from the quotidian (learning whether one was
pregnant with a boy-child, ensuring a safe journey in given directions of
the compass) to the extraordinary (meeting a king, anticipating an armed
invasion) (ibid: 18–27). Further undermining transcendentalist conceptions
of Sufism and Yoga, such works were forthright in their orientation towards
physical as much as spiritual ends.
Colonized Bodies and Indigenous Alternatives

Far from creating a sense of universal solidarity with the common facts
of the human condition, the embedding of Sufism and Yoga in the
pragmatic minutiae of daily life in colonial India echoed the shift towards
sectarianism in public debates over the nature of community. This politics
of meditation is most clearly discernible when meditation practices are
placed into the wider discourse on physical culture that from the later
decades of the nineteenth century increasingly sought to control—and
indeed define—Muslim and Hindu bodies. While inter-Muslim polemic
over the legitimacy of Sufi practice and authority is already well known, it
is important to situate this Muslim controversy within a wider contest for
the control of Indian bodies in which Muslims played only a part. For Sufi
and other discourses that propounded an expressly Islamic physical culture
were competing with alternative formulations of Hindu and British modes
of bodily comportment. If this polemical triangle had a point of origin,
this was the presence of a British colonial elite and their own consciously
distinctive physical culture. For with its pomp, its prestige and its literal
embodiment of power, the colonial etiquette of the British ruling class
provoked a crisis of confidence in the old Indian ways of physical being
in the world. One set of responses—an inevitable outcome of the cultural
encounter of the politically unequal—was for Indians to adopt ‘British’
forms of behaviour, from dress, pastimes and mannerisms to the occasional
extremes of English food habits. Another set of responses—the responses
explored in this essay—sought to develop homegrown alternatives to this
imperial culture of the body.
The impact of this imperial physical culture was variously seen in the
(self-)suppression of aspects of the customary physical cultures of India;
in the promotion of self-consciously indigenous alternatives; and in the
minutiae of everyday personal encounters underwritten by the unequal
distribution of power. Yet in the fraught intellectual and social climate of
the era, such indigenizing turns towards legitimate alternatives frequently
articulated themselves as self-consciously ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’ forms
of behaviour. Indo-British cultural relations therefore emerged out of a
series of debates that may be simplified into the pattern of a ‘trialogue’ of
Christian, Hindu and Muslim, a polemical geometry that came to lay out
the possibilities of definition for the self as for others. Of course, between
these three discursive voices in the trialogue more ambiguous formulations
of physical culture remained possible. Attempts to formulate a non-sectarian

‘national’ alternative may be plotted between Muslim and Hindu in the
communicative triangle (as in Nehru’s Islamicate dress), with the position
of the Muslim modernists lying between Muslim and British points of
reference. But despite these variant possibilities, the three main markers of
identity nonetheless plotted the discursive parameters of definition.
We suggest, therefore, that the promotion of Sufi and Yogi meditation
in the public sphere represented an important aspect of the colonial debate
over the ownership and control of the body that sought to formulate
the public display of personal identity. The proponents of Sufi and Yogi
discipline were competing with the imperial Anglo-Saxon mode of physical
culture in its broadest sense. As numerous studies have emphasized, in its
innumerable manifestations this vigorous imperial culture of the body
combined sporting prowess and military drill with a sense of missionary
‘action’, so encompassing an originally Protestant discipline of the flesh
with an imperial culture of socially hierarchical personal etiquette. As
with the rival systems of physical culture offered by those speaking in the
name of Muslim and Hindu tradition, proper bodily restraint and physical
endeavour for the British in India were underwritten by a strong ideological
and moral code—‘the code’—that drew on ascetic strands of Protestant
Christianity and public school sports adapted to the muscular contexts of
empire.11 For those willing to emulate imperial bodies, printed books in
Indian languages provided written initiation into the mysteries of Victorian
physical culture. In his Ma‘dan-e-tahzib (‘The Mine of Manners’), published
in 1901 in Lucknow, the old capital of Islamicate etiquette, the headmaster
of the city’s Hosainabad High School sought to instruct his boyish readers
in proper English behaviour through a series of practical lessons upheld by
admonitions no less forceful than those of his Sufi contemporaries (Husayn
1901). In this guidebook to the new mode of colonized being in the world,
Mirza Habib Husayn detailed an enormous range of practices that the
young Indian should endeavour to learn.These ranged from sitting correctly
and playing appropriate sports (khel aur varzesh) to behaving properly at
balls and even learning to dress in the fashion of the famous metropolitan
dandy, Beau Brummel (ibid: 33–34, 47, 75–76, 93–95). The Ma‘dan-e-tahzib
in this way aimed to self-consciously train its readers in modifications
11
On ‘the code’, see Honey (1977). On the reflection of these themes in colonial architectural projects,
see Glover (2005).
of bodily behaviour appropriate to India’s new colonial society. Yet such

works also bore an obvious political dimension, made explicit in the Ma‘dan-
e-tahzib through an appendix on the benefits of British rule (ibid.: 194–95).
Neither this work nor its contemporary Sufi and Yogi manuals can be
understood in isolation from the much larger body of Urdu books, pamphlets
and journals devoted to manners and etiquette published in colonial India.
These ranged from Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s hugely influential journal
Tahzib al-akhlaq (‘The Purifying of Manners’, founded c. 1870) to the well-
known book of the same name by the North Indian ‘alim ‘Abd al-Hayy
al-Hasani (d. 1923) and the similarly famous manual of female behaviour,
the Bihishti zewar (‘The Heavenly Adornments’) of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi
(d. 1943). Besides these better-known works, scores of less successful etiquette
manuals filled the shelves of India’s booksellers. Among these cheap print
works, many were still more practical and specialist in character, such as the
short guides to the rules of cricket—that most successful component of the
physical culture of empire—written by Muhammad ‘Abd al-Rahman of
Bareilly and Nanak Chand.12
Such colonial modifications of physical culture were echoed elsewhere in
Urdu print through the distribution of works delineating ‘Islamic’ alternatives
to colonial comportment. The Adat al-tanabbuh fi bayan ma‘ni al-tashabbuh
(‘Tools of Awakening for Clarifying the Meaning of Imitation’) of Mawlwi
‘Abd al-Hayy, published in Delhi around 1910, sought to prove that copying
the physical appearance of Englishmen was contrary to the Sunna of the
Prophet. The legitimately ‘Muslim’ style of moustache was of particular
concern, as was the length of beards and hair, with male Muslim readers
warned to also attend to the hair of their womenfolk (al-Hayy 1326 [1909]:
4–25). The alternative offered to imperial mannequins was a system of
etiquette based on a neo-classical model of Prophetic ‘custom’ (sunnat).
Although widespread, such attitudes were by no means uncontested.
In an early twentieth century magazine article entitled ‘Taj aur kulah-
e-darweshi’ (‘The Crown and the Dervish Cap’), the well-known Sufi
publicist Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1878–1955) offered a less antagonistic
attitude towards the sartorial symbolism of British rule by relegating all such
See al-Rahma-n (1898) and Cha-nd (1891). As clerk to the Municipal Committee in Sialkot, Cha-nd was
12
close to the wider colonial re-conditioning of Indian behaviour articulated through notions of public
property and its accompanying behaviour.
signs of power to an older Sufi discourse of the rejection of worldliness (tark-

e-dunya). Although the wearing of the crown makes people (by implication,
the British) appear different, advised Khwaja Hasan, without the crown, in
reality all people are equal and share the same eyes, tongue, heart and indeed
breath (Niza-mƯ 1912a: 170–72). Such sentiments notwithstanding, in other
articles Khwaja Hasan was no less insistent than many of his contemporaries
that the habits and attributes (khasa’il aur awsaf ) of the Prophet Muhammad
should be held up as the best behavioural example for his community,
making repeated use of hadith to stress the importance of good manners and
of Muhammad as their ideal model (Niza-mƯ 1912b: 177–79). Other printed
works sprang to the defence of ‘Muslim’ physical culture by taking on
single issues, as in the case of Babu Muhammad Husayn’s Risala-e-goshtkhori
(‘Treatise on Meat-Eating’), a tract in praise of the benefits to Muslims of
the regular consumption of meat (Husayn 1910). As in other such works
written amid the polemical triangle identified earlier, here Indian behaviour
was being shaped through debate with Hindu antagonists, with bodily praxis
used to quite literally incorporate symbolisms of community difference.
Consequently, frequent references to the Arya Samaj appear in the Risala-e-
goshtkhori (ibid.: 12–13, 37).
Print culture played a central role in publicizing these reformulations of
the practice of daily life. It is here that colonial writings on meditation are
also to be situated.
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As we have noted, to emphasise the transcendent aims of meditation practices
is to miss their central concern with the body and, through its medium, with
the wider social world. As scholars of Mediterranean late antiquity have long
recognized, the founders of the Christian monastic movement performed
their feats of self-discipline in vivid and direct competition with the athletes
of Rome. Indeed, in the prototypical Vita Antonii of Athanasius (d. 373),
the physicality of Saint Antony’s struggles was dramatically emphasized in
order to compare the saint with the representatives of the alternative (and
still at this point dominant) model of physical endeavour represented by the
athlete.13 Just as the new physical culture represented by the early Christian
13
See Athanasius (1950). On these themes more generally, see Brown (1988).
ascetics was understood in counterpoint to wider social assumptions about

the body, so was a similar set of cultural and historical references to be
found in the writings on Sufi and Yogi techniques that entered India’s
printed public sphere. Even more than their earlier models, Indian Sufi
manuals of the colonial period gave central emphasis to control of the body.
Such works promoted a form of physical conditioning that, in accordance
with longstanding tradition, was described in terms of ‘[physical] training’
(riyazat) and ‘work’ (shughl). Indeed, in the Ziya al-qulub (‘The Brilliance
of the Hearts’) of Hajji Imdad Allah (d. 1899), the author went so far as to
term the breathing practices he was describing as varzesh (‘athletic exercise,
sport’) in their own right (Faru-qƯ 1898: 137). In its account of the practice
of breath control (pas-e-anfas), the Ziya al-qulub even described a technique
that enabled the initiate to mystically breathe the living breath of his spiritual
guide: to breathe as a Sufi was to be quite literally inspired by one’s master
(ibid.). Breath had now become a way of articulating authority.
Attempts to respond to polemical attacks on Sufi legitimacy are also
seen in the writings of the Hyderabadi Sufi Iftikhar ‘Ali Shah Watan
(d. 1906). There instructions on meditation practices—such as zikr-e-jali or
zikr-e-kalima-e-tayiba—appeared only in the midst of this defence of Sufi
legitimacy that stressed the primacy of an unambiguously Islamic bodily
praxis of normative rituals and obedience to the shari‘a (Watan 1384
[1964]: 2–3, 5, 72–74). Meditation practices by no means hovered in serene
isolation above the ideological affray that surrounded them, but in such
ways participated inexorably in the controversies of the age—through the
books devoted to their elucidation and correct performance.
Without positing any kind of facile causality, this culture of self-
discipline nevertheless cannot be disentangled from colonial efforts towards
taming the violence of the holy man. For Sufi training manuals also need to
be situated in relation to the failure of the jihad movements of the nineteenth
century. These movements encompassed not only the unsuccessful jihad of
Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (d. 1831) but also the widespread sentiment among
many Indian Muslims that the revolt of 1857 had also been a jihad. Here it
is important to stress that from declaring holy war to formulating modes of
legal and cultural separatism from Indo-British society, the most stringent
rejections of colonial rule by Indian Muslims in the nineteenth century had
come from Sufi circles (see Rizvi 1982).
An illuminating example of the inverse relationship between armed
struggle and meditation is seen in the life and works of Hajji Imdad Allah
(d. 1899), whose involvement in the jihad of 1857 led him to seek exile
after the revolt’s suppression in the Hijaz, from where he continued to write
and teach. In addition to the oral dissemination of his teaching through
the network of Indian students emanating from his charismatic presence
in Mecca, Imdad Allah’s collected writings were also printed in Kanpur
in 1898. Written in Persian and Urdu, his works included one of the most
significant manuals on Sufi meditation of the nineteenth century, the Ziya-
al-qulub. However, Imdad Allah also composed a lengthy Urdu masnawi
poem, the Jihad-e-akbar (‘The Greater Jihad’), on the moral struggle against
the self; it was in many ways the poetic companion to his prose guidebook
on meditation. What is interesting about the poem is its adaptation of the
language of jihad for the disciplining of the self. Of course, the notion of
the struggle against the self as the ‘greater jihad’ goes back to a famous hadith
of the Prophet Muhammad and Imdad Allah was by no means the first
Sufi to expand the theme. But given his involvement in the events of 1857,
Imdad Allah’s subsequent decision to promote the internalization of this
rejection of British power had a particular salience.The language and poetic
imagery of the Jihad-e-akbar made its reference to contemporary physical
warfare quite clear, describing the struggles with the various elements of
the self in terms of a series of skirmishes and sorties involving battalions
(lashkar) armed with rifles (tufang), swords (tigh) and daggers (khanjar) (Alla-h
1898).14 Manifest here was the intimate relationship between meditation
and rebellion as resistance alternatively externalized through armed struggle
or internalized through the discipline and purification of the self. In either
case of inward or outward aggression, the body became the focus of
political struggle against external influence in which firm boundaries were
constructed between Indian Muslims and their British overlords.
#;QICQH5KNGPV4GUKUVCPEG
Having seen the connection of Sufi works to a wider Muslim discourse
on the body, it is now necessary to place colonial Yoga writings within the
14
Drawing on well-established tradition, such imagery was by no means unknown to Yoga works of the
period; the YogritƯ ba- taswƯr contains a section describing Yoga ascesis in terms of a battle (Prasha-d 1910:
50–52). However, perhaps Imdad Allah’s closest Hindu counterpart was the Maratha woman Tapasvini
Mataji (b. 1835), who fought alongside the Rani of Jhansi in 1857 before escaping to Nepal and spend-
ing three decades engaged in meditation. Returning to India, she established a neoorthodox Hindu
girls’ school in Calcutta in 1893 (Taylor 2001: 82).
same colonial transformation of Indian physical culture. As we have already

hinted, we suggest that the entry of the previously initiatory traditions of
Yogi no less than Sufi forms of bodily training into the public sphere of
print represented a self-consciously indigenous alternative to the physical
culture of the Raj. This may be most vividly demonstrated in connection
with the major publicists of the new Yoga of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, for several of these figures were also connected to the
nationalist and proto-nationalist movements (see Chowdhury-Sengupta
1996). The most obvious example is Gandhi, with his notions of the
connections between (bodily) swaraj and Yoga. However, a more interesting
figure is Aurobindo Ghose, for whom the practice of Yoga formed part of
a wider re-discovery of Indian knowledge concomitant with the rejection
of the colonial Learning he had acquired at public school in London
and at university in Cambridge.15 Ghose’s shift from nationalist violence
to nationalist asceticism occurred during his imprisonment in Calcutta
during the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908–09. It was only after his acquittal
that Aurobindo passed through the final stage of his metamorphosis from
political agitator to Yogi, rejecting the trappings of his colonial education in
favour of a dress act of indigenist self-definition. Once again print played
a central part in this reclamation of identity, with Aurobindo furiously
publishing his ideas on Yoga between 1914 and 1921 in the journal Arya
that was issued from his refuge in French Pondicherry as the counterpart to
his earlier political daily, Bande Mataram.16 The position we have argued for
Yoga within the indigenizing politics of the period is made quite explicit
in a number of Ghose’s writings in Bande Mataram. For as he declared in an
article entitled ‘Religion and Politics’ published in 1907, ‘There cannot be
a more mischievous delusion than to suppose that we can advance our soul
by committing our bodies to the care of others’.17
In many ways, the politics of Aurobindo’s choice of the ascetic yogi
as the authentic Indian was an echo of the confrontational politics of the
previous century. The East India Company’s military expansion in Bengal
15
On Ghose and nationalist politics, see Mukherjee and Mukherjee (1997). On Ghose’s Yoga, see espe-
cially Sri Aurobindo (1948).
16
The title of Aurobindo’s newspaper was borrowed from the famous Bengali nationalist song of the
same name, which first appeared in Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s nineteenth century novel, A-nandamath
(‘Abode of Bliss’, 1882), which itself dealt with a group of politicised nationalist sannyasis.
17
See ‘Religion and Politics’, published in Bande Mataram Daily on 2 August 1907 and reprinted in
Mukherjee and Mukherjee (1997).
had earlier been met with fierce resistance from the ascetic armies of the
Sadhu orders (akharas), while memories of the uprisings of 1857 continued
to be enriched with tales of the conspiratorial communications network
run by fakirs and Sadhus (see Dasgupta 1992; Kolff 1971). But Aurobindo’s
circle also contained other figures who represented this juncture between
revolutionary politics and Yoga, such as the Irish-born supporter of Indian
independence Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita (1867–
1911). A follower of Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita had also been strongly
influenced by the political writings of such figures as the great Russian
anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) (see Heehs 1994). Other nationalist
groups in Bengal established anu´silan samitis (‘self-culture clubs’), while in
other regions of India militant akharas posing as centres of Yogic instruction
attracted the attention of the British authorities.
Although few other Yogis had such expressly political careers as
Aurobindo, the place of Yoga in Aurobindo’s indigenous turn was nonetheless
clearly linked to the wider Yoga revival of the late nineteenth century (see
Sarma 1997). For despite its presentation as an antique and so ‘purely’
Indian tradition, the colonial Yoga of Aurobindo’s direct predecessors had
not remained unchanged by its imperial passage and had already begun to
blend with Anglo-Saxon notions of physical culture.
It is important to stress here the hybrid genealogy of the neo-Yoga of
the nineteenth century and its connections to the occult subculture of the
Victorian empire, a situation also reflected in the colonial rehabilitation of
a bowdlerised Tantrism (see de Michelis 2004 and Taylor 2001). As early as
the 1860s, the practice of breath control was beginning to be promoted in
Britain, with the earliest notable example being George Catlin. A blend of
ethnology and quackery led Catlin to promote the ‘natural’ method of nostril
breathing, as summed up in his motto shut your mouth. Although he had no
links with India, Catlin’s ideas were nonetheless founded on the exoticism
of foreign climes: he claimed to base his theories on the observation of
the Indians of Brazil, Peru and the United States (see Catlin 1862). By the
1870s and 1880s, breath was beginning to feature in several of the New
Religious Movements emerging from the suppressed cosmopolitanism
of Victorian Britain. Of these, the Sympneumata movement of Laurence
Oliphant (1829–88), that ‘mystic in lavender kid gloves’, is perhaps the
most interesting through its attempts to link breathing to individualist
self-discovery and the sexual liberation of the country women of Palestine
(see Oliphant and Oliphant 1885).18 A few decades later, by now in the
context of ‘meditation’ per se, breath control further infiltrated British
reading circles via the Theosophical movement (see Ayangar and Iyer
1893). Popular printed works further extended the adaptation of Yoga to
scientific notions of physiology and health, as in Health and Right Breathing,
published in London in 1912 as part of Cassell’s ‘Health Handbook’ series.
This book anonymously quoted Vivekananda as well as George Catlin in
its physiological exposition of breath control.19 Interestingly, the Cassell
handbook espoused the same appeal to scripture as Sufi and Yoga works did
in India, with precedent sought in the Old and New Testaments to support
the link between right breathing and moral rectitude (ibid.: 66–68).
With the growing interest in Yoga in the imperial centre in Britain, and
beyond it in America, Yoga would subsequently be further reconstituted
through still greater appeals to modern medicine and science (Alter
2004). Here, however, we are principally concerned with an earlier stage
in this colonial transformation of the means and ends of meditation. For
despite Aurobindo’s exemplification of a Yoga of colonial resistance, his
own turn from violent to meditational resistance had been influenced by
Vivekananda, whom Aurobindo considered his absent mentor, having only
met him through the vicarious medium of a vision he experienced in gaol
in Calcutta.
It was ultimately Vivekananda who was the most influential player
in this transformation of Yoga from minoritarian ascesis into the global
physical culture it would become over the course of the next century.
Despite its repeated appeals to Vedic authenticity, it is in Vivekananda’s Raja-
Yoga (‘Royal Yoga’, 1896) that we must locate the single most important
colonial hybrid of Indian and European notions of physical culture as
pertains to meditation. In reflection of the bourgeois parapsychologists of
late Victorian Britain,Vivekananda was the first of a long line of neo-Yogis
to elicit comparison between Yoga and European systems of knowledge,
so making the first steps towards the detachment of Yoga from the subtle
bodies of classical Sanskritic physiology to the mechanical human body of
modern science.20 Vivekananda was by no means the only figure involved in
18
On Oliphant himself, see Henderson (1956).
19
See Anon. (1912: 28–29 on Catlin; and 48–49, 58 on Vivekananda).
20
See SwamiVivekananda (1930: 38–39) with reference to the laughing gas experiments of Sir Humphrey
Davy (1778–1829). The text was originally published in English in 1896 in London and New York,
the colonial transformation of pre-modern Indian meditation and physical

culture through missionary work overseas.The Indian Sufi missionary ‘Inayat
Khan (1882–1927) offers another important example of the new centrality
that the body and its optimal health came to occupy in articulating the new
purposes of meditation. In the years after his departure from India in 1910
‘Inayat Khan’s presentation of Sufi practice in Britain and subsequently
America wrought a similar shift towards modernist notions of the body and
its health.21 Here, as in the physical culture of the Victorian public school,
physical vigour became an important frame of reference for Sufi meditation.
Breath control also played an important part in ‘Inayat’s message, with the
legacy of an earlier holistic Islamic paradigm of the physical and subtle
bodies adapted or discarded to fit modern Western notions of physiology.
Vivekananda was not only instrumental in the gradual mechanization
of Yoga, for he also passed on an older political discourse on Yoga breathing
that, in precolonial Indian society, had served as the ideological underpinning
of the activities of the Sadhu orders as warriors, merchants and bankers.22
It is here that a discourse on breathing re-enters our analysis, since for
Vivekananda the physical exercises of Yoga were primarily concerned with
control of prana (literally ‘breath’), the élan vital that he described as ‘the
infinite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe’ and whose force
could only be mastered through the practice of breath control (pranayama)
(Vivekananda 1930: 33–34).23 In his promised transformation of the
colonial subject into the puissant Yogi, Vivekananda unveiled the centrality
of power to his worldview by describing the vast cosmic forces accessible
to the masters of this indigenous practice of breath control that ‘opens to us
the door to almost unlimited power’ (ibid). Indeed,Vivekananda’s vision of
pranayama went as far as to offer an explicit political sociology:
with an Indian edition appearing in Calcutta shortly afterwards. Several translations of Vivekananda’s
Raja-Yoga into Indian languages were made during the first years of the twentieth century, including
Bengali editions and an Urdu translation (Swa-m Viveka-nand 1916).
21
See in particular the chapters on ‘Physical Control’ and ‘Health’ in Khan (1990: 49–56). On his life and
teachings, see Keesing (1981).
22
‘Till the nineteenth century asceticism was a most rewarding and promising option. Especially in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when ascetic orders dominated major parts of trade and
soldiery... . With the Pax Britannica this world of opportunity gradually disappeared…’ (van der Veer
1987: 693). See also Dasgupta (1992) and Kolff (1971).
23
In the Urdu edition of Raja-Yoga (Swa-m Viveka-nand 1916: 36–65), the sections on pra-na describe
the power of breath through the vocabulary of qudrat and ta-qat.
The gigantic will-powers of the world, the world-movers, can

bring their Prana into a high state of vibration, and it is so great
and powerful that it catches others in a moment, and thousands
are drawn towards them, and half the world think as they do.
Great prophets of the world had the most wonderful control of
the Prana, which gave them tremendous will-power. . . and this
is what gave them power to sway the world. All manifestations of
power arise from this control. (ibid.: 43)
Here Vivekananda finally turned India’s political reality upon its

head to provide an indigenous key to political empowerment capable of
undermining a colonial discourse explaining power in terms of moral
supremacy, technological advancement and political maturity.
The relationship that Vivekananda framed between breath and power
was also evident in vernacular works on meditation from the period. An
example is found in Shiv Brit Lal Varman’s Yog ke ‘amali sabaq (‘Practical
Lessons in Yoga’), one of the numerous autodidactic meditation manuals
fostered in India by the emergence of print capitalism. Having discussed the
uses of different types of Yoga, like Vivekananda (whom his ideas reflect),
Varman devoted several chapters to discussing the importance of breath
(pran) and breath control (pranayam) (Varman n.d.: 67–95). Varman began
this account with a discussion of the etymology of the word pran. While
this appeal to linguistic origins was possibly a reflection of the relative
unfamiliarity of the term vis-à-vis more common spoken Hindustani terms
for breath (sans, dam), it also demonstrated the same orientation to words’
‘original’ meanings and antique precedents shared by proponents of neo-
Hinduism and colonial scholars alike.24 But for all its ideological subtext,
like other contemporary works on physical culture, Varman’s work bore a
forthright practical orientation towards the supernatural empowerment of
his vernacular readership. His etymological conclusions were therefore that,
among its several layered meanings, pran signified breath (sans), life-power
(zind ki taqat) and more simply power itself (taqat) (ibid.: 67).25 Having
established that the entire universe—from planetary to human bodies—is
24
In reflection of this neo-classical swing in colonial India, Vivekananda had included a rendering of
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra as a legitimising appendix to his own Raja-Yoga.
25
A few pages later Varman re-emphasized the point by describing pran as ‘in essence a kind of special
power (khas taqat)’ (Varman n.d.: 70).
composed of a fusion of pran and akash (‘ether’), Varman then continued

to extol the might of this ‘breath power’. Since pran is limitless (la-mahdud),
he noted, so also are its works, such that all that people see in the world is
merely a manifestation (zahur) of pran, from the physical realm right through
to the imaginings of the inner life.
Capable of being mastered by ordinary Indians through the Yoga
practices of breath-control described in Varman’s book, once again pran was
here explicitly portrayed as the source of all power (qudrat) (Varman n.d.: 71–
72). In a printed ecumene in which vernacular works on Yoga shared shelf
space with accounts of the new British sciences, formulated here in cheap
print was an indigenist theory of power as prana. Like the parapsychologists
of the imperial metropolis, India’s colonial Yogis thus made comparisons
between their ‘antique’ Yoga and the arriviste findings of European science.
As Vivekananda grandly declaimed, ‘What moves the steam engine? Prana,
acting through the steam.What are all these phenomena of electricity and so
forth but Prana? What is physical science? The science of Pranayama [breath
control], by external means’ (Vivekananda 1930, pp. 48–49). If breathing was
related to power, then here we see rather the relationship between Indian
cultures of breathing and the discursive power of the scientific knowledge
and physical culture of the British Empire. In this vision of Indian breath as
Indian empowerment, we see meditation as a form of politics.
As we have noted in connection with the Sadhu armies of the
eighteenth century, this does not mean that precolonial notions of
meditation had borne any fewer connections with politics and power. This
may be seen in the various popular legends concerning breath control
(habs-e-dam, pranayama) that associated respiration and meditation more
generally with the acquisition of supernatural powers. We are fortunate in
possessing a number of ethnographic accounts from the nineteenth century
that provide considerable insight into the means and ends of meditation as
represented by perhaps the most significant precolonial representatives of
Yoga, the Kanphata Yogis (see Khakhar 1878; Leonard 1878; Postans 1839).26
The importance of the followers of Gorakhnath was not simply
commensurate with their limited number but measurable rather in terms
of their place in the popular imagination. Like the legends of Gorakhnath
26
For translations from mid-twentieth century Hindi versions of the Gorakhnath cycle, see Digby (2000:
140–220).
himself, the ‘split-eared’ Yogis who followed him were widely celebrated in
the folklore of precolonial and colonial India, and it is their central place,
lingering in this ‘unreformed’ folk discourse on meditation, that renders the
Kanphata Yogis of interest.
In the 1830s, the Kanphatas of Kuchh in Gujarat were visited by
the British soldier Lieutenant Postans and again in the mid-1870s by the
local educational inspector, Dalpatram Khakhar. Khakhar was able to visit
several Kanphata maths and both his and Postans’ accounts record the oral
traditions associated with the Kuchh Yogis and their illustrious forbears.
What is most striking about the legends is the place of supernatural power
as their principal theme. However, like similar tales of meditational power
from other parts of India, the legends collected by Khakhar and Postans
were more deeply embedded in the local landscape than in the written
ideological formulations of their colonial equivalents.27 The most famous of
these narratives described the formation of the arid landscape of the Rann
of Kuchh as taking shape when the Yogi Dharmanath opened his eyes after
12 years of meditation and gazed from his hilltop towards the sea, whose
waves were immediately burned up to leave the desolation of the Rann
(Khakhar 1878: 48–49; Postans 1839: 268–69). Khakhar also recorded a
legend (noting its adaptation to refer to all the ruined towns of Gujarat) in
which Dharamnath, upset when someone spilled his begging bowl as he
emerged from meditation, cursed the town of Pattan—‘Pattan sab dãttan!’—
which then immediately sank beneath the ground (Khakhar 1878: 49).
Other folktales connected the Yogis to more explicitly political applications
of supernatural power (see also Bouillier 1989; Gold 1995). Gharibnath
of Kachh was thus held to have miraculously intervened in the elevation
or extermination of a whole series of figures at the Jadeja court in Kachh,
as well as to have expelled the Jats from Kachh after one of their children
disturbed his meditational repose (Khakhar 1878: 49–50).
Such folktales, making explicit homologies between meditational
power and political supremacy, were also recounted in connection with
Sufis, whose own decade-long sessions of breath control (habs-e-dam, pas-
e-anfas) often paralleled those of the Yogis in their political application (see
Bouillier 1992; Green 2004b). The presentation expounded in the writings
of Vivekananda and his vernacular contemporaries of breath as power
27
On similar legends from the nineteenth century Deccan, see Green (2004a).
and of meditation as the route to its acquisition was thus by no means a

discourse limited to a learned coterie of Yogi authors in Bengal, but rather
the adaptation of an older and popular discourse of supernatural politics
for the new colonial era. Although undoubtedly shaped by their imperial
climate, the indigenizing meditational politics of colonial India’s masters of
breath control had deep roots in the soil of Indian tradition.
Categorizing Meditation: From Universal

4GURKTCVKQPVQ*KPFWCPF/WUNKO$TGCVJU
We have already noted the increased role of bodily health in underwriting the
value of meditation at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the connections
we have seen in Vivekananda’s Raja-Yoga between physical culture, health,
inner purity and material success were shared by other Hindu writers of
the period, not least those connected to the Arya Samaj. In the writings
connected with such figures, the physical condition of the body was seen to
parallel the moral state of society at large.28 These themes were expounded
in numerous publications, such as the early twentieth century chapbook
entitled Akhlaqi wa Ruhani Sihhat (‘Moral and Spiritual Health’) written
by Mahashah Kashi Ram (Ra-m 1904). The central theme of this work was
that physical well-being (tandorosti, sihhat) was the outcome of spiritual and
moral purification. Here, in reflection of the new physiological orientation
of Yoga, the achievement of mental purity (pak) and peace (shant) was
directed not primarily towards spiritual ends but towards the physical health
of the body (ibid.: 2–5). As in Yoga works of the same period, through the
connection made between health and morality a continuum was posited
not only between mind and body but also between the private and the
social body. Ethical behaviour in the social world was seen to reflect the
level of purity achieved by individual minds and bodies. This was not least
the case with regard to the practical ends to which such purification and
the physical strength that derived from it were to be directed in the world
of work. In a strong encouragement towards social utility, unemployment
(bikari) was said to lead to disquietude (biqarari), illness (bimari) and suffering
(ranj) (ibid.: 6).29
28
Cf. Peter Gaeffke’s remarks on the main writers of Hindi essayist prose in the early twentieth century:
‘All of them believed in the glories of the Hindu past, and all were convinced that only the reform
of Hindu society on the basis of tya-g (asceticism) and patriotism could bring about self-government.’
See Gaeffke (1978: 21).
29
‘Subjection makes a people wholly tamasik, a sort of physical, intellectual and moral palsy seizes them...’
Other Hindu texts notwithstanding, close parallels may also be found in

works on Sufi meditation printed in North India during the same period.
Once again, chapbooks formed the most important means by which this
discourse entered the public realm. Ayina-e-khodshinasi (‘The Mirror of
Self-Knowledge’), a short Urdu work on the doctrine and practice of Sufi
meditation printed in Lucknow in 1890, is a case in point (Najm al-dƯn
1890). Its author, Muhammad Najm al-din, similarly placed the body and its
travails at the centre of his presentation of meditational practice. Once again,
the body was regarded as impure, with the author reminding his readers that
all of our bodies come from the unclean stomachs of our mothers (ibid.:
7). The physical body provided Najm al-din with the frame of reference
with which to conceive the means and ends of meditation: the body suffers
from heat and cold, requires perpetual nourishment, and causes misery and
distress throughout life that can only be alleviated through the liberation
of spiritual ‘passing away’ (fana) (ibid.: 6–16). As in Kashi Ram’s Akhlaqi
wa Ruhani Sihhat, physical illness also played a central role in the rationale
of meditation, with a rhetoric of physical suffering counterbalanced with
instructions on the restorative ‘exercise’ (mashq) of the chanting of pious
formulae (zikr) (ibid.: 12–17). Here in the form of a provincial chapbook
was a subtle reconfiguration of Sufi doctrine that placed new emphasis
on the physical body, how to understand it and, in turn, relate to it. The
colonial transformation of Sufism seen earlier in the overseas missionary
career of ‘Inayat Khan can also be traced here in the vernacular sphere of
the book markets of the United Provinces.
This heightened Sufi emphasis on bodily purity was echoed in many
other Urdu publications of the period, such as Mawlwi Muhammad Salih’s
Silsila-e-Islam (‘The Tradition of Islam’). Framed in the format of a series
of questions and answers between a disciple (shagird) and his master (ustad),
in addition to emphasizing the benefits of formal prayer (namaz) like many
Sufi works from this period, the Silsila-e-Islam was largely devoted to the
question of ritual impurity (najasat) and its avoidance.The purity of the body
thus played an important role in the text, with an entire section devoted to
cleansing the body; subsections discussed ways to purify the mouth if it had
touched alcohol and the hair if it had been dyed (Sa-lih 1328 [1910]: 103–09).
Even beyond the arid terrain inhabited by such works, the same concern
(cf. the words of Aurobindo, ‘Politics and Spirituality’, published in Bande Mataram Daily, 9 November
1907, and reprinted in Mukherjee and Mukherjee 1997: 189–92).
for purity was central to the language and ethos of the works on Muslim
meditation discussed earlier. In this context too we witness the importance
of a discourse on breathing that sought to Islamise even the most quotidian
of corporeal activities. In the descriptions of techniques of breath control in
his Ziya al-qulub, Hajji Imdad Allah described one breathing technique as a
‘sweeping brush for the heart’ (jarub-e-qalb) capable of cleansing the heart of
all dust and dirt (Faru-q 1898: 137). For the influential Sufi Habib ‘Ali Shah
(d. 1905), the discipline of Sufi etiquette (adab) was a hermetically closed
system, a physical culture complete and self-sufficient in its own right. To
the east of Habib ‘Ali’s centre in Bombay, in the opening decades of the
twentieth century, Sufi meditation stood at the centre of a new purification
movement aimed at islamizing the ‘lapse’ Muslims of the Deccan countryside
in the hands of the Hyderabadi Sufi reformer, Mu‘in Allah Shah (d. 1926).
Like many of his contemporaries in other parts of India, Mu‘in Allah aimed
to achieve this through the promotion of an unambiguously Islamic life
praxis based on conformity to the shari‘a and the regular performance of
Sufi meditation (see Green 2005).
We have argued that the meditation practices promoted by the Hindu
and Muslim ideologues of nineteenth and early twentieth century India
were indigenizing forms of private physical resistance to colonial rule that
sited the body as the locus of cultural resistance. Yet in their intellectual
orientation many of the proponents of meditation were also communalist in
character, looking back at legitimate textual authorities (the Veda, Patanjali;
the Prophetic Sunna) rather than sideways at the contemporary social facts of
shared Muslim and Hindu traditions of meditational endeavour. For despite
the fact that caste groups comprising tens of thousands of Muslim Yogis
still existed in India at this time, Yoga was instead being defined in terms
of the social and intellectual categories suggested in ‘classical’ Vedic and
Vedantic writings which perforce excluded Islam as a frame of reference.30
While colonial Yogis discussed breath in terms of the Sanskritic vocabulary
of prana, for Sufi writers breath was correspondingly described through the
Perso-Arabic terminology of dam or nafas. In this way, breath itself came
to acquire a communalist dimension that shirked the everyday vernacular
of the ‘Hindustani’ term sans. A consequence of the colonial anxiety over
30
The 1891 Census recorded the existence of 38,137 Muslim Yogis in Punjab alone. By the time of the
1921 Census, only 31,158 Muslim Yogis were recorded in the whole of India (figures cited in Briggs
1938: 4–6).
the authenticity offered by textual precedent in ‘scriptural’ languages was

therefore the rejection of the middle ground of history that had comprised
the complex series of encounters between Sufis and Yogis.31 The quest for
unambiguous categorical purity therefore also extended to the social body,
with the result that the largely unwritten traditions of Muslim Yoga were
marginalized in favour of more transparently Hindu or Muslim forms of
meditation.
Breath control was by no means the exclusive domain of these religious
ideologues, but as we have seen, also played a central part in the nineteenth
century in folk traditions centring on the supernatural powers attainable by
mastery of the breath. Unlike the colonial Yoga and Sufi texts that placed
their respective forms of meditation within closely defined systems of
religious identification, this folk tradition was often less sectarian in nature,
which is to say, it employed a different set of categories than those of the
communalizing public sphere of print. If popular legends of Yogis and Sufis
competing in the longevity of their breaths and the ostentation of their
miracles remind us that there was no precolonial idyll in which religious
rivalries did not exist, what did nonetheless evolve at times was a shared
popular understanding that Sufis and Yogis were doing much the same
thing (see Green 2004c). In contrast to the abstract technical discourse of
written Sufi and Yoga theory, this world of narrative was much more open
to the subversive bricolage of Sufi Yoga. Numerous precolonial examples
may be found in Hindwi romance literature, as for example in Shaykh
Qutban’s well-known Mirgavati (1503) and in such lesser-known works as
the Citravali (1613) of ‘Usman of Ghazipur.32 Meditation techniques were
by no means the sole exchange between precolonial Yogis and Sufis. Nath
Yogis referred to their masters as pirs using the same Persianate terminology
as the Sufis and also wore the same patchwork cloaks, carried the same
coco-de-mer begging bowls (kashkul, khappar) and buried their dead in
mausolea that were often architecturally indistinguishable from those of
the Sufis (see Briggs 1938: plates v and viii; and Khakhar 1878: 48–51).
While printed practical guidebooks on meditation did offer important
31
Of course, these appeals to antique scripture were part of a wider neoclassical ethos that evolved
through the interaction of Indian scholars with European Orientalists, a movement whose invention
of a ‘classical’ era involved no less a denigration of a marginalized ‘middle’ ages than its European
counterpart.
32
On these Sufi Yoga romances, see McGregor (1984: 21–24, 66–71, 107, 148, 151, 188).
possibilities of self-definition and transgressive meditational praxis, such

voices were often lost in the clamour of calls to purify the social body.
Traditions of Muslim Yoga certainly continued to exist throughout the
twentieth century (see Dahnhardt 2002).33 But such formulations appeared
increasingly oxymoronic as modernist paradigms of religious definitions
came to replace the bricolage of religious practices born through centuries
of ad hoc negotiations on local ground rather than through reference to the
unambiguous written world of doctrine.
Belonging to textual genealogies drawing ultimately on Sanskrit and
Arabic models, both Yogi and Sufi writings on meditation were more
entrenched in cycles of inter-textuality than in the actual practices of the
societies that produced them. As Carl Ernst has demonstrated in a series
of recent studies of the Arabo-Persian literature of Yoga, textual precedent
played a far more important role in Indo-Muslim meditation manuals than
the observation of local practice (Ernst 2003, 2005). In the written sphere of
Indo-Arabic and Indo-Persian at least, such practices were generally ignored
in favour of more clearly ‘Islamic’ modes of practice.34 Yet the sudden
appearance of lithographic printing in India was able to transform such
handwritten manuals, previously passed between relatively small numbers of
learned and so likened minds, into a far more pervasive literature of socio-
religious norms. Print, then, was able to relegate custom to the defensive
margins in a way that (whatever the logocentric orientations of historians)
the manuscript ecumene had never previously managed to do.
This turning away from ambiguous social complexity towards the
uncompromising clarity of written doctrine may be seen in many Hindu
writings from the nineteenth century. Like the religious sobriety of Indo-
Islamic reform, temperance formed an important part of the neo-Hindu
movements of the colonial period. In their search for ‘classical’ authenticity,
figures like Vivekananda and Aurobindo ignored the living practice of
large numbers of Yogi practitioners to create a sober and restrained Yoga
based instead on what they presented as scriptural precedents, ignoring the
widespread use of cannabis and opium among the existing traditions of
Yoga.35 The suppression of the intoxicated breaths of the Kanphata Yogis
33
On Yoga and Sufi synthesis beyond India, see Winstedt (1961).
34
Cf. the Persian and Arabic texts studied in Ernst (2003, 2005) with the Bengali works of Sufi Yoga
studied in Cashin (1995: 116–57).
35
Both Khakhar (1878) and Postans (1839) remarked on the extensive use of opium at the Yoga maths
they visited in Kuchch.
and other precolonial traditions of Yoga was in this sense concomitant with
the suppression of the categorically transgressive praxis of the Muslim Yogis,
for these logocentric movements were axiomatic in their disregarding of
living practice in favour of antique writing. The pure pranayama breathing
of the Yoga revivalists was in this way coterminous with a wider process of
social and cultural purification. The inward focus on the person and the
purification of bodily behaviour represented by so many of India’s colonial
masters of meditation thus involved a rejection of the cross-traditions that
had over the previous centuries emerged from India’s pluralistic societies.
As a discipline based on the purification and control of the body, the
ascetic physical culture envisaged by the Sufi and Yogi writers we have
discussed was the analogue of a wider discourse of social purification.
Just as the female body became subject to ideological control of its social
and sexual interaction beyond the boundaries of the community, so the
disciplines of Yogi and Sufi practice sought to instil an ascetic self-discipline
that would constrain the bodies of both men and women (see Gupta 2002,
2005).36 From the regular performance of ritual Muslim prayer to the
careful control of all the fluids and foodstuffs that entered the body, the
purity instilled in the meditational body was in this sense the mirror of the
wider ideological obsession with the purification of Islam and Hinduism
as criteria for community in colonial India. This quest for purity prevented
the transgressive praxis of the Muslim Yogis from entering the new public
sphere just as it suppressed the traditional use of cannabis and opium in
meditation to deflect disrepute from its Indian reformulation of Victorian
moral puritanism.
Yet while print offered broad outlets for religious polemic and new
formulations of collective identity, it also opened up possibilities for more
individualistic forms of self-definition. The North Indian ‘Hindustani’ book
market encouraged readers to choose liberally between works on Yogi
or Sufi practice and, in doing so, to exercise a degree of choice between
the different programmes described and the distinct benefits such books
offered. Alongside the possibility for public disputation and polemic that
the printed sphere offered, such possibilities for individual self-conditioning
coined the other face of print. For it is important to distinguish writings
of a more collectivist kind from those of a more individualist orientation.
36
On semen retention as an assertion of political control over the self, see Srivastava (2004).
Alongside Urdu manuals on cricket, table manners and other forms of

the physical culture of empire, such works offered their readers a range of
indigenous alternatives to imperial medicine, science and physical culture,
not least in their appeal to the worldly benefits of breath control. Meditation
manuals held open to their readers the promise of self-transformation and
the possibility of self-definition. It is this print-mediated appeal to a new
individualism that makes them important, if wholly neglected, way-markers
of South Asia’s road to modernity.
Conclusions
According to the memoirs of the Iranian Sufi Safi ‘Ali Shah (1835–99),
dictated in Tehran during the last years of his life, before departing India
for Mecca around 1866 he spent a few days wandering around the port
of Surat. Although his travel arrangements had gone drastically wrong, Safi
claimed that he encountered a Yogi who calmly assured him that he would
make his hajj after all. Shortly after the meeting, Safi ran into a wealthy
friend who informed him of a ship departing for Mecca and saw to it
that the expenses for his journey were taken care of. Looking back on this
episode, Safi chose not to praise the generosity of his friend but to praise
instead the Yogi, whose supernatural power he described as his nafas or
‘breath’ (see Homa-yu-n 1371 [1992]: 258–62).37 Before the emergence of
the large-scale attempts to purify the physical and social body in colonial
India that were brokered by the public sphere of vernacular print, this sense
of breathing as universal praxis and cosmic principle had for centuries
allowed both practices and legends concerning breath control to be shared
between Hindus and Muslims. While encounters between the worlds of
Yoga and Sufism continued throughout the colonial period and beyond
it—in the ‘Sufi Vedanta’ of the Hyderabadi aristocrat Sir Ahmad Husayn
Amin Jang or in the provincial North Indian Hindu Sufism of Ananda
Yoga—the legacy of the colonial purification of Indian meditation was a
narrowing of the spectrum of legitimate physical culture (Jang n.d.; see also
Dahnhardt 2002). Through the publication of a series of writings on the
body and its proper training, here was a collective attempt to print upon the
body boundaries between Hindu, Muslim and Christian physical culture,
whether in terms of meditation, hygiene, sexuality or table manners. Re-
37
On SafƯ’s travels more generally, see Green (2004d).
formed doctrines and practices of breathing were only one part of this
wider process. But from the promotion of Vedic pranayama to the survival
of a folk discourse of miraculous habs-e-dam, as the epitome of the life of the
body breath remained the focus of a wider discourse on the human body as
the microcosm of society.
Yet for all the allure of unmediated experience, the proponents of
colonial meditation wrote themselves into nets of inter-textuality that
conversely detached them from the experience of the social world around
them. As we have seen, in colonial India the transgressive category of
the Muslim Yogi did not appeal to either the Hindu or Muslim public
masters of meditation. Nor was there any appeal to the similarly composite
meditational culture of the Nath Yogis, with their pirs and dervish robes; nor
to the cosmopolitan folk traditions describing the breath-control of non-
sectarian babas. The social facts of living practice were rejected in favour of
the more simplistic realm of written traditions, drawing on Sanskritic and
Arabo-Persian learning which had by its nature always remained closed
and self-perpetuating. In this sense, there was something deeply fraudulent
about the written discourse of meditation during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, for this was less the high road to real experience than
the disguised pathway to its concealment.
So the ambiguity of the world was rejected in favour of the clarity of
writing. Much of this change can be traced to the massive expansion in the
mediation of writing that was brought about by the spread of cheap print
in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Colonial Yoga cannot be understood apart from the shuddhi rituals of
the Arya Samaj any more than the nineteenth century publication of Sufi
meditation manuals can be seen apart from the explosion of printed manuals
on conformity to the shari‘a. As participants in the same public sphere, both
the Yoga and Sufi practices promoted in writing during this period turned
their practitioners away from members of what were increasingly seen as
other ‘religious’ communities. Instead, practitioners were to be transformed
into the physical embodiments of textually-mediated religious ideals that
would ultimately narrow the choice of physical role models into the virile
post-colonial masculinity of the Prophet Muhammad and Lord Ram.
When the expression of the politics of the body once again shifted from
the self to others, from inner to outer violence, the offspring would be
the ideological armies of Ram and Muhammad that haunt the new urban
and mountain battlegrounds of South Asia today.38 Yet it is perhaps not too
fanciful to suggest a connection, however metaphorical, between the Sufism
and Yoga of the colonial era and the psychological oppression of empire.
For control of the breath is an assertion of proprietorial control over a body
whose rhythms are no longer contingent on the clamour of the outside
world. Perhaps here—between the shallow and frightened breaths of the
subaltern and the deep and liberating breaths of the meditation master—lie
the intimate sounds of the history of colonialism.
4GHGTGPEGU
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PART II
Debating Reform
5
The Enemy Within
Madrasa and Muslim Identity in North India
Arshad Alam*
It is true that the BJP and other Hindu organizations hate Muslims. But at least
they hate us openly and do not hide their intentions. But the real enemy lives
amongst us; they claim to be Muslims and yet are leading the Muslims astray. They
are the greatest enemy of Islam. (A student at Madras a Ashrafia, Mubarakpur)
Introduction
L ong before 9/11, madrasas were made infamous in India by Hindu Right
wing parties.The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), theVishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP) and their ideological fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), all blamed the madrasas for teaching hatred towards the
majority (Hindu) community and engaging in what they claimed were
anti-national activities. In 1995, the VHP declared that it would not tolerate
the nefarious designs of madrasas as they were teaching ‘anti-Hindu’ ideas
to their students. The Hindu Right termed the madrasas ‘dens of terror’
*
I wish to thank the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowship Programme which supported my
doctoral research of which this paper is a part. Some portions of this paper were presented at the
‘International Workshop on Islamic Learning’ at University of Erfurt, Germany and seminar on
‘Sociology of Education’ at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I thank all of those who
commented on earlier drafts.
training jihadis to massacre Hindus and turn India into an Islamic nation.1
During the BJP led government, a ministerial committee report of 2001
stated that madrasas were engaged in systematic indoctrination of Muslims
in fundamentalist ideology, which was detrimental to communal harmony
(Sikand 2005: 271). The Report suggested that ‘modern education’ be
imparted in madrasas in an effort to bring them into the ‘national mainstream’.
Certainly, while in power the BJP could persuade only a handful of madrasas
to introduce modern subjects, for which grants were made available by the
state. Most madrasas were suspicious of the state’s intention and rejected
the offer.2 Such ideas on madrasa education were not the monopoly of the
Hindu Right alone, but were voiced on different occasions even by the Left
led government in West Bengal (Milli Gazette 2002). It is true, however,
that it was the BJP and its ideological partners which consciously tried to
foster the terrorist image of madrasas, as it suited the wider aim of portraying
Indian Muslims as the belligerent ‘other’.
It is clear that most contemporary debates on Indian madrasas remain
oblivious to the complexities of Indian Muslim communities, especially
their institutions. Both liberal and right wing commentators assume that
madrasas are the same across India and that they reproduce a monolithic
Muslim identity which is antithetical both to other religious traditions and
secularism. I will argue that the reality is much more complex: not only is
‘Islam’ itself a matter of fierce debate amongst Indian Muslims, but madrasas
are principally concerned with the transmission of their own (maslaki)
understanding of Islam. Rather than working towards creating a unified
Muslim identity in opposition to other religious faiths, madrasas reproduce
maslaki identities which are then internalized as properly ‘Islamic’ by their
respective followers and students. Discussing the processes and strategies
through which such an identity is internalized by madrasa students, I will
argue that—despite the rhetoric of right-wing Hindu parties—a madrasa
student’s ‘other’ is not the Hindu, but a Muslim from another maslak.3
1
For a sense of Hindutva’s tirade against the madrasas, see Godbole (2001: 3889–90); Katju (2003:
109–10); Kumar (2000: 977–78); and Sikand (2001: 3342–43, 2005: 267–77).
2
Indian madrasas argued that in the name of introducing modern subjects, in reality the government
wanted to control their functioning. More recently they have also rejected the state’s demand to
constitute a Central Madrasa Board. This also seems to be the case in Pakistan. The madrasas see
themselves as guardians of the Muslim ‘public sphere’ and resist interference within it. See Zaman
(1999).
3
Following Messick (2005), ‘maslak’ (maslaki: of maslak) may be understood as a named and typically
enduring ‘interpretive community’ which are fundamentally relational in nature; that is, individual
The Enemy Within / 119
Certainly, this is not an original idea. Historians have long documented

the maslaki divide in South Asia, demonstrating that Muslim identity itself
has been a site of contestation among different social groups on the basis of
differing interpretation of religious texts.They have also identified the central
role of madrasas in perpetuating maslaki rivalries (see, for example, Metcalf
2002; Saiye d and Talib 1985: 206; Sanyal 1999 and Sikand 2005: 245–46).4
However, owing to the nature and focus of their works, historians cannot
specify how and through what practices such sectarian identities are actually
formed. In other words, what is missing from their analyses is the very process
of identity formation, which is the focus of my discussion. I will consider the
formation of Muslim identities by observing various strategies at work in a
prominent madrasa in North India. While I will focus mostly on a madrasa
called al Jamiat al Ashrafiya Misbahul Ulum (hereafter madrasa Ashrafiya), for
comparative purposes I will also refer to another madrasa called Ihya ul Ulum.
Both madrasas are located in the same qasba (small town) of Mubarakpur.
The Qasba and Madrasas

Mubarakpur is located within Azamgarh district of eastern Uttar Pradesh
in North India. It has long been a town of low-caste Muslim weavers
who call themselves Ansaris.5 The town is primarily known for producing
Banarsi sarees, traded in India and abroad. However, it is not just for their
craftsmanship that the Ansaris of Mubarakpur want to be known, but also as
upholders of Islam.6 According to the 2001 Indian census, Mubarakpur has
a population of 51,100,7 although locals put the figure in 2004 as 80,000.
The qasba is predominantly Muslim, with Hindus comprising only 10 per
cent of the population. Muslims are divided into Barelwis, Deobandis, Ahl e
Hadis and the Shi’as, with the majority being the Barelwis. All these maslaks
have their own madrasas: Bab ul Ilm and the Dar ul Taleem madrasas belong
to the Shi’as and Ahl e Hadis, respectively, while the Deobandis run the Ihya
ul Ulum madrasa and the Barelwis, the Ashrafiya.
maslaks exist in interpretive worlds constituted by other such interpretive communities. Although
Messick has used the above description to understand Mazhabs (Schools of Law), I find his description
useful for my purpose too. I have consistently used the word maslak/maslaki instead of the more
commonly used ‘sect/sectarian’.
4
For the specific case of Pakistan, see Malik (1998); Rahman (2004) and Zaman (2004).
5
On the history of the Qasba, see Mubarakpuri (1974) and Pandey (1984).
6
One of the common phrases which I heard from them was: Hum Islam ka parcham buland kiye hue hain
(We have kept the flag of Islam flying in this area).
7
Data from Mubarakpur Municipal Population Register.
Madrasas such as the Ihya ul Ulum and Ashrafiya have had a common
origin in one maktab (small madrasa) called Misbahul Ulum, founded in
1899. This institution was financed by a few wealthy families, as well as
through popular donations.8 It was during 1915–16 that differences arose
between the only two full-time teachers of the original maktab— Mahmud
Marufi and Siddique Ghoswi—over whether Allah could lie.9
While Marufi argued that since Allah was capable of doing anything and
everything, he could also lie, Siddique Ghoswi argued that Allah could not
lie and it was blasphemous to ascribe bad deeds to Allah. Ghoswi accused
Marufi of being a Wahabi and under the influence of Deobandi ideas. This
led to a formal split and both teachers founded their own separate madrasas.
While Ghoswi moved out of the original maktab and founded madrasa
Misbahul Ulum, Marufi stayed, but renamed the original madrasa as Ihya
ul Ulum.
The split was one of the most important events in Mubarakpur, leading
to an awareness of belonging to different maslaks, Barelwi or Deobandi.The
fact that Friday prayers continued to be conducted under a common Imam
indicates that sectarian differences were not yet acute. But this arrangement
did not last long. In 1917, Madrasa Ihya ul Ulum saw the arrival of
Shukrullah Mubarakpuri. Fresh from the madrasa at Deoband, Shukrullah
was nominated Nazim (Manager) and Principal of the madrasa. True to his
reformist Deobandi ideas, he criticized various existing customary practices,
such as those associated with circumcision rituals, Eid festivals and marriage
ceremonies. As a Sunni reformist, Shukrullah was particularly incensed
by the adoption of Shi’a rituals, strongly opposing participation in tazia10
8
Regardless of a recognized common origin, histories written by madrasas Ihya ul Ulum and Ashrafiya
diverge. For the Deobandis, the maktab founded within the Masjid Deena Baba was originally called
Ihya ul Ulum, while the Barelwis claim that it was called Misbahul Ulum. See Misbahi (2001)
and Qasmi’s—present Nazim (Manager) and Principal of Ihya ul Ulum—‘Ihya ul Ulum ki Deeni
Khidmaat’, a printed khutba which he delivered in 1997.
9
This problem had emanated from the writings of Muhammad Ismail, who in his book Taqwaitul Iman,
allegedly wrote that it was within the power of Allah to create another Muhammad if he so wishes.
This argument was refuted by various Ulama, most notably by Fazl e Haq Khairabadi who argued that
since Prophet Muhammad was described by Allah as the seal of Prophets, thinking about the possibility
of another Muhammad would be tantamount to the belief that Allah had lied. For a fuller discussion of
the problem and the debates which followed nationally, see Misbahi (n.p.).
10
Replicas of tombs of Hasan and Husain, both grandsons of Prophet Muhammad, carried in public
procession during Muharram to commemorate their martyrdom. Muharram is the name of the month
in which they were martyred.
processions during Muharram (Mubarakpuri 2004). He also introduced

separate Friday prayers for his followers. Being an Alim trained at Deoband
added to his stature in Mubarakpur where he was instrumental in winning
over the support of some Muslims who were till recently Barelwis. At this
time, the Deobandi Ihya ul Ulum madrasa was supported by a few, relatively
educated and prosperous Muslims of the qasba (Mannan n.p.).11 Most of
the members of the shura (committee) which oversaw the functioning of
Madrasa Ihya ul Ulum are addressed as sardars,12 which attests that they
were important people in Mubarakpur. On the other hand, Misbahul Ulum
found support from a zamindar13 called Amin Ansari. Other members of
its committee, however, were mostly petty traders and small shop owners.
The emerging Deobandi–Barelwi divide in Mubarakpur thus had some
correlation to the social and economic status of its respective followers.
Deobandi reformism, led by Shukrullah Mubarakpuri, can be understood
as an attempt of one social group (which was relatively wealthy) to redefine
the popular practice of Islam in the qasba.14
The increasing popularity of Shukrullah did not go unnoticed among
the Barelwis. Muslims of Mubarakpur were murids15 of one Ali Husain
Ashrafi (1867–1948), then gaddi-nashin16 of the famous shrine at Kichocha,
with a lineage traced to Abdul Qadir Gilani17 (d. 1166). One of Ali Husain
11
Abdul Mannan was member of the shura (committee) and Mufti of Madrasa Ashrafiya till the 1980s.
This assertion is also based on various interviews conducted with elderly residents of the Qasba.
12
The title sardar has various uses. In textile and jute industries, sardars were labour contractors and their
status depended on how many labour hands they brought to the industry. Since Mubarakpur was a
weaving town, they were important for the local industry. Also, the headmen of a mohalla (locality,
roughly equivalent to a municipal ward) were referred to as sardars. In both cases, they were socially
important and relatively wealthy residents of the qasba.
13
In its popular usage zamindar means a person having considerable land.
14
Durkheim’s argument (as stated by Eickelman 1978: 486) that ‘changes in ideas of knowledge in
complex societies and the means by which such ideas are transmitted result from continual struggles
among competing groups within society, each of which seeks domination or influence’, seems to
fit the description of events in Mubarakpur. For such a redefinition and reform of popular Islamic
practice effected by a relatively educated and wealthy class in other contexts, see, among others, Soares
(2005: 189) and Warms (1992: 497).
15
Murid literally means ‘one who is desirous’; a murid is a disciple to a personal Pir (Sufi master), in this
case of Ali Husain Ashrafi, popularly known as Ashrafi Miyan.
16
‘Gaddi’ means throne, seat of authority at a shrine; gaddi-nashin refers to the person who represents
that authority.
17
Abdul Qadir Gilani of Baghdad is regarded as the founder of the Qadiri order of Sufism. Most of
the Barelwis are followers of this order. Kichocha, now in district Ambedkar Nagar of Uttar Pradesh,
became the seat of Qadiri order after Ashraf Jehangir, a descendant of Abdul Qadir Gilani settled there
in the twelfth century. Ali Husain Ashrafi is regarded as the 24th descendant of Abdul Qadir Gilani.
Ashrafi’s murids was one Amjad Ali.18 Being from the neighbouring town
of Ghosi, Amjad Ali was a well-known Alim in Mubarakpur. Moreover, he
was related to Siddique Ghoswi, who was instrumental in founding madrasa
Misbahul Ulum after the split. Responding to the Deobandis’ growing
popularity, Amjad Ali persuaded one of his students, Abdul Aziz, to go to
Mubarakpur to attempt to arrest the Deobandis’ progress. He advised Abdul
Aziz that he was sending him to an akhara (wrestling arena), and that by
the wishes of Allah, he would emerge victorious (Misbahi 1975). Finding
themselves together in Mubarakpur, between 1934 and 1936,Abdul Aziz and
Shukrullah involved the whole qasba in a series of munazaras (oral religious
debates). At the end of this two-year period of intense ideological rivalry—
where both sides claimed victory—the qasba became more polarized.
In 1935, the prefix Ashrafiya was added to Madrasa Misbahul Ulum
in deference to Ali Husain Ashrafi and a foundation stone was laid for the
construction of a new madrasa19 which eventually became—and remains
to date—the most important Barelwi madrasa in India. In the midst of such
developments, the rival Ihya ul Ulum madrasa has remained far behind
in popularity and following. While Ashrafiya has grown to accommodate
about 1,500 students in its various hostels, Ihya ul Ulum has the capacity for
only 250.20 Ashrafiya’s success is due on the one hand to the fact that the
majority of Mubarakpur Muslims are Barelwis and on the other to its wider
geographical network of donors and students compared to Ihya ul Ulum.
But even more important in the fortunes of Ashrafiya was the association
of renowned Ulama with the madrasa. Among its ranks were Mufti Abdul
Mannan, Zeya ul Mustafa (son of Amjad Ali) and Arshadul Qadri, all of
whom commanded great respect among the Barelwis and were instrumental
in creating a large network of prosperous donors, even as economic support
to Ihya ul Ulum madrasa dwindled. Moreover, the current chief of Madrasa
Ashrafiya, Abdul Hafiz (Abdul Aziz’s son)—a graduate from Aligarh Muslim
University—has started schools for local girls, which has brought the madrasa
yet new donors.
18
Amjad Ali (1878–1948) also known as ‘Sadr us Sharia’ among the Barelwis, spent 18 years at Bareilly
in the service of Ahmad Riza Khan, often helping him with fatwa writing as well as teaching in the
madrasa there (cf. Qasmi 1976: 64; Sanyal 1999: 299).
19
Most of the donations for the new madrasa were collected locally and the land on which the new
building was to come up was donated by Amin Ansari, a Zamindar of Mubarakpur.
20
Data for the year 2003–04; from the offices of madrasas Ashrafiya and Ihya ul Ulum, respectively.
Over time, Ashrafiya’s own outlook has changed. The once-competing

Deobandi Ihya ul Ulum madrasa is no longer perceived as a threat. Apart
from preparing students to become religious scholars, Ashrafiya nowadays
also concentrates on advising local Muslims on their everyday problems,
offering counsel from its own theological perspective. Its monthly magazine,
Mahanama Ashrafiya, increasingly cautions Barelwi Muslims against shirk
(associating partners to Allah) and bida (reprehensible innovations),
campaigns which were once the prerogative of Deobandis. While in
earlier times a famous graduate of Ashrafiya—Arshadul Qadri—took the
Deobandis to task for condemning local religious and customary practices,
today Ashrafiya has turned to encourage Muslims to get rid of ‘un-Islamic’
practices’—such as singing and dancing during marriage feasts—and to
keep life-cycle ceremonies as simple as possible. Ashrafiya has also been at
the forefront of campaigns to dissuade Mubarakpur’s Sunni Muslims from
taking out tazia processions during Muharram, reminding them that ‘they
should not behave like Shias’. Thus Madrasa Ashrafiya today sees itself in a
similar reforming role as the Deobandi Ihya ul Ulum saw itself during its
heydays.21
Regardless of such apparent ideological convergence,important doctrinal
differences remain between Deobandis and Barelwis. The most important
concerns the understanding of the person of Prophet Muhammad. For the
Barelwis, Muhammad is not just a ‘model man’; rather, he was bestowed
with special powers which make him truly unique. For the Deobandis,
in contrast, the Prophet should be emulated as an example of perfection
and piety, but should not to be venerated, since to do so would constitute
shirk (associating partners to Allah).Through their networks of madrasas, this
basic doctrinal difference is transmitted to students. I will now move on to
consider some strategies and practices through which the Madrasa Ashrafiya
reproduces sectarian divisions.
The Madrasa Constitution

The formative influences of the 1934–36 sectarian debates on Ashrafiya are
reflected on the madrasa’s Dastur e Amal (Constitution). This document not
only set a blueprint for the growth and development of the madrasa, but
21
Jeffery et al. (2004: 40, 42) have argued that such a reforming role of madrasas should be seen as a
‘civilizing mission’ which is directed towards a relatively poor and less educated class of Muslims.
also specified that Ashrafiya will remain always ‘Sunni’22 in orientation. At

least three of the objectives laid down in its Dastur relate to the propagation
of Barelwi maslak.23 The very first objective of the madrasa is to ‘spread
education of true religion’. The Dastur goes on to define ‘true religion’ as
the mazhab (faith) of Ahl e Sunnat wa Jamaat (people of the Prophet’s ways)
specifying that a ‘Sunni’ is a Muslim who follows and practises the path of
Ala Hazrat,24 that is, of the Barelwis. This definition is reiterated by stating
that a Sunni is one who believes in every word written by ‘Ala Hazrat’.The
Dastur also makes it incumbent on Sunnis to struggle against the Deobandis,
Ahl e Hadis and Shi’as, all collectively labelled as badmazhabis.25 In other
words, those who do not subscribe to the Barelwi definition of Islam are
not considered to be ‘true’ Muslims.
The Dastur also has a section called ghair mutabaddil usul (non-changeable
laws). These are three, and two of them underscore once again the Barelwi
orientation of the madrasa.26 Clause 1 states that ‘Members of this madrasa,
from a humble sweeper to the Manager, should all be the followers of Ahl e
Sunnat wa Jamaat’. No non-Sunni should ever find a place in this madrasa.
It goes on to state that, ‘If for any reason this madrasa falls into the hands
of a non-Sunni, then any Sunni from anywhere in India will have the
right to appeal to the courts in order to bring back the madrasa into the
hands of Sunnis once again’. Clause 3 makes it mandatory for all officials
of the madrasa, including members of Majlis e Shura (general committee)
and Majlis e Amla (working committee), to take a pledge of loyalty to the
madrasa. This pledge includes the statement, ‘I am a true Sunni Muslim and
I believe in every word of Hussam al Haramain’.27 Ashrafiya is not unique
in insisting that its officials abide to a specific definition of ‘true Islam’. All
madrasas do so. The Deobandi Ihya ul Ulum also insists that its teachers and
22
In this case ‘Sunni’ refers to a maslak rather than denoting the broad division between Shi’as and
Sunnis. In the Dastur, the terms Sunni, Barelwi and Ahl e Sunnat wa Jamaat are used interchangeably.
23
Dastur e Amal, al Jamiatul Ashrafiya, Purpose/Objective, Clauses 1, 5 and 7.
24
Ahmad Riza Khan is referred to as Ala Hazrat by the Barelwis. For more on the person and his
importance for the Barelwis, see Sanyal (1999).
25
A ‘bad-mazhabi’ is a person with wrong beliefs.The word mazhab literally in one of the four main Sunni
law schools (Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki and Hanbali) is used in the Barelwi context in the more general
sense of ‘faith’ or ‘belief ’.
26
Dastur, Ghair Mutabaddil Usul, Clauses 1 and 3.
27
Hussam al Haramain, a polemical work written in 1903 by Ahmad Riza Khan, is a collection of
fatwas against what it calls ‘Deobandis’ and ‘Wahabis’. It was in this work that Ahmad Riza Khan had
pronounced the fatwa of kufr (infidelity) on some of the Ulama of Deoband and, by extension, anyone
associated with the Deoband madrasa. On Hussam al Haramain, see Sanyal (1999: 231–40).
other zimmedaran (responsible) should be followers of their maslak, which

they argue is the ‘true Islam’.28 Even in madrasas where this injunction is
not written down in a Dastur, there is a marked preference for recruiting
teachers and other officials from within the maslak. What distinguishes
Ashrafiya, though, is the insistence that its members should take a pledge
of allegiance. In the qasba, even some Barelwis find this clause unacceptable
since, they argue, loyalty should be given only to Allah.
Criticisms apart, the institution of the pledge shows how strongly
Ashrafiya is wedded to the Barelwi ideology. For the madrasa’s students,
therefore, Ashrafiya is a pre-given ideological space, marked by a strictly-
defined value system to which all the members of the madrasa are called to
conform. It is against this ideological backdrop that students take to their
learning and everyday tasks. Coming from different geographic regions and
from families which are nominal Muslims,29 students acquire a common
identity in becoming Barelwi Muslims. I now turn to the processes through
which such an identity is acquired.
Texts and Identity

Like most Indian madrasas, Ashrafiya also teaches what it calls the
Dars e Nizami,30 the curriculum developed by Mulla Nizamuddin (d. 1748).
In contrast to the medieval system of Muslim education,31 when there was
no formal and fixed system of instruction, Nizamuddin for the first time
gave form to a madrasa curriculum which came to be known as Dars e
Nizami. This curriculum had a bias in favour of what was called the maqulat
(rational sciences) as opposed to manqulat (copied or transmitted sciences).
Thus, books on Hikmat (Philosophy), Mantiq (logic) and Riyazziyyat
28
Interview, Moeed Qasmi, Nazim and Principal of madrasa Ihya ul Ulum; the madrasa as yet does not
have a written constitution.
29
I use the word ‘nominal’ for those Muslims who are not aware of theological problems within Islam.
To use Clifford Geertz words, they are not ‘scriptural Muslims’; rather they follow Islam as a ‘tradition’
which has been transmitted over generations. The majority of the students at Madrasa Ashrafiya are
from such nominally Muslim families.
30
On the Dars e Nizami, see Robinson (2002: 42–55) and Sufi (1941).
31
For the historical ‘origins’ of medieval Islamic education, see Makdisi (1981); for a revised view of
Makdisi, see Tibawi (1974: 212–27) and Tritton (1957); for a more anthropological treatment on the
nature and character of medieval Islamic education, see, among others, Berkey (1992), Chamberlain
(1994), Messick (1993) and Starrett (1998); and for South Asia region, see, among others, Jafar (1972)
and Nizami (1996).
(Astronomy and Mathematics) outnumbered texts on purely religious

subjects as Kalam (Theology) and Fiqh (Jurisprudence).32 But the Dars e
Nizami taught in contemporary madrasas, including Madrasa Ashrafiya, has
little in common with Mulla Nizamuddin’s curriculum, resembling more
the modified version devised by the Ulama at the madrasa of Deoband in the
late nineteenth century, which drastically reduced the content of ‘rational
studies’ and put more emphasis on studying hadis. In this revised Deobandi
curriculum, religious education became the focus of madrasas. Indeed, in
popular imagination, madrasas today are associated with religious learning
alone, a perception which is shared, as well as defended, by the Ulama of
different madrasas (Zaman 1999: 297).
When Ashrafiya and Ihya ul Ulum madrasas both claim that they are
teaching what they call the Dars e Nizami, it does not mean that they teach
identical syllabi. In the absence of a single governing body, madrasas in India
have considerable freedom in choosing books to be taught in their respective
institutions. For example, even though the study of hadis forms an important
part in the curriculum of all madrasas, the commentaries selected for this
purpose differ according to the maslaki affiliation of specific madrasas. The
ideological orientation of the particular commentator affects the understanding
of hadis in different madrasas, so that hadis classes in madrasas such as Ashrafiya
and Ihya ul Ulum become spaces for ideological transmission.
In a hadis lesson in Madrasa Ashrafiya, for instance, a verse from Bukhari
Sharif 33 was being taught to explain students that Prophet Muhammad
possessed ilm e ghaib (knowledge of the unseen). The teacher stated that
according to this tradition, the Prophet knew who would go to heaven and
who would go to hell, in that he was omniscient. The teacher stressed that
this was one of the most important Barelwi beliefs; but in the same breath
he also made it clear that, contrary to this ‘truth’, the Deobandis believe
that the Prophet was given knowledge of only certain events. In the same
way, in Ihya ul Ulum, madrasa teachers cited another hadis recorded in the
same Bukhari Sharif, according to which Allah alone possessed knowledge
of ilm e kiyamat (knowledge of the Judgement Day). On the strength of
this hadis in Bukhari, teachers told the students that the Prophet had only
32
According to Francis Robinson, the emphasis on maqulat was due to the ‘superior training it offered
to prospective lawyers, judges and administrators’ and its popularity was explained by the fact that the
skills it offered ‘were in demand from the increasingly sophisticated and complex bureaucratic systems
of 18th century India’. See Robinson (2002: 53).
33
Bukhari Sharif is considered by the Sunnis as one of the six authentic collections of Hadis. They were
compiled by al Bukhari (810–870) using various oral and written sources.
partial knowledge and hence the Barelwi claim that the Prophet possessed
ilm e ghaib starting from creation to qiyamat (resurrection at the end of time)
was completely wrong. Similarly, there are differences over the maslaha
(theological problem) of Hazir o Nazir, a Barelwi belief that the Prophet
could be present at the same time in different places and that he could see
the whole world ‘just like the palm of his hand’. Students in Ashrafiya learn
that, one day before the battle of badr, the Prophet marked the exact spot on
the ground where two of the kafirs (infidels, enemies) would fall. Students
at the Ihya ul Ulum also learn the same hadis, but interpret the event
differently. Here, teachers tell students that the Prophet’s knowledge of the
event even before its occurrence was given to him by Allah, specifically for
this event, and not because he possessed ilm e ghaib as a personal quality; they
add that the Barelwi belief is erroneous. In a similar fashion, the Deobandis
emphasize that a Muslim should not ask for help from anyone other than
Allah; students at Ihya ul Ulum learn that the Prophet asked his own
daughter Fatima to seek help only from Allah. Against Deobandi beliefs,
Ashrafiya students learn that it is permissible to ask for help not only from
the Prophet, but also from pirs and other holy men.
Hadis lessons are not the only spaces through which doctrinal differences
are transmitted. Other subjects of study, such as jurisprudence, also serve the
same purpose. In the process of acquiring Islamic knowledge, an average
madrasa student simultaneously becomes aware of different maslaks among
Muslims. However, this does not lead to an ecumenical understanding of
different interpretations. Learning about other theological orientations
is inextricably woven with the understanding that all other maslaks are
misleading, if not altogether wrong. Thus for a student of Ashrafiya, it is
only the Barelwi interpretation which is the correct one.
There are a number of books which are not included in Ashrafiya
syllabus but which are extremely popular among its students. Fazilat34 degree
students told me that they are encouraged to get acquainted with books
written by Barelwi scholars and other Ulama of Ahl e Sunnat wa Jamaat.
Most popular among the students were polemical books written against
the Deobandis, such as Zalzala and Dawat e Insaf. The fact that the author
of both these books was Arshadul Qadri (1925–2002), a Fazilat graduate
of Madrasa Ashrafiya, added to their popularity.35 Zalzala and Dawat e Insaf
34
A higher degree in the madrasa system, roughly equivalent to a postgraduate.
35
Qadri was instrumental in founding various madrasas in different parts of India. His organizational
work saw him travelling to Europe, where he contributed to the formation of the World Islamic
are popular in Indian as well as Pakistani Barelwi madrasas (Rahman 2004:

197). Both books engage with Deobandi beliefs in order to refute their
interpretation of Islam. Both texts are like a writ (Istigaza), in which Qadri
appeals to Muslims of the subcontinent to judge for themselves what is right
and what is wrong. Their style of engagement is also similar. Arguments
are substantiated by quoting from relevant Deobandi texts which are then
analysed in the light of existing traditions, invariably ending in the refutation
of Deobandis’ positions. Some statements made by Deobandi Ulama, as
written in their biographies, are also compared to other Deobandi texts
with the intention of proving them contradictory and misleading. Most of
the arguments relate to the understanding of Prophet Muhammad. Ahmad
Riza Khan, the Barelwi central figure, argued that not believing in the
special powers of the Prophet constituted a grave shirk and he charged the
Deobandi Ulama with being knee deep in this shirk. Arshadul Qadri takes
this criticism further. In both texts, he argues that although the Deobandis
believe in the special powers of their own ‘elders’—people like Muhammad
Ismail, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Ashraf Ali Thanwi and Qasim Nanotwi—
they deny similar attributes to the Prophet. For Qadri, this amounts to
believing that elders of Deoband had more powers than the Prophet
Muhammad himself!36 This, according to Qadri, is an insult to the person
of Prophet Muhammad which is not permissible in Islam.
Taken together, these texts level three important charges against
the Deobandis. Firstly, they accuse ‘elders of Deoband’ of having been
disrespectful to the person of Prophet Muhammad (Qadri 1993: 15). Arguing
that the ‘sword of Islam’ has never spared anyone who has shown disrespect
to the Prophet, Qadri states that the famous Deobandi Alim Ashraf Ali
Mission at London in 1972, of which he became the vice president. One of the aims of the World
Islamic Mission was to counter the ‘Wahabi’ ideas among the Asian immigrants in United Kingdom.
See Lewis (1994: 86).
36
Zalzala cites Muhammad Ismail as writing in his popular work Taqwaitul Iman that ‘...whosoever
says that Allah’s Prophet or any Imam or Saint (Buzurg) had knowledge of the unseen is the greatest
liar... knowledge of the unseen rests with Allah alone’ (p. 10). Similarly, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, in
his Fatawa Rashidiya, is said to have written that ‘...and to believe that Prophet Muhammad had Ilm
e Ghaib is a grave shirk’ (p. 12). Furthermore, Ashraf Ali Thanwi in his Beheshti Zewar is said to have
written that ‘...to believe that a Buzurg or Pir has knowledge of all our activities is kufr’ (p. 12). Qadri
contrasts such statement of these Deobandi Ulama with other texts in which these very Ulama are said
to have special powers. For example, Qadri notes sarcastically that the biography of Qasim Nanotwi,
written by Munazir Ahsan Gilani, is replete with miraculous instances where Qasim Nanotwi knew
what others spoke in his absence and appeared after his death to guide his murids.
Thanwi once wrote that the knowledge possessed by the Prophet could
be likened to that of a maverick or the shaitan (ibid.: 13). This comparison,
according to Qadri, amounts to an insult to the Prophet, and dishonouring
the Prophet even in the slightest amounts to severing of ties with Islam and
Muslims (ibid.: 15).
The second set of objections broadens the criticism moved against the
Deobandi Ulama, raising questions regarding the status of shrines, pirs and
walis. As Metcalf and Sanyal have argued, one of the principal concerns
of Deobandi Ulama was to wean away Indian Muslims from what they
considered to be bida, or deviation from ‘true’ Islamic precepts.37 In
Deobandi understanding of Islam, visiting shrines or tombs of holy men
and asking for boons compromised the fundamental Islamic principle of
tawheed or the one-ness of Allah. They maintained that turning to anyone
other than Allah amounted to associating partners to God, which is a grave
sin. The Deobandi Ulama attribute the popularity of shrines and ‘grave
worship’ to Hindu influences on Islam. Hence, Deobandis fought to purify
Islam from ‘Hindu practices’. According to Qadri, however, the practice of
visiting shrines does not entail associating partners to Allah. Rather, he argues
that it provides an occasion to remember His glory. Moreover, since Allah is
all-powerful, He cannot be reached directly by his followers and, therefore,
something akin to a ‘spiritual ladder’ was necessary. In other words, he insisted
that intercession is an important aspect of Islam itself (Qadri 1993: 40).38
The third set of objections relate to those fatwas (religious legal opinions)
and writings of Deobandi Ulama through which, Qadri argues, Deoband
Ulama tried to show that most of the religious practices of Indian Muslims
were non-Islamic or in need of reform. Qadri is particularly incensed with
Deobandi attacks against even seemingly traditional ceremonies such as
marriage and tells readers that the Deobandis even frown upon wearing the
sehera, the bridegroom headgear (ibid.: 26). It has become commonplace
in scholarly literature to understand Barelwis as repositories of traditional
practices, while Deobandis are described as reformists who want to purify
Islam of the same.While Qadri’s defence of some traditional practices might
confirm such a view, the reality is more complex and does not yield to such
a simple dichotomy. Ahmad Riza Khan frowned upon women’s presence
37
For a fuller discussion of the issue, see Metcalf (2002) and Sanyal (1999).
38
For a fuller treatment of the issue, see Sanyal (1999: 163–65).
inside shrines and tombs and condemned the participation of Sunni

Muslims in Muharram processions, particularly the making of tazias. Qadri’s
other writings certainly agree with Ahmad Riza’s position, and hence his
defence of marriage practices among Indian Muslims should not be taken
as a blanket defence of all customary practices.
Through reading texts such Zalzala and Dawat e Insaf, Ashrafiya
students learn that Deobandis are the (internal) enemies of Muslims and
Islam. It is argued that since the Deobandis appear pious and committed
to Islamic precepts, they are even more dangerous, since one cannot fault
them on basic tenets of Islam. They are said to be like ‘termites’, which eat
up Muslims from within, through their erroneous teaching and practice
of Islam. To buttress their claim, students cite a hadis according to which
the Prophet had foretold that the most important danger to Islam would
come from a community which would behave as Muslims and would be
steadfast in their prayers, but in reality would spread confusion and sow
discord among Muslims. Students at Ashrafiya identify this community with
present-day Deobandis.
Pedagogical practices within Madrasa Ashrafiya thus not only make its
students aware of their own maslaki identity, but also of interpretations of
Islam which are deemed misleading or faulty. Specific texts are critical tools
which students should refer to in situations where they have to prove the
truth of their beliefs or to refute other interpretations. A student explained
how he had employed the arguments of Zalzala when he was debating
with a Deobandi in his village. Mere knowledge and argumentative logic,
however, are not enough.Within a more formal setting, the learning of texts
goes hand in hand with learning oration style and technique. In Madrasa
Ashrafiya, texts are enlivened through particular performative actions which
further embed Barelwi identity.
Enacting Identity
Every Thursday evening, Ashrafiya students prepare for their weekly
debating and oratory practice. They form groups of 20 or more to prepare
and participate in what is popularly called the bazm. There is no fixed space
for this performance; it could be any place ranging from students’ living
quarters to the mosque, or any open space within the madrasa. Groups
generally comprise of students with similar interests: for example those
having interest in naath-kwani39 would cluster together, while those interested

in munazara (oral debate) and takrir (speech) would form another group.
Given the large number of students, there would be more than one group
practising naath or takrir. Groups are mostly based on regional affiliations:
those from particular districts of Bihar would organize their separate bazms,
and so on. Although the institution of bazm is listed as one of the objectives
in the madrasa Constitution, its actual organizational details are taken care
of by the student body, while the presence of teachers—in a supervisory
role—is expected but not considered obligatory. Generally senior students
are responsible for allocating topics on which speeches will be prepared,
although in some groups this choice is left to individual students. Towards
the end of a bazm, the merits and demerits of individual presentations are
discussed and commented upon by senior students of each group.
These practices are important for the students in a number of ways.
Apart from fostering institutional bonding, they reinforce relationships based
on students’ regional affiliation or age. The sense of camaraderie developed
through practices such as bazm goes a long way in sustaining networks of
relationship at a later stage in the students’ career. More importantly, bazm
is one of the most valuable tools for gaining that self-confidence essential
for public speaking, a role that many will be called upon to take up later in
their lives. It is important to understand the social background of students in
Ashrafiya and other madrasas.The majority come from non-literate or semi-
literate labouring or petty-trading families. Very often the size of these
families is large and children are expected to earn a living from a young
age. For such families, sending a child to a madrasa—where he will receive
free board and lodging—relieves the household of a financial burden,
while simultaneously conferring status and prestige. An Alim in the family
brings in much social and cultural capital which might, through judicious
deployment, help secure a less precarious existence.40 For a student, though,
success depends not only on learning the texts, but also on developing good
oratory skills which will eventually bring monetary and social benefits. In
39
Recitation of naath verses. Naath is poetry sung in praise of Prophet Muhammad.
40
Madrasa students across India come from very poor socio-economic backgrounds. See Asian
Development Research Institute (ADRI) and Bihar State Minorities Commission (2004) and Hussain
(2004: 105–36). Madrasa students in Pakistan share the same profile, see, for example, Malik (1998) and
Rahman (2004: 89–93).
Ashrafiya, bazm allows students to hone the skills necessary to become good
public speakers and debaters.
Topics for debate are decided a week in advance and students are
expected to memorize their speech and naath before attending the bazm.
Here again, the majority of the themes revolve around refutation of maslaks,
Deobandis in particular. While some students take pains to write their own
speeches, culling their arguments from various texts, most of the students
look for ready-made published speeches made by one of their Alim. Students
also listen to audio speeches of their Ulama, which helps them to acquire a
narrative style. While eventually, within these bazms, some students acquire
distinctive styles of oratory, most copy the style of one of their Ulama.
The structure of the bazm is fairly simple. A student from the audience
introduces the speaker by adding honorific titles to his (speaker’s) name.41
The speaker normally stands up to speak or to sing a naath. The audience is
attentive and involved in the performance, now and then loudly praising the
speaker or singer. One of the students told me that when he takes part in a
bazm, he imagines a crowd of thousands listening to him, captivated by his
speech. Coming from very poor households, the mere thought of keeping an
audience enthralled must be no mean sense of fulfilment. Bazms, therefore,
apart from being arenas of performance, are also arenas of empowerment.
But again, one of the important tasks of the Alim is to guide Muslims in
differentiating between right and wrong. For the students of Ashrafiya, it is
the Barelwi understanding of Islam which is right, all other interpretations
lead Muslims astray.
During a practice of takrir (speech), one speaker alleged that the
Wahabis42 hold Prophet Muhammad to be an ordinary mortal who had
been given nabuwat (Prophet-hood) by the grace of Allah. He went on
to explicate his own understanding of the Prophet, linking him with the
concept of Nur,43 which, according to his words, had existed much before
creation. He argued that comparing the Prophet with any other human
being is a sin, since he (Prophet) was made of light (Nur) while humans
41
Titles such as Bahrul Ulum (Ocean of Learning), Imam e Millat (Leader of the Community) are
frequently used.
42
The Deobandis are often referred to as Wahabis in Ashrafiya. It appears that this linkage was first made
by the British and later on adopted by the Barelwis. For details see Hermansen (2000).
43
Nur literally means pure light. The Barelwis believe in the concept of Nu re Muhammadi, according to
which there existed a ‘light of Muhammad’ that had derived from Allah’s own light and had existed
from the beginning of creation.
are made of clay. To prove his point, the speaker cited a hadis, according
to which the Prophet did not cast a shadow because he was made of pure
light.To explain Deobandis’ alleged vilification of the image of the Prophet,
he considered Islamic history. Linking Deobandis/Wahabis with the
munafiqin,44 the speaker went on to narrate of a long chain of conspiracies
against Islam and the Prophet’s memory. He cautioned his fellow students
that the most dangerous evildoers are to be found within the community
itself. He went on to add that the Prophet himself had indeed foretold such
tribulations. Citing again from hadis, he clarified that Prophet Muhammad
had predicted that his community (qaum) would be divided into 73 groups,
and only one among them would be the true follower of the Sunnah and go
to heaven. The rest would all be banished to burn in hell fire.45 The speaker
ended with the exhortation that, as Barelwis, it was incumbent upon all
of them to fight against the Deobandis. On another occasion, a different
speaker dealt with the same subject, using a different oratorical style. Stating
that Islam is inconceivable without Muhammad, he told his audience that
the Quran does not tell Muslims how to offer namaz (prayer). It is only
through observing the Prophet that Muslims came to know about it. So, his
argument went, whatever the Prophet did became Islam.46
In the naath (religious poetry) sessions as well, Deobandis are berated
for allegedly not paying due respect to the Prophet of Islam. In Ashrafiya,
most naaths singers are junior students, their seniors concentrating on takrirs.
In naath recitations, Prophet Muhammad is understood as the saviour of
the followers of the ‘true’ Islam. In these poems, Ashrafiya students implore
the Prophet to save them from various secular and religious problems.
The naaths frequently refer to peoples’ powerlessness and to appeals to the
Prophet for help.
The institution of bazm is not unique to Ashrafiya. Although the
techniques and format might vary, in almost all Indian madrasas of different
maslaks, it is regarded as one of the most important objectives. For instance,
44
Munafiqin is generally translated as ‘Hypocrites’. It refers to a group of people who cheated Prophet
Muhammad and his men during their battle with the Meccans.
45
Interestingly, this hadis also forms one of the core beliefs of the Deobandis as well. They too consider
themselves as the chosen one!
46
I am reminded here of a visit to a village in district Garhwa, now located in Jharkhand, whose Muslim
inhabitants are mostly Barelwis. At the entrance of the lone mosque in the village, inscribed from right
to left, are the names of Muhammad and Allah respectively. I asked why Muhammad was written
before Allah. The reply was that since it was through Muhammad that they knew about Islam and
Allah; it was logical that his name would come first!
in Madrasa Ain ul Ulum47—located in Gaya, Bihar—bazm is much more

theatrical.The students here are divided into two groups—one representing
Barelwis and the other Deobandis—and pose questions to each other on
the understanding of Islam. Unsurprisingly, the ‘Barelwi’ group always has
the upper hand since both questions and answers are written by the Barelwi
teachers of the madrasa! Teachers argue that since the students are much
younger than in other madrasas, they find it much more interesting to get
involved in theatrical performances rather than in formal takrirs.
Since madrasas in India invariably espouse one maslaki identity or the
other, bazms are crucial for imparting and reinforcing ideological differences,
which cannot be sufficiently done through formal teaching alone. The
performances in bazms become necessary for the ‘stylized repetition of
acts’,48 through which a maslaki identity is thoroughly internalized. The
expression of this internalized ideology is visible in various posters brought
out by the students of Ashrafiya. In these posters, one finds vitriolic tirades
against the Deobandis, warning Barelwis to be vigilant against the lies spread
by the Deobandis.49
Conclusion
The educational practices I have discussed underscore that madrasas are
primarily concerned with the production and reproduction of specific
maslaki identities. I have shown how certain strategies adopted by the
Madrasa Ashrafiya lead to the ‘othering’ of those who are considered a
threat to Islam and Muslims. Since these ‘others’ are considered dangerous
precisely because of their proximity and familiarity, the process of ‘othering’
becomes important for boundary maintenance. While scholarship has
shown how the Hindu Right creates the Muslim as the ‘other’,50 processes
of ‘othering’ within the Muslim community itself have hardly received any
attention. I have argued that Muslims of different maslaks are considered far
47
Both the Manager (nazim) and Principal (sadr mudarris) of this madrasa had been a student of Madrasa
Ashrafiya.
48
The usage is from Judith Butler. Although she uses it in the context of gender identity, I find the
expression useful in this context also. See Butler (1999: 179).
49
Wall posters are a familiar feature in bigger madrasas of India. Similar vitriolic essays against the
Barelwis can be seen on the walls of Dar ul Ulum, Deoband. I am thankful to Yoginder Sikand for
this information.
50
See, among others, Sundar (2004).
more dangerous to ‘true’ Islam than are non-Muslims. Hence, for a Barelwi
student of Madrasa Ashrafiya, it is the Deobandis who are the enemies of
Islam, since they sow the seeds of confusion (fitna) in the minds of Muslims.
In other words, assuming that madrasas preach hatred towards non-Muslims
is erroneous.
In Madrasa Ashrafiya, a combination of texts and performances produces
the Deobandis as a Barelwi ‘other’. Coming from families where religious
education is very rudimentary, students propagate the Islamic knowledge
gained in the madrasa amongst their kin.They exhort them to pray regularly,
to shun television and to encourage women to follow purdah. At the same
time, they also tell their families about the Deobandis and other maslaks,
and how these are misleading Muslims. As one of the students of Ashrafiya
told me,
Before I came to Ashrafiya, I did not know what correct Islam

was.We did not know it, but the imam of our village mosque was
a Deobandi and told us not to visit shrines [sic] or take part in the
birthday celebrations of Prophet Muhammad. We all believed
him since he was the only Alim in the village. But now, with the
grace of Allah, we have our own imam and mosque in the village
and we do not pray behind a Deobandi imam. I and my uncle,
who also studied in a madrasa, established this mosque with local
contributions.
Certainly, not all students get the opportunity to do such ‘service in

the path of Islam’, yet most of those I talked to did say that they wanted to
establish their own madrasa so as to spread the light of ‘true’ Islam. Recent
decades have seen an increase in the number of madrasas and madrasa
graduates in India. Aided by technologies of print and audiocassettes,
madrasa graduates are now in a better position to transmit their ideology to
the wider Muslim community. Since the foundation of a madrasa is primarily
linked with the propagation of its own maslak, I suggest that Indian Muslims
will increasingly define their religious identity in terms of different maslaks.
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6
Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala,
South India
Introduction
n Kerala1 we find strong currents of Islamic reformism, the largest
I organization being the Kerala Naduvathul Mujahideen (KNM).This radical
reform movement, originating in the 1920s and (to date) limited to Kerala state,
draws its inspiration from a wide range of strands both within India and from
the wider Islamic world. Kerala’s Islamic reformism is simultaneously local—
in that it emerges within a specific social, political and historical context—
and also pan-Islamic or transnational—in that it embodies orientations which
historically characterize the development of Islam across the world. While
Kerala’s Mujahids (as KNM supporters are known) participate in wider currents
and are part of a universalistic trend, at the same time, Mujahid projects cannot in
any way be tritely subsumed under labels such as ‘global Islam’ (e.g., Roy 2004).
Kerala reformism must be understood as being simultaneously part of a global
Islamic impulse towards purification and also as a deeply locally rooted and
specific phenomenon, which produces itself on the ground through practice
and through dialogue with significant others, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
Indeed, public debate in Kerala between ‘reformist’ and ‘traditionalist’ Muslims
produces shifts in practice and works continually to generate and redefine the
focus of ‘reform’ and ‘anti-reform’.2
1
Located on the south-west coast of India, Kerala has a population of 32 million, split between
various Hindu (54 per cent), Christian (19 per cent) and Muslim (25 per cent) communities.
2
Research was funded by the ESRC, Nuffield foundation, the AHRC and SOAS.Thanks for comments
We are here critiquing anthropological tendencies to idealise and

celebrate sufi ‘traditionalism’ as somehow authentically South Asian in
contrast to reformism, which is then inaccurately—and dangerously
buttressing Hindutva rhetoric—branded as going against the grain of South
Asian society. We are also highlighting a related issue: what we perceive
as an anthropological bias, taking the form of a fondness for sufism and a
distaste for reformism—a stance which often goes along with the careless
branding of reformism per se as ‘wah’habi’ or ‘foreign inspired’. Looking
at Nile Green’s work on sufi reformism in Hyderabad (2005), or groups
like the Farangi Mahall (Robinson 2001b) and the Barelwis (Sanyal 1996),
but also Deoband and Tablighi Jama’at (Sikand 2007) reminds us that since
the nineteenth century, South Asian Islam at large has been moulded by
various strands of reformism, and that actually Sufism and reformism are not
polarized categories to be pitted against each other (although they normally
appear to be so from ulema and activist rhetorics).
If historians have sometimes over-asserted the theological dimensions
of South Asian reformism, and framed discussion within an Islamic
‘great tradition’ rooted in a putatively shared core, anthropologists have
(over) reacted against this tendency and at the same time given rein to
their (aesthetic, political, emotional) preferences for sufi-inspired Islam.
Indian anthropologist Imtiaz Ahmad’s position is clear when he asserts,
‘Most puritanical and orthodox Muslims see any form of sufism or close
interchange with other religions as a danger to true Islam’ (Ahmad and
Reifeld 2004: p. xxii), before he moves on to celebrate a putatively ‘Indian
Islam’. We need to interrogate this sort of stance and terminology: Ahmad’s
distaste for reformism is clear—but is it fair? We want to redress the balance
by appreciating the very local (and unassailably ‘authentic’) specificity of
Kerala’s highly radical reform movement and by placing the KNM agenda
into its context as part of wider Malayali concerns with social reform and
‘progress’. We worked for several years among low caste Hindus and have
written about their reform movements (e.g., Osella and Osella 2000). What
strikes us often in talking to Mujahid supporters is a familiarity of discourse.
Studying Islamic reform only in the context of material on Islam (whether
Orientalist or ethnographic) makes for a lopsided picture. As Nile Green
argues (Chapter 4), the broader social landscape is deeply relevant.While we
on early drafts to Irfan Ahmad, Patricia and Roger Jeffery, Edward Simpson, Ben Soares and Shajahan
Madampat
Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala / 141
see longstanding Arab links, contemporary Gulf links, India-wide currents

of Islamic reform and so on in Kerala’s KNM, we must also take careful
account of its local roots. Here then, we situate this material as part of
Kerala’s highly particularistic history of socio-economic transformations.
Historians have traced the emergence of reformist trends in late
eighteenth-century South Asia to specific circumstances: the decline of
Muslim political power, the growing influence of British colonialism and,
later, the emergence of Hindu revivalism (Robinson 2001a; 2001b: 184ff;
2004; cf. Metcalf 1982; Mayaram 1997; Sanyal 1996; Sikand 2002). While
a reformist tradition is perhaps as old as Islam itself, reformism appears in
this literature as an engagement with the ‘modern’: a universalistic and
rationalizing orientation—often compared to the Christian reformation—
articulated in a complex dialogue with (at times in opposition to)
colonial and postcolonial ‘western’ modernities (see Robinson [Chapter
2]; cf. Eickelman and Piscatori 1996; Kahn n.d.; Salvatore 1997). While
such readings place Islamic reformism squarely within modernity, an
overemphasis on theological debates and the religious milieu has produced
a reexoticization effect, which sets reformism as a uniquely ‘Muslim’ way to
be modern. (see, e.g., Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006; and Mahmood 2004)
From a Kerala perspective, Islamic reformism is not at all peculiar.
The reformist programmes articulated from the end of the nineteenth
century onwards by various Hindu and Christian communities have much
in common with similar processes taking place amongst Kerala Muslims;
all are responding to and reflecting upon similar historical contingencies
and also reacting to each other—a point made by histor ians with reference
to the emergence of (middle class) reformism in North India (e.g., Gupta
2002; Joshi 2001; Robinson 1993a, 1993b; and Walsh 2004; also see Green
[Chapter 4]), but somewhat lost in recent research. Kerala reformists are
concerned to shape behaviour with reference both to reformism elsewhere
and also to Kerala communities. Refuting any sort of Muslim or Islamic
exceptionalism, we argue that if on the one hand Islamic reformism, in
Kerala as elsewhere, has a clear universalistic orientation, seeking to
disembed religious practices from cultural specificities, on the other it
remains inflected by—or embedded in—the historically specific social and
political contexts of its emergence, which eventually define orientations
and debates. In other words, not only are categories such as ‘reformed’ and
‘traditionalist’ Islam unstable and produced discursively—to the extent that
their content undergoes huge shifts—but, moreover, we cannot assume
either the direction or the orientation which reformist discourse and

practice will take in specific locations.
Kerala’s Muslims
All Kerala Muslims are Sunnis of the Shafi school. But since the rise of
reformism, these days the term ‘Sunni’ is used to mean ‘orthodox’ or
‘traditionalist’ Muslims: those who stand opposed to the organized
reformists. While Kerala does have a few adherents to the Tablighi Jama’at,
and some followers of Jama’at-i-Islami, by far the two biggest groupings of
Muslims, and the most culturally salient distinction, is that between ‘Sunnis’
and ‘Mujahids’ (Abdul Haque 1982; Miller 1992: 275ff; Samad 1998; Sikand
2005: 130ff). Both groups run and have control of mosques, madrasas,
schools, colleges and orphanages, and both are formally split into two rival
factions. Contemporary Mujahids are divided between an ‘official’ group
from the original organization, headed by T. P. Abdulla Koya Madani; and
a largely Kozhikode3 based splinter Mujahid grouping led by the former
youth/student leader Hussain Madavoor.
Sunnis are equally split between two factions—one led by E.K.
Aboobaker Musaliar and one by Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobaker Musaliar.
An early ulema reformist group—the Aikya Sangam—was founded in 1922
and is generally recognized to be the precursor of today’s KNM (and the
wider Mujahid) movement, described by Sikand as, ‘the Kerala counterpart
of the Ahl-i-Hadith in north India’ (Sikand 2005: 131).4 While Mujahids
themselves admit to having only 10 per cent of Kerala’s Muslim population
affiliated as followers, they claim far wider influence; the reformist and
modernizing impulses promulgated by Mujahids have, since the 1920s, set
the agenda for the direction of the community in general.
A point we must stress immediately is that Kerala Muslims are quite
distinct from north Indian Muslims and even from many Tamil groups
(Bayly 1992: 71ff; Fanselow 1996; McGilvray 1989, 1998; Mines 1973,
3
Formerly known by its colonial name of Calicut, with a population of roughly 400,000 people,
Kozhikode is Kerala’s third largest city and, although Muslims are not the majority, it is considered to
be the Muslim capital of Kerala. Kozhikode Town, at the centre of Kozhikode district, sits right next to
the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram.
4
While there are many ideological differences between KNM and Ahl-i-Hadith, the two organizations
have strong ties at national level. We thank Shajahan Madampat for drawing our attention to these
linkages.
1975). Islam in Kerala spread early, through Arab trade and, later, travelling
Hadrami saints; and Kerala’s Muslims have an unbroken, longstanding and
deep direct connection with the Gulf region. Muslims in Kerala are not
Urdu speakers and (around coastal Malabar especially), Arabic is deeply
entrenched. Sikand (2005: 126) estimates 6,000 Arabic teachers and 500,000
students across Kerala. Schools offer prizes and run competitions for Arabic
poetry, composition, song and so on; Kerala Muslim folk arts (such as the
daf ) are heavily Arabicized. Until the 1960s, Arabi-Malayalam (Malayalam
language written into Arabic script) was in wide use—it is still taught in
Sunni Arabic colleges5 and is still used by some nowadays. In sum, there is
generally a strong Arabic thread running through Kerala Muslim culture,
especially marked in Malabar and reinforced by extensive post-1970s
migration to the Gulf (Osella and Osella 2007a). We underline this, because
it is most important to remember the historical and cultural depth of
coastal Kerala’s ties to the Arab world when engaging with various popular
(negative) characterizations of reformism as: ‘wah’habism’6; a phenomenon
born out of post 1970s Gulf migration; inauthentic because of its Arab
links. It is equally important to ensure that such mis-identifications do
not become part of the academic record and feed blunt generalizations.
In refuting sloppy stereotypes, we are drawing on material from three
sites: several visits into the rural Muslim-majority district of Malappuram,
adjacent to Kozhikode; short field-trips to various locations in the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) states; and Kozhikode town, where we and
our two children lived from September 2002 to June 2004, on the edge
of the Muslim neighbourhood of Thekkepuram, near Kozhikode’s big
bazaar—until recent waves of globalization a regional centre for trading in
timber, rice, spices, copra, and so on.
One of Kerala’s most prominent Muslim communities which has
been deeply involved in spreading reformism, are Koyas—a group which
flourished with colonial and Arab trade until the 1970s and lives in and
around Kozhikode’s Thekkepuram neighbourhood (Osella and Osella
2007a). Because of a serious decline in wealth, nowadays Koyas do not
correspond to an urban elite but rather to the class fractions of lower middle
5
‘Madrasa’ in Malayalam refers to classes where children receive basic Arabic language and religious
instruction; Kerala’s ‘Arabic Colleges’ are the equivalent of north Indian madrasas.
6
As in other parts of the world, and as in colonial usage, wah’habi’ is often used locally as a highly
prejudicial term of abuse (cf. Hermansen 2000).
to middle. While Gellner (1981) argues for locating reformism among

urban elites, we note that Koyas correspond sociologically to groups which
we commonly find (across all religious communities) as especially likely to
be associated with public activism—be it in political parties, social service
or even film-star fan clubs (cf. Srinivas 1996; Eickelman and Salvatore 2004:
13ff; Huq [Chapter 11]).
The Rise of Reform

