In the summer of 1922, a scrupulous Muslim cleric visiting Bombay, Maulvi Shafīq al-Raḥmān, made a sweeping ruling against the use of alcohol. The imperial city's residents had not asked him to rule on intoxicating beverages, since they knew these were strictly forbidden. But they had doubts about the permissibility of certain paints, perfumes, and drugs.Footnote 1 Could Muslims lawfully paint their mosques with solutions that contained a spirit such as methanol? If these paints were banned, would mosques not appear drab and contemptible beside the brightly painted temples of other religions? And what of other uses of alcohol? Was it fine to heed a non-Muslim doctor who prescribed a wine therapy? Or to apply perfume that contained the “impure and forbidden” substance? Shafīq al-Raḥmān answered each question in the most restrictive manner imaginable.
Agitated by his responses, advisory instruments known as fatwas, one Bombay Muslim decided to get a second opinion. He submitted an Arabic translation of the original texts, still lost or undiscovered but likely penned in Urdu, to a famous Islamic authority, the Syrian-Egyptian reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935). Referring to the turmoil in his community, the fatwa seeker asked Riḍā to clarify matters on the basis of “legal proofs” in “the shortest time.” Riḍā, who lived in Cairo, was the publisher and editor of al-Manār (“The Lighthouse”), a magazine that circulated globally, reaching Arabic readers as far as Brazil and China.Footnote 2 He was relatively well known in India under the British Raj, especially within circles of intellectuals committed to Islam's political resurgence. He visited a progressive Islamic university in Lucknow in 1912 and corresponded with fatwa seekers from Malabar, Bengal, and Punjab. Readers of his journal in South Asia had more than an inkling of his perspective on things.Footnote 3 Throughout his career, he preached the message that Islam's sacred law allowed Muslims to enjoy the goods of modernity. Chemical, industrial, and medical innovations excited him. He associated them with power and progress, and he wanted Muslims to embrace them, not to suspect them because they happened to originate in Europe.Footnote 4 These convictions moved him to shine a more favorable light on alcoholic products than did the Bombay mufti. He hurried to respond with a series of counter-fatwas, which he published in al-Manār in the winter of 1922.
This article is a comparative study of the fatwas for and against alcoholic products. Despite Riḍā's renown and historians’ interest in his polemical defenses of revivalist ideals and reformist methods, these fatwas have received little scholarly attention.Footnote 5 They deserve close comparative study, however. Whereas Shafīq al-Raḥmān belonged to the Ḥanafī rite and interpretive community, or madhhab, Riḍā, as a Salafist, refused to adhere loyally to the teachings of just one of the traditional Sunni schools of law. But the conflict between them cannot be reduced to tensions between Salafism and Ḥanafism, for no legal tradition supported Riḍā's perspective on alcohol as much as did the Ḥanafī tradition. This article contends that politics drove them apart. Differing anti-colonial nationalist strategies fueled the battle of fatwas. The muftis who engaged in this battle lived in cities that had much in common. Both Cairo and Bombay were populous, international cities under British dominance. In each of them in 1922, alliances of Muslim and non-Muslim activists advocated boycotts of British goods.Footnote 6 Like other experts on the sharīʿa in these cities, Riḍā and Shafīq supported self-determination movements, but they could not establish a unified religious and legal front. This article will explain why.
How to think of Islamic nationalism has been a critical question for historians. In an Egyptian context, a key point of debate has been the contention that a “supra-Egyptian Islamic nationalism” associated with the Muslim Brotherhood displaced, around 1930, the secular, territorial imaginings of the nation that had predominated in the 1920s, when liberal Muslim and Coptic intellectuals had embraced a common pharaonic heritage.Footnote 7 In a South Asian context, historians have stressed the extent to which nationalist Muslims supported the broader struggle for Indian independence despite the appeal of Islamic universalism, the establishment of separate electorates, the politics of partition, and the eventual foundation of a Muslim nation-state in the subcontinent.Footnote 8
Implicitly or explicitly, scholarship on religious nationalism has always had a comparative dimension. Scholars have defined the term in opposition to secular nationalism. They have also compared different religious groups’ nationalistic and anti-nationalistic leanings. The general tendency has been to discuss the relationship between religion and nationalism as a tense and ambivalent one, with an emphasis placed on incongruities between religious nationalism and territorial or ethnic nationalism.Footnote 9 In Transnational Muslim Politics, Peter Mandaville argued that anti-colonial pan-Islamic reformers “identified the nation-state with Europe” and hence tried to imagine an alternative polity that would transcend regional borders and somehow or other unify Muslims worldwide.Footnote 10 Similarly, Olivier Roy, an expert on global Islamic movements, contended that “Islamist ideology,” with its universal political aspirations, “is very opposed to nationalism” and “rejects the nation-state.”Footnote 11 It is nevertheless clear that at the end of the imperial era Islamic thinkers and activists in Egypt, India, and other colonies found ways and reasons to reconcile pan-Islamic ideals with ethnic or territorial nationalist politics, if only for a while.Footnote 12
Half a century ago, historians tended to see the rise of nationalism in “the Muslim world” from an evolutionary Eurocentric perspective. They represented pan-Islamism as a sort of “proto-nationalism” characterized by defiant, anti-colonial appeals to holy war.Footnote 13 More recently, historians have described pan-Islamism as an alternative to nationalism. The argument, presented by Cemil Aydin in The Idea of the Muslim World, is that this ideology or movement was never more appealing than in the years between the end of World War I and the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. These were years marked by colonized Muslim “disillusionment with grand promises of liberation” made by the Wilsonian politics of self-determination and by communist internationalism.Footnote 14
Because he was an influential defender of the anti-colonial ideal of pan-Islamic unity, Riḍā has featured prominently in studies on Islam and nationalism. Historians have examined many aspects of his religious thought and political activities.Footnote 15 Stressing his efforts to restore the caliphate to its former glory and promote Arabic as the language of Islam, Mahmoud Haddad emphasized Riḍā's significant contribution to the articulation of “Arab religious nationalism.”Footnote 16 Amal Ghazal analyzed the role that Riḍā played, as al-Manār's editor, to transcend some regional and sectarian divides and forge, in the hearts and minds of a far-flung network of Arab readers, an expansive sense of belonging to an imagined Islamic community, the umma.Footnote 17 Others have explained how and why, despite his commitment to Islamic law and Arab unity, Riḍā made fundamental contributions to the development of Syrian nationalism.Footnote 18
