The portable madrasa: primers on Islamic belief and practice and their contexts

A very brief overview of the authors will help frame the subsequent analysis. First, Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943) was among the most pre-eminent `ulama of modern South Asia. He was born in 1863 in Thana Bhavan, a small town in northern India, and entered the Dar al-`Ulum Deoband in 1878 and graduated in 1883,Footnote <sup>14</sup> teaching first in Kanpur and later returning to Thana Bhavan in 1897 for the remainder of his life.Footnote <sup>15</sup> There he presided over the Sufi lodge (khanqah) that had belonged to his Sufi master, Hajji Imdadullah al-Makki (d. 1899), while advising hundreds of disciples and writing prolifically across a variety of fields, including works on the Qur’an, hadith, Sufism, and other subjects, alongside collections of judicial opinions (fatwas) and numerous shorter pamphlets aimed towards reforming popular Islam; his Bihishti Zewar, Ta`lim al-Din, and Hayat al-Muslimin, the primers considered here, are among those texts. First published in 1905, the Bihishti Zewar is by far the lengthiest among them, spanning ten volumes, and covering a wealth of knowledge geared towards (but not exclusively for) women.Footnote ¹⁶ The publication dates for the other two texts are more obscure, but we can safely assume they date from the period after Thanvi returned to Thana Bhavan in 1897.Footnote ¹⁷

A rough contemporary of Thanvi’s, Mufti Muhammad Kifayatullah (d. 1952) was a prominent Deobandi, having graduated from the Dar al-`Ulum Deoband in 1897, and was later an early advocate of the Tablighi Jama`at.Footnote ¹⁸ Kifayatullah made his mark as a public debater and founded an organization, Anjuman Islah al-Kalam, to train madrasa students how to debate with critics of Islam.Footnote ¹⁹ He also played a major role in the formation of the Jami`at `Ulama-i Hind, becoming its first president in 1919.Footnote ²⁰ Intended primarily for young Muslims, Kifayatullah's Ta`lim al-Islam dates from the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote <sup>21</sup> Kifayatullah deliberately eschewed copyright so the book could be printed and reprinted by anyone with basic printing facilities. The book covers Islam's five ‘pillars’, the essential tenets of Muslim belief (`aqida), how to perform ritual ablutions (wudu and ghusl), prophecy, the life of Muhammad, the Companions of the Prophet, alongside a substantial exposition of Islamic etiquette (adab). It is the most explicitly catechistic of the texts analysed here, and it is perhaps noteworthy that the title itself reflects this objectification of ‘Islam’, especially when contrasted with Thanvi's Ta`lim al-Din.Footnote ²²

Muhammad Manzur Nu`mani (d. 1997), the author of Islam kya hai, was educated at Deoband and later became intimately involved in the early formation of Jama`at-i Islami, alongside Abu’l A`la Mawdudi, but eventually eschewed Mawdudi's political project altogether.Footnote <sup>23</sup> He subsequently became a fervent supporter of the Tablighi Jama`at, compiling the collected discourses (malfuzat) of the organization's founder, Muhammad Ilyas.Footnote ²⁴ Alongside his teaching post at Dar al-`Ulum Nadwa in Lucknow, Nu`mani had a prolific career writing publications on topics ranging from polemics against the Ahmadis to Qur’anic exegesis. He became especially well known for his public debates, for example with members of the Hindu revivalist organization, Arya Samaj.Footnote ²⁵ Nu`mani's Islam kya hai, first published shortly after the partition of India in 1947,Footnote <sup>26</sup> targets adult Muslims who need rejuvenation in their faith. The shortest among the primers, this text begins with the five pillars of Islam, and then covers piety (taqwa), monetary interactions, social conduct (mu`ashirat), ethics (akhlaq), love for God and the Prophet, supplementary prayers (zikr and du`a), and other assorted topics.Footnote ²⁷