In the Islamic month of Rajab, Thekkepuram’s Sheikh Palli (mosque)
celebrates its annual five day nercha (urs, shrine festival), at which cloth, oil
and body-part shaped appams (rice cakes) are the main items presented at
the jaram (dargh, tomb) of Sheikh Mammukoya. Early evening sees crowds
throng in, but these are mostly outsiders to Kozhikode—Mappilas from
rural Malappuram district—as are those devotees who, late at night before
the tomb, perform katti rateeb—a men’s devotional practice involving self-
cutting. Local men and women alike condemned the nercha to us as a prime
example of shirk or attributing partners to God (specifically, ‘saint worship’)
and as something undertaken by the unreformed, the lower class or by
the rural ignorant. We could not find people from Thekkepuram willing to
accompany either of us inside the mosque while the nercha was going on,
even if it was clearly understood that this would be simply for our research.
Both of us found people reluctant even to speak about the nercha; most
claimed ignorance of what it entailed. Lateef told Filippo, ‘I can’t be seen at
the nercha. People will talk and say that I am a Sunni. I don’t really care—I
am just a Muslim, I don’t follow anyone. But you know what our people
are like. . . ’. When some women in a lower status family talked to Caroline,
they told her, ‘The nercha is very interesting. They have an appam for every
ill, every size and shape, like kalappam for leg trouble and so on. But we can’t
see the rateeb . . . we can’t go to the nercha anyway, because we would get
beaten!’ To Caroline’s wider questioning, women were emphatic that nercha
is nothing at all like a Hindu temple festival, and seemed offended even
by her question about whether it was any way at all similar—would there
be a procession, a flag, would anything be offered at or given out from the
shrine, and so on. Nercha here is clearly located as part of unreformed ‘Sunni’
Muslim traditions. But we note that pressure not to attend the nercha is not
purely an index of active reformist affiliation; among Kozhikode’s Muslim
‘respectable’ middle classes even those who do not describe themselves as
Mujahid supporters feel constrained to stay away.
The conversations we took part in at the fringes of the Sheikh Palli

nercha—condemnatory, disavowing, feigning of ignorance, and so on—are
perhaps unremarkable, a rhetoric commonplace across the Islamic world
wherever debates between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘reformist’ Muslims have been
taking place. They are part of wider discussions occurring in the public
sphere—in mosques, madrasas, media, public meetings. Such debates actively
construct and continually (re)define the content and nature of these two
categories (see Asad 1986; Bowen 1993; Soares 2005: 7ff). While some
report a youthful educated middle class taking up reformism in critique of
a decadent older generation (see, e.g., Abaza 2002 on Egypt and Malaysia;
Abdel Rahman 2006 on Egypt; Brenner 1996; Huq [Chapter 11]; and
Jones 2007 on Java), Kerala reformism follows another of the commonly
recognized patterns: an urban, educated middle class waving the stick of
reformism at rural, lower class Muslims who stand accused of straying from
the path of ‘true Islam’ (Mayaram 1997; Metcalf 1982; Robinson 1993a,
1993b, 2001a, 2004; Sikand 2002; Troll 1978; Verkaaik 2001, 2004).
Around Kozhikode, we find that underneath a public discourse on
‘Muslim brotherhood’—commonly appealed to in religious meetings
to establish participation in a global community, to call for unity among
Kerala Muslims and to distance the community from the social practices
of non-Muslims—lies a barely disguised hierarchy of statuses. While
Malayali Muslims do not talk (as in north India) about the ashraf and ajlaf
or use terms like sharif, still they make several grades of local distinction
between status groups. Where once Kerala Muslims recognized only status
distinctions between themselves based upon ideas about descent and blood
or occupational status and class,7 sectarian divisions have also grown up
between supporters of Islamic reform—‘Mujahids’—and those who
continue practices deemed by reformism as un-Islamic such as saint and
shrine veneration—the ‘Sunnis’. The winning over of Thekkepuram’s high-
status middle-class Koyas to the Mujahid path has left ‘Sunni’ as inflected
with notions of low status and uncouthness. While the Sheikh Palli nercha
was once a grand affair, it is now a small event, boycotted by the Koya
businessmen who once were its main participants and sponsors. Those who
now attend are said to be ignorant rural outsiders or low-status labourers—
7
An alleged Arab-cum-upper caste origin, together with a long-term association to trade and business,
for example, are used by Koyas—Kozhikode’s ‘dominant’, in Srinivas’ terms (1966), community—to
draw distinction with other lower status Muslims (Osella and Osella 2007a; cf. Mines 1973, 1975; Bayly
1989: 71ff; Fanselow 1996; McGilvray 1989, 1998; Simpson 2006: 87ff;Vatuk 1996).
in Mujahid (and Koya) discourse ‘typical Sunnis’. It is unsurprising to find

that reformism for this once-grand urban trading group has also become
a vehicle for expressing and maintaining class and status distinctions, in
the face of widespread economic changes brought by Gulf migration and
the decline of Koya-dominated sites of capital accumulation—commerce
with Gulf Arabs, which made so many Koya families wealthy, has all but
stopped; the timber trade is in terminal decline; the copra and rice trades are
progressively moving out of Kozhikode’s big bazaar.
But limiting analysis of this declining urban middle-class Muslim
community’s withdrawal from nerchas to the politics of status would fail to
articulate Koyas’ complex relationship to reformism. Steering away from
an all too obvious instrumentalism (see Metcalf 1976; Robinson 1993a,
1993b: XIVff, 2001b), we suggest that participation in Mujahid reformist
projects of self-making holds a broader significance as index—via notions
of education and progress—of a particular mode of engagement with the
modern,8 leading to interrogations of orthopraxy and arousing anxiety over
association with practices deemed ‘backward’ and un-modern.
Kerala’s Mujahid Reformism

We meet the amiable and energetically busy Dr Hussein Madavoor in his
neat office at Ithihadu Shubbanil Mujahideen (ISM—youth wing of the
KNM). Madavoor studied for five years in Saudi Arabia and has a PhD
from Calicut University. An Arabic and Islamic scholar, he is director of the
Rouzathul Uloom Arabic College (part of Faroke College, Kerala’s first
Muslim university). Madavoor started his career in ISM, from which he split
to become leader of the KNM-Madavoor group. Madavoor tells us that,
‘The Mujahid movement is about religion, education, science and progress’
and goes through some major points of difference: Mujahids avoid prayer
at saints’ tombs and accuse Sunnis who do this of shirk; Mujahids oppose
celebrations such as prophet’s birthday; Mujahids worked for translation of
Quran into vernacular, Friday sermons in vernacular and more generally
for education and understanding; Sunnis use Arabic in their mosques; while
Sunnis ban women from mosques, Mujahids encourage female attendance;
8
While the ‘modern’ used to be simply associated to the practices of the colonizers, in post-independence
times ‘modernity’ becomes highly nuanced through Kerala, Gulf and Western modernities (Osella and
Osella 2007a; cf. Deeb 2006).
Sunnis follow the 400 year old shafi text, Fathul Mu-een, by Sheikh
Zainudhin Makhdum II; Mujahids believe fiq to be irrelevant. Madavoor
explained,
Fathul Mu-een is an important text, used in many Egyptian and

Saudi universities. But Sunnis take shafi fatwas as given, while
we say that Muslims should find solutions to current problems
from Quran and Sunnah, considering later interpretations only
as opinions, possible solutions.. . Most important is the Quran,
Sunnah and interpretations of first generation of Muslims . . . We
are called reformists, but it is the opposite: We want to return to
the true Islam of the Quran.
Madavoor’s summary of the Mujahid movement aligned it with

mainstream Islamic reformism: condemnation of shirk (attribution of
partners to God; idolatry), of bidah (innovations in worship) and of taqlid
(blind following), with a stress on the importance of ijtihad (reasoned
interpretation).
A member of the KNM (official faction) spoke to us:
Islam has been polluted by false knowledge. People are kept in

ignorance and superstition so that priests [Sunni clergy] can fill
their bellies and keep control, justifying their existence. You can
read in Logan’s book [Malabar Manual] about the pitiful condition
of Muslims in nineteenth-century Kerala. People were not
allowed even to learn Malayalam script—it was considered haram.
Ignorance leads to superstition and other un-Islamic practices.
When in crisis, people call the name of Sheikh Moihudeen.9 You
may have heard of the Moihudeen mala in his honour.10 Women
especially read the mala, and they believe they will get merit from
doing so. He might have been a great man, but this is shirk. Praying
to saints, prostrating in front of their jarams [tombs] is forbidden.
The Prophet himself did not want to have a grave! People go to
shrines asking saints for help or miracles, but only God can help.
Education—understood at KNM headquarters as direct access to

religious knowledge—is then presented as essential for the Kerala Muslim
9
Al-Jilani, 1078–1167, founder of the Qadiris sufi sect; see Miller (1992: 242) and McGilvray (2004).
10
A famous ballad—Miller (1992: 288–89); cf. Schomburg (2003).
masses of whom, according to Mujahid ulema, ‘90% commit shirk without

knowing it’. Mujahids are committed to fighting on all fronts for ijtihad
(reasoned argument) and to combat the ignorance which, they argue, leads
to the triple faults of shirk (deviation from monotheism), bidah (innovations
in worship) and taqlid (blind following). A defining trope in Mujahid
historical narratives and current rhetoric is the struggle for education in the
face of traditionalist opposition.
Mujahid ulema were organized from the 1920s, but in the 1950s
they decided to form a mass organization, the KNM. . . there was
plenty of opposition from Sunnis. Stones were thrown at them,
because they threatened the power of the Sunni clergy. Sunni
ulema opposed translation of the Quran into Malayalam because
they knew that once people could read the Quran by themselves
they would understand true Islam and abandon them. But the
Quran was translated. . . Again, in 1986 the Mujahid conference
declared that dowry was un-Islamic. Sunnis immediately replied
that dowry was allowed, but a few years later they also began
to say it is un-Islamic. . . Every time they are challenged, they
backtrack—because we present evidence from the Quran. People
nowadays can read the Quran and they know we are right. People
are becoming more literate and sophisticated, but still in the rural
areas there is no light of learning, sometimes there are still physical
attacks against us.
This stress on understanding and rational thought extends for Mujahids

to education more widely conceived. Reform through the advancement
of religious as well as secular education has been a central plank of the
Mujahid reformist project since the 1920s: formal madrasas were set up,
curricula were standardized, teachers were trained and eventually Arabic
colleges were started (see Miller 1992: 204ff; Pasha 1995; Sikand 2005:
122ff; cf. Metcalf 1982). Reformist leaders such as Vakkom Moulavi and
Makti Thangal campaigned in the erstwhile princely states of Travancore
and Cochin respectively for the introduction of schools where Islamic
subjects would be taught alongside ‘modern’ disciplines. In Malabar, CN
Ahmed Moulavi—the reformist leader who first translated the Quran into
Malayalam and worked from 1931 to 1949 as a religious instructor in a
Government Muslim High School—started a college under the auspices of
the Ernad Educational Association (Miller 1992: 209–10).When in 1934 the
Aikya Sangham—the predecessor of the KNM—was disbanded, it donated

its existing funds towards the foundation of Kerala’s first Muslim college
at Faroke (ibid.: 207). And the orthodox Sunni establishment eventually
responded to Mujahid enthusiasm in kind. Confrontations between Sunni
and Mujahid over the hearts and souls of Kerala Muslims takes place these
days not only through control of mosques but, crucially, through the number
of educational institutions run (cf. Zaman 1999; Alam [Chapter 5]).
The Samasta Kerala Jam’iyyatul Ulama, the main Sunni organization,
started in the late 1920s as a response to the growing influence of Vakkom
Moulavi’s Aikya Sangamam.11 In interviews, its leaders were just as eager
to show us their commitment to education: they claim control over more
than 8,000 madrasas (against some 500 Mujahid madrasas) with one million
students and 72,000 registered teachers, as well as a string of Arabic colleges
and, more recently, even an engineering college. Even the staunchly anti-
reformist Jamia Markazu Ssaqafathi Ssunniyya (led by Kanthapuram A.P.
Aboobaker Musaliar)—which in the past concentrated on male-only
religious education—nowadays runs Malayalam and English medium arts,
science and technology colleges for both boys and girls.
The Samasta has also moved away from its early complete condemnation
and boycott of reformist ulema, arguing instead that their ideas are “too
complex for common people, creating confusion and leading Muslims
away from Islam”.12 At the same time, it works to refute accusations of
‘traditionalism’ by reminding Muslims that past Sunni leaders not only
took a leading role against British colonialism but also worked towards
the spread of ‘correct’ Islamic practices. The renowned Mamburam Thangal
(Sayyid Fazl Pookoya Thangal) wrote, for example, famous fatwas in the late
19th century against the British as well as stinging attacks against Shi’a sufi
practices. He also exhorted Mappilas to follow ‘proper Muslim ways’, such
as covering the breasts of women, not working on Friday and refusing to
accept left over food from Hindu landlords. Certainly, it is easy to forget
nowadays the degree to which the bugbear of Mujahids, Thangals (Sayyids
claiming descent from the Prophet and generally associated to Sunni
11
In the same way as in north India Barelwis emerged in reaction to the growing influence of Deoband
(Metcalf 1982: 295).
12
To get a sense of the tone of public debates between Sunni and Mujahid ulema in the 1970s, see
Ernadan’s (1979) summary of the ‘Kuttichira Debate’.
traditionalism)13 have acted as reformists (Sathar 1999; Mobini-Kesheh

1997; cf. Sanyal 1996; Green 2005).
But to reformists, Sunnis’ understanding of and recent promotion of
education is far too limited, and their continued stress on Arabic colleges
reveals their ‘backward’ orientation. ‘What is the point of spending so many
years studying Islamic jurisprudence?’ asked one Mujahid activist friend:
You only need to know the Quran and Sunnah. And what is
the need for so many religious scholars? What job can you get
after that? Students go to Sunni Arabic colleges because they
get full scholarships. Their families are poor and illiterate and
think that this is proper education. This is also why Sunnis do
not want people to learn [the Quran]: then people have to rely
on moulavis. . . they pay moulavis to pray and recite the Quran. So
Sunnis make a good living out of people’s ignorance.
Filippo meets another activist, M.M. Akbar—science graduate, prolific

writer of reformist religious books and moving force behind ‘The niche of
truth’, a KNM-sponsored group—after he delivered a speech at the final
public meeting of the ‘Timekkedinnu, Nanmayilleku (away from vice, towards
virtue) campaign.14 Sitting in the back seat of a jeep, Akbar tells Filippo,
Muslims still lag behind in education, because in the past

the clergy did not want anyone to learn either Malayalam or
English—only Arabic. Malayalis are different from North Indian
Muslims: we speak like Malayalis, dress like Malayalis, we have
the same Malayali local culture. In north India you can spot
Muslims, Hindus or Christians by their dress culture. Even in
Tamil Nadu and Hyderabad you can see Urdu separateness. But
here we are totally Malayali. Muslims used Arabic Malayalam in
13
Thangals, standing apart for their undisputed Yemeni origin (Hadrami Sayyids), claim higher status, as
a Sayyid community whose families hold written genealogies linking them back to the Prophet (Dale
1997; Freitag 2003; Ho 2006; Laffan 2002; Sathar 1999). While Mujahids criticise Thangals for using
their ritual status to ‘promote superstition’ and to accumulate wealth, Thangals remain respected as
religious and political leaders amongst Muslims of the interior—Malappuram district’s Mappilas—a
group which is patrilineal and (until 1970s Gulf migration) largely agricultural, poor and, according to
Kerala standards, relatively uneducated (Dale 1980; Miller 1992; Panikkar 1989).
14
11 January 2004. The Bahrain Parliament Speaker, Ashaiq Aadil Abdurrahiman Almuaavidha,
inaugurated the final public meeting on Kozhikode beach.
the past because they were not literate in Malayalam, but now
we all know how to write in Malayalam script. What is more,
people have been in the Gulf and realized that education is
needed. Because of the Gulf, Muslims are now happy and have
self-respect, self-reliance and confidence. In north India, Muslims
are still illiterate, poor and keep caste differences. In Kerala,
only the Thangals keep caste—we ignore it. Kerala is generally
progressive, educated and modern, so Islamist movements here
are progressive. If Muslims don’t know English, how can they
communicate and learn? The West and USA put around wrong
information and rumours about Islam, they twist facts. How can
Muslims counteract this without knowing English? How can I
become a doctor or engineer without modern education? I will
remain forever downtrodden. The main truth of Mujahid is the
spread of education.
Activist rhetoric reveals some of the contradictions or tension within

Mujahid discourse. While Mujahids proudly declare that, ‘Nowadays there
are many Muslim women who are teachers, doctors and government
employees’ and while a picture of young pardah wearing girls learning to use
computers invariably appears in Mujahid publications, at the same time they
stress that women’s employment should not be actively encouraged. Rather,
‘educated women’—by which Mujahids generally intend women with
high school matriculation plus basic religious (madrasa) qualifications—are
envisaged as the prop for the family as a whole, fostering religious morality
and promoting the education of the children (cf. Jeffery et al. 2004; Metcalf
2002; Minault 1998).
The role attributed to women becomes particularly significant in the
context of Mujahids’ increasingly wide-reaching attempts to rid Kerala Islam
of what they consider to be un-Islamic practices. While it is recognized
that some degree of adaptation to ‘local culture’ is unavoidable, there is a
growing realization that much of Kerala’s ‘secular’ public culture and spaces
are in fact Hindu-oriented and should be resisted as part of the work of
purification (see discussion of, in the Jefferys’ phrase, ‘banal Hinduism’
in Osella and Osella 2007b: 9). It is women who are expected to shift
family practice so that children will grow knowing ‘true’ Islamic culture
and will have a habitus formed in an Islamic manner (Jeffery et al. 2004; cf.
Hirschkind 2001, 2006; Mahmood 2004). In practice, women make careful
and finely nuanced compromises. Caroline and her children were invited
to a birthday tea for a five-year-old Muslim girl, where the womenfolk had
bought a birthday cake—an item which they told Caroline was actually
haram and certainly prohibited by their family’s (Mujahid) menfolk (who
were out of the house). When Caroline and her children began to sing the
‘Happy Birthday to you’ song, nobody joined in. Women explained that they
had recently given up singing the birthday song; they really should not be
buying cake or celebrating at all. But, they reasoned, you cannot be so mean
to a small child as to deny them the ‘birthday party’ that their classmates
enjoy. Cake, but no singing, in the menfolk’s absence (and presumed or
feigned ignorance) was a reasoned and negotiated compromise.
In 2003, heated debates in Malayalam Muslim daily newspapers followed
the inauguration of a public function by a Muslim League minister who
began the proceedings by lighting a vilakku (oil lamp).While this is standard
practice on such occasions, lamp lighting is of course derived from Hindu
religious rituals, which leads reformist groups to brand it as un-Islamic and
to demand that Muslim politicians refrain from the practice. Reformists
have also recently advised Muslims against celebrating Onam [Malayali
Hindu new year] or Christmas with non-Muslim neighbours. This turn
has undoubtedly been reinforced by national and international political
events, widely interpreted throughout the community as evidence of an
attack on Islam and arousing among Muslims a sense of being a ‘community
under siege’ which needs to stick together.15 It also follows a generational
shift: there is intensified attention to what is ‘un-Islamic’ in the ideological
orientation of the Mujahid movement.
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Mujahids generally claim religious affinity with the full gamut of
Islamic reformism—from Ibn Taimiyah (1262–1327), Sheikh Ahmad
Sirhindi (1563–1624), Shah Waliyullah (1702–63), Mohammad ibn Abdul
Wah’hab (1703–92) and Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) to Jamaluddin al-
Afghani (1839–97), Muhammud Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida
(1856–1935). The fact that in contemporary discourse it is often Abdul
Wah’hab’s name which is popularly cited as foundational influence is not
as obvious as it might seem. Kerala reformism has complex historical roots.
15
Economic liberalization, intensifying bourgeoisification and Kerala’s powerful consumer culture,
resulting in increasing privatization of education and healthcare, is also playing into schismatic
processes (cf. Jeffrey et al. 2004).
The ideals of reformism and pan-Islamism are likely to have circulated

amongst Kerala’s Ulema at least from the mid-nineteenth century, brought
from Hijaz by Hajj pilgrims (see Laffan 2002) and by the (Thangal)
Hadrami Sayyids’ diaspora which reached Kerala in the early 18th century
(see Dale 1997; Freitag 2003; Freitag and Clarence-Smith 1997; Ho 2006;
Laffan 2002). Reformists, emerging in the wake of the 1921 Mappila lahala,
also had significant contacts with north Indian pan-Islamism through
connections established within the Khilafat movement (Dale 1980; Miller
1992: 128ff.; Panikkar 1989: 122ff; Rawther 1993; cf. Minault 1982). In the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, reform drew as much
from Vellore’s Arabic colleges (Tamil Nadu)—where early reformists such
as Chalilakattu Kunjahmad Haji (d. 1919) and Hamadani Thangal (d. 1922)
were found—as it did from the Egyptian reformism of Abduh as propagated
through the pages of Al-Manar (Haddad 2006)—a journal to which many
founding fathers of the Mujahid movement subscribed (Abdul Haque 1982;
Miller 1992: 265ff; Samad 1998).16
But in contemporary Mujahid narratives, the name of Abdul Wah’hab
obscures the heterogeneous roots of the movement, as ulema prefer to establish
historical continuity with Saudi Arabian and Gulf States connections—
Kuwait and Bahrain in particular. It is here that many Mujahid scholars
train nowadays—many contemporary ulema hold post-graduate degrees
from Saudi Islamic Universities. Arab ulema are regularly invited to address
public religious meetings and local doctrinal conflicts are sent to Saudi
religious scholars for adjudication. Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini religious
organizations provide financial support and ideological legitimation to
the movement. While a pan-Islamic orientation is not new—consider the
circulation of religious scholars and reformist ideas between mid-eighteenth
and early twentieth century—it has been significantly strengthened over
the last 30 years. Not only has Gulf migration brought thousands of
Malayali Muslims close to what they imagine as the heartland of Islam
and exposed them—with all ensuing contradictions and ambivalences—
to life in Muslim-majority countries, but it has also renewed ties with
Arab religious scholars. There is a sense of participating in a worldwide
renaissance of Islamic ‘moral values and culture’. An Islamic renaissance,
16
Al-Manar reached well beyond Kerala’s reformist circles. Kozhikode’s Valiya Qazi—a moderate Sunni
Thangal—told us that his father (the former Qazi and by no means a reformist) had studied in Cairo
and, like many others in Kerala, had held a postal subscription to Al-Manar.
Mujahids argue, would not just rid Kerala of the social problems—decline
of family, consumerism, pornography—brought to bear on Muslim lives
by globalization (the negative side of Gulf migration) but would also set
the basis for counteracting ‘western imperialism’. These are understood to
be problems faced by Muslims worldwide that can only be addressed by a
unified Muslim community.17
Yet Mujahids—especially the KNM-Madavoor faction—are also keenly
aware of the differences between themselves and the most radical forms of
‘Wa’habi’ reformism in the Gulf.18 This is so, for example, with regard to
prescriptions on male self-presentation, on women’s access to mosques and
a preference for using Arabic in sermons: these are all orientations which
Mujahids feel to be inauthentic and unreformed—indeed, they are associated
to traditionalist Sunnis. Here, then, Mujahids reveal and acknowledge the
specificities of their movement and its roots within broader 20th-century
Kerala-wide projects of social reform and modernity.19
Concerns about Christian missionary propaganda, about the
modernization of religious education and its introduction into rapidly
expanding state schools, about access to ‘western’ education, about
participation in government, about the need for public representation, were
central for all the caste/religious movements which emerged across Kerala
in the early part of the twentieth century. Smarting under colonial and
missionary criticisms and noting the rapid economic development enjoyed
by local Christians, all reform movements linked the goals of progress
and modernization to the embracing of ‘western’ forms of education,
employment and business, as well as to the reforming of ‘traditional’ socio-
religious practices which became branded as money-wasting superstitions.
17
Although this goal is closest to the hearts of Mujahid reformists, it has also been picked up by
mainstream organizations: the Muslim Students Federation (student wing of the Muslim League)
focused its 2004 annual conference on ‘Cordoba and Islamic Culture’; unity and forging global links
it is also subscribed to by Sunnis, who are equally enthusiastic and successful in drawing financial and
ideological support from the Gulf.
18
The Madavoor faction opposed attempts to steer the Mujahid movement towards the normative
strictures of Saudi salafism. This is one of the factors which generated the split within the KNM. We
thank Shajahan Madampat for drawing our attention to these events.
19
The driving force of the KNM’s forerunner—Aikya Sangam—was Vakkom Abdul Khadir Moulavi
(1873–1932), born into a wealthy Travancore Muslim business family. His relationship with the Izhava
saint and reformer Sree Narayana Guru and his admiration for the Pulaya social reformer Ayyankali
is well documented. Muslim reformists from all over Kerala converged around Vakkom Moulavi and
continue to refer to him as a foundational inspiration (Jasmine 2002; Miller 1976: 275ff; Samad 1998).
Socio-economic and religious reforms were assumed by 1920s and 1930s

leaders to go hand in hand (Devika 2002; Fuller 1976; Jeffrey 1976; Kodoth
2001; Osella and Osella 2000). In Kerala, communism, literacy, social reform
and an outward orientation (characterized, for example, by a longstanding
‘culture of migration’) have all entwined to make a self- conscious ‘Malayali
modern’ identity, putatively superior to Indians of other states. Reform,
with its universalist and progressive flavour, is then both symptom of
modernity and—like modernity—is necessarily worked out as a project
which is simultaneously local and transnational (Osella and Osella 2006).
Socio-religious Reforms in Kerala

As in the rest of India, the role of members of educated elites in the
development of reform movements and political organizations from the
1920s onwards is not at all unusual. As among their Hindu counterparts,
the message of socio-religious reform, modernization and ‘progress’ for
the whole Muslim community found support especially amongst the
educated middle classes. Indeed, Mujahid leaders argue that the movement’s
success and influence comes down to their ability to join forces with
the modernizing middle classes on a platform of socio-religious reforms.
Kodungalloor,20 with a wealthy landowning and educated Muslim elite,
became the cradle of reformism. Into the town converged not only religious
reformers from central/southern Kerala area, but also a number of Muslim
leaders who had been forced to flee Malabar after the 1921 Mappila lahala
(uprising).21 It is here in 1922 that the Muslim Aikya Sangham was born,
an ulema organization campaigning to ‘unite all Muslims.. . to educate. . . to
reform religious, moral and economic conditions of Muslims by removing
anti-Islamic practices’ (Samad 1998: 81–82). During its short life (in 1934
it merged with the more politicized Kerala Muslim Majlis) the Sangham
focused primarily on the development and reform of religious education,
but it also endorsed a wider modernist agenda.22 In Kozhikode at that same
20
Cranganore, in central Kerala; erstwhile Cochin princely state and site of Kerala’s first ever mosque.
21
See, e.g., Dale (1980) and Panikkar (1989) for different analyses, stressing the lahala as anti-colonial/
anti-landlords uprising or as Muslim jihad.
22
The Sangham’s 2nd conference (1923) was presided over by Abdul Jaffar Hazrat, principal of Baqiyattu-
Salihat Arabic College of Vellore, who encouraged participants to promote English education amongst
Muslims. At the 4th conference, in 1926, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall—British novelist and
journalist who, after converting to Islam, translated the Quran in English—argued that science was not
a prerogative of Christians, asked for the introduction of a youth voluntary structure along the model
period, we find Muslim merchants and traders, Koyas in particular, doing

relatively well under British rule and many ‘community leaders’—wealthy
and substantially Anglophile in orientation—enthusiastically embracing
colonial-driven modernization. Koya merchants built two ‘modern’ schools
in Kozhikode (Himayatul Islam High School, in 1908, and Madrasathul
Muhammadiya Vocational High School, 1918) with the blessings of
the colonial administration and support from the Sangham. Active in
Kozhikode’s public administration, they also promoted the introduction of
modern health and sanitation in the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods donating
land and money for the construction of local dispensaries and clinics.
But the conditions for the development of reform movements amongst
Muslims are significantly different from other communities. Muslim
reformism had to deal with the heavy issue of the aftermath of the 1921
Mappila lahala from which urban middle classes, after initially putting their
weight behind the Khilafat movement, eventually distanced themselves.23
Amongst rural Muslims, in the heartland of Mappilas’ many uprisings, the
benefits of the colonial modernity embraced by Kozhikode’s urban trading
middle classes were far from clear.Three hundred years of colonial penetration
and resulting impoverishment of agricultural tenants and labourers were
understood as the expression of a wider Euro-Christian attack against Islam,
stretching back to the fifteenth-century Portuguese conquest. The bloody
repression of the uprisings did nothing but confirm that the British were
out to rid Malabar of Muslims and Islam.24 For the ‘traditionalist’ ulema—in
whose practices and orientations the majority of rural Muslims recognized
themselves—opposition to Islamic reformism coalesced with a generalized
rejection of the wider project of modernization promoted by reformists.25
of the Boy Scouts and called for the development of modern farming methods amongst Muslims. In
1928 the Sangham started a—short lived—Muslim bank and in 1933 an agricultural exhibition to
showcase Muslims’ use of new scientific techniques of cultivation was held alongside the last annual
conference (Samad 1998: 80ff).
23
While the visit of Gandhi and other leaders of the Khilafat movement attracted large crowds,
Kozhikode remained substantially peaceful during the whole period of the lahala. To be sure, the
presence of British gunboats offshore Kozhikode played a part (Dale 1980: 199).
24
The British administration contemplated the deportation to the Andaman & Nicobar islands of all
Muslims in the areas affected by the 1921 lahala. Although this policy was abandoned for logistical
reasons, eventually several thousands of Mappilas were deported (Miller 1992: 149).
25
We are not suggesting here that early reformist leaders supported colonial rule. Indeed many of them—
such as Muhammed Abdul Rahiman Saheb, Moidu Moulavi, K.M. Moulavi and E.K. Moulavi—
spearheaded the independence movement in Malabar. In non-reformist rhetoric, however, such leaders
In other words, outside the minoritarian and limited spheres of the educated
urban middle classes and the reformist ulema, attempts to introduce ‘modern’
practices—such as English language or scientific education—were seen
with suspicion, if not altogether opposed.
Eventually, the chasm between urban ‘modernism/reformism’ and
rural ‘traditionalism/conservatism’ was bridged in the post-independence
period by bringing into the leadership of the Muslim League members
of Hadrami Sayyid families—such as Syed Abdurrahiman Bafaki Thangal
and Panakkad Syed Mohammedali Shihab Thangal—who were highly
respected and revered by rural and non-middle-class Muslims and by the
dominant Sunni non-reformist ulema. The Muslim League, emerging as the
sole representative of the community’s interests, managed to bring some
rapprochement between Mujahid reformism and Sunni ‘traditionalism’ in
the name of political unity—identified as a paramount necessity in dealing
with the predicaments of post-partition democratic politics—while also
helping push Sunni leaders towards an agenda of moderate reform for
the sake of community ‘development’ and ‘progress’.26 From an all-India
perspective, then, even Kerala’s Sunni ‘traditionalists’ appear modern and
reform minded to a degree (cf. Blank 2001).
Reformism in Practice
Back in Thekkepuram, our Koya friends and respondents, unlike the ulema,
seldom talked to us about the cleavage between Sunni and Mujahids in
doctrinal terms of shirk, bidah, taqlid or ijtihad. Commonly, differences were
expressed by reference to orthopraxy, as distinct ways of praying—from the
way hands are held, to the recitation of Qunooth during the Al-Fajir salat
(dawn prayer), etc. in other words, through cultivation of a particular habitus
and especially through daily embodied practice (cf. Mahmood 2004; Soares
2005: 187).27 Mujahid-oriented women spoke about reform meaning
became branded as ‘anti-Muslim’ for their association to the Indian National Congress which was
perceived to be Hindu-dominated, and to have betrayed the Khilafat movement and the lahala. By
and large (but not exclusively), non-reformist ulema later aligned themselves with the Muslim League.
26
The Muslim League’s orientation has since been one of cautious reformism, where policies are dictated
by pragmatism—the need to maintain unity and to participate in state government—rather than by
possibly divisive ideological or religious considerations.
27
Worried about this, one Mujahid scholar writes, ‘. . . can anyone say that people run to us seeing our
practice of putting hands on the chest [while praying], observing 11 Rakath Tharaveeh and avoiding
correct use of pardah dress (mafta and full coat or abaya) and avoidance of
any un-Islamic practice—ranging through the celebration of birthdays or
wearing nail varnish to calling on the martyr-saints.They also always stressed
to Caroline their relative freedom compared to Sunni women: they are
encouraged rather than prevented from pursuing education and attending
mosque. But respondents were always also keen to point out that, in the end,
‘We are all Muslims’, that Sunnis and Mujahids are substantially alike and
that differences are not of kind, being akin to those ‘between Catholics and
Protestants’. Within families, sectarian differences are discussed with teasing
and jokes. Fatima, a Mujahid madrasa teacher, interrogated Caroline about
the details of her religious practice, concerned to check that Caroline did
not indulge in ‘saint worship’. Meanwhile Fatima’s aunt—a devout Sunni—
told Caroline, ‘If you ever convert, I know you will come over to us. You
sing in church: well, if you join the Mujahids there is no singing, but we
Sunni women have such beautiful songs’.
Ulema debating issues of ‘public interest’ or the ‘common good’ (Ar.
maslaha/maslaha amma) distinguish between disagreements which amount
to contradiction and those which produce variety, and are to be welcomed
(Zaman 2004: 148). A degree of disagreement within the community is then
not necessarily seen as problematic.While Sunnis and Mujahids continue to
frequent different mosques, there are little traces of the public confrontations
and social boycotts which characterized past relationships between the two
camps. Those who embraced—as young men—the Mujahid cause in the
1950s and 1960s invariably recall severe beatings from their fathers and the
open hostility of their neighbours, telling even of being pelted with rotten
fruit and vegetables on returning from Mujahid meetings and mosques.
The feeling that one has in contemporary Kozhikode is that cards have
been dealt and divisions have fallen into the predictable routine of everyday
life, where some families are recognized to be ‘traditionally’ aligned with
Mujahids or Sunnis, while in others followers of either orientation coexist
amicably. And intermarriages are commonplace. Nowadays, there are very
few Kozhikode ‘conversions’ to reformism: young men or women are
Mujahids because their families are Mujahids and they therefore have been
socialized into reformism, for example, by receiving religious education in
a Mujahid madrasa. ‘Conversions’, on the other hand, are numerous in the
Qunooth? We should remember how our ancestors attracted people to our religion’ (Sullami 2002).
Gulf, where reformist organizations are extremely active—more so than are

Sunnis—offering migrants support and drawing them into social functions
and networks through which Muslim Malayali sociality is replicated and
celebrated. Any changes in religious orientation taking place among Gulf
migrants are less due to exposure to Saudi or Kuwaiti reformism—with
which migrants have a highly limited and indirect exposure—than to
intensified association with Malayali Mujahid groups.
The current lack of antagonism between Sunnis and Mujahids is only
partly explained by this apparent routinization of difference. In recent years
a ‘coordination committee’ has been instigated by a number of Muslim
entrepreneurs and industrialists—many of whom are running Gulf-based
business empires (Osella and Osella 2007c). Spurred by the 1990s rise to
government of Hindu nationalist parties, it brings together religious leaders
of different groups to foster unity within the community. It has managed
to resolve some of the most apparent expressions of religious factionalism,
bringing consensus, for example, over the timings of the beginning
of ramzan and the setting of eid. But what we want to note here is that
Mujahid reformism does not appear to the ‘unreformed’ as controversial
or threatening as it did 50 years ago because much of what it insists upon
has by now become taken for granted more widely, as the dominant and
normative means through which to express and experience engagements
with modernity and progress. Reformism, focusing on repudiation of
‘backward’ custom through religious learning and ‘modern’ education, holds
far wider significance as a necessary aspect of the modern outlook of the
Muslim middle classes and as normatized part of a distinctively ‘progressive’
Malayali identity.
In Kozhikode, traditionalism has become associated to ignorance,
superstition and uncouthness; it is seen as characteristic of either rural
(Mappila) or poor Muslims, to the extent that even ‘orthodox’ and unreformed
Koyas no longer participate openly in urs such as Sheikh Palli nercha.
Public religiosity and community-building are instead nowadays expressed
in family-oriented rallies, ‘social meets’ and mass prayers. Communal eid
prayers, for example, are organized in parks and on the beach by reformist
groups; every year, these attract thousands of Kozhikode Muslims, men and
women. While men and women pray in separate sections, this is a mixed
and family occasion.
While some ‘traditionalist’ practices in Thekkepuram are increasingly

confined to the domestic realm and while some traditionalist-leaning
Koyas refuse indignantly the label ‘Sunni’ and try to define themselves
simply as ‘just Muslims’, organizations devoted to the social and educational
‘upliftment’ of Muslims are thriving. Reformism in its social aspect has
become the dominant framework, leading to the replacement of older
forms of sociality—when men gathered in local ‘clubs’ to play cards and
consume alcohol—with new, such as involvement in NGOs or public
functions. Groups such as Citizens’ Intellectual Educational Social and
Cultural Organisation (CIESCO)—formed in 1956 by a group of high
school students—emerged within the general atmosphere of social activism
which characterized post-independence Kerala, exemplified by the famous
‘library movement’ (Nair 1993). Organizations like CIESCO not only
campaign for and support Muslim children’s formal education (CIESCO
runs a private English-medium school), but also organize regular camps or
seminars to entertain, educate and inspire local Muslims. Today, Mujahid
and Sunni supporters are equally involved in CIESCO’s management
committee; a women’s wing—the wives of male committee members—
organizes separate functions for women. Local women enjoy these socio-
cultural public programmes which combine entertainment (children’s
dance performances; cake baking competitions; henna hand-painting)
with reformism: speeches on how to live a moral active and rationalized
Muslim life delivered by community leaders, educationalists, public health
workers or women felt to be useful community role-models. At a host of
meetings run by organizations like CIESCO, Muslims are inducted into
the idea that they should be aiming for a ‘systematic life’ (Mahmood 2004;
Robinson 2004; cf. Watt 2005). Post-colonial modernity has then offered
fertile grounds for the flourishing of a standardized, partly reformed and
universalizing Islam of convergence which is self-consciously ‘progressive’.
Conclusions
Nile Green (Chapter 4) eloquently demonstrates that we cannot analyse
shifts in Muslim society without situating such shifts within the wider social
milieu. Kozhikode Koya enthusiasm for reform is clearly part of Kerala-
wide patterns: 1920s and 1930s agitations to break with the nineteenth
century past; 1950s post-independence social activism; post-1980s
religious revivalism. It even focuses on many of the same core issues, such
as education. We hear from Kerala’s Mujahids a critique of Thangals—

accorded respect by traditionalist Sunnis—as being an oppressive elite:
fond of superstitions, perpetuating caste-like differences, keeping learning
as a monopoly and maintaining ignorance among others, while living off
the back of people’s devotion. These charges are similar to low caste and
reformist Hindu critiques of Brahmans. Similarly, the Mujahid stress on
monotheism necessarily reminds us of reformed Hindu discourses such as
Advaita Vedanta, or the work of (e.g.) Sree Narayana Guru in Kerala who
was reacting around the turn of the 20th century to missionary accusations
of ‘idolatry’ and ‘devil worship’. Reform is of course attractive to certain
sections of any population. As among Kerala Hindus and Christians (e.g. the
reformed Marthoma Protestant church), we find among Kerala Muslims the
association of religious reformism with a self-consciously ‘modern’ outlook,
through promotion of education and the rallying of support from the
middle classes, with a concomitant association of orthoprax traditionalism to
‘backward’, superstitious and un-modern practices troped as being specific
to in rural and low-status locations.
The major differences which mark the specificity of the Muslim
experience of reform in Kerala are, firstly that rural Malappuram Muslims
(Mappilas) were in a poorer, more downtrodden condition than rural low
caste Hindu groups; secondly, that Muslims had a smaller middle class which
could move to promote reform and agitate for change; thirdly, that early
moves towards reformism among Muslims were slowed down by a wave of
conservatism in Malabar, following the brutal crushing by the British of the
Mappila lahala and general British anti-Muslim sentiments. But the entire
social landscape has changed dramatically since the 1950s and now even
the ‘traditionalists’ are running engineering colleges. What we have tried
to do here is to show how reformist rhetoric has pushed—and continues
to push—the entire Muslim community towards not broad ‘reform’ but
specifically to crafting a vision of and programmes for a modern Muslim
moral community. Reformism, via the central tropes of enlightenment,
education, rationality, and so on, has become imbricated with more
generalized ideas about progress. A ‘modern’ and ‘systematic’ life with good
secular education for one’s children is now a widespread aspiration.
We have insisted that Kerala Islam is deeply local. This is not, pace
Imtiaz Ahmad, because can be rooted in syncretic or sufi-inspired practice;
as we have seen, it is extremely hostile to such practice. But neither should
such practice anyway be read as necessarily the trope for what sort of Islam
is authentically ‘South Asian’. Nercha/urs, rateeb, and so on, are themselves

not ‘South Asian’, but are aspects of Islam: those working in West Africa,
South East Asia—even in parts of the Arab world—will recognise similar
practices as part of popular Islam (Manger 1998). Caroline’s embroidery
class colleagues were offended by her questions about what a nercha and a
Hindu utsavam have in common: it is clear that, even if blessed oil is offered
to devotees at a shrine, for the Muslim participants this is quite different
in meaning and sacred-emotional structure from a Hindu festival, and we
must take seriously our respondents’ insistence that this is so (cf. Werbner
2003). We must not ride rough-shod, but must recognise as critical such
distinctions in how people live their faith.
We have also traced some processes of production of categories of
‘reformism’ and ‘traditionalism’. While reformists are split between several
tendencies and debates continue about what are reform’s core aspects,
reformists unite around a general concern with shirk, still now sometimes
leading them into confrontation with Sunnis. In Kerala’s fully literate state,
the proliferation of newspapers aligned to particular sections underwrite
these processes: Kerala has five Muslim newspapers. Adoption of stricter
practices—such as take-up of full veiling—comes partly in response to all-
India politics, partly as assertion of middle class and ‘modern’ status and only
partly as response to Gulf exposure (Osella and Osella 2007b). Mujahid
and Sunni alike invite Arab ulema to make speeches at functions and both
groups successfully raise cash for projects from Arab benefactors. And the
fact is that shrine festivals and mosque building alike proliferate with Gulf
money, a tendency we situate as part of a Kerala wide, all-community,
religious revivalism (Tarabout 1986; Osella and Osella 2003; cf. Gardner
1985; Ewing 1997).
Our ‘localist’ analysis does not in turn imply that Kerala’s Mujahid
movement is not part of a wider tendency within Islam towards reform
(Robinson [Chapter 2]). We must acknowledge reformist aspirations to
universalism: how often in Kozhikode will somebody confidently inform us,
‘Islam says this’ or, ‘Muslims must do this’, speaking for all. Joel Kahn argues
against the branding of radical Islam as ‘particularistic, backward looking
and fundamentalist’ and insists that it is instead ‘just as universalist. . . as are
western movements for human rights. . .’ (Kahn n.d.: 5). Kerala’s Mujahid
movement, while certainly neither identical nor mere imitation, is obviously
inspired by similar core ideals and shares some founding influences (e.g.
Mohammad ibn Abdul Wah’hab, Muhammud Abduh) with reformist

movements right across the Muslim world. Noting this, and observing the
continual troping of Mujahid v/s Sunni as modern v/s backward, leads us
towards arguments suggesting that what Robinson has identified as the drive
to perfection may be a feature not specifically of Islam, but a feature available
within Islam (as in some other religious traditions) and especially likely to
flourish under conditions of modernity (Kahn n.d.; cf. Robinson 2004).We
need then to trace out the modern roots of reform, which are contributing
to its contemporary success in many locations, while simultaneously taking
on board reform Islam’s claim—as Mujahid leaders reiterate to us—not to
be anything created from new but to be a strand of time-honoured practice.
Finally, we note with interest the emergence around Kozhikode of
an identity as ‘just a Muslim’—neither one nor the other. A few of our
respondents insisted upon the fact that they were not aligned with either
Mujahids or Sunnis nor even more broadly with ‘reform’ or ‘orthodoxy’.
Such people might be, for example, open to ideas about western education
and use of the vernacular for khutba, but unwilling to insist upon strict
reformist-style pardah for their womenfolk; they may argue against Thangals
holding high status and political office but argue that it is not necessary to
abandon attendance at shrines. Ideological debates between Mujahids and
Sunnis, their leaders’ high public profile, the existence of media sponsored
by and aligned with particular groups, have all over-determined public
discourse, such that it seems almost impossible to avoid taking a clear public
stance on one’s affiliation for one or the other group. But in private practice
many people are negotiating doctrinal issues in relation to complex and
contradictory demands of everyday life, where families strive to provide
best opportunities for their children in an increasingly highly competitive
and globalized labour market. While ijtihad may be imagined by leaders
as the privilege of the ulema, it does appear that reform paves the way for
further democratization of and critical engagement with religious practice
(cf. Robinson 2004). Ben Soares tracks in Mali, as we have tracked for
Kozhikode, the ways in which a reformist minority have been able to
influence and shift majority practice and thinking (Soares 2005: 206). At the
same time, he argues that the development of the postcolonial public sphere
has also encouraged a general standardizing of Islam, a convergence between
reformists and their opponents as Islam comes to be defined around core
universalistic values such as the haj or observance of Ramzan (ibid.: 187,
200ff). While it seems highly unlikely that in Kerala any charismatic leader
as in the Malian case28 would emerge, those who refuse to be labelled Sunni
or Mujahid but lay claim to be ‘just a Muslim’ may perhaps also come in
time to articulate a formal position which would transcend the present
binary and be attractive to others. But, as Simpson has shown us, all such
developments are over-determined by political events (Chapter 8). Because
Kerala Muslims are forced continually to react, within the state, the nation
and the world at large, it is impossible to predict what directions Islam here
may take in future.
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7
Piety as Politics Amongst Muslim
Women in Contemporary Sri Lanka
Farzana Haniffa
Introduction
M uslims are 8.9 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population and they live
scattered throughout the country in small communities. The only
two significant population concentrations are to be found in the Eastern and
Western provinces. Although the Sri Lankan conflict is generally described
as one between Sinhala and Tamil ethnic groups, Muslims—especially those
of the conflict-affected areas of the Northern and Eastern provinces—have
been affected by the violence and militarization. They struggle today to
have their experiences acknowledged. The Islamic piety movement has
become visible in Sri Lanka, with Muslims all over the country adopting
the uniforms of piety—hijab and abhaya for women, beard and Tablighi
Jama’at’s large tunic and pants for men. The movement itself takes many
forms. In this essay I argue that the manner in which piety is perceived and
propagated among Muslims in Sri Lanka must be understood as located
within the context of ethnic conflict and the polarization between ethnic
groups that occurred in its wake. I will explore the work of one Muslim
women’s da’wa (preaching) group—Al Muslimaat—that pioneered the
process of making piety popular among lower-middle- and middle-income
Muslim women in a semi-urban Colombo neighbourhood. Looking at
the group’s activities and specifically through analyses of the bayan or lay
sermons delivered by their most charismatic member, I will look at the

nature of the pious practice that is preached. I will argue that in making
a self-consciously pious Muslim female subject, Al Muslimaat bayans are
affecting ideas of masculinity and femininity among the suburban Muslims
with whom they work, and recasting Muslimness in a manner exclusive of
ethnic others. Muslims are consistently marginalized in Sri Lankan popular
culture as an alien other;1 today they are finding a new idiom by which to
articulate their own cultural uniqueness by invoking a new global Umma
that has been rendered close via technology.
Al Muslimaat is in many ways similar to the phenomena emerging in
Muslim communities throughout the world. Women coming together in
informal piety groups all over South and Southeast Asia as well as in the
Middle East, in the wake of the Islamic revivals in their respective countries,
have received significant scholarly attention (Brenner 1996; Mahmood 2005;
Torab 1996). Azam Torab’s work on Iran describes the shia Jalaseh ritual
amongst suburban Iranian women as emerging in the wake of the revolution,
and focuses on reading the negotiation of gender identities that occurs
within such women’s homosocial spaces (ibid.: 248). In the Sri Lankan case,
I want to suggest that gender roles are transformed in the decisions made
to embrace pious practice and in the manner in which women, too, take
on the role of doing da’wa. Brenner (1996: 673) describes women in Java
participating in prayer groups in her discussion of veiling, and emphasizes
that the transformation of self experienced by women who veil in Java is
informed by and in turn contributes to larger processes of social change
occurring in Indonesia. Similarly, I am also claiming that, in addition to the
powerful personal transformations that they bring about, the piety groups’
work in Sri Lanka must be understood as a response to the militarization in
the country in the wake of the conflict, and the marginalization of Muslims
in conflict-related politics. Maimuna Huq (Chapter 11) describes ‘lesson
circles’ as sites where young middle-class Bangladeshi women confront
notions of authentic Muslimhood and interpretations of Qur’an and Hadith
privileged by the Islamist Movement in Bangladesh. Huq discusses these
sites as locations of a multitude of consensual as well as critical responses
to these discourses. Mahmood (2005) (producing her analysis principally in
response to liberal feminist stereotyping of Muslim women’s oppression in
1
For a detailed discussion of Muslim representations in Sinhala popular culture, see Haniffa (2007:
chapter 3).
Piety as Politics Amongst Muslim Women / 173
US academia) has described women’s mosque movements in Egypt where

similar issues regarding pious practice are discussed. Mahmood’s analysis, a
critique of liberal feminist interpretations of agency, calls for foregrounding
the intentions of those embracing piety and engaged in self-transformation
and valorizes the creation of a pious selfhood. I differ especially from
Mahmood’s analysis in that I foreground not only the individual intention
to transform, but also the process of social transformation that the women
intend to bring about and the consequences of that transformation for
gender and ethnic relations within the community.
The Second Minority

In a country where Sinhalese constitute approximately 78 per cent of the
population and Tamils are 12 per cent, the 8.9 per cent Muslims constitute
the second minority.2 In the evolution of post-colonial Sri Lankan political
governance, Sinhala majoritarianism and minority marginalization has
elicited different responses from the three largest ethnic communities.
While Tamil leaders had their own alternative vision for the governance of
the country, principally through a federal system that would give power of
self-government to majority Tamil areas, Muslims chose different paths (De
Silva 1998; Uyangoda 2001; Wilson 1988). Muslim leaders have historically
preferred to find ways to articulate their interests within a mostly Sinhala-
dominated status quo (Ali 1986, 1992; De Silva 1998; McGilvray 1998;
Phadnis 1979; Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam 1997). Muslim population
distribution has been such that a territorially organized federal system
would not necessarily guarantee adequate Muslim representation. Muslims,
therefore, preferred not to politicize their ethnicity, opting instead to be
ethnically neutral in their pursuit of political office (Ali 1992; McGilvray
1998). There have been Muslims in power from both the North East and
the South who have been elected from mainly non-Muslim constituencies
and they have been champions of the notion that ethnicization for political
ends is not helpful to the country’s future. Those Muslim leaders who
have emphasized Muslim concerns have accessed power not via Muslim
vote banks but through mobilizing patronage networks and personal class
connections with the Sinhala leadership (Ismail 1995).
2
Accurate figures are unavailable. Enumeration was not conducted in conflict areas during the census
of 2001. Even the 8.9 per cent figure for Muslims is an approximate figure. Full enumeration was
conducted in 1981 prior to the escalation of the conflict.
With the evolution of the ethnic conflict, and especially when the
significantly large Muslim populations of the Eastern Province became
increasingly affected by the violence, it became clear that the ethnically
neutral politics practiced thus far were not adequately addressing the needs
of the Muslim masses in the conflict areas. Further, the change in electoral
systems in the 1980s—the introduction of the proportional representation
system for instance—brought about the phenomenon of smaller parties,
with the chance of providing the seats needed for coalition governments.
This saw the emergence of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC)
(Knoerzer 1998). Unfortunately, even these changes in the system have had
only minimal impact in countering the country’s majoritarian governance
structures (Haniffa 2007). The SLMC, although with a consistent vote
base in the Eastern Province, has had only minimal success in bringing
substantive political gains for Muslims in a system that continues to be
organized to undermine minority representation. For instance, the SLMC
was a powerful part of the United National Front (UNF) coalition that
initiated the 2002–05 peace process. However, its leader Rauf Hakeem
was unable to persuade the government or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) to agree to a separate Muslim delegation to the peace talks.
Their successes have been limited to individual MPs’ resource utilization to
uplift the infrastructure in their areas. Unlike in the East, the large numbers
of Muslims that live in the Western Province, especially those that live in
Colombo (Colombo district has 205,078 Muslims, and they are 9.2 per
cent of the district population) live and work amongst religious and ethnic
others. Many of the Muslim middle classes in Colombo, decades after the
emergence of the SLMC, remain skeptical as to its usefulness and continue
to support the larger National parties (ibid.).
One other element of Muslim identity politics in Sri Lanka that has
to be understood in any analysis of the success of the piety movement
is the manner in which the religious category ‘Muslim’ is placed with
‘Tamil’ and ‘Sinhala’—the latter both identify categories based on language.
Muslims, a largely Tamil-speaking community, first refused the Tamil ethnic
label at the end of the nineteenth century over the issue of communal
representation under British rule (Asad 1993; McGilvray 1998; Zackariya
and Shanmugaratnam 1997). When the colonial administration, in its
move to provide more local control of government, proposed appointing a
Kandyan and a Muslim member to the legislative council in 1889, the Tamil
leadership opposed this, stating that the Muslims were ethnically Tamil.
Muslims protested against such a definition of themselves (Azeez 1957),
the British decided to create the seat—not necessarily because of Muslim

protest—and Tamil–Muslim difference became institutionalized.3 Therefore
in Sri Lanka today, Muslim religious identity works on the register of
ethnicity as well (Ali 1992; McGilvray 1998). With the advent of the piety
movement, religion has come to override all other forms of collective
identity for Muslims, even those of language and region. Any analysis of
the success of Muslim piety groups in the country cannot be conducted
without taking this peculiarity into account. Terminology popular in other
contexts such as ‘secular Muslims,’ ‘non-practicing Muslims’ is difficult to
maintain in Sri Lanka, given local identity politics. And further, the term
‘Tamil-Muslim’ as it prevails in Southern India is not meaningful in the Sri
Lankan context, where to call someone a Tamil-Muslim becomes a highly
contested political claim (Nuhman 2002).
The early Tamil nationalist movement saw some level of participation
by Eastern Muslims in the struggle of the Tamil-speaking people. However,
since the mid-1980s, with state intervention to arm Muslim civilians, relations
between the Tamil and Muslim communities in the Eastern Province
deteriorated.4 The most significant LTTE attacks on Muslims occurred in
1990 with the massacre of male Muslims at prayer in Kattankudi and Eravur.
Then the entire Muslim community of the Northern Province—75,000
persons or 5 per cent of the province’s population—was expelled by the
LTTE in an act of ethinic cleansing in October 1990 (Hasbullah 2001).
This violence and the ethnic cleansing by Tamil militants were not
directly experienced by Muslims in the south and west of the country, and
served mainly to further exacerbate the sense of insecurity with which
they lived among the Sinhala majority. The current generation of Southern
Muslims’ experience of ethnic violence was mainly as witnesses to the 1983
pogrom against Tamils organized by Sinhala nationalist elements of the state
(Wilson 1988). In the wake of the 1983 riots, there were many government
ministers in Colombo who spoke of Muslims as the ‘good minority’ and
many Muslims who witnessed the violence were also eager to underscore
their own allegiance to the state and the fact that they—unlike the Tamils—
knew their place as a minority (Ismail 1995).
3
However, even today, the LTTE brand of Tamil nationalism insists on Muslims’ Tamilness and sees
Muslims as traitors to their ethnicity. See Saminathan (2005) and Sivathamby (2004).
4
For a discussion of a different time of amicable coexistence of all three communities in the Eastern
Province, see Obeyesekere (2004).
Muslims in Sri Lanka, therefore, feel beleaguered as a socially, politically

and economically weak minority5 within a context where inter-ethnic
relations have often been defined by violence. Recent religious self-assertion
has given the community self-confidence in ways that the idea of a Muslim
political community—a distant possibility as a geographically dispersed
second minority—has failed to do (Haniffa 2007). Given the political realities
within which Muslims currently have to live, the minority consciousness
that they inhabit infuses even the religious precepts that they advocate. I read
Al Muslimaat’s attempts to transform notions of ‘Muslimness’ amongst its
constituency as informed by just such a minority consciousness. Religious
revivalism amongst Muslims has given them a greater appreciation of their
own identity, but has transformed their relations with ethnic others in a
way that mirrors the polarization that has taken place amongst the different
religious/ethnic groups during 25 years of conflict.
Al Muslimaat and the various other actors of Sri Lanka’s piety movement
are a part of globalized Islam and hugely influenced by movements that
participate in what Roy has described as a quest for a non-national,
homogenous Umma (Roy 2004). However, in the Sri Lankan case the
local plays a fundamental role in the logics through which the piety groups
operate.
Al Muslimaat
The core group at Al Muslimaat and the bayan (lay sermon) attendees
were from a variety of middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. They
included ladies who were dropped off in air-conditioned Japanese cars driven
from the more affluent Colombo areas of Colpetty and Bambalapitiya, as
well as those who took the bus or a dusty three-wheeler ride from the
closer Dehiwela suburbs. Al Muslimaat is well known in middle- and
upper-middle-class Muslim circles for its da’wa activities—proselytization
work through which the new orthodoxy is propagated among the fellow
Muslims—as well as for its social service work. Founded in 1990, when
the wider piety movement was gathering strength throughout the country,
today it is an institution well established in the community. It received
added impetus with the return of the charismatic Dr Mareena Reffai after
5
Because of the prevalence of the stereotype that Muslims are all rich and are all traders, the large
number of Muslim urban poor are virtually invisible in popular national discourse.
she completed her postgraduate studies in Ophthalmology at Sheffield

University. Al Muslimaat’s stated purpose is, ‘To do Da’wa with emphasis on
social and welfare activities, for the upliftment of women in particular and the
society at large in Sri Lanka.’6 Given that the much more widespread Tablighi
Jamaat movement propagates the segregation and seclusion of women, Al
Muslimaat activites are frowned upon by some; this impacts on the way in
which they work. Although the group elects different presidents each year,
Dr Marina Reffai is their public and most vocal member. Her status in the
community as a respected doctor, her family connections to the late A.C.S.
Hameed (a powerful foreign minister in successive United National Party
governments) and the fame of her bayans make her the undisputed force of
the group. Al Muslimaat also runs a marriage bureau, organizes an Ulhiya
sacrificial service during Haj and Ramzan festivals, conducts job placements
for women, runs an Islamic nursery school, distributes free hijabs to the
poor, runs the Ummul Muhmineen residential certificate programme for girls
between secondary school and university (or marriage), conducts weekly
radio programmes on Islam in Tamil and English, visits Muslim inmates at
the Welikada women’s prison and gives public lectures on invitation. Their
‘social service’ activities include working with Muslims expelled from the
Northern Province by the LTTE in 1990, with those affected by the 2004
Tsunami and with people displaced from Mutur (in the East of the country)
by August 2006 fighting between the LTTE and government forces. In
the aftermath of the Tsunami, Al Muslimaat took the lead in coordinating
aid activities amongst Muslim organizations.7 In the 1990s they worked
extensively with the expelled Northern Muslim population, conducting
health clinics, providing funds and coordination for building toilets at the
camps, building makeshift homes and paying salaries for two school teachers
and three maulavis (teachers of religion) in the Western Coastal district
of Puttalam where most of the expelled now live. They are a registered
organization that runs on donations and institutionalized funding. Their
organizational upkeep is based on members’ personal contributions, and
6
Al Muslimaat: Sri Lanka Association of Muslim Women and Girls. Souvenir of the Al Muslimaat
inauguration project. Muslim Women in the Midst of Change. Saturday 30 November 1991.
7
After the Tsunami of 26 December 2004, Al Muslimaat was inundated with money and goods in the
immediate aftermath. This was partly instrumental in the setting up of the Centre for Coordinating
Relief and Rehabilitation or CCRR, a new Muslim collective. Al Muslimaat was extremely active in
relief work in Muslim areas in both the south and the east. The extensive relief work that is conducted
by the organization, although it remains important to my analysis, is not my focus here.
funding received for projects like building wells, or toilets are fully utilized
to produce such wells and toilets. They take great pride in one aspect of
their work, that they, unlike other NGOs, do not charge ‘institutional
overheads’ on charitable projects. Al Muslimaat conducts daytime bayan for
housewives on Wednesdays (English) and Thursdays (Tamil).8 Their office (a
spacious house on Initium Road, Dehiwala) with its community activities
and its large rooms, offers women a refuge from their everyday lives that
is considered socially legitimate within conservative Muslim middle class
society, since it is a space for prayer as well. Emphasizing both learning and
service, Al Muslimaat and its da’wa and social service activities have offered
both medium and space of expression to middle-class Muslim housewives
beyond the duties of wifedom and motherhood, and a chance to participate
in the ongoing community improvement.Those who join the Al Muslimaat
inner circle are instructed in the history of Islam, Arabic language, Qur’an
interpretation and the importance of da’wa. In common with many such
groups worldwide, Al Muslimaat made it possible for women to enter the
traditionally exclusive territory of male UIema. At Al Muslimaat, religious
exegesis was the focus of intense discussion, with the intention of better
incorporating religion into women’s everyday lives (see also Brenner 1996;
Mahmood 2005; Torab 1996).
A Space for Change

In some of the focus groups I organized amongst Al Muslimaat activists,
I tried to elicit what they thought about the role of the organization
amongst the Muslim community as a whole. Kamila, one of the more active
committee members, said,
I think that every woman in the Muslim community has a talent

which is hidden. We ourselves aren’t aware that we have that
talent. And once we come here to Al Muslimaat we somehow
find out. Before we came to Al Muslimaat we didn’t know how
to write a business letter how to open a bank account. . . we
couldn’t even do a secretarial job! This [Al Muslimaat work]
brought out our hidden talents, and every single one has that,
8
I attended Al Muslimaat bayaans every Wednesday morning over a period of three months, sat in
on their committee meetings, and conducted focus group discussions with the older stalwarts of the
organization.
especially Muslims. Al Muslimaat isn’t something that apes the

Western world but it helps us be what we really can be and to
do what we want within the boundaries of Islam and Allah’s
teachings.... When we got married, we were just at home. Even
to go for a class, they were not very happy to let us go. Masha
Allah now with Al Muslimaat we are doing something for society
which we didn’t do before this.
Many of the women at Al Muslimaat that I spoke with had a narrative

of transformation similar to that of Kamila’s and all recounted how much
stronger they felt for being able to participate in the organization’s activities.
Al Muslimaat provided a space of high social and moral significance for
women to be legitimately active outside their homes, and their increased
personal piety, the social capital that many earned through their participation
in da’wa activities, transformed them.9 In the Sri Lankan case, and particularly
in the case of Al Muslimaat then, I want to draw attention to two aspects
of the transformative experience of da’wa. The first, as has been extensively
discussed in the literature, is the discovery of the path to increased personal
faith; the second is the experience of improving society through the da’wa
and social service activities. Both aspects of the transformative experiences
are equally important. The sense of increased self-worth that Al Muslimaat
members talk about, therefore, is not limited to greater personal piety alone.
The specificity of da’wa work in Sri Lanka—making it different from
any other narrative of Muslim evangelicals10 elsewhere—lies, I argue, in
the manner in which the piety movement has transformed significant
sections of a minority community—traditionally considered conservative
and backward, and with little social presence—into a highly energized
hive of visible activity and change within the country’s fractured polity.
Al Muslimaat represents one of the centres of women’s activity of this
movement through its mobilizing of Muslim housewives in the semi-urban
Colombo neighbourhood of Dehiwela.
9
It should be noted that the seclusion that Kamila alluded to in her narrative is not true of all the women
that attended. Some spoke of an upbringing that did not involve segregation (including a wider social
circle, interaction with men, parties, etc.) that was ultimately unsatisfying to them. They spoke of the
fact that the encounter with Islam that Al Muslimaat provided gave new meaning to their lives.
10
The usage of the ter m, with its Chr istian der ivation is done self-consciously. Reffai once
referred to herself and the work that she does as ‘evangelical’.
Mahmood (2005), in her investigation of Women’s Mosque Movements

in Egypt, attempts to read the manner in which Muslim women’s making
of their religious selves can be understood outside of liberal feminist
frameworks that view the world in terms of the binaries of subordination
and subversion (2005). Mahmood frames her discussion of women and
the mosque movement as a challenge to received notions of agency and
emancipation traditionally upheld by liberal feminism. Through discussing
the dispositions in operation in these women’s ‘training’ of their selves to
be better Muslims, Mahmood demonstrates the logic of self-making that
is actively pursued in the name of proper religious practice. Discussing
the cultivation of Sabr (patience) and that of Haya (modesty), Mahmood
demonstrates the manner in which these women participate in a discipline
of cultivation of a particular self, desired in the name of proper practice.
Mahmood understands such a self-making as different from even the
reiterative logic of femininity and masculinity articulated by Butler. In the
case of the Egyptian women, performative repetition—in the proper usage
of dress for instance—builds upon earlier performances. The framework
proposed by Mahmood, then, is different from Butler’s (1990) schema,
where each performance is either a successful or failed repetition of an
ideal. The difference lies fundamentally in the differential positing of
intention. Mahmood proposes a certain agency in the desire that motivates
the performance, whereas for Butler intention is very much a part of the
structural working of power; while in Mahmood’s reading of Butler, agency
sits only in the performative resistance—through parody for instance—to
sedimented ideals of male and femaleness.
In Mahmood’s case, there is a fetishizing of intention—in keeping with
the liberal notion of choice—without a concomitant analytical interest in
the larger context in which such a self is desired, or the social consequences
of choosing such a self. As a part of a broader project on Muslim minority
self-assertion within Sri Lanka, here I attempt to understand the workings
of gender as they operate in the worlds that Al Muslimaat women occupy.
However, my own interest is not so much in reading the Sri Lankan case as a
test for liberal feminist politics, but rather with analyzing the transformations
of gender roles—both male and female—that are experienced and
negotiated in this particular context. Having observed the advent of the
piety groups and their first tentative forays while I was growing up in
Sri Lanka, and conducting research into their later more assertive inroads
and the impact they have had in forming the social habits of today, I find
myself needing to look beyond the point at which Mahmood rests her
investigation. For example, amongst those at Al Muslimaat, wearing the hijab
was not a religiously transformative experience in and of itself, nor was
it always a part of a project oriented towards making a more pious and
aware self in the manner Mahmood describes. In Sri Lanka, Muslim women
across class and region, unconnected to any piety group, now wear the
hijab and even the abhaya. Today, this dress has become a marker of cultural
difference; more a sign of Muslimness in a multiethnic polity and less of
a newly and consciously embraced personal piety. Therefore the selfhood
embraced is Muslim, but not always radically religious. My critique, or at
least qualification, of Mahmood’s delineation of self-making through the
adoption of a pious demeanour is that such a practice shifts in meaning with
each generation, but Mahmood offers no discussion of the normalization
that occurs with the passing of time. Practice is meaningful in the manner
described by Mahmood for those who embrace it through conviction in
a social field not necessarily familiar with it or sympathetic to it, but it
becomes something quite different to the next generation of practitioners.
For many of those in Sri Lanka who follow the practice today, it is a sign of
the religious; but it is also part of the everyday, without the potent meanings
of self-transformation associated at an earlier moment. Wearing the hijab
then, loses much of its affective power over the self when, as those first
promoting it had intended, it becomes regularized as a required, everyday
practice amongst women of a certain group or class. It is for this reason that
I prefer to address the remaking of community that women at Al Muslimaat
perceive themselves to be engaged in, and the creation of a new normative
Muslim femaleness. At Al Muslimaat, embracing the hijab (at minimum, a
scarf pinned at the throat or under the ear, that covers the hair and neck)
and, more often, the abhaya (long cloak over everyday clothes) with a scarf
covering hair and neck certainly does mark an embracing of piety. But the
personal piety and modesty that is signified by the wearing of hijab is merely
the first step; the real work is yet to be done. Learning the rules of proper
practice, unlearning what was considered orthodoxy under a different
regime of knowledge and conveying that knowledge to one’s family and
peers in a manner that maintains community networks and does not unduly
disturb gender norms constitute the more substantive work at Al Muslimaat.
I share with Mahmood the desire to understand what motivates these
women in their work, but I want to do so in a manner that recognizes the
positive social transformations as well as the personal piety that these women
see themselves as achieving in the process. I will therefore foreground

both the intention that Mahmood points to and the additional contextual
question of the consequences of imagining a religiously ethical selfhood
for a beleaguered minority community wedged between two highly
majoritarian political projects. Therefore the emphasis I place is not just
on the techniques of personal practice, but also on how the embracing and
propagating of such techniques can be understood as impacting social
relations among Muslims as well as transforming Muslims’ place in a tensely
plural multiethnic polity.
Today, nearly 16 years after its inception, the Al Muslimat challenge
is not to introduce the hijab to local Muslims; this has already taken place,
and they are quite proud of their role in bringing this about. The challenge
today as already stated is to inculcate the basics of the new orthodoxy, and
maintain Al Muslimaat’s position in a context where different ways of being
piously Muslim are in intense competition.
Changing Gender Roles

In Sri Lanka, Muslimness—and particularly Muslim maleness—is not
obviously validated within the dominant national culture. There are no
widespread Muslim-identified media institutions, while representation
of Muslims in popular culture reflect their marginal status. As already
suggested, Muslims in the South additionally feel that constant vigilance
is to be practiced everywhere, against an amorphous potential violence
from the Sinhala majority. The dynamic between Muslim men and women,
newly energized by the movement for greater piety, have to be understood
as located within this minority sensibility. The re-reading of injunctions
and the compulsive preoccupation with proper practice that Al Muslimaat
advocates often brings about shifts in gender relations. Al Muslimaat by
its very presence has recalibrated hierarchies between Muslim men and
women. There is a structure of feeling, brought on by the subtle reordering
of kinship linkages among the urban middle classes, that are transforming
male/female relations amongst the Muslim middle classes as well. Marina
Reffai of Al Muslimaat also advocates a method of doing da’wa work that
does not question or challenge community notions regarding women’s roles,
thereby minimizing any threat that Al Muslimaat may be perceived as posing
to community gender hierarchies. The changing urban context, as well as
Reffai’s constant vigilance, helps maintain Al Muslimaat’s position, enabling
members to remain active. As Osella and Osella explore in their recent work
(2007) there is a shift across South Asia towards contemporary globalized
forms of companionate marriage and nuclearized family structures; these
pertain amongst those engaged with the piety movements in Sri Lanka as
well, and helps Al Muslimaat members to minimize and manage threats to
the gender status quo.
One day Reffai talked about head-covering practices in her natal
village. Reffai described the manner in which, in Akurana, during her
childhood, women often covered their heads in front of their husbands
during mealtimes.
‘Now, Allah never said “Cover yourself when eating”, in no

hadith or anywhere does it say that. Even for the recital of the
Qur’an you don’t have to cover. Because we have got used to it
from small days that covering has something to do with piety, but
we should really know what is piety and what is not. Who are
we covering in front of? Our husband, but a husband is the only
one who can see even our awra.’ A woman can’t see (another
woman’s) awra, a man can’t see the awra, not even your mother.11
This was one of a series of instructions regarding thinking about the

various forms of practice that have become naturalized among Muslims.
Reffai’s bayans constantly urged women to refrain from ‘blind following’
of the practices they were raised with and to be self-conscious about
prayer and practice. Here she drew attention to the ways through which
the injunction to cover yourself when going outside in the presence of
strange men was reduced to covering the head at mealtimes in front of
your husband. I find this discussion interesting not because of the manner
in which it denigrates existing practices and insists on new orthodoxy—
many have noted this feature in new piety movements—but because of the
manner in which denigrating this particular practice draws on a notion of
companionate marriage and nuclear family to propagate a particular form
of piety. For instance, arguing against the compulsory covering of head in
front of the husband—popular amongst Sri Lankan Muslim middle classes
of a previous generation—Reffai alters the meaning of the head cover. It is
11
Reffai herself defined awra for the group.The passage that I cited included the following. ‘What’s awra?
The part between the neck and the knees.’
no longer practiced in the service of hierarchized marital relations within

the home—the head was formerly covered as a mark of respect for the
husband—but rather in the service of a particular public Muslimness that
wearing the hijab today entails. Reffai saw head covering in front of the
husband as a misreading of the practice, a perversion of its true purpose.The
previous set of meanings associated with head covering is rendered dated,
irrelevant and requiring transformation.12 The current meaning—brought
about in the name of orthopractice—is one that calls attention to women’s
responsibility to maintain a norm of Muslim femaleness outside the home. In
other words, it acknowledges women’s expanded area of action in the wider
world as well. Secondly, such a reading valorizes the sexual bond within
marriage. Such a recasting of head covering indicates that the marital sexual
relationship—and, I would argue, companionate marriage in general—
is sacred under the new Islam, and is an essential part of the practice of
piety. The marital relationship then is cast as unique—another feature of
companionate marriage13—and outside other hierarchies of kinship that
normally organize Muslim society (one’s mother, for instance, is outside
of the space that is rendered sacred to a woman and her husband).14 The
current emphasis on the nuclear family over the extended system of an earlier
generation, increasingly popular amongst urban Sri Lankans, is becoming
entrenched amongst Muslims as well and, in the case of Al Muslimaat, is
drawn upon to propagate the idea of public female piety. The argument I
am making here is that the gender roles that are propagated by this piety
group are not reducible regardless of their claim, to their Muslimness alone.
12
Lara Deeb’s recent work discusses a similar practice among a Shi’i community in Lebanon of recasting
beliefs held by an earlier generation through a process that she terms ‘authentication’ (Deeb 2006).
According to Deeb, this authentication is part of a discourse of ‘progress’ in which this community
sees themselves as becoming stronger both spiritually and materially. My interest in this section is not
so much in discussing the trajectory of improvement that Al Muslimaat activists also see themselves as
participating in, but to understand the manner in which changing gender roles are manipulated and
managed in such a context.
13
See Johnny Parry’s (2004: 312) description of the difference between the marital relationships as
imagined by a father and a daughter in different types of marriages in Bhilai as cited in Osella and
Osella (2007).
14
I do not mean to suggest here that all relations between the newly pious men and women become
those between equals. In fact, as I will soon show, Reffai’s bayan sermons actively propose a persona
for women that is non-threatening of persisting gender hierarchies. I only describe certain shifts and
reorganization of hierarchies and show that gender roles become differently calibrated, and that it is
not always clear who comes out on top.
They are in fact much more in line with the requirements of class and of
the larger, globalized late capitalist world.15
My conversations with some Al Muslimaat women regarding the
practice of nikab further underscores this ‘structure of feeling’. Many of
these women did not practice the nikab, although they termed it a ‘very
highly recommended sunnah’ (i.e. among practices valued by the prophet—
considered meritorious but not termed compulsory for Muslims). It was
not a farl or a wajib (compulsory practice), they told me. To many of them,
wearing the nikab was inconvenient and unrealistic. Talking to the garbage
collector, the water-metre reader, the electrician, and so on, will either be
forbidden or will all require wearing the nikab even in the house; taking the
children to the doctor would be difficult when a woman dons the nikab and
is not supposed to talk to non-maharam (related) men. Therefore, a family
has to have a great many readily available ‘facilities’ in order to practice nikab,
they said. I asked these women activists whether it was necessary for one
to have a lot of money for servants, private transport, etc. to facilitate the
adoption of such a practice. My research with some wealthy Tabligh Jamaat
women had indicated just that.16 Formy Al Muslimaat friends, however, it
was not so much a matter of money as the husband’s commitment to do
the additional work required to support a nikab wearing wife. One of the
primary requirements of the nikab, they said, was the husband’s willingness to
take on the responsibility of helping the wife.The added burden of running
some household activities—paying bills, taking the children to the doctors,
grocery shopping, etc.—that the nikab wearing wife should ideally no
longer undertake will now fall on others. In a middle-or lower-middle-class
household without the resources needed to employ servants to take care of
such tasks, only the husband can take on these responsibilities. What would
essentially be the wife’s ‘subjection’, her retirement into further symbolic
and material seclusion, then requires husbands’ greater participation in the
smooth functioning of the domestic sphere. Thus, in the Colombo urban
and suburban context, there must be a necessary disruption of normative
gender roles for the accommodation of the wife’s embracing of nikab. I
15
Abu-Lughod (1998) makes a similar point in relation to the Islamist practices of Egypt which she reads
as propagating practices of marriage and family that are very similar to bourgeois Western notions of
companionate marriage and the nuclear family.
16
Their practice of full nikab—gossamer face veil that does not show the eyes as opposed to half nikab
that does—was eased by the large enclosed house, the servants that manned the gate and the cars that
ferried them to and from their bayans.
am not claiming here that such a sharing of responsibilities always takes

place, or that women are not called upon to both cover their face and
venture out into the world to take care of household needs. I want to
draw attention, rather, to women’s articulation of practices in terms of the
necessary negotiation of household duties.
The impact of piety groups on notions of masculinity remains another
perspective through which to address this ethnographic material. It is also
significant that Al Muslimaat women refuse to take on what they see as the
marker of an extra element of piety on the basis that it was not ‘practical’ for
them. Such a claim indicates that decisions regarding transforming everyday
practices to be more in line with new orthodoxies are normally family
decisions taken by husbands and wives in conversation with one another,
and requiring complicated reorganization of their lives. Here, men are called
upon to participate—in partnership with their wives—in formulating the
family’s position regarding piety. The Muslim self-embraced by women at
Al Muslimaat then cannot be imagined without taking into account the
consequences for their immediate kin.
Preserving Community
As I have described elsewhere (Haniffa 2007), the piety movement in Sri
Lanka includes the Tablighi Jamaat, Sunnat Jamaat, Tauheed Jamaat, and so
on. Different groups’ orientations towards practice are quite different, and
adherents have strong feelings regarding these differences. Muslim extended
families often have members that belong to different da’wa groups and these
differences have sometimes to be managed to avoid confrontations. In this
context of competition, members of the Tablighi Jamaat and persons from
the Salafi identified groups that I interviewed insisted that they preach non-
confrontation and try to manage differences without overt clashes between
persons holding different views on piety and social transformation (cf.
Alam [Chapter 5]). At Al Muslimaat, although the bayans’ rhetoric generally
promote Da’wa or preaching (to lapsed Muslims) and criticize ‘unIslamic’
behaviour, there is also a strong message that such preaching should always
eschew confrontation. Reffai constantly urges the women at Al Muslimaat
that, while it is their duty to inform those who do not know about the
‘correct’ way to practice, they must not take too seriously the burden
of convincing believers of the path of true Islam. While transformation of
society is emphasized and the importance of missionary activity stressed,
there is a firm commitment to the avoidance of fitna (chaos or social break

down) within the community of fellow Muslims. Under the frequent
invocation of lakum dinukum valiyaddin—the line from Sura Kafiroon that
states ‘to you be your way and to me mine’,17 women at Al Muslimaath are
urged to not be too affected by the many strongly held differences that they
will encounter. This generally meant that women were urged by Reffai
to avoid confronting normative gender hierarchies head on. While Reffai
stopped short of saying ‘don’t contradict men’, she promoted ‘patience’ and
advocated ‘good sense’ in making judgements regarding the appropriate
time and place to intervene. Their task, Marina Reffai’s bayans often told
women, was only to spread ‘the word’; changing people’s hearts was ‘Allah’s
job’.18
Al Muslimaat members practiced tolerance under trying circumstances
in the midst of a social field populated by many different groups competing
for supremacy: the Tablighi Jamaat was prominent; Sufi groups (colloquially
termed Sunnat Jamaat) that were on the wane during the past few years,
due to the prominence of the Tablighi and Salafi identified groups, are now
asserting themselves again. Further, groups like the Tablighi—who have a
much less public role for women—consider Al Muslimaat to be a forum
where there is potential for fitna.19 During one of our discussions, another
Al Muslimaat stalwart, Fareeda, recounted the following story.
Fareeda: Recently I went to a funeral house for a bayan on the

7th kaththam.20 [We asked] this moulavi what we should do for
the dead. He said, ‘Recite Mauluds as much as you can, recite
one thousand yasins, recites the salawaths.21 The dead man is like
drowning and every time you recite, it is like giving your hand
17
Last line of Sura Kafirun. Sura CIX line 6.
18
I realized later on that this call also reflected a rivalry between the Tablighi Jamaat and the Tauheed/
Salafi groups. The latter did not support the Tablighi’s benign insistence on one’s responsibility to save
others.
19
One learned female member of the Tablighi Jamaat made a passing comment to this effect during my
interview. The Tablighi make a point of being non-controversial and this sister did not belabour the
point; however, I noted down very clearly that she mentioned the word fitna in relation to the work
that Al Muslimaat engaged in.
20
Kaththam—a night of prayer and shared consumption of food to commemorate the seventh day after
the passing on of a loved one.Today these practices are conducted mostly by those identified as Sunnat
Jamaat and frowned upon by most other groups.
21
Yasin is a Sura from the Qur’an and Salawats are a particular form of prayers that are considered to
bring about great amounts of merit.
to pull him up’. He never spoke of the Sadakathul Jariya and he

never mentioned the three things that you can do for the dead.22
Everyone who was there was convinced. A cousin of mine said,
‘You said not to recite the Maulud, no? See, he talked about the
benefits of the Mauluds’.
Samiya: (another member present at the discussion) Why didn’t
you want to say anything at that point?
Fareeda: How can I speak with six men seated there and how
can I go and fight with the moulavi? Obviously it was not the
time and place for it. He asked, ‘Who is your scholar?’ and I said
I didn’t have a special scholar and I go to anyone who follows the
sunna—I was following Silmi who has qualified with the Salafi.
If I said that, I will have to explain what Salafi is. How could
you explain Salafi in a few lines? So these moulavis think we are
cowards and don’t want to explain. So I just said, lakum dinukum
valiaddeen—your religion to you and to me my religion.23
Fareeda’s tale is instructive in a number of ways.The funeral has become

an arena where different ritual regimes compete with one another in the
context of bereavement and cause much distress. The three things that one
must do in the case of a death—reciting the Janaaza (funeral) Prayer, taking
care of the deceased’s unfinished business and Sadakathul Jariya (charitable
deeds in the name of the dead that are beneficial to the community as a
whole)—are considered by the Salafi school, to which Al Muslimaat is loosely
affiliated, as the only necessary and sufficient rituals of mourning. However,
there are much more elaborate practices involving prayers and lamentations
which are popularly followed. The seventh Kaththam that Fareeda attended
and the Maulud that she mentions are part of these customary practices that
were popular among Muslims before the new orthodoxy introduced by the
Salafi and Tablighi Jama’at identified groups, and are still diligently practiced
by Sufi identified Sunnat Jamaat families.The fact that Fareeda held back in
the discussion of such a controversial subject is indicative of the manner in
which Al Muslimaat’s project of community transformation defers both to
the norm of not disturbing social relations and also to the traditional gender
hierarchies at play.
22
Sadakathul Jariya is charitable service that benefits the community at large, like the building of a
school or a well. Al Muslimaat advocated conducting such practices in the name of the dead over the
traditional kaththam and kandoori, the giving of alms at home and at the mosque.
23
This sentence regarding to you, your religion and to me, mine, is used in general when Muslims
confront those of other faiths. It is unusual that in Sri Lanka, it is used to refer to other Muslims.
Reffai, aware of the competition among the different groups, in her

bayans strongly discouraged infighting amongst Muslims on issues of
doctrinal detail. ‘Differences of opinion are there’, she said during one
bayan, ‘because Allah wanted it that way. So there is no use fighting about
it.’ Fareeda’s avoidance of fitna indicates a conscious following of these
instructions. The insistence on non-confrontation allows for the presence
of an array of strongly held dispositions and practices to maintain a difficult
equilibrium among the different piety groups. While I also heard the line
from Sura Kafirun referred to by members of the Tablighi Jama’at, their
particular orientation towards non-confrontation draws on a different
philosophy concerning the effacement of the self (Metcalf 1993).24 This
incident of giving way—told to me as part of a story regarding the difficult
conditions under which da’wa work is done—indicates the importance
placed by Al Muslimaat on community. It further suggests that in the case of
Al Muslimaat women, transformation of the self has limited efficacy outside
of the transformation of community and therefore, for their work to be
successful, women need as wide a community acceptance of their presence
as possible. Reffai emphasizes the containment of difference, and kinship
and class linkages are permitted to override variations in doctrine and
practice. At the same time, the existence of Al Muslimaat as an institutional
space that endorses their own form of piety as well as their avoidance of
confrontation ensured that women were rarely in doubt that their way was
the most suitable way. Public disagreements with men and calling attention
to themselves while in society at large were discouraged, but this was a
strategic stepping back. The safe homosocial space of Al Muslimaat and the
relationships growing there amongst women valorized their identities and
contributed to these women’s sense of self-worth. The authority of pious
women, with their access to true Qur’anic knowledge and information,
and the constant threat to traditional male/female hierarchies which these
women represented, was strategically managed. Normative middle-class
Muslim gender hierarchies privileged male status in ways that were not
always endorsed outside the community; in this context, women’s emerging
knowledge and power included the well-honed capacity to avoid overt
confrontation. Given that these gender norms were dated and crumbling in
24
The Tablighi Jama’at’s way of maintaining a non-confrontational da’wa practice works on a register
that is different from that of the gendered deference practiced by Al Muslimaat and it merits closer
analysis.
day-to-day life in twenty-first century Colombo, women did not seem to

find it especially difficult to appear to be deferential of them.25
The Place of the Kafir

Muslims in Sri Lanka’s commercial capital Colombo live, as observed
earlier, in social, political and geographical spaces that are populated with
large numbers of ‘ethnic others’. However, many practices of religious self-
making persistently call for the cultivated distancing of the religious other
and promote a sensibility of community exclusiveness among Muslims.
The consequences of the creation of the new pious selves in the urban
multiethnic context of Colombo are therefore quite socially and politically
different from contexts where there are no discernible religio-ethnic others
to contend with.
Discrediting traditional ritual practice is a common feature of new
religious movements. In the case of Sri Lanka, this manifested itself as a
discrediting of rituals shared amongst the various religions present in the
country and it reflects an assertion of Muslim religious exclusivity (not yet
overtly politicized other than in the Eastern Province) in the context of
Tamil–Sinhala political polarization. According to Reffai’s bayans, prior to
the advent of the piety movement, Sri Lankan Muslims were steeped in
ignorance, in shirk and bidat and needed the awakening that was brought
about by the converts of the west.26 The affective worship, the highly popular
25
Recent developments in the Eastern Province, where Thareekathul Mufliheen (a sufi group in the
Eastern Muslim town of Kattankudi) was attacked by mobs for being ‘against Islam’ is an indication
that this tolerance is not uniformly practiced among Muslims throughout the country. It speaks to
the very different social, political and demographic organization of the different regional Muslim
blocks in the country. Arguably, Eastern Muslims, one of the largest ethnic groups in the area, do not
subscribe in the same way as those in Colombo do, to Muslims’ minority sensibility. The difference
between the Southern and Eastern Muslims has so far been described in the literature in terms of their
different political interests. McGilvray’s (2001) work on Muslims in the Eastern Province remains the
only scholarship to discuss the Eastern Province’s specific social dynamics. However, this work does
not draw specific attention to the differences between the Muslims of the East and elsewhere in the
country and the manner in which this difference has shaped Muslims’ relationship to fellow Muslims
as well as to ethnic others.
26
This is another particular aspect of the Al Muslimaat philosophy as propagated by Reffai. Reffai sees
the piety movement—and especially the return to orthodoxy—as brought about by Western converts
to Islam. She is quite self-conscious about the fact that it is through westernized influence on precision
and rigor that Islam has been able to achieve the resurgence that it is now experiencing.
Sufi tariquats that were characteristic of Islam of the South Asian littoral27
were thus dismissed by Al Muslimaat as backward and retrograde. Reffai
would always open her bayan with a dua (supplication) stating that the two
means by which Islam will be ‘damaged’ is by ‘wrong teachers’ and ‘blind
following’. I was repeatedly told by members of Al Muslimaat that they
were no longer ‘blind followers’ but were informed believers, exercising
their choice to practice the religion of their preference. This rhetoric of
‘taking control’, of making their own decisions regarding religion, was
crucial to their sense of their own selves and their mission at Al Muslimaat.
And a large part of this control lay in identifying, denigrating and purging
the community of practices that constitute ‘blind following’.
One day, Reffai related an experience about the practice of placing small
sums of money into boxes at roadside places of worship—mosques, temples
or churches—for safe passage.These acts are not unique to Muslims, but are
followed by Christians, Buddhists and Hindus. The main arterial roads of
the island leading from Colombo to Kandy in the central hills, from Kandy
to the Northern city of Jaffna, and from Colombo to the Southern port city
of Galle, have several such places of worship at which travellers routinely
stopped to make offerings.
People stop and put kanikka [offerings of coins into the

strategically placed roadside tills]. It’s laughable how much they
put. Fifty cents, one rupee, two rupees... I was traveling one day
with some people and they stopped in Mawanella to put kanikka.
So I said, ‘Up to here you got protected without putting kanikka
so why are you putting it now?’ Then he said, ‘No, they are
collecting it and are building a mosque’. So I asked, ‘Show how
much your putting. How much? Six Rupees! You can joll y well
afford to put six thousand!’ He was driving a super car... The
intention is wrong because you won’t get protected by putting
money. We must get people to think on what and why they do things.
Reffai mobilized several elements of her reformist logic in this instance:

she called for the investigation of intentions, to have acts of charity be
meaningful and not ritualistic gestures that require repetition and not
27
See, e.g., Didier and Simpson (2005). They explore some of the particularities of ‘Littoral Islam’ that
cannot be explained just in terms of developments in the subcontinent.
thought, and for supplications (dua) to be done according to prescribed rules.