All of this interest in pan-Islamic and pan-Arab nationalism and in transnational or global Muslim interconnections has resulted, perhaps inevitably, in the amplification of Muslim reformers’ rhetoric of unity and an exaggerated appreciation of the political significance of their transregional networks. It is true that Riḍā cultivated connections with many like-minded reformers worldwide, including the correspondent from Bombay who asked him for a second opinion. But these reformers rarely represented the dominant cultural, religious, and political trends in their own cities and countries. On the contrary, they were often at odds with other social groups. They turned to Riḍā for fatwas because they wanted an external ally's support.Footnote 19 In defense of reformist projects, Riḍā obliged them, and his tendency was to do so in quite a combative style. Approaching Islamic reform with a pugnacious spirit, he frequently attacked rivals’ legal interpretations. Although he preached Muslim unity and supported rapprochement, his intolerance of superstition and heterodoxy as well as his hostility to popular Sufism, charismatic Shiʿism, and Sunni traditionalism could only deepen communal divisions.Footnote 20
Moreover, the sharīʿa did not work effectively as a unifying platform for anti-imperial resistance. Constructions of Islam's sacred law in Egypt, India and other colonies under British imperialism may be productively compared due to the flow of institutional models and legal ideals across the empire.Footnote 21 But jurisprudential efforts to translate this law into actionable rules never converged; they engendered debates and manifested divergences. During the interwar period, clear differences arose between nationalist cultures that invoked “Islamic law” (variously defined) to mobilize Muslims to join regional struggles for independence.Footnote 22 This article illustrates and analyzes such differences by comparing and contrasting the Bombay and Cairo fatwas. Some historical contextualization and interpretation will be needed, however, to defend my reading of the legal texts. The fatwas concentrated directly on technical juridical issues that stemmed from Islamic purity laws; they related to nationalist aspirations in a rather oblique or cryptic way.
THE BOMBAY FATWA'S WARNING AGAINST ALCOHOLIC POLLUTION AND COLONIAL MEDICINE
Why did alcoholic products trouble Bombay's Muslims? Only in small part because of sacred prohibitions and legal precedents. The Qurʾān described wine as more sinful than beneficial (2:219) and as an “abomination that stemmed from Satan's work.” It urged believers who wanted to prosper to avoid idols, divining arrows, and wine (5:90). The oral tradition incorporated multiple pronouncements—some relatively permissive, others rather restrictive—concerning alcoholic drinks.Footnote 23 Some ambiguity existed about the prohibition's scope, however. Early Islamic jurists, noticing that the critical Qurʾānic texts referred specifically to fermented grape juice (khamr), debated the legality of drinking a moderate amount of alcohol made from sources such as fermented dates and malted barley. Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 767) as well as many other jurists who followed in his footsteps argued against banning strictly these alternative drinks. They generally agreed with prohibitionists, however, in considering drunkenness an intolerable, punishable offense.Footnote 24
Yet the 1922 debate was not specifically about drinking wine or beer; it was about diverse uses of alcohol. In Shafīq's eyes, all alcoholic products were not only forbidden, but also intrinsically impure (najis) and therefore ritually defiling. With few exceptions, Muslim jurists before him had treated khamr, a kind of wine, as a dirty, polluting substance. They had associated it with pigs, excrement, semen, blood, and carrion, and had warned believers who would come into contact with any of these things to wash their skin or clothes before worshipping God.Footnote 25 Building on this juridical tradition, Shafīq claimed that a consensus existed among the founders of the four Sunni schools of law regarding the status of khamr as a “gross impurity” that was definitely tabooed, ḥarām, even in the smallest quantity. This claim would be banal and uncontroversial had he accepted the classical definition of khamr as referring to wine made of grapes. But he defined it as “alcohol” in the broadest sense to refer to a wide range of drinkable beverages and denatured liquids. On this basis, he argued that everything that contained alcohol, whether it was intended for human consumption or not, presented a threat to the Muslim quest for ritual purity.
Shafīq chose not to mention an early Islamic debate over the ritual utility of nabīdh al-tamr, a potentially intoxicating beverage made by steeping dates in water. According to a set of oral traditions attributed to ʿAbdallāh ibn Masʿūd (d. ca. 652), Muḥammad the Prophet performed an ablution with a mixture of “pure” water and “good” dates on the night that he recited verses from the Qurʾān to the jinn. Some early Muslim experts on the transmission of Muḥammad's acts and sayings disputed the authenticity of these traditions.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, these traditions formed part and parcel of a broader juridical debate. A few prominent early Islamic authorities, including Abū Ḥanīfa, ʿIkrima al-Barbarī (d. 723), and Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 778), reportedly held that, if water was unavailable, then it was permissible for Muslims to use date wine as an alternative substance for the minor rite of purification (wuḍūʾ) required before prayer.Footnote 27 Most jurists, including some members of Abū Ḥanīfa's law school, rejected and denounced this ruling.Footnote 28 Regardless, the ruling demonstrates that a few foundational Sunni thinkers refused to see each and every type of alcoholic beverage as a source of ritual pollution. They made an exception for date wine. The author of the Bombay fatwa was surely familiar with this ruling, since he belonged to Abū Ḥanīfa's law school. He neglected to bring it up for a strategic reason—to extend the taboo on khamr.
The principal and extraordinary target of Shafīq's fatwa was a “spirit” (isbīrtū) used by the paint industry. The reference was apparently to a liquid, made by the destructive distillation of wood, that was more toxic than ethanol and never marketed as a safe alcoholic beverage. Nevertheless, Shafīq insisted that there was no reason to distinguish the impure, defiling liquid from the wine that God proscribed, since it could also make one “extremely drunk.” Hence, Muslims needed to take measures to protect themselves from contamination by it. Shafīq specifically ruled that painting mosques’ walls with alcoholic paint was impermissible. Against those who argued that alcohol was necessary to realize this aim, he contended that alternatives existed and that mosques, in any case, had no need of fancy, glossy paints. True pride will not come from outshining the temples of other religions through the “ornamentation of mosques.” The prophet found such ostentation repellent. “True pride will come,” instead, “from our being sincere believers, from our praying five times a day, and from our congregating [at the mosque] in humility.”Footnote 29
Bombay's sacred architecture served as the backdrop to the discussion of aesthetic competition between places of worship. Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, Zoroastrian, Jain, and Muslim temples were clearly visible in the cityscape. Several religious buildings (Babulnath Hindu Temple, Jāmiʿ Mosque, Mount Mary's Church, and St. Thomas’ Cathedral) were truly spectacular, and they competed with one another for the attention of the city's dwellers. There were, in addition, many mosques that served different ethnicities and persuasions. Partly for these reasons, Nile Green's Bombay Islam described the city as a “competitive religious marketplace.”Footnote 30 In this environment, where sacred landmarks represented each community's status, a ruling against painting mosques in stunning colors was a matter of concern. Perhaps this was the reason for the dismay that triggered the search for a counter-fatwa.