How should we locate these texts in the context of lay readerships in late colonial India? The nineteenth century saw the introduction of large-scale lithographic printing across India, including the rapid expansion of Urdu language presses and Urdu book markets,Footnote ²⁸ and the concomitant emergence of Urdu reading publics.Footnote ²⁹ It also saw the Urdu presses churning out scores of pamphlets, screeds, tracts, newspapers, and Urdu translations of the Qur’an. In part, the expansion of Urdu in this period is the outcome of British colonial policies that privileged Urdu for administrative purposes over other vernaculars.Footnote ³⁰ Such circumstances dramatically expanded the audience of the `ulama, at the same time as it heightened inter- and intra-religious competition. As Barbara Metcalf explains of the `ulama, ‘Their teachings and opinions achieved ever-wider currency, and the intellectual orientations they represented were increasingly considered the defining characteristics of rival groups.’Footnote ³¹ This form of cultural production was part of a broader reification of religious identities in colonial India, in which especially Hindu and Muslim sectarian identities were increasingly entrenched. The `ulama saw the dissemination of Islamic religious knowledge as the most effective response to this cluttered religious field, and the exigencies of the age called for Muslims to ‘know, much more clearly and much more certainly than before, how to behave as Muslims’. Hence, ‘The printing press was a crucial means to this end.’Footnote ³²

Are there any precedents, then, for these primers in Indian Islamic history? There are certainly nineteenth century texts that share a similar reformist impulse, texts that were also driven by a need to reform and revive Muslim publics. One need only mention Muhammad Isma`il's (d. 1831) popular manifesto, Taqwiyyat al-Iman (Strengthening the Faith),Footnote <sup>33</sup> in which he endeavoured to purge Muslim piety of what he perceived as illicit devotional practices, particularly those surrounding the tombs of Sufi saints. Composed around 1824, it was also among the earliest works in Urdu to take advantage of new print technology.Footnote <sup>34</sup> Muhammad Isma`il explicitly sought to make his treatise as easy to understand as possible, writing not in Arabic or Persian but in ‘simple Urdu’ (salis Urdu) so that ‘both the elites and the commoners can derive some benefit from it’, a theme we will see repeated in the primers discussed here.Footnote ³⁵ And while these reformist texts helped call into being certain kinds of reformist publics, they also addressed, quite literally, crowds; these texts were often read out loud in villages throughout India.Footnote ³⁶ Metcalf relates a colourful story of Taqwiyyat al-Iman being read aloud in one village, inspiring illiterate Muslims to implement its reform of customary practices into their daily lives.Footnote ³⁷ This practice was, in fact, widespread in a predominantly illiterate society. As the missionary Charles Long noted in 1859, ‘With Orientals it is a common practice to be read to, and hence numbers who cannot read themselves listen to those who can.’Footnote ³⁸ Likewise, as I show below, the texts I examine here repeatedly call for readers to read aloud, to read in groups, and to read to those who cannot read, actively resisting the privatized reading subject.

Yet unlike the reformist tracts of the nineteenth century—and this point is crucial—the primers I consider here had the sole purpose of rendering the rudiments of a madrasa education marketable, portable, and easily digested. Taqwiyyat al-Iman and other reformist manifestoes were by no means ‘primers’ on Islam in the sense I am using the term here; although they helped galvanize reformist sensibilities, they were not systematic overviews of Islamic belief and practice. This sort of topical, serial arrangement of Muslim belief and practice did not appear until the turn of the twentieth century, at least not in the Indian subcontinent. What these new primers presuppose is the ability to organize Islamic knowledge topically and comprehensively. Yet they also presuppose an incipient Muslim literate class who are versed in vernacular Urdu and, perhaps, have leisure time to study these texts.

Constraining interpretation: negotiating the place of the `ulama in a world of print

The Deobandi `ulama took advantage of print's possibilities for bringing their reformist message to the widest possible audience of lay Muslim readers, yet were acutely aware of print's dangers and limitations as well—particularly the impact of print on structures of religious authority and the transmission of knowledge. Scholars of print culture in both Western and non-Western contexts have observed that print tends to privatize reading practices, bolster individualizing trends in religious practice and identity, foster the emergence of reading publics for religious texts, and most importantly, diminish and displace the authority of clerical establishments—notions associated particularly with the pioneering work of Elizabeth Eisenstein.Footnote ³⁹ Her influence has understandably loomed especially large in discussions of Islam and print culture.Footnote ⁴⁰ One of the challenges for scholars of Islam is how to adapt the insights of the vast scholarship on early European print culture without reinscribing certain ‘Protestant’ teleologies in assessing print's impact on the Muslim world.Footnote ⁴¹