These shared practices were also part of ‘blind following’ that most Muslims
were raised with, as opposed to a form of worship that was self-conscious.28
If you want protection on a journey then you recite the appropriate dua;
and if you want to help build a mosque then you give the Alim something
for that reason. Most importantly, the task of Da’wa was to get people to
think about what they do and wean them away from ‘blind following’. The
requirement that rituals be reasonable and be done self-consciously and not
‘blindly’ is an aspect familiar amongst self-conscious piety groups throughout
the world—as in the Egyptian Mosque Movement for instance29—and is
not of special note. In the Sri Lankan context, these practices were often
shared with other religions and their loss, in the name of preventing ‘blind
following’, marks yet another arena where the polarization of communities
becomes reflected. It is one example of the manner in which groups like Al
Muslimaat reference not a local context of shared beliefs—the practice of
seeking protection on one’s journey through the shared practice of alms at
shrines—but rather a global context of reform that devalues local practices
as impure. Slowly, ties to local notions of community—those of knowledge
and customs shared with ethnic others—are being cast off in favour of
orthodoxies common only to selected co-religionists.
A considerable amount of energy is then being expended by groups
like Al Muslimaat in transforming the community. The presence of many
such groups now makes piety a highly charged arena of community activity
among Muslims. The manner in which this newly energized and Islamized
community affects the relationships of Muslims to their ethnic others
remains a question worth exploring.
I regard the cultivation of Islamic religious specificity amongst Muslims—
with the personal and community transformation that it has entailed
among participants at Al Muslimaat and the many other da’wa groups in
the country—as the most substantive indication of a transformative Muslim
politics. However, this transformation is one that valorizes and formalizes a
pious selfhood in an idiom recognizable to Muslims alone.
28
See Deeb (2006) for a discussion of a similar orientation towards transforming ‘traditional’ practices.
29
Self-consciousness of practice is a central tenet amongst the women of the piety movement featured
by Mahmood (2005) as well. For a discussion of different analyses of this self-consciousness—i.e.,
objectification (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996) or authentication (Deeb 2006)—see Deeb (2006: 20).
The term kafir or infidel—as it functions today to refer to religious

others within the everyday language of the newly pious—is an introduction
of the piety movement. As Marina Reffai once stated, using terminology
identified with Islam was part of a strategy to place Islam at the centre
of Muslims’ everyday lives. It is an attempt thereby to foreground their
Muslimness as the most fundamental defining characteristic amongst a
populace that has—as indicated above—a variety of different class linguistic,
sectarian and regional allegiances. It is therefore a means of maintaining
ethnic exclusivity from religious others as well as one of bolstering uniformity
in a context where piety itself is taking many contested forms. The term
kafir replaced the more benign term ‘non-Muslim’ as used amongst the
middle classes of an earlier time. The emphasis on using assalamu alaikum
wrahmathullahu wabarakathuhu instead of ‘hello’; jazakalla khair instead of
‘thank you’; alhamdulillah instead of ‘bless you’; subhanallah instead of ‘Oh
My God!’; the calls to refer to time in the terms of the five daily prayers
(e.g. after Luhar and not ‘afternoon’, after Magharib and not ‘evening’) is all
part of this larger strategy. Reffai constantly and explicitly advocated this
change of terminology among those that attended bayans and never failed
to refer to religious others as kafirs.The word kafir is powerful in the manner
in which it imposes a uniformly homogenizing othering on an obviously
heterogeneous mass of persons amongst whom the bulk of the Sri Lankan
Muslim population— and especially those in Colombo—conduct their
day-to-day activities.
The representation of the ‘kafir’ in the Al Muslimaat bayan speaks to the
manner in which an erasure of the others’ worth is incorporated into the
discourse of how to be a good Muslim.
One day, when Reffai seemed particularly inspired she gave us the
following advice,
Have absolute trust in Allah. Allah is enough. No one else is

necessary. He will provide for you; you just practice. Some of
the things in the hadith, you just try.You don’t have 100 per cent
trust, but you do it anyway and see, and you can be thunderstruck
and humbled. You feel like crying. You feel like staying in sujud
24 hours. You must actually practice it and it happens and you
feel like going to the top of a mountain and shouting and saying
look this has happened! I feel so sorry for the kafirs. We have
this trust in Allah, he will not burden us, he will look after us,
we have so much comfort and solace. How do the kafirs manage? I
mean, when we have problems, we walk around with a smile.When they

have problems how do they manage?And make sure that they should be
patient? They don’t have that comfort. That’s why they cry and shout
and wail.
Reffai’s attempt to communicate her own affective experience of piety

was impressive. Other than that, the almost dismissive rhetorical reduction
of the kafir in the context of her transformative experience is interesting.
Reducing the ‘other’—the kafir—to the point of a caricature was a common
rhetorical strategy of her bayans. For Muslims in Colombo, interaction with
many different ‘others’ was unavoidable. And in many instances, it was more
than likely that Muslims’ relationships with work colleagues, neighbours
and school friends of other ethnicities were of as much significance as the
kinship and social relations between Muslims.Therefore, Al Muslimaat bayans
attempt to assert the importance of Muslim community over other sorts of
community that might be of significance to the Muslims that attend. Reffai’s
bayans encourage a brand of compassionate superiority through which to
maintain the difference. At Al Muslimaat, the kafir was rendered not as the
alien and fearful ‘other’, but as the much more benign and less threatening
figure of the less blessed, the less fortunate foil to the community of Muslims.
Together with the obvious ‘othering’ through the terminology of ‘kafir’,
the intense preoccupation with personal and community piety also adversely
affects Muslims’ sense of themselves as part of a plural polity that includes
persons of other faiths.The intensity of activity demanded of those engaged
with the piety groups further endorses the disengagement with the kafir. By
filling Muslim participants’ imagination and time with many compulsory
injunctions, engagement with the ethnic other is rendered minimal. Lists
of new injunctions to be followed and the policing of activities to prevent
accidental accruing of sin are constantly emphasized. For instance, one bayan
discussed the days on which Muslims were forbidden to fast; fasting on
the day of the Eid Ul Fitr is prohibited. The question, then, of whether
one should fast on the day before the festival, if the day of the festival
was ambiguous (due to moon sightings—itself a matter of debate) became
a worry.30 Then, another preoccupying issue evident in the bayans was
that of deciding by what process one learns and memorizes the different
30
There is an ongoing debate among piety groups in Sri Lanka over whether it is local moon sightings
or those of Saudi Arabia that have to be taken into account to decide the date of the festival.
duas supplications that have been allotted by Allah for various day-to-day
activities. As Reffai once said, ‘Practically for every situation there is a dua:
for opening your eyes, for going to the toilet, coming out of the toilet,
looking at the mirror, putting on your dress, all these... getting out of the
house, pain in the back, someone scolding you—a dua. For everything, He
has given us a dua’. Further, given the slightly different orientations of the
different groups engaged in propagating piety, members of Al Muslimaat,
and many Muslims of the Tablighi Jamaat, also became preoccupied with
who was following what method and which part of that was correct or
wrong, and why. Such issues preoccupied most Muslims having any links
to the piety groups and institutionalized social distance from ethnic others.
In creating a normative Muslim personhood, ethnic and religious others
now hold only the marginal and insignificant place of the ‘kafir’. In this
arrangement, extensive everyday engagements with non-Muslim next door
neighbours, garbage collectors, water-metre readers, vegetable vendors,
trishaw drivers, bus conductors and supermarket attendants were, however
briefly, forgotten. For many, due to the time that was now taken up with
practicing the new orthodoxy (cf. Huq [Chapter 11]) interaction with ethnic
others was also rendered perfunctory and fleeting. Nowadays interaction
between Muslims and ethnic others is limited to supplying instrumentally
the needs of everyday life, and does not extend to the qualitative social
exchanges of an earlier era. An earlier generation of middle-class Muslims
spent time as members of the multiethnic Rotary or Lions clubs; today, such
activities are largely replaced by Muslim only gatherings for da’wa work.
While the dehumanizing reduction of the ‘other’ that occurs in the midst
of piety groups such as Al Muslimaat is not identical to the othering which
is caused by militarization and violence (Haniffa 2005) it is nevertheless
a move which now makes it almost impossible for adherents to consider
Muslims’ problems as issues which are commonly shared, with themselves
understood as part of a common ‘Sri Lankan community’. Da’wa groups like
Al Muslimaat consistently emphasize and propagate religious community,
referencing a Muslim Umma that lies outside the bounds of the Sri Lankan
state. Unfortunately, this emphasis on religious community (that has taken
on the same power as language-based nationalism for the Tamil and Sinhala
communities) conceives of itself in an idiom that is not recognizable in
the terminology of either of the two majoritarian nationalisms. Such an
imagining of community—while perhaps inevitable—bodes ill for the
future.
Conclusion
I have delineated certain features of the Muslimness that is anticipated by
Al Muslimaat and explored the techniques they use to maintain certain
gender and ethnic power balances while conducting da’wa activities. I have
shown the level of commitment made by various middle-class Muslims in
order to embrace this new piety and transform themselves and transform
society in the pursuit of good Muslim selfhood and suggested how gender
identity is being managed to ensure the very survival of Al Muslimaat—as
a women’s da’wa group in the midst of a social field populated by mostly
male led-groups. While the community is then being transformed in many
positive ways, the piety movement is also affecting Muslims’ place in the Sri
Lankan polity, by the cultivation of ethnic exclusivity. This phenomenon—
entirely predictable in the context of intense ethnic polarization—may
have troubling consequences in the future. A most unfortunate result of
piety groups’ work to make Muslims informed and appreciative of their
religion, is the manner in which religious community is being emphasized
to the detriment of any other sorts of social participation. While Muslims’
newfound confidence through groups such as Al Muslimaat must be
appreciated, a concomitant sophistication in Muslim political and civil
society groups is only slowly beginning to emerge. A preoccupation with
religion has left little room for the political understanding of Muslimness
as part of a constellation of different ethnicities and religions within one
polity; Muslims are still struggling to find ways of articulating Muslim
grievances in a manner that can change current misconceptions regarding
Muslims’ place in the conflict.The lack of fit between the practices through
which Muslim society is transformed and energized and the practices of
society at large means that there is as yet no meeting point between the
language of the piety movement and the demands of activism in the larger
Sri Lankan context. In Sri Lanka today there are then three communities,
all three asserting their own integrity, but based on three entirely different
notions of selfhood. One can only speculate as to what this augurs for a
future settlement to the country’s conflict.
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8
The Changing Perspectives of Three
Muslim Men on the Question of Saint
Worship over a 10-Year Period in
Gujarat, Western India
Edward Simpson*
Introduction
I n this essay I discuss how three Muslim men hold to be true apparently
contradictory ideas about the legitimacy of saints.The principal argument
is that much of the sociology of religion, at least as often expressed in
contemporary anthropology, relies on somewhat static and instrumental
notions of belief and knowledge. I illustrate this and demonstrate the
consequences for the more general understanding of popular Islam and
reformism in South Asia.
The kind of simplifying drudge I have in mind is most extremely
characterized by surprisingly common statements such as ‘Muslims believe
X and Y’, the error of which hardly need to be demonstrated. However,
there are other levels at which this tendency operates. It requires cultivated
*
The fieldwork on which this essay is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
(RO0429634237). I am grateful to Caroline and Filippo Osella, Carrie Hietmeyer, Jason Sumich and
Sylvia Vatuk for commenting in constructive ways on this material. The names used in the text are
pseudonyms.
The Changing Perspectives of Three Muslim Men / 203
personal or professional interests in order to question statements such as,

‘The Barelvis hold that spiritual intermediaries are a vital part of the society
of Islam’. Such statements should beg the following kinds of questions: is
this group of Muslims (associated with the teaching of Ahmed Rida Khan
and Hanafi jurisprudence) formed solely by the uniformity of belief among
its members? Do all spiritual intermediaries hold Barelvis in equal regard
with other Muslims? Are all intermediaries held in equal regard by the
Barelvis? Who says so? How do they know? What does it mean to believe
or hold that something is true? While it is beyond my scope here to provide
a confident answer to the final question, my data illustrates some of the
limitations of discussing religious belief—and thus also ideas of reform—in
terms of truth and certainty at the level of the individual and hence, by
extension, at the level of the group.
The essay is broadly divided into three parts.The first section places my
material within the existing body of literature on Islamic reform in South
Asia, introduces the ethnographic context and outlines general debates
about the legitimacy of saint worship. The second section is ethnographic,
and describes the changing perspectives of three men over a 10-year period
in Gujarat, western India, on the question of saint worship.The third section
broadens perspective, to tie the ethnography into shifts in religious politics
in western India.
Islam and Modernity in South Asia

Many accounts of Muslim societies have focused on the division between
those who venerate living or dead saints as intermediaries between
themselves and Allah, and those who condemn such beliefs and practices.
For some scholars, clearly influenced to a degree by their own religious
practices and anthropological beliefs, this division has been dealt with as
matter of religious philosophy and as a fundamental contradiction at the
core of Islam (notably Gellner 1969; Gibb 1972). These scholars are not
entirely wrong to emphasize this division, because it is also a rhetorical
device often used by Muslims themselves, and one that has historically
driven many reformist movements (see Eickelman 1981, 1982). Scholars
and Muslims alike have often busied themselves with rhetoric, seeming to
hold that matters of belief and practice will follow unquestioningly behind
the words of reform.
Drawing on ethnography from the southern coastal belt of Kachchh
District in the far west of Gujarat, I suggest that the separation of ‘saint
worshippers’ (often equated to syncretism and the irrationality and

superstition of mythos and, inaccurately, likened to Catholicism, i.e. those
who ‘believe’ in saints) from ‘non-saint worshippers’ (often equated
to the rationality of logos and ‘reform’, and thus inaccurately likened to
Protestantism, i.e. those who ‘do not believe’ in saints) is a sociological
falsehood which has become entrenched in the anthropology of Muslim
societies, or, to be more careful in my claims, this division is something I am
unable to extract consistently from my own ethnography.
As a way into discussion, I make two further claims: the first relates to the
predominance of historical knowledge of particular types in the literature
and the second to the enduring legacy of a kind of thought, most accurately
described as ‘functionalist’, in the anthropology of Muslim societies.
Much of the best work on Islam in India has been written by histor-
ians, notably those working on the pre-colonial (Eaton 1978, 2001) and
colonial periods (Metcalf 2004, 2005; Reetz 2006; Robinson 2001, 2003;
Zaman 1999a, 1999b). This work has focused primarily on the emergence
of ‘reformist’ movements in the northern part of the country during the
nineteenth century. Hence, there is something of a lopsidedness to our
knowledge: we know more, and more thoroughly, about the historical
development of reform movements and their relationship to colonial thought
and practice than we do about the lives of Muslims in either colonial or
contemporary society. Thus, when one turns to the background to Islam in
South Asia, the key texts tend to focus on schools of thought, key figures and
the delineation and relationship of these schools to the competitive world
of pre-independence politics. Such works have a certain epistemological
character (the consequences of which I turn to below), and generally build
upon one another. This observation is not simple disciplinary sniping, but
has tangible effects on the contemporary production of knowledge about
Muslims and modernity in South Asia.
A recent book by the sociologist Rowena Robinson (2005), on Muslims
affected by violence in Mumbai and Gujarat, provides a good example of
the consequences of this lopsidedness for the study of contemporary India.
Robinson’s text is rich with data from interviews, but the details of doctrinal
differences among Muslims are trotted out in a much more formal—if not to
say formulaic—style in explanatory footnotes. Significantly, I strongly suspect
this—is because Robinson had to turn to historians’ work for the details
presented in these footnotes and because most of her interviewees would
not, nor could they even if pressed, describe differences between Muslims in
these terms.We learn, for example:‘Deoband teachings manifest a distrust of

other cultures and seek to purge Islam of Western and modernist influences
and to establish the Quran and the Hadith (‘sayings’ of the Prophet) as the
sole source of tradition’ (ibid: 189, note 7). In contrast, ‘Unlike Deobandis,
Barelvis believe in the powers of the Prophet and the saints’ and ‘…believe
in the intercession between humans and the divine through a chain of
holy pirs [saints] ultimately reaching the Prophet (ibid.: 190, note 11). We
learn about the ‘Sufi influences’ that inhere within the religious practices of
Indian Muslims and the growth of reformist movements such as the Ahl-e-
Hadith, Jamat-e-Islami and Jamat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, movements opposing
the worship of saints often described by the generic terms ‘Wahhabi’ or
‘Salafi’.
In this fashion, work on Indian Muslims stresses the significance of
divisions, notably by devotion or aversion to saints.1 The literature, of which
Robinson’s text is but an example, also stresses the importance of reform as
the principle idiom of both religious practice and theological division.2 The
temptation is, therefore, to see institutionalized forms of Islam—characterized
by a place and date of origin, a seminary, perhaps a series of well-catalogued
(and thus readily accessible) publications, and an uncontested set of beliefs
and practices—as reflecting popular understandings of Islam in India.To my
mind, however, there are simply too many improbable assumptions involved
in this picture of Islam on the sub-continent for it to stand. The differences
between schools of thought are much more difficult— if not impossible—to
demarcate consistently at the level of actual practices and actual people—not
everywhere always, but in many places often. Moreover, people’s knowledge
of different schools varies considerably, while relationships between rival
sects may have as much to do with political or economic factors as they do
with debates about authenticity or legitimacy.
Of course, Muslims I know recognize many divisions among themselves
and it is indeed true that particular mosques are often associated with particular
1
The major works on Muslims in Gujarat bring similar categorizing principles to the topic. The
gazetteers of the nineteenth century built upon the colonial practices of census and classification and
catalogue castes and the relationships between caste and sect; see, for example, the 1899 publication,
Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency. Vol. IX. Part II. Gujarat Population: Musalmans and Parsis. Twentieth
century publications by social scientists (Engineer 1989) and historians (Misra 1964) have been written
along similar lines.
2
In a sense, it is perfectly correct to stress purges of practice and the struggle for change because this is
the nature of jihad; the faithful are necessarily reformers in a generic sense, but this is not a point to
emerge from the literature I am discussing.
doctrines. I also know families in which fathers and sons attend different
mosques for such doctrinal reasons (or so they say).While I am not disputing
the presence of differences in doctrine, I am suggesting that they should be
placed in their proper relation to other social cleavages. None of my friends
and informants in Gujarat would be able to offer the kind of bird’s-eye and
historicized account of religious division that Robinson’s footnotes, echoing
historians, provide. Indeed, why should they be expected to?
The general overview is, I have suggested, something that anthropologists
object to because it does not reflect the reality of anyone other than the
historian or the footnoting sociologist. In this instance, the overview is worth
extra critical scrutiny because in day-to-day life in Gujarat the visibility of
divisions between sects is very strongly obscured by contours of friendship,
animosity, ethnicity, class, caste and other kinds of politics. The persistence
of the idea of what I am calling ‘the overview’ (but which could equally
be thought of, less flatteringly, as a catalogue), rooted as it is in colonial and
historical practice, seems yet another example of the way in which Muslims
are reduced to religious rather than sociological terms. In what follows, and
to escape the tension between the dictates of authoritative text and actual
practice,3 I take as a starting point Muslim social thought ‘as it is not as it
should be’, to use Robinson’s (1983: 185) well-turned phrase. This means
using the terms of reference of my friends and informants as the analytical
starting point.
This brings me to my second claim about the epistemology of the
anthropology of Muslims and the legacy of functionalism. The binary
of ‘saint worshippers’ and ‘non-saint worshippers’ (or for that matter
generic Muslims and generic Muslim reformers) stems, in part, from the
enduring legacy of anthropological regimes which separated ‘religion’ from
discussions of family and politics—amongst other things. This trend turned
simple questions of everyday moral reasoning into theological debates,
which were not proper at all. Furthermore, the models of logic and process
on which much anthropological theory is based have tended to shy away
from confronting contradictions (such as the co-existence of the immanent
and the transcendental), preferring instead neat and cohesive systems and
structures over mess and ambiguity.
The twin ideas that people are routinely engaged in activities other than
religion and that religious ideas impinge on mundane domains are truisms
3
See Das (1984), Lindholm (1986) and Robinson (1983) for some lively exchange on this topic.
in other areas of anthropology and sociology. The anthropology of Muslims

has, however, been slower to embrace the theoretical advances of post-
colonial, post-Oriental and, indeed, post-structuralist thinking. A shift in
emphasis is necessary: away from the study of Muslims as people necessarily
shaped by religious doctrines and towards a more properly anthropological
concern with Muslims as people who are engaged in all manner of other
social and worldly processes aside from the ‘religious’. There are of course
important exceptions; Rosen (1984; see also Asad 1986) eloquently shows
how the social realities of Moroccan Muslims are formed from shifting
networks of negotiable obligations and relationships rather than fixed
abstract precepts. Similarly, Eickelman and Piscatori’s (1996) discussion of
the language of Muslim politics illustrates how terms are opened up for
debate and contestation. More recently, scholars such as Marsden (2005),
Soares (2005) and Verkaaik (2004) have stressed some of the ambiguities
and conflicts in being Muslim and the significance of scepticism, humour,
irreverence and unfinished conversations.
I draw on what might be thought of this recent anti-functionalist
stance (individual authors frame their own ‘anti-’ differently) to assume that
ambiguities and inconsistencies—rather than fixed certainties given by texts
and unproblematic beliefs—are as central to the social life of Muslims as
non-Muslims. I also take it as given that individuals have context-bound
selves that shift in form and intention over time (as in Holland and Leander
2004). I immediately caution against facile assumptions here: the world I
am attempting to convey is not an unchained whirligig of limitless and
unbounded humanity, but one in which uncertain individuals are, by and
large, also bound in uneasy relationships to the structures of their society
and the history of Islam.
Giddens (1979: 161) suggests that human beings everywhere exist in
contradictory relation to nature. Contradiction arises because humans are in
and of nature, but they are also set apart from it because they have a ‘second
nature’, not reducible to physical objects. This contradiction, Giddens
explains: ‘…has its universal expression in the finitude of Dasein as the
negation of the apparent infinity of time-space in which each human life
makes its fleeting appearance’ (ibid.).4 This is not simply to say that nature is
negated by the ‘second nature’ of humans (for Giddens, it appears to be), but
that this fact gives humans a ‘contradictory unity’ that in turn makes them
4
The German term Dasein is from Heidegger’s (1962) examination of what it means ‘to be’ and translates
roughly as ‘being-there’, ‘life-world’ and ‘existence’.
further distinct from nature.The relation between Dasein and the continuity
of being is always mediated by society, and thus the existential contradiction
of human existence is reflected in structural contradictions in society.
There is no space here to grapple with the vast literature on the
relationship between individual and collective forms of representation or
the self in relation to society. I wish, quite simply, to follow Ewing’s (1997)
useful investigation of modernity, psychoanalysis and Islam in Pakistan.
Ewing takes Lacan to Lahore to explore the ways debates around sainthood
are used to question and anchor individual conflicts, uncertainties and the
quest for recognition. She demonstrates, echoing Giddens, how individual
fantasies of identity are caught simultaneously in seemingly stable webs of
plenitude and public talk on one hand and constantly threatened by the
transience of life and the immanence of death on the other. Thus, Ewing
is able to expose some of the deep sediment of meaning which forms
invisible/intangible parts of the relations between saints and their followers
and detractors. We could infer from her work that to their followers, saints
embody the negation of time through both genealogy and ritual proximity
to the infinite.
I now introduce the three men of my title and explore the nature of
individual uncertainties and how these manifest in broader social trends.
The Ethnographic Context

One day in 1999, Rafiq and I had made a short journey from his shipyard
on the east bank of an estuarine creek to the local town on the west to
obtain customs clearance for his vessel. After we left the customs office,
we stood on the docks to look through the tangle of shipyards and onto
the river. Rafiq initiated conversation with some men rigging a vessel in
the mud before us. As we chatted, along came a man dressed from head to
toe in green silk. He smelt strongly of perfumed oil and carried with him
a number of peacock feathers and a bundle of grubby charms. He looked
like a rogue but his words were considered and his tone contemplative. He
said he was a Saiyed from Rajasthan who was making a tour of the holy
places of Gujarat. He flattered Rafiq with kind words, waved the feathers
in the general direction of his head and asked for alms. Rafiq had bent
slightly to receive the blessing, and reached inside his immaculate white
robes to pass the man ten rupees. The man gratefully took the note but did
not leave as Rafiq had clearly expected him to. The stranger attempted to
prolong the exchange, perhaps believing he had stumbled across a potential

patron. To everyone’s surprise, especially that of the Saiyed, Rafiq told him
in no uncertain terms to get lost. The man was clearly shocked and, as
he started to regain composure, he informed Rafiq that this was no way
to treat an elder, a man of religion and a traveller in a strange land. Rafiq
replied by saying that waving feathers around was no sign of religion, that
the man was certainly old but not his superior and if the man was hungry
he should go to eat in a lodge and pay for his food like everyone else. The
overt confrontation in this exchange was out of the ordinary and provoked
some audible giggles from among the men on the ship. Their reaction
spurred Rafiq on: ‘I have been on haj. My family has built mosques and
given generously to orphanages. What are your qualifications?’ There was a
moment of silence before the man replied: ‘Well Haji, I may be a poor man
but I at least know how to behave’. He turned his back and walked away.
Rafiq had publicly lied—he had not been on haj—but the lie was
plausible and served its purpose. As we made the journey back to his village,
Rafiq moaned that he was sick of self-appointed authorities asking him for
money in the name of Islam. I knew that already, because he talked about it
all the time, but I simply could not understand why he had taken the man’s
blessing and paid for the service and then insulted the fellow. I asked him,
and he retorted: ‘that fellow on the docks, who was he? I have no idea!
You have no idea! He may have been the son of an oil presser from Uttar
Pradesh who has moved over here and started to claim he is a bawa [saint]
but he might not have been. You have to be careful. These people have
powers, whether we like it or not. I took his blessing before insulting him,
just to be on the safe side’.
Insulting those you trust to confer blessings is clearly at odds with
much conventional wisdom about the morality of exchange and reciprocity
associated with popular Islam in South Asia. For Rafiq, it was as if receiving
the blessing closed the way (perhaps optimistically) for any malicious intent
the man in green might have subsequently wished towards his younger
critic. Over the years, I have witnessed many similar forms of exchange,
but this one particularly stuck in my mind because Rafiq had told me
vehemently on many occasions (both before and after this encounter) that
saints and their powers had no place in ‘real Islam’ (his words).
Do these apparently contradictory forms of behaviour mean he
is slovenly in his thinking or simply driven by the opportunities of the
moment? While I would not completely discount either of these options,
I also suspect more compelling explanations, to which I will return later.
First, however, I outline the role of saints in western India and some of
the reasons why they are the targets of reformers in order to contextualize
why and how it is important that the three men discussed have changing
perspectives.
Saints in Western India

Notwithstanding the Christian connotations of the word ‘saint’, I use it here
to refer to a group of living Saiyeds who manipulate the grace and potency
of their genealogy to intervene in lives of their followers, with miracles,
advice, boons, sacred amulets, and so forth. In Gujarati, such people are
known as pir. The role and social position of such figures are commonly
linked to Sufi traditions (Mills 1998), and while there is much historical
evidence to affirm such connections, this is not something my Sunni
informants stress. In Kachchh, as elsewhere, there is considerable variation
in the qualifications, methods and reputation of local saints. Some have small
informal followings and no fixed place of business; others live and practice
within elaborate shrines, which may contain the graves of hundreds of dead
ancestors, and where interaction between saint and devotee is determined
by formal codes. Saints may be called upon to appease ‘non-Muslim’ deities,
adjust problems of human or agricultural fertility, nourish the deceased in
heaven or determine an auspicious day. They may be worshipped directly
or, in various ways, be required to mediate communication between their
devotees, their dead ancestors and Allah.
Such intermediaries between man and God are the target of reform in
many religious traditions. Those most opposed to saints in western Gujarat
argue that men are fundamentally equal in their potentials, and anyone
acting as an intermediary on the pretext of genealogy is an obstacle in
the way of man’s rightful relationship with Allah. There are many other
positions that are less hostile and admit the legitimacy of saints under some
conditions: namely, the nature of their qualifications, the types of services
they provide, the kinds of prayer over which they preside and the kinds of
relationships they claim between themselves and the dead (see Mills 1998;
Robinson 1983; Simpson 2006; also, see Parkin [2000] for the Swahili coast).
I have often been struck by the fact that most people claim that
associating with saints in particular ways is wrong; these are matters on
which everyone seems to have an opinion. I am also struck by how small
the number of people I know who have nothing whatsoever to do with
the saints. The role of saints is a matter on which there is no conventional
consensus, because there is both broad condemnation of particular practices

and patronage of others. Given the uncertainties and fragilities of the self,
and the unassailable idea of God, it is unsurprising that Muslims in Kachchh
debate the correct relation between the two and, indeed, between Dasein
(a vision the saints arguably embody) and the fleeting nature of individual
human life. There are, however, two more sociological points here.
First, condemnation of saints comes in pretty standard forms and, as I
have implied, is often a matter of minute differences in detail from the actual
practices of the condemner. In a sense, narratives of reform have become
a common property and as such occupy a peculiar status in sociological
terms. They have strong intellectual and cultural histories, and are often
reiterated in particular places (mosques and other religious functions), in
certain ways by particular kinds of influential people (prayer leaders and so
forth). They are essentially ritualized grand narratives, cultivated and honed
and written down over the years. The more common narratives—on the
status of the Prophet’s birthday, on the importance of regular prayer, the
ambiguous nature of intermediaries between man and Allah—are known
in various forms to a great many Muslims, and in western India many of
these narratives are also known by non-Muslims. Therefore, considerable
analytical caution is necessary when juxtaposing narrative and practice, as a
way of measuring what people may or may not believe in.
Secondly, there is the important matter of delimiting the scope of a
popular belief among Muslims. Elsewhere, I have argued that a popular
belief among Muslims in western India has at its core the principles of
historicized Sunni Islam, but that these are profoundly influenced (both
positively and negatively) by local conditions and rival social and divine
cosmologies (see Simpson 2006). Here, I provide indicative examples of
how Muslims may ‘believe’ in ‘non-Muslim things’.5 On some occasions,
Muslims consider the rituals of Hinduism to be efficacious, if somewhat
dangerous. While no one has ever told me, ‘I find Hindu rituals efficacious’,
it is worth remarking that Muslim friends will not enter Hindu temples
or shrines, even if there are no witnesses. On the dockside, they treat the
flotsam from Hindu water-side rituals with extreme trepidation—if not
to say fear—and have developed counter rituals for disposal. For Muslims
5
The phrase ‘non-Muslim things’ is undeniably clumsy and arguably misleading. I have however used it
here for want of a better alternative to indicate to the reader that I mean deities and ritual ideas that are
conventionally considered part of popular Hinduism.
of southern Kachchh, a plethora of forces are at work in the world; the

religious routines and practices (sunnah) given by Islam provide a method
for avoiding negative and corrupting influences, leaving people free to lead
good lives after the example of the Prophet. In this sense, in life, Islam is
seen as having something of a salvationary potential against the feckless
and immanent temptations of lesser forces (I am reluctant to say gods) and
spirits. At another level, the practice of regular prayer and reading from the
Quran is a routine which prevents individuals from improper speculation
and wandering into the realms of lesser powers and demons. Therefore,
being a client of a shrine which other Muslims regard as backwards and
superstitious (and this, remember, will include most people) still leaves a
very long way to fall if things take a turn for the worse.
There are undoubtedly some who live according to a clear vision
of Islamic practice; yet, for many more, narratives of religious reform are
primarily good to think with, to work through the contradictions and
uncertainties of their own lives. Many people I know simply have not, nor
perhaps ever will they, made up their minds in any absolute sense as to what
they should do, say or think—let alone hold as infallible— other than the
certainty of a formless and intangible deity; they have businesses to run,
houses to build, enemies to brutalize and other dreams to fulfil.
With this background, I now turn to the changing perspectives of the
three men.
The Three Men

My focus on individual men shifts from the conventional stress on aggregates
of castes and ethnic groups (after Mines 1994). Rafiq, whose meeting with
the man in green I discussed above, is the wealthiest and most influential
of the three. Rasheed is the second, a sailor, who once worked for Rafiq in
the mid-1990s, although I am unaware of any relationship between them
today. Abbedin is the third, a Saiyed, who has no connection whatsoever I
am aware of with Rafiq; Abbedin’s eldest brother once beat Rasheed when
he was a child for some now forgotten act of rascality; Rasheed remembers
this; Abbedin’s brother does not. The three men are now all in their mid-
thirties and all are relatively successful in their own terms. They belong to
different endogamous groups, and although the boundaries of such groups
coincide on occasion with religious activity (such as specific mosques or
particular saints being favoured) I wish to ignore the effects of this here.
How I know things about society in Kachchh has been very much
dictated by the structures of my relationships with people like Rafiq,
Rasheed and Abbedin. This is largely true for all anthropological fieldwork,
but for an intimate discussion of how people may or may not have changed
their minds about certain issues over time this fact seems to hold particular
relevance. I have been able to measure what these men do against what
they say over time. Over the last 10 years, we have learned how to ask each
other questions in new ways. All three men now have some idea about
anthropology and what I do with the information I write up as fieldnotes.
They have become adept at predicting when I will ask questions and what
form they will take. In some ways, they have learned to think about their
society in terms of anthropology—although I doubt they see worth in this.
Let me now briefly describe how I know these men—not out of
particularly introspective compulsions, but as a way of being clear about
the status and limitations of my data. I got to know these three men in
quite different ways; they also integrated me into their lives quite differently,
and this affects how and what I know about them. I got to know Rafiq
in a slow, gradual and accumulative way, but my relationship was always
primarily with him and not with his family or domestic affairs. I got to
know Rasheed through short periods of intense contact and long absences
when he was working overseas; he rapidly integrated me into the routines
of his family and domestic life both in Kachchh and Mumbai. I got to
know Abbedin through a long period of intense contact, a few years of little
contact and now regular contact both in India and England; I know very
little about his family.
I have known Rafiq since the third day of my first period of fieldwork
in the mid-1990s. In the intervening years, I might even venture to say we
have become friends.This has been slow, because he was very sceptical about
my motives at first, and I was very much perturbed by his occasional threats
of violence when he felt my questions too demanding. I spent nearly a year
working in, or close to, his shipyards and talked to him for hours nearly every
day. During this time, I got to know his father, brothers, sons and many of
his male cousins. He allowed me to accompany him on business to timber
yards in the east of Kachchh and on trips to his lawyer’s office in Bhuj, the
local administrative headquarters. I had known him for a year before he
invited me into his house, which was right next to the shipyard where we
both passed our days. He invited me for a meal at a restaurant after I had
known him for about five years. We also met socially in Mumbai twice in
the same year. In the seventh year after our initial encounter, he introduced
me to his mother in the shadowy cool of the courtyard at the centre of his
enormous house, which he shared with an extended family. The following
year, my wife and father-in-law were invited for tea and biscuits. In all of
these years, I never met Rafiq’s wife; she lived secluded from strange men,
and I was still counted as strange. Then, between my visits in 2004 and 2006,
Rafiq’s father died. He was an important local patriarch and domineering
within his household. In the family’s house it was as if some great pressure
had been released (there was grief too), and I was able to meet many of the
women I had only heard about over the last decade as they moved around
inside the house freely.
In the early years of our friendship, Rafiq appeared to me as a vociferous
reformist, speaking out against practices he deemed corrupt, carefully
choosing his own words and deeds, and investing heavily in outwards signs
of his own piety. He always took care and time to explain things to me
in formal language and would translate local terms of prayer and ritual
into English, which he speaks very well. Looking back, part of this stage-
managed appearance was of course about self-presentation, and to some
degree Rafiq took on the task of being a representative of local Muslim
orthodoxy for me. But he was also keen to teach me the vast array of swear
words that are routinely used in the shipyards he owns and in whose work I
was allowed to participate, albeit peripherally, as an anthropologist.
Like the majority of Muslims in Gujarat, in principle, Rafiq adheres to
Hanafi law, but he is vague about what this entails. Like many Muslims in
Kachchh (with the obvious exception of Shias), he prefers to call himself
‘Sunni’ or of the ‘Sunnat Jamat’ (i.e. Barevli). Rasheed and Abbedin do the
same; by so doing, they deny the relevance of different doctrinal and legal
frameworks within the general category of ‘Sunni’. I have asked them many
times about the influence of reformist and proselytizing organizations.They
are aware of the work of such groups, but consistently reject all labels that
are more specific than ‘Sunni’ for themselves.
At the time, and utterly independently of our relationship, Rafiq also
had his own reasons for wanting to be associated with local conceptions of
orthodoxy. He had been educated in a Christian boarding school far away
from Kachchh and was keen to shed his association with Christianity, at least
amongst Muslims. His family was involved in quite aggressive competitions
over status and largesse in his village, and providing money for the
construction of new mosques was one way of getting ahead in this struggle.
Back then, there was a noticeable trend among many Muslims of all classes
to distance themselves from practices associated in the popular imagination
with Hinduism. Rafiq was well aware that his father and his father’s friends
had in the past been associated with some of the practices which many
Muslims now spurned. He was most embarrassed and defensive about a
video recording which showed his father being cured rather violently of
a stomach disease by a man who claimed to control a large number of
powerful jinn. Someone (I do not know who) had made copies of the
video cassette, perhaps in an attempt to defame Rafiq, and for a short while
it was available for rental in town. Rafiq seemed to think that his efforts
at promoting new kinds of orthodoxy would compensate for some of his
father’s excesses, thereby securing his family’s reputation.
If Rafiq initially appeared as one of the more observant Muslims on the
quayside, more recently he has begun to appear as the most populist, if not
to say irreverent. Again, he has his own reasons for changing stance as he
begins to adopt the role of an informal political leader.
The infamous killing of many hundreds of Muslims in 2002 and the
rise of a Hindu nationalist government in Gujarat has prompted some
Muslims to search for bridges between their divided ranks. Occasionally,
this might involve opposing the politics of Hindu nationalism, but mostly
it is about reclaiming a sense of security from a hostile environment. In the
late nineties—before natural disasters (a cyclone in 1997 and an earthquake
in 2001) and the politics of Hindu nationalism loomed so large—aside from
saint worship, it was the festival of Moharam that caused greatest controversy
within the Muslim fold. Back then, most of my seafaring informants spoke
out against it and stayed in their homes as processions took place through
town. In 2004, a marked shift was apparent. Those previously dismissive
of the festivities (I have both Rafiq and Rasheed on record stating quite
clearly that it is a disrespectful sham) were now outside their houses offering
sherbet drinks and words of encouragement to those carrying the shrines
(tazias) of the martyrs through the streets; Rasheed even sponsored the
construction of a small shrine. Many of the processions of a few years ago
were confined to the streets of the town; today, all make the trip across the
river and through neighbouring villages, symbolically linking the Muslim
areas. People like Rafiq and Rasheed have put aside their previous attitudes
towards the festival in order to foster a sense of unity through its practice.
I also have Rafiq on record saying extremely harsh things about par-
ticular families of local saints; he would curse publicly and extremely
explicitly about them. For a while, in 1996, he also had a man working in
one of his shipyards whose family claimed Saiyed status. The poor fellow
was the butt of Rafiq’s endless jokes about how the high and mighty had
fallen to the level of a mere labourer; eventually, the man left the job because
of the severity of the harassment.
In the mid-1990s, as previously mentioned, Rafiq’s family was involved
in a political struggle in its village. The rival faction was closely associated
with a particular shrine. Rafiq had found it useful to discredit this shine, by
suggesting that it was illegitimate and could play no role in the religion of
the faithful. Recently, however, Rafiq has found it useful to befriend the
saints he formerly denounced, donating money to their coffers as a way
of gaining further influence outside his own immediate support network,
perhaps as a way of manufacturing unity.
Rasheed
I first met Rasheed in 1997 at Bapu’s teashop in an area of the town popular
with sailors. Then, he wore heavy gold necklaces, pungent aftershave,
branded t-shirts and replica jeans. He walked with a swagger and would
laugh and joke confidently on the street, even with strangers. We began
to meet regularly at Bapu’s in the evenings. Rasheed introduced me to
other sailors and together we talked of life at sea and in foreign ports. The
sailors wore their wealth conspicuously and clearly enjoyed a strong sense
of fraternity. For a novice anthropologist, Rasheed was a fantastic informant
because he knew many people, while years of experience on international
vessels had taught him that foreigners did not know the things he did, so he
took it upon himself to explain such things.
He spent his early childhood with his parents and two brothers in a one-
roomed house. This house was owned by a local shrine to which Rasheed’s
father paid a small amount of monthly rent in return for a property with
no running water or power. The family had continued to pay for this house
despite the fact Rasheed had recently purchased a grander three-bedroom
property. Rasheed claimed the upstairs’ front room as his own and decorated
it with photographs he had taken of shopping malls and ships at anchor in
Dubai, and prints of the famous Sufi shrine at Ajmer and various mosques
and pilgrimage sites in Saudi Arabia. Over the years, Rasheed and I have
become good friends. I have learned from him that people change their
minds over time—a process we seldom notice in ourselves and perhaps only
notice clearly in others if we keep notes.
During his seafaring career, first on a country craft owned by one of

Rafiq’s relatives and later on international tankers, Rasheed has slowly, but
not imperceptibly, adopted new political and religious attitudes. This has
brought him increasingly into conflict with his family. Change has been
reflected in his more assiduous observation of prayers, in his clothes, his
veneration of the words of the Quran, his deliberate attempt to learn more
Arabic and his disavowal of what he considered to be public displays of false
and immodest ritual during some festivals. These days, Rasheed no longer
wears gold, considering it unsuitable. He has also abandoned counterfeit
designer clothes and rests mostly content with simple cotton pyjamas. In
the late 1990s, however, the most notable difference regarded the question
of saints.
Rasheed’s parents and brothers remained regular visitors to the shrine
that owned their first house. Rasheed refused to visit this shrine or have any
dealings with its saints because he felt they were not behaving like ‘true’
(his word) Muslims. As Rasheed’s remittances had increased, however, his
mother started to send daily parcels of food to the shrine. Constant tension
between mother and son on this issue provoked many angry exchanges. She
would accuse him of ‘forgetting where he came from’ and of ‘ignoring those
he owed’. Rasheed would counter by saying she was giving her (he perhaps
really meant his) money to ‘beggars’, adding that it was wrong to think the
saints were divine figures to ‘whom she could never give enough’. Even
then, the tension between Rasheed and his family was somewhat lopsided
because his mother also respected Rasheed’s ‘new’ religious ideas because
they carried certain seals of authenticity. One of Rasheed’s brothers was
less careful in his criticism. In one of many loud arguments over Rasheed’s
attitudes, his brother said that Rasheed had simply replaced the ‘cult of
saints’ with the ‘cult of ship owners’ and the ‘cult of wealth’, being utterly
dependent on them, in a similar way, for success. The influential status of
men like Rafiq (a status to which Rasheed aspired), he added, was rooted in
money, not in the glorious history of Islam. Rasheed became apoplectic and
his brother moved to rented accommodation a short time later. Although
the brother was angry and possibly spite-ridden at Rasheed’s successes, he
had also perhaps pressed a raw nerve: whenever Rasheed was invited for
prayer or a social function with ship owners, upon meeting those on whose
ships he worked, he would stoop before them and touch his eyes and mouth
against the hand they offered him, much as his non-seafaring brothers did
when they called upon a saint.
Rasheed’s story suggests a drift away from the saints, his opinions
becoming entrenched with new wealth and the experience of life overseas;
had we not met again after 1999, this might have been a fitting conclusion.
The arguments he had with his mother about donating money and food
were questioning the legitimacy of those saints who had patiently taught
him the Quran when he was a boy. For Rasheed, I am sure his disquiet
with the saints was not simply about contesting religion but also a way
of rejecting the poverty of his youth (and, in a way, his family, particularly
his father) and disassociating himself from the relatively low status of these
particular saints as it was a way of contesting religious authority.
Rasheed’s example illustrates that, for many Muslims, saint worship
involves making choice, albeit the choice is always dictated by history and
locality as well as whim, because there are simply so many shrines, even in
small towns, that discrimination is necessary. People generally choose to
build up regular and often inter-generational relationships with particular
saints, rather than adopting a piecemeal approach. There are, of course,
questions of status at stake here. Many prefer to ignore all local shrines
and develop sympathies for national ones. Being far away, relationships
with these shrines have more flexibility because the relationship is largely
imagined. While distancing himself from his family’s lowly saints, Rasheed
has started to speak highly of the Ajmer Sheriff (the tomb of the Sufi Saint
Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti in Rajasthan) and, although he has never visited,
he keeps a small picture of the shrine in his wallet.
In 1998 I also got caught in a long squabble over Rasheed’s refusal to
go with his parents to a notable shrine to seek blessings for the forthcoming
sailing season. Rasheed yet again repeated that visiting saints was wrong;
he needed no intermediary to pray to Allah; in Islam all men were equal;
although saints were of noble birth, there was nothing intrinsically special
about them. On this occasion, Rasheed’s family departed without him,
leaving him alone in the house and free to invite his secret lover over for
the afternoon. In subsequent years, Rasheed has conspicuously taken his
family to that shrine before departing overseas. I can only think that in 1998
he used his well-rehearsed arguments about the illegitimacy of saints as an
excuse for not going on the pilgrimage, enabling him to pursue his other,
more worldly, interests.
This is not the end of the story. When I met Rasheed in 2003, he told
me bluntly and with no hint of irony that the reformist Muslims of the
Tablighi Jamat and the Ahl-e-Hadis had suffered the highest mortality rates
in the devastating earthquake of 2001. He was utterly convinced that this

was because they had forsaken the traditions of protection offered by local
saints and their shrines. For Rasheed, like many other Muslims in southern
Kachchh, the terrible destruction of the earthquake has brought about a
resurgence in the popularity of the saints. This again probably has as much
to do with the political shifts that have taken place in Gujarat recently as
it does with the natural disaster, as people search for idioms of unity rather
than division.
Abbedin
At about the same time as I met Rafiq and Rasheed I also became acquainted
with Abbedin, a Saiyed, whose family have a reputation for saintism. Now,
he lives with his unmarried sister and his brothers and their families in a
compound which contains their houses, a modest mosque, gardens and the
graves of many of their ancestors. Some of these graves are covered with
stone structures; others are simpler concrete affairs exposed to the elements.
Abbedin and I have spent hundreds of hours here talking about religion, our
ambitions and life in general, usually meeting in the heat of the afternoon
between the time when he led zuhr and asr prayers in the mosque. Over
time, I gradually became accustomed to the public and private working
rhythms of the shrine. A steady stream of visitors came to pay their respects
to Abbedin and his dead ancestors, some everyday. Visitors, even those
much older than Abbedin, treated him with tremendous respect, bowing
down to touch their eyes and mouth to his hand when approaching him.
They addressed him formerly and would stand silently before him waiting
until he granted permission to speak.
It had not always been like this.When I first met Abbedin, his father was
still living and presided over the shrine with unquestioned authority. He
had a prodigious reputation and people came from miles around to spend
time in his shadow. He would hold court in a small yard at the entrance
to the shrine everyday. He died rather suddenly and was buried in the
shrine complex. The popularity he had enjoyed in life dwindled somewhat
immediately after his death. Custodianship passed to Abbedin’s eldest
brother, who had a healthy knowledge of the Quran and of jurisprudence
if not exactly the charismatic authority of his father. However, not long
after taking over, he suffered head injuries in a freak accident. At the time,
Abbedin was studying for an undergraduate degree in commerce from a
local college and had other plans for his future. But happenstance got the
better of him and he ended up leaving his studies to manage the shrine
and its estate. He tentatively took on the role of advising visitors on moral
and legal matters, just as his father had done and began to preside over
prayers in the mosque and before the ancestral graves. Coconuts would be
broken, incense lit and small charms left scattered upon the graves. Abbedin
learned quickly to perform with authority and decorum and to provide
clear answers to supplicant’s concerns and anxieties. The shrine’s routines
became his routines: he ate, rested and offered counsel in its shadows.
In our meandering conversations, Abbedin told me what he knew of
the history of the shrine and some of the major miracles that had been
performed in its precincts. He told me of the protection it offered the
townsfolk against malicious influences and how its power held evil ghosts
and spirits at bay. He told me, somewhat sketchily, about his kin relations
with other saints who presided over well-known shrines throughout India,
who claimed descent from the Abdul Kadir Jilani, a twelfth century preacher
of Baghdad. He told me how Saiyeds were the highest order in Muslim
society, by virtue of descent and their propensity for wisdom, scholarship
and discerning judgement; how they should be respected and worshipped
by normal Muslims and how they had the capacity to act as a conduit
between human desire and the world of non-human powers which could
satisfy those desires.
Perhaps because he was unable to continue the tradition of miracles
for which his father had been known, the number of visitors to the shrine
declined. Gradually, however things in the shrine began to change. The
prayer area before the mosque was enlarged, signs advising visitors how
to behave appeared with Arabic words written in Gujarati script. Graves
were repainted and cleared of graffiti, the brilliant green covers removed to
reveal bare stone and concrete. Piles of incense stubs and the spent shells of
coconuts disappeared. I never saw either in the shrine complex again, other
than during the occasion of the shrine’s annual festival. These actions were
as much to align practices in the shrine with the prevailing orthodoxies of
the time as they were out of Abbedin’s own sense that he could not emulate
his father’s successes. As the number of regular visitors continued to fall,
Abbedin turned to the shrine’s estate for revenue to sustain his family. He
carved kiosks into the outer walls of the shrine that opened out onto a busy
commercial street and rented them to petty traders; for a while, one of them
somewhat improbably became an amusement arcade.
Many of Abbedin’s actions were doubly motivated: by a sense of duty

to the memory of his father and the failing fortunes of his family. He clearly
found running the shrine very stressful: he lost weight and his hair started
to fall out. He had to cut public ties with friends and girlfriends from
his college days because these relationships were unthinkable for a shrine
custodian (later, when mobile phones were introduced, he found ways
of communicating with some of these old friends). In order to cultivate
his reputation, he stayed within the confines of the shrine day and night,
to avoid the gossip and impurities of the street. As months passed, the
behaviour of Abbedin’s eldest brother grew increasingly erratic as his head
injury began to heal. He announced plans for Abbedin’s marriage to a
cousin from Hyderabad. After the ensuing weeks of argument, Abbedin ran
away to Dubai to work as an accountant; it later transpired that Abbedin had
been plotting his escape for sometime. International migration was a release
from both a marriage he did not want and the shrine. He lasted only weeks
in Dubai before returning home. According to Abbedin, it was too hot in
Emirates, and his pay too low for his skills. I also suspect that his return was
because he was required to work hard for people who treated him with
little respect, not recognizing his Saiyed status.
Later, Abbedin was employed by an educational trust with close ties
to England. He started to make annual visits during Ramadan to raise
money for the trust from Muslims in the East of England. His contacts were
mostly third or fourth generation migrants from Gujarat who had historical
associations with his shrine. He has found politics among Muslims in
England to be noticeably more factionalized than in Gujarat, and he is not
always welcome as a saintly Saiyed in people’s houses. I have accompanied
him on these forays and he hands out blessings and charms with greater
enthusiasm than in Gujarat. His followers present him with money and he
returns to India with cases bulging with clothes and gadgets. Over the years,
I have seen Abbedin learn how to behave as a holy man and I have therefore
always been slightly sceptical of his convictions. He was forced into the role
by circumstance and his charisma often appears to be demand-led rather
than supply driven.
In some memorably candid moments he has told me that Saiyeds do
not have special powers, and, in a sense, it seems if he were not a Saiyed with
responsibilities that hinged upon the fact he was he would have been more
inclined towards practicing Islam in which saints had no place, perhaps
more so than both Rafiq and Rasheed. To some extent, this is seen in the
changes he has overseen in the shrine, with grave rituals simplified and the
role of the mosque given a greater prominence, its signage Arabized. In the
shrine, and whilst on tour in England, he is unshaven and wears simple and
often grubby robes. In London, away from clutches of Gujarati Muslims, he
dresses and behaves quite differently. Last year, he wanted to go to a pub and
visit Madame Tussauds to have his photograph taken with a wax model of
Kylie Minogue. I do not think he wanted to do these things simply because
he thought I would like them, but equally I was not utterly convinced that
this was not simply another kind of performance, another deliberate act of
the many his life has become.
Abbedin inhabits an exceedingly broad range of geographical and
cultural spaces. I have mentioned his forays to England where he spends
time with people who have very firm ideas about the political potential
of Islam. Meanwhile, in Kachchh, he has befriended a group of expatriate
Europeans, whose numbers include a contemporary dancer, a conceptual
artist and an educational psychologist who is also the founder of a well-
known Oxford dinner club. Together, they make regular jokes at Abbedin’s
expense (in his presence) about pork and circumcision and generally talk as
if Islam was superstitious nonsense; Abbedin responds in every conceivable
way other than protest. Between the fervent ‘fundamentalism’ of Leicester
and the ‘avant-garde’ conversation of his other friends in Kachchh, he
returns home to a quiet and dignified life in the shrine. I see no difference
in his level of investment or quest for recognition within all three situations.
Gujarat, Politics and Being Muslim

After religious violence in Gujarat during 2002, and one key election later,
many of my Muslim friends and informants are angry and disillusioned
with party politics and the Hindu nationalist party in power. Many have
undertaken additional building works on their properties, strengthening
walls and gates and digging underground tunnels. As I stood with Rafiq on
top of the walls he was constructing in front of his house to prevent ‘intruders’
gaining access from the river estuary, he told me that the government had
gone too far; they were just creating problems for themselves by denying
‘human rights’ to Muslims. He said ‘when Modi [the Chief Minister of
Gujarat] talks of actions and reactions he does not seem to realize that we
too may have to react. Do they just think we will lie down while they burn
our homes and force us out?’
Rafiq has become increasingly politicized, speaking with a new

vocabulary against the injustices of democracy and the way the state
interprets the constitution. Along the coast, the spectres of violence and
catastrophe have brought rival Muslim reformist organizations into
dialogue with one another. Immediately after the earthquake of 2001, for
example, all local Muslim factions (including Shias and the influential Lunar
Committee) placed an advertisement in local newspapers stating Ahmediyas
were not Muslims and people should not accept aid from them. More
recently, Muslims have come together to protest about the unlawful killing
of Saddam Hussein. Under these new circumstances, Rafiq and his friends
are openly attempting to play a pivotal and paternalistic role by organizing
unity through frequent meetings of different social and religious leaders,
charity events and discussions with Muslims in neighbouring towns, to
whom they were hostile in the very recent past.
In this essay, I have presented some of what I know about three men
and their relationship to the question of saint worship in Gujarat over a
10-year period. I have framed snippets of their biographies within the
context of how I know them as well as in the terms of their class position,
their immediate family concerns and within the broader terrain of state-
wide politics. Some of this material suggest an erosion of the authority of
the saints and the social order over which they preside as scepticism, and
convenience seems to increasingly characterize the practices surrounding
them. Other aspects of the material suggest that the popularity of the saints
is on the rise, as they become figureheads of protection and unity.
Clearly, in the short-ethnographic term of a decade, it is impossible
to claim that the demise of the saints is inevitable as natural disasters, the
machinations of party politics, and personal circumstances have been shown
to create flux and reflux in their popularity. I wish to stress however that
while their fluctuating patterns of popularity are clearly related to shifts in
the broader political climate, an individual’s motivation for supporting saints
in any particular context might be quite different: protection for Rasheed,
unity for Rafiq and subsistence in Abbedin’s case. But perhaps the more
interesting point here is not simply whether there is a rise or fall in their
popularity because popularity is clearly not a zero-sum game, but to what
end their popularity is put.
I wish to conclude by drawing four further points out of this material.
First, and most obviously, how these men behave in relation to ideas of
Islam and reformism is largely context dependent and their actions and
words are influenced by who they are with and the webs of power and
influence that come to the fore in particular situations. Second, and beyond
the first somewhat commonplace observation, it is also quite apparent that
in and of themselves these men are not consistent in their words and deeds.
By this I do not simply mean that they perform differently over time in
relation to saints, although it is important that they do, but that they speak
and act with different registers of truth and belief on different occasions.
For example, they create other kinds of truth with lies, but in the instances
I have discussed the plausibility and success of the lie (and other similar
forms of playful manipulation) are given by the substantive provisions of
the commonly known history and philosophy of Islam and social ideas of
respect and decorum. Rafiq did not say, for example, to the man in green
‘you should respect me because I have a big house’; rather, he told him that
he had been on haj and was therefore worthy of respect. Similarly, Rasheed
used reform as a water-tight alibi so that he could spend time with his lover.
That there are varying registers of truth in operation quite fundamentally
exposes the limits of statements such as ‘The Barelvis hold that spiritual
intermediaries are a vital part of the society of Islam’. Through other lenses,
the three men could be considered Barelvis, as most of the local scholars
who speak in their mosques were trained in Barelvi madrasas and pass on
their own interpretations of Barelvi teachings; yet, I emphasize again that
this is not a term any of the three men ever use. It seems clear however that
these men do hold that spiritual intermediaries are a vital part of the society
of Islam, but not in any straightforward sense whatsoever.
Third, all three men use narratives of reform to argue outside the realm
of religious debate. Narratives of religious reform are grand objects. As I
have said, they are very well known and perhaps unique as sociological
artefacts. They can have a life quite independent of the beliefs and practices
of those reciting them, or they can form the basis of a code of exemplary
conduct. Such narratives and the social compulsions they imply are used as
a source of moral and, indeed, argumentative reasoning outside the realm of
theological debate: Rafiq attempts to build a political constituency, Rasheed
avoids the long road trip to a shrine so he can entertain his lover and
Abbedin flounders with the expectations of others in ways apparently quite
at odds with what he himself deems appropriate.
From this, it is tempting to conclude that the correspondence of patterns
of reasoning across domains is because Muslims do not distinguish religious
from social life. I not only think this would be a misleading conclusion,
but also an irresponsible one in the Indian context because it resonates
strongly with the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Hindu nationalism and some of
the less attractive forms of Orientalism. Most of my friends and informants
quite consciously distinguish between social and religious life and, as I have
discussed, often use the latter to gain sway within the former.6 The fact that
they can do so with the complicity (tacit or otherwise) of others suggests
that the domains cannot be clearly separated but that a malleable fault
line exists.
Finally, all three men are both ‘saint worshippers’ and ‘non-saint
worshippers’ at different times. I would like to hold this observation up
to another contradiction at the heart of the body of literature on Muslims
in South Asia. Assuming the majority of Muslims in India are indigenous
converts; on one hand, the process of conversion is held to have been
‘incomplete’ and, somewhat hesitant in their newfound faith, they also held
on to the old beliefs, only gradually putting them aside as the generations
passed (as in Robinson 1983; Roy 1983). On the other hand, conversion
is seen as having been abrupt and absolute and as the generations passed
the forces of popular Hinduism eroded the original integrity of the faith
(suggested by Ahmad 1984). The former position is clearly more plausible,
given lessons contained within the comparative literature on patterns of
religious conversion, but this does not utterly exclude the possibility of the
second condition coming into play at certain junctures. Abbedin, of course,
sees little sense in the way this debate is framed, because he claims Saiyed
status and thus some sense of continuity over time. In the abstract, however,
Rafiq and Rasheed agree with Robinson and Roy on this issue. In their
view, unknown ancestors submitted to Islam but retained Hindu names and
customs; later, they passed to a syncretic phase before they embraced the
correct-minded doctrines of today. In this light, however, they are to forever
refine their faith and practice and move constantly towards an image of
perfect practice. This is certainly how all three men feel in relation to (what
they see as) their father’s ad hoc religious ideas and practices—but as I have
shown their own words and actions lead us to more hesitant conclusions.
The fact that Rafiq took the blessing before insulting the visiting saint
suggests that caution is necessary in characterizing what facts about the
6
This may be because Muslims are a visible minority in Gujarat and adopt other kinds of appearances in
their social, economic and political lives.
world are salient to the belief and practice of Muslims. Shifts over time in
what is thought of as correct Islam in western India can be a process of
selection, of choosing from an array of forces and possibilities existing in
the world many of which would not be recognized in relation to Muslims
elsewhere. The tenor and targets of reformists in Gujarat are influenced
heavily by the existence and pressures of other cosmologies, whether they
are of a political, religious or economic nature, and cannot simply be seen
as a purge along pre-determined lines—despite the rhetoric which I have
suggested supplies the impression of such pre-determination. There are
many levels of conceit in operation which influence what people do or say
in relation to their equally contextual beliefs and practices other than the
dogmas of institutionalized religious thought, and some of these influences
are very intimate and mundane.
There is something somewhat mechanical if not to say functional
about the idea that faith is gradually moving towards an image of perfection
because it seems to assume religious values function independently of
human action. When we focus on the vagaries and anxieties of individual
lives, or on individual lives in relation to their fathers, the picture is far
less clear-cut. The separate cases I have discussed here animate some of
immediate issues to arise from the way Rafiq levelled insults at the man in
green. Perhaps, had it have been another day, or if his attempt to get customs
clearance for his vessel had not been foiled due to missing paperwork, and
he was not in such a foul mood, he might have behaved differently. Indeed,
had the men on the vessel against the quay that day not worked for one of
the men with whom Rafiq’s family was feuding then he might also have
behaved quite differently, not taking the chance to impress the employees
of his rival in his rival’s absence. Recently, Rafiq has started to wear clothes
and a beard in the style of his late father. He told me that in the past he had
taken the behaviour of his father to be ignorant and he often felt ashamed.
Now, faced with the burden of the responsibilities his father had carried,
Rafiq is beginning to realize how utterly wise his father’s populism was. It is
of course too late for Rafiq to tell the dead man in person, so he has turned
to a spiritual intermediary in the hope the message can be passed on.
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9
Women, Politics and Islamism in
Northern Pakistan
Magnus Marsden*
Introduction
I n Pakistan’s elections of October 2002 a coalition of ‘religious parties’

was elected into government in the North West Frontier Province’s
provincial assembly. The political parties making up this coalition, the
Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA), or United Action Front, claimed during
the campaign that they would introduce ‘Islamic’ or shari’a law into
Pakistan’s legal system. Indeed, they did quickly set to the task of ‘Islamizing’
the Frontier: playing audio music cassettes was banned in the region’s public
transport vehicles, for example. In the summer of 2003 I was in the Frontier
conducting research in Chitral—a mountainous region that is predominantly
populated by Khowar-speaking ethnically Chitrali Muslims. Chitral too had
seen the victory of MMA politicians in both the provincial and national
assemblies. After their election, these men issued statements saying that
*
This essay would not have been possible without the help, support and hospitality of many people in
Chitral. I would like to thank in particular Nizar Wali Shah and Hussain Ali Shah and their families for
their hospitality in Markaz during the summer of 2003. Research for this paper was undertaken with
the support of grants from Trinity College, Cambridge, the University of Cambridge and the British
Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has benefited from insightful comment and criticism from
Filippo and Caroline Osella, as well as Susan Bayly. Pseudonyms are used for all people and small places
referred to in the text.
Women, Politics and Islamism / 231
Chitrali women working in the offices of international development NGOs

active in the region should wear the Afghan burqa to work. Many of Chitral’s
mullahs complained both before and after the MMA’s election success that
the sight of men sitting with women in plush white jeeps whilst listening
to Indian music cassettes was corrupting the emotions of Chitral’s Muslims.
They argued in their mosque addresses that the presence of women in public
was a form of public indecency that rendered women prostitutes in the eyes
of Islamic law. In the face of these Islamizing injunctions, several women
verbally challenged the messages of Chitral’s ‘hardened’ men of learning and
d
piety (dashmanan). They claimed that the dashmanan were hypocrites bent
on perverting the ‘true’ teaching of Islam for their own political benefit.
This essay explores the responses of these women to the MMA’s Islamizing
messages. Its focus is on a category of small town Muslims whose voices
are rarely, if ever, documented in anthropological accounts of South Asian
Islam—women who are critical in public and vocal ways of ‘Islamism’.
I have spent a great deal of time over the past 12 years exploring the
nature of Muslim life as enacted in the region’s households and villages.
Such spaces impose important limits upon the access of women to the
world outside of the home: Chitrali women rarely if ever enter the region’s
village and small town bazaars. Moreover, many ‘Islamizing’ movements are
influential in the region today: the Jama’at-e Islami and the Jama’at-e Ulama-e
Islam both boast significant support bases and these parties also emphasize
the centrality of strict forms of purdah to Chitrali Muslim life. At the same
time, some if not many Chitrali young men have also attended para-military
training courses organized by so-called ‘Islamist’ organizations that have
played an active role in ‘jihadi’ violence in Kashmir and Afghanistan. At first
sight, therefore, it would appear that the messages of politically influential
Islamizers in Chitral are homogenous and their reception is incontestable,
especially by women living in this deeply purdah-conscious society.
By exploring the responses of Chitrali women to the Islamizing
legislation of the MMA, however, I hope to present a far more complicated
picture of their role in the making of Chitrali Muslim life. My arguments
are informed by two major bodies of scholarship on the personal lives of
Muslim women. Firstly, several ethnographies have documented the way
in which women in village settings frequently play powerful and decision-
making roles within the intimate domains of the home. Such accounts argue
that such spaces are free from constant male-scrutiny and the ‘techniques
of power characteristic of modern states and capitalist economies’
(Abu-Lughod 1986, 1990). Secondly, many ethnographic accounts have

sought to theorize the types of agency that are asserted by women who play
an active role in movements of Islamic reform.1 Mahmood (2001), most
notably, has sought to document the ways in which women participants in
the Cairo-based ‘piety movement’ she studied, seek to discipline their bodily
dispositions within Islamic ethical conventions. By consciously learning
ethical dispositions that allow them to fully submit to God’s will, these
women challenge the relevance of simplistic models of the autonomous
self to the analysis of the role of women in movements of Islamic reform
(Mahmood 2005).
Both Abu-Lughod and Mahmood have, thus, offered important insights
into the agentive possibilities for women of both practices of purdah and
participation in movements of Islamic reform. More broadly, their work
forms part of an expanding body of writing that seeks to penetrate beneath
the ‘level of expressed belief and opinion’ in order to understand the ‘common
substrate of embodied dispositions’ (Hirschkind 2001: 638) that lies below.
Many of the Chitrali women I know, however, live vocal, risk-taking lives,
and play an active and public role in their region’s intellectual and political
life. Displays of critical intellectual prowess and the experience of the
emotionally infused play of the mind are, indeed, central to the enactment
of Muslim virtuosity in Chitral (Marsden 2005). There is a rich culture of
joking, impersonation, music, dance, poetry and travelling in the region,
and these everyday practices ensure the ongoing vitality of local ways of
being Muslim in the face of an array of homogenizing pressures of ‘Islamist’
movements. All-male night time public musical programmes at which
performers combine Khowar-language poetic verse with contemporary
satire are one type of social events where complex standards of emotional
and intellectual refinement are enacted and instantiated. High-intensity
debates and discussions that take place in the homes and orchards of village
people as well as more formal occasions such as school meetings are another.
In all these village spaces, Muslims holding different ideas concerning what
it means to be Muslim engage in ongoing debates and discussions.These do
not inevitably lead to violence or antagonistic standoffs between reformists
and their opponents. Rather, they sustain the region’s intellectual life and
1
See, notably, Brenner (1996); Deeb (2006); Hegeland (1998a, 1998b); Mahmood (2001); and Torab
(1997). See also A. Ahmed (2006); Awn (1998); Jeffery et al. (2004); Minault (1998a, 1998b); Mir-
Hosseini (2000a, 2000b); Peletz (2002); and Vatuk (2005).
add to the ceaseless questioning and contestation of Chitrali ways of being

Muslim. It is not, however, only Chitrali men who play a part in these
public displays of critical thinking and debate.Women, as I document below,
also engage in intellectual contests with one another, and with Chitral’s
Islamic authorities. They are not simply dismissed by other Chitralis as being
immoral, nor are these women merely tolerated because of their man-like
or exceptional personalities (e.g., de Munck 2005). Their contributions to
Chitrali intellectual life, rather, are widely valued, a source of discussion by
the region’s people, and this dimension of life is being further stimulated by
new developments in education, learning and literacy today.
The women I focus upon here are not merely engaged, thus, in debates
with other women or close kin within the intimate settings of the region’s
homes about matters concerning the running of everyday family life
(although the role that personal choice should play in the making of marriage
matches is a recurring theme of the discussions I explore here). Rather,
some of them talk about and present themselves as having the capacity to
inform public opinion about hotly contested religious and moral matters.
These include, for example, the role that shari’a law should play in regulating
the personal lives of Chitral’s Muslims, and the authenticity or otherwise of
the Islamizing statements of the region’s dashmanan. There are, of course,
several high-profile campaigners for women’s rights in Pakistan who are
widely known in the West because they are interviewed and quoted in the
international media coverage of sensitive shari’a law cases, especially those
involving sexual violence and adultery charges. In contrast, the women
discussed here are from low or at best middle status Chitrali backgrounds
who live in a region that lies on the peripheries of the Pakistan nation
state. They are often educated as far as higher secondary level and some of
them have Bachelor degrees, yet they have undertaken degree courses in
the region’s government colleges or have been correspondent students in
Pakistan’s Open University.
There is a lingering assumption in some anthropological writing on
Islam that people who express views that are critical of reform-minded
forms of Islam are either privileged and liberal, or, alternatively, immersed
in un-reflexive forms of local or ‘traditional’ Islam (e.g., Ahmad 2004). Yet
the critical views expressed by Chitrali women I know cannot be dismissed
as those of an atypical and privileged elite or ‘traditional’ Muslims who are
‘resisting’ reform-minded forms of doctrinal Islam.What is important about
these women, rather, is that their approaches to being Muslim defy the
relevance of such categories for understanding Chitrali Muslim life. Much

of what they say simultaneously builds upon and challenges the ideas of
reform-minded Islam. At the same time, they also think deeply and critically
about local conceptions of Islamic virtuosity in ways that reflect their own
diverse personal experiences of life within and beyond Chitral’s villages and
small towns.2
In spite of the powerful political role occupied by Islamist parties in
the region’s political life, the difficulties for ‘a singular Islamic discourse
to prevail or remain uncontested’ (Soares and Otayek 2007) characterize
above all else being Muslim in Chitral today. Women who challenge the
teaching and activities of Chitral’s dashmanan are active contributors to
this ongoing process of contestation. At the same time, there is also much
more to the thinking and behaviour of Chitral’s madrasa-trained mullahs
who might easily be assumed to be true founts of Islamic reformism than
we might expect. Chitrali ‘bearded ones’ do seek to project themselves in
their speeches as being ‘heavy’ men of religion—it is they who often accuse
women who dare to shop in the bazaar of being ‘little prostitutes’. These
men and their moralizing attacks, moreover, are not simply dismissed by
Chitrali Muslims: mullahs are often described by Chitralis as being buzurgs,
or saint-like men of ascetic renunciation who are so pure, for example, that
they are able to discern if someone has partaken in illicit sexual relations, or
been immoral enough not to wash after sexual intercourse. Yet piety does
not even define these men in any simple sense. Some, for example, are said
to be ‘beautiful’ sheli and playful (cheruti) men, who love smart clothes, slick
haircuts, expensive perfumes, and take visible pleasure in telling sexual jokes
during the course of their mosque addresses.
In other words, whilst all the Chitrali Muslims I know are concerned by
questions regarding what it means to be a ‘proper’ Muslim in relationship to
the teachings of the region’s dashmanan as well as the Islamizing messages of
Islamist parties and movements active in the region, these are not the only
questions they consider relevant when setting to the task of ‘being Muslim’
and presenting themselves as Muslims to other Khowar-speaking people.
By exploring the way in which Muslims in the region address a complex
nexus of questions and debates concerning interactive modes of personal
2
See Haeri (2002) and Minault (1998a) for anthropological and historical accounts of the lives of elite
South Asian Muslim women. Compare Osanloo (2006) for a discussion of urban Iranian’s women’s
interaction with shari’a courts.
morality, comportment and self-presentation, I emphasis the ways in which

Chitralis not only fashion but also project themselves as Muslims at multiple
and varying levels and in relationship to diverse concerns, during the course
of their daily lives.
Islam and Social Transformation in Chitral

Chitral is the northernmost administrative district of the North West Frontier
Province of Pakistan. It is a relatively remote region: in winter all roads to
the region are blocked by snow and ice. Chitral is different in many ways
from other regions of the Frontier. The Frontier is dominated politically
and numerically by Pashto-speaking Pukhtuns, who have been the focus of
sustained anthropological study (Ahmed 1983; Banerjee 2000; Barth 1965;
Lindholm 1982). Yet most if not all Chitral people, who call themselves
Chitrali or Khó, are proud to assert that they are different in profoundly
important ways from their Pashtun neighbours (O’Brien 1895; Robertson
1899). The main language spoken in Chitral is Khowar—an Indo-Aryan
language unintelligible to both Pashto and Urdu speakers (Bashir 1996).3
Khowar-speaking Chitralis identify themselves as being either Shi’a
Ismai’li or Sunni Muslims. There have been episodes of violent conflict
between these communities, yet they continue to live together largely
peacefully in many of the region’s villages. Many Sunni Chitrali young men
are students (talib-e ilm) at ‘down country’ reformist Deobandi madrasas (e.g.,
Malik 1996). Such people often claim that Ismai’lis are non-Muslims; they
also seek to enforce strict veiling standards on the region’s Sunni women.4
Returnee madrasa students, for example, often try to persuade their sisters
who work as nurses and health visitors in the region’s hospitals and basic
health centres that they should no longer go to work. Women, they say,
should not even leave their homes, let alone be permitted to visit the houses
of men to whom they are not related, or, worse, work on night shifts with
male doctors and patients. Such advice (nasihat) is often politely ignored by
both these women and their fathers. Nevertheless, disputes over a father’s
3
Many Chitralis do understand and speak Urdu, those educated beyond the age of 16 are often also
competent in English, many also speak Dari which they learned from the many Afghan refugees who
lived in the region, Chitral people who have lived in other regions of the Frontier are often fluent
Pashto speakers.
4
On the expansion of madrasas in Pakistan, see Malik (1996).
decision to allow his mature daughters to leave their homes in order to

work or study are an important dynamic of life in the region’s homes.
Chitralis, thus, are knowledgeable and well-informed about a variety
of Islamic normative standards of belief and behaviour. Yet, rather than
being either automatically deferential to or simply resistant to the figures
of authority—the Taliban, mullahs and the representatives of ‘Islamist
parties’—who want to prescribe this kind of Islamic standard for all, they
are active, reflective and thoughtful about how and whether to embrace
these norms. Those who have embraced ‘reform-minded’ forms of Muslim
identity occupy only one part of a much broader spectrum of Muslim
thought and identity in the region.5 Despite the anti-music strictures of the
region’s largely Deobandi-trained dashmanan, for instance, musicians play
at all-night concerts, and Chitralis vocally express the attitudes they have
regarding contentious issues, such as the status of Ismai’lis as Muslims and
the influence of Taliban forms of Islam on Chitrali life.The region’s women
too hold a very diverse range of ideas regarding what constitutes the living
of a good Muslim life. Over the past 10 years increasing numbers of Sunni
Chitrali women have actively participated in women-only preaching tours
organized by the Tabligh-e Jama’at. At the same time, many women claim
that the pious women who come to Chitral from ‘down Pakistan’ to preach
are ‘hypocrites’: they visit Chitral not to share their knowledge of Islam, but,
rather, to indulgently escape from the summer heat of Pakistan’s dusty cities.
The focus of this paper is Markaz, a small town with a population of
about 20,000. It is historically a Sunni settlement, the population of which
is ethically diverse. There are significant numbers of Pukhtuns who work
as traders, shopkeepers and hawkers. Whilst Dari-speaking Afghan refugees,
who settled in the town’s bazaar after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
1979, work as labourers for the region’s Chitrali families and own thriving
business, especially butchers and tea-shops. This region of Pakistan, then,
is deeply influenced by political instability in Pakistan and in a range of
neighbouring countries, most notably, Afghanistan.
5
In both academic and popular literature, reform-minded Muslims of many different doctrinal traditions
are widely referred to as fundamentalists and Islamists. While it is important not to homogenize or
oversimplify, I will employ the term reformist to describe the wide range of ‘bearded ones’ (rigisweni)
whom Chitrali villagers and townspeople see as adherents of strict, reform-minded Quranic forms of
Islam. Such people are also referred to as ‘hardened’ (saht), ‘preachers’ (tablighi) and ‘extremists’ (imtihai
pasand).
Chitrali society has also undergone rapid social and economic

transformations over the past generation. At one level, the social estates
of the region’s landowning families have gradually broken down leading
to complex transformations of local values concerning the social
responsibilities expected of wealthy Chitrali families to their poorer
neighbours. At another level, Chitralis have seen the emergence of new
types of well-paid professional employment in Pakistan’s civil service and a
range of international ‘development’ NGOs (cf. Parkes 1996; Staley 1982:
259–65). At the same time, rising levels of education in Chitral have also
had significant implications for the diversity of women’s life experiences in
the region. According to provincial government surveys, literacy rates and
levels of school attendance in Chitral are now the highest for both men and
women in the Frontier province.6 The experience of education for young
Chitrali men and women, moreover, does not cease with the completion of
their school or college education within Chitral. Many of them now study
in both academic and skill-based vocational courses in Pakistan’s major
cities, especially Peshawar and Karachi.Young men from Markaz pursue, in
particular, social science degree courses in the town’s government degree
college as well as in Peshawar University; rising numbers of young town
women also now embark on such forms of university education. Finally,
growing numbers of young women also leave their villages in order to train
as nurses and health workers in hospitals in Pakistan’s major cities.
The educated women whose lives I discuss here are not city
professionals or the children of elite Pakistani families for whom Western
education is a normal feature of life. Rather, they are the first generation
of women to have received a formal school and higher education. At the
same time, the experience of agricultural work and urban migrant labour
is an important dimension of the experiences of all Chitralis, even those
who now work in as managers in the region’s NGOs. Many if not all of
the region’s well-educated men financed their graduate and postgraduate
studies in Pakistan’s cities by working as factory labourers, shop attendants
and domestic servants. What it is significant to note is that a majority of
young Chitralis are now educated to higher secondary level and beyond,
and they are either employed or seeking employment in non-manual
professions, such as teaching, development work and the medical sector.
6
http://www.dawn.com/2003/02/06/nat36.htm.
Thus, the types of life experiences that characterize many of the young and
relatively well educated people explored in this essay are not confined only
to the viewpoints of a small bubble of young and educated ‘moderns’ in a
world otherwise dominated by agricultural work or factory labour. Levels
of literacy, rather, are high in Chitral, and the experience of education over
the past 20 years has transformed social life in this region of Pakistan where
it is now the norm for the region’s youth to have experienced modern,
school- and university-based forms of education.
The ‘Contractors of Islam’

As many anthropologists have noted, the expansion of both secular and
religious forms of education alongside the importance of new types of print
and electronic media in the Muslim world have broadened the spectrum
of people able and willing to take part in debate about Islam. Much of this
work focuses on well-known and mostly male Muslim media personalities
and suggests that such ‘new Muslims’ have contributed to the fragmentation
of political and religious authority in the Muslim world and the emergence
of alternative forms of public Islam (e.g., Eickelman and Anderson 1999 and
Soares 2005: 255).
Fewer studies, however, relate these concerns to small town and
relatively remote Muslim societies such as Chitral or ask how far women
in such settings contribute to debates about public Islam. I now focus on
the life of one Chitrali woman who in recent years has actively sought to
play a vocal and public part in Chitrali debates about what it means to
be Muslim, most notably by challenging the pronouncements of Chitral’s
Islamizing dashmanan.The things she says and does do not represent those of
Chitrali women generally, yet the controversial public statements she makes
about the corruption of the region’s mullahs have garnered considerable
attention in Chitral since I first met her in August 2003. More broadly,
I have encountered many women in Chitral who actively, although less
publicly, challenge Chitrali understandings of the types of speech and
comportment considered suitable for the region’s women as well as the
dictates of the region’s ‘bearded ones’. The critical assertions these women
make about the messages of the region’s dashmanan point to ways of being
Muslim that cannot simply be understood as the product of ‘Islamic reform’.
Instead, they involve individual Muslim women exploring what it means
to live a virtuous Muslim life in a world where the pressure to comport
oneself according to the moralizing dictates of the region’s dashmanan has

heightened in recent years, and led to a growing disenchantment with
‘Islamist’ politics as being about petty moralizing and corruption.
In August 2003 I made the twelve hour journey between Chitral and
Peshawar in a shared taxi with a Chitrali man who worked as a clerk in a
government office in Markaz and his sister who was married in Peshawar,
and going home to visit her relatives. The other traveller was woman called
Amina, from Markaz, in her early forties, and employed as a health advisor
with an internationally financed ‘development’ NGO working in Chitral—
she was travelling alone and had been in Peshawar for a medical check-up.
I had first met this woman earlier in the day at the airport after the
cancellation of our Chitral bound flight: fully veiled, she had approached
me in the airport waiting room, in itself a daring and unusual move.7 After a
short time in the car, Amina told me that she was working for the rights of
women (auratano haqq) in Chitral. In recent days she had issued a number of
statements to the press and also made several speeches ‘against’ the region’s
religious authorities, or dashmanan. In the small car that we had hired Amina
announced that Chitral’s dashmanan were nothing more than tsar zhibak, or
the ‘eaters of funeral feasts’. They were interested in Islam, she said, only
because they wanted to fill their stomachs: in reality they cared little about
either helping the region’s people or encouraging them to understand
in greater depth the ‘true’ meanings of Islam. Amina, moreover, did not
make what could be interpreted as deeply offensive remarks about Chitral’s
dashmanan to me alone: the Chitrali Sunni man and his sister were also
taking a full part in the conversation. The critical remarks Amina made
about the dashmanan were articulated in a semi-public setting and in the
presence of Sunni people to whom she was not related.
Amina also goes to considerable lengths to have her views heard
in wider circles within and even beyond Chitrali society. In the car she
showed me a photocopy of a newspaper paper she had written for the
Chitral Times—an Urdu-language local newspaper that is printed in the
region’s district headquarters. In this paper, she accused the mullahs of being
7
Men are rarely if ever approached by unrelated Chitrali women in public settings, within or outside
Chitral. During the course of my days in Chitral, I do speak to a wide range of older and younger
women from a variety of religious and socio-economic backgrounds—I have known their families for
the past 10 years, have taught their daughters English and social science courses at the request of their
fathers and am considered a brother.
‘Islam’s contractors’ (islamo tikadaran): they were, she wrote, prepared to do

anything so long as there was a financial benefit in it for them. In addition
to her writing, she had also given speeches at a conference in Peshawar
organized by the Aurat Foundation—a major Pakistani NGO established
in 1986 and concerned with women’s empowerment in the country. In
her address, she told me, Amina had once again publicly called the mullahs
‘Islam’s contractors’, and demanded that they should tell people the real
meaning of Islam—that it conferred ‘rights’ on women—rather than just
using their positions of religious and now also political authority for their
own benefit. Amina did not merely use safe, intimate or nameless arenas
to express her outspoken views, she was, rather, a named contributor to
public and contentious debates about Islam.
Given Amina’s widespread notoriety for expressing independent views
in Chitral and elsewhere, it was, therefore, not a surprise to hear that her
comments had invoked critical responses from the region’s dashmanan.
Chitral’s dashmanan, as elsewhere in Pakistan, often legally pursue people
they consider to be committing blasphemy, a criminal offence punishable by
death in Pakistan’s legal system.8 Amina’s male colleagues had, indeed, been
so worried about the ferocity of her speeches and writings that they had
pleaded with her to be more moderate. They thought that the possibility
of their organization coming under attack from the dashmanan and their
‘tough’ and ‘emotional’ (jezbati) supporters was a real possibility. Yet Amina
was not prepared to change either what she said or wrote: if the mullahs
wanted to meet her, she told her colleagues, then they knew where her
home was.
Amina makes critical remarks about Chitral’s mullahs in public spaces
associated with the dangerous world of all-male politics, such as meetings
organized by controversial NGOs and political parties. Moreover, she uses
the print and electronic media to further her criticisms of the region’s
dashmanan. Playing an active role in public and verbal debates about Islam
and Muslim life in Chitral is also something that she sees as having earned her
8
Many Chitrali poets and musicians compose and perform music, for instance, in the face of violent
threats made by the dashmanan. The dashmanan claim in particular that the images the region’s Khowa-
language love poets deploy in their poetry—most importantly they compare the beauty of the ‘angels of
paradise’ to the bodily forms of their beloved ones—are not merely ‘un-Islamic’, but also blasphemous:
Allah’s angels, according to most of Chitral’s Deobandi-trained religious scholars, should never be
represented as having a human form.
a name in Chitral and the wider region. If making critical pronouncements

concerning the status of the region’s Sunni authorities is one way in
which many Chitrali men display their masculine bravado, then Amina’s
remarks demonstrate the ways in which publicly voicing critical and even
controversial views in public about contentious issues is not something that
is confined to male forms of speech and behaviour alone. Chitrali women
rather also seek to cultivate and earn reputations for being intelligent (kabil),
bold and powerful (takatwar), and doing so is also widely considered an
important marker of their own moral self-worth.
Telephones, Marriages and Mullahs

The ability to act in an assertive, confident and fearless way in the face of
criticism from the dashmanan is, then, critical to Amina’s everyday mode
of self-projection. Amina, of course, shares a dislike of Chitral’s dashmanan
with many others in the region—notably ‘new Muslims’ (Eickelman and
Anderson 1999) who are educated, often support movements of Islamic
reform that are critical of the authority held by Islam’s ulama, and may also
be active members of ‘Islamist’ parties such as the Jama’at-e Islami. It would
also be easy to imagine that Amina belonged to a very different category of
Chitrali Muslim: a wealthy and high status woman from a local family who
hold political power and have a stake in weakening the influence of the
region’s politically active mullahs. I aim now, however, to show that Amina’s
criticism of the ulama arises neither from her having embraced reform-
minded forms of Muslim thought, nor from her class or status subjectivity,
but from the complexity of her personal experiences of life as a woman
in northern Pakistan. More broadly, her story points toward the degree to
which much of being Muslim in Chitral today involves individuals selectively
incorporating very different and sometimes seemingly contradictory forms
of Muslim thought and identity.
In our subsequent meetings Amina has often told me that she does
not fear the mullahs, but, rather, they fear her. On one occasion, she told
me, a young male relative from a nearby village had arrived at her house
in the midst of night with a young woman—he proclaimed to Amina that
he wished to marry the girl, but that neither of their sets of parents had
agreed to the match. The two lovers (‘asheqan) told Amina that they had
searched for a mullah to undertake the marriage ceremony (nikah). Yet no
trained men of religious learning from their village would agree to conduct
the rites—they were afraid, supposedly, because the girl belonged to one of
Chitral’s gentry (adamzada) families, that was also wealthy, whilst the boy was
from a ‘low’ (pst) village family, possibly of one-time bonded labourers. The
village mullahs feared, therefore, that the girl’s influential father could make
legal objections to the marriage. There was the possibility that the mullah
who conducted the marriage ceremony would find himself the ‘enemy’
(dushman) not only of this powerful family, but also with the region’s police
and local judiciary. So, an unmarried couple were in Amina’s house, they had
run away from their homes without the permission of their parents, and had
thus far not found a mullah willing to carry out their marriage ceremony. As
a result, they faced the very real possibility of legal action initiated by the
girl’s parents on the basis of Pakistan’s Islamic personal laws (hudood). It was
after having faced the possibility of forcible separation either by the state or
their parents that they had turned to Amina for support.
Amina’s response to this situation highlights the complex ways in
which different categories of local people—in this case a ‘new Muslim’
woman—interact with Chitral’s dashmanan. Having confirmed with the girl
that the boy had not ‘forcibly’ taken her with him, but that she had ‘fled’
with him as a result of ‘her own choice’, Amina told me that she picked up
the telephone and called one of Chitral’s most influential dashmanan: the
‘alim who is the chief judge in the district shari’a court. She had thought
carefully about approaching this particular dashmanan: if she could persuade
him to carry out the nikah rites then the couple would face no future legal
problems. He was the Qazi (Islamic judge) in the region’s shari’a court—the
man, in other words, who ratified all Chitral’s marriage certificates (nikah
namah). At first, he refused to undertake the marriage ceremony, claiming
that he did not want to condone elopement as a proper from of marriage.
In response to the Qazi’s refusal to offer help, Amina did not acquiesce to
his judgement, but instead asked him another direct question: what, exactly,
was un-Islamic about the marriage? According to her account, the Qazi
had been rendered ‘without an answer’ (la jawab), and agreed to come to
her house immediately to perform the nikah: he came, the two young lovers
were married, and Amina ordered them to return to their homes. Amina
narrated the story in front of our travelling companions, saying that it was
clear proof that the region’s mullahs were scared of her and, moreover, were
compelled to behave in exactly the way she told them.
In her account of this event, Amina did not merely telephone the
mullah in order to ask for his advice regarding the most Islamic course of
action she should take about the couple in her home. Rather, she depicts
herself as having engaged in an interactive debate with this high-ranking
Qazi. It was she who advanced the steps that he should take in order to
legally ratify the young couple’s love for one another. Many scholars of the
Muslim world have documented the ways in which asking for religious
advice from mullahs and trained Islamic authorities is a normal feature of
everyday women’s experiences (notably Peletz 2002). At the same time,
scholars working in more urban contexts have shown how attending courts
is another ‘key arena in which they (women) express their grievances and
express differential aspects of patriarchal authority’ (Osanloo 2006: 200).
Few accounts of Pakistan’s Frontier suggest, however, that women engage
in active debates and discussions with trained men of piety. In other words,
the complex negotiations and interactions that took place between Amina
and the Qazi in their telephone conversation highlight both the ways in
which ‘new Muslims’ actively challenge and contest the authority of Islam’s
men of piety, and the possibility that women also play an active role in these
discursive processes.
There are, however, also more conventional anthropological models that
would allow us to explain the sequence of events discussed above. Firstly,
and most obviously, it could be seen as a clash between Islamic reformism,
on the one hand, and older local traditions of status hierarchy, on the other.
The married couple included the daughter of a landowning family of one-
time gentry elites and the son of a low-status family. Distinctions between
the local elite of gentry-like landholding families, and a class of landless
labourers who were once the serfs of Chitral’s self-proclaimed lords, remain
important in Chitral today. The ongoing importance of status distinctions
to Chitral life has come under attack from both many of Chitral’s Islamizing
dashmanan (who say they are un-Islamic) and from young and educated men
and women from a diverse range of backgrounds (who say that talk about
the region’s hierarchically nested status groups [qaum] is gandah, or dirty,
and a sign of being animal-like and uneducated). Yet what it is important
to recognize is that the Qazi did not enthusiastically endorse the couple’s
decision to elope in marriage, or talk about it in positive terms as reflecting
the weakening of traditional types of marriage practice and the growing
ascendancy of Islamic doctrinal standards for organizing family life in the
region. At the same time, interpreting this event as an example of a reform-
minded mullah playing an active role in the weakening of un-Islamic forms
of status distinction also overlooks the active initiative played by a woman in
securing the eventual realization of the lovers’ marital union.
Secondly, was Amina only able to persuade the mullah because she
was the relative of a powerful man in the region, the type of person the
mullah was either indebted to or actively seeking out as an influential
patron? Amina, however, is from a mid-ranking family of ordinary town
people—her family are not wealthy by local standards, and nor did they
occupy positions of power and authority either in the old Chitral state or
the region’s local bureaucracy today. This woman, moreover, is a divorcee:
she was married to a Punjabi man at the age of sixteen, whom she divorced
after a marriage that lasted about ten years. Amina is the type of woman that
South Asia specialists often depict as being marginalized from social life and
matters of intimate decision-making, let alone the making of public forms
of religious and political life.
A third way of understanding the significance of the telephone
conversation between Amina and the mullah would be to see it as structured
around the very different types of education they had experienced and
the influence of this on their status in Chitrali society. Did the influence
that Amina held over the mullah reflect the deference of a traditional man
who had undergone religious training in Pakistan’s madrasa network to a
modern and educated person? Yet Amina is not comparable to Pakistan’s
elite human rights lawyers and activists. Nor, indeed, is she well educated
even in comparison to other Chitrali village women, many of whom have
attended English-medium fee-paying schools in the region and undertaken
BA and Masters courses at Peshawar University. Amina, in contrast,
‘educated herself ’ only after having sought a divorce from her Punjabi
husband by following a distance-learning BA course run by Pakistan’s
Allama Iqbal Open University. The notion, moreover, that this particular
mullah felt threatened by Amina’s superior education is unlikely because he
was no ordinary, low-status, or poor village mullah, but the man in-charge
of Chitral’s district shari’a courts. The Qazi earns a high government salary
by local standards, occupies one of the region’s most powerful positions
of religious authority and is also an influential figure in the local wing of
the Jama’at-e Islami party—the party of which Chitral’s current Member
of National Assembly is a member. This story points to more complex
dynamics than that of a politically savvy mullah seeking to ingratiate himself
with a powerful local family or a traditional man of religious piety deferring
to the power of a modern and educated woman.
Amina’s interactive exchange with the Qazi shows that women in
Chitral’s small towns do not inevitably passively submit to ‘traditional’ men
of religious authority. Discussions involving women and trained dashmanan

can play a critical role, rather, in shaping the thought process of the region’s
Muslims. They also influence the nature of the moral judgements Chitralis
make about sensitive dimensions of people’s intimate lives. Far from simply
being an antagonistic debate between a small town woman and an influential
mullah, this event evoked an interactive process of mindful engagement
between a new Muslim and a trained man of piety in a way that allowed
both parties to present themselves as being able to think and act in sensitive
ways concerning the matter before them.
There is a final level of complexity that needs to be considered if the
social and intellectual dynamics behind this telephone conversation are to
be understood in their full complexity. Over the past 10 years this Qazi has
assiduously cultivated a reputation in Chitral for delivering especially ‘hard’
(sakht) speeches about the standards of Islamic comportment he expects
from the region’s men, but especially women. In the winter of 2001, for
instance, he gave a sermon at which he argued that if a woman appeared
in the bazaar she would automatically invalidate her marriage and could,
therefore, be legitimately forcibly married by any man present. Marriage,
according to the Qazi, is undone by an act of un-Islamic public indecency—
in this case a woman’s decision to go shopping in the bazaar renders her a
prostitute worthy of public sexual humiliation. It would be easy to assume
that the Qazi would think in similar terms about elopement marriage –
love marriages are proof that secret, amorous and even sexual liaisons take
place between Chitrali men and women, something that illustrates the
wider moral degradation of an ideally sexually segregated Muslim society,
and causes the urgent need for the enforcement of even stricter practices of
purdah and forms of shari’a law.9
At the same time, there is more to the Qazi’s reputation than firebrand
speeches alone. As in many other South Asian Muslim societies, Chitralis
often poke fun at dashmanan for being out of date and overly traditional.
The childlike ‘simplicity’ of these men is both a source of humour and
admiration.10 In contrast, the Qazi is known as a man who cares deeply
9
The Qazi has also given frequent speeches condemning the decision of Pakistan’s President, General
Musharraf, to support the American-led ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and later Iraq, as well as the
publication of cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper.
10
One of the region’s dashmanan, elected as the region’s representative in the Peshawar-based Frontier
Assembly in October 2002, for instance, was said to have arrived in Peshawar wearing plastic sandals
of the type that were not even fit to wear in Chitral’s village bazaars, let alone the provincial assembly
building. The newly elected mullah’s simplicity was evaluated in multi-dimensional ways by Chitralis:
about his appearance. Chitralis do not merely distinguish between different

types of dashmanan in relationship to the schools of Sunni Islamic thought
with which they are associated, or the political parties with which they are
affiliated. Rather, the ways in which these men present themselves and their
bodies to the region’s public are also important in determining the ways in
which they are categorized, judged and evaluated. My friends often told
me that the Qazi meticulously prepares himself each day before he walks
through the bazaar to attend his office in the district shari’a court and, later,
to lead the prayers in the bazaar’s main mosque. He dons an immaculate
white shalwar kamiz, a tailor made jacket, a cream-coloured Chitrali hat, and
sprays himself with sweet smelling and alcohol-free perfume brought to
him by his Chitrali friends working as labourers in Dubai—all dimensions
of his personal appearance that lead Chitralis to describe him as being a
‘playful’ dashmanan. He is known, moreover, to enjoy taking great pleasure
by surprising his mosque audiences by making jokes about matters of sexual
desire and attraction during the courses of his speeches. On one occasion
he told men gathered that it is not only they who are pestered by the town’s
fashion conscious girls—he too receives sexy telephone calls and that is why
he carries a cordless telephone wherever he goes.11
The Qazi works hard to earn a reputation for being a man of who
holds exceptional strict views regarding the forms of personal morality
the Muslims should embody during the course of their daily lives. At the
same time, he presents himself as somebody who has the capacity to make
risqué jokes about love, sex and desire. Yet the Qazi is not only said to be
a ‘hypocrite’ who does ‘one thing on the surface and another underneath’
by the region’s people, although many people do think and talk about him
in these terms. Instead, he is often described as attractive (sheli), playful and
‘fully human’ (pura insan). Thus, even men who might be assumed to be the
archetypal founts of reform-minded Islam in Chitral are flexible and choice-
making in their personal and public lives, and, as do many other Chitrali
Muslims, frequently switch between different registers of self-presentation
during the course of their daily lives.
for some it heralded a new era of corruption-free politics, whilst others asked how such a simple man
could express the needs of his region’s people in the Frontier assembly.
11
In the expanding body of literature on the content of mosque addresses and religious sermons, and the
listening practices of those who follow them, little attention has thus far been invested in exploring the
role played by humour. See, e.g., Gaffney (1994) and Hirschkind (2001).
Similarly, Amina’s distinctive mode of engagement provokes much

discussion in Chitral, yet she is not universally condemned for being un-
Islamic. Many women from a diverse range of backgrounds who live in
Markaz talk about Amina in very positive terms. Farida, is an Ismai’li woman
who is not formally educated, has four children and is married to a man
who works as an administrator in an international NGO in Markaz. When
I mentioned to Farida that I had met Amina she said she was an ‘excellent
daughter’ (zabardast zhour). Many other women and men also told me that
Amina’s response to the difficult and even dangerous situation in which
she had found herself showed that she was a good ( jam) woman capable of
speaking her mind (tan luan dik) and ‘living a life of her choice’ (tan zindagi
o chit). They contrasted her to other town dwellers who they described as
being unhappy, weak and unable to live life according to their own choice.
Amina says and does things ‘in the open’ (wereigha) and this makes
her different in positive ways from other Markaz women and men. Her
fearlessness, lack of hypocrisy and ability to bring things out to the surface
that other people kept hidden in the domain of the ‘secret’ (khoasht) are
what they value in particular. Amina, indeed, also often expresses her views
regarding the role that a woman’s personal choice should play in the making
of marriage matches. She had been telling girls that they should ignore the
views of their parents and elope in marriage with the boys they liked. If they
found a boy who was honest and polite, suitable for marriage and who also
held some form of employment (naukari), they should have no reservations
about eloping with the boy in marriage if their parents opposed the union.
If they sat in their home waiting for their parents’ choice (nan-taatan chit),
they risked being married off by force to an old, fat and ugly Punjabi man,
and spending the rest of their lives filling their husband’s hookahs with
foul smelling smoking tobacco. Amina openly challenges ‘traditional’ ideas
about marriage, and there are significant parallels between her thinking
about these matters and what have been termed as both modernizing and
reform-minded forms of South Asian Muslim thought.
Yet Amina has not embraced the teachings of reform-minded forms
of Islamic thought and disputation in any simple sense. She is not an active
participant in the women’s wing of any Islamic reform movements important
in the region and she works with NGOs that are criticized both by the
region’s Islamists and ulama, including, for example, the Aurat Foundation.
At the same time, she has also played an active role in establishing and
running low-finance NGOs established by Chitralis with the specific
purpose of addressing issues regarding the treatment of the region’s women.