Shafīq's opposition to medical uses of alcohol was sharp, too, but not categorical. Medicine containing alcohol “is never permitted, because it is tabooed and polluting, except when the ill person has reached the edge of despair, when no medicine is available for him other than alcohol, and when a skilled Muslim doctor has given his opinion that it would be beneficial.” Critical here was the qualification about the doctor's religion. Only a Muslim doctor, in this view, could adequately weigh religious restrictions against health benefits. All the same, Shafīq cited canonical traditions that called the wisdom of alcoholic therapies into question, including the prophet Muḥammad's saying that wine was a malady, not a remedy.Footnote 31
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And yet, more than ancient prohibitions, what provoked consternation about alcohol in 1922 Bombay were modern developments: technological breakthroughs in chemical production, Britain's industrial dominance, and a rise in Hindu and Muslim political resistance to colonial rule and “Western” medicine. In the nineteenth century, an industry emerged devoted to the production of alcohols following Louis Pasteur's investigation of fermentation and Aeneas Coffey's invention of a distilling machine. Specialized machines were devised for mashing barley, beets, potatoes, sugar cane, wood, and other raw materials from which industrial alcohol was distilled. Alcohols fueled engines. They also served as antiseptics for surgical operations and as solvents for the extraction of herbal drugs.Footnote 32
The modern paint industry relied on alcohol because of its capacity to dissolve resins and dyes, thus forming uniformly dispersed mixtures. Alcohols acted as solvents in varnishes and lacquers; mineral spirits made an inexpensive paint thinner. By the early twentieth century, alcohol-based primers, glossy finishes, and chemical dyes came into wide use. They served for decoration and protection, preserving engines from corrosion, and they symbolized scientific progress.Footnote 33 A Bombay store, K. H. Kabbur, proudly advertised its consignment of chemical colors, ranging from Indanthrine blue and yellow to Algol red, blue, and pink, boasting that the same chemical dyes were available in London, Alexandria, Paris, and Milan.Footnote 34 The colors of synthetic modernity had reached Bombay, too.
New alcohol-based medicines similarly spread from Europe to the colonies, and they also became flashpoints of controversy. In the mid-nineteenth century, British and French doctors began prescribing multiple, often radically new wine therapies and alcoholic treatments. Medical literature indicated glycerin to combat hospital gangrene; camphorated alcohol to prevent infections; injections of red wine to fight gonorrhea; wine enemas for typhus and tuberculosis. An editorial in the Lancet, a medical journal, mocked “the extensive spread of a belief that alcohol in some form or other is the panacea.” Yet, “There are few things more remarkable in the recent history of medicine,” it conceded, “than the extent to which alcohol has been introduced, and the importance which has been attached to it in the treatment of disease.”Footnote 35 In 1921, an Anglo-Indian newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle, ran an advertisement for a “world-famed” blood-purifier. It portrayed an English lady, Mrs. Whelan, proclaiming, “Told I was Incurable.” Clarke's Blood Mixture, made in Lincoln, England, cured her ailment. This medicine consisted of an infusion of gentian with ammonium carbonate, potassium iodide, and spirit of chloroform, an alcoholic dilution. It “thoroughly cleansed” the blood “of the impure waste matter,” leading to the recovery of sufferers of “bad legs, abscesses, ulcers, glandular swellings, piles, eczema, boils, pimples, eruptions, rheumatism, gout.”Footnote 36 Western doctors suspected quackery, but an obsession with hygiene and sanitation in the tropics led them to embrace alcoholic disinfectants fervently.
A “general atmosphere of suspicion, doubt, and resistance” haunted “Western medicine in India,” as David Arnold showed in Colonizing the Body.Footnote 37 Muslim nationalists did not reject all modern medical techniques, but they devoted themselves to the revival of Greco-Islamic medical traditions as part of a broader movement for self-determination. Gandhi's ally Hakim Ajmal Khan was especially successful in his efforts to gain support for systematically reforming ancient and indigenous medical systems. The goal was to encourage, with pride, the development of alternatives to colonial medicine.Footnote 38
Supporters of the Bombay fatwa were evidently aligned with this program. One of its endorsers referred to a medical book, Dr. Ghulām Jīlāni's Makhzan al-ḥikmat: (yā) Ghar kā ḍākṭar va ḥakīm; The Repository of Wisdom, or The Family Doctor and Physician, which contained a breakdown of the alcohol content of various kinds of drinks. He described the book as an Urdu translation of an English text, although it was actually an “adaptation” of a number of foreign works: an “encyclopedia of domestic medicine and surgery,” according to the cover's description, written for “Urdu-knowing medical men.”Footnote 39 Regardless, he cited Jīlāni's book to argue that India's “famous doctors” had classified beer (bīr), wine (wāyn), and liquor (sbirīt) as three kinds of khamr. Thus, he defined the Arabic term khamr to mean any alcoholic drink, not just grape wine, and then extended the Qurʾānic ban on khamr to all liquids containing alcohol, including drugs and poisons. Spirits had been introduced into “many of the European medicines,” he clarified, and this meant that the medicines were an “abomination from the work of Satan” (Qurʾān 5:90).Footnote 40
THE FATWA'S ANTI-COLONIAL CONTEXT: THE INDIAN MOVEMENT FOR NATIONAL PURIFICATION
Anti-colonial politics were arguably the most powerful motivating force behind the Bombay fatwa. Ancient prohibitions against handling wine do not really explain why denatured alcohol became an object of controversy in 1922 Bombay. They merely offered rhetorical flourishes and conceptual categories employed in the modern discourse on material impurity. Human dissection, plague control measures, and other aspects of colonial medicine contributed to suspicion and resentment of European medicines and non-Muslim doctors. But they do not explain the fact that the fatwa also targeted paint and perfume. Why did its author oppose not one but several classes of alcoholic products? For nationalistic reasons, it seems, because the fatwa granted religious legitimacy to a boycotting movement that targeted the British Empire's material interests.