We must also avoid assuming, as does Eisenstein, that there is something intrinsic in print itself such that it necessarily disperses religious authority; rather than ascribing to print an ahistorical agency of its own, we should focus on specific contexts in which individuals engage with print's local effects.Footnote ⁴² Moreover, what we often take for granted as the essential ‘nature’ of print has an aura of inevitability that is itself the product of print. As Adrian Johns made clear, ‘the very identity of print itself has had to be made… It was dedicated to effacing its own traces’, so that print could ‘gain the air of intrinsic reliability on which its cultural and commercial success could be built’.Footnote ⁴³ The `ulama who authored the primers I discuss below did not efface print's traces; on the contrary, they highlighted them. They foregrounded their anxieties about print, anxieties exacerbated by the oral and aural nature of traditional Islamic economies of knowledge.Footnote <sup>44</sup> The Deobandi `ulama attempted to mitigate the centrifugal forces of print by preserving orality in these primers, placing limitations on individual reader's interpretations of the texts, and insisting that the texts themselves are mere devices, as it were, to facilitate Islamic learning. They were to be understood not as replacements of, but as supplements for, traditional models of transmitting Islamic religious knowledge.

In this sense, the primers’ authors self-consciously sought continuity with pre-print economies of knowledge. They negotiated a balance between the benefits of print and its pitfalls; although they regarded reading as a (subversively) private act, here that privacy was displaced by their exhortation to readers to read in groups and to consult with `ulama at every step of the reading process. It was an effort to reinstantiate, to borrow terms from Nile Green, the ‘androcentric’ over the ‘bibliocentric’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Suspicion towards learning solely from books has a long pedigree in Islamic societies.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Books were not considered independent sources of knowledge,’ argues Green, ‘but were appendages to the personal pedagogical relationships through which knowledge was transferred.’Footnote ⁴⁷

The Deobandi `ulama sought to negotiate a profound ambivalence towards print. Ashraf `Ali Thanvi celebrated the widespread availability of religious books in Urdu for making it ‘easy’ (asan) for individual Muslims to access religious knowledge in their ‘free time’ (fursat).Footnote ⁴⁸ For Thanvi, books are to the acquisition of religious knowledge what trains and steamships are to travelling on the hajj pilgrimage; in early Islam, most people acquired religious knowledge from other people rather than books, just as they performed the pilgrimage on foot. Nowadays, of course, this is no longer feasible for most, and thus, certain caveats notwithstanding, books provide a certain utilitarian means of conveying religious knowledge and facilitate the fulfilment of religious duties.Footnote ⁴⁹ And yet, insofar as Thanvi believed that books could play a central role in educating the masses on how to be proper Muslims, we can see him grappling with the problem of how to bring religious knowledge to the largest number of Muslims without diminishing `ulama authority in the process. Thanvi proposed a novel solution, essentially advising his readers to pursue, in essence, three possible options for acquiring religious knowledge. The best option is to become an `alim oneself, even if it is means becoming one of a ‘middling’ status. Second, if one does not have the time or resources for this pursuit, one should read Urdu religious books on one's own, but should consult a fully trained `alim every step of the way. Third, he says, if you cannot read, then have Urdu books read to you. Thanvi's approach established the basis for his and subsequent primers.

To implement the first option, Thanvi arranged an abbreviated madrasa curriculum, one still based on the classic Dars-i Nizami syllabus used throughout South Asia.Footnote ⁵⁰ He sought to make a rudimentary madrasa education as widely available as possible, and believed that a madrasa education could no longer be the sole prerogative of students training to become full-time `ulama:

He called on madrasas to offer just this sort of abbreviated syllabus.Footnote ⁵² In this way, he believed, any Muslim can seek to acquire at least a modicum of religious knowledge comparable to that of a ‘middling religious scholar’ (mutawasit `alim)—a status a woman would also have, Thanvi explains, upon mastering the material of the Bihishti Zewar.Footnote <sup>53</sup> At the conclusion of that text, Thanvi carefully lays out a course for a reader who wishes to pursue her learning further. First, he suggests that she should ‘study some Persian and then begin to study Arabic, as men do. In Arabic there is much great and good knowledge, and the truth is that a real “taste” (maza) and full grasp of religious knowledge is not feasible without Arabic.’ After pursuing this course, ‘you will become within three years, God willing, a maulvi, a scholar of Arabic, and join the ranks of the `ulama. You will be able to give lectures on Qur’an and hadith, just like the `ulama. You will be able to give judicial opinions (fatwas), just like the `ulama. You will be able to teach Arabic to children, just like the `ulama.’Footnote ⁵⁴

But merely mastering Arabic was insufficient to make one a maulvi, in Thanvi's view. He lamented that, in his day, a smattering of Arabic was considered enough to make others consider one a ‘maulvi’; if that were the sole criterion, as he memorably notes, Abu Jahl and Abu Lahab—two of the most ardent opponents of the Prophet Muhammad—would be maulvis.Footnote ⁵⁵ One must also be an ethical exemplar, and indeed, for him the very raison d’être of acquiring knowledge is, first, to praise and honour God and, second, to lead a life in accordance with the Prophetic model in thought and deed.

Knowledge of Arabic, and by extension the ability to consult authoritative religious texts in Arabic, differentiated the `ulama from other Muslims. Thanvi must have realized that giving average Muslims a ‘taste’ of Arabic was a potentially risky endeavour; he warns his readers not to embark on interpretive tasks for which they are not suited. There was a danger in giving readers a false sense of empowerment, lest they debate and write about complicated religious issues (masa’il) openly. It was not long before Thanvi that Hajji Imdadullah, Thanvi's own Sufi master and one who inspired a whole generation of early Deobandis, implored the `ulama to write about religious disputations only in Arabic, to avoid leading the Urdu-reading masses astray.Footnote ⁵⁶

Of course, not everyone had the time or impetus to become an `alim. Thus the second strategy is to guide readers towards consulting the `ulama in their pursuit of religious knowledge. Moreover, Thanvi also submitted that because Muslims were being assaulted on all sides by the temptations of modernity and sectarian criticism from rival religious groups, acquiring traditional Islamic learning had become a compulsory duty (fard `ayn) for each individual Muslim.Footnote ⁵⁷ It simply would no longer suffice for a segment of the Muslim populace to acquire detailed knowledge of Islamic belief and practice and hope to teach its basics to others; now, each and every Muslim had to acquire this knowledge directly. These primers are the direct outcome of this mass educational mission.

Thus Thanvi argues that arming ‘common’ Muslims with religious knowledge, even on matters that are traditionally solely the prerogative of `ulama, is not only justifiable, but essential.Footnote <sup>58</sup> In surveying the state of Muslims in his day, Thanvi diagnosed a pervasive ‘spiritual malaise’ (ruhani maraz) among Muslims and believed that endowing his readers with religious knowledge was the only viable cure.Footnote <sup>59</sup> He thus begins Hayat al-Muslimin by citing a hadith of Ibn Majah—‘Seeking religious knowledge is compulsory upon every Muslim’—and explains: ‘This hadith establishes that every Muslim—whether male or female, city-dweller or villager, rich or poor—must acquire religious knowledge. And “knowledge” does not only mean reading Arabic. In fact, it means learning about the faith, whether through reading Arabic books or reading Urdu books, whether inquiring among reliable `ulama or listening to reliable lecturers.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Ideally, Thanvi says, all Muslims would have the time and ability to become qualified religious scholars, but since this is not the case, he proposes to offer in his text an ‘easy method for learning and teaching the religion’ that will also allow ‘common people to fulfil the obligation [of acquiring religious knowledge] and attain the merit thereof’. He urges readers to consult with `ulama whenever possible when reading religious books on their own, but also recognizes that sometimes a scholar is not available:

Thanvi issues the same advice in Bihishti Zewar. ‘If there is an `alim in your household,’ he writes, ‘inquire of him about any and every religious matter, or if there is no such person in your household, inquire of an `alim in your town or village.’Footnote ⁶² He advises his readers to ‘read Urdu religious books, and reflect on them until you understand. And whenever you have any doubt, do not figure out the meaning on your own, but inquire of an `alim.’Footnote ⁶³ To avoid the harm of reading bad books,