These organizations were established in response to accusations made by many
people in the region that some Chitrali men form a part of well-organized
‘groups’ that systematically search for poor parents who are willing to give
their daughters in marriage to Punjabi men in return for a significant bride
price. These Chitrali ‘middlemen’ (dallal) are said to take a cut of the bride
price. There are also pervasive rumours which suggest that such marriages
are a front for powerful ‘mafia’ groups to procure fair and beautiful Chitrali
girls to work in Pakistan’s sex trade. It is also widely suspected that marriages
between young Chitrali girls and Punjabi men are encouraged by the first
wives of these men as a cheap way of procuring a household servant in the
guise of a second wife. The frequency of all these types of marriage is widely
said to have brought a ‘bad name’ (badnaam) to Chitral’s people. Many Chitrali
young men often tell me how ashamed they feel when their friends in ‘down
Pakistan’ ask them if it is true that Chitralis ‘sell’ their daughters. Amina,
thus, is involved in a range of collaborative interactions with other Chitrali
Muslims. These collaborations seek to address sensitive moral problems
faced by Muslims in the region today; they use a discourse of reformed
Islam in order to emphasize the right that young Chitrali women have to
refuse marriage offers advanced by their parents. Yet they also reformulate
local understandings of Islam according to a model that differs significantly
from the notion of Islamic revival. In 2002, for instance, a ‘Legal Aid Forum’
was established in Markaz with the aim of protecting the ‘rights’ of Chitrali
women. Its members check vehicles leaving Chitral on their way to ‘down
Pakistan’ for Chitrali women who appear to be travelling with non-Chitrali
men and even assist in arranging marriages for young Chitrali brides who
have divorced their down country husbands.
Amina is not the only Chitrali women engaged in this type of activity.
Suraya, for example, has earned a name for being an especially active
participant in debates about the ‘sale’ of Chitrali daughters to ‘down country’
husbands. She is in her early thirties, from a Sunni Chitrali village, and is
the daughter of a village ‘bearded one’. She completed a Master’s degree in
sociology at Peshawar University, before gaining employment as a ‘Social
Organizer’ in an international development NGO working in Chitral —
she is also one of the co-founders of the Legal Aid Forum. Many Chitral
men and women talk about Suraya as being especially ‘educated’ (talimi
yaftah), but also ‘advanced’ in her thoughts and behaviour. In particular,
she is said to be modern’ (tajdid) and ‘fast’ (tez), in matters of dress, speech
and comportment in a way that other Chitrali women are not: she wears
fashionable Pakistani clothes usually associated with the county’s cities, and
sometimes even Western-style trousers (pantaloon).12 Some Markaz men and
women, indeed, did tell me that there has been much ‘propaganda’ about
Suraya’s lifestyle: as is the case with other ‘bold’ Chitrali women, she was
open to accusations of being morally lax and even sexually lose. Yet such
‘bold’ women are not simply dismissed as being either immoral and of bad
reputation or as embodying manlike qualities that render them acceptable
although unmarriageable. Boldness, rather, is widely conceptualized by
Chitralis as having an attractive and feminine dimension, especially by the
region’s educated young people.
It is not, however, only in relationship to matters of dress, bodily
comportment and extra-marital relationships that Suraya is said to be ‘fast’
and an active contributor to life in the region: she, like Amina, is known
as being capable of challenging the Islamizing dictates of the region’s
dashmanan by speaking her mind. After being told by the region’s MMA
representatives that women working in offices should wear the Afghan
burqa I was told by many men and women in the region that Suraya had
conveyed a message to Chitral’s representative in the National Assembly.
In her message, she had apparently told the MMA Mawlana that on the
day he went to Islamabad and persuaded all the women who worked in
the assembly building that they should wear the burqa, then she would
also put on hers. Yet as long as he sat next to rich and glamorous women
Senators then why should she be expected to wear the burqa and not them?
Suraya was said to bring the attention of her fellow Chitral people to double
standards set by the region’s dashmanan. One Ismai’li woman—who is in
her early thirties, originally from a village about forty miles from Chitral,
but currently working as a teacher in Markaz—told me, for instance, that
she had always thought that Sunni women lived more confined and purdah-
conscious lives than the region’s Ismai’lis. Having met Suraya, however, she
had come to realize that many Sunni women were far more ‘advanced’ than
she had previously thought.
Suraya and Amina are amongst some of the New Muslim women who
are now playing an active and increasingly public role in the intellectual
12
Chitrali women never wear Western-style trousers in public and even young Chitral women studying
in Pakistan’s major cities only wear trousers within the confines of their all-women hostels: being
known as a girl who ‘wears trousers’ in Chitral may become a focus for widespread gossip and criticism.
and political life of their region. Their lives demonstrate the assertiveness
of women in a region whose political culture is currently dominated by a
coalition of Islamist political parties and in a small town setting within which
rigid forms of sexual segregation are pervasive features of everyday Muslim
life. Additionally, they point towards the many layers at which the region’s
Muslims seek to fashion and project themselves to their fellow Chitralis
as good Muslims, the diverse types of religious and political influences on
which they draw as they do so, and the increasingly wide range of opinion
forming public figures who are currently intervening in the moral debates
animating moral thought in the region today.
Conclusion
This essay has focused on the lives of women who live in rural and small
town settings and are often critical in vocal ways of ‘political Islam’. At the
same time, these women also seek to contribute to debates about Islam’s
place in their society and assert their own forms of moralizing standards
in relationship to those advanced by other influential figures of religious
authority in the region. Such women are not an atypical feature of Muslim
life in Chitral—they do, rather, play a critical role in the ceaseless discussions
concerning the place of Islam in Chitrali society today. Some of the things
that such women say and do point towards important tensions between
ways of being Muslim advanced by ‘New Muslim’ moralizers who have
benefited from raising levels of higher education and other approaches to
Muslim life that are advocated by the region’s madrasa-trained men of piety.
Yet the modes of self-presentation deployed by Chitral’s madrasa-educated
mullahs rarely straightforwardly fit into the straightjackets of ‘reformism’ or,
indeed, ‘Islamism’.
In similar terms to Simpson’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 8), the
moral debates and diverse modes of public self-presentation important in
Chitral today are a clear reminder of the inherent ambiguity and inconsistency
of all social life.They also emphasize the degree to which for many Chitralis
the expression of controversial and often decidedly individual opinions,
beliefs and attitudes is an important feature of everyday Muslim life in a
world where there is little day-to-day consensus. In this complex multi-
vocal setting, work contrasting ‘expressed beliefs and opinions’ to more
fundamental and underlying ‘common substrates of religious dispositions’
(Hirschkind 2001: 638), risks privileging an emphasis on understanding how
Muslims seek to enact and embody coherent subjectivities in relationship

to Islamic traditions of self-discipline, at the expense of recognizing the
complexity and significance of the multiply-layered ways at which Muslims
project themselves during the course of their daily lives.Women like Amina
and trained dashmanan such as the Qazi elucidate the diversity of these modes
of self-presentation. More importantly, they point towards the importance
of these for understanding the continuingly multi-dimensional nature of
moral life and ‘being Muslim’ in a region of South Asia that has been deeply
influenced by profoundly purifying forms of Islam, especially over the past
30 years. Being Muslim in such a setting is a simple task neither for the
region’s Islamizers or their detractors.
On the one hand, there is a pervasive sense of popular disenchantment
with the authenticity of public expressions of Islamic piety in Chitral today,
both as they are enacted by ordinary Chitrali Muslims as well as by the
region’s powerful Islamizers. This feeling of disenchantment and often
cynicism is now also shaping the ways in which even the region’s apparently
most ultra-orthodox Islamists set to the task of projecting themselves to
the region’s people: if the Qazi presents himself as a fount of untainted
piety he is as likely to be accused of hypocrisy as much as being as a saint-
like buzurg. Thus, he tempers his public piety by publicly expressing his
own inconsistencies: sexy jokes and his ‘playful’ appearance are some of the
ways in which public piety and locally acceptable forms of impropriety are
combined in the Qazi’s personage. Amina projects herself as being open and
straight-talking: she leads a controversial life of critical engagement with
everyday normative conventions by breaking purdah and making statements
concerning the centrality of women’s choice and emotional feelings to
marriage. As a young divorcee, this leads her open to being targeted by
Chitrali Islamizers as a source of corrupting and un-Muslim immorality.
Yet her risky strategy of open straight talking positions her within ongoing
Chitrali moral debates about the pervasiveness of immoral hypocrisy,
corruption and the politicization of religion, thereby adding her voice to
public debates about being a Chitrali Muslim.
This essay opened with a brief description of some of the ways in which
Chitral’s madrasa-educated dashmanan have sought to Islamize daily life in the
Frontier since their election to provincial government in 2002.The following
pages have then sought to illuminate the ways in which these Islamizing
policies have resulted in complex responses from the region’s Muslims. In an
already deeply ‘Islamized’ world, thinking of Chitrali Muslims as reformers
and traditionalists or as Islamists and neo-fundamentalists, conceals the

complex and inherently unfinished nature of their responses to ongoing
Islamizing processes, a pervasive disenchantment with the authenticity of
public expressions of personal piety that is expressed by many of the region’s
Muslims, and, in this context, the continuing emergence of new ways of
being Muslim, modes of personal self-presentation and categories of Islamic
public opinion forming figures.
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10
Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic
Reform
Stories from the Muslim ‘Ghetto’
d
Rubina Jasani*
Introduction
was sitting in Suhanaben’s living room near the Sonal Cinema border,1
I not far from the plot where she and her brothers had organized the
Sonal relief camp for Muslims displaced during and after Gujarat’s 2002
riots.2 Suhanaben said, ‘dhamaal ke baad basti badi hai’ (after the riots the
population has grown). All I could see from her living room were boards of
various sizes advertising low-investment housing schemes (from one room-
kitchen tenements to four bedroom row-houses) and housing loans on very
*
I am thankful to Aga Khan Foundation for the grant I received for conducting my doctoral research.
This essay is based on the research conducted between 2003 and 2004 in Ahmedabad, Western India.
I am grateful to Caroline and Filippo Osella for giving me an opportunity to present an earlier draft
at the workshop they organized in May 2005 and for reading various versions of this essay. Thanks are
also due to Atreyee Sen, Geert de Neve and Edward Simpson for their comments.
1
‘Border’ was a term used very frequently in Ahmedabad to denote the imagined line which separated a
Hindu neighbourhood from a Muslim one.
2
Sonal Camp was one of the biggest and the longest run relief camps organized in Juhapura. It was
organized by a man who was known for his underworld connections. He was arrested after the closure
of the camp, accused of the murder of one of his subordinates and of involvement in a scam related
to smuggling of weapons. Residents of Juhapura said that the police had arrested him because he had
become ‘too powerful’.
low interest rates. Suhanaben was a Sunni Vohra3 from Charotar in Kheda
district. A native Gujarati speaker, she nonetheless insisted on speaking to
her children in a Gujarati version of Urdu. She had originally lived in
Haleem-ki-Khadki in Shahpur, in the heart of Ahmedabad’s walled city,4
but had moved to Juhapura after the 1985 anti-Muslim riots. Although,
Suhanaben had a postgraduate degree in Hindi Literature from Gujarat
University, she was also a qualified beauty-therapist, making a decent living
by running a beauty parlour in the heart of Juhapura. But at the end of the
1990s, she gave away her business, concerned that she had been encouraging
women to commit numaish (beautification and exposure of a woman’s
body), and hence that any money earned from such a business was haraam
(money not earned by fair means). The living arrangement in her drawing
room had also changed after the riots of 2002: her modern sofas and chairs
were shifted to a corner of the room and replaced with simple mattresses
and pillows on the floor; silk curtains in the living room were replaced
with cotton drapes. She had destroyed her television as she felt that it was
an instrument of shaitan (evil). Now she prayed five times in a day and had
altered her lifestyle in order to suit what she called an ‘Islamic’ way of life.
Suhanaben was now involved in the construction business, supervising two
construction sites and playing an active role in letting and selling properties.
She justified this rather unusual occupation by arguing that her work was a
means of ‘service’ to the community; she was helping riot-affected Muslims
moving into the Sonal Cinema area to obtain affordable housing.
Suhanaben’s doors were open to all poor women in the locality.
While counselling and supporting women experiencing economic
difficulties, she also tried to reform their religious practices. She told me
that, ‘These women are jahil (ignorant) and are on their way to jahanoom
(hell) as they have forgotten the promise they made to Allah.... they were
3
According to Misra (1964: 122), the label Vohra describes Muslims converted from Hindu castes such
as Girasias, Maleks and other Rajput communities. This community is concentrated mainly in Central
Gujarat and is different from the Shia Bohras.
4
Ahmedabad is segmented along caste, class and religious lines. River Sabarmati divides it into east and
west. The eastern part has the walled city (which is now more or less a Muslim city), industrial areas,
the railway station and services catering to low-income population.The industrial area has Muslims and
Dalits living in close proximity to one another. The western part is the cosmopolitan Hindu city (with
a few Muslim pockets—Paldi, Juhapura and Navrangpura Muslim society).
Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform / 257
suffering like this because they had become ‘gumraah’ (lost) and were not
praying’. To avoid divine punishment they should become chust (strict) in
the their faith and abandon bidas (innovation from the path of Prophet
Mohammad). Suhanaben started organizing women’s ishthemas (religious
congregations) in her living room every Thursday, inviting alemas (women
preachers) to deliver sermons. The alema belonged to the Tablighi Jamaat,5
a reformist organization which deplores a range of customary practices—
such as saints’ worship, durgahs (monuments built in the memory of saints)
and elaborate life-cycle celebrations—while endorsing a stricter dress code
for women.
Though she preached and conformed to a ‘Tabligh’ way of life, during
periods of extreme stress Suhanaben sought comfort by recourse to what
in the locality were commonly understood as Sunni Barelvi practices. She
would call a Maulana to her house for recitation of Fateha (verses of the
Quran) and distribute tabarooq (pieces of fresh coconut and crystal sugar)
to neighbours. In Suhanaben’s living room hung a picture of Baba Garib
Nawaz, the famous Sufi Saint from Ajmer, Rajasthan. I was told by her
friends that she was diwani (crazy) about the Saint. Once, while I was
looking at this picture, she understood my confusion and explained, ‘The
picture has been here for many years. I believe in him. I used to go there
every Friday, with whatever money I had, a few years ago. I don’t go there
anymore... I am not saying that I will never go back . . . I cannot disrespect
him, he has taken care of me in a very difficult phase of my life ... we did not
have anything before ... all this (gestures to her latest construction site) is
thanks to him’. After rolling her hands on her face and kissing them as a sign
of respect for the saint’s picture, she continued, ‘But now I have understood
what real Islam is’.
Suhanaben’s newly found piety undershot by ambiguity over her
practice of Islam emerges in the aftermath of the 2002 riots which have
led to a spatial segregation of Ahmedabad along religious lines (following
relocation of Muslims into ‘safe’ neighbourhoods) and have witnessed the
growing influence of Islamic reformism in the city. Suhanaben’s is not an
isolated story. It is the story of many men and women who moved into
Juhapura after the riots and who were attempting to redefine their Muslim
identity in order to gain social acceptance in the neighbourhood.
5
A movement started by Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas in the late 1920s. The movement aims at
revitalization of Islam through individual piety. The movement has close links with Deoband Islam.
Work on post-terror societies (such as Sri Lanka; see Perera 2001) has
often over-stressed—and romanticized—the role of popular religion as a
mechanism for coping with the horrors of violence and war. Mehta and
Chaterjee (2001), considering how people whose existence have been
ravaged by violence re-establish a degree of ‘normality’ in their everyday life,
instead draw links between ‘collective disorder’ and ‘rehabilitation work’.
They observe that, ‘What remains after the riots is not a coherent moral
and local world but a multiplicity of fractured communities, each charting,
through rehabilitation work, its strategies of survival and co-existence’
(ibid.: 202). Similarly, Hansen (2001) discusses the predicament of Muslim
migrants in post-1992 riot Mumbai. Expelled from formal industrial
employment and continually harassed by Shiv Sena thugs, these Muslims
have been torn between a strategy of ‘community purification’ and one of
‘plebeian assertion’ as promoted by small entrepreneurs and local strongmen
linked to the Samajwadi Party. Research on post-disaster reconstruction
has shown linkages between resettlement of survivors and religious reform.
Simpson (2004a: 137), for example, discussing post-earthquake Kachch
reconstruction, argues that a Hindutva politico-religious agenda became
objectified through the construction of segregated villages/neighbourhoods
and led to increased support for a particular kind of Hinduism. A new
religious economy managed by non-elected populist charismatic individuals
has been central to the reconstruction of Kachch, in the same way as, he
suggests, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Front for Salvation gained
support following earthquakes in Egypt and Algeria respectively.
Building on the above analyses, I will consider the moral meanings of
reconstruction and resettlement for the riot-affected Muslims of Ahmedabad,
focusing in particular on the growing influence of Islamic reformism in
Juhapura between 2002 and 2004.6 I will focus on the impact which three
Islamic organizations—the Tabligh Jamaat, the Jamat-e-Islami (J-e-I) and
the Jamiaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind—had on Muslims displaced during and after
the communal riots of 2002. Despite their different doctrinal orientations
and styles, these Jamaats encouraged a practice of Islam which focused on
particular styles of worship, dress and everyday behaviour. Moreover, these
6
Juhapura had developed as the biggest Muslim areas of the state of Gujarat after the violence of 2002. It
was located in the south-western part of the city and alongside Vejalpur which was one of the biggest
Hindu neighbourhoods. After the violence of 2002, the population of Juhapura rose from 50,000 to
250,000.
organizations all supported and propagated interpretations of Islam which

were broadly opposed to worship at the tombs of Sufi saints, practices
of animal sacrifice, sanctification of food and water, pilgrimages and urus
(birth or death rituals of holy men near their tombs) and the taking out of
taziyahs (symbolic tombs of Qarballah martyrs).7 These Jamaats were active
in providing and facilitating resettlement of refugees after the 2002 riots.
The Jamaats
In the city of Ahmedabad there are about 41 Shia and Sunni Jamaats. These
are composed of people who might share the same occupation, ethnicity or
regional origin; or might comprise people who recognize the authority of
a particular shrine, or follow a specific school of jurisprudence or doctrinal
orientation (Simpson 2004b: 87). Membership of a Jamaat is not exclusive. A
member of an occupational Jamaat, for instance, can also be associated with
a specific doctrinal Jamaat. Most of the occupational Jamaats are generally
endogamous, and marriages across doctrinal Jamaats are not common. After
the 2002 riots, boundaries between Jamaats became blurred. Violence and
the subsequent displacement into refugee camps led many people—who
did not want the added burden of having to control young unmarried
women in the precarious living conditions of the camps—to marry their
daughters across Jamaats through mass marriages organized free of cost by
various religious organizations. For the purpose of this essay, I will focus
predominantly on the three doctrinal Jamaats active in the resettlement of
Muslims after the violence of 2002.
J-e-I is one of the most active and well-organized Islamic movements
in South Asia. Founded in 1941 by Syed Abu Ala Maududi, it considers
Islam as a ‘perfect way of life’, informing not only people’s relations with
God, but also wider community affairs, considering the construction of
Islamic states as essential to the preservation of Islamic civilization. However,
in India, J-e-I militants and supporters have to strike a balance between
remaining part of a larger Muslim Umaah while also being citizens of a state
which calls itself ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ (Sikand 2002). J-e-I participated
in relief and reconstruction work in riot-affected areas of Ahmedabad,
7
In addition to these three main Islamic organizations, there were other organizations like the Sunni
Barelvi Jamaat and Dawat-e-Shariah, which played a role in reconstruction and resettlement.While the
former was not reformist, the latter associated itself with the Tabligh Jamaat.
and Gujarat more generally, through its relief wing, the Islamic Relief
Committee (IRC). Unlike J-e-I and Tablighi Jamaat, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-
Hind (the All India body of the Ulama) had already been active in the
city after previous episodes of communal violence. Founded in 1919 in
the wake of the Khilafat movement,8 Jamiat (which, claiming nationalist
leanings, did not support the Muslim League and partition of British India9)
was responsible for a 1920 fatwa sanctioning Muslim participation in favour
of the non-co-operation movement (Mayaram 1997: 235). During the 2002
riots, its ‘nationalist’ credentials allowed Jamiat to maintain good relations
with the BJP-led Gujarati government. Its activists secured curfew passes
and ran ambulance services within the city, taking riot victims to various
city hospitals. The Jamiat, however, does not have a separate ‘relief wing’.
The Tabligh Jamaat is one of the most popular reform movements in the
Islamic world (Robinson 2001: 15). It was founded by Maulana Muhammad
Illyas (1885–1944) in the 1920s as a movement whose objective was to
‘purify’ the Meos of Mewat in Rajasthan (and Indian Muslims more
generally) of un-Islamic beliefs and practices. Sharing roots with nineteenth
century Deoband reformism, its main objective is to promote mass Islamic
education in order to ‘correct’ Muslims’ religious practices and ‘perfect’ their
relationship with Allah. Overtly non-political,Tabligh Jamaat focuses on the
moral reform of individual believers, working towards ‘making Muslims
true Muslims’. Emphasizing voluntary missionary work, male activists go
for ‘tabligh’ (preaching) for a number of days in a year; at least once in their
lives, activists should spend 120 days of uninterrupted missionary work
(Metcalf 1982: 17). In some cases, men are joined in tabligh by their wife.
Hence, unlike Deoband and other reformist groups, the Tabligh movement
has moved the dissemination of Islamic teachings away from the madrasa and
into the community at large (ibid.: 16).
These three Jamaats built resettlement colonies for Ahmedabad Muslims
who had been displaced by the 2002 riots10 and were extremely active in
the ‘rehabilitation’ of refugees. While relationships were generally marked
8
The Khilafat (1919–24) movement was a political movement launched mainly by the Muslims in India
to influence the British government and protect the Ottoman empire during the aftermath of World
War I.
9
Though it is claimed that Jamiat’s opposition to Pakistan was not on nationalist grounds but because it
would divide the South Asian Muslim community into three groups and circumscribe the activities of
the Ulema (Mayaram 1997: 241).
10
In addition to these Jamaats, Dawat-e-Shariah had also established an office and built a resettlement
colony in Juhapura. This Bihar-based organization is also active in Jharkand and Orissa.
by co-operation, the Jamaats competed for establishing doctrinal hegemony

in Jahapura. Eventually, local people recognized that Tabligh Jamaat had
emerged as dominant in the neighbourhood. The growing influence of
reformist Jamaats could be gauged in many ways: in the number of new
masjids (mosques) and madrasas (schools of religious learning) they built;
in the number of ishthemas (religious congregations) they organized; in
the ways that the changes in language, dress and religious practices they
promoted were taken up by local Muslims; in the enrolment and adoption
of destitute children by reformist madrasas and more importantly, in the
number of resettlement colonies they built in this and other parts of the city.
Some Hindu as well as secular organizations complained that Muslims had
become more kattarwadi (extremists), inward looking, and that the number
of purdahs (veils) and beards in the community had increased. Even though
the process of Islamization among riot-affected Muslims was brought about
by the active involvement of the reformist Jamaats, I will argue that it was
also closely linked to labour migration patterns in North India and to the
movement of people from the mill districts to Juhapura. These factors also
determined the ways in which the displaced Muslim communities received
the Jamaati brand of Islamic reform.The survivors were aware of the political
agenda of the reformist Jamaats, and negotiated their relationship with these
organizations through tact and diplomacy. They used the Islamist agenda to
secure ‘safe’ living conditions.
Violence and Movement of Muslims within the City

Camps
Camps in the city of Ahmedabad were started on 28th February itself.
Most of the big durgahs (shrines), mosques and jamaatkhanas (community
centre) in Muslim areas became sites for the camps. School buildings and in
some cases Muslim cemeteries also became sites. Initiatives for organizing
the camps came from within the community. Most camp organizers were
people who had played some role in the community during the previous
incidents of violence; they were mostly local ‘big men’ from the area. For
example, the organizers of Shah Alam camp owned a construction company
in the area where their camp was located. They had considerable clout in
the area and had a trust registered in their names. They had organized
relief camps during previous episodes of violence. I was told by a survivor:
‘Decent people want to save their skin and stay safe at home. . . it is only
the goondas (thugs) who come out and carry out relief ’. For procuring
assistance from the state, organizers had to register camps under the name of
a private trust. Individuals with no backing from a trust or society had also
run relief camps in the city. Such camps could not secure any kind of help
from the Government as they were not recognized. It is important to note
that none of the Jamaat organizations played any active role in the setting up
of relief camps in the city. One commented, ‘There was enough attention
being paid to the city by private trusts and hence we concentrated on rural
relief. We thought we would come in when people needed to go back into
their houses.’ The survivors, on the other hand, said, ‘They got scared… it
was too risky to come out at that time… they came to build houses after it
became quiet’.
People from the locality started donating clothes and food in the mosques
so that those affected could be fed and clothed. Local doctors in the area
were called to attend to people being brought in from the affected areas.
Local pharmacies were opened with pressure from goondas and survivors
were given the necessary first aid. Arrangements were made for people with
serious injuries to be taken to the Civil Hospital. Ambulances owned by
community trusts were evacuating people and admitting them to hospitals.
The government resolution recognizing the relief camps and promising aid
came only on 6th March. It was on the 7th that the government started
providing assistance to the riot affected; NGOs started helping in the camps
after 5th March.These NGOs (both secular and religious, mainly Jesuit) had
formed a collective Citizens’ Initiative in order to respond to the violence.
There were no camps run by NGOs or any secular organizations. In response
to my queries about NGOs not running relief camps, a Director of a noted
organization which had played a role in relief said, ‘This has never happened
in the history of the city…and it was not possible for the community to trust
us after what they went through’. Most camp organizers acknowledged the
help they received from the NGOs. Since these NGOs were located in the
western part of the city, most of the work was co-ordinated by volunteers
from within the Muslim community. These volunteers were later joined
by non-Muslim volunteers from other states. Such volunteers formed an
important link between the camps and the NGOs.
By May 2002, the city had a total of 60 small and big camps. The
majority of camp organizers informed me that the state only provided
grains and that they managed on help which came from Muslim trusts
and organizations from other parts of India.11 This was subject to a head
counting exercise, which the Collector’s office engaged in regularly in order
to determine the accuracy of demand made by camp organizers. Within
two months of setting up relief camps, the camp organizers were informed
that the Collector’s office was going to stop the assistance. Six relief camp
organizers approached the Gujarat High Court through a writ petition
asking for continuation of assistance. Finally, the Gujarat Government gave
an assurance in court that it assumed responsibility for providing adequate
relief to the camps. The petition also urged army protection for the relief
camps, since on more than one occasion (instigated by politicians belonging
to the ruling party and by the police) relief camps had been attacked. The
Gujarat Government however, closed all relief camps in mid-July 2002.The
closure of camps coincided with the arrival of the monsoons. Survivors who
could not go back to their houses shifted to indoor camps on the initiative
of the Collector. These indoor camps were shut down in October 2002.12
The setting up of indoor camps was the last step the state took towards the
complete closure of camps and to declare that conditions in the city were
‘normal’ for conducting state assembly elections in December.
Despite recommendation from the National Human Rights
Commission (NHRC) that the displaced should not be asked to leave
the camps unless appropriate relief and rehabilitation measures were in
place—and contrary to the Prime Minister’s pledge on his visit to the city
that camps would remain open as long as required—the state government
had been pressuring the camp organizers to close down without offering
the inmates any feasible rehabilitation measures or any guarantee for their
security upon returning to the very places where they had seen their near
and dear ones killed.
11
The civil supplies department of the state government supplied per day, per individual, 400 g flour,
100 g rice, 50 g pulses, 50 g milk powder and Rs 5 per head was also given for meeting expenses on
vegetables, fuel and condiments.
12
The last four relief camps (which housed 2,530 people)—Hajj House, Qureshi Hall Jamatkhana,
Syedwadi camp in Khanpur and the Jehangir Nagar Camp in Vatwa were all formally closed down on
30 October 2002. There were some camps which continued to function despite the official closure.
The displaced in one such camp continued living in an open industrial shed by building walls of
old jute rags to divide the space till July 2004, when they were allotted houses by the Islamic Relief
Committee.
The Process of Displacement

The forceful closure of relief camps left displaced Muslim survivors with
very few options: moving back to their original place of residence or
moving into larger Muslim areas within the city. The worst affected13 did
not want to live in the same space where they had lost their loved ones.
They also feared attack. The majority of them were migrant Muslims from
the suburbs and outer suburban part of the city. Their parents had come
from Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal
to work as economic migrants in the textile mills. The closing of the textile
mills in the late 1970s and 1980s created unemployment among these
migrants, forcing them to find work in the informal economy around their
places of settlement or within the old city. It was mainly these migrant
groups who were found in the indoor camps. They had registered their
names for resettlement with various Jamaat organizations and meantime
decided to move into larger Muslim neighbourhoods or in proximity to the
sites where they were going to be resettled.
Within the city, the pattern of displacement was then such that Muslims
were moving to the peripheries of the city or into areas which were outside
the Municipal limits. Muslims could not move back to the walled city as it
was overcrowded and did not receive migrants. As most Muslims were daily
wage earners, they had found their means of livelihood in their immediate
neighbourhoods or in the mill districts, located not far from where they
lived. Being pushed to the eastern or the western periphery implied
moving further away from the informal economy and a lack of employment
opportunities. Even though some were provided with vegetable lorries and
fruit lorries to start work in the resettlement colonies, survivors found it
hard as they had not done that type of work in the past.
Jamaat2JKNCPVJTQR[CPF%QOOWPKV[2WTKſECVKQP
As the state did not have an official policy for resettling affected Muslims, the
Jamaats and Jamaat organizations stepped into the void. Islamic organizations
in Gujarat had their first exposure to humanitarian work after the earthquake
of January 2001. Their experience in post-earthquake reconstruction, along
13
The inhabitants of Naroda Patia, Naroda Gaam and Gulbarg Society, which witnessed the death of
over 150 Muslims on 28 February 2002.
with the collaboration with international organizations like the United

Nations Development Fund, formed the back-drop of discussions around
their present work and activities in the city after the violence.
With regard to the working of the Islamist organizations, there were
differences in their modus operandi. While J-e-I liaised publicly with other
secular organizations, the Tablighs preferred working quietly without
publicizing their work, or mingling with other organizations. Jamiat was
very careful about the image it was portraying and the work it engaged
in.14 It was very conscious to portray a ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ image. In
my understanding, this could be attributed to the fact that Jamiat worked
very closely with political forces—Congress in the past and the BJP in the
present. All three groups were engaged in rebuilding houses and resettling
displaced Muslims. Each group also engaged in ‘community purification’
through running regular ishthemas for both men and women in the newly
established resettlement colonies. This was done in most cases by playing
upon a sense of guilt and relating the conditions of riot survivors to their
neglect of prayers and having become gumraah (lost), by getting caught up
in worldly desires.
There seemed to be an unspoken understanding between Jamaat
organizations for the criteria of preference for allocation of new houses.
Women who were widowed during the violence were given the first
preference. Destitute children and widowers came second, followed by
survivors who had lost two or more members of their family.Witnesses, who
had identified perpetrators of violence in their First Information Reports
(FIRs), and who were waging legal battles with the assistance of NGOs and
finding it difficult to live in their previous places of residence, came last. In
most cases, houses were distributed free of charge. Tabligh Jamaat was the
only Jamaat which provided housing on subsidized rates. This was done
with the intention of instilling a sense of responsibility among recipients,
I was told. In cases where houses were distributed free of cost, informal
housing contracts were signed, but in most cases, there was no paperwork at
all. Survivors were allotted houses verbally and they simply moved in. The
property continued to remain in the name of the Islamist organization for
an initial period of three years. Inhabitants were told that on the observance
14
They made sure their nationalist leanings and secular credentials were emphasized through constant
reference to their role during the Independence period.
of ‘good conduct’ and ‘satisfactory behaviour’ by the maulana of the masjid

located in the colony, ownership would be transferred to the male head of
the family. In the case of widows, they had to prove that they were living
‘respectable’ lives in accordance with what was deemed as ‘respectable’ and
‘moral’ by the maulana and his wife. In one resettlement colony in Anand,
displaced Muslims were made to sign informal contracts promising that
the J-e-I’s ‘Akida’(doctrinal beliefs) would become the philosophy of the
families inhabiting these resettlement colonies and would be respected and
observed.
Applications for housing were made by affected Muslims while they
were in different relief camps around the city. Their new location depended
upon which Islamist organization approached which relief camp and which
NGO got involved in mediating the process of resettling inhabitants from
a particular locality.
The colonies had a more or less uniform look—a row of houses, with
a small living room white-washed in pale green or white, a kitchen with
an attached mori (open space to wash utensils, used as a bathroom) and a
toilet behind the houses. The toilet in most cases was clogged and people
had to go out in the open in the early hours.The inhabitants had practically
identical possessions—a set of pots, same brand of cooking stoves, water
storage drums, a few glasses and plates. Most utensils had letters inscribed
on them showing which organization they had come from or which relief
camp they were distributed in. In some cases, people were able to retrieve
their old beds and half-burnt furniture which sat in their new living-cum-
bedrooms. Some organizations provided water and electricity connections,
but in some colonies only the masjid and the maulana’s house had electricity,
while the rest lived without it. Water and electricity connections were
dependent on registering a change of residential addresses for ration cards,
but residents were afraid to change their residential address, having no legal
rights over these new houses. Survivors thus also had to fetch rations from
their previous places of residence.
The planning of these colonies was done in such a way that each had
a masjid, a maqtab (a primary school) and madrasa, a community hall in the
centre (used for conducting religious meetings, tailoring classes for women
and running a nursery for the children).This was a conscious strategy against
the secular NGOs which had got involved after the riots in honing the
skills of women and providing them with livelihoods. As one maulana put
it, ‘Now they don’t have to go out for seevan class (tailoring classes) or any
other classes, as we will start things here eventually.We will also start schools
and classes for children’.The colony resident maulana would come from the
school of jurisprudence that the sponsoring organization was affiliated to.
Some Maulanas were accompanied by their wives, who worked as an alema
(preacher) among colony women. In most cases, maulanas drew a salary from
the parent organization and lived from the goodwill of colony inhabitants.
Rebuilding of destroyed shrines and mosques in general was identified
as an immediate priority by leaders of Islamic organizations.15 Despite
acknowledging this priority, none of the organizations’ annual reports had
separate funds earmarked for reconstruction of shrines. It was also hard to
discern the linkage between the relief work of the organizations and the
broader ideology of the Jamaat. Queries related to the rebuilding of shrines
were avoided, with, ‘We cannot do everything; there are almost 100,000
people who don’t have a roof over their heads. It is for somebody else to
do... what do you want us to build, durgahs or houses for homeless people?’
It also appeared that the state was supporting Islamist organizations in their
agenda of not rebuilding shrines. The fact that flat roads had been built,
with state resources, on the sites of destroyed shrines, implied that the state
was complicit in the agenda of the Islamic organizations. One such was
the famous seventeenth-century Urdu poet Shah Wali Gujarati’s tomb,16
located just outside Shahibaug police station, a few miles away from the
City Police Commissioner’s office. This tomb was broken on 2nd March,
and a make-shift Hindu temple with a saffron flag put up in that place.
On 3rd March, that too was levelled, and by 5th March 2002 a flat road
was built on the site, implying that nothing had ever really existed there
(The Indian Express, 13 March 2002). The rebuilding of the poet’s tomb was
extensively debated in the media and eventually, over 2 years after the riots,
rebuilding was taken up by the Urdu Academy and a secular organization
from the city. By observing the work conducted by the Jamaats around
Ahmedabad, it became clear that there was a demarcation of tasks. The
rebuilding of destroyed masjids was taken up by J-e-I, while the Tabligh
Jamaat engaged in building new structures—masjids and madrasas—in areas
where Muslims were moving in. The Chand Committee (the relief wing of
15
Over 650 places of religious worship were destroyed all over the state of Gujarat.
16
Shah Wali Gujarati was a eighteenth-century Urdu poet, who pioneered ghazal writing in its present
form. He also was the first poet to have compiled a collection of prose ‘Divan-e-Vali’ which contained
hundreds of ghazals and other forms of poetry.
the Sunni Barelwi Jamaat), which was not reformist and did not have very
good relations with the reformist organizations, took up the responsibility
of rebuilding broken durgahs and mosques and was trying to get funds for
this from the State Waqf board and the municipality. Overall, all of this
activity implied that through reconstruction and resettlement a specific
meaning of Islam was being reinscribed in these neighbourhoods: an Islam
which did not believe in veneration at shrines and which was based on the
principle of tawhid (oneness of Allah).
The money for most of the Jamaat work came from individual grants.
These grants ranged from help from Gujarati migrants in other parts of
India to donations from the diaspora, routed through individuals (mainly
maulanas affiliated to various Jamaats, who visited Gujarat at the time of
crisis); sometimes, cash was collected through travel by Jamaat representatives.
Most of this money was zakaat (a certain percentage of an individual’s
income, removed for charity at the time of Ramzan) and sadakah (voluntary
donation) money. The head offices of various Jamaats collected money for
these groups by making announcements in local masjids and also by making
appeals to people through circulating CDs and reports about the violence.
There were rumours floating among the secular organizations about how
each Islamic organization had a jeep parked outside Ahmedabad airport.
Any Muslim businessmen or NRI arriving was whisked off for a guided
tour of activities in the Jamaat.There were rooms in certain three-star hotels
owned by Muslim businessmen where such visitors were put up. There
was also discussion about maulanas from certain Jamaats making tours to
Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom to collect Fala (contributions) for
their relief and rehabilitation work. Jamaat organizations also co-ordinated
with transnational Muslim organizations like the Indian Muslim Relief
Committee (IMRC), North American Islamic Relief and the American
Federation of Muslims from India. They also established contacts with the
British Muslims’ Association and with the head offices of their respective
Jamaats globally.
Tablighs and Their Popularity

On one of my visits to a resettlement colony built by Tablighs, I bumped into
Maroofbhay, who was, I was told, a Tabligh sympathizer. He hung around
the colony and helped inhabitants with water and electricity connections.
He told me:
M: Fifty percent of the population of Juhapura belonged to

Sunni Barelvi Jamaat. Thirty percent were Shias, Memons and
Bohras which are mainly Gujarati speaking, and the remaining
twenty per cent were a mixture of Tabligh Jamaat, Ahle-Hadith
and other smaller Jamaats. It is changing now: after these riots it
has changed drastically. The Tablighs are on the rise. Now they
constitute almost over 20 per cent of the population and are
on their peak. Take the example of Fatehwadi17; it was an open
piece of land—now the population is more than 20,000 people!
There are seven masjids and two madrasas that have come up
on this piece of land. All belong to the Tablighs. They have the
money. The money comes from Saudi Arabia, from the world
over. They are very strong and powerful people.
RJ: What had brought this change?
M: The Muslims who moved to Juhapura in the 1980s were
from the walled city. They were mostly Barelvis and were the
older migrants ... The change came after 1992, after the rathyatra.
Hoards of Muslims from the walled city and the suburbs moved
here. It started developing as a Muslim area. The Al-Fazal Masjid
(the area’s main masjid) was built by the Tablighs.18 After the
establishment of this masjid, their influence has increased. After
these riots they did a lot of imdad [Service] in the area. But they
don’t publicise the work they do. A lot of aid was disbursed from
the masjid. Our maulana kept providing food and other help for
people moving into Juhapura. They did not work in the camps.
Now they have built colonies. They also have a very strong
organizational base.
From the above discussion, I wish to draw out the fact that the popularity
of the Tablighs in Juhapura is related to the changing social composition of
Juhapura. As migrant Muslims started moving into Juhapura, they brought
with them their ideas of religion and reform and built what became the
most popular Masjid of the area. Reform in the city must then also be
linked to histories of earlier labour migration from North Indian states. The
oldest Tabligh Masjid was located in Gomtipur, very close to where migrant
17
Fatehwadi was a neighbourhood within Juhapura, which developed after the riots.
18
The Sunni Barelwis did not use that Mosque, but offered prayers at Sarkhej Roja, a few miles away
from central Juhapura.
Muslims from Uttar Pradesh had settled. There is, then, a very clear linkage
between migration and the spread of religious reform.
During the period I was in Gujarat, the Tablighs were referred to as
the dominant Jamaat, especially in areas where riot-affected Muslims were
moving in and also in the new resettlement colonies. I took it for granted
that their popularity was related to their vigorous resettlement work. As all
the new institutions in the area were being built by the Tabligh Jamaat and
as they had built resettlement colonies, I assumed that this would have an
impact upon the people moving into these localities. But to my surprise,
Tabligh was the only organization which charged (a subsidized rate) for
houses. As one Maulana put it: ‘We are religious people ... we are not into
social work. The scale of devastation was so high that we got involved for
the first time’.
How to account for the Tabligh’s growing popularity after the violence
was my growing interest. There was a standard response which visitors
received from maulanas and Jamaat leaders across the city: that people had
forgotten the violence, that life had returned to ‘normal’, that there was
‘peace’ and ‘calm’ and people had been resettled, while anybody trying to
speak to survivors was an intruder who had come to Gujarat to unsettle
Muslims by making them re-visit memories of 2002; outsiders had no right
to extract the experiences of poor Muslims.This made finding answers from
the leadership difficult.
There was certainly an increase in Isthemas (congregations) or meetings
after the riots.
They did, [hold meetings] but we were not bound. Now that
we live in the houses they have provided and we have signed
these contracts, it has become mandatory to attend. If we don’t
attend, the Maulana asks us the next day when he sees us in the
neighbourhood. We have nowhere to go; we are scared that if
we don’t attend we might have to leave these houses. Secondly,
they did not have a base, now they have this hall which was built
when our houses were rebuilt... so monitoring becomes easier.
The building of resettlement colonies then provided Jamaats with an

organized base among the survivors, which made the reformists’ task easy.
I attended a few ishthemas organized by Tabligh Jamaat and Dawat-e-
Shariah. In one such meeting, women were reminded that shame came
to the community in the form of sexual violence, (in places like Naroda
Patia, Naroda Gaam and countless villages in Gujarat) because the promise
made to Allah by them had been forgotten. Women were also reminded that
they had a very special role to play in restoring the community’s lost izzat
(honour) by adhering to an Islamic way of life, wearing the burqah (veil)19 and
keeping away from the influences of modernization (television and fashion).A
woman’s body was compared to a house: the house had to be happy and safe...
the house would need good curtains and doors to protect it from sunlight,
dust and intruders; in the same way, women need the burqah to protect their
honour and pass on the right values to their children. They were asked to
spread the word in their respective areas and to bring younger women, who
were becoming shikaar (entrapped) in modernization. Each woman was asked
to bring another woman along for the next ishthema. The emphasis was on
self-improvement and improvement of their immediate environment (family,
neighbourhood) through dress, rituals and simple living. Women were asked
to promise that for the next ishthema, at least one-third of them would wear
a burqah and that attendance would also improve. Violence thus became a
reference point for introducing the need for discipline and dealing with the
disgrace that the community had gone through.
Nilofar, who had moved into Juhapura from a nearby village and
attended most of the of the Tabligh Jamaat ishthemas, told me:
What is nice about them is that they simplify religion. I think

they are right—we should have a direct relation with Allah.They
have no selfish interest.They don’t pass judgements. I come from
a village where ours was the only Muslim household, and we
only knew that we were Muslims, but did not practise religion. I
did not even know how to do namaaz. Coming here, my children
are growing in a dini [religious] mahol [environment]. My son has
gone to the madrasa in Kaleej. There is a total change in him.
He has become so disciplined; he does not wear civilian clothes
anymore. He has taught us so many new prayers we should say
while performing various kriyas [daily chores]. I am going to
send my daughter to Baruch where this behensaaheb [the alema
conducting the ishthema] has done her training. I was beginning
to feel embarrassed that my children know so much and so I
started reading the Quran and learning the namaaz from my
19
This was particularly emphasized as, after the violence, many women who wore burqahs prior to the
riots had stopped wearing them as life had changed so much that they had to get out of their houses,
find work and fend for their families.
neighbours, who are Chaubisyes [a term used to describe Tablighs

in the city]... They don’t laugh at me and they teach me with a
lot of mohabbat [love].
Nilofar’s story shows how moving into Juhapura from a village and sending
her son to a madrasa had transformed their practice of religion within the
family. The fact that her son was respected in the neighbourhood and did
not waste his time like the other children of his age made her proud.
Amina, who was a Hindu Brahmin by birth but had married Yusufbhay,
a Muslim, and had moved from Naroda Gaam, told me:
I have been married to him, but never really practised Islam. I

used to celebrate festivals for the sake of it. But now I actually
understand the significance.This is my chance to get to know the
religion my children will practise. I like listening to them, they
make me think about my role in this world.They make me think
of myself as an individual and my relation with Allah. They don’t
treat me differently because I was a Hindu. They don’t make me
feel different. In fact, they never mention my Hindu past.
In Nilofar’s and Amina’s cases, attending the isthemas not only became
a means of finding social acceptance within the new place they had moved
into, but they also found it liberating that they could embrace their Muslim
identity, despite their ignorance about it, without being judged. The
economic class of the alema delivering the sermon was not very different
from theirs and they also found it uplifting to see the kind of respect and
social status that the alema enjoyed. Indeed, Nilofar was so inspired by the
alema that she wanted to train her daughter to be a preacher.
The Tabligh alemas had a unique style of working. They did not engage
much with the violence, issues of survival, poverty or politics. Their non-
political approach, coupled with an emphasis on the ‘individual self ’ for
improvement and change within oneself and one’s immediate environment,
worked very well for women. Sikand (2002: 67) discusses the idea of it being
the religious duty of each Muslim to see himself or herself as a muballigh or
missionary of Islam.
Such an emphasis on the self put extra responsibility upon women and
they took on the role of informal tabligh (spread) in and around their houses.
In one resettlement colony, instead of taking an afternoon nap, women

would teach women moving into Juhapura either how to do namaaz or
read the Quran. Alemas reiterated what the male leadership preached: that
life was back to normal and people had forgotten the violence. Women—
no matter where they came from, how they looked, which Jamaat they
belonged to, or what doctrine they had followed before—were made to
feel welcome. Behensahebs—dressed in finery (black burqahs, hand-gloves,
special nets covering their eyes and black nylon socks) and carrying an
aura of piety—visited individual houses with invitations, another factor
appealing to women. Mayaram (1997: 280) shows how reform among the
Meos instilled a new sense of social worth by participating in a discourse
which was ‘de-hierarchizing’ and offering an opportunity to common
people to become teachers and preachers. Becoming teachers and preachers
was something that women attending these ishthemas found very appealing.
In many cases, attending ishthemas became a means of social acceptance in
new neighbourhoods.
It would be tempting to argue that reconstruction (of institutions and
houses) provided an organized base for Islamist organizations among the
survivors of 2002. But the number of houses built by the Tabligh Jamaat
was very few when compared to Jamiat or J-e-I. Moreover, the Tabligh
was the only organization to charge money for houses. Hence, the Tabligh
success must also be linked in to the labour migrations of the past two
decades, to growing transnational linkages, to the organizational growth
of the movement and to the growing influence of the ‘global’ upon the
‘local’. The latter influence manifests itself in discussions by visiting UK
Gujarati diaspora about what was a more desired and acceptable form of
Islam.The Tabligh Jammat—a movement that was local (here I mean had its
origin in South Asia)—was going through a process of ‘authentication’ and
‘hybridization’ through support for it among migrants.
Razakbhay came from Shahpur Chakla in Ahmedabad, old city. He
migrated to the United Kingdom in 1970 and lived in Birmingham, where
he married a daughter of another Gujarati Muslim from Central Gujarat.
He ran a grocery shop and was associated with the Tabligh Jamaat in the
United Kingdom.When I met him, he was visiting his sister, who had newly
moved into Juhapura. He used to spend his evenings giving advice to young
boys on how to migrate and what life is like in London.20 He was helping
20
London was a general term used for being in the United Kingdom.
his nephew Firoze to migrate, having lost everything after the riots. One of
Razakbhay’s favourite topics was ‘din’ (religion) and ‘dini mahol’ (religious
environment) in the United Kingdom. I used to hang around with Firoze,
who arranged for me to meet his uncle. I found him wearing a white Kurta
and white trousers hanging short on his ankles. He was addressing five
young men:
The way you practise Islam is wrong. You want everything . . .

you want the durgahs…niyaz…fatehas [shrines and auspiciousness
of food and water] and you want Allah. Allahpaak has said that
you should not bow your head before anybody else… then why
do you bow your head in front of these durgahs? In the UK
we follow the Tabligh Akaid …that is what is practised in the
Muslim world... in West Asia ... in the Middle East. It is a very
chust [strict] and simple path… You will realise the importance
of what I am saying in the near future. I go on Tabligh with
other men to the mosques in other parts of the UK.You will be
surprised that most of them are well-educated professionals who
decide to dedicate time for the spread of ‘din’. I used to dress up
like you in shirts and trousers ... but not anymore. I wear Islamic
clothes…. It is very fulfilling to engage with people and explain
to them what Islam is about. I can show you evidence that this
is the way to be.
Through discourses like this, Tabligh (or, more generally, reformist) agenda,
was becoming more authentic in these neighbourhoods.
Ambiguities and Practice—Hum Sabka Sunte Hai

aur Apna Karte Hay (We Listen to Everybody and
Do Our Own Things)
People were, however, contesting the intentions of the Jamaats and their
work and not silently accepting what the Jamaats were offering. ‘Relief
committee’ was a generic term used for the work of all Jamaat organizations,
and in some cases Muslims did not even know the subtle differences
between them. Life had changed so much after the violence that they were
preoccupied with negotiating survival and making a living rather then
engaging with religion.
I came across the same group of women attending meetings organized

by both the Tabligh Jamaat and Dawaate-e-Shariah. When I asked about
this, women responded ‘din ki baat sunne main achi lagti hay, to hum bhegi hokar
jate hai. Dil halka ho jata hai’ (religious sermons are nice to hear, that is why
we get together and leave our homes, it is like a social thing, our hearts feel
lighter).
The fact that many Muslims moving into Juhapura had lived in relief
camps organized on the premises of durgahs also implied that these durgahs
had very special significance to experiences of survival. The biggest camp
organized in the city was located in the premises of Shah Alam durgah.21
Nilofar had sent her son to a Tabligh madrasa in central Gujarat; she attended
Tabligh ishthemas regularly, she aspired to train her daughter to become
an alema. Yet Nilofar’s husband refused a job as a cleaner in Ahmedabad
Municipal Transport Services (AMTS) bus company because he used to
spend Wednesday afternoons in Shah Alam durgah; he told me that he had
faith in Baba Shah Alam, who had saved their lives. He refused to work in
a job where he would not be able to take a day off in the middle of the
week to do bandagi (meditate) over Baba.The fact that his wife and children
were following a Tabligh Akida did create some family tensions. It was also
common to come across families where two brothers followed different
doctrines and hence went to different places to offer prayers and followed
two different styles of worship.
The fact that shrines were present on the landscape certainly held
meaning for people living in the neighbourhood. Baba Qutb-e-Alam’s
shrine, located in Vatwa, was central to the lives not only of the Syed Bukhari
family—who traced their lineage from it and were essentially Sunni Barelwi
in their practice of Islam—but also to members of the same family who
over the years had become Shia under the influence of preachers from
Iran and the middle-east. At the annual festival of the durgah, the qaramats
(miracles) of the Baba and his sons were being told and re-told: to visitors
curious about the history of the place but also, of course, to the new settlers.
Pre-existing relationships with shrines also retained significance.
Another resettlement colony housed Muslims from those parts of the main
‘Muslim city’ which were close to Hindu settlements and who hence could
21
Shah Alam was the son of Qutbe Alam, who was instrumental in bringing and spreading Islam to
Ahmedabad. The area in the city where his tomb is located is called Shah Alam.
not go back to their houses because of perceived threat from their Hindu
neighbours. Here, the visits of Shaukatbhay (a resident of the colony) to
Jamalpur (where he had lived prior to the riots) to fetch rationed kerosene
and grain would be incomplete without a visit to Gosh Paak Baba’s durgah
in Jamalpur. He told me, regarding reformism, ‘We hear it from one ear and
remove it from the other’. He had started growing a beard, wearing a kurta-
pyjama (tunic like top and trousers), attending the ishthema in his colony
every Wednesday night and was active in helping the maulana to sort out
electricity and water connections for the colony inhabitants. But when it
came to Friday prayers, he would offer them at Sarkhej Roza22 and not at
the Tabligh masjid Al-Fazal. He told me, ‘Where will we go if we don’t grow
beards, and if we don’t work for the community who will look at us?’ Since
resettlement was being provided by Jamaats and because the riot-affected
did not want to go back to their original place of residence, wearing an
Islamic identity became inevitable. For people like Shaukatbhay, becoming
involved was also a way of finding a purpose and dealing with the anger and
frustration that the riots had brought on.
Perceptions of the Tabligh’s motives also varied. There was a rumour
among some of my respondents that the initiative by the Tabligh Jamaat
was an American game plan to keep the community divided. On the other
hand, a group of young boys tried to convince me that the Tabligh had roots
in Saudi Arabia (they wrongly equated it with ‘Wahhabism’).
When I asked Ishaqbhay, who lived in a colony built by the J-e-I, what
the difference between Tablighs and J-e-I was, he told me:
There is not much difference between the two. They all tell us
the same thing... Tablighs probably are more chust [strict] about
the practice of religion. But these people too [J-e-I] speak about
doing the namaaz [prayers], keeping rozas [fasts], doing qurbani
[sacrifice] and doing zakaat [paying a section of your income
to the needy]. They remind us why Allah created us, that there
is a life after death and we are travellers in this world who have
to prepare ourselves for the next journey. They also tell us that
we suffered this dhamaal [riots and the devastation that followed]
22
Sarkhej Roza is a monument which houses the tombs of Saint Ahmed Khattu Baksh and also that of
Emperor Mehmud Shah Beguda and his queen. Saint Ahmed Khattu Baksh was the spiritual advisor of
Emperor Ahmad Shah who founded the city of Ahmedabad. The Roza also has a Masjid.
because we had forgotten our duty towards Allah, and that this
happened not because Modi hates Muslims and wanted to win in
the name of Hindutva but because it is Allah’s way of reminding
us that we have forgotten him. But how can we think about din
[religion] when our children are hungry? We have no money.
They have built these houses and are building air-conditioned
masjids, but nobody is talking about building a factory with that
money and giving us our livelihoods.
Another man listening to the conversation added:
I think they both also object to durgah, darood, niya , na re [shrines,

auspiciousness of food and water]. They also don’t believe in
babas and hakims [local healers] or the tombs of great poets.They
tell us only to concentrate on Allah and his Prophet. They tell us
not to fight, not to do immoral things like going to prostitutes
and drinking alcohol.
I asked Ishaqbhay:
Does that mean that now you are a Tabligh or that your Akida
[dominant philosophy] has changed?
He answered:
These are all ways and means of furthering their agendas.

Everybody has their matlab [own selfish interest]. They don’t
realise that the qaum [community] needs unity now. They
should not be dividing us. I do what I want to do, but attending
the meetings becomes inevitable. The maulana or the Relief
Committee people, when they see you in the neighbourhood,
embarrass you by saying, ‘Have you forgotten what happened
in Patiya?’
Jamaats, Reform and the Perceptions

of the People
Associating oneself with the Tabligh Jamaat was construed very differently
by different people after the violence. Violence and displacement had
brought about the disruption of established social hierarchies within the old
neighbourhoods. Wearing a ‘new Islamic identity’ was a means of dealing
with such displacements. For the ashraf (high-born) and more specifically
for the leadership of the Jamaats (mostly from North India) it was a means
of reclaiming their superiority while refining the Islam practised by the
common ajlaf (common Muslims). For Muslims of Gujarati descent,
especially the middle class (Memons, Ghanchis and Sunni Voras), it was a
means of upward mobility within North Indian Jamaat leadership structures.
It also assuaged insecurity associated with commonalities shared (culture,
food habits and language) with the majority of Gujarati Hindus. For the
ashraf from Gujarat, who claimed their lineage to a local shrine, reform
meant losing control over erstwhile means of patronage and control, which
had been carried over with migration and manifested in the cities with
privileges like allotment of special houses in the backyard of mosques.
For my ajlaf (common people) informants, the meaning of reform
varied.While for a few it was a means of reclaiming a lost sense of ‘self ’ after
the violence and not letting one’s mind get ‘out of control’, for others it was
a means of upward social mobility and feeling accepted by the leadership of
the ‘community’. For many it was a means of clinging to something when
nothing else around them made any sense. The majority looked at it as a
means of having a roof over one’s head, given the deteriorating economic
conditions after the riots. Also, at play was a positive feeling of the reformist
atmosphere enabling their children to grow up in a religious environment.
Reform also became a means of gaining social acceptance in the new
neighbourhoods where people moved to after the violence. For women,
attending isthemas served as a means of socialization but also a chance to
break out from the everyday routine, as manifested in phrases like ji halka
ho jata hai (we feel lighter), hasi majaak bhi karte hai (we laugh and entertain
ourselves), ghar se nikalne ka mauka milta hay (it gives us an opportunity to get
out of our houses). Overall, ideas of religion and competing ways of living
one’s religiosity certainly did become more pronounced after the riots, but
this was surely to be expected, given that Muslims had been persecuted
exactly because of their religious identity.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have explored the politics of religious reform within one low-
income neighbourhood housing displaced Muslims in Ahmedabad. Instead
of establishing a simple cause and effect relationship between violence and
reform, I have drawn out the social complexities around the meaning of
conflict and the restructuring of religious practices. I have also contested
simplistic (academic and popular) assumptions about riot-affected Muslims,
especially claims that, ‘The entire community had become extremists
after the violence’. Simpson’s (2004a: 164) work on post-earthquake
reconstruction in Kachch, Gujarat shows how a new religious economy
managed by non-elected populist charismatic individuals can be central to
rebuilding a devastated community. My analysis takes Simpson’s work further
and shows that a religious economy, managed by competing understandings
of religious practices, can also affect the nature of subjectivities (what it
means to be a ‘true Muslim’). In their engagement with the reformist
agenda, survivors made strategic choices in relation to religious practices,
clothes or rehousing in colonies built by Jamaat organizations. Here I have
deviated substantially from Mahmood’s (2005) understanding of piety and
agency within the context of religion and reform. She makes a claim for
understanding agency not only through the lens of subversion but also
through passivity and feminine docility. Mahmood’s contribution, though
important, fails to look at the personal desires or public actions of women
who attended meetings occasionally or have a strategic agenda. I have
explored here the ambiguities around people’s participation in and boycott
of reformist meetings, even though religious revival remained the dominant
discourse among the survivors. A complete ‘hands-off ’ attitude from the
state vis-à-vis riot-affected Muslims and the limited intervention from
secular organizations certainly paved the way for Islamist organizations to
build resettlement colonies, which eventually became a base for organized
reform. But I have suggested that the success of reform organizations also
needs to be linked in with the growth and expansion of these organizations
globally and with the impact of both these complex developments and
wider networks—such as those produced by migration—at the local level.
I have then kept in mind Van der Veer’s (1987: 283) analysis that, ‘Religious
experiences cannot be seen apart from religious organizations and group
formation; and since the latter changes over time, the former changes with
it’. This perspective usefully enables us to develop a better understanding of
reform and competing religiosities.
References
The Indian Express. ‘Shah Wali Gujarati’s Tomb leveled to Ground’,
Ahmedabad. 13 March 2002.
Hansen, T.B. 2001. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Post-Colonial

Mumbai. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mahmood, S. 2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Mayaram, S. 1997. Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and Shaping of Muslim
Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mehta, D. and R. Chaterjee. 2001. ‘Boundaries, Names, Alterities: A Case
Study of a “Communal Riot” in Dharavi, Bombay’. In Remaking a
World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery, edited by Veen Das, Arthur
Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphele Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds,
201–50. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Metcalf, B.D. 1982. Islamic Revival in British India, Deoband 1860–1900.
Misra, S.C. 1964. Muslims Communities in Gujarat: Preliminary Studies in their
History and Social Organisations. New Delhi: Asia Publishing House.
Perera, S. 2001. ‘Spirit Possessions and Avenging Ghosts: Stories of
Supernatural Activity as Narratives of Terror and Mechanisms of
Coping and Remembering’. In Remaking a World: Violence, Social
Suffering and Recovery, edited by Veen Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret
lock, Mamphele Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds, 157–200. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Robinson, F. 2001. Islam and Muslim History in South Asia. New Delhi:
Sikand,Y. 2002. Origins and Development of the Tablighi Jamaat (1920–2000): A
Cross-Country Comparative Study. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
Simpson, E. 2004a. ‘Hindutva as a Rural Planning Paradigm in Post-
Earthquake Gujarat’. In The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India,
edited by John Vavos, Andrew Wyatt and Vernon Hewitt, 136–65. New
York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2004b. ‘Migration and Islamic Reform in a Port Town of Western
India’. In Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia,
edited by Fillipo Osella and Katy Gardner, 83–109. New Delhi: Sage.
Van Der Veer, P. 1987. ‘“God Must be Liberated!”’ A Hindutva Liberation
Movement in Ayodhya’. Modern Asian Studies, 21(2): 283–301.
PART III
Everyday Politics of Reform

11
Reading the Qur’an in Bangladesh
The Politics of ‘Belief’ Among Islamist Women
Maimuna Huq
Introduction
I n Muslim communities in contemporary South Asia and other Muslim-

majority areas, informal religious lesson circles are proliferating rapidly
as mass higher education brings more Muslims under the umbrella of
standardized, nationalized education systems. These study circles often
revolve around the study of compendia of Qur’anic commentary or
exegesis, hadith (written records of sayings and acts attributed to the Prophet
Muhammad) such as the thirteenth-century Riyad al-Salihin, as well as
Qur’anic commentaries and theological texts produced by authoritative
traditional religious scholars, contemporary or recent.1
While some scholars have discussed contemporary commentaries on
the Qur’an and their authors, fewer have focused on the users of these
1
One example of such a text, popular among devout Muslims in the Arab world and increasingly among
diasporic Muslims, is the seminal work of the medieval Salafi theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, On
Disciplining the Soul and on Breaking the Two Desires. An example of an authoritative Islamic text popular
among literate pious Muslim communities in South Asia, particularly Muslim women, is the reformist
prescriptive treatise or advice manual Heavenly Ornaments, written in northern India in the early 1900s
by Ashraf Ali Thanawi (1864–1943), a scholar trained in the Deobandi tradition of orthodox Islamic
education in South Asia.
commentaries and of other Islamic literature, or on the specifics of audience

engagement with these texts (Eickelman 2004). Thus, for instance, while
the works of Sayyid Qutb (which are central to the Muslim Brotherhood,
the leading Islamic movement in the Middle East and North Africa) have
been analysed by several scholars (see, for example, Carré 2003; Kepel 1993
[1985]; Khatab 2006; and Moussalli 1992), some important questions are left
unanswered: How are Qutb’s ideas explained to adherents on the ground?
What styles of discourse are employed in lesson circles? Which ideas are
emphasized and which marginalized, and what kinds of techniques are used
to do so? Do lesson circles actually shape how individual members feel,
think, express themselves, and act? If so, how, and to what extent? Which
groups are reading which texts or selections from texts?2
As some scholars have noted, many contemporary Islamic activists are
not recipients of traditional religious education. Rather, they are studying,
or have studied, the sciences and humanities in non-religious public schools
and universities.3 What, then, are the specific processes whereby such activists
become familiar with Islamic texts and learn to view their own experiences
and duties in the light of this religious literature? How, in turn, do they view
this literature through the prism of their experiences?
I will outline answers to some of the foregoing questions in the context
of a particular women’s Islamist student organization in Bangladesh, BICSa
(Bangladesh Islamic Chatri Sangstha, i.e., Bangladesh Female Students’
Islamic Association). This group actively harnesses Qur’anic verses to re-
cultivate young, educated Bangladeshi Muslim women as activists committed
to the task of Islamizing self, community and state. By focusing on this
process, I will show that such Islamist lesson circles can be a key site for the
production of a particular form of Islamic subjectivity. In fact, I will argue
that lesson circles play a central role in the sustenance and expansion of
Islamic movements in Bangladesh. They do so by helping reshape activists’
conceptions of self, religious duty and others through a rhetoric that deploys
specific notions of religiosity and religious identity, culture, state, the global
Muslim community or ummah, and the current world order.
2
For an unusual and rich description of specific texts read by participants in a particular Islamic
movement, in this case the transnational Islamic revivalist group Tabligh Jamaat, see Metcalf (1993).
3
This has been noted for Islamic activism from South Asia to Southeast Asia to the Middle East and
North Africa. For example, see Banu 1992; Brenner 1996; El-Guindi 1981; Eickelman 1992; Göle 1996;
and Nasr 1994.
Reading the Qur’an in Bangladesh / 285
It is often in lesson circles that a lay-educated Bangladeshi trained in

nominally secular public schools first engages the contents of the BICSa
movement’s message, especially notions of pristine Muslimhood and
those interpretations of Qur’anic and hadith teachings privileged by the
organization. Yet, as I will also show, a lesson circle not only manufactures
consent but also generates, authorizes and equips dissent from the same
body of belief.
Lesson Circles, Education and Print:

The BICSa Setting
BICSa lesson circles, especially those centred around tafsir (Qur’anic
exegesis), are designed to attract recruits to the organization, deepen
the knowledge and enhance the faith of the active members BICSa calls
‘workers’, and train workers in the art of disseminating Islamic knowledge.4
BICSa lesson circles are part of a range of practices identified by some
scholars as increasingly constitutive of ‘public Islam’5 and are enabled, in part,
by the advent of mass higher education and media technologies. A growing
body of scholarship exists on the ways in which these related phenomena
are shaping Muslim understanding, expressions and practices of religiosity
within and across class, national and gender boundaries (for example, see
Anderson and Gonzalez-Quijano 2004; Eickelman 1992; Horvatich 1994;
Robinson 1993; Yavuz 2003; and Zaman 1999; also, see Eickelman and
Anderson 1999). While some scholars emphasize how media technologies
facilitate fragmentation of religious authority in the life-world of Muslim-
majority societies, others highlight their disciplinary and centripetal effects
(Hirschkind 2001). Particularly useful ways of thinking about contemporary
Islamic movements in the Middle East and elsewhere have been suggested
by recent path-breaking inquiries into the forms of religious discourse and
4
It is important to note, however, that some lesson circles, particularly those conducted by and for
women, are not formally connected to any Islamic organization but by individual persons as acts
of piety. Such circles centre more on Qur’anic commentary delivered by the group leader than on
group discussion. The goal of such grassroots circles is less to train participants in authoritative Islamic
knowledge than to re-moralize individuals and families in a particular neighbourhood (and often in
specific socio-economic groups) by imparting a basic knowledge of Qur’anic prescriptions, and to do
so by ‘returning to the source’—i.e., the Qur’an, as opposed to popular manual-style works such as
Heavenly Ornaments (see note 1 supra).
5
For example, see the collection of essays edited by Salvatore and LeVine (2005). Also, see the volume
edited by Salvatore and Eickelman (2004).
discipline supporting the effort to embody orthodox Islamic ‘moral– ethical

virtues’ in the Islamic revival in Egypt (Hirschkind 2001; Mahmood 2005:
79–107). Hirschkind (2001), in his analysis of the emergent Islamic public
sphere in contemporary Egypt, which is grounded in an early twentieth
century reformulation of the classical Islamic notion of da’wah (summoning
others to live in accordance with divine prescriptions), has argued that this
particular form of Islamic public sociality is neither singularly hegemonic,
as liberal theorists have conventionally understood religious socialization,
nor simply argumentative. Rather, it is a practice-oriented realm—where
deliberation amid participants, facilitated by the wide circulation of
sermons on tape cassette and unfolding against a background of shared
moral sensibilities, is integral to the cultivation of an everyday, embodied
subjection to orthodox Islamic norms.
Transposing this type of phenomenological and discursive analysis
(which attends centrally to the religious discussions and practices of
Islamic actors and their emergent publics) to Bangladesh, I will describe
a BICSa lesson circle as a site where Islamic reformist socialization and
contestation of certain Islamic revivalist paradigms unfold simultaneously
and interdependently.
While Bangladesh is the third-largest Muslim-majority country in the
world today, it shares little in terms of language or national/local culture with
North Africa and the Middle East, which have been the focus of so much
scholarship on the contemporary Islamic revival. This essay is therefore an
attempt at moving Bangladesh, and with it the larger region of South Asia,
where BICSa’s parent organization Jamaate Islami wields an increasingly
powerful Islamist presence, from the margins towards the centre of the ever-
expanding scholarship on Islamic revivalist or reformist movements.
The scope of this essay differs from that of Hirschkind’s work. I take a
microscopic view of a particular set of practices, in contrast to the stunningly
panoramic view Hirschkind provides of an Islamic public sphere. I focus my
analysis on a central site of ideological persuasion within BICSa, the leading
Islamic revivalist group for young, educated Bangladeshi women. In so doing,
I investigate one aspect (albeit an important one) of the intimate discursive
domain of a segment of the emergent Islamic public sphere in Bangladesh. In
this domain, the study group, men and women either directly or indirectly
affiliated with one or more Islamic organizations or informal groups loosely
formed around independent preachers6 form the core of the Islamic public
sphere and provide that sphere with much of its texture, and vitality.
Furthermore, my analytical framework differs from Hirschkind’s, which is
oriented around an inquiry into those modalities whereby orthodox Islamic
virtues produce ‘the ethical conditions for a domain of public deliberation’
(2001: 4). My emphasis is on the particular ways in which BICSa strategically
deploys a dialogic mode towards the end of manufacturing consent about
what constitutes the content ‘belief ’ or ‘faith’ (iman) and how it does so. I
am especially interested in the extent to which BICSa is able to realize this
objective, for deliberation within the women’s Islamic activist sphere of
BICSa, much like argumentation within the Egyptian Islamic public sphere
Hirschkind describes, is not a goal in itself: BICSa does not aim at producing
Islamic intellectuals, at the diversification of Islamic thought, or at promoting
independent reasoning. It does urge activists to convince others of the Islamic
authenticity and merits of BICSa’s project of moral–political transformation
by means inclusive of ‘rational’ or ‘logical’ argumentation, but argument and
rationality are only means to the end. In the BICSa microcosm centred
on learning and training to morally–politically fashion oneself and others,
discussion is intended as a mere modality for facilitating the formation of a
scripted Islamic pious-revivalist personhood and public. If BICSa believed
that song and dance would be more effective at making good Muslim women
than rationalistic discussion, it would employ them instead.
There are significant differences between the particular ideological–
cultural setting I consider and the loosely organized Islamic movements
for piety investigated in the pioneering works of Hirschkind and Saba
Mahmood. First, BICSa is a religious and social organization with an
elaborate, hierarchical administrative structure, detailed regulations governing
participation, and a political project, namely, to enable the Islamist party
Jamaate Islami ( JI) Bangladesh—BICSa’s parent organization—to secure
state power through democratic means. In BICSa’s view, an Islamic state
would crucially bolster from above the Islamization which this group and
others presently push from below through extending dawat (invitation to
Islamize one’s life; Ar. da’wah) to women, especially educated youth, and
through educational-training programmes for recruits.7
6
For a brief description of the emergent women’s Islamic public sphere in Bangladesh and the larger
region of South Asia, see Huq 2007
7
BICSa’s ideological–moral imperatives, organizational structure and style of operation derive largely
from that of Jamaate Islami. For insights into the historical relationship of Jamaate Islami (specifically
Second, for many BICSa activists, the texts comprising the formal
BICSa syllabus (determined by JI) are the sole source of substantive
religious knowledge. This syllabus centres on texts by leading JI thinkers on
a variety of Islamic doctrines and movement imperatives, especially those
by Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903–79), the founder of Jamaate Islami in colonial
India and one of the most influential Islamists of the twentieth century.
BICSa women therefore do not possess the kind of dexterity in traditional
religious reasoning or familiarity with diverse Islamic texts demonstrated by
some of the people described in Hirschkind and Mahmood’s studies. While
BICSa encourages its members, especially relatively advanced members, to
read Islamic texts beyond the organizational syllabus, most BICSa women
have little knowledge of Arabic, Persian or Urdu, the three languages in
which the most definitive orthodox and reformist Islamic texts have been
produced. Besides some Qur’anic commentaries and hadith collections,
most BICSa women have practical access only to those few authoritative
Islamic texts available in Bangla translation (primarily from Urdu).8
Third, reinforcing the foregoing point about BICSa women’s limited
sources of religious discursive expertise, women’s access to and participation
in the religious public sphere is even more limited in contemporary South
Asia, including Bangladesh, than in many Middle Eastern and North African
countries, including Egypt. Many BICSa activists (often recruited in their
mid-teens) have little exposure to substantive religious discussion prior to
joining BICSa. While weekly religious discussions by traditional religious
experts are broadcast on the state-regulated radio and television channels,
these are not widely watched by youth.
of its founder Maula Abul Ala Mawdudi) to other Islamic reformist figures and organizations in South
Asia, such as the transnational da’wah or pietistic movement Tablighi Jamaat, see Nasr (1994: 3–27, 1996:
9–68). Also, see Ahmed (1991). For useful discussions of Islamic reformist currents and movements in
Bengal (of which Eastern Bengal, home to the majority of Bangali Muslims and which now comprises
Bangladesh), namely, the Faraizi movement initiated by Haji Shariatullah (1781–1840) of Faridpur in
Eastern Bengal and Tariqah-i-Muhammadiya, an extension of the jihad movement launched in 1826 by
the sufi-warrior Shah Sayyid Ahmad (1786–1858) of Rai Barelwi in Northern India, see Ahmed (1981:
39–105); Banu (1992: 33–53) and Metcalf (1982: 68–71).
8
A view of the Bangla language as an ‘un-Islamic language’, which was widespread until the early
twentieth century among traditional Muslims in South Asia, including Bengal, likely impeded
translation of Islamic texts into and the composition of Islamic texts in the Bangla language. For
discussion of this particular historical contingency as well as its wider social, religious and political
context, in which a ‘Muslim identity’ came to be pitted against a ‘Bengali identity’ perceived as tainted
by Hindu socio-cultural and religious elements, see Ahmed (1981: 1–132). The issue of ‘identity crisis’
continues to surface in scholarly discourses on Islam, culture and politics in Bangladesh.
Fourth, since BICSa is a student organization by definition, most

BICSa members are required to be students, whereas many participants
in pietistic Islamic movements are adults and some have little formal
education.9 Occasional temporary exceptions are made for BICSa leaders
who have completed their educational careers but whose services are
considered indispensable to the organization. Between schoolwork, familial
commitments and BICSa’s demands on one’s time, it is hard for the average
BICSa activist to find the time to participate in any other forum for
acquiring religious knowledge, even if she wants to.
These factors can combine to significantly limit the breadth of
Islamic knowledge and viewpoints that activists bring to BICSa meetings,
lesson circles and training programmes as compared to some participants
in traditionalist, pietist movements. Finally, many BICSa activists who
participate in lesson circles, particularly those conducted in urban areas by
senior BICSa leaders, are not beginners but mid-level activists who have
already demonstrated notable leadership ability, dedication to the practice of
religious virtues, and commitment to BICSa’s moral–political project. The
highly methodical, formal–ideological character of the BICSa community
and the limited scope for significant diversification in religious knowledge
are important in shaping the deliberative space inscribed in a typical BICSa
lesson circle. Also significant is the historical opening a movement such
as BICSa creates for lay-educated women in Bangladesh to acquire some
authoritative knowledge of Qur’anic verses, exegesis, hadith and modes of
Islamist explanation and argumentation, and to do so amid other supportive
women and in relatively egalitarian settings such as those of lesson circles.
Yet it is important to point to the commonalities between Islamist
projects in Bangladesh and the Sunni-Salafi movement in Egypt, whose
members aspire to embody a range of orthodox Islamic moral–ethical
virtues as described by Hirschkind and Mahmood. As articulated repeatedly
9
College/university students have historically played a central role in social and political movements
in South Asia. This is particularly true for Bangladesh, where students played a leading role in the
1952 Bangla language movement and then in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. Also, the
privileged status of education in a poor country such as Bangladesh enhances the standing of students
as the source future leadership in many areas. Thus, every major political party in Bangladesh has an
affiliated student organization that recruits on college and university campuses and struggles to sustain
or extend the parent party’s hegemony on campus—struggles that often spill over onto the streets in
violent conflict.
and enacted daily in a variety of ways by participants from both movements,

central objectives are learning to purify the self and secure a pious social
surrounding in total and spontaneous submission to divine edicts and in
keeping with the traditional Islamic duties of da’wah and ‘enjoining good
and forbidding evil’.
Background Islamic Knowledge

Some Qur’anic commentary or exegesis is part of the background knowledge
of many Muslims in Muslim-majority societies (Eickelman 2004: 121). In
Bangladesh (as in many other Muslim countries), the primary site at which
this knowledge is gained is the madrasa or traditional religious school, where
jurisprudence studies (fiqh) and commentaries on the Qur’an and ahadith
are the core of the curriculum. An important secondary site is the modern
pubic school, where Islam is one among the many subjects taught within a
set national curriculum in first through tenth grade.10 While this subject is
not generally considered important, since it has little bearing on educational
or career success, it is taught as part of the state’s effort to produce morally
upright subjects with a basic knowledge of the religion of 88 per cent
of Bangladeshis. Parents are thus relieved of some of the responsibility
for religious education. Friday sermons at the mosque, popular public
preaching (waaz mahfil), and a few weekly religious programmes on radio
and television are tertiary sites for the production of generalized public
religious knowledge.
One reason for the effectiveness of Qur’anic lesson circles, I suggest,
is that these creatively exploit the ‘background’ or ‘informal’ Islamic
knowledge to which many Bangladeshis are exposed. Qur’anic lesson circles
build and elaborate on the kind of Qur’anic exegesis and the modern and
rigorously classificatory or compartmentalized style of religious discourse
introduced early on, albeit sketchily, in the non-religious public schools that
most students from the relatively well-to-do families in Bangladesh attend.
10
In Bangladesh, even though traditional religious schools have continued to receive some state aid,
partly in order not to alienate the ulamas and partly to limit educational expenses, state support
has been increasingly confined to public schools, with funds and key privileges (such as access to
government jobs) shifting increasingly to graduates of nonreligious state schools. The majority of
students, especially from the urban middle and upper classes, therefore attend modern, non-religious
public schools.
The Structure of a Qur’anic Lesson Circle

The lesson circle (qoraner pat chakra) is one of the two basic styles of pedagogy
that BICSa employs to confer Qur’anic knowledge. The Qur’anic lesson
circle—other varieties include the ‘book lesson circle’ and ‘topic-based lesson
circle’—often lasts 2 h or more, allowing for a relatively detailed exploration
of Qur’anic verses (pre-assigned for study at the end of the previous meeting)
in the light of exegetical texts, usually Mawdudi’s exegetical work Tafheemul
Qur’an. In the course of such a circle, individuals are prompted by a group
leader to discuss different assigned verses. Each person’s micro-presentation
or commentary may be followed by discussion.The overall result is a round-
table conversation, formal in tone and interspersed with questions, answers
and comments.
A Qur’anic lesson circle is supposed to emphasize practical examples
over theoretical discussions and citations from the Qur’an and ahadith. As a
BICSa leader explained to a group participating in a Qur’anic lesson circle
for the first time, ‘The main purpose of a group meeting is to transform
theoretical Islamic knowledge into practical knowledge so that we can use
this knowledge constantly in molding ourselves (atyagatan) and in drawing
others to the movement and molding them well as future Islamic workers
(karmigatan).’11 In the course of a lesson circle, references are made primarily
to texts by Mawdudi and secondarily to those by other leading Jamaat
thinkers. Top-level Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh such as Golam Azam and
Matiyur Rahman Nizami are also occasionally cited as authorities. These
leaders sometimes deliver lectures and conduct lesson circles for members of
the highest cadre in BICSa. These members, called sadasyas, are considered
sufficiently qualified to oversee group meetings and lesson circles.
Group Study of Surah as-Saff

The Qur’anic verses preassigned for the meeting I am about to describe are
among the most widely studied in BICSa, namely, verses 1–4 and 10–13
of a Surah (a chapter in the Qur’an) named as-Saff. I have also chosen
to describe this particular lesson circle because the themes extracted from
these verses in the circle relate to three key concepts of BICSa’s discursive
regime. Most BICSa training programmes and the micro-technologies
11
Field notes, Qur’anic lesson circle at a training program for members of the ‘worker’ cadre from all
over the country, Dhaka, 15 July 2000.
that constitute them—the ‘lesson’, ‘lesson circle’, ‘report preservation’ and

supererogatory prayers—are oriented around the conceptual triad of ‘belief ’
(iman), ‘hypocrisy’ (monafeqi) and ‘struggle in the path of Allah’ (jihaad fii
sabiilillah). Below, I describe how these key concepts, particularly ‘belief ’
and ‘hypocrisy’, are explained and discussed in a Qur’anic framework and
are harnessed to the task of reforming oneself and others as subjects of an
Islamic ideology. This details how the practice of lesson circles within the
Islamist movement in Bangladesh embodies a conceptual domain that is
simultaneously deliberative and disciplinary (Hirschkind 2001).
The organizational context for the meeting I am about to describe is
as follows: In the capital city Dhaka, where BICSa is strongest and where I
conducted most of my field research, lesson circles are often led by senior
BICSa leaders who usually occupy the highest administrative positions and
therefore spend much time in the organization’s headquarters or central
office.The meeting concerned took place in a room in this office in Dhaka,
which was simply furnished with a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and chair, and
a valet stand for headscarves and borkha overcoats. The presence of the bed
and wardrobe is explained by the fact that senior activists must occasionally
work late at the office and so find it convenient occasionally to spend the
night there. It is also used by activists from outside Dhaka who use the
office as a temporary home till they can find more permanent housing
in overcrowded dormitories. Following occasional episodes of especially
violent conflict involving dominant, leftist–nationalist student groups and
the Bangladesh Islami Chatra Shibir—BICSa’s male counterpart, the openly
political student wing of the Islamist party Jamaate Islami—BICSa women
who fear violent retaliation from opposite groups on college and university
campuses use the office as a temporary abode till tensions subside.
On the hot, hazy afternoon of 24 March 2003, I was in this room with
Nabila, the lesson circle leader or moderator, waiting for the other seven
participants to arrive. Since a group meeting is often 2–3 h long, it must
begin early enough in the afternoon so that participants can reach home
before dusk, at which time parents begin to worry for their daughters’
safety. Participants whose classes continue beyond noon must therefore
come directly from school. Some of these women may grab a quick bite
if they reach the office before the meeting (the office also has a kitchen).
Resident women cook several times a week, so there is always some cooked
food in the refrigerator, but meeting participants must go hungry if they
arrive at the office too late to eat. BICSa women sometimes joke among
themselves that almost every activist they know suffers from ‘gastric’, an
unpleasant stomach condition that can result from going without food for
long hours. On the day in question, Nabila herself had arrived hungry from
her part-time job as a school teacher. She did not eat even as we waited,
eager to begin the meeting as soon as most of the participants arrived so
that she could let them go home before dusk. All study-circle attendees are
junior in rank to the moderator and most are younger as well, so often the
moderator feels responsible for the well-being of the women in her group
and develops a relationship of affection and concern towards them.
Participants trickled in, eight all told. All but Nabila sat in a tight
semicircle on the bed. She sat on a chair close to and facing the bed, at the
focus of the semicircle. The room was small. Whenever a participant had to
leave the room, she would have to unceremoniously climb over the side of
the bed closer to the door. The room had a ceiling fan, but it was old and
worked only at a high speed. Since two of the participants were suffering
from cold, the group agreed to make do without the fan even though it was
hot in the room and some activists were visibly sweating. The room had
two windows, but both were curtained heavily to stop anybody from seeing
in from the windows and rooftops of the buildings that closely surround
the BICSa offices. These are located in the middle- and lower-middle-class
neighbourhood of small grocery stores, departmental stores, bookstores, and
dilapidated apartment and office buildings. The larger of the room’s two
windows was usually kept closed anyway during meetings to keep out the
noise of the neighbourhood, with its narrow streets full of rickshaws ringing
their bells in frustration, scooters beeping and occasional cars honking. The
smaller window was often left slightly ajar, but on that day loud English-
language pop music—the Backstreet Boys—was beating against the side of
the building, so both windows were fully closed.
Most of the women, however, seemed not to mind the room’s growing
stuffiness. Nabila gave the activists a grace period of about half an hour after
the scheduled start of the meeting to give latecomers a chance to arrive.
This was a concession to the packed nature of an average female activist’s
daily schedule.
Nabila is a petite, slender woman no more than 5 feet tall, but used to
talking to audiences. She began with a ritual invocation of the name of God
(basmalah), invocations of blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad (darud
shareef ), and thanks to God for enabling the participants to gather for the
meeting. She then chose a member, Bilkis, to recite the assigned Qur’anic
verses (Surah as-Saff: 1–4, 10–13) from memory in the original Arabic.
Bilkis did so. Once the various aspects of her recitation had been diligently
critiqued—fluidity of recitation, correct or incorrect joining of the last
letter of a particular word to the first letter of the next, pronunciation of
individual letters—Nabila asked another member, Nargis, to read out the
Bangla translation of the same verses from Mawdudi’s Tafheemul Qur’an
(Tafheem for short). Nargis was then asked to discuss, according to the
standard order of points, the ‘naming’ (namkaran) of the surah, the context of
its revelation (naziler sthankal or, more traditionally, shaane nuzul), and its gist
or ‘subject matter’ (mool bishaybastu). Bilkis was also requested to discuss each
verse in the set in a numerical order. Having attended numerous ‘worker
meetings’ designed for initiates, to which the study of Qur’anic exegesis is
central, lesson circle participants who are relatively advanced are well familiar
with these discursive categories (e.g., ‘naming’ and ‘context for revelation’),
which are also commonly found in modern Qur’anic exegetical works such
as Tafheemul Qur’an.
Below, let us follow the activists’ and the group’s handling of these
categories in order.
Significance of Discussion of Naming and

Context of Surah
In study circles, discussion of the naming of a Surah and of the place, time and
socio-historical context of its revelation (i.e., whether during the Prophet
Muhammad’s stay in Makka or Madina and prevailing circumstances)
establishes continuity with the authoritative style of Mawdudi’s exegesis.
More traditional forms of Qur’anic exegesis tend to ignore historical and
socio-political contexts and application to personal life and to focus instead
on the philological aspects of the text and its underlying values, which
are understood as eternal, impervious to time and place (Eickelman 2003:
54). In BICSa’s Mawdudi-derived style of exegesis, an emphasis on the
‘sociopolitical context’ of the revelation (shaane nuzul) of a particular set
of verses enables BICSa to privilege certain verses by drawing analogies
between events experienced by the Prophet with his companions and by
contemporary Islamic activists. BICSa thus legitimizes the narrative frame
it uses to interpret current events and its strategies for coping with these
events. The eternal nature of Qur’anic guidance, especially as embodied in
its numerous verses concerning the struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, is
reaffirmed but in such a way as to establish its relevance to the flux of history,
a way which increases the plausibility of the Islamist project. Moreover, only
certain sections of certain Qur’anic chapters (surahs) are included in the
BICSa syllabus, a selectiveness that implicitly passes a distinctly human set
of judgements on the relevance of various scriptures for the present time.
However, few BICSa activists would acknowledge this selectiveness.12
Discussion of Subject Matter

Nargis described the subject matter of the two groups of verses, drawing on
Tafheem, as follows:
Verses 1 through 4 describe the greatness of Allah. These also

mention a particular quality found among the believers that Allah
dislikes and the kind of dedication Allah favors.Verses 10 through
13 state that the only way to success both in this world and in the
hereafter is to have sincere belief in Allah and in His Prophet, and
to wage jihad in the cause of Allah through sacrificing life and
property. The obedient will be rewarded in the Hereafter with
paradise, and in this world with Allah’s help and victory.
These remarks were followed by an extended discussion in which Nabila

asked one member after another to discuss a single verse or sometimes two
verses.13 The explanation of each verse offered by the chosen participant—
12
This is not to say that BICSa does not consider the other parts of the Qur’an to be less important; as
BICSa activists advance in levels of piety and knowledge, the syllabus broadens accordingly, and one is
expected to study an increasing number of Qur’anic verses and chapters. For the most advanced BICSa
activists, who are usually a small group and comprise the core organizational leadership, the ideal is
to study each and every chapter of the Qur’an. What is at stake here, therefore, is BICSa’s ability to
familiarize low- and mid-level activists working under significant time constraints with a selection of
materials. BICSa sees itself as racing against time—the duration of each member’s academic career—to
produce authentic Muslims who will counter what it sees as the growing secularization of Muslim
Bangali (Bengali) society and culture specifically and the global Muslim community of the ummah
generally. For mid-level activists such as lesson-circle participants, BICSa’s syllabus therefore features
verses and chapters that equally emphasize both the cultivation of virtuous dispositions and the integral
necessity of striving in the path of God both personally (in private, within oneself) and socio-politically
(in relations with others, especially Muslims, and in the public sphere).
13
Some study-circle leaders employ another method, which is to group two or more verses thematically
for discussion. They feel that this forces an activist, trained to follow Mawdudi’s Tafheem closely, to
develop her own approach to the study of the Qur’an by beginning to think about the verses for
based on Tafheem, other Qur’anic verses, ahadith, and practical examples—

was followed by supplementary or critical comments by other participants,
including the moderator. At the end of the discussion of each verse, Nabila
would prompt individual activists for questions and then close with responses
to questions raised and comments offered.
Belief (Iman)
BICSa activists discussing Qur’anic verses in lesson circles engage
enthusiastically in exegesis in the light of concerns of both individual
activists and the Islamic movement as a whole, especially the task of morally
reforming one’s self and the way Islam is understood and practiced in
Bangladesh today. This is nowhere more evident than in BICSa discussions
of ‘belief ’ or ‘faith’ (iman) and what it means to declare that one is a Muslim,
that is, that one ‘believes in Islam’ and that one’s deen (religion) is Islam.
Among the verses of Surah as-Saff discussed at this meeting, the tenth and
eleventh comprised one of the two sets to address the issue of iman most
directly.
(10) O you who have attained to faith! Shall I point to you a

bargain that will save you from grievous suffering [in this world
and in the life to come]?
(11) You are to believe in God and His Apostle, and to strive hard
in God’s cause with your possessions and your lives: this is for
your own good—if you but knew it! (Asad 1980: 861–62)
At moderator Nabila’s prompting, it fell to an activist named Reena

to talk about this particular verse. As is common in BICSa Qur’anic
lesson circles, Reena did so by discussing successively and systematically
three terms she felt were central to the verse: ‘the faithful’ or ‘believers’
(imandargan), ‘bargain’ or ‘trade’ (babshya), and ‘suffering’ or ‘punishment’. As
a characteristic of such lesson circles, she drew substantially on Mawdudi’s
interpretation of the verse. In this particular case, however, Mawdudi focuses
herself instead of simply paraphrasing Mawdudi. Nabila felt that paraphrasing Mawdudi’s exegesis for
each verse and then supplementing that exegesis with knowledge derived from other sources was a
more thorough approach; this way, the material ‘becomes truly imprinted on the heart’ (mone genthe jai).
However, sometimes even Nabila would resort to a discussion organized around thematically grouped
verses when there was too little time for the quantity of verses being considered.
only on the concept of ‘bargain’ or ‘trade’. In her elaborations of the ideas

of ‘belief ’ and ‘punishment’ based on sub-texts from earlier BICSa lessons
and from required readings of various booklets that comprise the BICSa
syllabus, Reena therefore adds significantly to Mawdudi’s narrative. This is
not uncommon among advanced activists such as Reena.
Reena often used rhetorical questioning to emphasize and clarify her
points, liven the presentation, focus the attention of the audience, gain
time to collect her own thoughts, and link her presentation to the style
of popular preaching (waaz) used by traditional religious authorities, thus
claiming greater legitimacy for BICSa’s way of engaging with the Qur’an:
So, who is being addressed in this verse? The believing people.