Certainly, the fatwa tried to rally Muslim subjects to fight against alcohol, and it appealed to several movers and shakers in Bombay. Little is known about its author, Muḥammad Shafīq al-Raḥmān, besides his self-identification as a member of the Ḥanafī school of law who resided in the city as a stranger (nazīl).Footnote 41 Even so, multiple Bombay authorities endorsed his fatwa. Official preachers and prayer leaders at several of the city's oldest and most established mosques—the Jāmiʿ, Ismāʿīl Ḥabīb, Zakariyya, and Mināra mosques—signed it. Teachers from two local madrasas, Hāshimiyya and Muḥammadiyya, also supported it, as did the director of a Muslim orphanage. Some of these institutions served Kutchi Memons, who adhered to the Ḥanafī rite. Others served Konkani Muslims, who followed the Shāfiʿite rite. Public endorsements of fatwas were uncommon at the time, so why did leading members of these communities and institutions band together to promote this one? They did so because they wanted to drum up support for it and thus fulfill a common goal that was tied, as we shall see, to the broader struggle for self-determination.
By the early twenties, the British Crown's Indian subjects had grown extremely self-conscious about the consumption of imperial goods. At this time, Bombay was awash in foreign products. The Bombay Chronicle published advertisements for Rose's Lime Cordial, English Valour Hats, and Byla's “French Remedy” for consumption. The advertisement for Asahi Beer, a Japanese lager, showed a middle-aged gentleman wearing glasses and a coat and looking very much like a British doctor enjoying a drink. An English perfumery, Grossmith & Son, advertised “Shem-el-Nessim, Scent of Araby.” Banking on the appeal of English goods, Bears’ Honeydew Cigarettes featured London's Tower Bridge in its advertisement.Footnote 42 Bombay's Hindus and Muslims responded to these foreign products in varied ways, but they were acutely aware of the nationalist argument that the decision to buy or not to buy imperial commodities had political implications. Gandhi and his allies had called for boycotts as part of the campaign of non-violent resistance. To reject British goods meant to defy British rule. Abstention signified independence.
Although it can be linked in a specific and convincing way to this nationalist movement, the fatwa in its published form does not refer explicitly to the boycott of British goods or the non-cooperation movement. How can these omissions be explained? A likely reason was censorship, or rather self-censorship. In Censors at Work, Robert Darnton showed that, due to its liberal pretensions, the British Empire censored the press in India relatively lightly.Footnote 43 But Lokmanya Tilak, an Indian nationalist who published articles that encouraged picketing in front of liquor shops as a way to fight against the British government's economic interests, was arrested and charged with sedition.Footnote 44 Moreover, the colonial regime seized and in effect banned tracts, posters, and leaflets that urged Indians to “Boycott British Goods.” Among other things, it targeted fatwas that called on Muslims to join the non-cooperation movement.Footnote 45 Newspapers had the freedom to publish advertisements beseeching readers to burn “foreign” cloth, but they could not print with impunity anti-British propaganda. Prudence demanded obliqueness. Perhaps for this reason, one of the fatwa's supporters made no more than a veiled critique of colonial medicine by referring to devilish European cures rather than specifically English cures.Footnote 46
The fatwa's author could have freely edited out anti-British remarks to elude British censors without departing much from field-specific practices, for legal thinkers omitted circumstantial details when they strove to articulate broadly applicable rulings.Footnote 47 As Brinkley Messick has observed: “In the spectrum of sharīʿa discourse,” the fatwa has “hovered on the border” between the universal abstractions of doctrinal treatises and the local contingencies of court cases.Footnote 48 Stripped of explicit references to the British Empire, the fatwa would have sounded all the more authoritative, ostensibly transcending temporal conditions without losing its political force in the moment if the audience knew the context and grasped the subtext. Alternatively, either the translator of the Bombay fatwa or Riḍā himself might have expunged from the text subversive words. In his prefatory remarks, Riḍā disclosed that the Arabic edition included only an “abridgement” (talkhīṣ) of the questions originally submitted to the Bombay mufti.Footnote 49
To buttress the argument that Indo-Muslim resistance to British rule fueled the fatwa, it is necessary to delve further into the historical context. The critical fact to bear in mind is that Shafīq issued his fatwa during a period of intense political agitation that included an anti-imperial temperance campaign.Footnote 50 This agitation was powerfully felt in Bombay, which hosted several conferences on non-cooperation where Muslims and Hindus discussed the boycott as a political strategy. In this hub of colonial trade, nationalists found this strategy especially appealing, and the movement against foreign consumption had greater effect there than perhaps anywhere else in India.Footnote 51
For a few years after World War I, Muslim and Hindu leaders established an effective though fragile alliance to work together for independence.Footnote 52 As representatives of a minority, Muslim nationalists worried that Hindu dominance might mean their “political extinction.”Footnote 53 Their political consciousness differed from that of Hindus in another respect, too: Indian Muslims had an affective tie to millions of coreligionists abroad and were deeply invested, as Ayesha Jalal has shown, in the interwar struggle to sustain the caliphate.Footnote 54
Indeed, they established the Khilafat movement to advocate for the preservation of this symbol of Islamic sovereignty. Allied plans to partition the Ottoman Empire, combined with the Turkish war of independence, stirred Muslim public opinion. Sir Theodore Morison, a British educator, put it best when he wrote that, in India, “The whole of the Muslim community from Peshawar to Argot is seething with passion on this subject. Women inside the zenanes are weeping over it. Merchants who usually take no interest in public affairs are leaving their shops…. [E]ven the medieval theologians of Deoband and Nadwatu'l-ulema, whose detachment from the modern world is proverbial, are coming from their cloisters to protest against the destruction of Islam. For Muslims, this one preoccupation has swallowed up all others; they can think and talk of nothing else.”Footnote 55
Particularly embroiled in the pan-Islamic movement were Bombay Muslims. As a port city, Bombay acted as the launching site for a highly publicized Khilafist embassy to Europe, and Ottoman ambassadors landed there, with much fanfare, to promote their cause.Footnote 56 This was not solely a Muslim cause, however. Gandhi himself urged: “All Muslims should fast and pray and suspend all their business and close their shops… and hold monster meetings and pass resolutions of protest against the contemplated betrayal of Turkey.”Footnote 57 Khilafists used various techniques, as Gandhi suggested, to persuade the British government to preserve the caliphate. But it is especially significant for our purposes that many of them focused on “the crusade against alcohol and boycott of foreign cloth.”Footnote 58