At the conclusion of Bihishti Zewar, we can see Thanvi struggling to channel the transformative power of print in predictable and morally salutary ways in his lengthy recommendations of ‘good’ books to read and ‘bad’ books to avoid.Footnote ⁶⁵

Like Thanvi, Kifayatullah and Nu`mani also embraced what was essentially a third option for disseminating religious knowledge, tailored to those who were illiterate: having others read religious books aloud. Nu`mani sees this strategy as a way of overcoming the limitations of print in a context where many would simply not have the requisite literacy to read the text, as well as enabling the text's message to reach the widest possible audience. As Nu`mani explains:

Nu`mani is emphatic in calling for those who can read to read his text out loud in mosques and to small groups of Muslims for the benefit of those who cannot:

We can discern this quest for accessibility in the authors’ efforts to write in the simplest Urdu possible. Like Muhammad Isma`il before them, they set out to write in ‘simple language’ or ‘simple Urdu’, not just to facilitate understanding among a nascent reading public, but also to facilitate reading the text aloud. Kifayatullah deliberately wrote his primer for schoolchildren learning basic Urdu, though the text remains popular among all ages, and he intended it to be conducive to memorization.Footnote <sup>68</sup> Nu`mani wrote in a ‘simple and easy language’ (zaban-i salis aur asan) so that readers could read the text aloud to their families and fellow Muslims.Footnote ⁶⁹ In short, these texts consciously preserve the oral and aural accents of Islamic education. Here, ‘print becomes a stimulus to orality and, in turn, a stimulus to action and behavior’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Reformist publics: embedding Deoband's critique in the primers

The authors of these primers cast them as nothing more and nothing less than easy, accessible summaries of what the average Muslim needs to know in order to be pious and observant. But in a much more subtle sense, they also embedded elements of Deoband's reformist programme in their overall messages. The texts address not just ‘Muslims’ in the abstract, but specifically address Muslims in need of personal moral reform and rejuvenation, actively seeking to cultivate reform-minded sensibilities among their readers.

We can see this clearly in Thanvi's primer Ta`lim al-Din. In roughly a hundred pages, this text seamlessly combines an outline of Islamic belief and practice with a broader reformist message. The text begins with a serial, numbered listing of 43 Islamic ‘beliefs’ (`aqa’id), ranging from the most basic (‘Belief 1: The universe did not exist before God brought it into existence’) to those that reinscribe Deoband's critique of popular Sufism (‘Belief 19: Anyone opposed to the Shari`a cannot be a friend of God (khuda ka dost), and if he, by his hand, displays some incredible thing, it is magic, or a selfish and satanic vocation’).Footnote <sup>71</sup> Thanvi also adapts Muhammad Isma`il's reformist critique of popular piety in enumerating that author's four forms of polytheism (shirk, literally ‘associating’ any other entity with God), and two forms of heretical innovations (bid`a), which Thanvi took directly from the Taqwiyyat al-Iman, mentioned previously.Footnote <sup>72</sup> These are followed by a serial listing of 120 aspects of Islamic practice—literally ‘deeds’ (a`mal)—covering ritual prayer, funerals, charity, fasting, recitation of the Qur’an, supplications (du`a), taking oaths, and finally, a list of social interactions (ma`mulat) and Islamic etiquette (adab)—covering business, commerce, marriage, relations with non-Muslims, travel, how to eat, how to dress, greetings, and one's rights and obligations towards others. He ends the text with a brief overview of Sufism and Sufi ethics (akhlaq).