Who are the believers? Those who believe. But what does it
really mean to believe? Does it mean that we simply whisper the
kalimah [the fundamental short declaration of faith in the Arabic
language] in the ears of an infant and she grows up thinking
that she is a Muslim because her parents are Muslims? This is
conventional (gatanugatik) belief. True belief (khanti iman) does
demand that we formally articulate our belief but mere utterance
is only the first requirement of faith and does not exhaust the
meaning of faith in any way. Having declared the kalimah, one
must realize its meaning in practice. One’s entire life must revolve
around this kalimah, the affirmation of one’s belief in God and in
the messenger of God, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him. This is the real significance of the kalimah. Only then can
one be a true believer. Such true faith shapes a person’s life in a
very distinct way. This is the kind of believer Allah is addressing
in this verse.
In this speech, Reena performs several definite ideological actions. First,

she distinguishes between form and content. While reciting the kalimah in
the ears of a newborn or by oneself is indeed correct in customary form,
living up to the content or realizing the meaning of the kalimah in practice is
as important, or more.
Second, she critiques mainstream Islam in present-day Bangladesh for
its emphasis on ritual form and what she perceives as its negligence of
content. Scriptural content, properly internalized, marks every aspect of a
person indelibly. While BICSa pays considerable attention to the obligatory
rituals central to the orthodox Islamic tradition—including the obligatory
five daily prayers (namaz or salat), fasting during the month of Ramadan
(roza or sawm), charity (zakat) and pilgrimage to Makkah (hajj)—it insists
that in order to reap their true benefits to the fullest, one must embody
belief at every moment and in every aspect of one’s life. Conducting the
prescribed rituals is important both in itself and because it prepares one
to abide by God’s wishes in areas of life beyond the contexts of specific
rituals. In BICSa’s cosmology, in accordance with Mawdudi’s thought,
means and ends are intricately intertwined and equally significant. Since
the importance of the means (that is, ritual) is commonly recognized in
mainstream Bangladeshi culture, BICSa, in a compensatory balancing
act, tries to draw one’s attention to the ends, defined in terms of BICSa’s
revivalist understanding of Islam.
Third, Reena distinguishes between conventional believers and true
believers. In doing so, not only does she distinguish between those Muslims
who do not support Islamist efforts and those who do, but she asks Islamic
activists themselves a cautionary implicit question: Are we really committed
to Islam? This theme of self-critique and the inculcation of a Foucauldian
‘panoptical’ style of self-discipline through constant self-surveillance appears
in many Qur’anic lessons and speeches delivered by BICSa leaders at large
training events.14 This will become even clearer in the second part of this
essay, which will focus on a lesson-circle discussion of ‘hypocrisy’.
Another activist, Najma, pointed out that verses 284–286 of Surah
Baqarah contain a more explicit discussion of ‘belief ’. A Muslim must,
according to these verses, believe in Allah’s unity, in the books Allah has
revealed, in the prophets and messengers Allah has sent, and in the Last Day
of Judgement. Belief, she suggested, means that a person enslaves herself
to Allah: that everything she has and is belongs to Allah alone. She added
that in daily conversation a Muslim habitually refers to her possessions as
‘my home, my property, my wealth, my talent, my health, my family’, when
all these blessings are really only entrusted to human beings by Allah, and
one must account to Allah on the Last Day of Judgement for the uses she
has put them to. If she uses these blessings in ways sanctioned by Islam,
14
Suzanne Brenner notes the ‘panoptical’ nature of the disciplinary practice of veiling among Islamic
reformist women in Java, Malaysia. She demonstrates the ways in which the embodiment of discipline
through clothing helps sustain a constant sense of anxiety regarding the religious appropriateness of
one’s actions (Brenner 1996: 688–89).
then she will have earned God’s pleasure and be duly rewarded; if she uses
them whimsically, yielding to Satanic temptations, she will have earned
God’s anger and be duly punished. Najma thus critiqued the way in which
an average Bangladeshi Muslim relates to things and people around her,
suggesting that re-calibrating these perceptions is inherent to the project of
proper belief.
In BICSa’s ideology, and in the Qur’an for that matter, belief is sometimes
understood in the context of ‘bargain’ or ‘trade’ and in relation to ‘suffering’
or ‘punishment’ and rewards. Reena (following Mawdudi) defined ‘trade’, as
used in the tenth verse of Surah as-Saff, as ‘an endeavour in which a person
uses her capital, time, labour, merit etc. for the sole purpose of accruing
profit’. ‘But why’, asked Reena rhetorically, ‘does Allah want to inform us of
a specific type of bargain? Given His own description of His might earlier,
surely, there is nothing that Allah could possibly need from us?’ She supplied
the answer:
The fact of the matter is that Allah created us because He wishes

to test us. Since He loves us immeasurably, He wants us to avoid
failure and hence punishment. He wants us to pass this test and
win paradise as the reward.Thus He wants to inform us of a trade
whereby we invest certain things, such as our lives and property,
in a certain project and reap many times the profit in the form of
paradise and avoidance of Hell.
Reena went on to cite Qur’anic verses from Surah Al Imran, Surah

Dukhan and Surah Waqi’ah in which humanity is warned of the inevitability
of death and of the impending Day of Judgement. She then conjured up
a vivid image of Hell for her audience by citing various other verses. To
make the horrors of hell more imaginatively accessible, she referred to
mundane experiences: ‘How will we drink boiling water in Hell when it’s
so difficult for us to bear the summer heat in this world? How restless we
become when there is no electricity and hence no fan even for the briefest
of periods! How painful the slightest burn can be. And yet, hellfire will be
so many times more intense than this earthly fire.’15
15
There are clear similarities between these rhetorical techniques and those employed by conservative
evangelical Christian preachers.
While hellfire dominates traditional preaching discourse in South Asia,

in BICSa it is dwelt upon most in meetings and training programmes for
relatively inexperienced (hence uninformed and uncommitted) activists. In
Qur’anic lesson circles, which are usually reserved for moderately advanced
activists, discourses of punishment and hellfire recede to make more room
for discourses of love for God and ways in which one can attain greater
intimacy with God by advancing from the level of a basic ‘believer’ (mumin)
to that of a vigilant God-fearing person (muttaqi) to that of an enamoured,
God-loving person whose entire being is a constant longing for the presence
of God (muhsin).
Discourse about a Muslim’s personal relationship with God enables
BICSa activists to distinguish between different levels of belief or piety and
so between different types of Muslims.Various levels of commitment to the
Islamist cause are identified as corresponding to different degrees of piety
or intimacy with the divine. Indeed, the whole notion of the cadre system
in BICSa—whereby activists are organized vertically in accordance with
degrees of knowledge, piety and organizational commitment—is based
on and legitimized by exactly this hierarchized notion of the character of
belief. It is assumed that the intensity and authenticity of one’s belief, hence
one’s proximity to the Divine, is roughly measurable.16
This understanding of faith or belief as roughly gradable or measurable
in degree or ‘strength’ (majbuti) by virtue of its embodiment in conduct is
clear in the remarks made by the moderator in response to Reena’s discussion
of iman. Nabila posited a direct relationship between an activist’s level of
iman, her vulnerability to worldly distractions, and the success of the Islamic
movement of which she is a part. Differentiating between levels of intimacy
with Allah or stages in the acquirement of belief, she correlated these to
stages in one’s participation in the Islamic movement: better faith, more
involvement. She drew on secondary textual authority in linking a central
tenet of Islamic belief—the Day of Judgement—to the movement’s success,
citing a Mawdudi-authored booklet widely studied among BICSa members:
A basic relationship between Allah and Islamic workers may

suffice for launching an Islamic movement. But for such a
16
For a detailed description of BICSa’s administrative structure and cadre system, see Huq (2006:
73–125).
movement to gather strength and succeed, we must develop a

sincere relationship with Allah (Allahr sathe antarik samparka gare
tulte habe). Mawlana Mawdudi discusses this in Islami Andolan:
Safalyer Shartabali [Islamic Movement: The Criteria for Success].
A virtue he considers essential for movement success is constant
anxiety regarding accounting on the Day of Judgement (akherater
chinta). It is clear that we are failing in acquiring this basic level
of faith. Otherwise, why do we worry so much about school
exams and not about the Last Day of Judgement? If we were
to think about the Day of Judgement seriously, would we ever
fail to study texts assigned for Qur’anic lesson circles? Do we
walk unprepared into an exam hall at school? Our prophet and
his companions did not just believe in and think about akherat,
they were constantly anxious (pereshan) about it and this anxiety
manifested itself in the way they lived every moment of their
lives.
The concept of ‘belief ’ was further elaborated by another activist’s

discussion of verse 11, where God calls upon the believers to have faith in
Him and in the Prophet Muhammad. Tanya asks, seemingly puzzled, what
it means when God commands believers, that is those who already believe,
to believe in God and His Prophet. She suggests, following Mawdudi, that
this can only mean that there are different degrees of faith, and in verses
such as this, God commands the faithful to become ‘truly faithful’ or ‘pure
Muslims’ (khanti Musalman). Mere verbal proclamation of faith is necessary
but not sufficient, states Mawdudi; an adequate Muslim must be prepared
to undertake any amount of hardship in practicing, implementing and
upholding that faith to which they declare their submission (Tafheem, vol.
28, p. 111).
A boundary between ‘pure Muslims’ and ‘conventional’ or ‘partial
Muslims’ is thus discursively constructed and repeatedly reaffirmed.
This differentiation serves to legitimize, in part, the Islamist project of
transformation of self and society. In BICSa’s view, recognition of the flaws
in the state of one’s present Muslim self better enables one to transcend this
state and move towards an improved state of Muslimhood. Furthermore,
as is discussed below in the section on ‘hypocrisy’, such categorization or
exclusion also turns the critical eye inwards, upon Islamists themselves, to
exact a greater commitment to the Islamic movement and thus to Islam
itself (as BICSa understands it).
The demand for consistency between word and action strongly

resonates with Islamic activists in a context where popular and print media
are replete with critiques of promise-breaking political leaders, bureaucrats
and administrators. BICSa’s identification of these national leaders and civil
servants as ‘hypocritical’ Muslims suggests a solution: the production of
Muslims who are truly different, who do not only claim to be Muslims
and perform the canonical prayers when it suits them, but constantly strive
to enact their belief in Allah and His commandments in every aspect of
their lives. BICSa perceives the failure to do so, the problem of ‘hypocrisy’,
as pervasive of the Muslim world, including the Islamic movement in
Bangladesh and elsewhere.
Hypocrisy (Monafeqi)
Discussion of the assigned verses continued. In response to an explanation
by an activist named Rikta of the first verse of Surah as-Saff—which
declares the greatness of Allah’s powers (‘All that is in the heavens and all
that is on earth extols God’s limitless glory: for He alone is almighty, truly
wise!’) (Asad 1980: 860)—activist Najma asked:
Given how clear Allah’s omniscience and omnipotence are, why

are we so reluctant to submit to every command of Allah? Why
do we want to spend more time sleeping, resting and pursuing
the fleeting pleasures of this life than working for Allah’s cause?
Why do novels interest us more than Islamic literature? We
believe in Allah and in Islam and we know what we must do.Yet
why do we lose enthusiasm along the way? If we were to truly
recognize the might of Allah and understand ourselves as His
slaves, we could never be arrogant, and like every other species in
this universe, we human beings would be able to embrace Allah
and obey His commands in all sincerity.
This speech reflects the increasing concern among Islamic activists that
Islamists today are not as steadfast in their belief or faith (iman) as earlier
generations.
When Nabila prompted others to respond, Nahid volunteered, linking
the problem of a perceived gap between an average Islamic worker’s belief-
knowledge structure and her commitment to action to a general crisis of
belief, where ‘belief ’ is understood to define the nature of one’s relationship
with Allah:
I think our real problem lies at the very source: we have not been
able to develop a truly intimate relationship with Allah. We fear
Allah to some extent, but a higher and truer form of intimacy
grows out of love, and we have not been able to acquire that
level of belief yet. If we could truly love Allah, we should be
able to make any sacrifice necessary to please Him. An Islamic
group like Tabligh Jamaat [a pietist group] is able to cultivate a
closer relationship with Allah by focusing on the basic rituals of
worship. Their only but serious problem is that they deny the
vital importance of Islamizing the state. But we know that a
true Muslim cannot pick and choose from among the various
components of the Qur’an and hadith as they wish, emphasizing
one that suits them and neglecting the other that does not. Our
problem is that our approach becomes too practical and technical
sometimes. We can become so occupied with paperwork and
formalities, which is of course essential to the success of our
movement that we tend to lose sight of the most important thing
of all—our relationship with Allah earning whose pleasure is our
ultimate goal.
This kind of self-critique is often articulated only at higher-level meetings,

such as Qur’anic lesson circles attended by moderately advanced members,
rather than at ‘worker meetings’ for members of the lower, ‘worker’ cadre
level. At a ‘worker meeting’, perceived shortcomings are usually attributed
to one’s vulnerability to the ‘whisperings of Satan’ and to one’s failure to
master the desires of one’s nafs (baser self). This is because junior activists,
generally assumed to be less than devoted to the Islamic movement, must
become habituated to faithful performance of their organizational duties
before the self-critique of excessive busy-ness can be effective. While the
critique of succumbing to nafs is also prevalent among higher-level cadres,
it co-exists with both partial acknowledgement and extensive denial of the
erosive effects on ‘God-fearing’ Muslim personhood of modern pedagogic
techniques, even when used for the good of an Islamic movement. These
techniques are often understood within BICSa as ‘scientific’, that is, as
having some basis in the natural and/or social sciences or simply being
‘logical’ or ‘appropriate to the times’ (jugopojugi).17
17
One such technique is disciplining oneself by maintaining a detailed and precise log of daily activities.
A pedagogical technique is the practice of ‘worker meetings’ where an initiate learns to (1) study
and articulate Qur’anic teachings; (2) obey strategic instructions issued by city-level and/or central
In BICSa’s Islamist ideology, gaps between belief and action and between
verbalization and action are distinguished. Both are discussed through the
lens of Qur’anic references to ‘hypocrisy’ or monafeqi.Thus, the second, third
and fourth verses of Surah as-Saff, as Nahid explained at Nabila’s behest,
state Allah’s displeasure with those who utter words they do not put into
practice and those who claim to do what they do not do:
(2) O you who have attained to faith! Why do you say one thing
and do another? (3) Most loathsome is it in the sight of God that
you say what you do not do! (4) Verily, God loves [only] those
who fight in His cause in [solid] ranks, as though they were a
building firm and compact. (Asad 1980: 860)
Following Mawdudi, Nahid explained these verses as a condemnation

of hypocrisy. Her exegesis is three-stage. She used several hadith to identify as
defining elements of hypocrisy three different kinds of gaps between word
and action: lying; not keeping one’s word; and violating safe-keeping or trust.
BICSa’s focus on hypocrisy serves three purposes. First, it helps
motivate Islamic activists to greater self-surveillance and devotion to Islam
and the Islamic movement. Thus, Mawdudi’s exegesis of Surah Baqarah,
a Qur’anic chapter frequently assigned for study in BICSa, provides a
detailed description of different categories of Muslim hypocrisy, the last
being, in the words of a participant in one lesson circle, ‘characterized by
a lack of sincerity. These people believed in Islam but were not sufficiently
committed to enthusiastically practice its teachings rigorously in every
aspect of life. They were reluctant to rid their lives entirely of past ways
of feeling, thinking and acting.’18 In the course of Qur’anic lesson circles
and other training programmes, BICSa activists’ perceived shortcomings as
Islamic workers, and hence as Muslims, are repeatedly identified both by the
activists themselves and by their superiors as being rooted in this specific
kind of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the weak believer rather than of the
sham believer.
Second, the hypocrisy concept is used to construct boundaries between
Islamic activists and their supporters—‘sincere Muslims’—and Muslims
BICSa authorities who might advise local units that it is time, for example, to organize public events
in celebration of the life of the Prophet Muhammad or that it is time to engage in some intensive
18
Field notes from a Qur’anic lesson on the last (40th) section of Surah Baqarah at a ‘worker meeting,’
10 September 1999.
who do not support the Islamist movement. Muslims who actually oppose
Islamists are understood to suffer from the most basic kind of hypocrisy—
inconsistency between verbal claim and practice. Those Muslims who insist
on a separation of religion from politics, such as activists in the transnational
pietist movement Tabligh Jamaat, are seen in the BICSa paradigm as suffering
from the kind of hypocrisy that the earliest Muslims in Makkah were
allegedly afflicted with: authentic belief paralyzed by fear of persecution.
Third, in keeping with contemporary mainstream Islamic thought,
BICSa subscribes to jihad (struggle or exertion) on two different levels.
The ‘greater’ jihad entails spiritual warfare, battling those passions of the
soul that impede one’s cultivation of piety. The ‘lesser’ jihad entails efforts
(militant and otherwise) to propagate, establish and defend Islam, that is, to
‘strive in the way of God’ ( jihad fi sabilillah) with one’s possessions and life
force, and thus to embrace martyrdom in the process if necessary. While
there is considerable consensus among contemporary Muslim scholars on
the desired centrality of the greater jihad (self-purification) to the life of a
Muslim, there is divergence regarding the lesser jihad (militant exertion).
For many such scholars, the lesser jihad is obligatory ( farz-e ayn) for every
Muslim only in those contexts (e.g., non-Muslim-ruled, non-Muslim
majority societies) where Muslims are prevented from practicing the
essentials of Islam. According to contemporary majority scholarly opinion,
in the case of a Muslim-majority polity, jihad conducted to secure or sustain
the domination of Islam is obligatory ( farz-e kifaya) only for the state or a
dedicated activist minority. Influential Islamists such as Mawdudi or Qutb,
however, consider efforts to secure the domination of Islam a fundamental
religious obligation for every Muslim even in a Muslim-majority society
ruled by Muslims until such time as the state is officially and practically an
Islamic state wholly grounded in Islamic law (shariah). In BICSa ideology,
jihad fi sabilillah therefore is—or should be—integral to the ‘belief ’ or iman
of every Muslim in Bangladesh, where ‘belief ’ is the most fundamental
criterion of Muslimhood. This allows BICSa to identify those Muslims
in Bangladesh and elsewhere who oppose Islamist efforts to transform
society and state not only as hypocrites, but also as Muslims whose iman is
fundamentally deficient or ‘partial’.
In the study circle, Nahid’s treatment of hypocrisy offered not only a
glimpse of the rich repository of Islamic prescriptions concerning even the
most minute aspects of human character and relations but also a critique of
the current political landscape in Bangladesh. ‘Take our political leaders, for
instance’, she said, ‘who make so many promises prior to elections but renege
on them afterward.’ Such critique is a stock element of national discourse,
where political parties constantly charge one another with reneging on
promises. The print media, which operate with remarkable freedom in
Bangladesh, are replete with accusations that the party in power has failed to
deliver on election promises, and it is popularly felt that the nation’s troubles
arise in large part from lying politicians. Nahid drove her point home further
by moving from the national-political level to that of daily social practices,
focusing on the experiences of her peer group, college students:
We tell a classmate that if she would lend us her notes, we

would return her notebook to her within two days, but we
end up returning her notebook a month later. This not only
inconveniences another person but turns us into hypocrites as
well, for a sincere Muslim must never speak carelessly. Once it
is uttered, she is obliged to either keep her word or pay kaffara
(compensation) if she is unable to keep it. Otherwise, she commits
a sin and will be held accountable on the Day of Judgement.
She expanded this critique to include quotidian BICSa practices as

well: ‘Sometimes we tell a donor that we will visit at three pm but we
show up at six instead. We agree on a particular time for an organizational
meeting, but we show up half an hour later.’
Having considered the issue of hypocrisy through the national– political
landscape and the subcultures of college and BICSa, Nahid shifted her
discussion to the historical circumstances to which, according to exegetes
such as Mawdudi, the verses concerned were a response. ‘Some among the
Muslims, despite having expressed much enthusiasm about following the
Prophet into battle whenever necessary, became reluctant once the Battle
of Uhud grew imminent.’ Citing verses from Surah an-Nisaa’ and Surah
Muhammad, she demonstrated Allah’s displeasure with this kind of hypocrisy.
But she did not stop there. Paraphrasing Mawdudi, she went on to
cite the comments of two medieval authors of tafseer (Ibne Abbas and
Ibne Zayed) on the historical context (shaane nuzul) of the verses under
discussion. She ended her discussion of verse 3 by urging BICSa activists to
guard constantly against ‘weakness’ in belief and hence in the performance
of jihad. She reminded her audience of the punishment of social isolation
(shunning) until repentance that was meted out to those who did not want
to fight in the battle of Uhud and asked dramatically, ‘How then shall we
account to Allah for our reluctance to make far smaller sacrifices for His
cause?’
Nahid’s rhetorical strategy accomplished two things. First, though
neither Nahid nor the majority of other BICSa activists are recipients of
traditional religious education, by the technique of mentioning Mawdudi’s
occasional references to classical exegetes, she linked her discussion to
traditional Qur’anic study, thus drawing on the authority that this has
historically enjoyed in public imagination. Second, her stentorian call to
guard against any kind of ‘weakness’ in commitment to jihad reiterates a
widespread intra-organizational critique of the tepid dedication of many
BICSa activists to the present Islamic movement. BICSa’s leaders frequently
lament in the course of informal conversations and training programmes,
including lesson circles, activists’ ‘reluctance to strengthen their belief and
make even the smallest sacrifices for the Islamic movement.’19
At Nabila’s prompting for comments from the group, Nargis posed a
question:
We know and our ‘work procedure’ (kormopodhyoti) book states

that our method of jihad is an eternal (chirantan) one. By this
we mean that the Islamic movement is struggling exactly in the
same manner and spirit in which the struggle to establish Islam
has been waged in every age by the prophets and their followers.
But sometimes we are asked whether the Prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him, conducted his Islamic group exactly in
the same manner in which BICSa conducts itself today. We are
asked whether the prophet had his band of followers fill out
organizational forms or had them record their daily activities so
that he could evaluate those or whether Islamic workers at that
time followed the kind of cadre system we follow today. How
should one respond to such questions?
After allowing a few minutes for others to respond, she answered:
Naturally, the technical strategies (kaushal) for establishing Islam

must change with changing times, but not the basic principles.
19
Field notes from a lesson circle at a ‘training session’ (TS) held on 23 June 2000.
Today we live in an age dominated by science. Hence to be

successful we have adopted scientific techniques for preaching
Islam, training our workers, and solving their problems and
those of the community. But these three principles— preaching,
organization and training, and problem-solving—clearly stated
in our constitution, and practiced by Islamic workers in all
ages, have withstood the test of time. Neither the objective of
establishing Islam nor the fundamental teachings of Islam have
changed. All that has changed and must change with time and
place is how we go about realizing these principles in practice.
But these changes in strategy do not and should not have any
effect on the primary objective, teachings, and intended fruits of
the authentic Islamic movement that has been waged since the
times of the prophets.
The questioner did not seem fully satisfied but did not pursue the
matter further. However, another participant, Shameela, followed up on
this question. Fleshing out a concern that the participant Nargis alluded to
earlier in the form of questions raised by outsiders (especially competing
Islamic activists) regarding BICSa’s movement techniques, and building
on a similar point that the presenter Nahid had hinted at in her remarks
concerning moral shortcomings evident in the daily conduct of some
activists, Shameela commented:
I’ve been observing my roommate Rooma closely over a period

of months. She is a Tabligh activist. It seems to me that she is
able to spend more time performing nafl ibadat (supererogatory
worship) because she need not spend half as much time as we
do on technical matters of organization. Tabligh workers are
therefore more able to focus on nafl ibadat than we. They can
therefore cultivate a more intimate relationship with Allah and
this often shows in the way they conduct themselves in their
daily lives.This, in turn, attracts others towards them. It therefore
seems to me that our style of furthering the cause of Islam
does indeed affect the quality of our belief. Sometimes, it is the
conduct of some of our sisters that causes their neighbors and
relatives to question the authenticity of our methods. Was the
Prophet Muhammad not able to train Muslims only through
preaching and was he not able to draw others towards him by
virtue of the sheer beauty of his character? Also, the organization
requires us to do so many things that sometimes I feel that I am
not learning much of anything at all. Reading just one slim book
on a particular aspect of Islam is not usually satisfactory, and yet,
between schoolwork and required organizational reading we
must rush through so many texts on so many different topics
that it is difficult to master a particular Islamic topic such that
the topic is clear in my own mind. I now feel that I merely have
a vague idea about Islam as a whole but do not have in-depth
knowledge of any of its parts. I also feel that I am neither able
to master Islamic texts properly nor my school texts. It is simply
too much work!
Nabila looked around and smiled. ‘Shameela has made a good point.
What do the others think? Would anybody like to respond?’
Sabiha, another participant, raised her hand and said:
I think if we are sufficiently committed to Islam, we should

be able to adequately perform both nafliyat and organizational
duties including the study of Islamic literature. The life of a
believer is not meant to be easy, it is meant to be a constant
exertion. If we do not strive adequately in this life, how can we
expect to be rewarded in the Hereafter? We must invest more
time and effort in organizing than Tabligh does because our
objective is not to establish Islam partially but fully, on every
level of life, from the personal to the economic to the political.
To do this we must organize and maintain this organization and
this naturally takes a lot of work. In order to attain belief fully,
we cannot live as Muslims only at home and then stop acting or
thinking like Muslims in school or in the Parliament. True belief
encompasses every aspect and every moment of life. Did the
Prophet Muhammad only pray and fast? No, he also preached
and trained, fought battles, forged treaties, and established the
first Islamic society and state in Madina. If we claim to emulate
him, we must strive to live as he lived. He is our primary role
model.
Nabila commended Sabiha for her comment, and went on to add her
own thoughts and to conclude the session:
Indeed, the stronger one’s belief is, the more able one is to work
hard and on different levels. Why? Because belief, organizing,
and discipline go hand in hand, each enhances the other two.

To sustain belief is much more feasible in a group setting than
isolated, on one’s own.Thus the Qur’an and hadith urge Muslims
to stay together and not fight among themselves. This way, when
I slip in my belief, and we all do, my companions can alert me
and help me correct myself. It is therefore crucial to organize and
bind oneself to an Islamic organization. But then it is not possible
to conduct an organization unless its members are disciplined
and diligently abide by and uphold its rules and regulations. This
is why so much of our organizational training revolves around
learning to discipline ourselves. This discipline, in turn, enables
us to use every second at our disposal towards a good deed
performed to please Allah, be it the nafl prayer of tahajjud or
study of the Qur’an or performing a familial duty or reading
Islamic literature. Without discipline, it is impossible to get up
early in the morning for the dawn prayer, especially during the
cold days of winter, or to interrupt one’s daily work to offer the
afternoon prayer or to skip watching a favorite television drama
to read an Islamic book instead, isn’t it? May Allah enable us to
attend satisfactorily and simultaneously to our various duties and
to realize that our primary goal in this world should be to please
Allah and thereby secure salvation in the Hereafter.
The kind of tension evident in these discussions between the practices

of discipline and deliberation characterized most of the lesson circles
I was able to attend in Dhaka. Ideally, these practices enable each other
and are mutually constitutive. Discipline allows for a seamless flow of
discussion which, in turn, further grounds an activist in the realm of self and
organizational discipline. For its part, deliberation is intended to enhance
Islamic discipline by encouraging the surfacing of questions and doubts,
especially the most troubling ones, among advancing activists and thereby
creating an opportunity for these doubts to be dislodged effectively through
the most cogent—‘rational’ or ‘logical’—explanations offered there and then
by leading activists. In practice, however, activists are able to use the space
of deliberation to question the feasibility of the intense, all-encompassing
disciplining BICSa demands of them. Sometimes the supervising activist
or a peer is able to answer a question to the satisfaction of the questioner,
sometimes not.
Conclusion: Double-edged Techniques of

Discipline
The nature of some of the contemporary techniques BICSa uses to craft a
highly disciplined Islamic activist subjectivity morally rooted in orthodox
Islamic ideals is hybrid. It is a combination of traditional ‘virtue cultivation’
and pedagogical techniques with contemporary methods of rationalistic
inquiry, manufacturing consensus and leadership, movement administration
and organization, and panoptical surveillance of both self and other. Despite
the denial prevalent among BICSa activists (especially BICSa’s leading
representatives) this hybridity has unique effects—some intended, others
not—on the kind of subjectivity produced (Huq 2006: 126–87). Although
BICSa officially insists that it merely replicates the manner in which Prophet
Muhammad sought to instruct individual Muslims in piety and to establish
Islam in Arabia, many BICSa activists partially recognize among themselves
that the form of the struggle has shifted significantly with time and place, that
new accommodations have been made. Instead of defending Islam against
idol-worshipping Makkan pagans, for example, BICSa must defend it against
fellow ‘misguided’ and ‘ignorant’ Muslims, against capitalism, consumerism
and a partly ‘Hinduized’ or ‘Indianized’, but primarily ‘Westernized’ and
liberalized–secularized modernity and the latter’s ‘propaganda’ against ‘real’
Islam and observant Muslims. A subterranean recognition of some of these
shifts and of the growing multiplicity in interpretations of Islam, especially
increasing lay access to this diversifying arena of canonical knowledge,
helps prompts the concerns evident in the questions and remarks of BICSa
activists reproduced above, which I heard being articulated in numerous
Qur’anic lessons.20
Intimately interlocked with both past and present, BICSa’s lesson circles
conceptually embody the kind of normatively Islamic yet locally–globally
modernist–revivalist sensibilities that BICSa aims to craft and legitimize.
The questions and comments integral to these study sessions sometimes
reflect the tensions inherent in such a project. The clear encouragement to
questions that characterizes BICSa lesson circles conveys, in part, BICSa
leaders’ acute awareness of the significant contestations to Islamist thought
and praxis, and thus these leaders’ eagerness to dislodge any resulting
‘confusion’ among activists through explanations and clarifications. Activists
20
Notes from field research conducted between 1998 and 2003 among BICSa women in Dhaka.
encounter contestations to their ideology and practices daily in various

domains. One is the domain of the home and family, where parents and
older siblings of activists often question and sometimes aggressively oppose
activists’ views and practices of Islam. Another is the domain of school,
particularly the liberal-secular culture of gender-mixed university campuses
in Bangladesh. On these campuses, BICSa activists are sometimes attacked by
instructors and peers for their beliefs and practices, and where temptations
abound in the forms of a growing sub-culture of gender-mixed socials, and
dormitories equipped with the satellite dish disseminating Hollywood and
Bollywood productions around the clock.
Effecting change simultaneously from below (by effecting individual
transformation) and from the top (by Islamizing the state democratically)
is the envisioned purpose of BICSa’s lesson circles, where relatively
advanced and promising activists are trained to become leaders able to
spearhead BICSa’s movement for change. In casting present times as a
replay of jaheliyat (the spiritually deplorable state that the Islamic tradition
attributes to pre-Islamic Arabia) and Islamists as a besieged minority akin
to the early Muslims of Arabia, these emergent leaders seek to establish
unambiguously—in their own and in their junior fellow activists’ minds
and practices as also in the public imaginary—continuity between BICSa’s
own projects and those of the prophets, especially Prophet Muhammad.
This presents lesson-circle participants with an urgent motive to invest their
physical, emotional and intellectual energies in Islamizing self and polity.
Yet this model does not work seamlessly in practice. This is evident in the
above lesson circle discussions where, for example, we find BICSa activists
such as Shameela suggesting that the vast amount of organizational work
necessary for socio-political reform impedes the enhancement of belief
through self-purification. Such impediment, in the view of such critiquing
activists, engenders hypocrisy in individual activists and ultimately weakens
the movement, particularly its crucial ability to attract potential recruits
through the exemplary daily conduct of individual activists.
As earnestly as BICSa attempts to elide issues of interpretation and
diversity within Islamic traditions, the historical coexistence of different
approaches to Islam in the larger region of South Asia and the intensifying
competition between Islamic groups in contemporary Bangladesh (even
though most are of a conservative-orthodox-revivalist bent) make the issue
of ‘interpretation’ an obvious and contentious one. On college campuses,
BICSa activists’ encounters with liberal-secular student activists, the gradually
growing presence of women affiliated with the more conservative Tabligh

Jamaat, and the latter’s increasing competition with BICSa for recruits all
compel BICSa activists to ask themselves and their superiors a growing
variety of questions such as those concerning the Islamic authenticity and
efficacy of organizational bureaucratic labours evident in the comments
of participants such as Nargis and Shameela. I have therefore sought to
delineate a BICSa lesson circle as a space both of discipline and deliberation,
as a methodical attempt at the inculcation of a totalistic, unambiguous
worldview21 and as an integral habituation (often unintended) to the process
of interrogating this view, to a certain extent.
Ambiguity, in this alternative sphere of schooling, is viewed officially as
detrimental to concerted action.Yet in the course of attempting to remove
uncertainties through questions, comments and clarifications, the better
to enable activists to adhere to the disciplinary requirements of revivalist
Islamic traditions, where the latter makes heavy demands on an activist’s
time and emotional—physical–intellectual resources, further questions and
reflections emerge, some more unsettling for BICSa’s revivalist programme
than others. These questions gain legitimacy precisely through the
deliberative process whereby a particular study group and its moderator/
leader attempt to grapple with them. A study group and its conductor’s
openness to questions—practically any question related to Islam or even to
the existence of God and issues of fate—motivates a participant to strive
to discipline herself into a better Muslim and social activist in conveying
to her the extent of BICSa’s confidence in its beliefs. At the same time,
once questioning is encouraged, it is difficult to completely control what
questions they will ask.
In practice, BICSa’s moral tripod—belief, hypocrisy and struggle—is
thus in a continuous state of wobble. The embodiment of belief, so central
to BICSa’s project of self- and socio-political reform, entails a range of
hardships. These include conflict with non-Islamist cultural values and
practices, the discomforts of strict veiling in a hot and humid climate, the
psychological pressure of relentless hyper-scheduling, and the allurements
of Bollywood and Western culture as conveyed by the satellite dish to
21
The totalistic nature of this particular Islamic worldview is enshrined in one of BICSa’s central and
Mawdudi-derived tenets that Islam is a ‘complete code of life’. The unambiguousness of this ideology
or ‘way of life’ is idealized in the frequent assertion that Islam constitutes a ‘straight’ path and renders
life ‘easy’ (sahaj) and ‘simple’ (saral).
campus lounges and homes. These daily experiences create an obvious

temptation to ‘hypocrisy’ or shirking of the work of the movement. This
kind of hypocrisy, in BICSa’s understanding, in turn undermines correct
belief both directly, by undermining the piety of the activist who slacks or
compromises, and indirectly, by postponing the establishment of authentic
Islam. A reformed Islamic polity, in the BICSa view, is the only environment
in which a truly devout Muslim subjectivity can securely thrive over the
long term.
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12
Cracks in the ‘Mightiest Fortress’
Jamaat-e-Islami’s Changing Discourse on Women
Irfan Ahmad*
The Argument
espite critiques, much of the scholarship on Islamism1 and the ‘woman
D question’ continues to be driven by a modernization paradigm. A
classic example is the assumption that not only Islamist movements but
*
This essay is based on my postdoctoral research on the ‘immanent critique’ of India’s Jamaat-e-Islami.
Funded by a Rubicon fellowship from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, this
project explores facets of the critique of the Jamaat from within as well as from without. Different
versions of this article were presented at Staff Seminar, ISIM, Leiden (September 2006), American
Anthropological Association Conference, San Jose (November 2006), South Asia Seminar, Department
of Anthropology, University of Sussex (December 2006) and Department of Sociology, JNU (September
2007). I am indebted to Dale Eickelman, Martin Van Bruinessen, Annelies Moors, Asef Bayat and Shifra
Kisch for their valuable comments on an earlier version. Filippo and Caroline Osellas’ rich suggestions
and criticisms greatly helped me finalize this article; my deepest thanks to both of them, especially to
Filippo who invited me to present a version of this article at University of Sussex. I am also thankful to
Thijl Sunier for many useful references, and to Julie McBrien for helping with translation of the title.
Errors, if any, are solely mine.
1
By Islamism, I mean a modern movement that reads Islam as a system of life, with a state, based on sharia
(divine laws) as its goal; see Ahmad (2005a: 282–83).
Islam itself stand against women’s equality. Articulated variously under the
flags of Islamic ‘religion’, ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’, it is held that Islam is the
signature cause of women’s plight. From an atheistic framework, Winter
(2001b) argues that Islam and Islamist movements (she conflates them) have
irredeemably chained women. She asks: is Islam not ‘a primary cultural
means of ensuring men’s political domination of women’? (Winter 2001a:
33). Furthermore, she dismisses the idea that Islamist movements (she
describes them as right-wing) have become moderate. Thus, she rejects any
progressive reading of Islam claiming that the Qur’an (like other holy texts)
is inherently ‘oppressive to women’ (ibid.: 12; see also Sahgal and Yuval-Davis
1992). Critical of ‘Islamic feminists’ project of evolving non-patriarchal
readings of sources of Islamic authority (see, e.g., Badran 2002; Mirza 2005;
and Moghadam 2002), Moghissi (1999) too contends that gender equality
is ‘diametrically opposed to the basic principles of Islam’ and that ‘. . . no
amount of twisting. . . can reconcile the Qur’anic injunctions. . . with. .
. gender equality’ (ibid.: 140; also, see Karmi 1996: 79). Likewise, Mojab
(2005: 325) avers that Islamic feminism ‘is a compromise with patriarchy’.
Several assumptions animate such arguments. To begin with, these
writers reify Islam. If, for Winter, Islam is a primary cultural means of women’s
domination, for Karmi masculine rule is fundamental to the Qur’anic view
of society. For Moghissi, gender equality is alien to Islam because Islam has
an essence, basic principles in her words, which clashes with feminism. These
critics also gloss over many forms of mutations which Islamist movements
have historically undergone. More importantly, their arguments are derived
from studying the trajectories of Islamism in largely undemocratic Muslim-
majority countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Iran.
Based on the study of the Indian Jamaat-e-Islami (hereafter Jamaat), I
will make two interlocking arguments. Firstly, drawing on emergent works
on Islamic feminism (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1998; Afary 1997; Ahmed 1986,
1992; Engineer 1998; Fernea 1998; Hassan 1991a, 1991b, 2001; Mernissi
1985, 1993 and Moghadam 2002),2 I will argue that Islam has no essence;
hence a non-patriarchal reading of Islam is plausible. It is my contention
that it is not the Qur’an per se, which legitimates gender hierarchy, but the
person making interpretation thereof and the context in which it is done.
2
Each of these writers may not call herself/himself an Islamic feminist. What, however, is common to
them is an engagement with an anti-patriarchal reading of Islamic traditions. I use the term precisely
in this sense.
Cracks in the ‘Mightiest Fortress’ / 319
Thus, Ubaidullah Sindhi (d. 1944), a theologian of the Deoband, quoted

the Qur’an, sura as-saf 9, to argue for Communist revolution. Abul Ala
Maududi (1903–79), the Jamaat’s founder, quoted the same sura to debunk
Communism and call instead for Allah’s Kingdom (Ahmad 2005a).Without
multiplying examples, I stress that it is wrong to assume that the Qur’an is
predisposed against women. As Zayd (2006: 91) writes, ‘...(T)he Quran is
at the mercy of the ideology of its interpreter. For a communist, the Quran
would thus reveal communism, for a fundamentalist it would be a highly
fundamentalist text, for a feminist it would be a feminist text, and so on’.3
My second argument is that to impose, as Winter does, a blanket label of
‘right-wing’ on all Islamist movements is misleading.4 Such a label simplifies
the complexity of Islamism. In Prophet and the Proletariat, Harman (2002)
argues that Islamism also has a progressive language—now shrill, now mild.
During the first Gulf War, to the anxiety of Saudi Arabia, Islamists in many
countries protested against the invasion of Iraq.5 Harman concludes that
Islamism is ‘a response to the ravages of imperialism’ (ibid.: 6). The label
‘right-wing’ is flawed on another count: Islamist movements lack a uniform
character. The nature of Islamism in Iran is different from that of Egypt
(Bayat 1998). Such differences become certainly substantial in the case of
Islamists of India where Muslims, in 2001, numbered over 130 million.
The distinctiveness of Indian Muslims, however, is not simply due to their
demography. Indian Muslims have been makers of and participants in a polity,
which is a secular democracy for over half a century. This distinctiveness
eludes the Muslim-majority societies of the imagined ‘Islamic heartland’,
the Middle East. For example, while the post-1979 Iranian state forces
women to veil, the Turkish state forbids veiling in public institutions. By
contrast, the Indian state leaves veiling to the volition of its citizens. In
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, imams are required to have a licence from the
state to deliver sermons. India has no such law. I take the Indian state’s
3
I do not wish to be taken as a religious determinist. I believe that Islam is simply one among many
factors shaping Muslim lives (see Abu-Lughod 1998; Ahmed 1983; Ahmed 1992; Jeffery 1979). I stress
religion here because the Jamaat grounds its vision in shari’a.
4
I equally disagree with Halliday’s characterization of the post-Revolution Iranian regime as ‘Islam with
a fascist face’ (in Harman 2002: 9). Brown’s comparison of Islamist parties with the racist parties in
Europe is, to say the least, misplaced. Their respective contexts and genealogies, I submit, are markedly
varied.
5
Interestingly, Habermas justified, though sadly, the war against Iraq in 1991. His justification was based
on the principle of rule of law and its universalism; see Hill and Montag (2000: 7).
stance here as derived from its secular–democratic character. It is due, inter

alia, to this factor that the Jamaat is probably the only Islamist party in the
world to fight for secular democracy. To call it ‘right-wing’ is to miss this
radical mutation.6 A vital facet of the Jamaat’s transformation is its changing
discourse on gender.7 Building on Trouillot’s (1995) Silencing the Past, I will
argue below that the factor catalyzing change was practice both within the
Islamist arena and in the larger world Islamists inhabit. The vehicle of this
changing discourse is Islamic feminism—a concept I will discuss in the
section ‘Conclusion’.
In the first part of this essay, I discuss the Janus-faced character of the
Jamaat’s gender ideology as laid down by its founder, Maududi. Arguably,
he was the first thinker in India to open the door of his organization to
women qua individuals. At the same time, he stipulated the harshest rules for
women. For instance, he argued that if women stepped out of the home they
must be veiled from head to toe. In the second part, I show how Maududi’s
position came to be critiqued by his followers. I discuss criticism on issues
such as veiling, women’s participation in the public domain (including work
and cinema) and questions of eligibility to become head of state and study
in co-educational institutions. In the final part, I account for the factors
behind change. In the section ‘Conclusion’, I discuss what such criticism
of Maududi’s neopatriarchate entails. Does it inaugurate an Islamic feminist
discourse? If so, what is its meaning and form?8
6
I have made this argument more elaborately in my book; see Ahmad (2009).
7
The scholarship on Indian Muslim women has largely focused on reform movements (e.g., Ali 2000;
Devji 1994; Metcalf 1992, 2001; Minault 1983, 1990, 1998 and Robinson 2000), and the controversy
over the right of a particular divorced woman, Shah Bano, to seek maintenance costs from her husband,
‘the Shah Bano case’ (e.g., see Chhachhi 1991; Engineer 1987; Hasan 1994, 1999; Kishwar 1998;
McDonough 2002; Mody 1987 and Pathak and Rajan 1989). Other works deal with veiling, education,
marriage, divorce, mobility and so on (see Ahmed 2003; Hasan and Menon 2004; Lateef 1990; Menon
1981; Ruhela 1990). The ‘Shah Bano’ issue has come to epitomize the ‘Muslim woman question’ in
India. Kumar’s (1993; also, see Forbes 1996) history of Indian women’s movements deals with dynamics
of Hindu society: the sole chapter on Muslim women is thus about the Shah Bano issue. Study of
Islamic movements and their position on the ‘woman question’ is neglected. Exceptions are Metcalf
(1999) on women in the Tablighi Jamaat and Willmer (1996) on women in the Muslim League. To my
knowledge, there is no work on the Jamaat and women.
8
A methodological note is in order here. My data comprise both printed materials and accounts gathered
in my own fieldwork. The sources for the latter are exclusively male Jamaat activists. This article then
deals with the changing discourse of the Jamaat on gender issues as articulated by male activists. To
ensure anonymity of the people I did my fieldwork with, I use pseudo names. However, protecting
anonymity is impossible in the case of those who are known authors and whose publications I cite.
Maududi’s Neopatriarchate
To appreciate the Jamaat’s changing discourse on women, it is crucial to
historicize the movement’s formation.Why did Maududi found the Jamaat?
How did women figure in the Jamaat’s weltanschauung?
After his turn to Islamism in the 1930s, Maududi critiqued both the
Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) and the Muslim League
(hereafter League). He considered Congress to be a Hindu, not a secular,
party (Maududi 1938). As for the League, he found it a replica of the
Congress for both parties believed in a secular state. Since the League had no
agenda for a shari’a state, Maududi declared that the future Pakistan would
be an ‘infidelic state of Muslims’ (Maududi 1942: 109). In 1941, he founded
Jamaat-e-Islami and called for an ‘Islamic State’. Maududi’s call arose out
of the loss of Muslim power to the British. To undo that loss, he stressed
rehabilitation of a pure, uncontaminated Islam. To Maududi, a reigning sign
of Islam’s contamination was the ‘moral degradation’ of women. His treatise
Purdah (‘The Veil’) argued that women’s freedom had led to the decline of
many a nation (Maududi 1953).9 Praising the Greek nation, he lamented
its latter degeneration caused when women began to participate in the
public domain and hedonism grew pervasive. The ultimate sign of Greece’s
immorality was its worship of Aphrodite, goddess of love (Maududi 1959:
12). The modern West was on the same path of immorality, he observed, as
the Greeks in the past.10
Maududi saw a similar scenario unfolding in colonial India, especially
among westernized Muslims.11 He attacked the League for flouting shari’a’s
limits on women. In his view, there was no difference between the Congress
and the League in their respective stances towards gender issues. Both held
anti-shari’a approach to women. He noted that unveiled women were
9
For Maududi, nation (qaum), not individual, is the analytical unit. He called Greece nation, not a
civilization.
10
Maududi (1959) positions himself between extremes of excessiveness (afraat) and curtailment (tafreet).
While the Greeks exemplified the former, Hindus did the latter. He noted that a Hindu woman was
considered successively a property of her parents, husband, children and forced to commit sati. She had
no right to property or divorce. Similarly, medieval Christianity regarded women as ‘gateway to hell’
(Maududi 1953: 16). A nation may hold both attitudes at different times. Maududi presented Islam as
a system of balance.
11
Ashraf Ali Thanawi (d. 1943), a renowned religious reformer who wrote Bihishti Zewar (see Metcalf
1992), considered Western education so poisonous that he advised Muslims to send their daughters to
brothels rather than marry them to the Western educated men (Thanawi n.d.: 530).
the ‘candles of the party’ in the meetings of the League in the same way
Hindu women were in the meetings of the Congress (in Ahmad 2005a:
70). Maududi (1959: 91) called Muslim men like those in the League ‘true
believers in the religion of the West’. He cited an Urdu story, Repentance,
written by a man.12 In it, a young unmarried girl falls in love with a man.
They end up making love and she gets pregnant. Once pregnant, the fear of
sin haunts her. She asks herself:
Sin? I have committed sin, never. I am not repentant at all. I am

again ready to do that.. . What is chastity? Only virginity? Or
sanctity of thoughts? I am no longer virgin but have I lost my
chastity?... I am not worried whatever harm cruel society wants
to inflict on me. . . . My heart says that I have done right...Why
should I, then, behave as a thief? Why should not I announce it
to the world that I have done this and it is right? (Maududi 1953:
93–94)13
With such quotations, Maududi showed how Muslim men mimicked

‘western culture (firangi tahzeeb)’. He described Western culture as an
‘epidemic’ (Maududi 1959: 201). Like Westerners, such men promoted
values antithetical to shari’a. They encouraged women to step outside of
their ‘natural’ space—home. Maududi singled out women’s visibility in
public arenas—council, bazaar, college, theatre, restaurant, etc.—as the
greatest threat to morality. Art, literature, music, film, dance, use of makeup
by women: all were shrieking signs of immorality (Maududi 1953, 1959).
Though men embraced the ‘epidemic’ before women did, the embrace of
the latter was lethal for Maududi who regarded harem (women) as the last
shelter wherein Islam preserved its culture. In his usage, harem means both
women and space; segregated, and guarded. Stressing its spatial import, he
wrote:‘Harem is indeed the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture, built so that
Islam could seek shelter there if it was ever defeated’ (Maududi 1959: 201).
He lamented that even this fortress was no longer safe from the epidemic.
Maududi’s almost paranoid endeavours to protect the fortress resonate
with those of wider Islamic reform movements (see Devji 1994; Metcalf
1992). Indeed, as Chatterjee (1993) notes, Hindu reform movements too
12
On women’s depiction in pulp Urdu fiction of Pakistan, see the elegant article by Ali (2004).
13
Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from Urdu into English are mine.
paraded the logic of protecting the inner domain (women) from the external
intrusion of ‘the West’. Given the invasion of harem by westernization,
Maududi (1953) devoted two-thirds of The Veil to outlining mechanisms for
safeguarding the fortress of Islamic culture. Before I come to the specifics
of his mechanisms, let me outline the general principles. The origin of
the universe and its purpose are the axioms of Maududi’s ideology. As the
creator of the universe, Allah made humans, like other creations, in a pair.
He endowed each pair with ‘natural sexual attraction’. But unlike other
creations, which possess limited attraction (solely to perpetuate themselves),
humans have an unlimited capacity of attraction. Humans’ goal is neither
simple self-perpetuation nor pursuit of pleasure. Maududi (1977: 93)
viewed pleasure-oriented sex as subversion of the divine, condemning
contraceptives and birth control and likening the latter with suicide. Allah
or what Maududi called ‘nature ( fitrat)’14 wanted humans to fashion a ‘pious
civilization’ (Maududi 1953: 109). The foundation of that civilization is the
heterosexual family. To sustain the family beyond sheer functionality, nature
had instilled in women the merits of beauty, sacrifice and shame, to attract
men. As Maududi saw it, the plan of nature was to fashion a moral order
free from chaos ( fitna/fasad). He presented this as a balanced path between
the sexual anarchy of modern West and the women-degrading stances of
medieval Christianity and Hinduism (see note 10).
The position of woman is central to this pious civilization. Quoting the
Qur’anic verse Sura an-nisa 6, Maududi argued that Allah made men rulers
(qauaam) over women. A man has thus authority to rule over his children
and wife. He invoked a hadith, Prophet’s saying, to state that anyone who
disturbed such ordering of the family would not be dear to the Prophet
(Maududi 1953: 176–78). To maintain the ordering of the family, Allah also
divided spheres of work for men and women. Provision of livelihood for a
woman was the job of her husband and the ‘natural domain’ for a woman
was the home. She was, therefore, not allowed to travel unless accompanied
by a mahram, a man forbidden in marriage, e.g., brother or father (antonym:
ghair mahram). In the case of dire needs she might go out; however, this was
an exceptional concession.
14
This trope of ‘nature’ as synonymous with ‘reason’ has been central to Islamic modernists; see Majeed
(1998).
Behind Maududi’s insistence on woman’s confinement to the home

lay the belief that her entry into the public domain caused immorality such
as that which, he believed, had led to the fall of a once-mighty power like
Greece. He saw woman’s body as a source of fitna and destructive of nature’s
wish for a pious civilization. Outside of her home and in the presence
of ghair-mahram, the sight of an unveiled woman is a visual sin inevitably
inciting sexual storm in men, which in turn prefaces the ultimate sin—
copulation.15 To one refusing such Newtonian causality, Maududi asked if
he will also deny that ‘the lava beneath the smoke of the volcano on the
mountain is not restless to come out’ (ibid: 234). Since there was a sinister
volcanic power in the female body that body was a threat to the pious
civilization. Precisely for this reason Allah, Maududi argued, contained the
volcano by limiting women to the home. According to him, Islam at most
allowed a woman to unveil only her face and palms. Even in the presence
of mahram in the home, she was obliged to observe this norm. A pious
woman in the era of the Prophet, Maududi noted, covered herself from
head to toe by wearing neqab. She also wore gloves to hide her palms.
Further, a woman’s voice, gait, smell, not to speak of gaze, was all fitna. He
also described photographs and drawn images of living beings as haram. ‘All
pictures. . .’, he wrote, ‘will remain haram’ (Maududi 1999a: 125). He made
no difference between a woman and her photograph for the consequence
of both was chaos (Maududi 1999b: 52). Music (ibid.: 135) and films were
likewise illegitimate (Maududi 1963: 438). Obviously, there was no question
of a woman acting in a film.
Legitimizing separation, Maududi called co-education ‘poison’
‘Howsoever acceptable gender-mixed education may be to non-Muslims,
from the Islamic viewpoint it is destructive....’ (in A.A. Islahi 1997: 108).
Like the reformists Nazir Ahmad and Ashraf Ali Thanawi before him,
Maududi noted the need for women’s education. But he considered only
that education legitimate which made her a perfect mother and housewife.
15
Maududi’s position should not be taken as a case of Islamic/Indian difference vis-à-vis the West, a
position that informs the writings, inter alia, of Subaltern Studies. St. Augustine’s view debases this
mystique of difference. He believed that women should not enter the public domain as ‘they cause
erections even in holy men’ (in Hassan 2001: 68, note 3). Thus, in the wake of the 1995 United
Nations Women Conference, conservative Christians from ‘the West’ and Muslims from ‘the East’
formed a coalition, led by John Paul II, against women’s rights; see Bayes and Tohidi (2001: 1–5). The
thesis of difference, however, continues. Articulated in a complex philosophical format, this discourse
of difference or authenticity crucially informs Mahmood’s (2005) work.
Only exceptionally bright women could study other non-domestic sciences,

provided they didn’t transgress shari’a. Maududi regarded women inferior to
men. He thought it, ‘impossible that even a single person of the stature of
Aristotle, Avicenna, Kant, Hegel...would be born in the fair sex’ (Maududi
1953: 148). The reason was biological: nature had made woman suitable for
nurturing and domesticity, not for intellectual pursuits. Like patriarchs in
other religions, he offered, inter alia, menstruation and pregnancy as reasons
for the domesticity of woman (ibid.: 138–50).16
Maududi didn’t allow any political role to women. Like theologians
before him, he believed that it would spell disaster if woman became a ruler.
He quoted a hadith in which the Prophet said: ‘A nation which handed over
its affairs [of state] to a woman would never prosper’. The issue of ‘head of
state’ aside, Maududi didn’t allow a woman even to vote in elections. When
asked why Islam forbade a woman to vote, he justified it as follows: ‘The
present-day assemblies... control the whole of national politics. As such their
status is... that of a qauaam [ruler] over the whole republic.... In sura an-nisa...
Allah clearly assigns the status of qauaam to men’. Pre-empting the objection
that the said verse dealt with the domestic domain, he went on to argue that
if Allah did not make a woman ruler inside the home how could He allow
her to rule a republic, ‘a collection of millions of homes’? (in Azmi 1999:
206) To strengthen his point, he quoted the Qur’anic verse Ihzaab 4, to say
that Allah commanded women to remain in the home. Rejecting the view
that Allah’s command was specific to Muhammad’s family and did not apply
to common women, he asked, ‘Does Allah want to see each Muslim home
other than the Prophet’s steeped in indecency?’ (in Nomani 1998: 113).
From the above outline, one might say that Maududi’s gender ideology
was a plain replay of patriarchy. Such a view is simplistic. Following Shirabi,
I will instead call it ‘neopatriarchy’, a reworked version of traditional
patriarchate in a modern context (in Kazemi 2000: 455). And precisely
because of the radically new context of its articulation, what appears as a
re-assertion of patriarchy and tradition is indeed a subversion of tradition.
Below, I show how Maududi used Islam to at once subvert and invent
tradition.
16
To validate such claims, Maududi quoted many Western sources, often without their full details.
Some of them are Weinberg, Dr Reprev, Dr Voice Chevsky and Lapinsky’s book, The Development of
Personality in Women, pp. 142–43.
It was in the early twentieth century that Muslim women began

participating in modern politics (Jalal 1991; McDonough 2002). They held
their first conference in 1915. Bi Ammi, mother of the Ali brothers, was one
of the first women to address a public meeting in 1917.Women’s participation
intensified with the League’s demand for Pakistan17 (Jalal 1991; Willmer
1996). The rationale for their participation, however, stemmed more from
secular than theological sources. Organizations like the Jamiatul Ulema-e-
Hind (see Dastoor-e-asaasi n.d.) and the Tablighi Jamaat, which based their
agenda on Islam, had no provision for recruiting women. The Jamaat was
the first to grant membership to women qua individuals and on the basis
of the Quran and hadith. Stipulating membership criteria, the Jamaat stated
that any person, ‘whether a man or woman’, could become its member if
s/he agreed to work for its goal (‘Dastoor-e-Jamaat-e-Islami’ 1942: 177).
The membership of women was clearly an invention of tradition since the
very idea of a party like the Jamaat was foreign to premodern polity (Tilly
1984), as was the notion of a constitution. Social movements are themselves
‘an invention of the modern age’ (Tarrow 1998: 2). It is in this sense that the
politics of Razia Sultana, a female ruler in the Sultanate period, belongs to a
different catalogue. It was not only membership which set the Jamaat apart
from the rest. The role it assigned to women was a departure of sort from
tradition. The Jamaat’s Constitution obligated women members to preach
its ideology to their families. It urged them to ‘disobey the commands of
their husbands and guardians if such commands were sins against Allah. ..’
(‘Dastoor-e-Jamaat-e-Islami’ 1942: 183).18 Clearly, this call to disobey
husbands went against tradition obliging women to obey.
Islamic Critique of Maududi’s Islam

The innovation of allowing membership to women notwithstanding, the
Jamaat’s Constitution obligated them to observe shari’a and it was this aspect
of its ideology which became dominant. After Partition, Maududi himself
left for Pakistan. The Indian Jamaat, however, faithfully followed its founder,
including his neopatriarchal prescriptions. Like Communists, the Jamaat
17
A number of Muslim women were active in the Communist movement. Since Islam was not their
master frame, I do not focus on them. For a biographical account of a female Communist, see Daudi
(2001).
18
It is hard to gauge the extent to which the granting of membership impacted on women. In any case,
in early 1947 their number was only four, all being wives (Maududi’s included) of male members. The
women held a separate meeting at the Jamaat’s headquarters in Pathankot (Ali 1988: 231).
initially believed that Islamic revolution was imminent in India. In 1951, its
organ, Zindegi, wrote what would happen if ‘God-worshippers [the Jamaat]’
came to rule. Depicting the horrors India would face if Communists
captured the state, Zindegi listed several benefits if the Jamaat did. One basic
merit, Zindegi wrote, would be that the gender mixing would become a
‘serious crime’ and ‘women will remain women and men will men’ (in
Ahmad 2005a: 278). Zindegi urged women to accept that there was a ‘clear
difference in the physical, mental makeup of men and women which can’t
be eliminated’ (Zindegi, May 1961: 54). In 1964, Zindegi reproduced each of
Maududi’s neopatriarchal arguments (Zindegi, August 1964: 20–32). Further,
the Jamaat resolved to fight dance, music, obscenity and birth control
(Jamaat-e-Islami Hind 1964: 10). As late as 1980, it forbade wearing lipstick
outside the home (Zindegi, September 1980: 48). Officially, the Jamaat
continued to stick to Maududi. But from the 1980s onwards, dissenting
voices began to emerge from within. In the 1990s, they grew stronger to
form a new critical language we can label Islamic feminism (see the section
‘Conclusion’). Below I will discuss its forms of reasoning as it appears both
within the Jamaat and its student wing, Student Islamic Organization (SIO).
I will also discuss one heated debate on veiling in Zindegi-e-nau.19
Halfway through my fieldwork, a critic of the Jamaat advised me to
meet Akram Zurti. Aged 80 or so, Zurti had retired as a reader from Aligarh
Muslim University (henceforth AMU). He had heard Maududi deliver, in
1940, a speech at AMU.This speech transformed Zurti into a Jamaat member.
Around the mid-1960s, however, he resigned. As a student of Chemistry,
he could not endorse Maududi’s rejection of Darwin. He instead believed
that the Qur’an supported evolutionism. More importantly, in Zurti’s view,
the Qur’an was a book of ethics (ikhlaq) and justice (adl) for the entire
humanity, regardless of religious divides.The Jamaat had, by contrast, turned
it into a book for ‘Muslims’ as an ethnic group. Thus, Zurti lamented, in
the early 1960s when communal riots broke out in India, the Jamaat sided
with Muslim victims even if they were rapists, liars, hypocrites and cruel.
To Zurti, this stance of the Jamaat was un-Islamic: rather than speaking for
humanity it defended Muslims as an ethnic group. By backing the Urdu-
speaking West Pakistan against the Bengali-speaking East Pakistan in the
19
Since inception in 1948, Zindegi was published from Rampur, the second headquarters of the Jamaat
after Malihabad. When the headquarters shifted to Delhi, its name was changed to Zindegi-e-nau.
1971 War, in Zurti’s narrative, the Pakistani Jamaat further degenerated,

coming to equate Islam with one language.
By ethics, Zurti meant what was morally good: love, kindness and care
for the poor. So pivotal is ethics to the Qur’an that it calls prayer ‘fraud’
if a prayer-doer disregards compassion. Zurti cited Sura al-maoon where
Allah chides worshippers who are unkind to their fellows. For Zurti, the
Qur’an is also a call for action, at the heart of which lies the obligation to
command maruf and forbid munkar. The words maruf and munkar are taken
to mean ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.20 In Zurti’s reading, these terms had different
meanings. For a thing to qualify as maruf, it should (a) be popular (maruf),
acceptable (maqbool); (b) it should accord with Allah’s feature (sifat): justice
and compassion and (c) it should stand to reason. Further, Zurti stressed that
since Islam was dynamic, with societal change the notion of maruf would
also change. He defined munkar as the ‘other’ of maruf. As he considered
Islam a religion for humanity, maruf was beyond religious borders. He held
that in the modern West several ideas of maruf had developed: human rights,
democracy, freedom and women’s equality. So had ideas of munkar: slavery
and colonial loot, for instance. According to Zurti, it was Muslims’ duty
to embrace maruf and shun munkar. He argued that not only did women
have the right to vote in elections but that they could also become Prime
Ministers. Against Maududi, he didn’t consider women to be intellectually
inferior. Arundhati Roy, he said, is brighter than many men. He lamented
that Muslims had not produced a Roy (whose lecture at AMU in early
2004 was a big event). In Zurti’s view, women were also entitled to equal
shares in property. Today, he continued, women’s education, including in
co-educational institutions, and their participation in the public domain
were maruf. In India, they could also uncover their head and wear a half-
sleeve blouse, as both were maruf. Rejecting popular practices of the age, he
warned, would run against the Qur’anic call to command maruf.
Clearly, Zurti departed radically from Maududi. In Zurti’s account,
Maududi confined women to the home because he took an ethnic, not a
universalist, approach to Islam. Had Maududi’s approach been universal, he
would have welcomed Western maruf about women. According to Zurti,
Maududi also ignored justice—a feature (sifat) of Allah. As Allah desires
20
Cook’s (2000) work is probably the best example of the conventional interpretation of maruf and
munkar.
justice, he contended, how could He deny the right to vote or run a state
to women? Maududi, despite his questioning of many theological positions,
remained a muqallid (an imitator). In Zurti’s view, Maududi had the potential
to be a mujaddid (renewer) but ended up defending patriarchy. He called
Maududi’s commentary on the Qur’an, Tafhimul Qur’an, as a piece of ‘sheer
ignorance (niri jahiliat)’. He lamented that none—from Ibn-e-Tamiya (d.
1328) to Maududi—understood the Qur’an because commentators had
thus far interpreted it through the hazy lenses of mostly distorted hadith
and medieval jurisprudence. The sole authentic book was the Qur’an, the
writing of whose commentary, in its own terms, was his mission.
When I asked him if he had published his thoughts, Zurti sadly told
me that owing to his advanced age he could not write any more.Whenever
ideas came to him, he recorded them in cassettes. He had employed a Ph.D.
student to transcribe and read them out for further reflections. He was
hopeful that one day his views would appear in print. In one of the several
sessions I had with him, he urged me also to meet Sultan Ahmad Islahi to
whom he often referred.
In the Islamist arena, Islahi was a contested figure. Some admired him
for his novelty; others attacked him for diluting the Jamaat’s ideology. To his
detractors, he was moody, provocative. He critiqued Maududi, they alleged,
to equal himself to Maududi’s stature. He was also considered ‘obscene’, for
in one book (see below) he freely discussed the subject of sex. Born in 1951,
Islahi was educated at Madrasatul Islah (in Azamgarh), a seminary initially
receptive to Maududi. In 1974, he joined Aligarh’s Idara Tahqiq-wo-tasneef,
a Jamaat research institute. He has remained with it since then. Islahi also
held key leadership roles in the Jamaat. He was, however, foremost a writer.
He has authored 20 books. Among other issues, it was his unusual view on
women that was a point of debate, especially among the young Islamists.
Bemoaning deviation from Maududi’s ideology, one Jamaat hard-
liner told me how people like Islahi were responsible for it. In this critic’s
opinion, Islahi justified unveiling, dancing and singing. This critic asked me,
rather angrily, what people would think of the Jamaat when Islahi’s own
daughter went to study at Abdullah Girl’s College of AMU in a half-sleeve
qamiz and with her head uncovered—nangi (naked) he called her. Such was
the hostility towards Islahi. In such allegations, however, Islahi saw the play
of manly power rather than concern about Islam. Men’s obsession with
women’s veiling, he argued, ignored the fact that Islam also had codes about
men. The Prophet forbade a handsome man to roam unnecessarily in the

streets. None of the ulema (theologians), however, ever cited this hadith to
issue a fatwa against men. The wearing of tight jeans, which show the crest
and trough of a man’s body and hamper the ritual of prayer, is likewise
un-Islamic. But ulema do not prohibit it as they fear the wrath of men.
They, however, always focus on female dressing because women are easy
targets. In Islahi’s opinion, his critics misconstrued the nature of Islam. It
is ‘a soft (narm), flexible (lachakdar) religion’. Excluding the categorically
forbidden, he held that shari’a was flexible enough to swim with the age and
women’s issues were no exception. Islahi told me that his critics also didn’t
understand the principles of shari’a. The early jurists (foqha) did not reject
maruf—by which he meant local culture. If a maruf didn’t directly clash with
Islam, most jurists accepted it. Thus, in Africa, they not only sanctioned
dance and music but some of them also took part.
To fully comprehend Islahi’s argument, let me turn to his 43-page article
(S.A. Islahi 1997) in a journal from AMU. Given Islahi’s unorthodox position,
the editor put a disclaimer that the he didn’t agree with all the arguments.
Titled ‘Modern Media and Islam’ and laced with over 90 references (mostly
Arabic), the article was written with the realization that despite attempts at
reform media could not be purified of songs, women’s voice and images
and that these were indispensable to life. Islahi’s objective, then, was to find a
rationale for women to participate in these arenas, notably films. The maxim
of Islahi’s analysis was: Islam is a soft, flexible and natural religion, fitri deen.
He used fitrat differently from Maududi. While the former used it to limit
women to the home, Islahi used it to pave the way for their participation
outside home. Again against Maududi, he did not consider veiling (neqab)
Islamic. Citing works by Imam Hanifa and others, Islahi argued that Islam
permits woman to unveil her face, hands, arms and feet. She could also
work outside the home: indeed, such was the case in Islam’s early era. The
daughter of Caliph Abu Bakar, Asma, worked in the field nine miles away
from Medina. She collected fodder for animals and carried them on her
head. If Asma worked outside of the home, Islahi argued, today women can
certainly work in fields, offices and schools. The veil, for him, was more a
status symbol of elite Muslims, shorfa, than a tenet of shari’a. Islahi’s specific
aim, as stated, was to explore whether a woman may also act, dance and sing
in films (ibid.: 67–68).
According to Islahi, a woman can certainly act in films.To argue this, he
invoked canonical texts not discussed here for lack of space. I will focus on
his conclusions and argumenation. To argue for woman’s acting, Islahi first
proposed that her co-actors be mahram; preferably, her husband. However,
since shooting never happened in seclusion, in the presence of mahram
she could also act with ghair mahram. The setting of shooting was such that
chances of romance were non-existent. The next question, to Islahi, was
the extent to which she could show her body. She could show her face,
palms, hands, arms and feet as shari’a allowed it. The question was whether
she could reveal her other parts. In Islahi’s view, she could on the following
ground: Islam makes a distinction between ‘slaves’ and ‘free women’ and had
different provisions of satr for both. Satr means the part of body which must
not be revealed. Though a man’s satr is generally from navel to knee, Imam
Hanifa didn’t include the navel. In the eyes of shari’a, the satr for all men
and for female slaves was the same, except that for the latter it also included
the back and the belly. Stating that while he had no wish to revive slavery,
if a free woman wanted to use the provision of a slave and thus show other
parts of her body, Islahi argued that it wouldn’t be un-Islamic. She could
even touch a believing man. In a country like India, if such a provision was
denied to her, Islahi feared, she might leave Islam itself. Allowing her to
show parts of body a slave was entitled to show, he mused, was a lesser evil
than apostasy. Islahi argued that women could also sing, as the Qur’an did
not forbid music and singing. He did not regard, as Maududi did, woman’s
voice as fitna. If necessary, women could also dance in films. Pre-empting his
critics, Islahi went on to argue that if a hadith on music and singing was taken
literally, then a Muslim should become a renouncer because the Prophet
once described the world as a curse, laanat (ibid: 68–73, 80).
Like this paper, Islahi’s book (2000), Sex in Islam, also departed radically
from Maududi’s ideology. The book covers a variety of issues. I will deal
with just some themes. As you will recall, for Maududi, sex for pleasure was
illegitimate. Sex’s only intent was to procreate, in order to fashion a pious
civilization. Islahi (2000: 240–47), by contrast, argued that pleasure in itself
was equally Islamic. Unlike Maududi, he also saw no problem in using
contraceptive. For Islahi, the issue was not legitimacy but the terms of usage.
If a woman didn’t want pregnancy, her husband could not force her. If he did,
Islahi argued, she could take him to court (ibid.: 309–10). The book in fact
teaches how to use contraceptives so as to maximize pleasure and minimize
risk. It also critiqued masculinity. As an example, Islahi cites the attitude
of husbands during the first night when, to prove their ‘manliness’ and
subdue their wives, they indulge in repeated intercourse. Such an attitude,
Islahi argues, is un-Islamic (ibid.: 204–05). He also approvingly discusses

the practice of honeymoon. But what was especially taken as obscene was
the graphic detail with which he spelt out Islamically legitimate modes
of intercourse, called by him ‘Islamic positions (aasan)’ (ibid: 221). The
Sanskrit text on sex (kok shastra) mentions 84 aasan of intercourse. Based
on experiences with his clients, Keval Dhar, a sexologist, argues that only 6
were practical. Islam, Islahi notes, approves 11 aasans.
The young activists of SIO also questioned Maududi’s neopatriarchate.
Of 28 SIO members at AMU in 2002, Jamal was quite distinctive. His
father was a member of the Jamaat, to which he had converted after a
long association with the Communist party. Jamal had his early education
in a government school that was gender-mixed. On conversion to the
Jamaat, Jamal’s father sent the boy to Jamiatul Falah, the Jamaat madrasa
in Azamgarh, for further study. Jamal did not feel at home at Falah. He
critiqued his teachers and friends for their ‘orthodox’, ‘theocratic’ views. Let
me give one illustration. In class, a teacher argued that the Qur’an said that
women should be subordinated to men. Jamal asked what the rationale was.
The teacher responded that it was ‘woman’s nature’ and that was why they
had always worked within the home. Jamal argued back, saying that there
was nothing such as ‘woman’s nature’ and that if educated, they too could
excel. He asked, what about women such as Razia Sultana, Rani Laksmi Bai
(who fought against the British) and Sarojni Naidu (a leader of the anti-
colonial movement)? Jamal told me that he did not get ‘rational’ answers to
his questions. He was not convinced either about Maududi’s argument that
Islam prohibited a woman to be head of state. Like his brother, also an SIO
activist, he believed that a woman could surely become a head of state. As a
student at Falah, Jamal’s brother had written his final year essay arguing for
why Islam allowed a woman to become Prime Minister.
Such intense debates as Jamal had at Falah are also articulated in the
Jamaat’s organ, Zindegi-e-nau (hereafter ZN). ZN discussed veil, the ultimate
symbol of Islam’s ‘bigotry’. The article by Alkaf (2002), a Jamaat intellectual,
unleashed a fierce debate. Educated at Sanvi Darsgah (Sanvi), a higher
studies institute founded by the Jamaat in 1949, Alkaf was based in Sana.
The Jamaat had established Sanvi for those of its activists who boycotted
modern universities (like AMU) because Maududi had described them as
‘slaughterhouse[s]’ (Maududi 1991: 45). Alkaf ’s article delegitimized veiling
as Islamic. Quoting Sura ihzaab, he argued that Allah’s command to women
to remain in the home was specific to the Prophet’s wives, and not meant for
women in general. Given such a clear Qur’anic order, he wondered why all
interpreters, including Maududi, were ‘adamant on’ turning the specific into
the general (Alkaf 2002: 19). In Alkaf ’s view, there was neither command
for women to be in the home nor veiled (Alkaf 2002: 27–29). Women
were required to cover only their ‘head, neck, chest and nothing else’. He
called veiling an ‘invention of man’ having ‘no place in the divine laws’
(ibid.: 32). Calling for ‘justice’ to women, he stated that it was the ‘anti-
shari’a manliness of men’, and not the Qur’an, which prevented women
from participating in economic activities.
Alkaf ’s article invited strong reactions. From March through June 2002,
ZN carried a dozen responses, mostly negative. The fiercest came from a
Bombay woman, Farzana Tabassum. Describing his argument as a result of
an ‘apologetic mind’ under the influence of ‘mesmerizing and glittering
Western civilization’, she refuted him point by point (Tabassum 2002:
71).21 In so doing, she repeatedly invoked Maududi. In Tabassum’s opinion,
Alkaf ’s attempt was ‘contemptible’ because it went against the ‘categorical
commands of the Qur’an and hadith’ (ibid.: 64). Indeed in Alkaf ’s argument,
she detected a conspiracy.
By producing some ‘intellectuals’ among Muslims and with their

assistance, it is in fact a strategy of the eternal enemy of human
beings that such commands [Allah’s about women] are attributed
only to the wives of the Prophet, and not to common women, so
that the door to spread evil is opened. (ibid.: 57)
The angry responses to Alkaf went beyond the pages of ZN. One aged
Jamaat hardliner told me that Alkaf was not alone in propagating anti-Islamic
ideas. In his view, a top section of the Jamaat leadership, most of which had
either lived or were still living in the West and the Gulf countries, had sold
itself out to the West and the lure of money. Alkaf, he said, belonged to that
section. So did the Aligarh-based ZN editor, who had lived for 11 years in
Saudi Arabia. When I asked this critic how he would explain the views of
Zurti and Islahi who had never lived away from India, he remarked: ‘To be
un-Islamic, one need not live in the West or the Gulf ’.
21
The defence of Maududi’s neopatriarchate by a female Islamist may be called a ‘paradox’. Sahgal and
Yuval-Davis (1992) theorize women’s participation in fundamentalist movements as a paradox. If so,
how do we explain the participation of male Dalits (formerly untouchables) in Brahmanized Hindu
nationalism?
So far, I have discussed some shades of critique levelled against

Maududi’s ideology by Jamaat activists themselves and the ways in which
they offer a new discourse. I showed how Zurti, a former Jamaat member,
critiqued Maududi and offered a new reading of the Qur’an on women’s
issues. I then shifted focus to lay out the theological reasoning of Islahi, an
active Jamaat member. Then, I discussed the critical views of Jamal, a SIO
activist, and concluded by discussing the debate on veiling in Zindegi-e-nau.
In the remainder of this essay, I will discuss the context and factors that went
into questioning Maududi’s neopatriarchate and what such critique means
analytically.
Context of Transformation
Writing about the Haitian revolution, Trouillot argues that it ‘thought
itself out politically and philosophically as it was taking place’, in a context
where ‘discourse always lagged behind practice’ (Trouillot 1995: 89). A
similar process is at work in the case of the Jamaat’s changing discourse.
The dissenting voices I discussed above came to find a place in discourse
because they were already being played out in practice. The levels at which
these practices got staged were multiple. To start with, in the Islamist arena
itself, Maududi’s ideas began not to be strictly adhered to. In the mid-1970s,
Nazar was an Islamist student activist at AMU. Then newly married, he
did not let even his friends see his wife. Under Maududi’s influence, he
believed in the complete veiling of women. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi
banned the Jamaat, several of its leaders in Aligarh were put in prison. One
key leader of the Jamaat, a professor at AMU, was jailed. When Nazar went
to visit the professor in jail, he also saw the latter’s wife. She was without
neqab. Even her scarf (dupatta) was not properly placed. To Nazar’s shock,
she even wore lipstick. Later, Nazar learnt that she did not consider neqab
Islamic. If not wearing neqab is against Islam, she asked, were the unveiled
women studying in AMU not Muslim? In Nazar’s account, the professor
himself didn’t consider the veil Islamic. Let me offer another example of
practice preceding discourse. To Maududi, co-education was ‘destructive’.
However, most postgraduate SIO activists at AMU have studied alongside
women. In Jamal’s class of Communicative English, comprising 21 students,
nine were women and only two of them wore the veil. Jamal didn’t consider
studying with women un-Islamic: indeed he even talked to and spent time
with them. Let me here mention the shift in Jamaat’s stance on AMU itself.
Earlier, I noted that in the 1940s the Jamaat forbade its members to study
at AMU because it was a ‘slaughterhouse’. On the doctrine of necessity, in
the 1950s it allowed some students to study. Soon, their numbers began
to increase. Much to Jamaat’s chagrin, these students didn’t find AMU
to be a slaughterhouse. Due, inter alia, to pressure from AMU-educated
sympathizers and members, in the 1960s the Jamaat stopped calling AMU
a ‘slaughterhouse’.
Practices within the Islamist arena have also been intimately linked into
a much broader context. This context includes notable changes in Muslim
society and Indian socio-political formations at large.The process of change
began in the 1970s, an important decade for the women’s movement in
India. Considered as the decade of ‘reawakening’, the 1970s saw massive
mobilizations by women throughout India. The ‘reawakening’ was clearly
influenced by international developments, the women’s movements of
the 1960s in the West being crucial. The relative lull of the 1950s–1960s
gave way to a heightened feminist consciousness in the 1970s (Calman
1989; Mazumdar and Agnihotri 1999; Patel 1988). How could Muslim
society remain untouched by such a monumental wind of change? Change
certainly registered itself on the landscape of AMU. Prior to 1947, veiled
women came in palanquins to attend classes. During the 1950s, classrooms
at postgraduate levels were partitioned with a curtain to separate boys from
girls (undergraduate classes were held separately, as they are still today). The
1970s saw the withering away of postgraduate gender segregation. Delhi’s
Jamia Millia Islamia, another important university for north Indian Muslims,
did not lag behind, and the number of Muslim women attending AMU and
Jamia Millia continued to increase. Women’s visibility was not limited to
universities. Many women achieved success in politics and even became
cabinet ministers. As a prime time national TV newsreader, Selma Sultana
became a household name in the 1980s (Shaheen 1990).
The visibility of women in the public domain, especially in the new
professions, was closely connected to urban class formation. Owing to a
maze of factors, with the post-colonial developmental state as an important
agent, the size of the middle class had expanded from the 1970s. In the 1930s,
there had been no more than a dozen Muslim women with matriculation
degrees in Bihar (Daudi 2001). By the 1970s, their number had dramatically
risen and there were a considerable number of women going to universities.
Writing about the position of the Tunisian Islamist party, Mouvement de
la Tendance Islamiste (Movement of the Islamic Trend, MTI), Mahmoud
(1996) links the loosening of its rigidity in gender to the aspirations of

this nascent middle class, MTI’s main constituency. A similar link can be
observed in the Jamaat. In The Veil, Maududi ruthlessly critiqued the middle
class and its revolt against Islam as manifest in women’s freedom. From the
1970s on, the Jamaat began to address itself to a segment of this very middle
class, or those aspiring towards the middle class status. In Sex in Islam, Islahi
discussed the practice of ‘honeymoon’ and concluded that Islam allowed
it: in fact, he called it ‘desirable’. I noted that he also discussed the relative
benefits of different contraceptives: condoms, pills and copper T, and while
discussing this, he also informed readers about their prices. Clearly, such
desires and needs are hardly those of the Indian working classes. One telling
index of Islahi’s (as well as Alkaf ’s) assumed middle class audience was the
assumption of a desire for privacy. As Islahi told me, he considered the joint
family harmful for it denied privacy to its members.
The transnational ties of one segment of the Jamaat’s leadership were
another significant factor. Elsewhere, I have dealt with the ways in which this
segment influenced Jamaat’s shift in favour of secular democracy (Ahmad
2005b). Here I will dwell on the views of such leaders on ‘the woman
question’. During the 1970s, some influential Jamaat leaders from Aligarh
went to work in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries and the United States. They
also visited Britain, France and many Muslim-majority countries. The views
of these leaders carried weight, as most of them were university teachers and
members of the Jamaat’s shoora, an executive committee similar to the politburo
of the Communist parties. One such member, Nejatullah Siddiqi lamented
that the Jamaat kept an eerie silence about women’s role in public life. Calling
for women’s involvement in political processes, he pleaded for a rethinking
of the Jamaat’s position on women (Siddiqi 2000: 416–18, 2003: 99; also, see
Siddiqi 1995). In this rethinking, he urged the participation of women who
were equally well versed in modern and Islamic education. If there were no
such women, he proposed, steps should be taken to produce them. Siddiqi was
not alone in his call for a rethinking. The editor of ZN also believed that the
Jamaat needed to recast itself in accordance with new challenges, particularly
those relating to women. Without naming Maududi, he told me that ulema
were wrong in equating the Indian custom of purdah with Islam.Views such
as those of Siddiqi and ZN editor were to an extent also a part of the wider
change in the discourses of Islamist movements worldwide. In the course
of my telephonic interviews with him, Siddiqi often favourably mentioned
Tunisia’s Rashid Ghannoushi and urged me to read his works. As Esposito
and Voll (2001: 91–117) observe, Ghannoushi was one of the first Islamists to
argue for women’s participation in political processes.
To a certain extent, Maududi’s death in 1979 paved the way for a
thorough critique of his ideology. Though the Indian Jamaat had stopped
heeding him already when still alive,22 his death left no room for Jamaat
hardliners to consult their ultimate authority, Maududi.
Conclusion
Analytically, what does the critique of Maududi’s neopatriarcate by
his followers mean? For lack of a better term, I submit that it gestures
a move towards an Islamic feminist discourse. The question is: what is
Islamic Feminism? This is not a clearly defined term (e.g., in Badran 2002;
Mirza 2005 and Moghadam 2002). On the basis of my material, let me
first clarify what it is not. It is not the militant streak of Western feminism
which believes, for example, in the nullification of marriage. Neither is it
a denunciation of holy texts. For all Jamaat activists, including Maududi’s
critics, Islam remains the frame of reference, and none, for example, held
relationships outside marriage as legitimate. Likewise, family—the prime
institution of patriarchy in the Marxist analysis—remains important to
them. I use Islamic feminism, then, as shorthand to capture a transformative
current in the Islamist movement on ‘the woman question’. Central to this
current is a serious engagement with Islamic traditions—the Qur’an and
hadith in particular—to question the neoptariarchate such as is represented
by Maududi. As compelling works by Leila Ahmed, Riffat Hassan, Engineer,
Mernissi and others (see the section ‘The Argument’) show, there exists a
strong possibility for an anti-patriarchal, egalitarian reading of Islam in its
full complexity and diversity. Positively speaking, Islamic feminism seeks to
secure, in the words of Iranian writer, Nayereh Tohidi, an ‘egalitarian ethics
of Islam’ (in Moghadam 2002: 1147) whose content and nature, however,
is not clearly spelt out. Both as a phenomenon and analytical field, it is in
the making.
In this essay, I have focused on the ways in which Indian Islamists have
called into question three core tenets of Maududi’s neopatriarchate. First,
22
In January 1974, Maududi had strongly advised the Indian Jamaat not to take part in the elections.
Unmindful of this, the Jamaat participated in the Assembly elections of 1977; see Ahmad (2005b:
288–89).
for Maududi, home was the natural place for a woman. She was therefore
forbidden to step out unless there was dire need. And if she stepped out,
Maududi obligated her to veil from head to toe. It was also for this reason
that he described co-education as destructive. Second, since he considered
man to be the ruler over woman, he did not allow women even to vote in
elections, leave alone assume a key political role. Third, Maududi regarded
woman as naturally inferior to men. All these three core elements of
Maududi’s ideology derived their legitimacy from a particular reading of
the Qur’an and hadith. For a long time, Maududi’s ideology reigned in
Jamaat as the sole authentic version of Islam. But from the 1970s on, the
Jamaat activists began to question it. I showed how in different ways Zurti,
Islahi, Jamal and Alkaf critiqued Maududi and arrived at alternative readings.
According to their readings, the home ceased to be the natural place for
woman. And Islam did not prevent women from working outside or
participating in the public domain, including even films. Indeed, Maududi’s
critics call for women’s participation in every domain. According to them,
not only does a woman have the right to vote but she can even become
Prime Minister. The argument that women are intellectually inferior to
men has lost validity.
Alternative readings of the Qur’an such as those indicated in the
theological debates on veiling in Zindegi-e-nau or in Zurti’s and Islahi’s
employment of maruf to encompass the ‘popular’ practices call into question
the assumption—central to both Winter and Moghissi—that Islam or
the Qur’an has a patriarchal ‘essence’ and that no other interpretation is
possible. Theological debates on veiling, woman’s right to vote, and their
participation in the public domain indeed show how the Qur’an can be
open to multiple interpretations. Thus, the Qur’an can also be put to use,
against Winter’s atheistic proposition, for a discourse favourable to women.
From this perspective, Islamic feminism is not necessarily, as Mojab avers,
‘a compromise with patriarchy’. It may instead be a critical instrument for
questioning a neopatriarchiate, such as Maududi’s, or for the enlarging of
women’s rights. In 1999, the Jamaat shoora discussed the invisibility of women
in the leadership (in 2000, out of 4,776 members, only 303 were women).
It proposed that the Jamaat President should be authorized to nominate 15
women to the body from which shoora members are elected (Zindegi-e-nau
1999 June: 62–63). Though there is still no woman in shoora, the proposal
itself is important. After all, it was only a few years ago that a woman could
enter the politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
In this essay, I have also shown the specificity of the Jamaat and suggested
ways in which the distinctiveness of Indian socio-political formation
has shaped its trajectory of transformation. This alerts us to the folly of
sweeping generalization like Winter’s which would impose a universal label
of ‘right-wing’ on Islamist movements everywhere. Winter’s and Moghissi’s
arguments, let us recall, are derived from Muslim-majority societies of
the so-called Islamic heartland, the Middle East. Islamism outside of the
‘heartland’ and in a secular–democratic set-up such as India, as this essay
depicts, has a substantially different and complex trajectory.
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13
Islamic Feminism in India
Indian Muslim Women Activists and the Reform of
Muslim Personal Law
Sylvia Vatuk*
Introduction
I n recent years, growing numbers of Muslim women in India have been

publicly calling for reform of Muslim Personal Law (MPL), justifying
*
This essay has been updated from the original version published in Modern Asian Studies in 2008. I
have based my revisions upon interviews conducted with Muslim women activists in January 2011.
I have also drawn upon newspaper and web reports and upon some recently published articles and
conference papers by scholars (cited herein) who have done research on the topic since I conducted my
earlier fieldwork in the winter of 2005–06. I thank Filippo and Caroline Osella for giving me a reason
to think more seriously and systematically about the movement I discuss here and for their careful
reading and critiques of earlier drafts. Geraldine Forbes, Karen Leonard and Andrea Rugh have also
provided valuable input. In revising and updating this essay for republication, I have greatly benefited
from correspondence with Mengia Hong-Tschalaer and from recent discussions with Nadja-Christina
Schneider, Nida Kirmani and other participants in the workshop ‘New Approaches to Gender and
Islam: Translocal and Local Feminist Networking in South and Southeast Asia’ (Humboldt University,
Berlin, 29–30 April 2011). I am especially grateful to Yoginder Sikand for initially calling my attention
to the phenomenon of Muslim women’s rights activism in India. I am indebted to the following
women who, at various times between 1998 and 2011, kindly made time in their busy schedules to
allow me to observe their ongoing activities, talk about their ideas, their goals, their past and current
activities and their future plans: Haseena Hashia, Sona Khan, Sughra Mehdi, Terry Rogers and Suraiya
Tabassum in New Delhi, Nigar Ataulla, Zakia Soman and Hasnath Mansur in Bangalore, Flavia Agnes,
Islamic Feminism in India / 347
their demands for gender equity with religious arguments, referring to

the authority of the Qur’an rather than to the Indian Constitution or to
the universalistic principles of human rights that have long guided Indian
secular feminists in their campaigns for a gender-neutral uniform civil code
(UCC) of personal law. These women are part of a trend observable all
over the Muslim world, in which ‘a new breed of Muslim women scholar-
activists’ (Sikand 2005a) is seriously and critically studying the foundational
texts of their religion. They are
challeng[ing] conventional histories and canonical texts . . .

pointing to the openness of the Qur’an and Sunna to ijtihad. . .
looking at the context in which the Qur’an was revealed... [and]
applying this understanding to the present so as to question the
ways in which Islamic knowledge has been produced. (Cooke
2001: 62)
Scholars of the Middle East began to use the term ‘Islamic feminism’
in the 1990s for movements then gaining prominence in Egypt, Iran and
elsewhere, in which women were attempting, ‘through a rereading of the
Qur’an and early Islamic history’ to ‘reclaim their religion... [and] undermine
both Islamist patriarchal distortions and Western stereotypes of Islam as
backward and terroristic’ (Moghadam 2004: 53). While the goals of these
Islamic feminists—to achieve greater gender equity under the law and in
society more generally—are similar to those pursued by ‘secular feminists’,
their understanding of the sources of male bias in Muslim societies and
many of the remedies they propose to combat it are different.
Many scholars have questioned whether those whose aim is to get
women their Qur’anic rights can be called ‘feminists’ at all and the related
Neelofar Akhtar, Farhat, Nasreen Fazalbhoy, Hasina Khan, Khatun Begum, Uzma Naheed, Naseem,
Noorjehan Safia Niaz, and Yasmin in Mumbai, Jameela Nishat, Noorjahan Begum and Rehana
Sultana in Hyderabad and Badr Sayeed in Chennai. Finally, I thank the following religious authorities
for discussing their work and sharing their perspectives on women’s rights and duties under MPL:
Mohammed Abdul Rahim Qureshi, Secretary of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB),
Muhammad Khwaja Sharif, Dean of the Department of Hadis at Ja’mia Nizamia and Qazis Anjam
Arifi, Mir Muhammad Qadar Ali, and Najamuddin Husain Shah in Hyderabad; Qazi Salahuddin
Muhammad Ayyub in Chennai; Qazi Muhammad Waliullah in Vanyambadi; Syed Jalaluddin Umari,
Vice-President of the Jama’at-i Islami Hind (JIH) and Qazi Maulana Kamil, presiding officer of the
AIMPLB’s dar-ul quzat, in New Delhi.
issue of whether an ‘Islamic approach’ to gender justice is in any way viable

has aroused strenuous scholarly debate (for example, Badran 2007; Moghadam
2002 and Moghissi 1999). Moghissi, for example, sees a real risk that if Iranian
women are pushed into accepting an ‘Islamic feminist’ approach as ‘the only
“culturally suitable” or workable’ one, any chances of achieving true gender
equity will be foreclosed (Moghissi 1999: 10; cf. Moghadam 2002; Mir-
Hosseini 1999). Muslim women activists in India do not have to contend
with the force of an authoritarian Islamic state. But their adversary, a well-
entrenched and widely influential male religious establishment, is only slightly
less intimidating. Insofar as they choose to confine themselves to ‘changing
MPL from within’, rely on the Qur’an for guidance and side with the ‘ulama
in their rejection of state intervention, they risk having to scale back their
aspirations for gender equity under the law.
Nair has a slightly different but related fear. ‘It may be too early’, she
says, ‘for feminists to take heart’ from the growth of Islamic feminism in
India, because blatant challenges to the authority of the ‘ulama may have
‘the unfortunate consequence of providing a rallying point for a new
patriarchal unity’ (Nair 2005), leading to renewed attempts to make women
give priority to community solidarity over the pursuit of their own interests
as women. I am somewhat more optimistic than Nair on this point. It seems
unlikely to me that the women whose activities I will describe here will
allow themselves to be distracted by religious identity-based appeals of this
kind. This is especially true for those among them who are already more-
or-less openly calling for taking the next step, working to get women their
Islamic rights but preparing them to ‘go beyond shari’at’ to obtain those that
the Qur’an does not provide. There is little sign that these women can be
made to stop and reverse direction anytime soon.
Realistically speaking, there is, for a variety of political reasons, little
prospect that either a UCC or any new legislation within MPL will be
enacted in India in the foreseeable future. Under these circumstances, an
‘Islamic feminist’ approach holds considerable promise, at least in the short
run, for improving the legal lot of Muslim women. The movement may
make some concrete progress toward remedying the consistent failure of the
religious authorities to implement those provisions of Islamic law that were
originally designed to protect women but are widely ignored in practice
today. More importantly, as these activists’ voices become louder and
more persistent, making the Muslim community—clerical and lay alike—
increasingly aware of the issues and of the remedies they propose, some
amount of change is inevitable. Clearly, an approach that merely seeks to
obtain for women those rights provided them in the Qur’an will not lead to
complete equality of the sexes. But it is nevertheless a promising beginning.
An Islamic Feminist ‘Movement’?