Indeed, since boycotting every British thing was impossible, activists decided to target mainly cloth and alcohol. In a breathless article published in the Bombay Chronicle in October 1921, a reporter described a bonfire that Gandhi and others lit up at Elphinstone Mills, in Bombay: “All sorts of foreign clothes of foreign make were there,” thrown “in a heap … [and] soaked in kerosene and mixed with crackers.” The bonfire “was extremely impressive: the vast audiences, the burning clothes, and the passionate speakers, under God's sky in the growing night.”Footnote 59 The “crusade against drink” also generated headlines. A July 1921 article reported that Gandhi appealed to “the liquor merchants to give up the trade which was ruining the people of India and sapping their growth.” Liquor shop owners, nearly all of them Parsis, resented aggressive picketers and worried about the impact of the actions on their business. One shopkeeper claimed that, as a result of boycotters picketing bars, regular customers had “taken to drink methylated spirits” at home.Footnote 60 In November of the same year, an unruly crowd in Bombay set a liquor shop on fire, molested Parsi women, and harassed citizens wearing European clothes. Rioters killed two Parsis, two Europeans, and one American, and injured many others, especially Parsis. As a proponent of non-violence, Gandhi felt deeply contrite. He suspended the campaign for civil disobedience and fasted in penance.Footnote 61
The Bombay Chronicle printed many advertisements in support of the temperance campaign, the boycotting of cloth, and swadeshi enterprises, which sold “Made in India” products. One announcement called upon “Energetic and public spirited Young Men and Ladies” to picket liquor shops. Another asked Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, and Jews to discard their foreign clothes, either “for destruction” or for donation abroad. Besides advertisements for British goods, this newspaper published advertisements for alternative Indian goods. Thus, it promoted Godrej's “Toilet Soaps” as “perfectly pure and free from animal fats.” Made in a Bombay factory with “Indian Capital” under “Indian Management,” these soaps would last “much longer than imported soaps.”Footnote 62 The Bombay Swadeshi Co-op paid for very large advertisements that highlighted the value of “Indian goods, Indian capital and Indian labour.” The co-operative's name came from Gandhi's call for economic self-sufficiency, swadeshi, a critical step in the trajectory that he envisioned toward political independence. Business was good. Just days after the publication of Shafīq's fatwa, the Bombay Swadeshi Co-op announced the opening of a new branch, on Carnac Road.Footnote 63
As swadeshi advocates brought to light India's dependence on imported paint and varnishes, colonial officials grew embarrassed and defensive. Domestic alternatives existed. Before World War I, a major trading firm that stocked British paints, Shaw, Wallace & Company, also sold in its Bombay branch a product made in a Calcutta factory, Shalimar paints.Footnote 64 What could be done, development advocates asked, to encourage and protect the fledgling Indian industry? Testifying before the Industrial Commission, Sir Frederick Nicholson, Director of Fisheries in Madras, claimed that “indigenous” paints had “miserable” covering power and that it was “almost a waste of money to use them, especially for outside work in our sun.” Even so, he considered it a shame that India was spending millions of rupees on the imported commodity, and asserted that one or two English experts could “easily set” the colonial paint industry “on its legs.”Footnote 65 An industrial inspector explained that, to manufacture high-quality colored-paints domestically, India would need wood-spirit factories. Meanwhile, a financier involved with Bombay's Swadeshi Stores wanted the government to establish “demonstration factories” to show locals how to make paint and varnishes.Footnote 66
But targeting alcohol in general made sense to Indian nationalists for several strategic reasons. It helped, first of all, to recruit into the resistance movement Hindu and Muslim moralists who resented intemperance in their midst. Religious prohibitions mattered in this respect. Alcohol was forbidden not only to Muslims but also to two of the three highest Hindu castes, the Brahmin and Bania castes.Footnote 67 In the late nineteenth century, two Hindu reform movements, Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, had preached against alcohol. Some Muslim reformers then joined Hindu reformers and Christian missionaries to form ecumenical temperance societies.Footnote 68 This made prohibition all the more appealing after the war, when Indian nationalists actively searched for religious inspiration and common ground. Like the Bombay fatwa's author and signatories, these nationalists tied abstention to purification.
Second, prohibition was attractive as a martial discipline. Like the British legislators, who had taken measures during the world war to restrict drinking in pubs, boycotters perceived temperance as a patriotic measure of social control.Footnote 69 Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das was arrested for seditious propaganda shortly after he published an article in 1921 where he declared: “The Prohibition movement is known in India as the National Purification movement and is designed to make the people more capable of carrying on their struggle for independence.”Footnote 70
Third, the consumption of alcohol in India symbolized, as well as the dissipation of the colonized, the privileges of the colonizer. Before World War I, Germany led the world in the manufacturing of synthetic dyes. The war spurred Britain to invest in this field and develop British alternatives. The government requisitioned distilleries, sponsored a new company named British Dyes, and extended the “full spirit duty” to diverse products made with industrial alcohol, including varnishes and lacquers.Footnote 71
Like the excise taxes waged on domestic alcohol, tariffs imposed on imported alcohol were a significant source of revenue for the colonial government. In some provinces, these tariffs and taxes amounted to the second largest source of income.Footnote 72 Enterprises “started and run by Indians” that made “spirituous products,” such as the Alembic Chemical Works Company, resented the fiscal burden. “Spirit for use in industrial services should be free of duty,” argued Mr. Amin, the company's director. He wanted the government to encourage the “indigenous” industry with the same concessions and rebates granted to manufacturers based in the United Kingdom. He asked to be placed on “equal footing with British distillers.”Footnote 73 Gandhi, who recognized how much revenue the colonial government earned from alcohol, claimed that the British promoted drinking in the country for their own financial profit.Footnote 74 Abstaining from alcohol therefore seemed like an effective way to oppose Britain's material interests.