Ironically, in one of the very texts in which he enumerates Islamic beliefs, Thanvi laments that contemporary Muslims have reduced Islam to a rote list of beliefs, failing to understand that Islam is a comprehensive system incorporating every aspect of one's daily life. Thanvi begins Ta`lim al-Din with the sarcastic observation that, ‘In this age, most think that Islam is limited to prayer, fasting, and a few beliefs about what will happen on the day of judgment, and about beautiful maidens in paradise and snakes and scorpions in hell.’ Thus the ‘outcome for the masses is that they only believe it necessary to consult the `ulama on prayer and fasting, but in social matters and ways of life, they follow their own path’.Footnote ⁷³ He concludes, ‘When I saw this state of affairs had become universal and this harm had permeated all manner of people, sympathy for fellow Muslims compelled me to reform these errors and write this short treatise…so that it can benefit all Muslims.’Footnote ⁷⁴ However, the rhetoric of addressing ‘all Muslims’ should not distract from Thanvi's ultimate aim, that of reasserting his reformist project.

Like Thanvi, Manzur Nu`mani conceives of his audience as one of ‘ordinary’ literate Muslims who need to rejuvenate their faith. And he likewise begins Islam kya hai by imagining that if the Prophet Muhammad could return today and see the ‘extreme ignorance and depravity’ of contemporary Muslims, he would once again entreat each Muslim to revive his or her faith, and then to do the religious ‘work’ (kam) of calling on others to revive their faith. Nu`mani thereby located readers within broader publics of the reform-minded, addressing his readers directly: ‘If you concur, in your heart, with what I have said, then resolve that, at this very moment and throughout the future, you will make this work part of your life.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Mobilizing readers to participate in the work of reform is part and parcel of the primers. It is worth adding that this aspect of the texts is most salient in Nu`mani, and accords with his role in the Tablighi Jama`at, in whose literature the language of ‘religious work’ (dini kam) is prominent.

The Deobandi critique of popular devotional piety is also thoroughly embedded in these texts. In fact, the primers are so replete with these critiques that I can only hint at a few of the main themes. For example, all of the primers explicitly reject key aspects of Sufi devotional reverence for the saints and subvert conventional structures of saintly religious authority. Thanvi provides a serial list of ‘heretical innovations (bid`a), bad customs and bad deeds’, listing the myriad dangers of visiting Sufi saints’ graves foremost among them:

Kifayatullah puts forth his own enumeration of heretical innovations, likewise overwhelmingly concerned with the grave as a site of myriad spiritual dangers. In a sense, Kifayatullah repackages Deobandi opposition to local Indian Sufi practices as essential to Islam as a whole:

Besides critiquing customary practices, the primers offer a sober, constrained view of Sufi sainthood, implicitly diminishing the authority of Sufi saints’ shrines and their custodians at the same time that they expand the very parameters of sainthood to include any pious believer. In the Bihishti Zewar, Thanvi writes,

Thanvi then cautions,

Similarly, Kifayatullah submits that quite literally anyone can be a saint, provided that he or she simply learns the very rudiments of Islamic knowledge that his primer sets out, and integrates them fully into his or her life. On the subject of sainthood, Kifayatullah asks ‘Who is a saint (wali)?’ and answers that a saint is ‘A Muslim who obeys the commands of Allah and his messenger, prays abundantly and refrains from sins, and loves Allah and his messenger more than everything in the world.’ Asking what characterizes saints, he responds: ‘The mark of a saint is that one is a God-fearing (muttaqi) and abstemious (parhezgar) Muslim, prays abundantly, loves Allah and his Messenger immensely, has no envy for the things of this world and keeps the next world constantly in mind.’Footnote ⁸⁰ In Islam kya hai, similarly, Nu`mani invokes and subtly alters the Sufi language of ‘the perfect man’ (al-insan al-kamil), offering the notion of a ‘perfect believer’ (mu`min kamil) in its stead.Footnote ⁸¹ Insofar as these texts invite ‘average’ Muslim readers to join the exalted status of ‘saints’, they undercut traditional hierarchies of Sufi authority and intercession, which Deobandi scholars actively sought to flatten.Footnote ⁸²