Islamic feminist activism in India is not yet an organized ‘social movement’,
in the strict sense of that term. It is being pursued by a rather amorphous
assortment of individuals and groups, all engaged in avid discussion and
debate about the negative impact of MPL on women but only loosely
organized in terms of action.1 These women share similar goals—to spread
awareness of ‘the correct teachings of Islam’ about women’s rights (huquq-
e-niswan) and find ways to help women gain practical access to them. And
they employ similar arguments to justify their calls for legal reform.
Though most work quite independently or in small groups, they are
well aware of one another and even those living in distant places find or
create periodic opportunities to meet and exchange ideas. Sometimes
they join together, often in cooperation with sympathetic secular feminist
organizations, to call a press conference, draw up and submit a petition
or demonstrate publicly against some perceived threat—whether from the
state or from orthodox religious forces—to Muslim women’s welfare.
How many are involved in this nascent movement is impossible to
gauge. There are a few prominent activists in each of the major cities and
in certain other second-tier urban centres like Lucknow, Ahmedabad and
Calicut. Some run small to medium-sized NGOs with associated staff and
have a significant local ‘grassroots’ following. But, even if one includes the
latter in the reckoning, they are far fewer than the numbers associated with
‘women’s wings’ of Islamist reform organizations like the Tablighi Jama’at
(TJ) or Jama’at-i Islami Hind (JIH).
1
Margot Badran, for example, contends that in the Egyptian context it is inappropriate to speak of
a ‘feminist movement’, because gender activism there ‘is mainly pragmatic rather than political in
the more highly-organized or self-conscious sense’ (Badran 1994: 203). Al-Ali (2000: 3–8), on the
other hand, is prepared to define the term ‘movement’ more broadly. Similar issues are discussed with
reference to India by Schneider (2009).
The All-India Muslim Women’s Personal

Law Board
Two years ago, the formation of an All-India Muslim Women’s Personal
Law Board (AIMWPLB) drew national and even some international media
attention (Manjul 2005). The organization was conceived by a small group
of prominent women who had gathered in Lucknow for a wedding. They
cited as the motive for their action the failure of the mainly male All-India
Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB)2 to seriously come to grips with
women’s concerns: ‘Despite prattling about working for the rights of the
women, the men-dominated boards took no account of the voice of women’
(ibid.; emphasis added). They assembled 35 women, representing the major
sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence and including a few Hindus. They
got off to a good start toward the end of February 2005, convening a mahila
adalat (‘women’s court’), at which 166 cases of unilateral divorce and ‘atrocities
related to dowry’ were registered. The alleged offenders were summoned to
appear two months later to answer the charges (The Hindu 2005).
The AIMWPLB was greeted by condemnation and derision from
members of the AIMPLB, who denied its legitimacy and questioned the
women’s scholarly credentials and political motives (The Muslim News 2005).
But, that body was already becoming increasingly sensitive to charges—
from both within and outside of the community—of failing to address
women’s problems. It had begun to pay more attention to such issues at its
annual meetings and in 2001 had organized a national conference to which
it invited some of its more prominent female critics. In 2000 the Board was
enlarged and the number of slots reserved for ‘lady members’ was increased.3
But women still represent only 12 per cent of its membership. Even if
they voted as a bloc they could not seriously influence the outcome of the
Board’s deliberations. Some observers complain that these women do little
2
This self-appointed body was established in 1973 ‘to protect the Muslim Personal Law in India’. Its
251 members include many of the country’s leading clerics, representing the major Islamic sects
(http://www.aimplboard.org/index.html). It has no real authority to set legal policy for the Muslim
community but is very vocal and exercises a great deal of public influence on matters related to MPL.
3
Originally, 15 seats (10 per cent) were reserved for women. In 2003, their numbers were increased to 25
and one of them was appointed to the 41 member executive committee (All-India Muslim Personal
Law Board 2003). At the March 2010 meeting of the Board, four additional women members were
elected to serve on the executive committee, the Board’s constitution was amended to increase that
committee’s size from 41 to 51 members, and a number of new men and 3 women were nominated
to serve on the Board, raising its total membership to 251. See Bhatt 2010; Ahmed 2010; Daily News
and Analysis 2010.
to promote women’s causes in any case, either because they genuinely share
the conservative outlook of the male majority or because
they are simply too scared to speak out against [the Board’s]
patently patriarchal biases . . . They fear that if they do they
might be accused of dividing the community or challenging the
authority of the mullahs. (Sikand 2005b)
In all fairness, it should be noted that several of these women have taken
strong pro-woman positions during the Board’s deliberations in recent years.
But so far they have little to show for their efforts.4
Neither the women behind the Lucknow initiative nor other women’s
rights activists are asking that MPL be abolished or secularized, nor do most
of them favour passage of a UCC. By and large they identify themselves as
devout Muslims and many affirm their willingness to be governed entirely
by Muslim law in the realm of family relations. But they resist being told
by the AIMPLB or any other male clerical organization what that law
consists of. They insist that MPL is not ‘a true reflection of the intention of
the Quran’ (Sikand 2004). They consider that text to be supportive of the
principle of gender equality but claim that over the centuries it has been
subjected to highly ‘patriarchal’ readings, leading to women being deprived
of many of their God-given rights. As one activist explained: ‘According to
most people’s understanding of Islam, all of the rights belong to men, all of
the duties to women!’5 And another told me:
There are so many rights given to women in the Qur’an that are
not found in the books of any other religion. But the religious
authorities mislead people, they misuse their position . . . The
‘ulama are an almost entirely male group. They give everything
a patriarchal interpretation. . . interpreting the texts to suit their
own interests.6
4
For example, when a new nikahnama (‘marriage contract’) was being drafted, Begum Naseem Iqtedar
Ali, the sole woman on the Executive Committee, tried unsuccessfully to insert a provision for
‘delegated divorce’ (see below). See Anand et al. (2004).
5
Interview, Noorjahan Begum, 3 January 2006.
6
Interview, Neelofar Akhtar, 30 November 2005.
Muslim women’s rights activists assert their right to read the Qur’an for
themselves and interpret it in a woman-friendly way. They point to God’s
command that all believers read and study the Holy Book, using their own
reasoning abilities to understand it, rather than relying on intermediaries:
The Qur’an clearly says that there is no clergy. So the ‘ulama have
no right to tell me anything. Their job is to tell women to read
the Qur’an, not to tell women what the Qur’an says!7
In thus insisting on going back to the foundational Islamic text for guidance,
they are reclaiming the right to ijtihad that the Sunni establishment maintains
was foreclosed many centuries ago.8
These women also reject the notion, so often put forward by clerics to
justify their opposition to state-initiated legal reform, that MPL is divinely
given and therefore inalterable.They point out that MPL was created during
the colonial period. Though based on Islamic law (shari’at), it has been
modified by judicial precedent and by several legislative enactments that in
each case, ironically, were initiated by representatives of the ‘ulama.9 So why,
they ask, cannot further changes now be introduced to benefit women?
Notwithstanding their insistence on the need for legal reform, these
activists are always at pains to emphasize that neither their religion nor
their personal law are ultimately responsible for Indian Muslim women’s
oppressed condition:
Our women’s problems are largely economic, caused by poverty,

lack of education, lack of job opportunities. It is the media and
the general public that always blames their problems on religion.10
7
Interview, Hasnath Mansur, 25 November 2005.
8
The vast majority of Indian Muslims are Sunni, followers of the Hanafi school of law. Muslim
women activists are quite diverse in terms of their sectarian affiliation, though most are also of Sunni
background. But in their legal rights work they generally try to avoid identifying themselves or the
issues they deal with in sectarian terms.
9
The laws referred to are the Wakf Validating Act 1913, Shariat Application Act 1937, Dissolution of
Muslim Marriages Act 1939 (DMMA) and Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act
1986 (MWA).
10
Interview, Hasnath Mansur, 25 November 2005.
Nevertheless, they believe that better enforcement of MPL’s more woman-

friendly provisions and implementation of others in ways that enhance
and safeguard women’s interests would go a long way toward easing the
difficulties that so many confront as mothers, daughters, wives, co-wives,
divorcees and widows living under Muslim law.
Muslim Women’s NGOs

Muslim-led women’s NGOs began to make an appearance in the late
1980s. While Muslims predominate among their staff and clientele, like
other feminist NGOs they welcome women of all religions, considering
it antithetical to their purpose of promoting gender equality to make
sectarian distinctions among themselves or among those they serve. For
some, the fact that they came into being in times of heightened communal
unrest reinforces their commitment to ‘communal harmony’.11 The main
focus of most of these NGOs is similar: aiding and ‘empowering’ poor,
illiterate, abandoned and otherwise marginalized women, especially victims
of domestic violence, while ‘raising their consciousness’ about the sharp
gender inequities that exist in their society and the need to strive to
overcome them. Their concern with larger issues of legal reform is usually
an outgrowth of these more service-oriented activities.
Awaaz-e-Niswaan
One of the oldest, largest and most well-established Muslim-led women’s
NGOs is the Mumbai-based Awaaz-e-Niswaan (Women’s Voice [AeN]),
founded in 1987. In 2005 it occupied several rooms on the first floor of a
seven-story walk-up building, a former Jain school in the heavily Muslim
neighbourhood of Dongri. The organization offers literacy classes and
teaches work skills to poor women, giving them the tools to both support
themselves financially and deal self-confidently and effectively with the
larger world around them. It also provides once-a-week marital ‘counselling’
sessions, run by peer counsellors who in some cases initially came to AeN
11
This is true, for example, of Shaheen and Aman Shanti (a Christian-sponsored NGO), both working
among low-income Muslim and Hindu women in the old city of Hyderabad. The Mumbai-based
Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG), founded in 1993 in the aftermath of riots following
the demolition of the Babri Masjid, has also been deeply involved in efforts to bring about Hindu-
Muslim understanding.
seeking assistance with their own problems and then stayed on to use what
they had learned to help others.
These sessions follow a pattern familiar in the world of the Indian
feminist NGO mahila mandal (‘women’s circle’). Women gather at an
appointed time, often accompanied by a close relative or neighbour and
frequently carrying small children in their arms. Each new ‘case’ is registered
in a large ledger and is called upon to tell her story, to speak out, to hold
nothing back. The counsellors listen attentively and usually sympathetically,
only occasionally expressing irritation when someone wanders off the point
or gets overly excited or hysterical. There are frequent interruptions as the
narrator’s supporters contribute additional information, make corrections
and offer their own opinions. Audience members, those waiting to present
their own tales of woe, listen avidly, sometimes expressing sympathy or
offering unsolicited suggestions. The counsellors probe for further details
before conferring as a group to consider possible courses of action.
The next step is usually to summon the husband for a hearing. Should
he fail to appear, a delegation may be sent to fetch him. AeN prefers, if
possible, to reconcile the couple or at least broker a settlement agreeable
to both parties. But the ultimate outcome of many of these disputes is a
separation or divorce. Sometimes AeN calls upon a sympathetic religious
functionary for help. Aisha, for example, had returned to her parents’ home
after suffering physical abuse from her husband for four years. ‘I wanted to
be rid of him’, she told me. ‘I didn’t want to have his name, to be known as
Rashid ki bibi (“Rashid’s wife”)’. Her family pleaded with him to divorce
her but he refused, saying that divorce was not customary in his family. So
AeN persuaded a local cleric to dissolve the marriage without his consent
by faskh-e-nikah.12 Aisha then completed high school and found a job: ‘Now
that I can earn myself, I don’t want to be dependent on anyone. I am
very happy, living a free life!’ While she could now legally remarry, she is
reluctant to risk becoming trapped in another unhappy marriage.
When a husband proves recalcitrant, AeN sometimes resorts to veiled
(or even not-so-veiled) threats. They may indicate to him that if he refuses
to listen to reason they will assist his wife in filing for a maintenance award
or will go with her to the police station to file a charge of cruelty or dowry
12
Many clerics refuse to use this procedure but others are willing to use it to accommodate women who
have been abandoned or severely abused (see Hussain 2003).
harassment under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. Farzana came
to AeN when her husband married a second time and moved out, leaving
her and her children behind in his parents’ home. A delegation from AeN
went to see her husband’s uncle, who owned the house in which they were
living. He was sympathetic to Farzana’s plight and agreed to set her up in a
small house of her own. But her husband refused to contribute to her living
expenses, claiming that he could not afford to support two families. So AeN
took her to the ‘legal centre’ of Majlis, a secular women’s NGO with whom
they have a cooperative relationship, and with their help she obtained a
maintenance order against him.13
AeN also brings women together for regularly scheduled informal
gatherings, where they socialize, share personal experiences, sing uplifting
songs and lend one another moral support in times of domestic crisis. In
1999, these meetings were being held in a small rented room, up some
rickety stairs, above the Laxmi Beer Bar. One day 10 women had gathered,
including AeN’s Co-ordinator, Hasina Khan, and two other staff members.
They sat sociably in a circle on the floor, discussing recent happenings in
the neighbourhood and in their lives and filling me in on the background
of their own involvement with AeN. Just as one woman was winding up
her tale of dowry harassment at the hands of her husband and in-laws, a
youngish man burst into the room and thrust a plastic folder into Hasina’s
hands. It transpired that a few weeks earlier he had been summoned to AeN
because his wife had come there seeking help in filing for divorce. They
had been married for four years but, according to her, he was impotent
and the marriage had not been consummated. He had denied his wife’s
allegations that day and now had come to deliver the results of a medical
examination that he claimed would prove that he was capable of sexual
intercourse. He was alternately deferential and belligerent. He insisted that
not only was he not impotent, but that he had had sex with his wife 50
times in the early weeks of marriage, ‘not only at night but in the daytime
too!’ At this, all of the women in the room began to giggle; Hasina tried to
maintain her composure but soon started laughing as well. He was clearly
embarrassed but would not drop the subject. ‘It is a matter of her word
against mine. If she will place her hand on the Qur’an and swear that we
never had intercourse, I will accept it’. Hasina protested: ‘Here we don’t do
13
Majlis’ founder is the prominent lawyer and legal scholar, Flavia Agnes (see Agnes 2004 and ‘Ashoka
Fellow Profile—Flavia Agnes’ 1986).
any swearing on the Qur’an. If you want to do that, do it in your own home
or somewhere outside, not here’. She agreed to find a physician to interpret
his medical reports and promised to contact him again. After he left they all
had a good laugh at his expense and at Hasina’s, for having been unable to
retain a more professional demeanour during the encounter.
For special events AeN can assemble an even larger number of women.
Two months prior to this meeting, members of AeN and other women’s
NGOs had plastered the city with posters protesting the Shiv Sena’s attempts
to suppress showings of the Deepa Mehta film, Fire. More recently, in July of
2005, they mustered a 100-strong group, ‘many of them wearing burqas,...
carrying roughly made cut-outs of maulanas with their faces crossed out’,
to shout provocative slogans against attempts by the Tablighi Jama’at in one
heavily Muslim neighbourhood of the city to suppress the singing and
ceremonies customarily performed by women at weddings (Menon 2005).14
Muslim Women’s Networks

A number of ‘networks’ or ‘coalitions’ of Muslim women’s organizations
have also come into existence in recent years. Two of the earliest of these
were the Muslim Women’s Forum (MWF) in Delhi and the Federation of
Muslim Women of Bangalore (FEMWOB). Rather than help individual
women, they strive to develop a dialogue—among themselves, with the
clerical establishment and within the larger community—on women’s
issues.To this end they hold conferences at which resolutions are passed and
issued to the press and organize rallies, often in conjunction with secular
women’s organizations.They run ‘legal awareness camps’ for poor women in
rural areas and urban slums and occasionally investigate and even intervene
when an ‘anti-woman fatwa’ is issued by clerics somewhere in the country,
drawing widespread public attention.15
Muslim Women’s Rights Network

The most successful and longest surviving coalition and the one that until
2007 had the most national reach is the All-India Muslim Women’s Rights
14
Women’s customary rites have been key targets for Islamic reformers at least as far back as the early
19th century and continue to be so today.
15
For example, the 2005 ‘Imrana case’, involving a rural UP woman allegedly raped by her father-in-
law (see Reddy 2005). Metcalf (2006) has analysed public responses to this event.
Network (MWRN). It was started in 1999 in Mumbai by leaders from

Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG) and AeN. Their first
conference was attended by approximately 250 women, including a few
Hindus, from 25 different organizations. Issues of child custody, guardianship
and adoption, women’s rights in the marital home, compulsory registration
of marriage and divorce, mahr (dower), a proposed model nikahnama (standard
marriage contract) and the need for a ban on ‘instantaneous divorce’ (triple
talaq) were on the agenda (Awaaz-e-Niswaan 1999).16 Since then they have
met once or twice a year, each time in a different city. The November 2005
gathering, attended by 300 women and a few men, was held in Lucknow.
On the agenda were sessions on the role of the state in protecting women’s
rights, ‘anti-woman fatwas’, the impact of communal violence on Muslim
women and the challenges ahead for Muslim women’s activism.17
Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan

In 2007 a new national organization dedicated to voicing the concerns
of Indian Muslim women was inaugurated at a meeting in New Delhi
attended by more than 350 Muslim women from all over India, along
with many academics, social activists and government officials. Prior to
this convention, according to one of its founding members, there had
been much discussion about what to call the new organization. The final
choice was made in accordance with the group’s desire to emphasise among
themselves and convey to outsiders that they were a national ‘movement’
comprised of ‘women’ who identify as both ‘Indian’ and ‘Muslim’: hence
the name Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA or ‘Indian Muslim
Women’s Movement’).18 At that time they claimed to have already enrolled
5,000 members from throughout the country; since then its membership
has reportedly grown to 23,000.19
As these numbers suggest, the BMMA has a very different organizational
structure from that of the MWRN and other earlier Indian Muslim women’s
16
Interview, Farhat,Yasmin and Naseem, 30 November 2005.
17
National Consultation on Muslim Women by All India Muslim Women Rights Network 21st to 23rd
November 2005, Tentative Schedule, Lucknow, 20 October 2005.
18
Interview with Zakia Soman (formerly Johar), 6 January 2011.
19
Ibid. See also ‘Muslim Women Pull Together for Education, Livelihoods, Health and Harmony’,
http://www.actionaidindia.org/Muslim_women_pull_together_for_education_livelihoods_health_
harmony.htm (accessed 11 August 2011).
rights networks. Rather than being a coalition of like-minded NGOs, the

BMMA is a mass organization, enrolling individuals as members. Like most
other Muslim-led NGOs and networks, it welcomes non-Muslims to join
its organization; they currently make up 10 per cent of the total. It enrolls
some men as well. But the BMMA has a specific policy of reserving its
leadership roles for Muslim women. This is based on their belief that the
mainstream women’s movement in India has historically been so dominated
by upper-caste/class Hindu women that the concerns of Muslim women
have never been given the attention they deserve.20
The BMMA has branches in 15 states, all guided by its core values of
democracy, secularism, equality, non-violence, human rights and justice, ‘as
enshrined in the Constitution of India’.21 Each branch initiates and carries
out its own projects to ameliorate the overall conditions of the local Muslim
community—in particular, its women—while also helping the latter ‘to raise
[their] voice at the national level’ (ibid.). The main foci of these projects
are those that the movement has identified as particularly critical for the
Muslim community, namely education, livelihood, health, social security
and law reform—areas in which Muslims are (in the Andolan’s own words)
known to be ‘extremely backward’.
Thus, for example, efforts have been instituted in various states to enable
girl drop-outs to gain re-admission to their former schools, in some cases
providing them books and special coaching classes as well. Other BMMA
state units run general education classes and literacy instruction for adult
Muslim learners, provide scholarships for female college students, and so
on. The Tamil Nadu branch of the BMMA has focused upon increasing
awareness of and facilitating access by Muslims to various government
welfare schemes for which they are eligible but have not previously taken
advantage of in significant numbers. BMMA activists in Maharashtra have
directed their efforts toward the economic betterment of the community,
for example by targeting corrupt practices in the distribution of food rations
to the poor. In other states, local branches have emphasized vocational
training for Muslim women and worked to enhance their access to small
business loans (ibid.).
20
Interview, Zakia Soman, 6 January 2011; Kirmani (2009a: 81–82, 2009b).
21
See ‘About BMMA’, in http://bhartiyamuslimmahilaandolan.blogspot.com, 1 October 2010, accessed
20 July 2011.
Legal reform is thus only one of several items on the BMMA agenda,
but it appears—at least if its media coverage is any indication—to be the
one that the national headquarters is most directly and actively involved
in. In line with its commitment to equality and democratic decision-
making within the organization, a number of ‘state consultations’ were held
to discuss issues of Muslim Personal Law before the leadership began its
long-term project of designing and working for the codification of a more
‘woman-friendly’ set of family laws for Indian Muslims. At these meetings,
participants were encouraged to identify those aspects of the present code
that affect them most negatively, to prioritise their concerns and to suggest
specific reform measures (ibid.). To date, the organization’s main concrete
accomplishment in this area has been to draw up a ‘model nikahnama’ that,
since it was issued in 2008, is said to have been used by 40 marrying couples
in Mumbai and in 200 group marriages in one district of Gujarat (ibid.).22
Characteristics of Women Leaders

Muslim women’s rights activists are quite diverse in terms of such variables
as social class, sectarian affiliation, educational background, the amount of
time they commit to the cause and the degree of Islamic expertise they
command. Some come from the same elite, sharif Muslim families that
produced some early twentieth-century women reformers.23 However,
the class origins of most of the current leadership are more modest. While
almost all whom I interviewed have degrees from English-medium colleges,
many were raised in lower-middle class, non-English-speaking homes and
are among the first women in their families to have been educated to
this level.
Several of the activist leaders were inspired by personal hardships to
devote themselves to bettering the lives of others. The father of Hasina
Khan was reportedly an alcoholic, sometimes violent, who ‘gambled away
the family’s money’, forcing her mother to work as a maid and seamstress.
Her brother went to work in the Gulf to help support the family but he
later squandered all that they had saved from his earnings and turned to a life
22
For a detailed discussion and analysis of this document, see Tschalaer (2011). See also Sikand (2010).
23
These women belonged, for the most part, to families whose male members held Islamic modernist
views and were themselves engaged in social reform efforts. They were mainly concerned with
promoting female education and achieving enhanced mobility for women through relaxation of the
more stringent forms of female seclusion (parda). See Minault (1997, 1998).
of crime. Hasina struggled to remain in school and work her way through
college. These experiences eventually led her ‘to recognise the injustices of
patriarchy’ (‘Ashoka Profile: Hasina Khan’ 2000).
Sharifa Khanam is founder of an NGO called STEPS in Pudukottai,
Tamil Nadu, that aids victims of domestic violence. She is currently
spearheading a controversial and widely publicised campaign to build an
all-woman mosque. Born ‘the tenth child of a poor rural family. . ., [she]
grew up without a father’. Due to their poverty, her family was never able
to arrange her marriage and she has remained single to this day. It is perhaps
for this reason that she regards the custom of ‘dowry’ as one of the most
serious problems facing Muslim women today (Baird 2004).24
Rehana Sultana, Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at
Hyderabad’s Maulana Azad Urdu University, is another well-known
spokeswoman for Muslim women’s legal rights who was impelled by
personal adversity to dedicate her life to empowering Muslim women.
Raised in a stable, religiously observant middle-class home, she was married
while still in high school. But the marriage was not a happy one and
soon ended in divorce. Though her natal family gave her little financial or
moral support, she was determined to finish her education; eventually she
completed high school, a BA, MA, PhD, and a law degree. In addition to her
university job, she runs a school for girls in a building adjoining her home
in a Muslim-dominated area of the old city and devotes her weekends to a
small NGO, Bazm-e-Shama-e-Niswan, that provides marriage counselling
and legal advice to troubled women. After what she has suffered, she says,
she wants to save others from a similar fate.25
Legal Reform Priorities
Talaq: Male-initiated Extra-judicial Divorce

Close to the top of most activists’ list of priorities is the issue of male-initiated,
extra-judicial, unilateral divorce, especially the infamous instantaneous
divorce by ‘triple talaq’. The women do not usually speak out against extra-
judicial divorce per se, in as much as it is clearly allowed by Islamic law, but
24
This practice is of Hindu origin but is widespread among Indian Muslims today.
25
Interview, Rehana Sultana, 18 March 1999.
they insist that if a man wishes to divorce his wife he should be required to
do so in a ‘phased’ manner, pronouncing one talaq, then waiting for a month
before uttering a second. In the meantime the two should try to reconcile
their differences, with help from their respective families. Only if, after
another month has passed, it is clear that their problems are irresolvable,
should the man be permitted to utter the third, irrevocable talaq.26
Indeed, when pressed on the point, most clerics27 also express disapproval
of triple talaq and the AIMPLB has gone on record as ‘recommending’ the
more gradual procedure just described. In the English version of their new
model nikahnama the husband is ‘instructed’ to ‘avoid declaring “Talaq” thrice
at a time [italics mine]’. But the Board is unwilling to go any further than
this, insisting that instantaneous divorce is a ‘social evil’, not a ‘legal’ one.They
say they cannot either ban or invalidate divorces effected in this manner but
can only endeavour to make the faithful aware that to pronounce a ‘triple
talaq’ is a morally undesirable act.
Khul’: Woman-initiated Extra-judicial Divorce

Most activists would also like to make extra-judicial divorce more readily
available to women. The 1939 Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act
(DMMA) provides a generous list of grounds on which a Muslim woman
can file suit for divorce. But a ‘court divorce’ is expensive and time-
consuming and a woman who resorts to it risks social disapproval. An
extra-judicial khul’ divorce is simply arranged and inexpensive. However,
it requires the husband’s consent. Activists want religious functionaries to
respond more sympathetically to women’s applications for khul’, even when
their husbands refuse to cooperate or cannot be located. Alternatively, they
want the faskh-e-nikah option to be more liberally employed.
26
In 2002, the Supreme Court of India—in the case of Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. and Anr.—decreed
that an irrevocable talaq can only be given for ‘a reasonable cause’ and must be preceded by ‘an attempt
of reconciliation’ by relatives from each side. See 1 October 2002, http://www.supremecourtonline.
com/cases/7383.html (accessed 19 December 2003). This decision notwithstanding, triple talaqs
continue unabated.
27
It is, of course, impossible to validly generalize about ‘clerical opinion’ on any particular matter of
MPL. Tens of thousands of men in India are assigned—or claim—the label of ‘alim (plural ‘ulama).
They in no way constitute a unified group, either ideologically or organizationally. They are divided
by sect and within each sect into many distinct schools of thought and each has personal views on
specific points of law, on which he may differ even from his closest peers.
But male clerics do not generally favour making it easier for women to
initiate divorce, reasoning that to do so would cause an unacceptable rise
in the divorce rate. As the Secretary of the AIMPLB told me, ‘we are in the
business of preserving Muslim families, not contributing to their breakup!’
He explained that women are too emotional to be given the privilege of
divorcing on demand. If allowed to do so, they would begin divorcing their
husbands on the slightest of pretexts; the result would be social chaos.28
Mahr
Islam obliges a man to give his bride a ‘dower’ (mahr) in cash or other
valuables when they marry. The amount must be recorded in every marriage
contract but need not be paid immediately; in India its payment is usually
deferred indefinitely. Upon pronouncing an irrevocable talaq, however, the
man must hand over the full amount. In theory, this provides a woman with
some insurance against hasty divorce. And, should her husband divorce her
anyway, the mahr serves as a nest-egg with which she can start a new life.
But as there is no legal mechanism to enforce its payment, in practice few
women ever receive it.
Mahr amounts are in any case often quite minimal. Women’s rights
activists propose that the cleric presiding over the marriage (the nikahkhwan)
insist that the groom pledge more than a token amount and either pay it
in full or fix it in terms of some material asset (like gold) whose value will
rise with inflation. They also want clerics to speak out against the common
practices whereby the husband persuades his new bride to waive her claim
mahr or the in-laws convince a widow that if she claims her legal right
to be paid her mahr before her deceased husband’s estate is distributed
among the heirs, he will suffer greatly in the afterlife. Clerics, of course,
readily acknowledge that every wife is entitled to her mahr, if not during
the marriage then certainly upon divorce or widowhood. Some even go so
far as to declare it a sin to force a bride or widow to forego it. But few are
prepared to take any firm measures to ensure that women actually benefit
from this provision of the law.29
28
Interview, Mohammed Abdul Rahim Qureshi, 31 January 2006.
29
Some qazis insist that, if a man wants to formally ‘register’ his divorce in their office and receive a
signed and stamped ‘divorce certificate’ (talaqnama), he must first deposit the full amount of his wife’s
mahr. But a man is not legally required to register his divorce and most do not. See Vatuk (2005).
Polygamy
Restrictions on polygamy are also high on the agendas of Muslim
women’s rights activists. They contend that the Qur’anic injunction to
treat multiple wives equally is clearly impossible either to comply with
or to enforce; therefore, a man should be allowed to marry another wife
only under very special circumstances, such as the inability of the first to
bear children.30 In that case he should be required to get his current wife’s
permission and the nikahkhwan should be required to ascertain that he has
done so before proceeding with the wedding. Again, neither the AIMPLB
nor other clerical bodies have shown any inclination to discourage multiple
marriages by instituting such procedures.
The Model Nikahnama

In the 1990s, Muslim women activists began trying to make Muslims
aware that the law permits a woman to specify in the marriage contract the
conditions under which she is giving her assent to the match: for example,
that she will be allowed to continue her education or that her husband will
not take another wife during her lifetime. She may even require him to
agree that, should he fail to fulfil the conditions she has set, she may dissolve
the marriage herself, by a procedure called talaq-e-tafwiz (delegated divorce)
(see Carroll 1982).31
A Mumbai group that includes several lawyers, academics and NGO
leaders has been trying since the early 1990s to draft and disseminate a model
nikahnama that clearly presents these options. However, they have found
it difficult to reach unanimity on its wording. One of the main sticking
points has been whether to include a mention of talaq-e-tafwiz and, if so,
how. But in 1994 some of the group presented a version to the AIMPLB
for its consideration.32 It tackled the problem of polygamy by including a
declaration by the bridegroom as to his current marital status. If married, he
is asked to affirm that his first wife is aware that he is marrying again, that
30
These same arguments were put forward in an anti-polygamy campaign conducted by the Anjuman-
e-Khawatin-e-Islam (All-India Muslim Ladies Conference) in 1918 (Minault 1998: 145–46, 289–90).
31
Already in the late 1930s a ‘model nikahnama’ containing such a clause was promulgated—under the
leadership of its Muslim president—by the non-sectarian All-India Women’s Conference (Minault
1998: 299).
32
Its authors were Uzma Naheed, Flavia Agnes, Nasreen Fazalbhoy and Neelofar Akhtar, assisted by
Maulanas Mohammed Shoeb Koti and Abdul Waheed Wahid Fayazi.
he has set up a separate household for her and has made provisions for her
maintenance. The document also outlines some conditions under which he
may later take another wife.
Not surprisingly, the AIMPLB did not embrace this document. But
it did take note of the issue and after years of discussion and debate,
issued its own model nikahnama in April of 2005 (AIMPLB 2005). While
some activists welcomed this as a step in the right direction, most were
extremely critical (Seshu 2005). They complained that the model contract
fails to address several matters of vital importance to women’s interests.
For example, whereas the nikahkhwan is instructed to establish whether the
couple is eligible to marry—in terms of the prohibited degrees of kinship
relationship and the woman’s marital status—nowhere is he instructed to
verify that they are old enough, under Indian law, to do so!33 Nowhere is
it mentioned that the bride may specify the conditions under which she
marrying, nor is space provided on the form for her to set them down.
There is also no mention of the option of khul’, by which the wife can
initiate dissolution of a marriage that she considers untenable. And the only
mention of polygamy is contained in instructions for the nikahkhwan, who
is merely told to ascertain that, if the groom already has one wife, he will
follow the Qur’anic injunction to treat both wives equally. How he is to
determine this is not explained.
In addition to these omissions, there are a number of clauses that activists
found to be highly objectionable. For example, in the list of ‘guidelines’
(hidayat) for the couple, outlining their respective marital obligations, the
wife is told that it is her duty to obey her husband and never leave the house
without his permission. Activists point out that such injunctions make a
mockery of the concept of gender equity.
Shortly after the AIMPLB nikahnama was unveiled, a group from AeN
took part in a protest demonstration at which a young woman in a black
burqa was photographed in the act of tearing it up (Katakam 2005). The
MWRN soon released a nikahnama of their own devising, which, they
claimed, would better ‘protect the rights of women in times of marriage,
divorce, custody and maintenance’ (Seshu 2005). The AIMWPLB then
33
Under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 (PCMA), which applies to all Indians, regardless of
religion, the minimum legal marriage age for women is now eighteen, for men it is twenty-one. But a
large proportion of Muslim brides are younger than this.
issued its own sharp critique of the AIMPLB document and in January
2006 announced the formation of a 30-member committee to develop ‘a
set of marriage laws, which. . . will safeguard [women’s] interests’ (Mishra
2006) by, among other things, specifying that the mahr be paid before or at
the time of the nikah, prohibiting ‘triple talaq’ and removing the halala rule
that requires a divorced woman who wishes to remarry her former husband
to first marry and be divorced by another man.34
In March 2008 the AIMWPLB’s new 4-page ‘model nikahnama’,
published in both Hindi and Urdu, was released in Lucknow at a special
meeting of the organization. In addition to making it more difficult for
a man to divorce his wife unilaterally by so-called ‘triple talaq’ and/or
via modern means of communication such as instant messaging, email,
telephone or video-conferencing, the marriage contract requires him to
pay his divorced wife’s mahr and make other financial provisions for her
and their children. It also affirms the woman’s right to seek an extra-
judicial divorce (by khul’) under certain conditions.35 Other clauses require
that both bride and groom have reached the legal age for marriage under
Indian law and that the marriage be registered with the appropriate civil
authorities.36 Predictably, the reaction of the religious establishment to
the AIMWPLB document was generally hostile. The ‘ulama especially
objected to the latter two clauses that, if enforced, would, in the view of
some, seriously infringe upon Islamic law. Even the sole woman on the
executive committee of the AIMPLB at that time—Begum Naseem Iqtedar
Ali of Lucknow, the seat of the AIMWPLB—opined publicly that the new
marriage contract simply distracts attention from more pressing issues facing
the Muslim community.37
34
In April 2006, the Supreme Court, ordered the state of Orissa to provide police protection to a couple
who, in defiance of a fatwa issued by local clerics, had resumed conjugal relations after the man, in a
drunken rage, had pronounced triple talaq. This may encourage future courts to refuse to enforce the
halala rule (Venkatesan 2006a).
35
Tschalaer (2011) usefully compares the AIMWPLB nikahnama with those drafted by, respectively, the
AIMPLB (in 2005), the All India Shia Personal Law Board (AISPLB) (in 2006) and the BMMA (in
2008).
36
These two stipulations do no more than conform to existing Indian law. The Prohibition of Child
Marriage Act, 2006, prohibits the marriage of males under 21 years of age and of females under 18,
regardless of their religion. Furthermore, on 25 October 2007, the Supreme Court of India ruled
that every state must enact, within three months, legislation making registration compulsory for all
marriages.Whether all states have actually passed such laws and, if so, whether they are being effectively
enforced, is another question.
37
For other reactions to the document, see Ramakrishnan (2008).
What is rarely openly acknowledged by those campaigning for a revised

model nikahnama—though they are of course well aware of it—is that in
actual practice few women ever have the chance even to examine their
marriage contract, never mind add any stipulations to it. Negotiations over
its terms are essentially limited to the question of how much is to be offered
as mahr and they are handled entirely by the bride’s father, with no input
from her. Although during the wedding ceremony she is asked to consent
to the marriage, she is seldom if ever given a chance to peruse the contract
at that time. So even if the clauses desired by the women activists were
inserted into the AIMPLB nikahnama, there is little guarantee that any but
a very few adult, highly educated and personally assertive brides would
be able to lay down conditions of their own choosing. Without the active
cooperation, not only of the clerical establishment but of all of the men
who are arranging their daughters’ marriages, a revised nikahnama would
not alter the marital ground rules for the vast majority of women.
Shari’at Courts
The AIMPLB has been trying for some time to persuade Muslims
experiencing marital difficulties to approach shari’at courts (dar-ul-quzat)
rather than resort to the state-sponsored judiciary. Muslim women’s rights
activists oppose this, as they believe that these exclusively male-run religio-
legal bodies are biased against women. But they themselves are not entirely
satisfied with the way the civil and criminal justice systems operate, in terms
of providing solutions for women’s marital and other problems. Recent
moves to set up special ‘women’s courts’ in various parts of the country
reflect this attitude.38 However, their scepticism about the law’s efficacy does
not prevent Muslim women’s NGOs from assisting their clients to make use
of the courts when alternative measures have failed.
Challenges Facing the Islamic Feminist Movement

Ideological Divisions
Whereas all of those involved in fighting for Muslim women’s rights say
that their goal is to achieve gender equity under the law, there are some
38
The ‘Tamilnadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat’, established by Daud Sharifa Khanum’s NGO, STEPS, in
the town of Pudukottai, is one such example. See her interview at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
saldwr/message/1669 (accessed 12 August 2011).
important differences of opinion among them. The most crucial question

is whether and to what extent to go beyond the boundaries set by shari’at
in seeking equal rights for women. Noorjehan Safia Niaz, a Co-Director
of WRAG, told me that, since there are some areas of Islamic law that
are inherently biased against women, her group advocates taking what is
relevant from the Qur’an while at the same time pressuring the state to
codify Muslim law anew.39 An AeN volunteer likewise told me that, while
Islam gives some rights to women, there are others that are unavailable in
shari’at. ‘So we need to go outside it to provide women those rights as well.
This is not to say that religious law should not be followed. But it is not
enough’.40
The question naturally arises whether all of those who use religious
arguments in arguing for gender equity are truly convinced that Islam—
when interpreted ‘correctly’—can provide everything that women need.
The choice of an Islamic discourse can be ‘both genuine—an expression
of. . . religious convictions—and a strategic attempt to acquire legitimacy
that also serves to broaden the base of support for women’s rights’
(Moghadam 2002: 1157). Here Moghadam’s distinction between ‘Islamic’
and ‘Muslim’ feminists is relevant: the latter are ‘believing women who agree
that Islamization has been detrimental. . . to women’ and approach issues
of legal reform from that perspective but also ‘often use familiar cultural
concepts and religious phrases’ in order to promote their reformist goals
more effectively to a Muslim audience (Moghadam 2004: 53). There is
reason to believe that at least some of the women whose ideas and work I
have been discussing here would fall into this category.
However, there is little doubt that others sincerely believe that
Islam already provides women all the rights they could possibly require.
Noorjahan Begum, who runs ‘women’s empowerment’ programmes for the
Hyderabad-based COVA,41 acknowledged that her organization has some
differences with AeN over this issue: ‘They say we need to go beyond the
shari’at, but we don’t agree’. Her co-worker, Qamar, continued: ‘We feel
39
Interview, Noorjehan Safia Niaz, 28 November 2005.
40
Interview, Farhat, 30 November 2005.
41
COVA is not a women’s organization as such, but rather ‘an umbrella group of over 100 community-
based organizations’. It was formed in 1994 when a number of Hindu and Muslim groups joined
together to work for communal harmony and only later broadened its mandate to include issues of
specific relevance to women.
that it is enough if women get the rights that they are given by Islam’.42
It was mainly because of their discomfort with the position taken by the
leadership of MWRN on this question that they and some other groups
decided to withdraw from the network a few years ago, though COVA has
since returned to the fold. Divergence of opinion on this point has made it
somewhat difficult for MWRN to keep its membership rolls intact and to
present a united front towards the male religious establishment that most
regard as their principal adversary in the battle for legal reform. But thus far
it has not led to a permanent cleavage. All of those involved seem to believe
that more is to be gained from continuing to work together than from
allowing their differences to derail the larger effort.
That said, it may be noted that differences on this issue were at least
partly responsible for the fact that in 2007 some of the groups that were
formerly involved with MWRN (among them, most notably, WRAG) left
that network to go on to form the BMMA. As one observer puts it: ‘[T]he
MWRN…is tolerant but not celebratory of religion, [while] the BMMA
actively engages with Islamic texts as part of their strategy…’ (Kirmani
2009a: 77). The same could also be said of the AIMWPLB, though, as
Tschalaer shows in her comparative analysis of their respective nikahnamas,
the latter organization’s use of Islamic discourse seems to be more than a
purely strategic device (Tschalaer 2011).
Whereas those who resist going outside of shari’at are naturally averse
to state intervention in reform of MPL, they do not necessarily rule out
supporting pro-woman legislation that impinges only indirectly upon their
code of personal law. For example, none of the activists to whom I spoke
oppose—as does the AIMPLB and some other clerics—the application to
Muslims of the PCMA. And many have expressly called for the compulsory
registration of marriages, though many clerics regard government attempts
to institute such a requirement as interference in their personal law. They
also argue that it is anyway unnecessary for Muslims, since the officiating
imam or qazi already keeps a record of every marriage he performs.43
42
Interview, 3 January 2006.
43
In February of 2006 the Supreme Court ordered all states to institute such procedures (Smt. Seema
v. Ashwani Kumar [2006] 2 SCC 86). They are already on the books in several states, though not yet
actually implemented in all of them. See Venkatesan (2006b).
Relations with the ‘Ulama

There are also differences of opinion about whether and how to work with
the ‘ulama on issues of personal law. Most Muslim-led women’s NGOs do
maintain contacts with local qazis or the imams of nearby mosques and, as I
have noted, regularly seek the cooperation of the more sympathetic among
them when trying to help the women who come to them with marital or
other problems. Some spend considerable time and effort trying to develop
relationships with and keep open lines of communication with the local
religious authorities. But they are often frustrated by these men’s frequent
reluctance or refusal to heed their recommendations when dealing with
issues that affect women’s well-being.
All of the Muslim women’s networks have also at some time or other
entered into dialogue with the higher clerical leadership, in particular with
the AIMPLB. Those who are themselves members of this Board naturally
believe in working closely with the ‘ulama, exerting whatever influence
they can from within, rather than opposing them from without. As one
told me, ‘One should be positive in one’s approach, not confrontational’.44
Another pointed out that, since the masses have great respect for the ‘ulama,
it is counter-productive to tell women not to heed what they say. It is much
better to show that one is willing to give them proper deference and work
with them to the extent possible.45
The MWRN and some of the smaller coalitions, positioned well outside
of the AIMPLB and not so averse to confrontation, have on different occasions
invited members of the Board and other prominent clerics to discuss issues
of women and the law. Though there is still a large gap between what most
women activists would like to see the AIMPLB do and the steps that it has
actually taken, there are clear signs that the reformist women’s voices are
being heard by the members of this body and are even having some impact—
though hardly a dramatic one—on their decision-making. Some women are
pleased by the results of their efforts to exchange ideas with the Board, while
others are discouraged by what they perceive as an absence of positive results.
Thus one of the leaders of WRAG is quoted as saying,
44
Interview, Haseena Hashia, 14 October 2005.
45
Interview, Neelofar Akhtar, 30 November 2005.
For a long time we did try to dialogue with [the AIMPLB].

But with each of their declarations, they haven’t done enough.
They had a golden opportunity to do so much [in their new
nikahnama]. How long can we direct our energies at them? It’s
like banging one’s head against the wall. (Seshu 2005)
Presenting a Public Image

Activists in the movement for Muslim women’s rights often find themselves
in a position of having to defend themselves against both direct attacks
and more subtle, insidious insinuations from the religious leadership and
from members of the wider community, including members (especially
men) of their own families. The activities they engage in often preclude
their conforming strictly to orthodox standards of seclusion and Islamic
femininity.They are also vulnerable to criticism for putting their interests as
women ahead of the community’s need to maintain a united front against
the communal forces rampant in the society at large. Since so many Indian
women’s NGOs rely heavily on funding from foreign aid agencies, they
are sometimes the target of suspicion on that front. And even aside from
questions about the sources of their funding, they risk being accused of being
‘in it only for the money’ instead of genuinely concerned about the welfare
of poor women.
The strength of their loyalty to the community is often questioned as
well, especially if they also belong to non-sectarian women’s organizations
or to Muslim organizations that work closely with secular ones on
controversial issues of current concern to Muslims. The same is true if they
are closely associated with one of the secular political parties. In this case
they may be suspected either of knowingly allowing themselves to be used
by politicians (perhaps for personal gain) or of being unwittingly duped
into participating in dubious activities harmful to the community.46
Women activists’ Islamic credentials are also routinely questioned.
Even those who succeed in presenting themselves as devout Muslims can
be dismissed as lacking in scholarly qualifications when they begin to cite
the Qur’an or other religious sources to support their demands for gender
46
For example, the fact that the Founder President of the AIMWPLB is ‘a longtime secretary of the
Rashtriwadi Communist Party’ has been raised by at least one of its prominent clerical critics (Awasthi
2006).
justice. Although growing numbers of Indian young women are being

educated in women’s madrasas, some even earning the title of ‘alima (‘female
scholar’), few of these have shown an inclination to involve themselves
publicly in fighting for women’s rights. Activists argue that one doesn’t
need to be a highly-trained religious expert in order to read the Qur’an
and discover for oneself that Indian Muslim women today are not being
given their God-given rights. But the fact that very few of them have had
a rigorous religious education makes it easy for the ‘ulama to dismiss them
and their ideas out of hand.
To Be or Not to Be a Feminist
Muslim women who are pressing for social and legal change in pursuit of
gender equity always have to concern themselves about ‘framing’ the issue
of women’s rights in such a way that they are not ‘put on the defensive
and made to prove that they are not spouting alien and Western concepts’
(Moghadam 2004: 51). Uzma Naheed, a granddaughter of the founder of
the Deoband madrasa, is one of the few prominent Muslim women’s rights
activists who has earned advanced Islamic qualifications. When I met her in
her office, she was wearing a long-sleeved salwar-kamiz with a headscarf tied
so as to completely cover her hair and shoulders. Her husband was seated
at an adjoining desk but did not take any part in our conversation. When I
asked about relationships between women activists and the clergy, she said
that she was able to remain on good terms with the AIMPLB leadership
because,
[A]lthough they know I am working for women, they know that

I am not a feminist. It is because our religion has given us rights
that I am doing this. . . It is important, if we want them to listen
to us, that we show that we are good Muslims. By not wearing a
sari, by covering our heads and so on.47
47
Interview, 28 November 2005. Though some activists do wear saris, most wear the salwar-kamiz,
draping a dupatta over their chest and shoulders when indoors. Assuming this dress is not necessarily
a religious statement: it is nowadays de rigeur among college-educated young women of all religions.
Some activists wear a black burqa when in public, either the older style two-piece garment with
attached face veil or the newer long coat with a separate square of cloth covering the head, neck and
shoulders and sometimes pulled tightly across the face in such a way as to leave only the eyes visible.
Hasina Khan similarly used the phrase ‘not strongly feminist’ when
explaining to me AeN’s approach to raising the consciousness of their
mostly poor and uneducated women clients.48 The reluctance that these
and other activist women display to openly claim a ‘feminist’ identity—at
least when campaigning for women’s rights before a Muslim audience—is
understandable, since the term has quite negative connotations, not only
within this community but in India more generally. It calls up images of
an excessively Westernized woman, unfeminine, aggressive, antagonistic
toward men, immodest, sexually loose and careless of domestic and
family responsibilities. Thus, despite sharing with self-identified feminists
‘a theoretical perspective and a practice that criticizes social and gender
inequalities, aims at women’s empowerment, and seeks to transform
knowledge’ (Moghadam 2002: 1165), they shy away from adopting the label
for themselves.49
From the other side, these women are often suspect in the eyes of
their secular sisters, who tend to view them as either suffering from false
consciousness or using a misplaced rhetoric as a convenient, even cynical,
strategy. Even those secular feminists who recognise the difficulty of
confronting an entrenched male religious establishment from within the
community and are therefore prepared to give Islamic feminists credit
for standing up to be counted on the issue of Muslim women’s rights are
often dubious about what they can actually accomplish.Yet, forced as these
women are to operate within a context wherein a more radical secular
feminist approach is certain to attract strong community antagonism, an
Islamic feminist approach may indeed be the wisest choice.
Conclusion
I have sketched here in very broad outlines the growth and development
of a nascent Islamic feminist movement in India, wherein a relatively small
cohort of young to middle-aged, middle-class, college-educated Muslim
women, spread throughout the country in various large and medium-sized
cities, many of them long engaged in providing adult education and various
kinds of social services to poor and otherwise marginalized women, have
48
Interview, 18 February 1999.
49
For this reason, some scholars question the appropriateness of using the term in their own writings
(cf. Cooke 2001: ix).
begun to campaign for changes in the way MPL is interpreted and applied,
with the aim of achieving a greater degree of parity for the sexes under
the law. To support their arguments for legal reform they refer chiefly to
the authority of the Qur’an, which, they say, gives women many rights and
benefits that in India today are denied them in practice.
The most immediate roots of this movement can be traced to the 1985
Supreme Court judgement in the Shah Bano case and the subsequent
successful campaign by the Muslim clerical leadership to enact the MWA,
making divorced Muslim women no longer eligible to sue their husbands
for maintenance under the relevant provision of the Criminal Procedure
Code (Engineer 1987). But the broader context of its emergence lies in
the process of ‘fragmentation of religious authority’ in the contemporary
globalizing Muslim world that is related to such developments as the spread
of mass education, the coming of new forms of media and transport and
the growth of a mobile, worldwide labour market (Eickelman and Piscatori
1996: 68–79, 131–35).
With respect to issues of MPL in particular, while the Indian ‘ulama
continue to claim exclusive rights to interpret shari’at, the arenas in which
it is now being discussed are opening up. Those who formerly followed
clerical authorities unquestioningly are raising their independent voices
and demanding to be heard. A variety of ‘new people’, including Western-
educated Muslims who lack religious credentials of the traditional sort,
are participating in these conversations. Robinson has argued that in India
this process began with the widespread adoption of lithographic print
technology by Urdu-speaking Muslims in early nineteenth century, a
process that intensified in the early twentieth century (Robinson 1993). For
centuries, manuscripts of the classic texts of Islam were reproduced by hand
and were consequently in scarce supply. This gave religious scholars a firm
monopoly on religious knowledge. The only way to study these texts was
by sitting at the feet of someone to whom the knowledge they contained
had been passed down orally through a long line of earlier teachers. But
now they could be reproduced, in the original language or in translation, in
thousands of copies. Any literate person could read them for him or herself.
There was no longer any need to rely on an intermediary to explain their
meaning or to give one permission (ijazat) to pass on what one had learned
to others.
Ironically, although the ‘ulama themselves exploited this technology
because it enabled them to disseminate religious knowledge more widely,
it ultimately eroded their authority as exclusively qualified interpreters

of Islam. A wide variety of competing sectarian groups soon sprung up,
each with its own religious vision. In time, newer media technologies were
developed—first the radio, then television, audio and video cassettes, CD-
ROM and the internet—and were enthusiastically received and utilized
by such groups as well as by individual self-styled Islamic experts. In the
case of the sound and visual media, the ever-expanding audience for new
religious ideas included many who lack the literacy skills required to absorb
them from the printed page. Even though literacy is spreading at a rapid
pace throughout the Muslim world, in a country like India the number of
Muslims—especially women—who are still unable to read remains high. By
whatever means they are exposed to new religious ideas, members of the
modern audience are not simply passively taking them in.They are forming
their own opinions, avidly discussing and debating them, and trying to
bring others around to their way of thinking. Increasingly this means trying
to follow—and persuade others of the importance of their following—new
standards of virtuous Muslim behaviour.50
Women are becoming increasingly prominent participants in this ‘new
Muslim public sphere’ (Eickelman and Anderson 2003: 10–11). Female
voices were previously virtually absent from scholarly religious discourse
but today women increasingly feel in a position to develop and promote
competing views on these subjects and are making themselves heard through
a wide variety of media forms, both old and new. The Indian women’s
rights activists about whom I have written here are part of this worldwide
trend. They make ample use of the media, experiencing little difficulty in
obtaining newspaper or television coverage for their activities: images of
black-robed women raising a ruckus against the male clerical establishment
can always be counted on to attract readers—or viewers, as the case may be.
Their opinions are also regularly sought by journalists, whenever incidents
occur in which Muslim women are mistreated by their menfolk, community
elders or clerical authorities. Yet they are highly ambivalent about the
media’s role in relation to their cause, criticising it for habitually playing
up such incidents in ways that reinforce existing negative stereotypes of
Muslims. Here they echo the concerns of the clerical leadership, which
likewise perceives the ‘secular’ media to be overly inclined to sensationalist
50
See Hirschkind’s (2001) discussion of how the wide circulation of religious cassette tapes in modern
day Cairo has contributed to the creation of a new and diverse ‘Islamic counterpublic’ there.
reportage that helps to stir up anti-Muslim sentiments among the general

public.51
Muslim Women’s Rights Activism and

Islamic Reform
In many ways the ‘movement’ I have been describing fits uneasily within
current discussions of Islamic reform movements, either historically or in
the contemporary Muslim world. The politics of gender have been central
to reformist discourse in India from the nineteenth century onwards, though
its specific manifestations were varied and changed over time. Women
began to be called upon to assume the role of symbolic representatives of
their larger community of faith (Devji 1991; Metcalf 2004):52 this process
accelerated after Independence, with pressure from both outside and within
the Muslim fold. As Metcalf suggests, there has been
a shift in the boundaries of public and private from an ideal

long held in Islamic societies: women are, ironically, now part
of public life... [and] talk about women. . . fills public space.
(Metcalf 2004: 102)
Contemporary Islamic reform movements are of course many and

varied, both ideologically and in the specific practices that they endeavour
to promote, as the other chapters in this volume show. But insofar as their
discourse on women is concerned, they all tend to share a preoccupation
with the need for women to conform to Islamically prescribed norms
(however these may be defined) of ‘modest’ behaviour and appearance.53
Traditional maternal and domestic roles are usually valorized as well; if, due
to economic or other exigencies of modern life, women must also assume
51
As Syed Jalaluddin Umari, a founding member of the AIMPLB and Vice-President of the JIH,
remarked, ‘The Imrana case was very bad but such things [incest and rape] also happen among Hindus.
The media is biased. If something happens, one case, they make a big hullaballoo about it. One Hindu
journalist said to me, “then you should make your views known in the media’. I said “how? The media
are in your hands!”’ (Interview, 25 October 2005).
52
This was at work also in the nationalist discourse on women’s education and reform that was directed
largely at a redefinition of Hindu tradition (see Chatterjee 1990).
53
I do not mean to suggest that men in these movements are not also expected to adhere to norms
of proper Islamic behaviour but I am specifically concerned here with the way these movements
construct the ideal Muslim woman.
other roles, their priorities are supposed to remain with home and family.
Islamist women’s movements also strongly emphasize the importance of
self-disciplining the mind and body through regular prayer, the study of
the Qur’an and other religious texts and the conscious emulation of ideal
feminine models from the Islamic past.54
In these respects,‘Islamist’ women,‘less concerned with the advancement
of women’s rights than with the advancement of Islamization’ seem to have
little in common with the Islamic feminist activists whose ideas and work
I have discussed here (Moghadam 2004: 53). That is not to say the some
of the individuals involved in women’s rights activism may not also hold
‘Islamist’ views and be engaged in promoting these (for themselves and
others) in their personal capacities or as members of religious organizations
that share such an orientation. But the Muslim women’s rights ‘movement’,
per se, is not concerned with identifying or enforcing particular standards of
dress or deportment, teaching women how to become better Muslims or
encouraging them to pray more regularly. Its leaders are indeed outspokenly
critical of—and, as I have mentioned above, have at times have publicly
protested against—reformers’ attempts to control women’s behaviour.
Although I never heard it explicitly verbalized in this way, their attitude
seems to reflect a conception of religion that is very far from that of the
Islamists, one that sees religious faith and modes of observance as private
matters, to be negotiated by each individual between herself and God.
Notwithstanding my assertion that a considerable gap exists between
Muslim women’s rights activists and Islamist women in India and elsewhere,
there are recent indications that even the women’s wing of the Indian
branch of the Jama’at-e-Islami may be moving in an incipiently Islamic
feminist direction on issues of Muslim marriage, family life and personal
law. Whereas in 1998, 75,000 JIH women gathered in Kerala to discuss
girls education, the right to worship in mosques, abolition of dowry and
‘protecting the right to live with modesty and dignity’,55 at a February
2006 meeting of the same organization in Hyderabad, attended by 30,000
people from around the country, women’s legal rights were prominently
54
See Mahmood’s (2005) description of a women’s piety movement in Cairo and, for some South Asian
examples, see Metcalf (1999); Shehabuddin (1999); and essays by Maimuna Huq (Chapter 11) and
Shehabuddin (Chapter 16) this volume.
55
‘Reformist Drive Spreads among Muslim Women in Kerala,’ Rediff on the Net, 13 June 1998, http://
www.rediff.com/news/1998/jun/13muslim.htm, accessed 1 May 2012.
highlighted and the state chief of the JIH women’s wing, Nasira Khanum,
was quoted as saying,
Islam advocates protection of women rights [sic] but men-

dominated society hides the facts. Women themselves should
know about their rights and learn to snatch them if denied! (The
Hindu 2006; The Times of India 2006)
Whether this meeting really heralds a new direction for the JIH remains
to be seen but it is certainly an encouraging sign when the leader of a
religiously orthodox Islamist mass organization of this kind essentially echoes
what the leaders of so many much smaller organizations with longstanding
and serious commitments to the pursuit of feminist goals, have been striving
for two decades to communicate to the Muslim clerical establishment and
the Muslim community at large.
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14
Disputing Contraception
Muslim Reform, Secular Change and Fertility
Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey
D uring our first research in Jhakri, an exclusively Muslim village in

Bijnor district (north-western Uttar Pradesh), the sterilization drive
associated with the Emergency of 1975–77 was a recent memory. Our
field-notes, then and subsequently, have repeatedly registered the conviction
that using contraceptive techniques, especially sterilization [nasbandƯ or
‘tube closing’], is contrary to Islam.1 Recent surveys elsewhere in India
indicate that 9 per cent of currently-married Muslim women—but only
1 per cent of Hindu and Christian women—say that their main reason for
1
This essay draws primarily on our research in Jhakri in 2002–05 funded by Wellcome Trust (GR067231)
but also on research elsewhere in Bijnor district on education (including madrasahs) with Craig Jeffrey
in 2000 funded by Economic and Social Research Council (R000238495), Ford Foundation and Royal
Geographical Society. We have used the present tense to refer to our material from this period. Earlier
research in Bijnor district was funded by Economic and Social Research Council in 1982–1983, 1985
(G00230027 and G00232238) and Hayter Fund; in 1990–1991 by Overseas Development Administration
and Rockefeller Foundation. We thank them for their support; none bears any responsibility for what
we have written here. We also thank the people of our study villages and our research assistants, Swaleha
Begum, Zarin Rais, the late Radha Rani Sharma, Chhaya Sharma, Shaila Rais, and Manjula Sharma.
Our thanks also to Filippo and Caroline Osella, participants at the Muslim Reform workshop in SOAS
in 2005, and Sanjam Ahluwalia, Guy Attewell, Rachel Berger, Markus Daechsel, Joyce Flueckiger, Sarah
Hodges, Laura Jeffery, Justin Jones, Fareeha Khan, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Adil Mehdi, Barbara Metcalf,
Gail Minault, Dietrich Reetz, Barbara Ramusack, Francis Robinson, Yoginder Sikand, Mrinalini Sinha,
Muhammad Qasim Zaman. For more details on our Bijnor research, see Jeffery and Jeffery (1996); Jeffery
et al. (1989); Jeffery and Jeffery (1997).
not intending to use contraception is because it is ‘against their religion’.

For Bhat and Zavier (2005: 400), these figures reflect Muslims’ slavish
obedience to ignorant mullahs and account for most of the differences
in contraceptive use between members of the three communities. Islamic
doctrines are widely presumed to be central to Muslims’ everyday lives.
Superficially, Jhakri residents might seem to endorse this rarely examined or
substantiated assumption, but leaving matters there would fall far short of
adequately accounting for their fertility behaviour.
First we outline how several aspects of Muslim reformers’ agendas
might seem consistent with fertility limitation, yet the historical record
provides no clear impression of their views on contraception. Further, the
idea that Muslims slavishly follow a monolithic ‘Islamic doctrine’ ignores
the contested and shifting understandings of contraception yielded by the
same authoritative Islamic sources. With this backdrop, we outline how
most women in Jhakri assert that sterilization is contrary to Islam—yet
almost in the same breath also complain about poverty and their inability
to rear and educate numerous children properly. Moreover, whilst teachers
at village madrasahs and senior clerics at the influential Daru’l ‘Ulu- m
seminary at Deoband generally take a restrictive view of contraception,
Muslim villagers who oppose contraception (especially sterilization) take
a harder line still. We argue that we must situate the fertility behaviour of
rural Muslims in north India in the wider social, political and economic
contexts within which they are struggling to make their way in the world—
the standard demographic practice for people of other faith communities.
‘Islamic doctrine’ and clerical pronouncements alone provide a poor basis
for interpreting Muslims’ fertility behaviour in contemporary India.
Muslim Reform and Contraception

Muslim reformers in South Asia have long debated what Islamic doctrine
decrees for its adherents and what practices constitute un-Islamic accretions.
A succinct account is virtually impossible, for the debates were often heated
and the conclusions reached were diverse (Metcalf 1982; Reetz 2006;
Robinson 2001; Sanyal 1996). One recurrent theme, however, is individual
responsibility for salvation, which can be ensured through the performance
of good actions in this world. Thus Muslim reformers have exhorted
ordinary Muslims to learn what is required and to ‘rationalise’ their everyday
behaviour (Daechsel 2004; Metcalf 1984, 1993, 1994b, 1996, 2004; Zaman
1999). For reformers, education was key to eradicating the ‘backwardness’
Disputing Contraception / 385
to which many élite Muslims considered their brethren were prone (Seth
2006). And, whether with respect to bodily discipline, manners, clothing
and speech, moral purification and domestic cleanliness, or living according
to a strict daily schedule, women as homemakers, wives and mothers are
central in Muslim reform agendas (Daechsel 2006; P. Jeffery et al. 2004,
2005, 2006, 2012; Metcalf 1990, 1994a, 1999; Minault 1998; Winkelmann
2005a, 2005b). TablighƯ writers are not alone in seeing this ‘inner struggle to
discipline and moral purification’ as the greater jiha-d (Metcalf 2004: 274).2
These efforts, moreover, strikingly parallel the class projects of non-Muslim
reformers attempting to ‘gentrify’ poor illiterates by purging their ignorant
habits; the view that education was the means of achieving this; and educated
women’s responsibility to create domestic orderliness and rear children for
whom bodily discipline and ‘civility’ were second-nature (Gooptu 2001;
Gupta 1998, 2002; Joshi 2001; Walsh 2004).
At the very least, contraception might seem to have an elective affinity
for the reform agenda and ‘rationalized’ everyday life, especially as Muslim
reformists’ disciplining regimes did not include sexual abstinence within
marriage. Szreter et al. (2003: 145) characterise a demographic orthodoxy
in which ‘the planning of families is somehow umbilically tied to the
modernization of society’ and widespread contraceptive usage occurs only
when people’s lives approximate to ‘modernity’. Before that, people tend
to say that conception is ‘up to God’ or a matter of ‘fate’, something that is
not (and should not be) subject to human intervention. With ‘modernity’,
people’s views and behaviour shift from fatalism to imagining the possibility
of family planning. And what demographers generally see as quintessential
trademarks of ‘modernity’—disciplined bodies, regulated domestic life and
so forth—find their echoes in Muslim reform.Would not the good Muslim
life be more attainable if women’s devotion to domestic and religious
duties, attention to their children’s educational progress, and investment in
their children’s education and well-being are not undermined by repeated
childbearing? Rather surprisingly, however, Muslim reformers do not seem
to have recommended fertility limitation or birth spacing. Historians of
Muslim reform in the late colonial period rarely even mention contraception,
whilst historians working on contraceptive debates have generally not
examined documents written by Muslim reformists.Yet, we would contend,
2
TablighƯ Jamaàt is a Deoband-inspired proselytising movement to apprise Muslims of their core
religious duties. See Metcalf (1993; 1996; 1999); Sikand (2002).
viewing Muslim reform in South Asia through the lens of contraception

would give new leverage over our puzzles in this essay.
The Qur’a-n SharƯf contains no more than implicit discussion of
contraception and hadƯs do not provide a consistent view. In the pre-modern
period, judgements were reached through ijtiha-d [interpretive thinking] by
religious experts, based on ijma- [consensus] and qiya-s [analogical reasoning].
Human fallibility in interpreting God’s will provided scope for legitimate
disagreement and for reaching different conclusions in good faith. Over
time, schools of jurisprudence and individual Muslim scholars reached
differing conclusions about contraception (Omran 1992; Sachedina
1990). Yet the main schools of jurisprudence all considered contraception
permissible, if sometimes blameworthy and disapproved [makru-h]. A person’s
motives [nƯyat] are crucial for gauging the permissibility of their actions
(Katz 2003: 43, 45): conflicting yet apparently inviolable principles required
compromises and ‘necessity’ could be the trump card (Bowen 2003: 57).
Musallam’s (1983) survey of legal, medical and erotic literatures in
Muslim west Asia up to the nineteenth century lists suppositories, ointments,
coitus interruptus or ‘azl, but not surgical contraceptive techniques. As
Musallam comments, this presumes neither efficacy nor widespread use of
contraceptive techniques.3 Nevertheless, Muslim reformers in nineteenth
and twentieth century South Asia had access to an array of textual materials
discussing contraception, some of which featured in yu-na-n-Ư tibb curricula in
South Asia (Zillurrahman 1994).4 But were they taught in full (and why, then,
is the secondary literature so silent about them)? Or had they been abridged
to exclude references to contraception (and if so why)? Or had they been
bypassed by reformers intent on returning to (supposedly) authenticated
texts dating from an earlier period than the material Musallam cites?
Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (1864–1943), for instance, is renowned
within the South Asian reform literature because of his advice manual
BihishtƯ Zewar (Metcalf 1990). He did not discuss contraception there, but
in a collection of fatwa he said that the use of contraception is permissible
only if there is a ‘legitimate excuse’ [‘uzr sahih], as when a woman is
weakened by repeated childbearing.5 Although the ‘legitimate excuse’ gives
3
Musallam also notes that attributing agency to people in pre-modern Islamic societies challenges the
modernist demographic orthodoxy that presumes pre-modern fatalism.
4
Also, Guy Attewell, personal communication, 7 June 2006.
5
We thank Fareeha Khan for this reference (Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s fatwa collection, Imdad
some interpretive flexibility, he considers that contraception is generally not

permissible—in other words, hardly an enthusiastic endorsement.
On the other hand, as Islam moved towards increasingly narrow views
of the shari’a as invariant and exact, new artefacts and ideas considered
of Western origin could be deemed unacceptable, because they were not
legitimized by the sharià and other authoritative texts (Zaman 2002).6
Hostility to contraception might reflect that change.7 Certainly, Muslim
clerics, among many others in South Asia, often perceived aspects of
contemporary Western gender politics—such as women’s entry into paid
employment—as profoundly immoral. For Syed Abul A‘la- Maudu-dƯ (1903–
79), contraception and freely available abortion were a Western plot to
spawn sexual promiscuity and social disorder in which Women’s focus on
domestic duties would be undermined (Maudu-dƯ 1968 [1937]; Maudu-dƯ
1972 [1939]); both originally published in Urdu).8
The arithmetic of communal politics in colonial India and Muslim
anxiety about minority status could also mesh with hostility to contraception.9
By the 1920s, a ‘common wisdom’ about Muslim fertility was already in
play (Jeffery and Jeffery 2006). Proto-Hindutva writers insistently made
shrill claims that Hindus would soon be outnumbered by Muslims (see
Cohn 1987; Datta 1999; Gupta 2002). It would be puzzling if Muslim
reformers made no equally vociferous replies: in other debates, Muslim
élites intervened on the representation of different religious communities in
public bodies, trying to preserve or restore their earlier over-representation;
Muslim theologians also resisted shuddhƯ campaigns [‘purification’, or ‘re-
conversions’ to Hinduism] (Dietrich Reetz, personal communication, 11
May 2006; cf. Reetz 2006: 148–51).10
al-fatawa (Dar ul-Uloom Karachi 6-volume edition,Volume 4, pp. 202–205) (personal communication,
24 May 2006).
6
Messick (1993: 34) discusses a similar shift in Yemen towards more rigid and codified versions of the
shari’a under the modernizing pressures of colonizing powers. By contrast, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
and colleagues involved in the Aligarh movement were generally positively inclined towards Western
science and technology, although the secondary literature does not discuss contraception: Ahmad (1967:
31–56); Lelyveld (1978).
7
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, personal communication, 22 May 2006.
8
Although not a trained ‘ulama, Maudud - Ư was central in Jama’at-e Islami and his writings have had
widespread influence: Ahmad (1967: 208–23); Bowen (2003); Karim (2005: 50ff); Mahmood (1977:
107–27); Nasr (1994).
9
Justin Jones, personal communication, 27 May 2006.
10
Western licentiousness and concerns about ‘numbers’ also figure on the global stage: at the 1994 UN
International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, some Muslim delegates (and
The ‘rationalizing’ tendencies of Muslim reform—domestic order and

cleanliness—might have pointed towards contraception. Conversely, horror
at Western immorality or the communal numbers game might have pushed
in another direction. Quite probably, Muslim élites in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries adopted diverse positions on the subject.11 The
relative silence of the historical record is intriguing, though, given how
politically contentious contraception is in India today. In the contemporary
period, few Muslim clerics have advocated family planning and Khan (1979:
184–91) suggests that sterilization is not actively endorsed by any school of
Islamic jurisprudence.Yet there are diverse views about when contraception
may be permissible.
For instance, the late Qadi Mujahid al-Islam Qasimi (once chief qa-zƯ of
the Muslim Personal Law Board in Bihar and Orissa and executive member
of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board) asserted that contraception is
not normally permissible. It should be adopted only under very stringent
conditions, including the mother’s health and spacing children so that they
could be reared properly, but excluding women’s professional or social
concerns and fear of being unable to feed one’s children. Sterilization is
almost always forbidden, because it ‘destroys the power of reproduction’
and ‘renders a woman incapable of conceiving’ (Qasimi 2003–04). Shaykh
Faraz Rabbani, a Deobandi sympathizer of South Asian descent who works
in Amman, argues that having children is important in Islam, but also that
modern kinds of contraception are akin to ‘azl [coitus interruptus].They may
be used if there are ‘sound reasons’—including wanting a manageable family
size, lacking support of extended families in childrearing, wanting to give
children the attention, education, and support they need in difficult times,
genuine health reasons, etc., all providing that the spouses agree: a broader set
of conditions than those specified by Qasimi (Rabbani 2005). Like Qasimi,
Rabbani excludes sterilization, but ‘because of the general impermissibility
others from the global south), saw abortion, in particular, as a threat to morality and a means by which
Western governments and development agencies were trying to limit Muslim populations: Bowen
(1997); Katz (2003); McIntosh and Finkle (1995); Petchesky (1995).
11
Sanjam Ahluwalia, personal communication 20 May 2006. Contraceptive debates touched on many
other issues: eugenics and ‘racial’ decline, age of consent, child marriage, gender politics, reproductive
health, and the furore generated by the publication of Mother India; see Hodges (2006); Mayo (1998);
Ramusack (2006); Sinha (1998); Whitehead (1996).
of “changing” the human body’, noting that this opinion derives from the
same texts that render cosmetic surgery generally impermissible.12
Mahmood’s (1977) starkly contrasting argument is an extended critique
of Maudu-dƯ and clerics adopting a similar stance.13 A verse in Sura 17 in the
Qur’a-n SharƯf [Ba-nƯ Isra-Ưl or Children of Israel] commands Muslims not to
slay their children out of fear of want: infanticide is a great sin and Allah will
provide for all. Some readings equate contraception with killing the unborn
children whom Allah has written into one’s fate. Mahmood contends
that Muslims should interpret the Qur’a-n SharƯf in light of contemporary
concerns: this verse, he insists, forbids murder (not contraception) and ‘azl
should include all pre-conception contraceptive techniques.14 People’s
livelihoods are divine gifts that require effort, not idle submission to nature.
Contrary to Maudu-dƯ, contraception is not a Western imposition and it is
better to rear small numbers of ‘good Muslims’ than numerous ill-kempt
children. Mahmood also discusses several prominent Indian Muslims—
clerics, lawyers, politicians—who advocated family planning and saw no
contradictions with Islamic precepts, including Maulana Azad and Dr Zakir
Husain (ibid.: 70ff). Similarly, Asghar Ali Engineer considers that Muslims
should subject contraception to the same searching interrogation or ijtiha-d
(interpretative thinking) that enables them to respond to any social change.
He defines ‘azl as contraception in general, rather than coitus interruptus, and
concludes that contraception is usually permissible (Engineer 2005: 98–110).
Advocating contraception, however, is extremely controversial, as witness
the spat between leading figures in the All-India Muslim Personal Law
Board. In late 2004, Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, vice-president of the AIMPLB
made a statement in favour of family planning: he was roundly contradicted
by Sayyid Muhammad Rabe Hasani Nadvi, the AIMPLB President, and
contributors to the subsequent debate in the Urdu newspaper Rashtriya
Sahara (Sikand 2005a). Sadiq re-entered the fray by insisting that Islam
requires Muslims to be ‘rational’ and that family planning is not contrary to
Islamic principles (The Times of India, 4 December 2005).
12
We thank Fareeha Khan for these references. When she asked Rabbani to clarify his position, he
replied: ‘The opinion I gave is more liberal than the Deobandi position (classical and contemporary),
but is more representative of (a) Arab Hanafi scholarship; (b) what the texts seem to state; (c) what I
feel is closer to the needs and circumstances of people’ (Fareeha Khan, personal communication, 25
May 2006).
13
Tahir Mahmood is an academic lawyer and one-time Chairman of India’s National Commission for
Minorities.
14
Likewise, Dawood considers that this injunction refers only to the pre-Islamic practice of female
infanticide (Dawood 1968: 231).
In other words, the same theological sources can lead to diametrically

opposed conclusions about the permissibility of contraception in Islam. But
how do these matters play out on the ground?
The Bijnor Context

Bijnor district in north-western Uttar Pradesh rates relatively highly on
most economic indicators, but its social indicators—such as literacy—are
more modest: it ranked 57th of the 63 districts in UP (Singh 2001: Table
VIII.3), with a literacy rate of 47 per cent for females over 7 and of 70
per cent for males (Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India
2002).15 Literacy levels in rural areas and amongst the poor are generally
lower than the aggregate figures.
At nearly 42 per cent of the total, the district’s Muslim population
is unusually sizeable (comprising about a third of the district’s rural
population and over two thirds of its urban population) (Registrar General
and Census Commissioner of India 2004). Some villages have exclusively
Hindu or Muslim populations, others are mixed. Jhakri, for instance, has
an all-Muslim population (of 663 in 2002). Muslims are underrepresented
in formal schooling in Bijnor district (Jeffery and Jeffery 2006; Jeffery
et al. 2007; R. Jeffery et al. 2005), and, as elsewhere in UP, Muslims in Bijnor
district have lower literacy rates than the aggregate figures and they are
disproportionately concentrated towards the bottom of the urban and rural
economic hierarchies (Ali and Sikand 2006; Khalidi 2006; Sachar 2006;
Shariff 1995). Moreover, Muslims are not as politically influential in Bijnor
district as their numbers might suggest (Jeffery and Jeffery 2006: 13ff).
The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the district are Sunni.There
is a negligible presence of Barelwis.The Daru’l ‘Ulu-m seminary in Deoband,
in neighbouring Saharanpur district, exercises a decisive influence: the long-
standing vice-chancellor who died in 2010 was from a prominent family
in Bijnor town and there are many links between Bijnor district and the
seminary. Local madrasahs have direct links to Deoband: inspections by
Deoband staff, despatching some senior pupils there to study, or recruiting
teaching staff [maulwƯs] from Deoband itself or from other madrasahs within
its ambit. At the time of our research in 2002-05, for instance, the ima-m
15
At the time of writing, data from the 2011 Census were not yet available.
in Jhakri ran a small madrasah: he had studied at the Maza-hir-i ‘Ulu-m in

Saharanpur, an offshoot of Daru’l ‘Ulu-m. Many maulwƯs originated from
Bijnor district itself, some from relatively poor urban backgrounds, others
from rural households (usually ones owning small amounts of land). A few
were from impoverished families in places such as eastern UP and Bihar
and had studied in boarding madrasahs since childhood. Like the Muslim
villagers we talked to, the maulwƯs were convinced that Muslim ambitions
in the wider world are routinely thwarted. Most could not have afforded
to obtain high educational qualifications in the Hindi-medium schooling
system: the madrasah sector had provided a cheap or even free route to
respectable—though rarely lucrative—employment that they believe would
otherwise have eluded them.16 The numbers of rural girls and boys attending
local madrasahs have risen substantially since the early 1990s, although most
children have ceased attending by the age of 12 or so. In Begawala, about a
kilometre from Jhakri, pupil numbers exceeded 1000 in the early 2000s, and
several smaller madrasahs served other nearby villages.
MaulwƯs play a conspicuous role in the ‘civilizing mission’ with respect
to their pupils—bodily cleanliness, refined speech and punctuality, so
familiar from accounts of reform movements in north India (cf. P. Jeffery
et al. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011). Madrasah curricula do not explicitly address
family planning. Some maulwƯs, however, are also ima-ms in village mosques,
and are often asked to answer moral problems. Further, the TablighƯ Jamaàt
was hardly a presence in rural Bijnor until the early 1990s: in the early
2000s, though, tablighƯ parties made periodic tours to villages—including
Jhakri—and adult Muslim villagers have increasingly been exposed to their
instruction.
Nevertheless, despite the increased reach of such educational activities,
few adults in Jhakri can read Urdu or Hindi with facility, let alone Arabic.
And, aside from creating problems for accessing employment, low literacy
compromises the reform agenda, which rests so heavily on individual self-
improvement. So what is the relationship between Islamic teachings and
fertility behaviour? How do Jhakri residents’ views on contraception relate
to all this clerical outreach?
One commentary on the demographic transition notes that
contraceptive behaviour at the grassroots has often been conspicuously
16
For a more general account of madrasahs in contemporary India, see Sikand (2005b).
adrift from élite debates (Szreter et al. 2003). Further, Obermeyer (1994: 71)
argues that ‘we do not clearly understand … how changes in ideology affect
the choices women make—or do not make—and how alternatives are
translated into the behaviours of individual women’. The case of Taranam
and Talib provides a vista from which to begin exploring these questions.17
Talib and Taranam

Talib’s 0.16 hectares of land provided little income, and the household
basically relied upon his wood-trading business. He was earning around Rs
6,000–7,000 each month, a good sum for an uneducated village man. In
the first nine years of their marriage, Taranam had had eight conceptions,
including three miscarriages. In 1998, her eighth pregnancy resulted in
obstructed labour: she was taken to hospital, where Talib instructed the
doctor to sterilise her—and the girl born by caesarean section survived only
a few hours. The medical costs had amounted to Rs 16,000.
When we first asked Taranam about the nasbandƯ [sterilization], her
response seemed surprisingly casual:‘If it is forbidden, what then? My health
was bad and the doctor was saying there was no chance that I’d survive
another delivery. My health in general was bad and when I became pregnant
I had a cough and fever. And I’d also had several miscarriages.’ Yet when we
met them both later, a much more complex picture emerged. Shaila and
Patricia were talking to Taranam and to Talib’s married niece [eBD] about
family planning when Talib came in and sat down beside Taranam.18 He
immediately joined in the conversation. According to Talib, most villagers
are boorish [gawa-r] and illiterate people [ja-hil log], who believe that having
more children will generate more income:
Talib: But that’s not true. Earnings are getting less and the eaters
are becoming more.You’ve heard about my niece’s children. One
is ‘making beards’ [barbering], another is riding a rickshaw and
another is ‘digging grass’ [doing nothing useful]. If there were
fewer children, they wouldn’t be doing this useless work. …
17
We use pseudonyms throughout this essay; people who figure in our earlier publications have their
original pseudonyms. All quotations have been translated by Patricia Jeffery.
18
This discussion was in February 2003. Shaila took detailed notes at the time, wrote up in Hindi, and
Patricia translated them into English.This abridged account excludes our discussion of the importance
of having children (especially sons), a significant influence on family planning decisions that often
arose in discussions in Jhakri, along with the financial troubles generated by emergency medical care.
How will a mazdu-r [labourer] feed 10-12 children? People here

don’t think that chhota- pariva-r sukha- pariva-r hoga- [‘a small family
will be a contented family’, the Indian family planning slogan].
Patricia: But people in the village say that children are Allah’s gift
[Allah kƯ den] and that they shouldn’t stop them coming.
Talib burst out laughing: Children aren’t Allah’s gift! People are
saying incorrect things! They [children] are a man’s gift [a-dmƯ kƯ
den] and if a person wishes, then he won’t make any children.19
However many children he wishes, those he can make. If there
are few children, then you can do everything. But villagers don’t
think of this comfort. Bas, they close their eyes and keep on
making children and don’t do anything else!
Being sterilized is a great sin, Talib continued, because it is not permitted

according to hadis: when a sterilized woman dies, he asserted, her funeral
prayers cannot be said and she will not be blessed when she goes ‘above’.
We asked what would happen to Taranam, since Talib had agreed to her
sterilization whilst she was under an anaesthetic. Taranam said she would
not have agreed if she had been conscious and Talib butted in to say that
Taranam had done nothing wrong and the sin would all rest on him.
Nevertheless, he insisted, it was the correct decision for them.They had few
children and were living peacefully:
I’m thankful to Allah that we’re living very well, the children and
the two of us. Whatever the children need, I bring immediately.
If the children have asked for Rs 50 shoes, then I’ll bring them
and they’ll last for 6 months and then I bring some more. And
if I had 10–12 children, I’d be bringing shoes for Rs 2–4 that
break the very moment they arrive at the house! So having few
children gives this benefit.
In any case, the doctor told him that any future children would have to be
delivered by ‘operation’ [caesarean section]:
I thought that her [Taranam’s] health would be damaged and

where would I get so much money from? I thought, today I have
Although a-dmƯ also means a ‘person’ unmarked by gender, we have translated it as ‘man’ since this
19
accords with Talib’s meaning here.

Rs 16,000, but tomorrow if I don’t, then she’ll die. That’s why I

agreed to the [nasbandƯ] operation.
Certainly, he admitted, other people in the village had criticized him for the
decision, but his riposte was robust:
Why should I listen to what anyone says? I have to bring the

children up and if she [Taranam] were to die like Razia did, what
would happen to my house? … Women don’t understand that
this [childbirth] is women’s death. Just look at Razia. She herself
died in giving birth. And behind her, her children are worried
and her husband is also worried. She’d had 11–12 children and
there was no life in her body. She’d become weak.There’s a great
advantage in having few children. Razia from my village died
because of poverty. There were only the women of the house
beside her and they had called a da-Ư [traditional birth attendant].
But if they had taken Razia to town sooner, then she, bicha-r Ư
[poor thing], wouldn’t have died.
Taranam, however, was not convinced by Talib’s argument: people who are
sterilized have made a calculation, she said:
sterilization is correct for this world but not correct for that
world. In that world, we shall have to answer questions about
why we closed off having children. … Razia saw nothing of this
world, but she’ll be very happy in that world. She’ll be in paradise
[jannat].
Shaila was startled: Razia will be in jannat, but where will her
children be?
Taranam:You and we are just sinners thinking that. This world is
only for a short time, so what is there to think about it?
Patricia: But don’t people have to think about it a bit?
Talib:That’s right.You have to think about this world.You should
also think about what will happen to your children after you’re
gone. Allah Miya-n has also sent us to this world to live a good life
here. So, bhai, we also think about this world.
Taranam: I think about that world and you are all thinking about
this world.
Shaila: Which thinking is more correct?

Taranam: Look, ji, you should think about both worlds. But after
you die, what will happen? You should think of that first of all.
Like you’re writing: if there’s some mistake in what you’re writing,
then you ask again. You correct your error. Our calculation is
in the same manner, that Allah is writing everything up above
and if we’ve done anything wrong, then he’ll ask why we’ve
done this wrong thing. So that’s why we think about that world
more. When a child does something wrong, then its mother will
punish it. Allah’s calculation is like that too. If we do anything
wrong, Allah will certainly punish us.
Talib: But Allah also looks at necessity [majbu-r Ư ]. If someone’s
throat is being cut and if their life can be saved by our telling one
lie, then Allah will forgive that lie. And if we’ve just lied for no
reason, that won’t be forgiven.
Taranam: Everything is calculated in Allah’s house and sinful
people will go to hell [doza-q] and women like Razia will go to
paradise [jannat]. That poor thing finished off her life, and she’s
become ‘beloved of Allah’ [because he summoned her].
Talib: She has become ‘beloved of Allah’ but she’s left her children
behind crying.
Ambiguities of Village Voices

Talib and Taranam’s concerns parallel ones that have echoed through our
conversations about childbearing over two decades in Jhakri and in rural
Bijnor more generally: the impossibility of rearing numerous children
properly, and the damage to women’s health of repeated childbearing, fears
about maternal mortality, the costs of medical interventions in childbearing
(Jeffery and Jeffery 2008)—for Muslims, all jostling with anxieties about
what counts as ‘necessity’ and how behaviour in this world affects a person’s
destiny in the afterlife.
Razia’s death in childbirth in 2002 provided a focal point to which
women’s thoughts repeatedly returned (Jeffery and Jeffery 2010). One day
in 2003, Mehmuna, with seven living children from 10 pregnancies, told us:
My spirit is filled up [‘fed up’] with children. I have lots of

distress [giving birth] and now I’m also becoming afraid in case
some other ailment comes up. Recently, Razia died. Just half
of her child’s arm had appeared outside. She had a great deal
of trouble and the poor thing died. That’s why I’m very fearful.
… Thinking about Razia, I become very sad, because the poor
thing never saw any of the celebrations for her children [their
marriages, the birth of their children]. In giving birth to that
child, she must be ‘beloved of Allah’, poor thing.
Her neighbour Nargis chipped in scornfully:
Women here don’t think about whether they’ll live or die. They
just need children, no matter what happens. Razia died and even
so the women haven’t learnt a lesson [sabaq].
One young woman complained disgustedly about the short gaps

between her children [‘sab tale-u-par ke hain’: they were all born pell-mell).
Another mentioned her sister, who was pregnant again, yet her oldest
daughter was already due to be married:
Her husband is like a maula-na-.20 That’s why there’s a paltan

[platoon] of children in the house! I don’t like having many
children. It’s not within my capacity to bring up many children.
Yet another expressed her views like this:
Everyone in the village has 8–10 children. They have to do all

the work for them. With ten children, if you wash the face of
one, another remains dirty. If you wash the second one’s face, the
third one remains dirty. With so many children, there is a lot of
food to be cooked, there are lots of clothes to be washed and the
house will also be dirty all the time. … There’s no benefit at all
from 10–12 children.
And, during her 12th pregnancy, another woman delivered this spirited
commentary:
Here they get people married at 14–15 years and then you have
‘vile hardship’ [a-fat gandƯ ho ja-]. There are 10–10, 12–12 children.
Maula-na- literally means a judge, but is widely used in a derogative or derisory fashion to denote
20
someone who is excessively pious and strict.

You can neither look after yourself nor the children. You can’t
flourish. Just as you’ve cared for one, another is born. The ‘vile
hardship’ continues. How can a person flourish?
Several women begged Allah to prevent further pregnancies [band kara--de]

or talked about intending to make some ‘arrangements’ or said they had
‘caught hold of their ears’ [vowed not to have another child]. Yet women’s
comments about excessive childbearing and childrearing have not translated
into high levels of contraceptive use, which had risen from around 1 per cent
in the 1980s to around 6 per cent by the late 1990s.21 Jhakri women rarely
adopted ‘modern’ contraceptive methods and sterilization, in particular,
remains very uncommon—aside from Taranam, just two Jhakri women
were sterilized during the 1990s.22
One was Najma, who had nine pregnancies but only four surviving
children. By 1990, her supportive mother-in-law had died, an eye injury
had badly affected her eyesight and she was in poor general health. She
had nasbandƯ ‘just because I was angry’. Nevertheless, she had to endure
the scorn of neighbours and relatives (Jeffery and Jeffery 1996: 53–68). In
2003, Najma claimed that some women nowadays are being sterilised ‘chup
ke se’ [secretly]. Shaila asked if this was not pointless, since Allah knows
everything. Najma’s sister’s daughter Mehmuna agreed, saying that women
seemed more afraid of people than of Allah. And she confirmed that her
mother had indeed been angry with Najma, because ‘nasbandƯ is considered
bad’, ‘there will not be any forgiveness [bakhshish] and her funeral prayers
will not be recited.’ Najma retorted ‘what would I have done with so many
children? If there had been more children, there would have been nothing
to eat and nothing to wear!’ Mehmuna agreed:
There’s no benefit in having many children. Nowadays it’s said

that ‘a small family is a contented family and a large family is
troubled’. … If there’s a small family, there will be less dukh-
taklƯf [misery-distress]. … With a small family, there’s money in
the hand and good food and drink. In a small family, there is
complete peace.
21
This was significantly lower than for comparable Hindus in neighbouring Dharmnagri.
22
A few women reported attempting abortions (generally by oral medication), not always successfully.
Despite endorsing small families, however, Mehmuna then provided an

elaborate account of the sinfulness of being sterilized:
One time some village woman went on hajj. … Afterwards, a

voice comes from above to say if the hajj has been accepted or
not.This time, the voice said that the hajj hadn’t been accepted. …
The hajj of all the people there wasn’t accepted. So then they all
started saying that their pilgrimage hadn’t been accepted because
of someone amongst them and everyone was searched.Then one
woman was found who had done nasbandƯ and everyone said that
their hajj hadn’t taken place because of this woman. So someone
told that woman to go and lick a large stone there with her
tongue. That woman went and licked the stone and three grubs
emerged from her tongue. And everyone said that these grubs are
the souls of three children. If she hadn’t had the operation done,
she’d have had three more children. So this woman had killed
three children and that was why the hajj didn’t take place.
A few women said all contraception is against Islam. More often, though,
Jhakri women said only sterilization is forbidden and that other methods—
pills, injections, IUCDs—are permitted. Jamila, for instance, had used
‘Mala-D’ oral contraceptives and was using a Copper-T [IUCD] at the time
of our research.23 She had eight living children. In large families, she argued,
the plight of the youngest children is bleak, especially once the parents have
died, because no one (including their older siblings) would look after them
properly:
But we’re Muslims and that’s why we couldn’t do nasbandƯ. …

You’ll know that when someone has nasbandƯ, the funeral prayers
can’t be said. Hindus have one or two children and then have
nasbandƯ. They educate those two children properly, and feed
them well. But with us, this thing is completely forbidden and
that’s why there are many children. … But just see, we have no
matlab [interest] in this world. We shouldn’t be thinking about it.
… We are just like a guest in someone’s house: no matter how
23
For more on Jamila, see Jeffery and Jeffery (1996: 201–15). Many women in rural Bijnor believe that
Mala-D causes garmƯ [‘heat’, in the humoral sense] in a woman’s head, and that the Copper-T is liable
to rise up into a woman’s abdomen or chest.
long guests stay in your house, one day they’ll have to go to their
own homes. … Life here is only for a few days. At the very most
it will be 100 years. … Then we have to show our faces to Allah.
In the next life, this life will seem like a dream.The life there will
be for eternity.
Just a handful of women thought otherwise. The third woman sterilized

during the 1990s was embarrassed to be pregnant when her oldest children
were already young adults. After a failed abortion attempt, she had nasbandƯ.
‘People say that their funeral prayers won’t be accepted,’ she said, ‘but really
it isn’t forbidden. There’s no prohibition. If you want to do it, you can. We
thought, “Allah will do just what he was going to do—but what would I do
being so embarrassed?”’ And when we commented to one young woman
that many people consider that sterilization is against Islam, she promptly
retorted:‘And if you’ve produced 10–12 children and you haven’t made even
one of them dƯn-da-r [religious], then what’s the benefit of 10–12 children?
That’s why, if there are 2–3 children you can look after them properly.’
Like Talib, then, many Jhakri women voiced opposition to large
families. But Talib’s ‘this-worldly’ calculations about providing adequate
food, clothes and education for his children led to his unusual decision
to permit Taranam’s nasbandƯ. And he was scornful about ja-hil [ignorant]
people unwilling to do likewise. But Taranam’s worries about ‘that world’
find their echoes in other women’s views of sterilization.
Authoritative Voices of Local Islam

During conversations with Muslim clerics in Bijnor town, its rural hinterland
and in Daru’l ‘Ulu-m in Deoband, we explained that village women often
lament the strain that childbearing puts on household budgets and their
own health, yet feared the consequences of using contraception. We asked
if contraception is always sinful or sometimes permissible, what happened
to people in the afterlife if they adopted contraception, and whether Allah
accepts the funeral prayers of the sterilized.
All the clerics said that Muslims should not normally limit their fertility.
Several referred us to Sura 17 in the Qur’a-n SharƯf (see above). The manager
of the Begawala madrasah explained it this way:
It’s like murder! Look, it’s completely forbidden, because the

person who gives us our daily bread [rizq] is Allah. It isn’t true
that those who have many children are poor and those who
have one or two children are rich, they are also very poor. I
could show you so many examples in the neighbouring villages
of people with 1-2 children who are poor. So whatever daily
income Alla-h-taà-la- has written, that much will be received. If
we kill our children because of fear of daily bread, this will be
very wrong, because Allah is the giver of daily bread.
People can beg forgiveness for a wrong of their own doing, he said, but
destroying something that God has made is unforgivable: ‘God gives breath
to humanity and later he takes it back to himself. So now you understand
this: humanity hasn’t made humanity and therefore humanity hasn’t been
given the right to kill it.’
Likewise, the senior MuftƯ at Deoband asserted:
It is written in Islam that however many children you have is a

matter of good fortune [khush nasƯbƯ]. However many descendants
are born will be correct [sava-b], because the master of our daily
bread is Allah, who made both you and me. … He alone feeds us
here and you as well. He nourishes the whole world. So what’s
the need to worry? Don’t destroy your offspring for fear of daily
bread. … If you don’t sow seeds, how will there be a crop? …
And if there are no children, how will the world flourish? People
are the world’s lustre.
Several clerics also linked contraception with unwelcome social changes.