Upon consideration of this historical context, the argument that the Bombay fatwa aimed to persuade Muslims to boycott all things alcoholic for religious and nationalist reasons seems plausible. Evidence that Muslim clerics resorted to fatwas to support the Indian nationalist movement would make the argument even stronger. In fact, they did just that. In 1920, they issued fatwas as part of a bold new effort to re-envision Gandhi's philosophy of passive resistance, satyagraha, with Islamic concepts and terms. They referred to non-cooperation by the term tark-i muvālāt, “the abandoning of friendly relations.” Quoting scripture, they argued that God forbade Muslims to befriend “those who have battled against you because of [your] religion” (Qurʾān 60:8–9). Drawing on a juridical prohibition against selling weapons to infidels, they banned arms sales to “enemies of Islam” and extended the prohibition to cover commercial exchanges that would strengthen the imperial foe.Footnote 75 A hundred members of Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, an anti-colonial Islamic organization, endorsed this fatwa. However, its vague and unprecedented rationale for boycotting all British commodities, as well as its broad and indiscriminate case for non-cooperation on multiple fronts, irked moderates, who issued counter-fatwas.Footnote 76
By contrast, the 1922 fatwa called for boycotting a single “class” of goods, products made with alcohol, not all British things. Its description of alcoholic products as impure and forbidden provided a more concrete religious, legal rationale for passive economic resistance. It also led, subversively, to the association of British industry with impurity. The British had often characterized Indians as filthy, unhygienic subjects; the Indian fatwa turned the tables by representing Muslims as pure subjects threatened by British impurity. Defiantly, it described the very modern products of the chemical revolution (medicines, paints, fuels), which the British took special pride in, as dangerous contaminants that Muslims had to keep away from their bodies and mosques.Footnote 77
IN DEFENSE OF ALCOHOL'S PURITY: RASHĪD RIḌĀ’S COUNTER-FATWA
In November 1922, Riḍā issued a detailed counter-fatwa in which he passionately defended industrial alcohol. A pair of reformist convictions inspired him throughout his career. One was the idea that European scientific innovations were beneficial for humanity and compatible with Islam. The other was the belief that legalistic worries about impurity violated the original spirit of the sacred law and prevented Muslims from thriving in the modern age. But his commitment to the issue under discussion was personal and profound. Between 1903 and 1935, he wrote over a thousand fatwas. That in defense of alcohol, at nearly twenty pages, was apparently the longest, and it embroiled him in an extended “transnational” debate. This fatwa differed from others, too, by defying the formal, impersonal conventions of the genre. In a striking digression, Riḍā revealed details about his own family's experiences with alcohol.
Readers of al-Manār could easily have anticipated his arguments against the Bombay fatwa. As early as 1901, he began to defend alcohol's purity.Footnote 78 Two years later, he indicated the acceptability of the Bacchic cure.Footnote 79 In 1904, in a fatwa that responded to an “Indian Question,” Riḍā declared all beneficial medical prescriptions lawful. He made no exception “for what is tabooed by a [scriptural] stipulation, such as wine and pork,” unless there existed an effective substitute.Footnote 80 That same year, too, he published a fatwa on perfumes. The enquirer, an Egyptian, had while praying at a mosque been subjected to the intoxicating smell of men who had sprayed “European” cologne on their bodies and clothes. Holding that “ritual purity is a condition for many of the rites of worship,” he had lamented the spread of this alcoholic calamity to sacred Islamic space. Riḍā quickly dismissed these preoccupations.Footnote 81 Furthermore, in October 1922, a month before he published the Arabic translation of the Bombay fatwa, Riḍā offered al-Manār's readers a preview of his extended defense of the purity of alcohol. He did so in a response to a series of questions raised by a fatwa seeker from Bangkok about “new things,” such as lottery tickets, petrol lamps, soft drinks, beer, and French perfumes.Footnote 82
Riḍā criticized Shafīq for pretending that a consensus existed among jurists regarding wine, spirits, and alcohol.Footnote 83 He recognized, as did every Muslim, that wine was an abomination, since the Qurʾān so defined it. For this reason, all jurists had prohibited its consumption. But scripture did not clearly specify that it was fundamentally impure and therefore defiling upon mere contact. Already in the twelfth century, Ibn Rushd had commented in The Jurist's Primer about the absence of a consensus: “The majority of jurists agreed about the impurity of wine (najāsat al-khamr), but there was disagreement (khilāf) about this among traditionists.” Later jurists, the revivalists of Yemen and Bhopal Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Shawkānī (d. 1839) and Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (d. 1890), took the alternative position, arguing for its purity. Therefore, the matter of wine remained open to juridical interpretation (ijtihād).Footnote 84
All jurists agreed that drinking wine made from grapes was strictly forbidden, but they disagreed about extending the Qurʾānic ban, through analogic reasoning, to other alcoholic liquids. Everyone could perhaps agree, reasoned Riḍā, that the underlying reason (ʿilla) for the divine prohibition on khamr was that drunkenness worked against the remembrance of God and stimulated spiteful behavior. On this basis, a few early Islamic jurists had tried to restrict the ban's scope, arguing that the moderate consumption of alcoholic infusions made from wheat, barley, dates, or figs, which they called by names other than khamr, was permissible.Footnote 85 Along these lines, Ḥanafī jurists, “whom most Muslims in India follow loyally,” had defined khamr as fermented grape juice. Reasoning independently of school affiliation, or madhhab, Riḍā preferred to define khamr as “every intoxicating beverage.” By this expansive definition, he referred only to drinks made for human consumption; though poor, desperate alcoholics might try to get drunk on methylated spirits, denatured alcohol was not a beverage.Footnote 86
Riḍā proceeded to argue that alcoholic drinks presented no danger to ritual purity. He pointed out that the term for “abomination” (rijs), which the Qurʾān used to characterize wine, frequently appeared in scripture without referring to “palpable impurity” (al-najāsa al-ḥissiyya). All impurities, he clarified, designated dirtiness and filth, but they came in two kinds: tangible and symbolic. Pagans were symbolically impure, but nothing made their impurity discernible besides the human intellect and divine revelation. Urine, due to its vile smell, was perceptibly impure. Muslim scripture included swine's flesh in its list of abominations (6:145), and pork counted as an impure substance. But the Qurʾān also listed divining arrows as an abomination, and these artifacts were not physically defiling things. Thus, the abominable was not synonymous with the impure.Footnote 87 An anecdote about an early Islamic response to the taboo on wine served Riḍā to support this argument. Supposedly, when Muḥammad's companions heard the revelation of Qurʾān 5:90, they poured out all their wine, so that it “flowed on the streets of Medina.” They did not undertake rites of purification to cleanse skins and jugs, their hands, their clothes, everything that had been touched by the liquid. This relatively relaxed attitude suggested to Riḍā that the Muslims who first heard the prophet preach the virtue of temperance perceived wine as abominable, but nevertheless pure. Alcohol therefore posed no ritual danger.Footnote 88