Imagined readers: publics in and beyond South Asia

One of the most striking characteristics of the primers, taken as a whole, is the way they become progressively shorter and their content more ‘essentialized’ over time. In the earliest primers—Bihishti Zewar and Ta`lim al-Islam—there is an overwhelming concern with traditional cultural etiquette (adab) which gradually disappears in the later primers. The emphasis on traditional adab, which comprises the bulk of Thanvi's Bihishti Zewar, has all but completely disappeared by the time we arrive at Nu`mani's primer, published in mid-century.Footnote ⁸³ Nearly a third of Kifayatullah's Ta`lim al-Islam is concerned with details of purity and general cleanliness that were particular to South Asian Muslims’ daily lives. Bihishti Zewar, Hayat al-Muslimin, Ta`lim al-Din, and Ta`lim al-Islam are all concerned with minutiae that, at first glance, seem incongruous in a primer on ‘Islam’, devoting entire lessons, for example, to the process of cleaning a well into which a dead animal has fallen,Footnote ⁸⁴ or how to apply dye to one's hair,Footnote ⁸⁵ or the etiquette of sneezing, laughing, and yawning in public.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet, perhaps the very fact that these concerns now seem somehow out of place in a primer on ‘Islam’ is itself the outcome of an essentializing process that was only in its incipient stages when Thanvi and Kifayatullah wrote these texts.

Indeed, as the audience for these primers expanded, this sort of content tends to diminish. Perhaps we can most readily glimpse the contours of this essentializing process by noting one final primer, a far more recent one: Hakim Muhammad Akhtar's (d. 2013) Ek Minit ka Madrasa. Muhammad Akhtar was a Sufi pupil of Ashraf `Ali Thanvi and presided over a Sufi khanqah, Khanqah Imdadia Ashrafia, in Karachi. The title of his primer—One Minute Madrasa—is really a misnomer; the book does not purport to give anything resembling an actual madrasa education, but it does purport to give, like the earlier primers, the ‘most essential aspects’ of an Islamic education.Footnote <sup>87</sup> Published in 1991, Ek Minit ka Madrasa is explicitly designed to be a sort of vade mecum for reform-minded Muslims. The cover of the book indicates that it is a ‘special gift for those who have a little free time (fursat)’, and one may imagine Muhammad Akhtar is targeting busy middle-class professionals. He explicitly asks his audience to study one of the lessons after fajr or `asr prayers, so that ‘one can become informed on the most essential matters of religion (din)’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Starkly minimalist in content, each lesson offers just five things: (1) a few words of the Muslim profession of faith in Arabic with their transliteration and translation into Urdu, (2) a tip on how to perform Islamic ritual prayer (salat) according to the Prophet's example, (3) an exposition of a particular ‘sin’, (4) the harmful effects of that sin, and (5) the benefits of following the Prophet's example in moral conduct. In Ek Minit ka Madrasa, each of the 105 lessons has dispensed with nearly all subjects present in the previous primers save for the proper performance of salat and its ethical implications. Muhammad Akhtar is indeed addressing a quite different audience; it is worth noting that his book is free to download on his popular Internet website.Footnote ⁸⁹ His work has a truly global reach and is read by his followers in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. One may surmise that, as the text's implied audience extends far beyond the confines of South Asia, the South Asian inflections of the other primers are no longer as relevant to most readers. And as these local inflections diminish, a far more truncated and objectified ‘Islam’ emerges in their place.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is an Islam presented as a sealed, discretely bounded entity comprising its most ‘essential’ doctrines and ritual performances, one that has its roots in Thanvi's and Kifayatullah's work, becomes more explicit in Nu`mani’s, and is thoroughly essentialized in Muhammad Akhtar’s.

If, taken as a whole, we can then discern a progressively ‘minimalist’ approach to educating Muslims in these primers, one that gradually streamlines that education and dispenses with increasingly ‘extraneous’ details, we ought to ask if there are other sites where a correspondingly ‘maximalist’ approach continues to thrive. One possible example is that of the numerous and widely consulted compendia of juridical opinions (fatawa, singular fatwa), which can commonly run into thousands of pages and incorporate individual judgements across the widest spectrum of Islamic belief and practise.Footnote ⁹¹Fatwas became a means for individual Muslims, or in some cases, other `ulama, to elicit explanations and clarifications of complicated issues (masa’il) and, in a sense, these collected volumes complement the primers. We have seen here how the `ulama discouraged independent religious speculation by their readers and repeatedly urged readers to consult the `ulama, and the fatwa collections became one reliable means for doing precisely that. It is partly because these primers are rudimentary that their authors are especially anxious to obviate independent speculation about the rules and regulations therein.