In terms reminiscent of Maudu- dƯ, the Qa-zƯ in Bijnor town lamented that
people are freer now than previously and dissoluteness [a-va-ragƯ] has spread:
Ever since people took these precautions, society has taken the
wrong path. From that, religious faith has also gone wrong. And
from the society’s point of view, people do wrong because they
know nothing will happen since they have taken precautions.
Similarly, the Deoband MuftƯ denounced contemporary society: the

illegitimate children born because of people’s wrong-thinking [ghalat
soch], who will have the same faults as their parents, today’s men who just
need pleasure [lazzat] and bodily enjoyment [jisma-nƯ maza] and indulge
in relationships for which Islam has no place: ‘Behaving like that is a very
serious sin [sakht guna-h]. … Marriages have been laid down in the Shariat so
that … you will not think about some other man or woman.’
Several clerics, however, added a rider to their comments: family planning
would not be sinful in situations of majbu-rƯ [compulsion, helplessness, constraint,
powerlessness]. In real life, favouring one Islamic principle may necessarily
infringe another equally significant one. If people are majbu-r, contraception
can be permitted—when there are mitigating circumstances, Thanawi’s
‘legitimate excuse’ or Rabbani’s ‘sound reasons’. And precisely how majbu-rƯ
is delimited leaves some space for interpretative and behavioural flexibility.
The Deoband MuftƯ, for instance, gave several guidelines for judging when
contraception (including sterilization) is permissible:
Our Gracious Prophet says that children are God’s exceptionally

valuable [besh-qƯmatƯ] gifts. But for the sake of a woman’s health
or for some other majbu-rƯ it is better that a further child not
be born. … Many people come, saying that a doctor has told
them that there is a danger to life and so they should have the
operation. … I ask them to bring the written opinion of the
doctor, and when I see that I give permission.
In his view, however, straitened circumstances and food shortage, whether

actual or feared, could not justify contraceptive use. Yet, apparently
contradicting this, he said contraception would be permissible if the
government orders people to limit their fertility, and if a man would lose
his employment unless he or his wife is sterilized: ‘Because if he loses his
job, what will he eat, how will he look after his wife and children?’ If the
government tries to enforce the slogan ‘ham do, hama-re do’ [we two, our two],
Muslims should mobilise and try to delay it as much as possible. ‘But, if ham
do, hama-re do became compulsory [majbu-r],’ the MuftƯ continued, ‘Muslims
would have to obey the government. They can be sterilized if there is
majbu-rƯ, when there is no other remedy [cha-ra]. … Please understand that in
our Islam if something is understood as majbu-r, if there is majbu-rƯ, then things
that are not permitted can become permitted.’24 How, then, did the clerics
24
In 2008, the ifta department at Deoband issued a fatwa saying that it is permissible for Muslims to use
temporary contraceptives to space children and ensure that they are properly nourished. The fatwa
did not mention sterilization, and several press reports commented that Muslim clerics considered it
interpret villagers’ beliefs that funeral prayers cannot be recited for people
who have been sterilized? A maulwƯ at the Begawala madrasah commented:
Look, if there is majbu-rƯ and no option except the operation, then

in those circumstances the operation is allowed. And the funeral
prayers can certainly be recited, because people commit very
big sins and even so their funeral prayers are said. … Whether
the funeral prayers are acceptable or not, that has not been
written. In the Qur’a-n SharƯf it has been written that if there
is some necessity those things that are not permitted become
permitted—like the operation is not permitted. But if there is
some necessity, then that forbidden thing becomes permitted.
Similarly, the Deoband MuftƯ emphasized repentance and forgiveness

whilst contradicting the villagers’ beliefs:
It isn’t written anywhere in the Qur’a-n SharƯf that any man or

woman cannot have their funeral prayers recited if they have had
nasbandƯ. If someone has had nasbandƯ and they beg forgiveness it
will certainly be accepted. Bas, the Shariat states that before you
die, you should repent your sins [tauba karna-]. … But ignorance
spreads in the world. People who are ignorant say things about
funeral prayers being unacceptable. They have no knowledge
about whether it is true or not. They don’t have the learning
about this. So from ignorance these people say these topsy-turvy
things. Look, no maulwƯ or muftƯ, no-one who knows about
Islam, could have told them such things. People place their trust
in rumours [sunƯ-suna-Ư]. Then they wander about and send these
rumours wandering even further.
Clerics in Deoband and Bijnor do not speak with a single voice about
contraception, any more than villagers do. Yet the clerics’ understanding
that people sometimes face majbu-rƯ, and that Allah is merciful to those
who have repented presents a contrast with the uncompromisingly harsh
views of many villagers about the sterilized person’s fate. This mismatch
undermines assumptions that the rural masses are slavish followers of their
forbidden to make permanent changes to the body, unless the mother’s life was in danger. (See, for
instance, The Indian Express, 16 January 2008 and The Times of India, 17 January 2008.)
religious leaders. Indeed, calm domestic order and cleanliness are not readily
compatible with everyday rural life (cf. Jeffery et al. 2004). Despite TablighƯ
tours in rural Bijnor, much of the reform agenda has not taken an effective
hold there. Rural children usually attend madrasahs for only a few years (at
most): madrasah staff often lament that the fragile impression they make on
their pupils’ self-discipline in cleanliness, speech, routine and punctuality
is liable to reversal once pupils return to the village atmosphere (Jeffery
et al. 2005, 2006, 2012). Thus, we should question how central the reform
agenda is in the mundane lives of rural Muslims in Bijnor.
Situating Fertility
Greenhalgh emphasises the importance of showing how fertility ‘makes
sense given the socio-cultural and political economic context in which it
is embedded’ and of seeing fertility transitions as ‘products of changes in
class-specific opportunity structures in response to transformations of global
and regional political economies’ (Greenhalgh 1995: 17, 21). Similarly, for
Obermeyer, ‘the political context is a key factor for understanding the way
in which [Islamic] religious doctrine is interpreted’ (Obermeyer 1994: 59).
These insights are germane here. Muslim villagers’ contraceptive
practice is certainly coloured by what they believe to be ‘Islamic doctrine’.
But, as we have shown,‘Islamic doctrine’ on contraception is not monolithic.
Consequently, privileging apparently theological issues will lead us astray.
Rather, a more compelling account is yielded by focusing on rural Muslims’
‘secular’ concerns: economic and social marginalization, the Indian
government’s family planning programme and communal politics, and the
political economy of hopelessness (cf. Jeffery and Jeffery 2006).
Social and Economic Marginalization

Despite their numerical strength in Bijnor district, Muslims do not dominate
the local economy or politics. Crucially, moreover, Muslims in rural Bijnor
also perceive themselves as economically and socially marginalized.25 Jamila,
for instance, explained the lack of Muslim doctors this way:
25
For more on Muslims in Bijnor district, including residents of a predominantly Muslim village near
Jhakri, see Jeffery and Jeffery (2006); Jeffery et al. (2007); Jeffrey et al. (2004, 2010) and Jeffrey et al.
(2008).
You see, Muslims are poor and no one gives them any help. But
the government helps Hindus. Even if Muslims educate their
children, they still won’t get ‘service’. A Hindu will get ‘service’
and will have earnings, so he’ll give his children food on time,
he’ll cook good food to eat and he’ll educate them in a good
school and pay out money for the books. Since the ‘service’ is
good, they’ll make expenditures. And when children receive
education, then they may become doctors. But Muslim children
don’t get their food on time and the government doesn’t help
Muslims. So tell me, how can Muslim children become doctors?
… Whoever has money is making their children into doctors,
whether the children have the capability [qa-bilƯyat] inside them
or not.
Similarly, Latifan commented that Muslims do not benefit from education

because they do not obtain ‘service’ afterwards. Her neighbour added that
this is why Muslim boys do not study, and ‘you spend so much money on
education and even the money that you have saved will also be spent—
and still you will not get ‘service’. Rather than that, you should spend the
money that you have saved on starting some business.’ A widespread view
is that without social contacts to exert influence [‘source’ or sifa-rish] or
money to bribe the personnel making appointments [‘force’ or rishwat],
employment will not materialize—even for someone with educational
credentials. Jabruddin asserted:
No one values Muslims. Hindus obtain employment in a single

breath, but not Muslims. … That’s why Muslims aren’t educating
their children. They know that they won’t get employment—
and there is this damage, that a boy won’t be willing to do farm
work. He won’t want to pick up the sickle. So the unfortunate
Muslim is worried just about this: he’s poor. Should he feed his
children or spend money on educating them?
By contrast, madrasah teachers generally saw inherent value in education,

yet they too perceived discrimination against even well-educated Muslims
and the need to bribe officials when seeking employment. Whilst some
madrasah teachers felt called to perform work that brings religious merit,
others had turned to madrasah teaching because of financial distress and
frustrated ambitions—and because madrasah employment can be obtained
without bribes. One Begawala madrasah teacher said he had been unable to
study further because of financial worries:
I had already tried to get other ‘service’, but to no benefit. So

then I took the ‘service’ here [in the madrasah]. … Enough!
There were worries in the house—our situation [ha-la-t] was not
good. I had to give daily bread to my wife and children. I had to
show them consideration.
One of his colleagues turned to madrasah teaching because his older brother
failed to fulfil their father’s ambition to have a son highly educated in
religious matters. Only after we pressed him did he comment:
Listen! With respect to worldly matters, I’m not happy. … I don’t

have money because in this ‘line’ there isn’t much money. Now
I have just one job: to please Allah. If there’s nothing for me
here, then I pray to Allah that I will receive my reward up there.
Look, as far as worldly matters are concerned, I’m certainly not
happy. … Today, if I were doing something else—for example
‘service’—then I’d have more money. When I consider my
financial position, I’m not happy.
Population, the Indian State and Communal Politics

During the political emergency (1975–77), the government’s population
programme took a markedly coercive turn after health workers and other
government employees were disciplined if they failed to meet family
planning ‘targets’, particularly sterilization. There was unparalleled public
debate—and widespread distrust of government health workers. Nearly 30
years later, the Deoband MuftƯ commented:
Sanjay [Gandhi] captured people and did nasbandƯ on them.

People were on journeys by bus and they were dragged out and
sterilized. There was great tyranny [zulm] then.
Throughout our Bijnor research, Muslims have believed they were the
particular targets of family planning workers and they especially resented the
pressure to adopt a technique they believe is contrary to Islam. For Muslims,
high-caste Hindu domination of health-care provision, government and
private alike, undermines the state’s legitimacy and some even suggested
there was a government initiative to eradicate Muslims. Furthermore, the
hate-speech of Hindutva ideologues has a long and infamous genealogy:
building on the ‘common wisdom’ about Muslims’ untrustworthiness and
lack of patriotism, family planning issues have been increasingly politicized
along communal lines (Basu 1996, 1997; Jeffery and Jeffery 2006). In
September 2003, the release of (uncorrected) statistics from the 2001 census
created a furore over Muslim fertility, which the corrected statistics released
later did little to quieten (Bhat and Zavier 2005; Jeffery and Jeffery 2006;
Jeffery and Jeffery 2000, 2005; Rajan 2005).
Moreover, Muslims’ sense of economic insecurity is compounded by
the rise of Hindutva politics during the 1990s. In 1990, there were serious
disturbances in Bijnor town related to the Babri mosque dispute (A. Basu
1995; Jeffery and Jeffery 1994), whilst the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat
in 2002 (Varadarajan 2002) generated fearful commentaries from villagers
and madrasah staff alike. In March 2002, Patricia asked a Begawala maulwƯ
about the on-going communal violence in Gujarat. After commenting on
rumours that madrasahs are weapon arsenals and that Muslims are traitors,
he continued:
You have come here several times. You come without warning.
Have you ever seen any work of this sort going on? Where are
we giving training in shooting guns? Here there is not the money
for food to eat, so where shall we get bullets? Those people who
say that there are arms in madrasahs, that there are ISI agents
[Pakistani spies]—they should go just once and catch them and
bring them forward. To this day, not a single recovery of arms
has been made in any mosque or madrasah. No one has been
caught. Our reputation is being destroyed. But we remain silent.
These are false accusations. People talk. Let them talk.We cannot
reply. We are weak. We remain quiet and silent. … These people
are getting us killed. Straight off, they are getting us ‘fried’ by
bullets. The PAC [Provincial Armed Constabulary] are pursuing
Muslims tenaciously. … They want to finish Muslims off. But
they can’t finish us off by firing 100–150 bullets.
Political Economy of Hopelessness

The Indian state’s complicity with Hindutva-inspired anti-Muslim
violence—active participation by some officials, incitement by others—has
seriously compromised rural Muslims’ willingness to rely on state protection.

Communal biases in health-care provision (especially family planning) and
problems accessing secure employment amplify their mistrust. It is, then,
unremarkable that Muslim parents in rural Bijnor sense their powerlessness
to plan their futures—a condition that is captured by the notion of a political
economy of hopelessness, in which people at the bottom of extremely
inequitable social systems realistically believe that they cannot exert much
control over their lives (Appadurai 2004; Jeffery and Jeffery 2006: 128ff;
Popkin 1980; Scott 1985). Implicit here, however, is a presumption that
social and economic changes could provide Muslim parents with incentives
to invest in the education of a small number of children. It is instructive here
to consider countries where Muslim clerics have been involved—in various
ways and to different extents—in government-sponsored population
programmes.
Sometimes we commented on how family planning is actively promoted
in Bangladesh. Jamila was adamant:
Such people can’t be Muslims. … Just calling yourself a Muslim

doesn’t make you a Muslim. We’re certainly uneducated. We
don’t know which child was born on which date. But we do
know what is in our Islam and what is forbidden.
Similarly, the Deoband MuftƯ said Bangladesh had been incorrect to

normalize sterilization:
Islam is the same everywhere. It cannot be changed. … If

someone gives me Rs 10 lakhs and I sell myself—that is a sinful
matter. If because of greed for money, I give a false fatwa, then the
punishment [‘aza-b] will be upon me.
By contrast, however, one of his colleagues commented (out of his hearing):
People must change with the times. For example, it used not to
be allowed to use a microphone for the aza-n. On many matters,
Egypt is ahead and allows different things. People should have
the children they can rear, but [in the past] they did not.
Muslim fertility rates in different countries vary widely, however, and there
are no consistent differentials between Muslims and their non-Muslim
neighbours. Consequently, Jones and Karim (2005) argue, presumptions
about monolithic religious ideologies, or about ‘Islamic contraceptive
practice’, divert attention from the diverse contexts to which Muslim clerics
and others are responding. In Bangladesh, Muslim clerics have not opposed
family planning and sterilization to the same extent as in India. Indeed,
their stances shifted very rapidly when social and economic conditions
changed (Amin and Basu 2000; Amin et al. 1996; Caldwell et al. 1999). By
the late 1980s, Bangladeshi Muslims generally believed that family planning,
including sterilization, was not contrary to Islam (Bernhart and Uddin
1990), whilst clerical support for the state’s family planning programme was
crucial in the unprecedented and dramatic decline (by 44 per cent) in the
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) between 1980–85 and 1995–2000 (Khuda 2005).
In Pakistan, by contrast, erratic government policy on family planning, the
political influence of Maudu- dƯ and the failure to co-opt Muslim clerics,
accompany much smaller declines in TFR than in Bangladesh (Hakim
2005). Popular perceptions of religious leaders’ views on contraception are
that they are hostile (Ali and Ushijima 2005). In other Muslim-majority
countries, notable changes in fertility have occurred, sometimes with
clerical endorsement of contraception, sometimes without they playing a
central role (see, for example, papers in Jones and Karim 2005).
Of course, these are places where Muslims hold the reins of government.
By contrast, Muslims in rural Bijnor highlight the role of Hindutva interests
and the Indian state in their physical vulnerability and social and economic
marginalization. Since the early 1990s, moreover, Muslims in rural UP have
been affected by changes wrought by economic liberalization: squeezed
household budgets, rising consumerism reflected in dowry demands, the
burgeoning market for private education and health-care provision and
moribund state provision. Further, high fertility and declining mortality
since the 1960s have led to land fragmentation: those whose land once
provisioned their families now describe themselves as ‘neither farmer nor
labourer’ [na- kissa-n, na- mazdu-r] or as people just ‘managing to survive’
[guzar-basar karnewale], whilst the landless or land-poor can no longer rely
on agricultural labouring. Young men increasingly seek employment in
Bijnor town, Delhi, Punjab, Kashmir or Surat, generally in sectors where
Muslims are already well placed (e.g. machine embroidery, tailoring, house
construction and painting, barbering, vehicle maintenance and rickshaw

pulling). Some sectors—especially craft work—have been particularly
badly hit by economic liberalization (Ali and Sikand 2006) and may not
provide long-term employment for rural migrants. Young women are still
usually married and experiencing childbearing in their mid-teens. There
are signs that young men are being married at later ages, however, and some
continue working outside Jhakri (probably with unintended consequences
for fertility). Whether these developments might trigger intentional fertility
limitation is an open question, though.
Hopelessness may persist, whether because of continuing economic
marginalization or communal unrest—and urban employment might
increase young men’s contact with clerical hostility to contraception. And, if
hopelessness about life in this world predisposes people to avoid behaviour
they believe is sinful to guarantee a good life in Paradise, declines in fertility
may be slow and halting. Yet privileging supposedly doctrinal views on
contraception both obscures the diversity of Muslim opinion and side-steps
how ordinary Muslims handle the exigencies of daily life in a liberalizing and
globalizing economy. Further, despite interventions by prominent Muslim
clerics and Hindutva ideologues, Muslim fertility in UP, and India overall,
has declined markedly since the early 1990s. Tellingly, TFRs for Muslims
in south India are often lower even than for Hindus, leave aside Muslims, in
UP (Jeffery and Jeffery 2006: 33–35). The depressed social and economic
conditions of UP Muslims are undoubtedly significant in this regional
contrast.The Sachar report (2006) advocated numerous policy interventions
to ameliorate Muslims’ position and the UP and central governments alike
have pledged to implement the report’s proposals. If Muslims’ situations
improve, if hopefulness were to become imaginable, Muslim fertility levels
in UP would almost certainly decline—not least because clerical hostility
to contraception is not buttressed by effective surveillance within the
household. As people say, miya-n bƯwƯ ra-zƯ, kya- karega- qa-zƯ (husband and wife
agree, so what will the qa-zƯ do)?
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PART IV
Reform, State and Market

15
Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic
Space
Foreign Resident Muslim Women’s Halaqa in the
Arabian Peninsula
Attiya Ahmad*
ver the first 15 years, foreign resident and migrant women1 have
O developed a multitude of Islamic study circles or halaqa throughout the
Arabian Peninsula (Gulf ). While some scholars attribute the development
of these study circles to the overall spread of Islamic organizations in the
region, I present a contrasting explanation in this essay. Based on several years
*
I am indebted to Katherine Ewing and Neha Vora for their critical feedback and incisive comments on
earlier drafts of this essay. I am enormously grateful to Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella for including
me in this marvelous venture and for their invaluable suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Shukria
and mashkura to my interlocutors in Kuwait and the Gulf, who have given so generously of their time,
friendship and patience. The richness of their experiences, utterances, and thoughts both animate and
surpass my renderings of them.
1
In addition to their citizenry, the population of the Gulf Cooperation Council States (GCC) is
comprised of foreign residents and migrants. In most GCC countries the non-citizenry comprises
the majority of the total population—for example over 90 per cent in Qatar and the UAE, and 66
per cent in Kuwait. Where there are not majorities such as Oman and Saudi Arabia, they comprise
significant proportions of the total population. The difference between foreign residents and migrants
is not necessarily based on the length of their residence in the GCC countries—both groups may
spend months, years or generations in the Gulf. Differences relate to their class, occupation and their
attendant right or ability to sponsor their family members to reside with them in the GCC.
of fieldwork conducted in the mid- to late-2000s, my discussion points to

how conventional analyses are not so much incorrect as they are limited in
their scope of analysis. Islamic reformist organizations influence women’s
halaqa; however, the development of these study circles are part and parcel
of a broader set of processes shaping foreign resident and migrant women’s
religious experiences in the Gulf. Notable here are two factors: women’s
everyday diasporic uncertainties, and their development of cosmopolitan
forms of Islamic practice.
A fieldwork moment prompting me to consider the importance of these
processes occurred shortly after one of Auntie Noor’s halaqa, gatherings that
were attended primarily, if not exclusively by middle and upper-middle
class South Asian women residing in Kuwait. The official part of the halaqa
had ended. Those of us without pressing engagements or errands to run
had moved to the kitchen, where Auntie Noor, our host and organizer of
the weekly halaqa, had prepared a lavish meal. Carefully balancing a plate
heaped full of pulao2 and sahlin,3 I was wending my way through the room
when a conversation caught my attention.
Auntie Noor was in the midst of dealing with a situation that most
of the women in the room were now familiar with. Amir, her only son,
had recently completed a finance degree at a prestigious North American
university. The family was in the process of deciding whether he should
remain in North America and continue to look for work there, or take up a
position he had recently been offered at an Islamic bank in Malaysia. Much
hinged on the family’s decision: not only the issue of where Amir would
reside over the next few years, but also the type of work, career prospects,
and social networks he would be cultivating. Auntie Noor was also greatly
concerned about the type of Islamic lifestyle her son would be leading
during this formative stage in his young life. Her discussions about her son’s
situation intertwined pragmatic considerations with religious and moral
ones, instantiating an ethical sensibility she both developed and promoted
through her halaqa.
All this I knew after nearly a year of fieldwork,4 but what captured my
attention in that moment was the way in which Auntie Noor expressed
2
A rice dish that includes a mix of vegetables and meat.
3
A dish or casserole of vegetables and/or meat, often called ‘curry’.
4
Overall, my work is based on over 22 months of fieldwork conducted in Kuwait in 2004, 2006–07,
2008, 2010, as well as two months fieldwork in the UAE (2004) and 10 months in Qatar (2009–10).
Cosmopolitan Islam in a Diasporic Space / 423
this intertwining. Her eyes glittered with an intensity that transfixed the
women around her. She had placed her plate and glass on the counter next
to her, freeing hands that punctuated her comments:
…I did istikara [Islamic ritual where a supplicant seeks signs from

God in order to make a decision] for seven days, but nothing is
clear. I don’t know. It’s [the decision] important, yes? It is safer
there [North America]: I have a sister and friends who will keep
an eye out for him…there is a good mosque and community
there…and once he gets a job and a few years of experience
he can go anywhere [in the world to work]. But what kind of
work will he find? What kind of work will it be? In Malaysia,
mashallah, he can do good studies and good work. They have a
good system there. And it is closer to us…I just don’t know. And
I know that one day I will stand before Allah subhanawatuallah
and need to give an account [of this]…I woke up this morning
with such a strong feeling I could hardly breathe. I will be held
to account for this and…what shall I say? Will Allah accept?
My initial puzzlement (and skepticism) that a woman such as Auntie

Noor—who exemplified virtues reformist Muslims valued and strove
towards—would be anxious about being held to account about this
particular matter was furthered by some of the other women’s responses.
Rather than reassuring Auntie Noor, or dismissing her comments as overly
modest or perhaps even disingenuous, they concurred with her. ‘Yes,’
another interlocutor replied,
when you really think, really reflect, you feel Allah is with you
always, and always you think about when you meet Allah and
are held to account, will your deeds be accepted, your decisions
accepted, or (may Allah grant me mercy) will we draw Allah’s
displeasure?
The ‘account’ and ‘meeting with Allah’ my interlocutors mentioned refers

to an eschatological sensibility they share. At its most basic, this sensibility is
rooted in their belief in the afterlife, where their destiny would be decided
by God’s judgement of their deeds in their present life. This belief infused
and intensified their everyday experiences with a visceral consciousness
of God’s judgement—a palpable sense of dread and anticipation of the
consequences of their actions both in the here and hereafter. As Auntie
Noor’s situation with her son demonstrates, this eschatological sensibility

both expressed and precipitated their experiences of diasporic uncertainty.
By associating her visceral feeling of apprehension ‘I woke up…with such a
strong feeling, I could hardly breathe’ with standing before God and being
held to account, Auntie Noor not only articulated the pained uncertainty
she felt about her son’s future in eschatological terms. Her belief that God
would hold her to account for her decision also gave rise to her uncertainty.
Although she undertook the ritual of istikara to discern what course of
action she should take, she was still uncertain and concerned about whether
God would judge her actions unfavorably, as her question ‘will Allah accept?’
so poignantly illustrates.
This eschatological sensibility both spurred my interlocutors’ religious
seeking and channeled moments of uncertainty they experienced in relation
to their diasporic status. Halaqa, such as the ones organized by Auntie
Noor, played a crucial role in triangulating these processes. The halaqa were
developed by foreign resident and migrant women as collaborative spaces
of Islamic learning where they could deepen their understanding of Islamic
precepts and practices—including cultivating an eschatological sensibility.
The halaqa also provided a space for these women to collectively discuss
and deliberate about issues they were grappling with in their everyday
lives. These processes developed concomitantly: the women apprehended
Islamic precepts and practices through their everyday understandings
and activities, which were then reassessed and reexamined through the
precepts and practices they were learning. On occasion, the outcome of
this cyclical and recursive process would shift or counter their preexisting
religious understandings and practices. Through the halaqa, they developed
fluid Islamic frameworks that shaped and were shaped by their everyday
diasporic experiences, frameworks they often described as ‘cosmopolitan’
and juxtaposed with what they retrospectively deemed parochial or ‘cultural’
practices of Islam. The cosmopolitan forms of Islam they developed, ones
constituted by their ongoing assessment and deliberation about whether
their actions were in keeping with Islamic precepts and practices, was both
anchored and animated by an eschatological sensibility.
Locating the Halaqa: Scholarly Obfuscations

and Orientations
Islamic study circles like the ones organized by Auntie Noor are crucial
to the religious experiences of foreign resident and migrant Muslim
women. Their development points to the vital role reformist Islam plays
in the formation of subjectivities and social networks in contemporary
transnational and cosmopolitan spaces. Despite their significance, the halaqa
have largely eluded academic attention. Several interrelated reasons account
for why they are little studied. The first has to do with the bifurcated
nature of Gulf scholarship—research either focuses on the region’s citizenry
or its migrant and foreign resident populations. This bifurcation, which
reflects (and reinscribes) socio-political divisions in the region, entails an
academic division of labour. Research on migrants and foreign residents
revolves around issues of labour migration. Existing scholarship focuses on
this population’s demographic composition,5 the political economy of their
migration and patterns of remittances (Amjad 1989; Arnold and Shah 1986;
Birks and Sinclair 1980; Eelens et al. 1992; Kouaouchi 1998; Mohammed
2003), the gendered nature of migration processes (Mahdavi 2011; Shah
2000; Shah et al. 1991; Shah and Menon 1997; Shah et al. 2002), and systems
of migrant governance (Crystal 1990, 1992, 2005; Gardner 2010; Longva
1997, 1999, 2000). Scholars typically portray this population as ‘temporary
foreign workers’ whose situation is contingent upon their labouring status,
representations that belie the fact foreign residents and migrants constitute
a large, diverse and longstanding presence in the Gulf, albeit one that is
unlikely to ever be naturalized given the restrictive citizenship laws of these
countries. Only recently have scholars begun examining other dimensions
of foreign resident and migrants’ experiences in the Gulf, most notably
the forms of belonging they develop in the absence of dejure citizenship
(Leonard 1999, 2003; Osella and Osella 2008; Vora 2008).
With a couple of important exceptions,6 scholars have not researched
the religious activities of foreign residents and migrants. Work on Islam in
the Gulf, a burgeoning area of scholarship post-9/11, focuses on the religious
activities and movements of Gulf citizens. This includes the development
of the Sahwa or ‘Islamic Awakening’ movement in Saudi Arabia (Lacroix
2010), pan-Islamism and jihadists in Saudi Arabia (Hegghammer 2010),
transnational networks and religious authority among the Shii (Louer 2008),
shifts in religious learning among Omani women brought about by the
advent of oil and state development (Limbert 2010), and the transnational
5
A notable example of this is Kapiszewski (2001).
6
Including work on Jamaat-i-Islam among South Asians and Filipino Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Please see
Osella and Osella (Chapter 6); Werbner and Johnson (2010).
spread of Gulf Islamic organizations into Europe (Al-Rasheed 2005). These

careful and nuanced studies underscore the varied religious topography of
the greater Arabian Peninsula—a region all-too often glossed as ‘Wahhabi’—
with one notable omission. They ignore foreign residents and migrants, a
significant exception given that this group constitutes a sizeable percentage
if not the majority of the population of Gulf Cooperation council states.
Another reason why foreign resident and migrant women’s halaqa are
overlooked is because of the widespread perception that their significance
is reducible to a broader historical process, namely the growth of Islamic
organizations in the late twentieth century. Many scholars, public
intellectuals and political officials I interviewed in the Gulf assumed that
these study circles have developed because of the spread of local and
transnational Islamic reform organizations from the 1970s onwards. Notable
here is the Islamic Presentation Committee, an organization founded by a
cosmopolitan group of Muslim men, some of whom were affiliated with
the Muslim Brotherhood. The IPC has developed dialogically in relation
to Kuwait’s burgeoning non-Arab and non-Muslim foreign resident
and migrant population. What began as a series of Arabic classes taught
in neighborhood mosques has now burgeoned into a sprawling Islamic
network comprised of a vast array of learning centers, media campaigns and
community development projects that promote Islamic da’wa in Kuwait.
Another organization local intelligentsia considered important to the
development of foreign resident women’s Islamic study circles is the Islamic
Heritage Society (IHS). The IHS emerged at the same time as the IPC,
but due to a different constellation of factors. Part of the broader salafiyyeh
movement, members of the IHS promote a form of Islam they deem faithful
to the practice of the first ummah or community of believers. The IHS
has developed due to the influence of other salafiyyeh groups throughout
the Arabian Peninsula, and to the political integration and ascendance of
Kuwait’s Bedu population (Rizzo 2005). Since the late 1990s, both the IPC
and IHS have developed multi-lingual Islamic courses for Kuwait’s female
migrant and foreign resident populations. Many consider women’s Quranic
study circles to be the trickle-down effects of these group’s pedagogical
activities.
Scholars and local officials also pointed to the expansion of transnational
Islamic organizations as leading to the formation of the halaqa. They
acknowledged the existence of these study circles, but considered them to
be noteworthy only insofar as they indexed the spread of organizations such

as Al-Huda and Jamaat-i-Islam.7 These transnational Islamic organizations
are not as publicly visible and lack the resources commanded by local
organizations, however, they have established a significant presence in the
Gulf over the past two decades. Their development is largely attributable
to the efforts of their members. Members migrating to the region founded
local chapters of these organizations. Transnational relations between local
and transnational chapters have been maintained through members’ travel
and the circulation of old and new media, including pamphlets, books,
cassettes, videos, list-serves and internet sites. The development of Al-Huda
in Kuwait illustrates these processes. Women who had taken courses with
Al-Huda while living in Pakistan in the mid-to late-1990s started offering
similar courses in Kuwait beginning in the early 2000s. Over the summer,
while visiting family members in Pakistan and Toronto, Al-Huda members
from Kuwait took advanced courses with Al-Huda centres located in these
areas. When these women returned to Kuwait, they shared their learning
with other Al-Huda members. They also brought back and distributed
pedagogical materials ranging from homiletic bookmarks and greeting cards
to audio-recordings of lectures given by Dr Farhat Hashmi, the founder of
Al-Huda. Members who were unable to travel to Al-Huda learning centres
overseas often supplemented their coursework in Kuwait with cassette-
based and online classes.
A number of women who participate in the halaqa have taken classes
and are members of Islamic groups such as the IPC, IHS, Jamaat-i-Islam
and Al-Huda. Although pedagogically and institutionally linked to Islamic
organizations in this way, the impetus for the development of the halaqa
is not reducible to them. To assume so would overlook another socio-
historical process animating migrant and foreign resident women’s greater
involvement in Islamic learning and living in the Gulf. The time I spent with
my interlocutors—attending their halaqa, visiting them and their families,
learning about events that shaped their lives, and chatting with them about
all and sundry—points to a contrasting explanation. My research suggests
that Muslim foreign resident and migrant women’s diasporic experiences
spur their religious seeking. These women develop the halaqa in order
to deepen their understanding of Islamic precepts and practices; learning
7
For a discussion of Al-Huda’s development and activities in Pakistan, please see Ahmad (2009).
that is prompted by their everyday household and gendered relations,

and moments of viscerally experienced uncertainty that stem from these
experiences. Complementing existing scholarship on cosmopolitan and
transnational Islam, which focus on emergent Muslim public cultures
and the cross-border movements of particular groups of ethno-national
Muslims and Islamic organizations, my work foregrounds the important
role of everyday diasporic experiences to the development of cosmopolitan
forms of Islam.
Women’s Halaqa in Kuwait: Formation and

Functions
Women’s halaqa are found throughout the Gulf.8 Their ubiquity relates in
part to the simplicity of their design. At their core, the halaqa consist of
groups of women who gather together to improve their understanding and
practice of Islam. Most halaqa participants are foreign resident women who
are not employed in the wage-labour market, and whose work centers on
their households.The frequency with which the women meet and the issues
they address depends on their interests. The timings of the halaqa are usually
flexibly arranged around family schedules—for instance, ongoing halaqa are
usually held during the late mornings and early afternoon, while children
are at school and spouses at work. During the summer, when families are
on holiday, the halaqa are usually put on hold. The importance of household
considerations is also reflected in the halaqa’s content. Although varied in
their pedagogy and in the topics they address—the halaqa may include one
or a combination of Quranic exegesis (tafsir), Quranic recitation (tajwid),
Islamic etiquette and jurisprudence (fiqh), biographies of the prophet (seerat),
Islamic history and lessons in Arabic grammar, etymology and vocabulary—
these lessons are largely read in and through members gendered diasporic
experiences, ones centred around their household activities. In toto, the
halaqa constitute flexible and conducive spaces for foreign resident women
to discuss and assess a whole host of issues they are grappling with in their
everyday lives, including relations with their family and household members,
8
Although no surveys exist, my research indexes their extensiveness. While conducting ethnographic
fieldwork in the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait in 2004, 2006–07 and 2009–10, I regularly attended eight
such gatherings, and heard mention of countless others.
changing gender roles, political processes and events both near and far, and
how they are managing their ever-widening transnational social networks.
The halaqa organized by Auntie Noor exemplifies many of these
features. Auntie Noor first began hosting halaqa almost twenty years after
she moved to Kuwait, a period marked by dramatic transformations in her
understanding and practice of Islam. When she and her husband Mansour
migrated from Karachi in the early 1970s they were at the forefront of a
large wave of middle and upper-class South Asians moving into the region.
Most of the men were shopkeepers, professionals, mid-level bureaucrats and
executives; the women mostly housewives or other household dependents.9
This larger group splintered into a series of overlapping networks, ones
cemented by social gatherings largely organized and attended by women,
including informal social calls or ‘tea meetings’, dinner parties or ‘dawats’,
birthday parties for children, and among the wealthier class, brunches at
hotels or ‘ladies lunches’. Religious gatherings were more sporadic and
included aqiqah,10 Eid gatherings, and group readings of the Quran or
‘khatme-Quran’ to mark important events such as births, deaths, and a move11
into a new home. For their part, Auntie Noor and Mansour interacted with
a group she described as ‘liberal’ and ‘not observant’. Their socializing was
marked by ‘too-modern’ features such as mixing across gender, dancing,
alcohol consumption, and the wearing of clothes such as trousers, mini
skirts and sleeveless blouses among the women. The choice to mix with
this set is one Auntie Noor attributed to her husband. Although they were
cousins who had grown up in the same social milieu, she and Mansour
had different ideas about what constituted proper conduct. Auntie Noor
preferred ‘simple people’ whose comportment she associated with the social
conservatism of ‘back home’. Their differences in perspective widened as
Auntie Noor began to articulate her social conservatism in religious terms.
Before describing these shifts in Auntie Noor’s piety, I should note that our
discussions about Kuwait’s South Asian Muslim community, her position
therein, and differences between her and her husband’s approach to religious
matters were greatly informed ex post facto by her halaqa experiences. Her
discussions of the past indexed the subject position she inhabited at the
9
This gendered pattern of work and employment relates to the gendered nature of migration to the Gulf.
For a discussion of this, please see Dresch (2005).
10
Gathering to celebrate the birth of a child. It involves a sacrifice of an animal, whose meat is then
distributed throughout the community.
11
Foreign residents cannot own homes or any landed property in Kuwait and most Gulf States.
time of our conversations, a subject position shaped by decades of religious

seeking. Whether or not the understandings and memories she shared with
me map onto what she thought or experienced in the past is not a question
that I am in a position to answer or that I seek to assess. Her utterances
remain significant as they express changes in her own understanding of her
piety and the attendant changes in her life.
In discussing her shift from ‘dawat to dars’ and ‘parties to prayer,’ Auntie
Noor often lingered on a particular subset of moments. Whether it was
the day her eldest son started going to an international English-medium
school, the summers she stayed in Kuwait because of her husband’s work,
a nasty disagreement with a cloth seller in Karachi who dismissively
called her ‘sheikha’, or watching alone from the corner of the room as
her husband and their friends debated Pakistani politics, these moments
underscored feelings of bafflement and loneliness she associated with her
overall diasporic condition. On numerous occasions Auntie Noor described
to me situations of intense dislocation, where she felt as though she was
encountering circumstances for which she knew of no precedent. Her son
Amir’s situation is a good example. While sending her son overseas to
study was something she could (albeit reluctantly) cope with—her husband
had also studied while away from his family and other upper-middle class
Muslim South Asian family friends in Kuwait had sent their children to
study overseas—she had not anticipated the difficulty her son would have
in returning back to Kuwait. The type of job opportunities he sought,
namely working in the private sector, had dwindled with Kuwait’s state-led
efforts to nationalize the country’s workforce. This left her son scrambling
to find work in the US, and to consider seriously the internship offered by
a Malaysian bank. Auntie Noor was accustomed to a diasporic Kuwait-
Karachi axis, however, a multi-country diasporic context was one that posed
a series of new questions: Was it better for her son to remain the US or go
to Malaysia? If he was going to reside on a country on his own, should she
insist he marry sooner than they had already planned? What sort of wife
would be suitable? How would their family manage visits to see him and
vice-versa?
Moments like these, ones emphasizing Auntie Noor’s liminal and
shifting position between Kuwait, Pakistan and other potential countries,
engendered feelings of acute uncertainty and anxiety. Her responsibilities
and the potential consequences of her decisions weighed heavily upon her.
When she first moved to Kuwait she sought her parents’ advice, writing
them letters and speaking with them on the phone. This did not suffice,
however, as there were often time lags in her communication with her
parents, and as the amount of time she and her family resided in Kuwait
lengthened, she found her parents’ advice limited by their lack of familiarity
with the specifics of the Kuwaiti context. Auntie Noor also drew on
the advice of her friends, fellow South Asian Muslim women in Kuwait,
but felt their advice was not always helpful or authoritative—her friends
often seemed as uncertain and overwhelmed as she felt. While they could
discuss and commiserate about their shared experiences, her friends did not
necessarily have a better grasp on their situation than she did. Describing
herself as an already practicing Muslim, Auntie Noor found solace and
guidance in Islamic teachings. Her religious seeking marked her attempt
to make sense of and respond appropriately to the unprecedented familial
and social situations she often found herself confronted with. New forms
of Islamic learning provided her with a framework of action in the face of
her shifting, liminal diasporic situation.
Auntie Noor’s studies developed gradually. They began simply, with
her coming across and beginning to read a number of books and pamphlets.
She gravitated towards the work of Islamic reformers, ones she described
to me as ‘learned, understandable and sensible’. Her hall bookshelves
bear testimony to this period, their rows filled with a variety of volumes
including Mawlana Mawdudi’s ‘Understanding Islam’, Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s
‘Bihishti Zewar’, an assortment of publications from Dar-ul-Islam and Good
Books, various pamphlets, an Arabic-Urdu dictionary, and both English and
Urdu translations of the Quran. What she learned she started to put into
practice in her everyday life. Already regular in her daily prayers, she took
pains to conduct them in prominent places throughout her home, where
she was sure to be observed by her husband and children. Auntie Noor
supplemented her children’s Quranic lessons with classes in classical Arabic
so that they might ‘recite and know.’ She gently but insistently began to
urging her husband to stop visiting friends whose behaviour she found
problematic, and she stopped going to Sufi zhikrs at one of her friend’s
homes, gatherings she felt were ‘for show’ but did not truly encourage her or
the other women present to ‘live Islam everyday’ in their lives. Auntie Noor
also started to seek out opportunities to do ‘good works’ such as preparing
food and care packages for community members in need. When I asked
whether she thought these practices differed from the Islam observed by her
parents, friends and even her own prior practice, Auntie Noor gave a finely
honed response. She characterized her parents as ‘quietly traditional’ in their

practice, meaning they followed the basic tenets of faith (aqidah, prayers,
fasting, pilgrimage and giving charity), but she felt they did so largely by
rote, based on what they had learned from family members and others in
their community. While she acknowledged how meaningful Islam was to
them, she felt their engagement lacked an animating spirit, which led them
to continue practices she deemed misguided and mistaken. These include
the use of amulets (taaviz) and spells, and visiting sheikhs to intercede or
interpret God’s will on their behalf. Her family, in turn, considered her to
have become inflexible and ‘too-strict’ in her practice. Mansour especially
disapproved, convinced that his wife’s religiosity had alienated many of their
friends in Kuwait.
Despite her husband’s objections, Auntie Noor started to spend more
time with other women, her ‘sisters’ who were also interested in reformist
Islamic learning. At first, the women she met, and the spaces in which
they met overlapped with her existing social milieu. Through instances
such as impromptu conversations about religious maxims and hadith that
developed during ‘dawats’, or debates about the work of Islamic reforms
that occurred during ‘tea meeting’, a series of ongoing and overlapping
discussions started to develop, discussions that gradually started to coalesce
into a more definitive form. By the late 1980s, Auntie Noor and her sisters
started meeting on an ad-hoc basis, usually with particular objectives in
mind. In pairs or in small groups, they gathered to collectively improve
specific dimensions of their Islamic practice, for example their knowledge of
Islamic history and seerat, the biographical details of Prophet Muhammad’s
life. These gatherings were consolidated and routinized in the early 2000s
due to several interrelated reasons. To begin with, Auntie Noor and her
sisters’ familial circumstances had changed. Many of their children began
attending high school during this period, freeing up time for the women to
organize and attend regularly scheduled halaqa. There was also a new influx
of middle and upper-middle class South Asian Muslim women into Kuwait
during this period. A number of these women held religious views that
were resonant with those of Auntie Noor and her sisters.12 Unlike women
of Auntie Noor’s generation, most of these women were formally educated
and held advanced university degrees. Several had worked before or during
12
A number of my interlocutors mentioned that the migration of this group of South Asians had tapered
off in the 1990s. They attributed this to Kuwait’s nationalization policies.
the early years of their marriage. Dubbed ‘professional and modern ladies’ by
Auntie Noor, these women had more exacting standards for what they felt
the halaqa should accomplish. One such person, Kaukab, had taught English
for several years at a university in Islamabad. After marrying a Pakistani
residing in Kuwait, a prosperous banker who insisted she stop working in
the formal labour market, Kaukab found herself with a great deal of time on
her hands. She used the opportunity to improve her knowledge of Islam,
something she had longed to do. Using her linguistic and pedagogical skills,
Kaukab introduced one of the most brilliant learning aids I encountered
during my research: a series of trilingual English-Urdu-Arabic vocabulary
tests linked to particular passages of the Quran, ones designed to help
members improve their comprehension of the Quran and to learn Arabic.
By then weekly affairs, the halaqa were further shaped by the involvement
of Muslim women of different ethno-national backgrounds, including the
Lebanese and British mothers of children who attended the same schools as
halaqa members’ children; the Syrian wife whose husband worked with one
halaqa members’ son, the Filipina woman a member repeatedly encountered
at the jamiyyeh,13 and neighboring Egyptian and Turkish women.14
In theory participation in the halaqa was only restricted along gendered
lines. Halaqa gatherings were open to any woman who was interested in
learning about Islam, regardless if they were Muslim or a proponent of
reformist Islam. In practice, however, participation was channelled through
halaqa members’ existing social networks, which were structured along
ethno-national, class and spatial lines. The women participating in the
halaqa either knew each other through their social circles—which were
organized along ethno-national lines. Or they had become acquainted
through cosmopolitan social spaces, such as workplaces and international
schools, where interactions occurred along class lines.15 Or, they had met
through neighborhood interactions.16 Self-selection also played a role in
the composition of the halaqa. Women attended based on the appeal these
13
Neighbourhood cooperative shopping centre.
14
During my research in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, with only one exception I did not observe any
Gulf nationals participating in these gathering, an indication of how few interactions occur between
foreign resident women and citizens.
15
For example, the children of upper-middle class or elite families often attended international schools
with a diverse student population. In workplaces colleagues socialized with those who occupied a
similar status or position.
16
For example, as neighbours or by meeting in neighborhood spaces such as walking tracks and shops.
gatherings held for them. For example, Kaukab joined the group because of
her longstanding desire to improve her knowledge of Islam. This contrasted
with another of my interlocutors, Heba, a South Asian Muslim woman
who told me she did not attend the halaqa because she thought they would
be tedious. She preferred going to Sufi gathering that were organized by
a Bengali woman who was also a part of her and Auntie Noor’s broader
social circle. These women’s perceptions and preferences with regards to
the halaqa were informed by the often unspoken but widely acknowledged
fact that these gatherings were reformist in orientation. For example,
many women who considered themselves to be Sufi did not feel as though
they were restricted from going, but they were not interested in doing so.
Participation was also not restricted along sectarian lines. Ismaili and Shii
women attended, however, halaqa groups were predominately Sunni.
Structured through relations of gender, race, class and space, the halaqa
became increasingly diversified.17 The participation of women of different
ethno-national and (to a lesser degree) socio-economic backgrounds both
precipitated and indexed a shift in the ethos of the halaqa. Through their
interactions, discussions and deliberations, the women started to develop
new understandings of what constituted proper Islamic practice. Halaqa
members began to conceptually disentangle Islamic precepts and practices
from particular traditions of Islamic practice they had learned and been
disciplined into over the course of their lives. A series of moments illustrating
this process occurred within the first few months of my attending Auntie
Noor’s halaqa. The halaqa she organized began late in the morning and
ended around the time of zuhr, the midday prayers. After several weeks of
attending the halaqa, I started to notice a pattern in the women’s responses
when they heard the adhan or Islamic call to prayer just before zuhr. A
few of the women who did not cover their hair proceeded to do so, while
others kept their hair uncovered. Eventually, this difference prompted one
of the other halaqa members to pose the question why—why were some
women covering their head and others not? A back and forth discussion
17
The languages spoken during the halaqa further underline their diversity. Classical Arabic remained
the language of ritual, and a mix of English, Urdu/Hindi, and colloquial Arabic were used during
conversations and discussions. In addition, multiple translations in other languages, for example
Punjabi and Tamil, took place and reflected the shifting or varied composition of different halaqa.
Members did not necessarily consider the linguistic nature of the halaqa a unique or noteworthy
feature, as a plurality of languages is a common feature of many Gulf countries’ social landscapes.
ensued where it was established that most of the women from South Asia
had been taught that it was necessary to cover their hair when they heard
the adhan. Some of these women said it was a custom that they had never
really considered, much less scrutinized, and that they maintained this
custom out of habit. Others explained that they covered their hair out of
reverence. They believed the call to prayer to be intrinsically sacred. The
women from predominately Arab countries responded differently. Some
argued that is was not necessary for them to cover their hair because the
adhan was not a sacred utterance. As one woman stated: ‘it is the call to
prayer not the actual prayer itself ’. Others speculated that South Asian
women’s practice of covering their hair bespoke differences in the extent
and frequency with which the call to prayer was heard in South Asia. For
example one woman opined that in the Arab world, where (it was assumed)
the call to prayer was heard more often, it was simply not practical for
women to stop their activities (e.g. cooking, caring for children) to go look
for a hair covering every time they heard the adhan, hence the reason why
Arab women typically did not do so. Uncertainty developed through these
discussions: What was proper practice in this context? What constituted
a sacred utterance? Was this indeed a situation where women needed to
enact modesty, reverence and devotion through the covering of their hair?
Moments like these—where halaqa members were confronted with
a plurality of Islamic traditions and where they deliberated about what
constituted proper Islamic practice—both spurred and bolstered their
understanding of the halaqa as a cosmopolitan space of Islamic practice.
Halaqa members did not perceive their gatherings to be spaces where a
particular tradition of Islamic practice, one associated with an ethno-
cultural group or a geographical place, was being preserved or diffused. For
example the Arab women were not necessarily being persuaded to cover
their heads, and the South Asian women to uncover their heads when they
heard the adhan. And vice-versa—the Arab women were not necessarily
being persuaded to continue to keep their heads uncovered, and the South
Asian women to continue to cover their heads. By referring to the halaqa as
cosmopolitan,18 members were not only pointing to how different traditions
18
My use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ draws from works by Pollock, Mignolo and Vertovec, all of which
provide conceptualizations and genealogies of this term that go beyond Eurocentric understanding
and models (e.g. Kantian model of citizens of the world). These scholars recognize that there are
multiple histories and forms of cosmopolitanism, multiple conditions and ways of experiencing
of Islamic practice were being brought into conversation with one another
through the space of the halaqa. They were also pointing to how these
conversations and members’ attempts to discern what is incumbent upon
them to do as pious Muslims were leading to emergent forms of Islamic
practice. In other words, Muslim women shaped by different traditions of
Islamic practice were influencing one another’s understanding and approach
to Islam, and developing emergent forms of practice that were shaped but
not reducible to their previous practice of Islam.19 For example, during
a subsequent discussion about the adhan and hair coverings, one of the
halaqa members, Seemal, told us that in lieu of covering her hair, she had
decided to recite a dua or prayer at the time of the adhan. She felt that this
practice would help remind her of her obligation to pray, and cultivate her
taqwa or God-consciousness, both of which better expressed and enacted
the reverence she felt towards the act of prayer. This change in Seemal’s
daily religious practice illustrates the ways in which the halaqa spurred and
channelled the development of new forms of Islamic practice—forms that
are processual in nature, and emerge through members’ ongoing efforts to
ascertain and enact what they consider to be proper Islamic practice.
Quranic Engagements and Ethical Deliberation

Quranic study is central to halaqa members’ efforts to improve their
understanding and practice of Islam. When I began my research in the
mid-2000s, members of Auntie Noor’s halaqa were especially intent on
improving their knowledge of the Quran. For several months at a stretch
they focused their attention on a chapter or surat of the Quran, which they
studied at several different registers simultaneously. One sister, Aisha, led the
group in tajwid session. Aisha had spent many years studying with Kuwait’s
‘Dar al-Quran’, a Quranic school supported by the Ministry of Religious
affairs. She taught the sisters how to sound out Arabic letters and words, and
the different styles of Quranic recitations. Several different halaqa members
also facilitated the exegesis or tafsir of these passages by drawing on Sayyid
Qutb’s ‘In the Shade of the Quran’, Mawdudi’s tafsir, and an assortment of
Dr Farhat Hashmi’s works.
cosmopolitanism, and that cosmopolitan projects are dynamic and emerge through ongoing
interrelations and dialogue among people in different locations and social worlds. Please see Mignolo
(2000); Pollock et al. (2000);Vertovec and Cohen (2002).
19
For a discussion of a similar dynamic among Muslim minorities, movements and public cultures in the
US and France, please see Bowen (2004) and Leonard (2009).
These lessons spurred a series of conversations about what constitutes

proper etiquette and practice when engaging with the Quran. During
these discussions, which threaded their way through weeks of meetings, the
women all agreed that it was necessary to be in a state of ritual purity when
touching the Qurans (i.e. untranslated ones in Arabic), and that these Qurans
should never be placed on the floor or under any books or objects. They
believed the Quran to be the direct word of God, a manifestation of God,
and hence should be treated as a sacred object. Several also discussed how
important it was to wrap the Quran in a cloth when it was not being used,
and that passages from the Quran should never be thrown in the garbage
but buried. Similar to their discussions about the adhan, halaqa members
disagreed about whether it was necessary for women to cover their hair
when engaging with the Quran. The women from South Asia argued that
this practice was necessary to their expression and enactment of reverence
towards the Quran. Most of the other women disagreed, arguing that it was
necessary to cover their hair only when praying or when they were in the
presence of men who were not their mahram (i.e. men who were potentially
marriageable). Members also raised a number of questions about what were
the appropriate circumstances for engaging with the Quran: Was it proper
for them to listen to Quranic recitations when they could not fully devote
their attention to listening, such as when they were driving or cooking?
Were there moments when one received more blessing for reading the
Quran? Were Khatme-Quran and other rituals where groups of women
gather to recite but not focus on understanding the meaning of the Quran
permissible and proper?
Concomitant to questions about how they should engage with the
Quran, halaqa members also deliberated about issues raised through their
reading of the Quran. They frequently discerned and analysed these issues
in relation to questions, events and activities stemming from their everyday
experiences. For example, what was at first a stilted or hesitant discussion of
Surat Al-Safaat, a chapter from the Quran that mentions Prophet Ibrahim,
became more involved and boisterous as halaqa members started to make
connections between their own diasporic situations and Prophet Ibrahim’s
migration from his homeland and his subsequent attempts to establish his
family in unfamiliar places. Over the course of their discussion, one woman,
Bushra, made the following comment:
We thought when we came to Kuwait that we would eventually

go back to India [i.e., migrate back] when we could [i.e. were in
a financial position to do so] and now we know this is too hard.

The children, they are used to it here; they are used to modern,
smart places. India is not home to them. But I never thought
she [her daughter] would end up even further, somewhere away
from us [in Canada]. Any of them [children], I didn’t think they
would be away from us [her and her husband]. What do we do?
Should we be patient and trust in God that she will come back
or it will work out, like Hazrat Ibrahim’s sacrifice? Or should we
work harder to bring her back here like Hazrat Ibrahim toiled in
the desert in building his nation?
Here, Bushra is drawing direct parallels between her experiences and

those of Prophet Ibrahim. Both had left their homelands for reasons of
necessity—in Bushra’s case this was out of economic necessity as her
husband had been unable to find employment in India. When she and
her husband migrated to Kuwait they initially believed their stay would
be temporary. As their children grew older and came to regard Kuwait as
their home, she realized a return to India was unlikely. Resigned, Bushra
took comfort in the idea of an imagined future where her family in Kuwait
would grow and prosper together. Like Prophet Ibrahim when he was
asked to sacrifice his only son, her hopes for the future were threatened
when her daughter migrated to Toronto. Prophet Ibrahim’s devotion to
God—expressed through his potential sacrifice of his son, and his lifelong
work to establish and build a pious community provided Bushra with two
potential courses of action in relation to her daughter: wait patiently and
trust in God that the situation with her daughter would resolve itself on its
own, or push to bring her daughter back to Kuwait.
The mention of God’s command that Prophet Ibrahim sacrifice his
only son also spurred Auntie Noor’s further reflection about her situation
with Amir. Like Bushra she had not anticipated that her son would remain
overseas. She was also worried about whether she should advise her son
to stay in the US or go to Malaysia. For Mansour, Auntie Noor’s husband
the issue was largely a pragmatic one—would the financial advantages of
working in Malaysia outweigh the social costs of leaving the US, where they
had extended family members residing, and where their son was already
integrated into the thriving South Asian and Muslim communities there?
Would the immediate benefits of working in Malaysia be outweighed by
the potential long-term diminishment of his son’s career options? For
Auntie Noor these pragmatic considerations were intertwined with moral
and ethical questions: what type of work would her son be involved with
in the US? With his expertise in finance, would he necessarily have to
work with companies that practiced ribaa (usury/interest) or other haraam
(forbidden) practices? Although the Muslim community in her son’s city
was well established, was it better for him to reside in a Muslim-majority
country? To Auntie Noor her situation resonated with the dilemma Prophet
Ibrahim faced over the sacrifice of his son. Like Prophet Ibrahim, Auntie
Noor wondered whether she should trust in God and suggest her son go
to Malaysia despite it appearing to be less advantageous to his financial
and social interests. By working with a bank that did not engage in ribaa
and by living in a Muslim-majority country, practices she believed were
commensurate with Islamic values and virtues, would her son’s devotion to
God ultimately secure and smooth his future?
Auntie Noor, Bushra and the other sisters’ multi-layered engagement
with the Quran—in the form of tajwid, tafsir, proper etiquette and practice
when engaging with the Quran, and the issues they discussed through their
reading of the Quran—underscores the dialogic rather than diffusionary
nature of the halaqa. Not only do these spaces of collective Islamic learning
develop through foreign resident women’s diasporic experiences, they
also constitute flexible spaces where members learn about and engage
Islamic precepts and practices in relation to their daily lives. Members
may participate in the activities of ‘Dar al-Quran’ and draw on the works
of Islamic reformers such as Qutb, Mawdudi and Hashmi in order to
improve their overall knowledge of Islam; however, when these teachings
are brought into the space of the halaqa, members engage and interpret
them through the activities, events, problems, that mark their daily lives.
The importance of gendered diasporic experiences to the formation of
the halaqa complements Peter van der Veer’s (2001) analysis of transnational
religious organizing. In his study, van der Veer argues that processes of
racialization and the interpellation of migrants by host communities lead to
Muslims’ greater awareness and adherence to Islam in the West. In contrast,
in the predominately Muslim countries of Kuwait and the Gulf, Muslim
foreign residents and migrants develop new forms of Islamic practice and
organizing through their everyday exposure to different traditions of Islamic
practice.20 Halaqa members both learn about different traditions of Islamic
20
I am indebted to Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella for their insights related to this issue.
practice and develop cosmopolitan forms of Islamic practice through

their ongoing and sustained interactions with Muslim women of diverse
ethno-national, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. My research on foreign
resident women in the Gulf also contrasts with and complements the work
of van der Veer and others who argue that Muslims’ religiosity increases
through their migration and diasporic experiences. The formation of the
halaqa does not necessarily mark the increasing importance of religion to
foreign resident Muslim women’s lives; rather, it marks a new form in which
they express and enact their practice of Islam. Many of my interlocutors were
observant Muslims before they migrated to the Gulf. Their understandings
and practices changed through their experiences of living in the region. For
example, several halaqa members did not previously consider the study of
the Islamic discursive tradition to be essential to their pious practice. Others
had previously considered Sufi practices and what they called ‘folk practices’,
such as the use of the taaviz (amulets) and going to religious healers, to be
a proper and legitimate form of Islamic practice. These understandings and
their practice of Islam shifted through their diasporic experiences—shifts
that are channelled through their participation in the halaqa.
Conclusion: Uncertainty and Eschatology

Foreign resident Muslim women in the Gulf form Islamic study circles in
relation to the uncertainty that marks their shifting and liminal diasporic
situation.The halaqa provide members with a space to learn, confer, deliberate
and practice what they believe are incumbent upon them to do as believing
Muslims. These spaces help them to identify and intertwine Islamic values
and virtues with what are often the unexpected and unprecedented social
situations they encounter in their lives. Islamic teachings provide them with
a meaningful and authoritative framework to assess and respond to their
diasporic circumstances. As the halaqa diversify, members come to recognize
that there are multiple traditions of Islamic practice, and they start to develop
cosmopolitan forms of Islamic practice that are shaped but not reducible
to traditions of Islam they have been disciplined into. The cosmopolitan
forms of Islam they practice are processual in nature. They emerge and
are characterized by halaqa members’ ongoing efforts to discern and enact
what they deem to be proper Islam. Through the halaqa, members seek to
deepen their understanding of Islamic precepts and practices, which they
learn and engage through the activities, events, problems and opportunities
that comprise their everyday experiences. As Bushra and Auntie Noor’s

reflections upon Surat Al-Safaat illustrate, the outcome of their ethical
deliberation is not necessarily clear. For example Bushra was uncertain
whether she should push to have her daughter return to Kuwait, or let
the situation unfold without her interference. Auntie Noor was uncertain
whether she should advise her son to go to Malaysia or stay in the US. A
consistent theme running through my interlocutors’ utterances is that despite
their best efforts to learn and practice Islam properly, ultimately only God
knew if their efforts are adequate. They might draw on the work of Muslim
reformers, teachings from Islamic organizations, and their own engagement
with the Quran, hadith and other texts that comprise the Islamic discursive
tradition—learnings channelled through the halaqa; however, ultimately
only God knew whether their deeds are adequate. The Islamic frameworks
these women strove to develop through the halaqa did not provide them
with certainties of action, but courses of action. Rather than dampening
their efforts, the uncertainty of the outcomes of their actions, quickened
their learning and striving towards proper Islamic practice.
This dynamic is not necessarily new or unique to foreign resident
women’s diasporic experiences. As Mahmood (2005: 54–55, 104) and
Lambek (315–16) have discussed, self-reflexivity and striving is intrinsic
to pedagogical processes and ethical practice. What is distinctive is the
way in which halaqa members experience their religious uncertainty and
seeking. They understood and expressed these processes in terms of an
eschatological sensibility. This sensibility developed through their belief in
the afterlife, where their fate would be decided by God’s judgement of
their deeds in their present life. This belief infused and intensified their
everyday experiences with a visceral consciousness of God’s judgement—a
palpable sense of dread and anticipation of the consequences of their
actions both in the here and hereafter—a sense Auntie Noor described
as ‘such a strong feeling I could hardly breathe’ in relation to her son’s
situation. This sensibility spurred, quickened and made more acute her
and other halaqa members’ ongoing reflection of what constitutes proper
Islamic practice, leading them to reassess and recalibrate their ideas and
actions on an ongoing basis. This sensibility gave shape and substance to
the uncertainty they experience in relation to their diasporic situation, and
spurred this uncertainty. Anchored and animated by this eschatological
sensibility, foreign resident women engage in ethical deliberations about
proper Islamic practice. These deliberations are channelled through the
halaqa they develop spaces of religious practice that constitute a form of
cosmopolitan Islam not reducible to their past practices of Islam, or to the

activities of Islamic organizations.
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16
Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh
Women, Democracy and the Transformation of
Islamist Politics
Elora Shehabuddin
A man came to Allah’s Apostle and said, ‘O Allah’s Apostle! Who

is more entitled to be treated with the best companionship by
me?’ The Prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man said, ‘Who is
next?’ The Prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man further said,
‘Who is next?’ The Prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man asked
for the fourth time, ‘Who is next?’The Prophet said,‘Your father.’
(Narrated by Abu Huraira, Sahih Bukhari,Vol. 8, Book 73, No. 2)1
I n his waaz mahfils (public lectures) attended by thousands of women

and men throughout Bangladesh, prominent Jamaat-i-Islami (Society of
Islam) leader and former parliamentarian Delawar Hussain Saidi routinely
discussed the above hadith as part of his effort to highlight the importance
attached by the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and Islam itself to the
role of the mother in Muslim society, and the privileged status of women
generally in Islam. Interestingly, he used the verb ‘to serve,’ transforming
the man’s question into ‘Whom shall I serve?’ He repeatedly punctuated his
1
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/searchhadith.html (accessed on 29 June 2006).
lectures on women with the question, ‘Have women come out as winners
or losers under Islam?’ And, invariably, the audience responded loudly and
enthusiastically, ‘Winners!’
In this essay, I argue that, around the turn of the century, leaders of
the Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh regularly invoked women’s privileged
status as mothers—as in the hadith cited above—to counter the claims of
the largely secularist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating
in the country that Islam has been harmful to women and the only route
to progress is to discard the shackles of religion and tradition. This Jamaat
rhetoric marked a significant change from the original Jamaat position—
elaborated by the party’s founder Abul Ala Maududi—that women’s
divinely-ordained place was in the home.2 While he encouraged women
to vote in elections, he situated their primary contribution to the Islamic
movement in running an Islamic home, raising their children as good
Muslims and keeping their husband on an Islamic path. Several decades
later, Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh still enjoined women to fulfil domestic
obligations; however, they also went to great lengths to highlight Islam’s
recognition of women as ‘individuals’ with ‘individual’ responsibilities to
God and Islam as well as Islam’s support for women’s right to study, work and
vote. I contend that the Jamaat in Bangladesh was prompted to undertake
these recent modifications by specific developments in local, social and
political contexts, namely the twin pressures on the Jamaat of operating in a
functioning—if often imperfect—democratic polity; and of competing with
more secular organizations for the hearts, minds and votes of impoverished
women. The Jamaat in Bangladesh thus found itself in circumstances that
were substantially different from those of Pakistan, where the party first
thrived under Maududi’s leadership, and India (discussed by Irfan Ahmad
in this volume), with clear implications for the kinds of changes the party
found itself compelled to make in its message and in the manner in which
it communicated its message to the voting populace.3
I begin by examining some of Maududi’s written and public statements
about democracy, women and gender that date back to his earliest days
of political activity. Because the Jamaat was originally established as an
organization for educated, elite men, the gradual incorporation over the
2
For one example of recent rethinking of the sexual division of labour under Islam, see Wadud (1999:
62–93).
3
For the Pakistan context, see Jamal (2005).
Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh / 447
years of non-elite men and women of different classes has been the result of
deliberate strategies. I then turn to present-day Bangladesh and trace recent
changes in the public rhetoric of the Jamaat-i-Islami on these same subjects.
Maududi on Democracy
The Jamaat-i-Islami was founded in 1941 in British-ruled India by Abul
Ala Maududi (1903–79).4 He authored several books in Urdu on subjects
ranging from Islamic law, political theory and economics to philosophy and
gender relations, and his fame and influence spread throughout the Muslim
world, thanks to translations in numerous languages.5 He was repeatedly
elected amir or leader of the Jamaat until bad health forced him to step
down in 1972 (Shehadeh 2003: 23). The writings of the chief ideologue
of the Jamaat remain required reading for all Jamaat members even today.6
As a young man, Maududi became particularly interested in reaching
out to the category of Muslims in his society whom he saw as Muslim only
in name, who were more drawn to the ideas, fashions and customs of the
West than to their own Islamic heritage; he called them ‘neo-Westerners’
and ‘Oriental “Occidentals”’. Lamia Shehadeh describes how Maududi
‘came to realize that the best method to transform any society would be to
prepare a small, highly disciplined and dedicated, well-informed group to
assume leadership in social and political matters’ (ibid.: 24–25; see also Nasr
1994). Over time, he hoped that the group would Islamize the entire society
and, only then, would it push for an Islamic state. Although initially opposed
to the creation of Pakistan, he later became even more apprehensive that,
if left unimpeded, the new country’s secularist leadership, ‘ignorant of even
the ABC of the Islamic Shari‘ah’ (Maududi 1960: 43), would abolish the
public role of Islam akin to Kemalist Turkey or attenuate it as in Pahlavi
Iran. Thus, following partition in August 1947, Maududi and his followers
moved to Lahore and set out to demonstrate their support for Pakistan,
hoping that, over time, the new country would be transformed into an
Islamic state. Maududi actively participated in the discussions about the
constitution of the new state and demonstrated himself to be an active
4
Detailed biographies of Maududi and analyses of his political vision can be found in Ahmad and Ansari
(1979); Ahmed (1994); Gilani (1984); Jameelah (1982); Nasr (1994, 1996).
5
Such as Arabic, English, Turkish, Persian, Hindi, French, German, Swahili, Tamil and Bengali.
6
See essays by Irfan Ahmad (Chapter 12) and Maimuna Huq (Chapter 11) in this issue.
pro-democracy activist when secular, Western-oriented members of the

armed forces seized national political power.
While Maududi was clearly concerned about winning over the
Westernized elite, he seemed fairly confident of a near instinctual support
from those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, the unlettered
majority of the population. In a Lahore magazine interview published in
1967, Maududi was asked whether democracy was indeed the best way
forward since the ‘masses’ were surely more likely to support un-Islamic
movements that would promise to ‘ensure freedom from want at the
expense of faith and religion’. He replied:
Their hearts throb with the love of Islam and they cannot be
lured away by the slogans of bread and clothing. Even in Arab
countries the popularity of un-Islamic movements is a mere
propaganda. I have observed the situation obtaining there and
have also had the opportunity to study closely the Arab masses.
They love Islam from the core of their heart. But whether in
Syria, Egypt, Iraq or some other Arab country, the masses have
never been allowed the right to choose their representatives.
(Maududi 1982: 151)
His response, representative of the Jamaat’s own attitude for much of

its history, betrayed a lack of concern with the genuine basic needs and
preoccupations of the ‘masses’, assuming that the Islamic state would solve
all their problems, that Islam alone could attract their votes, and that the only
reason they had not yet demonstrated this love of Islam was that they had
not had a chance to cast ‘real’ votes. As it turned out, the 1960s was marked
by much public discontent with the Pakistani government: socio-economic
problems, accusations by the provinces—notably East Pakistan—of unfair
allocation of resources by the central government, as well as demands for
the restoration of democracy. The Jamaat, however, as Vali Nasr points out,
failed to seize this opportunity to ‘successfully ride the wave of discontent’.
The party’s overwhelming concern with Islam and democracy rendered it
‘oblivious to the significance of the socioeconomic changes’ the country
was experiencing. Moreover, its emphasis on Islam ‘had committed the
party to the unity of the state, therefore making it unsympathetic to ethnic
and linguistic sentiments, which were now ineluctably predicated upon
socioeconomic cleavages’ (Nasr 1994: 157). Maududi’s blind commitment
to the unity of Pakistan became starkly visible in 1971 when the central
government under General Yahya Khan responded to the Bengali nationalist
movement with brutal force—and the Jamaat’s cooperation. I will return to
this period later in the essay.
Maududi on Women’s Role in Society

As I noted above, Maududi was deeply troubled by the impact of Western
ideas and practices on Indian Muslims and reserved his harshest words
for those Muslims who had fallen under the spell of the West. As early as
1935, in an article in the monthly Tarjumanul Quran, he lamented that even
women were beginning to succumb to Western influences:
Until recently,. . . only our males. . . suffered with this bias, and our
women folk were immune. We could say that our homes serve
as sanctuaries of Islamic civilization and culture. A very vital and
important consideration behind the Islamic commandment for
women to observe purdah or Hijab is to keep that breast illumined
with faith and conviction which suckles a Muslim infant so that
at least the nursery of the budding Muslim generation is secured
against infidelity and deviation, immorality and misdemeanour,
providing Islamic environment to our children wherein they get
the first everlasting impression about the realities of life.
A Muslim home under the care and guidance of a loving mother
is, in fact, the most powerful institution of Islamic etiquette and
social life and a stronghold to fall back upon. But alas! This last
stronghold is also crumbling. The evil of Western secularism and
materialism is infiltrating our homes.The well-to-do class of our
society is dragging its women out of their homes to be infected
by the same germs of westernism that have already spoiled
our male population. We are getting our daughters admitted
in educational institutions imparting all sorts of deviation,
irreligiousness and immorality and grooming them in Western
culture in the same fashion as the have made our sons to revolt
against the tenets of Islam.
This last move in our opinion, shall complete the change-over
as pointed by us. It is no guess, but the most tragic fact that we
have foreseen. Now the situation has come to such a pass that a
Muslim woman comes out with full make-up in sheer defiance
of the clear injunctions of the holy Quran and Sunnah, dines
and lunches in English hotels, sits among strangers in cinema
halls, goes shopping in bazaars without the least pricking of

conscience or feeling of shame, rather she boasts of her outdoor
activities with pride. (Maududi 1991: 196–97)
For Maududi, the future of modern civilization depended crucially on

the regulation of gender relations. From his survey of world history, Islamic
texts and current events, he concluded that Islam, unlike other civilizations,
viewed men and women as equal and complementary, a position that is
strikingly similar to other dominant Islamist positions on gender (Maududi
1977; see also Shehabuddin 2008: chapter 5; Shehadeh 2003: chapter 3).
In a 2003 article entitled ‘The true clash of civilizations,’ Ronald
Inglehart and Pippa Norris argued that ‘Samuel Huntington was only half
right’ in his 1993 claim about an impending ‘clash of civilizations.’ They
concluded that the ‘cultural fault line that divides the West and the Islamic
world is not about democracy, but sex. According to a new survey, Muslims
and their Western counterparts want democracy, yet they are still worlds
apart when it comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality
and gay rights—which may not bode well for democracy’s future in the
Middle East’ (Inglehart and Norris 2003). While a detailed analysis of their
argument is beyond the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that Maududi
would have been the first to agree with their basic premise, so convinced
was he of the vast gulf separating Islam from the West. As he repeatedly
stated in his speeches and writings, the West had failed to value women
for their unique abilities; rather the demands of life in the West and the
women’s movement had managed to pit men and women in competition
with one another in a manner that was entirely wrong and unnatural. Islam,
by contrast, had granted women a privileged status in society precisely
because of their unique abilities:
Whatever rights the woman has been granted in the West have
been granted her not for her own sake but as if she was the man.
The woman is still inferior in the Western eyes as she was in
the past ages of ignorance. In the West a real genuine woman
has yet to have respect as the queen of a home, the wife of a
husband, the matron of children. The so-called respect that she
enjoys today is in fact for her being the he-woman or the she-
man who is physiologically a woman, but mentally a man, and
who pursues masculine activities in life. Obviously, this respect is
for manhood, not for womanhood.. . . It can, therefore, be said
without fear of contradiction that the West has not honoured the
woman because she is the woman. This was done by Islam alone
which accorded woman the place of pride in her own natural
sphere in society and civilization, and thus raised the status of
womanhood in the real sense. The Islamic civilization segregates
men and women and employs them respectively for the purposes
Nature has created them for, affording them equal opportunities
of attaining success and honour in their own natural spheres.
(Maududi 1977: 157)
Maududi regularly reminded women that, in the religious sphere, they

were responsible directly to God. In a February 1948 speech to ‘a gathering
of ladies’ in Lahore, he emphasized that they had ‘a separate identity of their
own’ and must not ‘lose their identities in those of their men’:
On the Day of Judgment every woman will rise from her own
grave and not that of her father, husband or brother. And when
she will have to render the account of her deeds, she cannot
attribute her beliefs and deeds to her menfolk in order to get
herself exculpated... she is herself responsible for her way of life
and shall be accountable to God for what she thinks and the way
she conducts herself in this world. (Maududi 1981: 65)
In effect, then, Maududi recognized women as individuals, with individual

responsibilities to God. Rather than make men and their roles and
responsibilities the standard to which women should aspire—which he saw
to be the situation in the West and has certainly been true of certain strands
of Western liberal feminism—he insisted that Muslim women should strive
to succeed within their designated sphere on the earth (domestic work,
childbearing and childrearing) and strive like men only in terms of fulfilling
their personal responsibilities to God and Islam.
At the same time, as the leader of a new Islamic movement, Maududi
did not hesitate to remind women that they had a role to play in furthering
the cause of Islam, if not by directly participating in the movement, by
creating the ideal home environment that would produce husbands and
sons predisposed to participating in such a movement. In a speech he gave
to women in the princely state of Tonk in April 1947, he told his listeners:
The participation and cooperation of women in our fold is no less

important than that of men. Men and women are equal partners
in life and the affairs relating to women are as significant as those
concerning men. They are interdependent like two wheels of
a carriage that can only function together. In other words the
system of collective life cannot work unless both the sexes play
equal roles. Allah has designed this two-wheeled carriage in such
a way that if one wheel of it [is] jammed or revolves backward
the carriage would soon cease to move.
Allah, who according to Islam, is alone worthy of service, is the
Lord of women in just the same way as He is of men. (ibid.: 43)
In this and later speeches, he discussed at length the important role that
Muslim women played in the early days of Islam—as the first convert, the
first martyrs, as nurses and, even soldiers, in the early battles:
These historical events bear ample testimony to the fact that the
women have served Islam as much as the men have done. .. .You
should therefore tread in their footsteps and thus demonstrate
your faith in the cult of truth.
What our ladies have to do at the moment is to clean their
homes and rid their families, neighbours and acquaintances of
ignorance and vices, order your family life in accordance with
Islamic principles. . . educate the illiterate among women as well
as reform the educated and bring up their children in Islamic
tradition. If your men have gone astray and indulged in excesses,
try to bring them back to the right path, but if they are busy
doing something for Islam, you should extend full cooperation
to them. (Maududi 1981: 45–46)
He dismissed the notion that women cannot effect change in men’s

character. He elaborated thus:
They can, in fact, create deep impressions on the minds of the

latter. If the Muslim girl expresses her liking for the features
of the Holy Prophet (S.A.W.) or his bosom friend Abu Bakr
(R.A.A.) rather than those of Churchill or Truman, you
will find a complete change in the features of your menfolk.
[Similarly,] if the Muslim woman denounces the pattern of life
adopted by the westernized element of our society and, on the

contrary, expresses her fondness for the Islamic way with all its
distinguishing marks including prayers, fasting, piety, politeness,
fear of God and Islamic refinement, you will witness the pleasant
change coming over the lives of your men. (ibid.: 67–68)
He was prompt to address:
suspicions [that] are being created in the minds of the people

that if an Islamic government is established in the country an
era of backwardness will follow and its progress will come to a
standstill. It is emphasized in particular that in the Islamic system
the status of women will be degraded. Nothing can be further
from [the] truth. As a matter of fact, if an Islamic government is
set up in this country, it will be a[s] great a blessing for women
as it will be for men. . . in the Islamic system the woman will not
be kept as a doll as some ignorant people believe. She will, on
the contrary, be provided maximum opportunities of progress.
It should be clearly understood that we will give a respectable
status to the woman as woman. We will not turn her into man.
(ibid.: 71, 73–74)
He then listed a number of ways in which women’s situation would improve

under an Islamic government, the first of them pertaining to women’s right
to vote. He informed his listeners that ‘Islam recognized. . . women’s right
to vote hundreds of years before her enfranchisement under the modern
democratic system. . . .Under an Islamic government, every adult woman
will have the [same] right to vote as every adult man’ (Maududi 1981: 71).
However, Maududi expected there to be certain limits to women’s political
participation, as he made clear in a speech addressing women in Sahiwal in
September 1950:
We have made our position quite clear about the right of

women to vote. They do have this right like men. But we are
not in favour of their taking part in politics. They can, of course,
exercise their right to vote freely but they should not contest for
the seats of an assembly… we are of the opinion that political
affairs are the close preserve of men and the ladies should not
be burdened with political responsibilities. But they should
of course be consulted on political matters. (Maududi 1981:
136–37)
At a gathering of Karachi lawyers and intellectuals in late 1952, Maududi

outlined in some detail what he considered to be the ‘First Principles of
the Islamic State’. To be eligible to rule, he argued, one must be Muslim,
male, ‘sane and adult’ and ‘a citizen of the Islamic state’ (Maududi 1960:
261).The topic of female political leadership would continue to be debated
by the Jamaat and other Islamists in Pakistan in the 1980s during Benazir
Bhutto’s foray into politics as well as in the early 1990s in Bangladesh
with the restoration of democracy and the emergence of Khaleda Zia
and Sheikh Hasina in the alternating roles of prime minister and leader
of the opposition.7 However, even during his tenure as amir of the Jamaat,
Maududi found himself in the difficult situation of going against his own
public position on the subject of female leadership in the interest of what
he described as the greater good of the nation.
While Maududi was in prison in 1964, the Jamaat endorsed Fatimah
Jinnah as its candidate against the military ruler Ayub Khan in Pakistan’s
January 1965 presidential elections. Fatimah Jinnah was the sister of
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the most prominent leader of the movement for
Pakistan, widely recognized and revered as Quaid-e-Azam, the ‘Father of
the Nation’. Upon his release from prison, Maududi supported the party’s
choice, even though this endorsement was in flagrant contravention of
his earlier speeches and writings, in which he had cited passages from
the Quran to condemn female political leadership. Maududi justified the
Jamaat’s decision to support Fatima Jinnah’s candidacy by pointing to the
need to combat a greater evil, Ayub Khan and his martial law regime: ‘On
one side is a man; other than his gender there is nothing good about him;
on the other is a woman; aside from her gender nothing is wrong about her’
(cited in Nasr 1994: 234, fn. 47).
His reasoning failed to persuade critics within the party or conservative
ulama outside. The Jamaat amir of Lahore, Kawthar Niyazi, pointed out
that Maududi had made important doctrinal compromises not only
in supporting a woman candidate but also in favouring participation in
elections since 1951. However, with little internal support of his own or
for his position, Niyazi was forced to resign from the party. The purging of
dissenting, indeed more doctrinaire, party members became routine over
the years as the Jamaat continued its slide into a more pragmatic politics
7
On the developments in Pakistan, which are beyond the scope of this essay, see, for example, Zakaria
(1990).
(ibid.: 41–42). Ayub Khan, for his part, was quick to obtain fatwas from
ulama stating that a woman could not be head of an Islamic state. Pro-Ayub
ulama pointed to Maududi’s own writings on the subject and charged him
with ‘playing fast and loose with Islamic injunctions’ (Hasan 1984: 178).8
Maududi retorted that there was a great deal in Pakistan at the time that
was in violation of Islamic injunctions—women ministers and ambassadors,
coeducation, men and women working together, air hostesses who ‘serve[d]
wine to the passengers’—and demanded to know why there was suddenly
such a furore now over a woman candidate for president. He believed quite
strongly that ‘the point at issue was not whether women should or should
not participate in politics’. Rather, for him, the ‘real question was how could
the nation be rid of a personal dictatorial rule which was responsible for
the deterioration of Islamic values’ (ibid.: 179). The elections were held
in early January 1965. Ayub Khan emerged victorious, despite claims of
irregularities at the polls, and Pakistan was spared the prospect of having to
accept a female head of state.
Shehadeh describes Maududi as a truly revolutionary Islamist thinker
because he called for a ‘bold reinterpretation of the Qur’an, Sunna, and
Hadith, and was gratified not to have been educated as a madrasah, thus
keeping his mind unfettered by traditional thought. ... [He] stretched
rationalism and human independence and freedom to their limits’ (Shehadeh
2003: 41–42; see also Nasr 1996). But, as she points out, he did not extend
this approach to his analysis of women and gender, drawing directly on
the very sources, the ‘Hadith and Sunna, which he had just denuded of all
authenticity, to shackle women with ever heavier, tighter chains’ (Shehadeh
2003: 42). Similarly, while he discouraged strict emulation of even the
Prophet, he did not hesitate to tell women that they must follow injunctions
that many scholars today argue were meant strictly for the wives of the
Prophet, such as the Quranic verses pertaining to veiling (ibid.: 44; see,
for example, Ahmed 1992 and Barlas 2002). Although his followers in later
decades continued to cite Maududi’s work faithfully, they demonstrated
greater flexibility on ‘women’s issues’ in response to changes taking place
around them. As is shown in the remainder of the essay, this was particularly
true of the Bangladeshi context.
8
It is important to mention here that Maududi was, of course, not alone in his contradictions, especially
on the subject of women. Khomeini, for example, declared women’s suffrage ‘un-Islamic’ in 1963 yet
described the vote as ‘a religious, Islamic, and divine duty’ and actively sought women’s vote for the
Islamic Republic. See Shehadeh (2003: 235).
The Break-up of Pakistan

Following the Jamaat’s disastrous performance in Pakistan’s 1970 elections,
when its preoccupation with Islam and national unity won it few
supporters—only four of the eighty national assembly seats it contested
in West Pakistan and none of the 71 seats it contested in East Pakistan—
Maududi conceded that the party may have sacrificed too much with its
purges and compromises, urging a return to the original holy community.
But by then, his day-to-day influence had waned. Within Bangladesh, the
Jamaat eventually emerged as a key player in national politics, especially
following the restoration of democracy in 1991.
The 1970 Pakistani parliamentary election was significant less for the
rout of the Jamaat than for the overwhelming victory of the Awami League,
which won almost all the seats allocated to East Pakistan and, one might
argue, for the inevitable move towards the break-up of Pakistan. The West
Pakistan-based central government’s unwillingness to recognise promptly
the Bengali Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the new prime minister of all of
Pakistan simply added to the Bengalis’ list of long-simmering economic,
political and cultural grievances against the western territories. To make
matters worse, the central government was inexplicably slow to respond to
the devastating cyclone of December 1970 in East Pakistan. In March 1971,
the Bengalis declared independence.
During the nine-month war that followed, the Jamaat of the erstwhile
East Pakistan gained notoriety in secularist and nationalist circles for
speaking out against the country’s independence, for collaborating with the
West Pakistani army and for participating in mass rapes and killings. Upon
independence, the Jamaat and all other religious parties were outlawed—
both because of their activities during the war and because Bangladesh
was established as a secular socialist republic. In the years that followed,
however, the early ideals were abandoned and parties such as the Jamaat
slowly emerged as full participants in the political process, rehabilitated
by generals Ziaur Rahman and Hussain Muhammad Ershad, consecutive
military rulers in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as with Presidents Anwar Sadat
in Egypt and Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, who made it possible for Islamists to
have a larger presence on the political scene in their respective countries, so
the primary motivation of the authoritarian rulers in Bangladesh was also
to bolster their own political legitimacy through their much-publicized
support for Islam.
The Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh

As had happened in the early years of Pakistan, the Jamaat in Bangladesh
became actively involved in the movement opposing military rule and in
support of the restoration of democracy. Disappointed by Ershad’s decision
to declare Islam the state religion in 1988—rather than declare Bangladesh
an Islamic state—the Jamaat no doubt felt that a democratic system would
enhance its chances of achieving the kind of society and state it sought.
The Jamaat also played an important part of the movement for what
would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in
March 1996, according to which all future elections would be preceded
by three months under a ‘neutral caretaker government’ led by a retired
chief justice (Ahmed 2003: 59; see also Ahmed 2002). Democratic elections,
acknowledged as generally free and fair by a multitude of domestic and
international observers, were finally held in 1991 and, again, successfully in
1996 and 2001. The Jamaat has contested all three elections and although
it has not been able to make an effective bid for national power, it has
managed to win enough parliamentary seats over the years to serve as a
crucial coalition partner to the more successful parties. Jamaat leaders in
Bangladesh maintained, in interviews with me, that the party was in no rush
to win elections and quite prepared to wait until the population at large was
supportive of the move towards an Islamic state.
Much like the main supporters of Islamist movements in other parts
of the world, the vast majority of official Jamaat members in Bangladesh
today—men and women—are middle-class, well-educated and urban-
based (Ahmed 1994; Bahadur 1994; Banu 1994; Hashmi 1994).9 However,
what differentiates the Jamaat in Bangladesh from Islamist movements
elsewhere—in much of the Arab world for instance, where parties such as
the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt operate within distinctly undemocratic
contexts—is that it has been allowed to and has chosen to operate as a
political party in a democratic national polity. The Jamaat, therefore, is now
necessarily concerned with numbers. Moreover, as importantly, the massive
mobilization of impoverished and illiterate Bangladeshi women fostered in
recent years by international and indigenous development organizations
has made them an unusual constituency within the Muslim world and
a force that can no longer be ignored. The Jamaat appears to have come
9
For a comparative perspective, see Wickham (2002) and Wiktorowicz (2004).
to the realization that it cannot expect to win national power by relying

exclusively on educated middle-class support in the midst of mass illiteracy
and without addressing the needs and concerns of the increasing numbers of
poor women who now demand educational and employment opportunities
(see Shehabuddin 2008).
Since the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85), inter national
organizations and donor countries have directed millions of dollars into
projects targeting women throughout the developing world, and Bangladesh
has received its fair share of funds and attention. Bangladeshi individuals
and organizations have managed to achieve global renown with innovative
strategies in the arena of development and poverty alleviation, for instance,
with microfinance and adult education. Millions of women are now
affiliated with one NGO or another, and while the thousands of NGOs in
the country vary in their strategies, objectives and degrees of effectiveness,
it must be acknowledged that, by their very presence in rural Bangladesh
and their interaction with women, they have begun to transform social and
gender relations.10 What is important for the purposes of the analysis here
is that, particularly since the resumption of national elections in the early
1990s, many NGOs have engaged in voter education programmes to help
the uneducated poor make informed voting decisions. This is in addition
to other social development programmes many NGOs already had in place,
such as in the areas of adult and legal literacy and women’s rights. While
the majority of NGOs have remained non-partisan—simply helping their
members to identify honest, hardworking local candidates for office—a few
NGOs have urged their members to vote either for or against a particular
party.
The latter sort of targeted campaigning was particularly visible prior to
the 1996 elections.11 The year marked the 25th anniversary of independence
and secularist organizations celebrated the occasion by campaigning actively
in favour of the ‘ideals of 1971’ and against those who were opposed to the
movement for the independence of Bangladesh. However, the rallies that
I attended and the distributed literature that I read during that campaign
season were not always clear on what those ideals were. For instance, the
10
The following is simply a small sample of the vast literature on NGOs and women in Bangladesh:
Feldman (1997/2000, 2003); Karim (2011); Rahman (1999); Shehabuddin (as Rahnuma Shehabuddin)
(1992); White (1992, 1999).
11
For a more detailed discussion of the 1996 elections, see Shehabuddin (2008).
four founding directive principles or pillars of the 1972 constitution were

nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, yet one heard very little
about socialism. The primary issue appeared to be the tension between the
secular foundation of the nation and the decidedly more Islamic direction
the state had taken in the past two decades. Thus, some organizations
campaigned openly against the Jamaat-i-Islami, reminding their listeners of
the party’s 1971 opposition to the break-up of Pakistan and Jamaat workers’
involvement in rapes and killings of the local population, as well as of its
more recent criticisms of NGOs targeting women. The Awami League,
which had led the movement for independence, emerged victorious in the
1996 elections and returned to power after 21 years. The Jamaat, which
had won 18 seats in 1991, came away with just three. Both the Jamaat
and its opponents seemed convinced that the newly-mobilized ‘category’ of
impoverished women voters had been responsible for the Jamaat’s disastrous
performance. Interestingly, rural women who consider themselves to be
good practicing Muslims turned their backs on the Jamaat in 1996, not
so much over the 1971 issue, but as they were persuaded that the Jamaat
was opposed to their efforts to improve their lives through NGO activities
(Shehabuddin 1999). This lesson, I contend, led the Jamaat in Bangladesh
to rethink its relationship to the poor and to women, in order eventually to
win mass support for Islamization. Thus, although Maududi and the Jamaat
did indeed recognize the importance of women supporters early in the
Jamaat’s history, what changed in the Bangladeshi context in the past decade
of the twentieth century is that the Jamaat’s public rhetoric moved beyond
affirmations of the spiritual equality of men and women and celebrations of
women as mothers of future generations of Muslims, to a clear recognition
that the impoverished, uneducated majority of the country’s women have
both material and spiritual needs. In other words, it was not sufficient
simply to promise voters direct passage to heaven if they voted for the
Jamaat. Women are also concerned, for example, about access to education
and employment, procuring sufficient food to feed their families, and a
safe environment within and outside the home. Although the Jamaat had
certainly made some overtures to rural women before 1996, there appeared
to have been a more systematic campaign to woo impoverished, illiterate
women in both rural and urban areas in the years following 1996 with clear
implications for the message directed at these women and the manner in
which the message was delivered.
Traditionally, the Jamaat had reached out to prospective supporters

through written literature, direct personal contact and large public lectures;
after 1996, one could discern subtle changes even within these time-
honoured strategies.The waaz mahfils or public lectures that often last several
days and nights were particularly interesting because they were attended
by thousands of men and women, and audio recordings of the lectures of
the more popular Jamaat speakers—such as Delawar Hossain Saidi—would
be widely available on inexpensive cassettes. While waaz mahfils themselves
are not a new phenomenon in Bangladesh, what was interesting was how
Jamaat leaders used the waazes to appeal to women directly, as a distinct and
independent audience. Starting in 1997, Saidi set aside at least a half-day
during the waazes to be devoted entirely to, as he calls them, ‘the mothers
and sisters’. Cassettes of these women’s sessions are available separately for
sale and distribution.
In a 2005 lecture for a women’s gathering in Bogra in northern
Bangladesh, Saidi began by reminding his listeners that women and men
are equal in the eyes of God, and that they receive equal sawab or reward
from God for the same deeds (‘Women’s Gathering 2005’, Saidi n.d.). He
further reminded them that when the Prophet came to this world, women
had no rights, it was a curse to be born a woman in that era, and infant girls
were regularly killed; Islam changed all that. He identified three stages in
a woman’s life—daughter, wife and mother—and elaborated at length on
the kind of behaviour towards one’s daughter, wife and mother that God
would reward. He spoke at length about many of the positive comments
that the Prophet is said to have made about daughters: for example, that the
angels of God come into a home in which a daughter has been born and
bring blessings to her and to those who love her; that one should always
bring back gifts for one’s children when one travels but should give the
daughter her gift first. He then narrated an incident in which the Prophet
had reprimanded a man who showed more affection toward his young
son than his young daughter, by putting the former on his lap but not
the latter.
Saidi turned next to marriage and a woman’s life as a wife. He spoke
of the special bonds of love that God has destined between husbands and
wives, but lamented that the wholly ‘un-Islamic’ practice of dowry in today’s
Bangladesh has made it impossible for such bonds to develop. He attacked
those who constantly criticize inheritance provisions in the Quran, pointing
out that, while men can inherit only from their father, Islam allows women
to acquire wealth from a number of different sources. Most notable among