Having considered the Qurʾānic evidence, Riḍā turned to the Sunna, the corpus of venerable Islamic customs. The evidence that it presented seemed to him ambiguous. One oral tradition addressed the challenges that pious ancestors, the Salaf, faced when they ventured to the land of pork-eating, wine-drinking Christians. “May we use their dishes?” asked Abū Thaʿlaba al-Khushanī (d. 694). “If you do not find [alternatives],” replied Muḥammad, “then rinse them with water and eat from them.” On this basis, a jurist might infer that wine, like pork, was materially impure. Riḍā did not rush to this conclusion. The oral tradition did not recommend scrubbing the dishes so as to rid them of impurities; it only stated that they could be cleaned. This was no ritual command. As a matter of principle, he encouraged Muslims to presume, whenever they lacked knowledge to hold otherwise, that the things of this world were good and pure.Footnote 89
Furthermore, Riḍā argued that Muslims would alienate non-Muslims if they treated their possessions as impure and disgusting. To demonstrate excessive zeal in washing dishes first used by non-Muslims would lead to “social estrangement from them” before their attainment of any “mastery of Islam.”Footnote 90 Such behavior would, in other words, negatively affect relations with non-Muslims and alienate potential converts. This was a striking comment in light of the contemporary Indian and Egyptian boycotts of British goods and persons. It suggested that commensality, partaking of food at the same table, might best serve the cause of Islam.
To suggest that India's temperance crusaders had a compulsive attitude toward alcohol that diverged from the relaxed attitude of Islam's founding fathers, Riḍā discussed a remark ascribed to Muḥammad's companion Abū al-Dardāʾ (d. ca. 652), who had settled down in Syria to serve as Damascus's first Islamic judge. There, he discovered murriyy, a regional condiment made from salted, spiced, wine-soaked fish laid out to dry in the sun. Like Magian cheese, this was a product that Muslims encountered outside of the Ḥijāz, in conquered lands.Footnote 91 Abū al-Dardāʾ held that “the fish and the sun slaughter the wine,” rendering the object lawful. The sun transformed the wine, explained Riḍā, detoxifying the condiment to make it legally edible. In light of this tradition Riḍā argued that, despite the Indian mufti's “irrational” ruling, reasonable Ḥanafis should concede that wine might be pure.Footnote 92
In this fatwa, as in an earlier ruling on toilet paper, Riḍa gingerly suggested that Muslim moderns needed not worry much about ritual purity. He adopted a modern critique of “primitive” religion as characterized by an irrational, superstitious obsession with defilement. But he grounded his views in the early Islamic canon. His argument was basically that impurities posed little or no danger.Footnote 93 To this end, he recounted that Muḥammad once used water from a polytheistic woman's leather bag in order to perform a ritual ablution.Footnote 94 The prophet would not have done so, insisted Riḍā, had he worried obsessively about contamination. Another oral tradition described Muḥammad's response to the defilement of sacred space. A group of Muslims, city-dwellers, caught an Arab from the desert urinating in a mosque. The prophet ordered them to release the offender and pour water over the urine. He then proclaimed, “You have been given a mission to make things easy, not difficult.”Footnote 95 “This religion is easy (yusr) and altogether devoid of obstacles,” Riḍā concurred, highlighting a core principle of his legal philosophy.Footnote 96
Islamic law discouraged exposure to material impurities, but Riḍā was convinced that this was for medical reasons. Thus, he considered the taboos on owning dogs. The canonical tradition had warned that angels would not enter a house inhabited by a dog, and medieval jurists had ruled that water previously used by dogs was unfit for ritual ablutions. Such warnings appeared scientifically justified to Riḍā, because doctors had discovered tapeworms, which could infect humans, in canine saliva. Prohibitions on palpable impurities had to be respected, then, in recognition of the harmonious relationship between the sacred law and modern science. But it was wrong to invent new taboos.Footnote 97
The fatwa's discussion of alcohol's purifying nature also took on a scientific inflection. Methanol, argued Riḍā, was “the most powerful of purifying substances.” The wood spirit served for “medical purification” and saved organisms from putrefaction.Footnote 98 The abuse of Islamic law to prohibit it would be “the cause of death for many ill persons.” A prohibition would extend many diseases’ duration and increase patients’ pain in various circumstances, though especially in war. For illustration, Riḍā referred to the medical benefits of “tincture of iodine,” an antiseptic containing ethyl alcohol that nurses applied to soldiers’ wounds. Egypt's experience during World War I, when the country's hospitals were overwhelmed with wounded soldiers, had only augmented his appreciation of alcohol's usefulness.Footnote 99
To explain why banning alcohol would be “one of the greatest crimes against Muslims,” Riḍā dared to reveal a personal story. He disclosed that rheumatism had afflicted his mother to such an extent that she could neither walk nor pray properly—a strenuous act that required genuflections and prostrations. The family doctor, a Turkish physician named Sharaf al-Dīn Bey, had gained fame for his prescriptions of iodine as a wonder drug. He told her to mix ten drops of an iodine solution, twice the usual dose, in a glass of water to be taken before meals. Riḍā's mother recovered so well that she was able to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, without hardship. Similarly, the doctor relieved children's chronic coughs by prescribing to them an iodide and cologne ointment, and with “God's permission” he cured Riḍā's domestic servant from typhus fever. These anecdotes suggested that alcoholic remedies had restored Muslims to good health, by divine providence, and allowed them to fulfill essential pillars of worship, the rites of pilgrimage and prayer.Footnote 100
Finally, pragmatic political and economic calculations led Riḍā to defend Muslim participation in the alcohol industry. He presented this industry as critical for chemistry, pharmacology, medicine, and technology, and described it as one of “the most important reasons for the supremacy of the Europeans.” A ban on Muslim involvement would be oppressive, he warned. It would cause unemployment and prevent Muslims “from gaining skillful mastery in the sciences, in technological fields, and in many trades.” Over time, it would drive forward-looking Muslims to abandon their religion. This process was already underway. Finding Islamic law as interpreted by hardliners overly restrictive, some rulers felt “forced to abandon the sharīʿa and to follow instead the laws of the Europeans, so that they might have a powerful state and a society ascendant and respectable.”Footnote 101 Innovations in the alcohol industry seemed to him of such critical, strategic importance that he compared them to military innovations. In times of war, to defend the Muslim community's welfare, army commanders had the freedom to adopt new foreign weapons and tactics. They did not have to justify these choices on the basis of the sharīʿa, but merely make sure that they did not commit a “sin against God.”Footnote 102 Riḍā wanted Muslims to approach alcoholic innovations with the same utilitarian philosophy—freely, urgently, and with the recognition that these were modernity's weapons.Footnote 103
*****
The battle of fatwas did not quite end there. A few months after Riḍā published his rebuttal, Muḥammad Shafīq al-Raḥmān wrote to al-Manār in protest.Footnote 104 He asked Riḍā to clarify a few things. He wanted to know why Riḍā disagreed with his hero and mentor, the Egyptian reformer Muḥammad ʿAbduh, who had apparently classified spirit (sbīrtū) as an alcoholic, intoxicating drink. He also enquired, “Is a learned scholar whom the People of Islam emulate permitted to proclaim openly to all people that he treated his poor mother with a repulsive, execrable alcohol—with cognac?”