Islam’s financial injunctions, he pointed out, was the mohrana or dower, the
wealth that a man is required to give his wife as a condition of marriage.
Although this is faroj (Islamically compulsory), it is not practiced properly
and, to the contrary, the incidence of dowry—a transfer of wealth from the
bride’s family to the groom’s—is on the rise. Moreover, traditional Islamic
doctrine stipulates that the wife is not required to spend a single penny on
household expenses, no matter how great her wealth; all expenses pertaining
to the house and family are the responsibility of the husband.
Finally, Saidi talked about women’s responsibilities and status as mothers.
He discussed the hadith cited at the beginning of this article to show how
highly the Prophet esteemed mothers. Saidi dismissed the belief, particularly
popular in rural Bangladesh, that heaven lies at the feet of one’s husband. He
cited a hadith in which the Prophet had said that heaven lies at the feet of
one’s mother and that no child can ever compensate a mother for the time,
effort and pain she put into bearing and raising him or her.
Saidi moved on to discuss more general matters about Judgement Day,
when everyone will have to account for each deed, good or bad, in life. For
those who might wonder how many volumes would be needed to record
an individual’s every deed, he used the analogy of the chip inside a mobile
phone. ‘If man can produce the technology to store so much information
on so small a surface, imagine what God can do!’ He then deftly returned
to women’s specific responsibilities in life as part of his discussion of what
counted as correct behaviour during one’s ‘fleeting’ time on earth. He
told his listeners that observing purdah was faroj (compulsory) in exactly
the same way that prayer and fasting were: ‘Islam has given women many
opportunities.... It is not the case that just because you have been born
women, you cannot get an education, work, run a business.... You can do
everything, but you must do it in purdah. For example, just as you have come
to the mahfil today in purdah—alhamdulillah’. He added that purdah did not
‘hinder women’s progress’. Rather it is a dhal, a ‘shield’ like that carried by
the police when they have to face rallies and want to protect themselves
from stone-throwing protestors. Like the police shield, Saidi continued, the
burqa protects women from the inappropriate gaze of male strangers:
If a woman wears a burqa, observes hijab and niqab, then no-

one will even utter a bad word.... To the contrary, when you
go into a store wearing a burqa, the shopkeepers will greet you
as khalamma (aunt, mother’s sister), chachi-amma (aunt, wife of

father’s brother). And if you go in all dressed up and without a
burqa, then they call you bhabi (sister-in-law), apa (older sister),
etc. and they flirt and joke with you. This does not increase your
status but rather ruins it. It is precisely to preserve your morjada
(dignity) that God has arranged for the burqa. And those who
wear a burqa are protected from all sorts of dangers because they
are following God’s injunctions.
He emphasized Muslim women’s right to study and work—as long as they

observe purdah—in several of his other lectures too including, for example,
a waaz on ‘The Rights of Women and Non-Muslims’, addressed to men:
Islam has given women the right to education. . . she can work,
she can go to the army, do first-aid work. . . on the Prophet’s
battlefields, men would do jihad and women would carry out the
injured on stretchers and administer first-aid. . . say subhanallah
(All glory is to God) loudly.Who then has given women all kinds
of morjada (dignity)? Islam has. That is why I will say to Muslim
mothers, the so-called progressive forces are not so progressive.
They are in fact dangerous. Do not go out onto the streets at
their behest and risk ruining yourselves (sharbonash). You can
study, work, do everything from within purdah. But you must
stay in purdah. (‘The Rights of Women’, Saidi n.d.)
Another common theme in his lectures was the notion that God has, in fact,
made it easier for women to attain divine rewards. For instance, at a waaz for
women in Comilla in 2006, he pointed out that women are not required
to give azan (the call to prayer) or participate in jihad. He cited a hadith in
which the Prophet said that because a woman suffers in many ways during
pregnancy, she will receive sawab from God that is equivalent to what she
would have received had she spent all those months fasting. Similarly, for
breastfeeding women will receive sawab equal to what she would for saving
a dying person.
He closed the Comilla lecture in his usual manner, by leading a prayer
in which he asked God to bless the thousands of mothers and sisters as well
as young children present at the gathering. He asked God to forgive them
all and to assuage women’s sorrows: ‘those who are married but have no
children, God, please give them children; those who have grown children
but have not been able to get them married, please make that possible;
husbands and wives who do not get along, do not love one another, whose
home is like jahannum, God, please create love and affection (mil-mohabbat)
between them’.
The Hearts, Minds and Votes of Poor Women12

How exactly did women in Bangladesh respond to these overtures from
the Society of Islam? To a small group of the nation’s women, the Jamaat
did offer a promising future, in this world and the next. Destitute slum
women I interviewed in Chittagong just before the 2001 elections insisted
that through their involvement with the Jamaat, they now knew how to
pray properly and they understood the importance of purdah, fasting and
the meaning and interpretation behind many of the Arabic Quranic prayers
they used to routinely memorize and recite. When I asked some women
about their religious practices prior to their encounter with the Jamaat,
they replied:
The way we understand purdah now, we didn’t understand it

then. We didn’t fear non-kin men then, the way we do now. We
didn’t observe purdah then.
We knew about praying. Our parents told us to pray, so when
it was time to pray, we prayed, but we didn’t attach as much
importance to it then as we do now. We didn’t prepare and plan
for prayers.The fear that we must pray, we didn’t have that before.
They had learned that there were many supposedly ‘incorrect’ Islams,
corrupted over the centuries by local customs and practices, and only one
correct Islam—that propagated by the Jamaat. These women thus dutifully
attended the Jamaat’s meetings, attempted to live by its teachings and no
doubt voted for it at election time because they believed these actions would
help safeguard their passage to heaven. Taking their faith and belief in the
afterlife seriously, one can argue that their motivation behind supporting
the Jamaat was one of self-interest, albeit intangible and unverifiable.
It was clear that the women had also gained a valuable lesson in how
they could use the democratic process to achieve the kind of government
12
For a more detailed discussion of women’s response to Jamaat, see Shehabuddin (2008).
they believed they wanted. That the Jamaat workers had discussed voting
and elections in some detail with the slum’s inhabitants became evident
from the poor women’s responses to my questions regarding their plans for
the upcoming elections. One woman I spoke with expressed hope that the
current prevalence of violence against women would come to an end under
an Islamic government that required women to observe purdah:
People throw water and acid at them from small plastic bags.
They spit at them. They throw color[ed liquids and powder] at
the girls. What we want to say is that there are many problems
in our country....
What we say is that if our country were an Islamic state, if we
had a truly Muslim government, then that government would
announce that all women must wear the burqa. Then all women
would have to wear the burqa. If the government said that
women couldn’t go out without a burqa, then they certainly
couldn’t go out without one.
She had not been persuaded by detractors who had warned her that
a Jamaat government might prevent her daughters from working outside
the home:
People say that if we vote for the Jamaat, the garment factories
will be shut down. Why should they be shut down? Men and
women will simply have separate garments factories! People
tell garments workers that they will lose their jobs if they vote
for the Jamaat. Why should that happen? There should just be
separate factories for men and women! Can’t it be that way?
Why should we lose our jobs if we vote for the Jamaat? . . .It’s
only if we work with men that men can see us... if we don’t, then
they can’t see us.
She also believed that an Islamic government would be able to ensure the
piety of its citizens by mandating breaks for prayers. In the end, she felt
strongly that the Jamaat—as a party of real Muslims—deserved a chance to
run the country:
If we go to anyone, they don’t listen to us, they say we are shibir.13

That’s what they say if any of them [ Jamaat members] stand for
election. But this is a Muslim country, why not see what happens
if we vote for Muslims? You have brought the Awami League to
power once, you have brought the BNP to power once, you have
brought the plough [Jatiya Party’s ballot symbol] to power once. .
. why not vote for the Jamaat once and see what happens?
The perception among many women that the Jamaat was absolutely honest
and above the corruption that plagues politicians everywhere was also of
enormous importance. Although a few high-ranking Jamaat men appeared
on the graft lists prepared as part of the caretaker government’s anti-
corruption drive in 2007,14 it is not clear what impact this—or the more
recent high-profile arrests on charges of war crimes in 1971—will have on
the greater reputation for honesty that Jamaat candidates have long enjoyed
relative to candidates of other parties. Indeed, a background check of all
electoral candidates by the Election Commission in 1996 found that the
Jamaat was the only major party with no bank loan defaulters on its slate!
More recently, the two Jamaat leaders who were given cabinet positions
following the 2001 elections emerged as the most efficient and least corrupt
of all government ministers—this squeaky clean reputation also holds
true for Islamists in government elsewhere, such as the ruling AK party in
Turkey and the Hizballah parliamentarians in Lebanon. By the personal
example of its elected members as well as formal party rhetoric of religiosity
and honesty, the Jamaat can project an alternative to the corruption and
patronage politics that has long characterized the political scene, under both
authoritarian and democratic rule.
There are, of course, certain limits to the Jamaat’s overtures to a distinct
female constituency, and it is this reluctance that continues to cost them
dearly at the polls. Even in 2001, after all its direct appeals to women voters
and its participation in a four-party alliance led by the victorious Bangladesh
Nationalist Party, the Jamaat won only 17 seats. I contend that this is in
13
Shibir is short for Islami Chhatra Shibir, the male student wing of the Jamaat. Very active on college
and university campuses throughout the country, the shibir have gained notoriety for violent acts and
terror tactics against their political and ideological opponents. See Hashmi (1994) and Hossain and
Siddiquee (2004).
14
The Jamaat MP on the graft list is Gazi Nazrul Islam of Satkkhira and he is currently under arrest. See
Hasan (2008); BBC News (2012).
part because the Jamaat continues to cast women in a subordinate role

in society—despite its talk of spiritual equality between men and women,
despite a recognition that women today want to and need to work outside
the home and despite an acknowledgement that Muslim women, mothers
or not, already have suffrage. It continues to insist on a strict form of purdah as
the most important marker of authentic Islam and opposes women working
alongside men in garment factories and NGOs—the two largest and most
visible employers of Bangladeshi women in recent decades; it adopts male-
biased positions on issues with immediate implications for women such as
family law; and finally, it refuses to field female candidates for parliament.
The refusal to field female candidates for parliament illustrates perfectly
the contradiction inherent in the Jamaat’s support of democratic rights for
women and perhaps offers an explanation to why all women, especially
poor, illiterate women, do not flock to support the party.
Although Jamaat members have publicly supported the increased
presence of women in parliament, accepted parliamentary seats from the
women’s quota (of indirectly elected seats), and indeed has been part of
a coalition government under a woman prime minister twice—in 1991
and in 2001—the party still refuses to nominate women candidates for
direct election to parliament. There are, of course, impoverished women
who actively support the Jamaat and voice strong opposition to female
politicians. One woman I interviewed was quite adamant that no self-
respecting Muslim woman would even want to run for public office: ‘Why
should they when there are men who can run?’ She insisted that if elected
to parliament, women are expected to shake hands with non-kin men, walk
on the streets in the midst of strangers, get their hair cut in a short bob—
conduct she felt was highly inappropriate for any God-fearing Muslim
woman. One young woman sitting nearby chimed in, ‘There can be no
question of there being a female prime minister when there are plenty of
men around to do the job’.
However, my research clearly shows that the vast majority of poor women
are beginning to think otherwise, that many women have developed an
interest in politics recently precisely because of the presence of women prime
ministers and the growing number of NGO supported women in local
elected office. In many areas, rural women have also had the opportunity to
interact with powerful women, such as heads of NGOs and important NGO
workers. For many women, these are all clear indications that, as many said to
me, ‘Women can now do anything!’These women are left dissatisfied by the
Jamaat’s view of women, as what Linda Kerber calls ‘deferential citizens’ or

voters ‘who freely chose their social superiors to office rather than exercise
a claim on office themselves’ (Kerber 1997: 59–60).
Gender, Democracy and the Transformation of

Islamist Politics
In the 65 years since it was founded, the Jamaat-i-Islami has shown time and
again that it is cautiously open to persuasion and change. Founded in 1941
as a community of pious men, it declared its intention in 1951 to contest
general elections in West and East Pakistan and became an advocate for
democracy. It would be another 20 years before it would recruit working-
class men or any women. It initially opposed the creation of Pakistan but
then accepted the fait accompli and tried to mould the new nation in its
own way. For a very long time, it paid no attention to the socio-economic
concerns of the majority of the population, the so-called ‘masses’, taking
their support for granted and arguing that Islam would solve any and all
problems. In Bangladesh, this has proven to no longer be an option—if it
wishes to survive as a political party—given the furious mobilization among
the impoverished majority by NGOs, and among women in particular.This
has had clear implications for the content of its campaign promises and their
methods of outreach—and not without some success.
During election years, the Jamaat has made a special effort to tell
women voters that they alone should decide for themselves how to cast
their vote, irrespective of their husband’s wishes (Shehabuddin 2008). What
is interesting is that in recent years, the Jamaat has sought to maintain the
support of non-elite women voters even between election campaigns and
this strategy is manifest from the manner in which Saidi discusses gender
issues, from both the content of his message and the method of delivery.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Saidi and the Jamaat in
Bangladesh have diverged significantly from Maududi’s own message on
gender issues in order to woo women voters, it is clear that they have made
an effort to strongly emphasise women’s equality to men in front of God—
and in the election booth. As is evident from the above analysis of a few
recent waazes, Saidi goes to great lengths to reassure women that Islam is
supportive of their rights, that Islam has made women winners, not losers.
Maududi had been quite insistent in his writings about the sexual division
of labour, whereby ‘the woman has been made queen of the house. Earning
a living for the family is the responsibility of the husband, while her duty
is to keep and run the house with his earnings’ (Maududi 1977: 145). Saidi
reaffirms this basic dictum but repeatedly stresses that women are free to go
out and study and work as long as they are appropriately dressed.
Perhaps the most remarkable difference between the speeches of
Maududi and those of present-day politicians such as Saidi lies in the very
nature of the language used, in particular the efforts of the latter to present
their message in a manner that would make it accessible to the unlettered
majority of the population. The language is straightforward and colloquial;
the lectures are filled with references to local beliefs, popular hadiths and
the concrete woes of the rural poor, such as dowry and security. It is worth
noting that, according to Daniel Brown, Maududi considered Abu Huraira,
a contemporary of the Prophet, a liar (Brown 1996: 86; cited in Shehadeh
2003: 42); yet, the hadith about the importance of the mother that Saidi
regularly cites was relayed by Abu Huraira himself. Finally, one also discerns
from today’s lectures and writings that the Jamaat feels the need to respond
to the attacks of, as Saidi and other Jamaat leaders call them, ‘so-called
progressive forces’ in Bangladeshi society and, of course, prolific Western
academic and popular writers.
Over the past six decades then, the Jamaat-i Islami, at least in its
Bangladeshi incarnation, has transformed itself, in response to changing
realities around it, from an organization of elite and educated men hoping
to reform nominal Muslims, to a political party that contests democratic
elections and actively seeks the support of the poorest women in society.
Although it is tempting to dismiss these small modifications in the Jamaat’s
presentations of its message as based on sheer instrumentality—the desire
for votes—I argue that they also represent an Islamist accommodation to
changing social and political realities. Although the combination of the
twin pressures of a democratic polity and mobilized women renders the
Bangladeshi context unique in the Muslim world, there are nonetheless
important lessons to be drawn regarding the transformative potential of
Islamist politics and the possibilities for change.
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17
Secularism Beyond the State
The ‘State’ and the ‘Market’ in Islamist Imagination
Humeira Iqtidar*
I am proposing only that we should abandon the state as a material object

of study. . . while continuing to take the idea of the state extremely seriously.
(Abrams 1988: 75)
I slamists are defined as those among Muslim revivalists who focus on taking
over the state—they certainly seem to take the state, both as an idea and
as a material object, very seriously (see, for instance, Fuller 2003). However,
even as taking over the state remains the proclaimed aim-prompting, in
response, an alarmist discourse about the imminent dangers of an Islamist
coup, actual strategies pursued over the last two decades have involved a
subtle move away from the state as the locus for mobilizations. It is argued
here that in rough alignment with the shift in global political imagination
where the state is no longer the dominant mobilizer of political energies
and projects, Islamist strategies belie a move towards using the market as an
alternative engine for defining and facilitating moral and political change.
This shift does not imply a complete break with the past and certainly at the
*
I am grateful to David Gilmartin, Asef Bayat, David Washbrook, Ira Katznelson, Sadaf Aziz, Mohammed
Qasim Zaman and the two anonymous MAS reviewers for suggestions and critical comments. I am also
grateful to my students in the Theories of the State course at LUMS who raised incisive and productive
questions and comments.
Secularism Beyond the State / 473
rhetorical level the focus on the state continues. However, as shown below,
increasingly marginalizing Maududi’s vision of the state as the central agent
of change in the modern world, contemporary Jamaat-e-Islami activists are
grappling with the many contradictions in their relationship with the market
as an engine for the formation and transformation of the moral community.1
Moreover, the idea of the market remains infused with conflicting sentiments.
On the one hand, the market is seen as an arena of suspect and selfish desires,
on the other, as a place of autonomous moral choice and assertion. This
shift in strategies flows from the space that the state has had to concede to
the market within global political imagination and is important to analyse
critically to build a nuanced understanding of the relationship between
Islamism and the political landscape within which it operates.
Initial recognition of a serious change in Islamism is beginning in
academic writings, and some attempts at grappling with the nature and extent
of these alterations within Islamism are already underway. The most cogent
of these by far is Asef Bayat’s nuanced description of the phenomenon that
he calls ‘Post-Islamism’ (Bayat 2005, 2007). His contention is that Islamism
has lost much of its initial energy, and is in the process of reconciling itself
to notions and practices of democracy and pluralism. The debate about
the validity of the term ‘Post-Islamism’ is linked intrinsically to the idea
that Islamism has failed. Roy (1994) has proposed that Islamism has indeed
failed; Kepel (2002) and Ahmad (2009a) sidestep the question of failure by
emphasizing that Islamism has now morphed into Post-Islamism with a
decentring of the focus on state, and greater acceptance of plurality within
and outside the movement. In responding to the widespread use of the
term ‘Post-Islamism’, Bayat points out his understanding of the term as
representing ‘both a condition and a project’. As a condition, it refers to the
draining of energy from the initial sources of legitimacy of Islamism. As a
project, Post-Islamism refers to a more explicit negotiation with democracy
and liberalism. Bayat’s arguments are compelling, and certainly the case is
clearer for Egypt and Iran (the two countries that Bayat deals with) than for
Pakistan. In part this is because in Pakistan, unlike Egypt in Bayat’s assessment,
1
I am not suggesting a readily formed and concrete ‘community’ that the Jamaat-e-Islami can mobilize.
The Jamaat-e-Islami activists’ own use of the notion of ‘community’ ranges from a small Jamaat-e-
Islami core to all the Muslims in the world—the putative community of the ummah. In fact, it is
precisely the formation and definition of the community that is the challenge. See Gilmartin (1988)
for a perceptive analysis of the creation of particular conceptions of ‘community’ during colonial rule.
there is still some hope for Islamists’ electoral ambitions, and unlike Iran,
Islamism has not yet exhausted its potential because it has not been directly
in power, or for long enough. Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the key Islamist parties
in Pakistan, and indeed an influential one internationally, continues to be
closely engaged in the electoral process, in claiming its continued ambition
to influence and control the state. Yet, there are important echoes of the
changes that Bayat describes: a subtle shift has taken place in the strategies
of the Islamists, linked to a shift in political imagination, even though their
rhetoric has remained relatively unchanged.
These modifications in Islamism are too often studied only in terms
of changes within the territorial bounds of nation-states and without
reference to a global political imagination.2 The term ‘political imagination’
is capacious enough to accommodate both intellectual history and popular
political discourse.This capaciousness is useful because it allows conversations
about some general trends, which are valuable in their contributions to our
understanding of politics, and would otherwise be impossible to conduct.
Historians of political thought/intellectual history have employed it to
discuss the rise and use of political concepts such as democracy, empire,
secularization or Europe (see, for instance, Pagden 1990, 2002; Pocock 2009;
Skinner and Strath 2003; Stedman-Jones and Katznelson 2010).3 Whether
interrogating the path of particular political concepts from the works of
canonical writers to broad public appeal, or contextualizing their writings
by placing them in the concerns of the period, these works have provided
an insight into how, when, and why, certain ideas have inspired political
action. Building on such usage, I distinguish it slightly from the concept
of social imaginary as used by Charles Taylor by which he means, as do I,
‘something broader and deeper’ than social theories.4 However, rather than
2
For an exception to this trend, see Faisal (2005). While Devji places Islamism within the context of a
global political imagination, he is not concerned with changes within Islamism.
3
Perhaps the example of Europe is a useful one. That Europe is ultimately an idea rooted in a particular
imperial imagination rather than a clear geographical zone provides an interesting example for our
purposes here. Both Europe and South Asia are appendages to the vast landmass that is Asia. In terms
of landmass, physical space, population, number of languages, religions and ethnic groups, South Asia
is bigger than Europe. There is a clearer demarcation from Asia in the form of the mighty Himalayan
mountains compared with the murky boundary between Europe and Asia. Yet, South Asia is a ‘sub-
continent’ while Europe is a ‘continent’. This imagination is linked to specific and concrete sets of
institutions such as the European Union. See also Lewis and Wigen (1997).
4
Taylor (2004: 23) then goes on to distinguish imaginaries from theories on three accounts: (1)
imaginaries are how ordinary people ‘imagine’ their world. This is then represented not in theoretical
terms but instead carried in images, stories and legends; (2) while theory circulates within a small
taking as given the distinction between theory and imagination, as Taylor

does, this paper explores the ways in which both are implicated together in
broader political changes.
Islamism and the State: From Lenin to Gramsci

To understand this shift one must first grasp the nature of Jamaat-e-Islami’s
focus on the state. Irfan Ahmad and I have both argued that the importance
of the state in Jamaat-e-Islami discourse is not the result of a theological
compulsion within Islam, but a result of the context in which it was
founded (Ahmad 2009b; Iqtidar 2010). A key feature of this context is the
increased reach and importance of the modern state—a general name for
particular arrangements of power—in colonial India. I contend that it is
not just the increased intrusion of the state, but also the specific kind of
secularism that the colonial state practiced which has shaped and defined
Islamism’s focus. Thus, the relationship between Islamism and secularism is
not one of negation alone, but of creation and suggestion. This essay will
focus on two key components of colonial secularism that were critical in
supporting the rise of Islamism, itself an innovation in Islamic thought and
practice. The first is the structural vehicle of this secularism: the modern
state that was much more intrusive than the Mughal state had been. More
importantly this state engaged in an ontological remapping of individuals
as part of the practice of modern state-craft. The second component relates
to the substantive aspects of this policy that allowed only particularistic
attachment to Muslim practices, attaching universalism to those modes of
belief and behaviour that seemed secular to the colonial administrators,
but particularly Christian to the colonized. Islamism, like many other
movements that originated in a period that was particularly thick with
debate and alternatives, cannot escape engaging with the state, but it inverts
the substantive elements of colonial secularism by attributing universalism
to Islam and claiming its compatibility with modernity.5 In a sense, it is a
mirrored reversal of colonial secularism. Of the various responses possible
number of people, imaginaries are shared by large groups of people; and thus (3) social imaginary is that
common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.
5
It is possible to see the richness of debate, and the depth and nuances of alternatives that were discussed
within India at the turn of the century as a response not just to the demands made by the idea of
nationalism but also to the problem of squaring nationalism with the dominant political entity of the
time: the modern state, i.e. how to make a nation-state.
and produced, Islamism replicates the structure and concerns of colonial

secularism most closely by inverting them in an Islamic idiom through its
focus on the state, its conception of Islam as a cohesive system that is central
to political life and its aspirations to universal application.
Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, was a journalist and activist
who was sympathetic to Indian nationalism initially, but then began to
distrust nationalism for its propensity to divide Muslims. During his years in
Delhi he interacted with a wide range of intellectuals and activists including
the socialist Khairi brothers (Iqtidar 2009). Many such influences on his
thinking go unacknowledged by him and by key commentators on his
work,6 but it is possible to discern the definite imprint of his exposure to
Leftist debates and strategies.7 Jamaat-e-Islami is organized as a Leninist
cadre-based party; Maududi’s focus on ideology, ideological training and
structured organizational management belies the modernist aspirations
of this so-called turn towards tradition. More than the structure of the
organization though, it is the content of his writing that speaks of his
modernist influences: his historicist reading of Islam, his insistence on the
‘rationality’ of religion and his attempts at purging Islam of ‘irrational’ and
‘superstitious’ practices such as saint worship. Maududi’s message found
some resonance among those who were educated—if not always very
highly—urban, and committed to an idea of the Islamic route to modernity.
However, it remains important to reiterate that there was a range of other
ideological options also available to educated, urban Muslims of different
regions and across classes at this historical juncture. In addition, Maududi’s
insistence on a cadre-based system and his desire to control the organization
meant that while his writings influenced many and found avid readers across
6
See, for instance, Maududi’s (1971) own essay on his life and his daughter’s account of life with her
parents (Maududi 2005) where no mention is made of these influences. Aziz (1987) and Nasr (1996)
hint at these but do not explore them in detail.
7
I suggest that this leftist imprint is present not despite Maududi’s opposition to communism but
precisely because of it. What I do not wish to imply is that Maududi or the Jamaat-e-Islami was
sympathetic to leftist ideology. Indeed he saw in communism a challenge but one that he was willing
to take on. While commenting on what he saw as the fallacy of a ‘Muslim’ university at Aligarh that
did not in fact, aim to produce good Muslims, Maududi wrote: ‘But, you could say that the British will
never allow such a university. It is true to a point, but you can ask him that out of all Muslims and all
Communists who do you prefer? You will have to choose one of the two.The Anglo-Mohammaden of
1910 will not be found for much longer. Now if you want to see all new Muslim generations as fully
Communist then stay firm on your ancient anti-Muslim path...only one force can stop this plague and
that force is Islam’. (‘Humaray Nizam-e-Talim ka Bunyadi Nuqs’, Tarjuman-ul-Quran, August, 1936.
Article reproduced in Abul Ala Maududi ((1939) 1999) Tanfihat: 141).
North India, the Jamaat-e-Islami remained a small, relatively tight-knit

group for many decades after its inception. Indeed, the Jamaat-e-Islami can
be seen as the best Leninist party in Pakistan in terms of its organizational
structure and modus operandi.
After partition Maududi chose to come to Pakistan, and brought a faction
of the Jama’at-e-Islami to Pakistan. Maududi had opposed the formation of
Pakistan and his decision to live there was motivated in part by his political
ambition: he calculated that it would be easier to form a Muslim state in
a country that was formed on the basis of religious nationalism, than in
India.8 From the beginning, Maududi managed to create an effective lobby
and pressure group through his Radio Pakistan lectures and mobilizations
around the issue of the Objectives Resolution for the constitution of the
newly formed country. At the same time, and again in contradiction to
Maududi’s 1930s argument against democracy, the Jamaat fielded candidates
in provincial elections in the 1950s. Since then it has engaged continuously
with the electoral process in Pakistan.
The 1960s and 1970s was a period during which socialism was a major
influence in the global south, including in Pakistan. Socialism’s focus on the
state was, at that time, matched by Islamism’s insistence on controlling it.
Both were products of a context in which the idea of the state dominated
political imagination. This is not to imply that there were no competing
ideas at that time, and I shall take this up again later, but that the state was
the dominant political idea of the period. More significantly, the shared
focus on the state did not override fundamental differences in what the
socialist and the Islamists wanted to do once they controlled the state. It is
useful to remember that at that particular historical juncture, the Jamaat-e-
Islami supported private landholding against the socialist programme even
as it continued to focus on the state as the engine of all social and political
8
Maududi’s resistance to the formation of Pakistan was due to his distrust of the idea of nationalism
and his opposition to the division of Indian Muslims into separate nations. However, it is important
to also remember that Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami disavowed his earlier critique of Pakistan once
the leftists brought it up in the 1960s. By then the Jamaat-e-Islami was busy casting itself as the
defender of Islam in this nation of Muslims. One way in which the Jamaat-e-Islami side-stepped the
issue of Maududi’s initial resistance to the formation of Pakistan was to highlight, in Jamaat-e-Islami
publications, Maududi’s meeting and association with Mohammed Iqbal (the national poet of Pakistan
credited with proposing the idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of India). By stressing that
Maududi had been chosen by Iqbal to lead the model community of Muslims that Iqbal had helped
fund at Pathankot, the organization attempted to present their relationship as a particularly close one
when in reality they had only met once, a little before Iqbal’s death (see, for instance, Maududi 1971).
change. Here I want to emphasize the converging tactical and strategic

focus of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the leftist groups on the state as the vehicle
for transforming society. It is in part because of this focus that they came
in direct conflict with each other. I have argued elsewhere, that while there
has been significant study of the impact of Islamism on the left, there is little
study of the impact of the left on Islamism (Iqtidar 2009). A detailed look
at the interaction between the leftist groups in Pakistan and Jamaat-e-Islami
during the late 1960s shows that this contentious engagement forced the
Jamaat-e-Islami to expand its activities, modify its strategies and engage
with constituencies it had hitherto ignored. For instance, Jamaat-e-Islami
was almost forced into more visible student activism by the threat of leftist
control over institutions of higher education in the country;9 prior to this,
Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing had operated as a kind of study circle. This
threat of leftist influence was a particularly potent one for the Jamaat-e-
Islami because, with its modernist tendencies, and unlike the various ulema
organizations, it did not at that time have its own madrassa network and
relied heavily on universities and professional colleges for recruitment into
the vanguard party that would take over the state.
The end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s saw the actual
takeover of a state by the Islamists in Pakistan’s neighbour, Iran. In Pakistan,
too, the Islamists gained relatively sudden and unexpected access to the
state through General Zia’s military coup—an access that they had not
adequately prepared for nor anticipated, given the Jamaat-e-Islami’s
disastrous electoral results in the 1971 elections. General Zia-ul-Haq, whose
coup against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was approved of and supported by the
US administration, became a key ally in the war against communism in
Afghanistan. Zia did not hide his admiration for the ideas propounded
by Maududi, who had died in 1979. Maududi’s successor, Mian Tufayl, a
compromise candidate and a long-term Maududi aide, did not hide how
flattered he felt by Zia’s attention and admiration for Jamaat-e-Islami.
Key Jamaat-e-Islami ideologues and leaders had unprecedented access to
influence policy decisions in both official and unofficial roles. In universities
and colleges, the actual battlegrounds of the competition between the
9
It is interesting to note that the newly-elected fourth amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Syed Munawar
Hassan, started his political engagement as a leftist activist during the 1950s. Munawar Hassan was
initially associated with the leftist National Student’s Federation. Later, as a student in Karachi University,
he joined the Islami Jamiyat Tulaba the Jamaat’s student wing.
Jamaat-e-Islami and the leftists, Jamaat-e-Islami administrators, lecturers and

students were handed positions of authority. In public sector enterprises
where union activity had become quite strong during the Bhutto years,10
Islamists unions were supported to break their strength (see, in particular,
Iqtidar 2011; also Noman 1988). In state departments and the army, pressure
for public piety was slowly increased. Praying in public view, keeping a
beard, not drinking alcohol, all became important for an ambitious career in
the army and increasingly in the civil bureaucracy. More than the actual role
of Jamaat-e-Islami members in shaping policy, it was Zia’s use of Islamist
vocabulary that accorded the Jamaat-e-Islami a public role much beyond its
actual membership base.
Nasr has argued that Zia had used the Islamists and Islam to legitimize
his rule (Nasr 1994, 2001). Whether the Jamaat-e-Islami was used or was
trying to use Zia, there is little doubt that the the Jamaat-e-Islami gained
significantly in public exposure and political influence during Zia’s regime.
At the same time it is clear, through interviews and conversations, that
the Jamaat-e-Islami was also an organization under great strain during the
Zia years. There was real tension between those who used the Jamaat-e-
Islami for personal gains and those who were committed to the ideological
programme of the organization and the movement. Quite apart from fears
about corruption of ideology, Zia’s policy of supporting the ethnically
motivated Muhajir Qaumi Movement in Karachi brought the Jamaat-e-
Islami in Karachi in direct political conflict with the regime. In Karachi,
the commercial heartland of Pakistan and the city that absorbed the largest
number of migrants from India at the time of partition, the Jamaat-e-
Islami’s strength lay among these very groups. During the first two decades
of Pakistan’s formation Karachi provided the most dedicated Jamaat-e-
Islami workers, its largest constituency and several key ideologues apart
from Maududi (such as Khurram Ja Murad). Zia’s decision to support the
MQM created a real schism in this key constituency of the Jamaat-e-Islami.
During the 1990s, the period beyond which the most authoritative
English language study of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan does not extend,
the Jamaat-e-Islami underwent significant transformations that have
10
This is not to imply that Bhutto provided unconditional support to unions. Indeed, state patronage
in certain sectors or for some types of union activity went hand in hand with suppression of others.
See Ali (2005).
remained largely below the threshold of academic attention (Nasr 1994).11

One serious limitation within the vast majority of academic studies of
Islamism, and in this particular case of the Jamaat-e-Islami, has been their
focus on the proclamations and writings of the founding ideologues.12 What
the current leaders say or do, how the ordinary member of the organization
makes sense of the original writings and the newer pronouncements has not
been studied in detail. For too long the Jamaat-e-Islami has been studied
only in terms of the writings of Maududi. However, Maududi died in 1979
and his imprint on the organization has grown faint with each passing year.
Under Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the third amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami (1987–
2009), the Jamaat-e-Islami changed into a national political party, entering
into alliances with other national and regional political parties. One such
important alliance was the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (Islamic Democratic
Alliance), with the precursor of the contemporary Pakistan Muslim League
Nawaz Sharif group, as its other major partner. More critically, since the late
1980s but particularly during the period 1997–2009, the Jamaat-e-Islami
has undergone a subtle but important shift in the range and nature of its
mobilization strategies and tactics, on the kinds of issues that are raised and
some of the solutions that are suggested.
Through schools and colleges, dispensaries and hospitals, dowry funds
and neighbourhood clean-up operations, micro-enterprises and skill-
training in low income areas, the Jamaat-e-Islami’s activists spend much
more time in engaging with the ‘society’13 within the framework of the
market than with preparing the vanguard party for an imminent takeover
of the state. Taking one important example of this extended reach: the
Jamaat-e-Islami’s humanitarian/NGO face, the Al-Khidmat Foundation
11
One reason for the relative neglect of the Jamaat-e-Islami has been the increased activities of more
militant and radical groups and the resulting shift in academic interest towards those.
12
The vast amount of literature produced on Islamism in both the Middle East and South Asia falls
within this category (e.g., Ayubi 1991; Esposito 1997; Nasr 1994; Sivan 1985; Tibi 1988, 1998). Useful
exceptions focusing on ordinary members and looking beyond leaders include Ahmad (2009a); Collins
(2007); Eickelman and Piscatori (1996); Singerman (1995).
13
There is some variation in the Jamaat-e-Islami’s mobilization strategies across different parts of
Pakistan. For instance, in the 2002 elections the Jamaat-e-Islami made political alliances with electable
candidates of religious leanings who emphasized public morality in Sarhad closer to the Afghan border.
In urban Karachi and Lahore the campaign emphasis was much more on service delivery and political
accountability.
claims to be the biggest network of humanitarian services in Pakistan.14 The

Foundation has subsumed an earlier initiative started during the 1960s by a
Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizer, currently called the Al-Khidmat Trust, which
is managed and run by women affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami. However, it
was only incorporated formally within the Jamaat-e-Islami organizational
structure during the mid-1990s. Maududi was very reluctant to officially
affiliate the Al-Khidmat Trust with the Jamaat-e-Islami even though the
founder was keen on such a relationship.15 Since the 1990s though, there has
been an exponential growth in the scope and scale of the Trust’s activities.
Although it is difficult to assess its claims as the largest humanitarian service
provider in Pakistan, the diversity of its services does provide a glimpse
into a well-established network. The Foundation and the Trust administer
a new school system started by the Jamaat-e-Islami, called baithak Schools,
women’s vocational centres, adult literacy programmes, hospitals and mobile
dispensaries, refugee care programmes, prisoner welfare programmes,
orphan sponsor projects, drinking water projects, subsidized vaccination
against Hepatitis B, emergency relief, Ramadan and dowry gifts, Eid gift
packages, and qurbani (sacrifice—typically refers to animal sacrifice for Eid)
programmes. These are all precisely the activities that Maududi had resisted
during his lifetime and the Jamaat-e-Islami had avoided engaging in as an
organization for more than a decade after his death, preferring to focus
instead on political analysis and state-focused mobilization.
The emphasis away from controlling the ‘state’ and more clearly towards
building a Muslim ‘society’ through other means can be seen, in particular,
by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s increasing involvement in funding, building and
running schools in different parts of the country,16 their legacy about a decade
old. Despite the great importance that Maududi attached to education he had
resisted moves to open schools as a part of the Jamaat’s activities choosing
instead to focus on public institutions of higher education as recruiting
14
The mission statement of the Al-Khidmat Foundation denies affiliation with any ‘regional, ethnic or
political party’ but Jamaat-e-Islami activists claim it as their own. The Jamaat-e-Islami website listed
the Foundation among its affiliates, http://www.jamaat.org/new/urdu/otherweb/ (accessed 7 June
2009). However, the recently revamped Jamaat-e-Islami website does not contain a direct reference
to Al-Khidmat.
15
Interview, daughter of the founder of Al-Khidmat Trust (she did not wish to be named), at her
residence, Defence Housing Authority, Lahore, 10 December 2005.
16
These are in addition to the schools that have been started by Jamaat-e-Islami affiliates as private
ventures such as the Dar-ul-Arqam Schools of Islamic and Modern Sciences.
grounds for attracting the vanguard, Islamic elite that he hoped to induct into
the party. During fieldwork in 2005 I visited newly opened ‘baithak schools’
in the working class neighbourhoods of Lahore with Jamaat-e-Islami activists.
These schools were part of a new initiative, led by the Women’s Wing within
the Jamaat-e-Islami, to reach out to the poorer segments of society.17 While
the political goal of creating a vote bank within these previously ignored
segments was a factor, of equal importance was the language of demand and
supply, incentives and individual choice which were used to support the
programme of creating a better ‘Muslim society’ that would be ready for the
Muslim state that the Jamaat-e-Islami would help establish. In conversations
with activists, leaders and Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizers, I was struck by this
inversion of Maududi’s original formulation.
The Gramscian turn within the Jamaat-e-Islami is part of the process in
which this Leninist party has been socialized. But it is also part of the larger
process in which the state has been socialized in both academic theories
and popular political imagination. At the theoretical level this socialization
has meant viewing the state increasingly as a social actor enmeshed in
specific institutions and path dependencies. At a popular level it has meant
a mounting questioning of the notion of a state as an independent actor
standing above and outside society. This questioning may be generated as
much through patronage scandals involving politicians or bureaucrats acting
out of a socially embedded expectation to support their family or biradari,
as through the circulation of academic theories and ideas about state(s)
through a globalized media.18 From the late 1980s and particularly during
the 1990s, the idea of the state started losing some of its dominance over
global political imagination. As the Soviet state began to unravel, so too did
the argument for the state as an engine of social transformation. Thatcher’s
TINA (There is No Alternative) and Reagan’s Reaganomics, supported by
corporate mass media, put immense pressure on the idea of the state as the
creative engine for individual or collective development. Within academia
too, by the 1980s the focus of research began to wander elsewhere. The
related notion of nationalism came under immense critique during the
1990s converging with the slogans of promoters of corporate globalization
17
In 2005 the Jamaat-e-Islami Women’s Commission alone operated 125 schools, 24 madrasas and 14
industrial homes with enrolment by 11,010 students (male and female), 1,295 (male and female) and
265 (females only) (Raftar newsletter, Women’s wing Jamaat-e-Islami, Islamabad, April–June 2005: 9).
18
See Gupta (1995) for a subtle treatment of the relationship between the discourse of corruption, the
imagining of the state, media and international financial agencies such as the IMF.
who highlighted its promise, through common markets and free flows
of ideas and people, to draw together populations artificially divided by
the nation-state.19 In this context, a question that many Jamaat-e-Islami
activists raised when I spoke to them about this shift in their strategies is an
important one for theorizing about the state generally: how useful is it to
think in terms of a strict division between the state and society?
The State in International Political Imagination

Theorizing about the state has gone through a fairly erratic career. As a
new wave of enthusiasm about socialism gripped the global south in the
1950s and 1960s, American academia in particular debated the value of
thinking about the state separately from society.20 In the late 1970s and
early 1980s the debate was rejuvenated in an attempt to ‘bring the state back
in’ (Hall 1986; Held et al. 1983; Jessop 1990; Migdal 1988; Skocpol 1985;
Vincent 1987). But at a fundamental level the debate remained mired in
the attempt at delineating the state from society. From the 1980s onwards
the state has been increasingly socialized in academic writings: it has been
defined increasingly as a social network, or as an institutional actor. These
attempts were abandoned partly because of the criticism that this fuzziness
obscured analysis, that this socialized state was hard to place in an analytical
framework. David Held, representative of many writings of the period,
declares, ‘nothing is more central to political and social theory than the
nature of the state, and nothing more contested’ (Held 1983: 1). However,
despite the continued confusion, the state remains ‘the master noun’ of
modern political science (Skinner 2007).
The curious disjuncture between the pervasiveness of the state in
political analysis, with an equally widespread confusion about its precise
meanings is bridged creatively by Mitchell (1991). He argues for taking the
boundary between the state and society seriously, not in search of a clear
demarcation between the two, but for interrogating the actual processes
that create the effect of the state as a separate entity standing outside and
19
Most critiques of nationalism were locally generated and in response to repressive aspects of it, but as
Dirlik (1994) has pointed out, there was too easy an appropriation of these critiques by the supporters
of neo-liberal globalization.
20
For an excellent overview of these debates, see Mitchell (1991). See also Migdal (2001).
independent of the society. Mitchell has concretized Philip Abrams’ critique

of theorizing about the state by showing exactly how the ‘state’ is created
in a particular context—in this case, in Egypt—by parsing out the precise
relationships between business and political projects, local rulers and colonial
administration, landlords and international companies that constitute the
state (Mitchell 2002). He details the particular nodes of power that remain
unacknowledged and subsumed within the idea of the state.We see the state
as a work in continuous progress rather than a fully realized entity at any
point. Most importantly his meticulous attention to the precise modalities
of power and negotiation gives a concrete understanding of the power that
the idea of the ‘state’ lends to these interests, and that they would otherwise
lack. The state then emerges as a particularly useful idea, a coming together
of interests that cannot in reality be analysed by attempting to separate the
political from the social and economic, or in other words ‘society’ from the
‘state’. To fall into the trap of trying to theorize the limits of the state vis-
à-vis the society is to lose sight of the very real power the idea of the state
exerts on those who find it expedient for furthering their own interests
but also those who resist precisely this imposition of interests. Abrams had
rightly pointed out that even though elements of Marxist theory recognize
the illusionary nature of the state, ‘... Marxist practice needs the state as a
real-concrete object, the immediate object of political struggle’ (Abrams
1998: 70).
To highlight Mitchell’s critique is not to suggest that it also directly
informs popular understanding of the ‘state’. In fact the acceptance of his
ideas within the discipline of political science seems to be relatively limited
because although the term state is used ubiquitously there is a kind of
moratorium on direct interrogation of the concept.21 In recent years, the
only concentrated critical academic attention that the state has received has
been grounded primarily in the discipline of anthropology. Much of this
literature focuses on the precise ways in which the state is experienced by
different segments of society (Corbridge et al. 2005; Ghosh 2006; Gupta and
Sharma 2006; Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 2005; Li 2007; Trouillot 2001).
In an illuminating inversion of this view, James Scott shows how a state—
any state, capitalist or communist—tends to look at populations under its
control (Scott 1998). Mitchell’s formulation may appear orthogonal to this
21
For a useful attempt at analysing some of the reasons for this moratorium, see Bartleson (2001).
stream of literature at first glance, but it seems to me that it actually clarifies

many of the questions left unanswered by the anthropological interrogations
of how the state may be experienced or exercised. One important question
here would be why are these quite particular arrangements of power in
Ecuador, or Indonesia, or India or the Netherlands called the state? The
answer would have to go some way towards acknowledging that importance
of the idea of the state: the state as an idea legitimizing the exercise of
power in modern polities. Considering in particular Islamist mobilizations,
Mitchell’s work is very useful for two reasons. One, that it forces us to
acknowledge the seriousness and importance of the ‘idea’ of the state, both
in facilitating oppressive arrangements and in inspiring liberatory projects.
Two, combining Mitchell’s insights with the reality of a changed political
imagination where the idea of the state has lost some of its previous
dominance as an inspiration for projects and movements, raises important
questions about the new arrangements and ideas, and the disciplinary forces
accompanying them. What, then, is the idea that has emerged as a serious
contender to the idea of the state for the Islamists?
At a popular level, it is commonplace that across the globe the state
declined in importance from the 1980s onwards, particularly after the
fall of the Soviet Union. The failure of the Soviet state was held to be
emblematic of the larger failure of ‘the state’ to be a sustainable engine
for individual and collective development. If looked at closely though, it
is possible to discern not a decline in the actual role of the state but a
shift in the domains that were previously considered to be under the state’s
purvey and that went hand in hand with changes in the idea of the state.
The notion of the ‘developmental’ state gave way to the ‘regulatory’ state.22
Neo-liberal economic globalization and the associated WTO, IMF and
World Bank injunctions popularized the notion of ‘rolling back the state’.
The rhetoric of rolling back the state hides the fact that while there has
been shrinkage in one aspect of the state’s role—its welfare and service
provision role—there has been a great expansion of another one—policing
and enforcement mechanisms. Even as service provision was increasingly
constructed as beyond the responsibility of a state, regulatory mechanisms
for supporting intellectual property right protection, private property, and
paradoxically,‘unregulated’ financial services were added to its core activities,
22
See Sassen (1996) for an argument about the re-territorialization and strengthening of state control to
facilitate economic globalization. Also, see Dunn (1995).
particularly from the 1990s onwards.These regulatory mechanisms required

greater policing strength and sophistication behind them and the relevant
institutions within the state were strengthened through a redirection of
resources from developmental projects.23
The more fundamental shift then was not in the ‘strength’ of the state
but in its place in political imagination. The state did not fail, as neo-liberal
reformers claimed, but the idea of the state was challenged seriously.The state
as a project, as an inspiration to projects was no longer dominant whether
in Britain, Argentina, Ghana or Pakistan. This fall from grace cannot be
seen in absolute terms but has to be judged relatively: both by its own past
importance and by its relationship with other competing ideas.The idea that
emerged as the most potent challenge to the state as a mobilizer of ideas,
political energies and imaginaries is the idea of the market.24 No doubt the
idea of the market suffers from the same kind of theoretical problems as the
idea of the state: how to distinguish the market from society. Is it a set of
institutional arrangements or a product of a regulatory framework? Does it
stand above, below or alongside the society? Yet over the last two decades
the idea of the ‘market’ has exerted enough pressure to at least de-centre the
focus on the state within the global political imagination.25
This shift in political imagination and its implications for activism
within the Jamaat-e-Islami has not yet been sharply articulated but
has been significant enough to merit reflection and comment by many
23
In Pakistan’s recent history, the Musharaf regime received $18 billions from the US alone to strengthen
its policing, espionage and military services. For some details and deeper fears about the changes in the
US context, see Ackerman (2006).
24
My intention here is not to suggest an uncomplicated narrative about the failure of the state with the
market having to step in to correct the wrongs of the state. Again Mitchell (2002) provides a useful
corrective to this view through a detailed look at the performance of public sector enterprises in
Egypt. These were, he argues, predominantly financially vibrant and viable. It was the construction of
a particular discourse that exacerbated the crisis in state legitimacy by focusing on the inefficiencies of
these state enterprises. While there are important variations due to local contingencies and modalities,
as discussed later, there was a similarity in how the idea of the state was discredited through an
enhanced and positive emphasis on the idea of the market as an alternative engine for growth and
equity. For a critical account of the sale of the profitable state owned telecommunications company
with a similar unsubstantiated focus on state inefficiency and the alleged need for its replacement by
a putatively more efficient private entity in Pakistan, see Munir (2009). Munir shows how in fact the
replacement of a public monopoly by a private monopoly led to a dramatic decrease in profitability
and long term viability of the company.
25
This is particularly noticeable in the discourse on development. For a critical look at the process
through which such a decentring takes place, see Escobar (1995) and Ferguson (1990, 2006).
middle-level activists with whom I interacted. I found the middle-

level activists to be particularly perceptive towards changes within the
organization. These middle-level activists are often long-term Jamaat
members or sympathizers, they are embedded in their particular social
contexts and act as a bridge between the national Jamaat leadership and
particular localities.The notion of a bridge, though, is too static to bring out
the transformations they are able to facilitate in the process of the movement
of ideas, issues and debates across the two groups that they have access to.
In the process of communicating, these middle-level activists also infuse the
conversation with their own preoccupations and concerns. Their location
allows them a view across policy making as well as policy implementation
within the Jamaat-e-Islami.
One such long-time activist, Naeem,26 in his forties when I met him,
belonged to a ‘Jamaat-e-Islami family’. This meant that his father was also
a Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizer and activist in a medium sized Punjabi city,
Sargodha. His father’s involvement meant that as young adults Naeem and
his siblings were exposed to Jamaat-e-Islami literature and study circles.
Since the late 1950s, and particularly during the 1960s, Naeem’s family
had also been involved in door-to-door campaigns in Sargodha for Jamaat-
e-Islami electoral or issue-based mobilizations. In the early 1970s, Naeem
moved to Lahore and became active in student politics through the Jamaat-
e-Islami. He continued his engagement with the Jamaat-e-Islami whilst
serving in a government institution, and over the years became a locally
influential organizer.
As he reflected on his years of engagement with the Jamaat-e-Islami, he
spoke about the increasing difficulty in actually persuading Jamaat-e-Islami
activists as well as members of the wider public to attend a jalsa or a meeting.
Initially, he blamed it on the city of Lahore. Lahore was, he said, ‘too big’.27
The size of the city was a deterrent to people actually getting to know
26
Names have been changed where individuals showed a preference for not using their real names.
27
At the same time there is a deep realization within the Jamaat-e-Islami that its base is primarily within
the cities and not in the rural areas. Chaudhry Rehmat Ilahi, long time Shura member and one of
the oldest members in Lahore (interview, residence Mansoorah, 22 November 2005) reflected often
repeated opinions among Jamaat-e-Islami activists when he said: ‘Our base is sronger in the cities
because there is less pressure from feudal obligations, biradari ties (kinship). There the waderas (feudal
lords) and the chaudhries can exert such pressure as to make life difficult for those who sympathize
with us. Generally, resistance is easier in cities. There is a feeling of openness. It is easier for us to take
our message to people and also for people to stand up in our favour’.
each other but also on a practical level it meant that commuting calculations
played a big role in people’s decisions. Having kept his ties with Sargodha
alive through frequent visits to his siblings, who still live and mobilize for the
Jamaat-e-Islami there, he was struck by the difference between the two cities.
In Sargodha there was a greater cohesion—people knew each other—but
more critically, there was ‘more time’ (ziada waqt). ‘In Lahore people are in a
state of frenzy. They are working two jobs, ferrying their children to tuitions,
going shopping. And it takes so long now to get from one place to the next’.
Initially he stated that people were almost forced into (majboor hain) this state
of frenzy by the size of the city, but later he also ruminated that ultimately this
was linked to the desire to consume new goods, gadgets and products that
instead consumed human time and energies.
People have no time for the tehreek (movement).28 They are

convinced that they need a TV, a DVD player, latest books [all
three in English] or clothes. They work two jobs, kill themselves
to buy these things for themselves and their children.... Mostly,
also they are not sure what they will achieve through political
activities (siyasi sargarmi) but they know what they can buy!. . .
How can we compete with that?
How indeed, does one compete with the subtle layers of disillusionment
and despair that political action directed towards the state carries within
it now? At a pre-election meeting in Mansoorah Women’s College at
the headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Lahore in August 2005, many
speakers warned against the lure of the market as an alternative to politics.
One speaker addressed this gathering of key local activists from within
Lahore district by declaring, ‘you will have to struggle against the shopping
trips. . . both in yourself and with others. How can we buy these things?
I don’t understand—who has the money to buy these things when the
country is being bled dry by the MNCs (international companiyan) and the
IMF?’ She then pointed towards the audience to say, ‘Can you afford [she
used the word in English] that TV ? Can we [as a country] afford these cars
and these fridges? Do you know how much we owe the IMF? And how did
28
Many Jamaat-e-Islami activists think of the Jamaat-e-Islami as both amovement (tehreek) and a political
party (party, jamaat).
we end up with this loan? Were you asked about this? Is this government
[hakumat] capable of fulfilling the obligations of the state [riyasat] towards
the people?’
This disenchantment in the state and frustration at its takeover by the
market is also shared by others outside the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the course of
my fieldwork, political activists and leaders from the Jamaat, and also from
other political parties such as the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan
Muslim League Nawaz Sharif group, emphasized repeatedly to me that the
state has, in effect been taken over by the market. One way to understand
this assertion is that the idea of the state is subservient to the idea of the
market as officials and politicians justify actions and policies within the
market paradigm.This argument is not about the extent of liberalization and
privatization within Pakistan—that has varied even over the last three decades,
although the general trend has been towards increased privatization—but
about the emergence of an official discourse that recognized the primacy of
the market in setting its agenda, what the philosopher Michael Sandel has
called the state’s ‘market mimicking assumptions’ (Sandel 2009).The ‘market
mimicking assumption’ about the state refers to the fact that not only is the
paradigm of the market used for making state decisions but the main aim
of the state is then defined as correcting for market failure. The conceptual
ascendancy of the market is not without its impact on political options and
spaces. During the course of my research, politicians, some of them former
or current ministers, commented on the very slim margins that they had to
play with as state officials. One long time politician represented the general
feeling when he said:
Since our policies are not made here, I can’t even get somebody
a teacher’s job now [particularly after the World Bank-led
devolution reforms]. What do we offer our constituencies when
we go to ask them for votes? Previously, the biggest favour we
could do them used to be a job, preferably in a state institution.
Now either the state institutions don’t exist, or we don’t have
control over them or we find that people don’t want those jobs
anymore.... I have created my own security company to be able
to provide some jobs to the men from my village.29
29
Incidentally, the key contracts for his security company were with three major international banks in
Lahore.
The Jamaat-e-Islami’s own relationship to the market is ambivalent:

on the one hand, as seen above, Jamaat-e-Islami activists and leaders speak
against consumerism as well as the free market rhetoric that pervades
Pakistan’s public sphere and government decisions—an increasing criticism
of the IMF/World Bank conditionalities within Jamaat-e-Islami official
discourse is a discernable trend30—and on the other hand they are not
immune to the allure of the market as a mechanism for bringing about
societal and individual transformation.
Islamism, Middle Class and the Market

Contemporary Jamaat-e-Islami activists and leaders talk of the welfare/
developmental state as the ideal they are striving towards. The idea of the
developmental state in the immediately post-colonial years of Pakistan was
not a complete break from the past. Indeed there was an important element
of continuity, and post-colonial notions of the developmental state were
a nationalist reworking of British ideas about the colonial state. The post-
colonial state was seen as an engine of social and political transformation
in ways similar to the British imagining of the colonial state. The state was
seen to stand above and outside of society, yet at the same time it had the
power to transform society. The role that science played in this imaginary
was significant. The ‘scientific empire’ depended heavily on science for
legitimizing and enabling structures of power (Gilmartin 1994). The idea
of science being harnessed by the colonial state both for its own effective
management and the fulfilment of developmental goals was an important
hallmark of the late colonial period. This reliance on scientific knowledge
and expertise, due to its intrinsic superiority to local knowledge, was
central also to the notion of the developmental state of the 1950s through
to the 1970s not just in South Asia but within a global context (Escobar
1995; Ferguson 1990; Agrawal 2005). Much of this emphasis on scientific
knowledge and technology is reflected among contemporary Islamists.31
However, even at the peak of its hold on political imagination, the idea of
the developmental state was not without challenges. A pronounced tension
30
See, for instance, the 2002 Jamaat-e-Islami election manifesto. In addition, CDs produced by the Jamaat-
e-Islami affiliate Islamic Mass Media covering speeches by Sayeed Munawar Hussain (particularly,
Ijtima-‘am, 2004), Liaqut Baloch, and Professor Ghafoor Ahmed contain discussions along similar lines.
31
See also Hatem (1998) for similarities in the Egyptian context.
between the ideas of the ‘state’ and the ‘market’ has been a defining feature of
twentieth-century politics. The relationship between the two has elicited a
range of responses centred around the concern about a qualitative change in
politics due to the increasing encroachment of consumerism. Interestingly,
the most prominent twentieth-century critics of consumerism—which can
be seen as the engagement at the level of an individual with the ‘market’—
Marxists and Marxians, from Karl Mannheim, Theodore Adorno to Pierre
Bourdieu, have shifted the focus, even if at times unintentionally, away from
the state as the locus of mobilizations and political energies.
These tensions are often seen to play out most prominently within
the middle class. The middle class in South Asia, as elsewhere, is a group
particularly defined by its attempts at self-fashioning (Chakrabarty 1991;
Daechsel 2006; Joshi 2001), willing to use both the state and the market
for realizing its aspirations as well as defining the substance of them. In an
interesting analysis of fascistic movements within the Urdu middle class milieu
in interwar North India, Daechsel highlights the particular susceptibility of
the Urdu-speaking North Indian middle class to consumerism as a means
to self-fashioning.32 Yet, for others within the same middle class, the state
too has been of considerable attraction for similar reasons of self-definition
(Chatterjee 1986; Seal 1968).The vast majority of Jamaat-e-Islami members
in Pakistan today are part of the aspiring middle class and bring to their politics
their conflict-ridden relationship with both the market and the state, their
interest in using both or either for self-fashioning and self-expression.Their
previous experience supports a continued focus on the state but alternatives
are increasingly being tested. The current leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami
comprises predominantly first generation university and college graduates
who have, over the last 30 years, moved up the social ladder. Their route
into this social mobility has been mostly through state sponsored schools,
colleges and universities. It is therefore no coincidence that the threats to
Jamaat-e-Islami membership through privatization of public universities
under General Musharaf ’s regime were taken very seriously. The Board
of Governors scheme, initiated in 2002, was widely seen as a move to
privatize the education sector and open it up for international institutions.33
32
Osella and Osella (2009) provide an insight into middle class aspirations and the promise of the market
from the point of view of the entrepreneur.
33
The critics of the Board of Governors and Model University Ordinance (2002) pointed towards
a World Bank report on the education sector in Thailand that was replicated almost verbatim by a
The Jamaat-e-Islami’s critique of privatization of national education was

couched in terms of the principle of equal access to health and education,
but no doubt shaped by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s continued dependence upon
public universities for recruitment. The Jamaat-e-Islami moved quickly
through the Islami Jamiyat Tulaba, its student wing, to organize mass protests
throughout the years 2002 to 2005. Waqas Anjum, Islami Jami‘yat Tulaba
national Nazim from 1995 to 1998 and now a Jamaat-e-Islami rukn,34 was
involved with these protests and explained:
The government is only increasing the segregation in society

through these measures. Those who sit on a taat (jute mat) in
their school will have one board [of education—for curriculum
and examination etc.], the army has its own, and then the Agha
Khan Board. They are creating different types of people—those
who rule and those who are ruled.... It is only the organizational
capacity of Jamaat-e-Islami and my involvement in it that sustains
me, otherwise the situation in Pakistan is truly depressing (dil
shakista karnay walay halat hain).35
While the state remains the rhetorical focus of Jamaat-e-Islami

mobilizations, the move beyond the state has been routed through the
market. The use of market as a facilitator of middle class activism is an
option at a time when the state is seen as ineffective as well as inaccessible.
A response to the kinds of problems that Waqas Anjum raised are the private
schools run by Jamaat-e-Islami affiliates, even as they continue to agitate in
support of state provision of education. Over the last two decades Jamaat-
e-Islami activists’ engagement with a market that allows them space for
politico-entrepreneurial activity as well as consumer activism has increased
significantly. The two are related precisely because consumption of veils
in different colours with laces and embroidery,36 Islamic CDs and DVDs,
Boston based consortium of consultants hired, with World Bank money, to formulate an education
policy for Pakistan. The suggestion was that the Board of Governors scheme is part of a larger World
Bank agenda to open up developing country markets for multinational institutions wishing to profit
from the strong demand for higher education within these countries. Interview, Nazim Husnain,
President All Pakistan Lecturers’ Association, at his residence in Iqbal Town, Lahore, December 2002.
34
To become a rukn (or full member) of the Jamaat-e-Islami at his age (early thirties) means that Waqas
Anjum is seen by those within the Lahore Jamaat-e-Islami hierarchy as a particularly promising activist.
35
Interview, Waqas Anjum Jaafari, Idara-Marafat I Islam, Mansoorah, 29 November 2005.
36
See also Navaro-Yashin (2004: chapter 3) on Islamist fashion and consumption in Turkey.
Islamic schools,37 books, pamphlets and children’s stories, catering companies

that hire women to serve in the women’s section at weddings and parties,38
interest-free banking systems, taxi services that provide adequate purdah
facilities, decoration pieces that involve calligraphy rather than human and
animal forms, television and radio channels that provide Islamic content,
entail both a political stance and public consumption. More fundamental
than the actual goods and services bought and sold is a reworked conception
of politics as a place of transactions, the need for incentives to structure action,
the logic of demand and supply to situate mobilizations, the importance of
efficiency and individual choice in locating the role of religion—the many
facets of the language and paradigm of the market.
Unthinkable two decades ago, political action for many of the Jamaat-
e-Islami activists I interacted with is infused by this new conception of
politics. As I accompanied some upper-middle class Jamaat-e-Islami women
from the suburbs of Lahore, to their weekly visits to inner city sewing
schools and income-generation projects, it became apparent that the line
between entrepreneurship and political mobilization—one that had been
sharply delineated by Maududi for the Jamaat-e-Islami—had become a
blurred one today. When I asked them how their work here was relevant to
the work of the larger organization the Jamaat-e-Islami women responded
that they were facilitating the work of the organization in two ways. First,
through creating a relationship with the underprivileged in an area of the
city previously closed to Jamaat-e-Islami influence they were opening the
channels for a ‘longer-term relationship’ a euphemistic reference to electoral
mobilizations.39 Second, and more importantly through the exposure to
Jamaat-e-Islami literature and proselytizing messages these women in the
sewing schools and income-generating projects were being told about ‘the
right kind of Islam’ (sahih islam) and being made into a ‘suitable citizen for an
Islamic state’ (islami riyast kay liyay mozoon shehri); citizens who were pious,
efficient, economically independent and ‘tuned to the laws of demand and
supply’. Coming back to the futility of separating society from the state, and
in a neat inversion of Maududi’s formulation, they would ask rhetorically
what is a state without the right kind of society and citizenry to support it?
37
One important private school chain started by a Jamaat-e-Islami affiliate is the Dar-al-Arqam School
system.
38
Such strict gender segregation of service providers is a very recent development in urban middle class
weddings and social functions.
39
For some discussion on the resistance that residents of Lahore’s inner city had shown to the JI, see
Iqtidar (2008).
Quite apart from the ready stratification as consumers and producers,

it is the use of market mechanisms as facilitators of moral and political
projects that signals an important shift in Islamist imagination. This shift,
manifested through the changes in their mobilization strategies and focus,
are linked inextricably to the changes in the wider political imagination and
the place of the state in it. However, there are slippages in the relationship
between global political imagination, academic theory and local political
imagination.This essay has attempted to show that even when the state idea
has been seriously challenged in international political imagination, and
even when the Islamists have accommodated these changes through shifts in
their mobilization strategies, they cannot abandon the state idea completely,
there are local imperatives for a continued Islamist engagement with the
notion of the state including the past experience of the vast majority of its
members and other path dependencies.40
Secularism Beyond the State

Secularism is invariably conceived in relation to the state—whether in terms
of a separation from or management of religion. However, if we recognize
the state as an idea that allows particular configurations of power to
function, it is important to recognize the competing, but also paradoxically
complementary, place of the market in this equation. The role of the market—
in regulating the ‘conduct of conduct’—has received less direct attention
than the role of the state, particularly with reference to religious practices. In
his alternative reading of secularism as state management of religion, rather
than a separation of religion and the state, Asad recognizes that the modes
of governance he refers to are tied to the emergence of capitalism and
the nation state; secularization led to the release of ecclesiastical property
into private hands and market circulation in the European context (Asad
1993, 2003; Salvatore 2005). Nevertheless, the focus of Asad’s argument
remains the state and his understanding of secularism is tied closely to the
notion of governmentality. In the South Asian context, the implications
of governmentality during colonial rule have been explored in significant
detail over the last three decades (Chatterjee 1986; Cohn 1996; van der Veer
40
On such disjunctures between the local and the global, see Aziz, this volume.
2001).41However, the changes in it in post-colonial contexts have remained

relatively under explored.42 It is critical to nuance our understanding by a
deeper look not just across localities but also through temporal variations.
Otherwise, rendering inconsequential the differences in governmentality
across time and space, we run the risk of attributing too much or too little
to certain modes of power.43 The idea of the state engendered certain
particular forms of governmentality. As the idea of the state weakens its
hold on popular imagination so does, potentially, the ability of particular
institutions associated with the state in managing and directing individual
behaviour.The kind of scepticism that defines the relationship of the citizen
with the state in Pakistan precludes any easy conclusions about the ability of
state to regulate ‘the conduct of conduct’.44 At the very least we can easily
establish that it is nowhere close to the kind of control that the Foucauldian
French state exerted. The rise of the idea of market in this context bears
further scrutiny. Its implications for regulation and management of religious
belief and practice appear important but remain relatively under-explored.
One important implication of framing political activity within
the market paradigm is the increasing pull of individualization. The co-
imbrication of market and piety in producing a particular kind of self has
been perceptively articulated by Rudnyckyj through his investigations into
‘market Islam’ (Rudnyckyj 2009a, 2009b) which ‘simultaneously draws
on immersion in an Islamic discursive tradition, calculating economic
rationality, and instilling principles and practices of selfmanagement’
(Rudnyckyj 2009a). He finds in his study of an Islamic management
company at a state steel-producing plant in Indonesia that market Islam
involves, ‘designing a form of Muslim practice commensurate with the
goals of eliminating corruption, promoting privatization, and enhancing
productivity in an increasingly global market’—goals that Rudnyckyj
identifies with neoliberal reforms in Malaysia. Similarly, Bryan Turner has
identified an increased and specific kind of consumption as a means of
religious fulfilment.Turner points out that ‘life on earth is no longer merely
41
However, see Washbrook (1999: 571) for some important questions regarding the precise modalities
of colonial governmentality.
42
Notable exceptions in the case of India include Chatterjee (2004), Corbridge (2005) and Ghosh
(2006).
43
See ibid. for a perceptive discussion along these lines. Also, see Scott (1995).
44
For an insight into the genealogy of cynicism in Pakistan, see Khan (2003).
a prelude to the consumption of happiness in the next world: the promise

of consumerism is to have one’s desires satisfied now’ (Turner 2009). Not
only does consumerism support a different theology—from ‘prosperity
religions’ to ‘spiritual economies’ and ‘occult capitalism’45—but also allows
in some instances a fluid commitment and identity.46 At the same time as
consumption becomes a route to practising citizenship and identity, the
decisions around what and where to eat, buying clothes or choosing a drink
cannot avoid becoming invested with political and religious significance.47
Both as consumers, workers and producers Islamists, like others, operating
at the nexus of religious inspiration and the market, operate at the dawn of
new normativities and subjectivities. Activism structured around the idea of
the market has the potential to transform investments in meanings of the
success or failure of the Islamist project itself.
The shift in the place of the state in Islamist political imagination
presents an interesting opportunity to explore some of the complexities
generated at the interface of an international political imagination and
local political dynamics. The Jamaat-e-Islami’s focus on the state is in part
a legacy of a period when the idea of the state played a dominant role in
global political imagination. The precise relationship between the state and
the Jamaat-e-Islami that Maududi articulated at that time was the result of
local political configurations infused by a global imagination. As the idea
of the state has changed over the last decades of the twentieth century
in the larger political imagination, so has the Jamaat-e-Islami articulated
subtle shifts in its mobilizational strategies. In the case of Pakistan, this link
with the global remains curiously under-studied and over-used at the same
time. On the one hand analysis of Pakistani politics, and particularly of
Islamism, is almost never carried out without reference to an international
political order (for instance, Baxter and Wasti 1991; Malik 1999; Waseem
1987) and on the other hand, specific developments within Pakistan have
not been looked at in depth by linking them with an international political
imaginary. This essay has looked at why and how ideas about the state
45
For prosperity religions, see brief introduction in Garett and King (2005: 19) and Coleman (2000);
for spiritual economy, Rudnyckyj (2009a); and for occult capitalism, Comaroff and Comaroff (1999,
2000).
46
This may vary across classes. Turner (2009: 50) quotes the example of superstar Madonna moving
from Catholic themes to more Jewish ones as Rachel after her exposure to Kabbala.
47
See Trentman (2006) for an insight into historical and sociological discussions about the relationship
between new subjectivities and consumerism.
have changed within the Islamist imagination and has briefly alluded to
the implications of these changes. The Jamaat-e-Islami’s shifts in activism
and struggles with moral ambiguities that the ascendancy of the market in
political imagination has catalyzed, force us to recalibrate the emphasis on
the state as the source of governmentality in terms of an active moulding of
religious thought and practice (also, see Sharma 2006). That these struggles
are tied to shifts in a global political imagination also compels us to re-
adjust the emphasis from theology to context, the local to the global, and
from the particular to the general. Interrogating global capitalist structures,
with an eye to local developments, remains a challenging project. Debates
and discussions about secularism in Pakistan cannot be meaningful without
recognizing the particular configuration of the idea of the state informed as
it is by an imaginary beyond the nation and the ummah.
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Index
Abul Ala Maududi/Abul Ala Mawdudi, 55, 148–49, 151, 189, 204, 284, 288, 320–22,
288, 319, 446–47, 476 356, 375–76, 383–86
Afghanistan, 27, 231, 236, 245, 478 Barelvi/Barelwi, xix, 59, 67–68, 119–30,
Ahl e Hadith/Ahl-e Hadis/Ahl-i Hadith, 132–35, 140, 145, 149, 203, 205, 224,
28–29, 32–33, 37, 44, 54, 59, 67–68, 90, 257, 259, 268–69, 275, 390
92, 119, 124, 126–27, 130, 133, 142, 218, Barelwi, Ahmad Rida Khan, 34
269, 393 Barelwi, Sayyid Ahmad, 3–4, 28, 31, 33, 36,
Ahmed, Imtiaz, 319–320 38, 89, 91, 152
Ahmedabad, 255–61, 267–68, 273, 275–76, Basu, Alaka, 406, 408
278, 349 Basu, Helene, xv, 65–66
Aikya Sangam, 142, 149, 154–55 Bayat, Asef, 317, 319, 472–74
Ajmer, 216, 218, 257 Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), 117–18, 260,
Al-Ghazali, 35, 39, 283 265
Aligarh Movement, xix, 3–4, 23, 387 Bhutto, Benazir, 454
alim/alima/alema, 34, 89, 121–22, 128, Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 478–79
131–32, 135, 192, 242, 257, 267, 271–72, bid’a, unlawful innovation/Bida/
275, 361, 371 innovation/Bidah, 53, 63–66, 123, 129,
Allah/God, 24, 51–52, 61–62, 65–67, 72, 147–48, 157, 257
120, 122–23, 125–29, 132–133, 135, 183, bidah (innovations in worship), 147–48
187, 189, 193, 203, 210–11, 256, 260, bidat, 190
268, 271–72, 292, 295, 297–304 Bihar, 131, 134, 260, 264, 335, 388, 391
All India Muslim Personal Law Board blessings (barkat), 52, 62–65, 73, 156, 208–
(AIMPLB), 347, 350–51, 361–66, 368– 09, 218, 221, 225, 293, 298, 437, 453, 460
71, 375, 389 British India/British rule/colonialism/
Arab/Arabia/Gulf/Arabian Peninsula empire/colonial administration, xiii, xvii,
(Gulf), xviii, 141, 143, 145–46, 162, 283, 3, 28, 44, 60, 87, 89, 98, 141, 149, 156,
311, 391, 421–42, see also Dubai, Gulf, 174, 260, 447, 484
Gulf Cooperation council (GCC) states, Burga (veil), 271, see also hijab, veil
Gulf, kaleej, Saudi Arabia
Arabic, 72, 104, 143, 146, 148–50, 153–55, colonial India, 3, 81–82, 84–85, 87, 89, 96–
178, 217, 220, 288, 294, 297, 330, 391, 97, 99–100, 105–07, 288, 321, 387, 475
426, 428, 431, 433–34, 436–37, 447, 463 Calicut/Kozhikode, 142–46, 150, 153,
Ayub Khan, 454–455 155–56, 158–60, 162–63, 349
Chishti/Chishtiyya order, 54–56
Badran, Margot, 318, 337, 348–49 Constitution, Indian, xxi, 347, 358
Bangladesh, 283–314, 445–68 Cosmopolitan/ism, 65, 85, 94, 107, 256,
Barbara Metcalf, xvi, xvii, 30–31, 36, 38, 421–442
40, 59–60, 64, 67, 119, 129, 141, 145–46,
Index / 505
Dargah, 144, see also Durgah/shrine/tomb Fiqh/jurisprudence, 147, 290, 428

Darul Uloom Deoband/Deoband, 29–30,
33, 36, 40, 120–21, 124, 126, 128–29, Gellner, Ernest, 44–45, 144, 203
140, 205, 257, 260, 319, 371, 384, 387, Gender/ing, xix, 4, 19–20, 134, 172–173,
390 180–89, 196
Deen (religion)/din/Din/religion, 274, 277, Global Islam, xi, xix, 139
296, 330 Globalization, 143, 154, 247, 482–83, 485,
Delhi, 14, 21, 55, 89, 327, 356, 476 488–92, see also (World Bank, WTO,
Democracy IMF, International NGOs)
election, 222, 226, 230–31, 251, 284, God/Allah, 24, 51–52, 61–62, 65–67, 72,
306 120, 122–23, 125–29, 132–33, 135, 183,
voting, 446, 458, 464 187, 189, 193, 203, 210–11, 256, 260,
Deobandi, see Barelvi/Barelwi 268, 271–72, 292, 295, 297–304
Devji, Faisal, xiv, xvi, xix, 3–24, 36 Graves/tombs/jaram/dargah, 58, 64, 67, 73,
Dissolution, 83, 352, 361, 364 128–29, 144, 147, 210, 219–20, 222, 451
Divorce, 39, 244, 248, 251, 320–321, Green, Nile, xiii, xv, xvi, xviii, 29, 59, 65,
350–55, 357, 360–65, 373, 450, see also 79–108, 140–41, 150, 160
dissolution, khul, marriage, nikah Gujarat, 202–226
Dubai/Gulf, 216, 221, 246, see also Gulf, Gulf Cooperation council (GCC) states,
Gulf Cooperation council (GCC) states, 143, 421, 426
kaleej, Saudi Arabia, West Asia Gulf/GCC/kaleej/West Asia/Gulf
Durgah, 257, 261, 267–68, 274–77 Cooperation council states, 46, 143,
274, 386, 421, 426, see also Dubai, Saudi
Earthquake, 215, 219, 223, 258, 264, 279 Arabia
East Pakistan, 327, 448, 456, 467
Education, xii, xiii, 4, 16–18, 23, 30, 37, 39, Hadith, 29, 33, 40, 53, 58, 68, 90, 92, 172,
41, 58, 93, 118, 124–26, 135, 146–52, 183, 193, 205, 283, 285, 288–89, 303–04,
154–55, 157–61, 163–64, 233, 237–38, 310, 323, 325–26, 329–31, 333, 337–38,
244, 250, 283 432, 441, 445–46, 455, 461–62, 468
Egypt, 53, 59, 65, 145, 153, 173, 180, 185, Hakan Yavuz, 285
258, 286, 288–89, 318–19, 347, 407, 448, Hansen, Thomas Blum, xv, xix, 258, 484
456–57, 473, 484, 486 Hasina, Sheikh, 454
Eickelman, Dale F., xvi, 41, 53, 121, 141, Hijab, 171, 177, 181–182, 184, 449, 461, see
144, 192, 203, 207, 238, 241, 284–85, also veil/burqa
290, 294, 317, 373–374, 480 Hindu nationalism/Hindu fundamentalism/
Elections, 230, 263, 306, 325, 328, 337–38, Hindutva, xv, 118, 140, 215, 225, 258,
446, 454–59, 463–465, 467–68, 477–78, 277, 333, 406, 408–09
480 Hinduism, xv, xvii, 97, 105, 151, 211, 215,
Employment/unemployment, 100, 151, 225, 258, 323, 387
154, 237, 247–48, 258, 264, 338, 387, Hirschkind, Charles, xiv, xvii, 141, 151, 232,
391, 401, 404, 407–09, 429, 438, 458–59 246, 250, 286–89, 292, 374
entzauberung, 42–43. See also Weber/ Housing, 255–56, 265–66, 278, 292
Weberian Hyderabad, 140, 150, 221, 347, 353, 360,
376
Family, 14–23, 39–40, 55, 131, 144, 151,
154, 159, 177, 181, 183–86, 206, 209, Ibn ‘Arabi, 29, 32, 55–56, 59
213–14, 216–21, 223, 226, 233, 241 Ibn Abdul Wahab, 152, 163
506 / Index
Ibn Tamiyya/Ibn Tammiya/Ibn-e-tamiya, Jinnah, Fatimah, 454

59, 329 Jinnah, Muhammed Ali, 454
idolatry (shirk), 9, 53, 147, 161
ijtihad (independent reasoning), xvi, xviii, Kaleej, 271
29, 147–48, 157, 163, 347, 352 Kerala, 139–164
Ilyas, Maulauna Muhammed, 31, 38 khalifa (vicegerent), 51, 53, 61–62, 64, 68, 74
IMF, 482, 485, 488, 490 Khilafat, 34, 156–57, 260
India, 79–108, 117–35, 139–64, 202–26, Koran, see also quran, qu’ran, 53, 67–68
346–77 Khul, 361–62, 364–65
Indian Mutiny, 5, 11
Indian National Congress, 157, 321 Lambek, Michael, 441
Intermediaries/saints/intercessors, 203, Law, 13–14, 29, 35, 40–41, 56, 214, 230,
210–11, 224, 352 see also Islamic law/Muslim law/Law/
International NGOs, 247 jurisprudence/fiqh
Iqbal, Muhammed, 28, 31–32, 36, 38, 477 Literacy/education, 155, 233, 237–38, 353,
Ishthema/religious meeting/Isthemas 358, 374, 390–91, 458, 481
(congregations), 145, 153, 257, 261, Lucknow, 5, 10, 21, 88, 101, 349–51, 357,
265–66, 270–73, 275–76, 278 365
Islamic etiquette and jurisprudence (fiqh),
126, 290, 428 Madrasa/madrassahs/Madrassa, xix, 29–31,
Islamic feminism, 318, 320, 327, 337–38, 35, 37, 40, 51, 117–35, 142–43, 145,
346–77 148–149, 151, 158, 224, 234–35, 244,
Islamic fundamentalism, xii, 27, 47 250–51, 260–61, 266–67, 269, 271–72,
Islamic law, 53, 56, 231, 305, 348, 352, 360, 275, 290, 332, 371, 383–84, 390–91, 399,
365, 367, 447 402–06, 455, 478, 482
Islamic study circles or halaqa, xix, 421–42 Mahmood, Saba, xiv, xvii, xx, xxi, xxii, 46,
Islamic subjectivities, xx, 284 53, 68, 141, 151, 157, 160, 172–73, 178,
Islamism/Islamist, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 180–82, 192, 232, 279, 286
27–28, 32–33, 44–46, 67, 102, 139–64, Mahr/Mehr/mohrana/dower, 323–24, 331,
172, 185, 230–52, 261, 265, 273, 279, 357, 362, 365–66, 437, 461
283–314, 317–21, 329, 333–35, 337, 339, Market
347, 376–77, 445–68, 472–97 capitalism, 27, 83, 97, 496
Ismaili, 434 commerce, 146, 219
trade, 38, 96, 143, 145–46, 296–97,
Jama’at-e-Islami/Jamaat I Islami/Jamaat-e- 299
Islami/Jamaat-i-Islam/Jamati-Islami, xiii, marketplace, 82–86
xviii, xix, xx, 317–339, 376, 445–68, 477 Marriage, 31, 63, 120, 123, 129–30, 158,
Jamaats in Ahmedabad, 267 177, 183–85, 221, 241–50
Jamia Millia Islamia, 335 arranged, 274
Jamia’at-e-Ulema-e-Hind/Jamiaat-e- love, 39, 245
Ulema-e-Hind/Jamiat ul Ulema/Jamiat- Maududi/Mawdudi/Maulana Maududi/
e-ulema-Hind, 258, 260, 265, 273, 326 Maududi, Syed Abu Ala, xiii, xx, 42, 55,
Jamma’at-i-Islami Hind (JIH), 347, 349, 67, 259, 319–34, 336–38, 446–56, 459,
375–77, 385, 425 467–68, 473, 476–82, 493, 496
jihad, xvi, 26, 33, 42, 91–92, 118, 155, 205, mawlid/‘arus, 64–65
231, 288, 295, 305–07, 425, 462 Mayaram, Shail, xv, xvii, 141, 145, 260, 273
Index / 507
Media, 145, 163–64, 182, 233, 238, 240, Muslim League, 152, 154, 157, 260, 320–21,
267, 285, 302, 306, 330, 350, 352, 359, 480, 489
374–75, 426–27, 482, see also newspaper, Muslim Personal Law (MPL), xxi, 346–77,
print 388–89
Meos, 260, 273
Metcalf, Barbara, xvi, xvii, 30–31, 36, 38, Namaz or salat, prayer, 298
40, 59–60, 64, 67, 119, 129, 141, 145–46, Naqshbandi, xviii, 29, 51, 53, 55–56, 59, 61,
148–49, 151, 189, 204, 284, 288, 320–22, 68–69, 71
356, 375–76, 383–86 Newspaper/s, 93, 152, 162, 223, 239, 245,
Migrant/s, 61, 63, 128, 159, 221, 237, 258, 346, 374, 389
264, 268–69, 273, 409, 421–22, 424–27, NGO/NGOs, 160, 178, 231, 237, 239–40,
439, 479, see also migration 247–48, 262, 265–66, 349, 353–56, 358,
migration, 143, 146, 150, 153–55, 221, 261, 360, 363, 366, 369–70, 446, 458–59,
269–70, 273, 278–79, 425, 429, 432, 437, 466–67, 480
440 Nikah/Nikahnama/Nikah, faskh-e nikah,
Minault, Gail, xiv, xvii, 151, 153, 232, 234, 241–42, 351, 354, 357, 359, 361–66, 368,
320, 359, 363, 383, 385 370, see also marriage, divorce
Mitchell, Timothy, 483–486 Nile Green, xiii, xviii, 29, 79–108
Modern/modernity/modernities/ North West Frontier Province (NWFP),
Modernist/modernism, xi, xii, xiii, 3–4, 230, 235
22, 26–46, 62, 81, 85, 88, 96, 104, 106,
141, 146, 154–57, 159–160, 163, 203–12, Olivier Roy, 139, 176, 473
311, 323, 359, 386, 476, 478 Orthodoxy, xi, xii, xvii, 53–54, 56, 59, 64,
Moghissi, 318, 338–39, 348 73, 163, 176, 181–183, 188, 190, 195,
Monotheism/tawhid, 29, 36, 52, 63, 148, 214–15, 385–86
161, 268
Mosque, 21–22, 27, 130, 133, 135, 142, Pakistan, 35, 42–44, 51, 53–54, 61, 66–67,
144–46, 149, 154–55, 158, 162, 173, 180, 118–19, 128, 131, 208, 230–52
188, 191–92, 205–06, 209, 211–12, 214, Pakistan Muslim League, 480, 489, see also
216, 219–20, 222, 224, 231, 234, 246, Muslim League, Pakistan
261–62, 267–69, 274, 278, 290, 360, 369, Pardah, 37, 135, 151, 158, 168, 231–32, 245,
376, 391, 406, 423, 426 249, 251, 261, 321, 336, 449, 461–64,
Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, 27, 67 466, 493, see also hijab, veil
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Partition, 157, 260, 326, 335, 447, 477, 479
later Aligarh Muslim University, 3 Peter van der Veer, xiii, xv, 96, 279, 439–40,
Muhammed/Mohammed, 156, 347, 363 494
Muhhamad Ilyas, 31, 38, 257 Piety, 171–196, see also piety movement
Mujahid movement, xii, 142, 146–47, piety movement, xvii, 36, 171, 174–76, 179,
152–54, 162 183, 186, 190, 192–93, 196, 232, 376
Mujibur Rahman, 456 Pilgrimage, 216, 218, 259, 298, 398, 432
Mullahs, 231, 234, 236, 238–50, 351, 384 Pir, 55, 72–73, 121, 128, 210
Mumbai, 204, 213, 258, 347, 353, 357, 359, Piscatori, James, xvi, 41, 53, 141, 192, 207,
363 373, 480
Muslim Brotherhood, 145, 258, 284, 426, Political Islam, xii, 67, 250
457 Print, 5, 30, 33, 41, 81–86, see also literacy,
Muslim law, 351, 353, 367 education, media, newspaper
508 / Index
Prophet Muhammad, 53, 57, 71, 90, 92, Saba Mahmood, xiv, xvii, xx, xxi, xxii, 46,
107, 120, 123, 126, 128, 131–33, 135, 53, 68, 141, 151, 157, 160, 172–73, 178,
245, 283, 293–94, 297, 301, 304, 307–09, 180–82, 192, 232, 279, 286
311–12, 432, 445 Saint/Saints, xiii, xv, xviii, 29, 51–55, 57–69,
Protestant Christianity/Protestant/s, 72–73, 90, 202–26
protestantization/Protestantism/ Salafi/salafism/Salafiyya, xii, 67, 154, 186–
protestant ethic, xii, 28, 32, 35, 44, 54, 66, 88, 205, 283, 289, 426
88, 158, 161, 204 Salvatore, Armando, xvi, 141, 144, 285, 494
Public space, 35–36, 39, 79–85, 88, 91, 93, Saudi Arabia, 146, 153, 194, 216, 268–69,
103, 105–07, 118, 145, 163–64, 240, 276, 319, 333, 336, 421, 425, see also
286–88, 295, 374–75, 490 Gulf, Gulf Cooperation council (GCC)
Pukhtun/Pathan/Pashtun, 235–36 states
Purdah/pardah, 37, 135, 151, 158, 168, Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi, 3–4, 28, 31, 33, 36,
231–32, 245, 249, 251, 261, 321, 336, 38, 89, 91, 152
449, 461–64, 466, 493, see also veil, hijab, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, 34
burqah Scripturalism, 28, see also Protestantism
Secularism/secularization/secularity/
Qur’an, ahadith, 290–91, 296 secular, xxi, 28, 42–46, 295, 383–409,
Qur’an/Qur’an Sharif/Quran, 283–314 472–97
Quranic exegesis (tafsir), 428 Shah Bano case, 320, 373
Quranic recitation (tajwid), 428, 436–37 Shah Wali Allah, 27–28, 46, 59
qawwali, 64 Shari’a/Shari’at/shari’ah, 42, 53–56, 62,
64, 73, 230, 233–34, 242, 244–46, 319,
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 117 321–22, 325–26, 330–31, 333, 348, 352,
Rationalisation, xii, xiii, 28, 40–43, 45 366–68, 373, 387
Reform/Reformism/Reformist/ Shirk (attribution of partners to God;
Reformation/Protestantism/ idolatry), 147, 157, 190
scripturalism, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, Shrine/shrine worship, 40, 53, 57, 60,
xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 3–24, 26, 28, 35, 37–38, 64–66, 121, 129–30, 135, 144–45, 147,
44, 66, 121, 139–52, 204 162–63, 192, 210–12, 215–22, 224, 259,
Reformist, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, 261, 267–68, 274–75, 277–78, 313, 358
xx, xxi, 3–24, 26–46, 51–74, 79–108 Sikand,Yoginder, xvii, 30, 37, 118–19, 134,
Refugee, 235–36, 259–60, 481 140–43, 145, 148, 259, 272, 346–47, 351,
Religion, xiii, xiv, xviii, xxi, 3–4, 18, 31, 37, 359, 383, 385, 389–91, 409
40, 42, 44, 52, 62, 80, 93, 124, 146, 175, Simpson, Edward, xi, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, 54,
177–78, 188, 190–92, 196, 202, 206, 209, 57, 140, 145, 164, 191, 202–26, 250, 255,
216, 218–19, 234, 251, 258, 271, see also 258–59, 279
deen, din Soares, Benjamin, xi, xiv, xvi, xxii, 59, 121,
Religious education, 126, 135, 149, 154–55, 140, 145, 157, 163–64, 207, 234, 238
158, 284, 290, 307, 371 Socialism, 459, 477, 483
Riot/s, 175, 255–62, 265–67, 269–71, 274, Sri Lanka, 36, 171–96
276, 278–79, 327, 353 State, 472–97
Robinson, Francis, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, Sufi/Sufism, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, xxi, 26,
xviii, 26–46, 79, 81, 83, 125–26, 140–41, 29, 33, 38–40, 51–74
145–46, 160, 162–63, 205–06, 210, 225, Sunni Barelvi Jamaat/Sunni Barelwi Jamaat,
260, 285, 320, 373, 383–384 124, 257, 259, 268–69, 275
Syncretism, xv, 55, 204
Index / 509
Tablighi Jamaat/TablighƯ/Tablighi Jama’at Urdu, 3–4, 7, 11, 33, 35, 54, 72, 85, 89, 92,
(TJ), xix, 28, 30–31, 64, 140, 142, 171, 96, 101, 106, 143, 150, 235, 239, 256,
177, 185–89, 195, 218, 236, 257–61, 265, 267, 288, 322, 327, 365, 373, 387, 389,
267–77, 284, 288, 303, 305, 308–09, 313, 391, 431, 433–34, 447, 481, 491
320, 326, 349, 356, 385, 391, 403 Urs/nercha/Urus/festival, 64–66, 68, 73–74,
Talaq, see also divorce, marriage, 357, 144–45, 159, 162, 259
360–66 Uttar Pradesh, 119, 121, 209, 264, 270, 383,
Tamil Nadu, 65, 153, 358, 360 390
Taqlid, blind following, 29, 147–48, 157
Tawhid/tauhid/tauheed, the singularity and Vakkom Maoulavi/Vaikkom Moulavi,
unity of God, 29, 36, 52, 63, 186–87, 268 148–49, 154
Taylor, Charles, 37, 45, 474–75 Van der Veer, Peter, xiii, xv, 96, 279, 439–40,
tazia, 123, 130, 215 494–95
Television/media, 61, 135, 256, 271, 288, Veil, 20, 172, 185, 261, 319, 321, 323, 330,
290, 310, 374, 493, see also newspapers/ 332–36, 338, 354, 371, 492, see also burqa
print, public sphere hijab, pardah
Tomb, 60, 68, 120, 129–30, 144, 146–47,
218, 259, 267, 275–77 Wah’habism/wah’habism/Wahabbis, xii,
Tradition/Traditionalism/ist, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, 58, 143, 276
xvi, xvii, xviii, xxii, 4, 9–10, 15, 19, 21, Wahhab, Muhammed ibn Abd-al, 27
28–35, 37, 54, 82, 139–42, 145, 148–50, Wakf, 352
154, 156–57, 159–62, 252, 289 Wali Allah, 27–28, 46
Turkey, 447, 465, 492 Waqf, 268
Weber/weberian, xii, 28, 40, 42–44, 54
Ulama/ulema (religious scholars), xvi, xvii, Women, 171–96, 230–52, 283–314, 317–39,
xx, xxi, 26, 29–30, 34–35, 39–40, 43, 346–77, 421–42, 445–68
51, 55, 59, 61–62, 64, 68, 74, 120, 122, World Bank, 485, 489–92
124, 126–29, 132, 140, 142, 148–49, 153, WTO, 485
155–58, 162–63, 241, 247, 260, 290, 330,
336, 348, 351–52, 361, 365, 369–70, 373, Zakat/Zakath, 298
387, 454–55, 478 Zaman, Qasim, xiii, xvi, 118–19, 126, 149,
Umaah/Umma/Ummah, xix, 172, 176, 195, 158, 204, 285, 383–84, 387, 472
259, 284, 295, 426, 473, 497 Zia, Khaleda, 454
Uniform civil code, Indian (UCC), 347–48, Zindegi-e-nau, 327
351 Zindapir/Zindapir Rab Nawaz, xviii, 51–
Unity of God (tawhid), 29, 52, 63 52, 60–64, 68, 73
Unlawful innovation (bida’), 53, 63, 66

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Islamic Reform

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

Part I: Reformist Journeys

Part II: Debating Reform

10. Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform: Stories from

Part IV: Reform, State and Market

Attiya Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The George

completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was also a

of Gujarat since 1800: A Select Bibliography of English and European language

Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella*

T he authors in this volume discuss contemporary Islamic reformism in

to its specific meaning in contexts in which individual authors work—in

volume), as it is a reaction to public critiques of Muslims and Islam moved

The articles are written at a time when employees of Euro-American

other, with reformist insistence on the purification of un-Islamic elements

and the production of Muslim identities alike clearly emerge as deeply

eschatological sensibility and concern of pious reformist women is still—

do not propose rigid or unchanging demands on Muslims, but negotiate and

Appadurai, A. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of

Hirschkind, C. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic

McGilvray, D. 2011. ‘Sri Lankan Muslims: Between Ethno-Nationalism and

B y the middle of the nineteenth century many of India’s thinkers were

Educational Conference and voluminous writings, including a journal, the

The Prostitution of History

Lutf hay kawn si kahani men?

And this indicates a problematization of the old history as witness

Marne ke din qarib hain shayad ke ay hayat

autonomous or objective past, and to represent it in the sense of being its

Ham ko bhi kya kya maze ki dastanen yad thin

Taken alone this verse is quite innocuous, a typical example of the

of the past delightful in comparison. The reformation’s historians were all

Kis ko sunaen hal-e dil-e zar ay Ada

While the appeal to narration is clear here, it is expressed in the typical

Kabe men ja ke bhul gaya rah dayr ki

Shab-e furqat basar nahin hoti (ibid.: 20)

Ay Ada ham kabhi na manenge

courtesan responds to this suggestion in the fashion of traditional poetics,

Whatever the personal experience, I have expressed a poetic

There is no doubt that your history (halat) must be very

Umrao puts up a good deal of resistance to the munshi’s idea, which

I have no doubt that whatever has been related in this life-story

This challenge is to be taken seriously, for Mirza Ruswa himself treats

Na puchh nama-e amal ki dil avezi

Suddenly last night around twelve o’clock my eyes opened. As

had such pleasure reading other stories, because while reading

In this remarkable passage Umrao Jan finally overcomes her objections

This kind of talk had a certain meaning in the past, because at

Madness in the Family

Following a miraculous recovery, Nasuh embarks upon the reformation of

The whole paraphernalia of providence, then, the cholera epidemic

That man who is the oldest in this house is in the position of

If to think oneself an emperor isn’t madness then what is it?

Talim-o tarbiyat ka hay ikhtilaf har ja

Zindagi awr qiyamat men ‘relation’ samjho