Riḍā found these ad hominem questions vexing enough that he devoted twenty more pages to explain his views. ʿAbduh, he revealed, was worried about increased alcoholism among peasants, who were drinking grain alcohol diluted with sugar water. This liquid was not an alcoholic beverage, but a deadly poison. Having contextualized ʿAbduh's comment, Riḍā criticized the Indian mufti's expectation that a jurist should follow his teacher blindly. ʿAbduh despised reflexive imitators. He treasured, instead, minds unclouded by tradition that independently searched for the truth.Footnote 105 Then, wasting little ink on the “deceptive” insinuation that his own mother had indulged in the cognac cure, Riḍā returned to more important matters.Footnote 106 He reminded readers that the central dispute concerned such things as alcoholic paint, and that the main reason for the divergence was the Bombay mufti's inclination to make Islam hard.Footnote 107
DIVERGENT JUDGMENTS AND NATIONALIST DISTINCTIONS
Riḍā gave his readers many reasons for his divergent judgments, and these reasons were fundamental to his religious and legal philosophy. Since he believed that God designed Islam's sacred law for believers’ convenience, he routinely argued for legalizing modern commodities. Convinced that free trade was advantageous and legal equality virtuous, he frequently advocated lifting barriers to commerce between Muslims and others. Against restrictive, scholastic rulings, which he blamed for the poverty of Muslims worldwide, he proposed a flexible approach to Islamic legal interpretation that would keep up with the times and facilitate every good plan for economic progress and political power. To justify this approach as an authentic Islamic approach, he offered liberating readings of ambiguous scriptural prohibitions and exerted himself to give the impression that early Muslim paragons, the Salaf, had a relaxed, open attitude toward objects and practices that had nothing to do with worship. These ideals and values characterized the ideological program or reformist project that historians have labelled “modernist Salafism” or “Islamic modernism.”Footnote 108 In Modern Things on Trial, I use instead the term “laissez-faire Salafism” to define “the ethos,” which Riḍā's journal embodied and channeled, “of the economically liberal movement of Islamic reform that arose under the aegis of the Empire of Free Trade.”Footnote 109
Like other religious reformers in this period, Riḍā emphasized the virtue of ijtihād, independent legal reasoning with the goal of reinventing Islamic law, and despised the practice of taqlīd, dogmatic adherence to a school of law.Footnote 110 His 1922 fatwa may in many ways seem a classic Salafist fatwa. To justify his easygoing, liberalizing ruling with authoritative precedents, he highlighted the sharīʿa's ambiguities and allowances and referred strategically and selectively to the Salaf's most permissive opinions and practices. Moreover, he heaped scorn on Maulvi Shafīq al-Raḥmān, representing him as an inept imitator (muqallid) of Ḥanafī doctrine, and insisted on the need for what might be called “post-madhhab” reasoning to resolve the question of alcohol.Footnote 111 Indeed, readers familiar with the history of Islamic legal theories might see his ruling as deriving directly from Salafist principles. But laissez-faire Salafism did not arise fully formed in a vacuum; it emerged gradually in an imperial world where capital, goods, and ideas circulated globally as never before. And self-styled reformers contributed to its development when they strove to identify scriptural justifications for controversial objects and exchanges that they deemed advantageous. This entailed arguing against contemporaries who relied on their madhhab's “outdated” or “provincial” doctrines (as Salafists saw it) to make the case for barriers and restrictions. In other words, instead of seeing Riḍā's fatwa as an example of the mechanical application of Salafism, we should treat it as a piece of evidence that illustrates why Salafism was made and sustained in a period of globalization.
Rooted in his dualistic view of the late imperial world as the stage for a fateful struggle between reformers and imitators, Riḍā's representations of self and other should be taken with a grain of salt. The battle of fatwas was not really a battle between “modernist” and “traditionalist” approaches to Islamic law. As well as his refusal to presume the “abomination” ritually dangerous, Riḍā's utilitarian appreciation of alcohol may seem rather modern. But it is not difficult to find precedents. In addition to permissive early Islamic opinions, such as the rulings that allowed travelers to use date wine for an alternative ritual ablution, it is important to remember the existence of a robust medieval discourse about the utility of objects associated with impurity. Jurists debated whether and how to make use of the tanned furs and skins of animals such as wild foxes and pigs whose meat was unlawful, or ḥarām. Participants in these debates argued, as Riḍā would centuries later, that the dubious animal products were useful and pure.Footnote 112 When we consider such precedents as well as the fact that Riḍā never tried to break fully with the past during his mission for renewal and reform, it is clear that there is no reason to describe him as a “modernist” in an unqualified sense.
Despite Riḍā's mockery of Bombay's Ḥanafī mufti as an imitator of scholastic traditions, too little is known about Maulvi Shafīq al-Raḥmān to characterize him as a “traditionalist.” Actually, his fatwa was in many ways a strikingly modern instrument. If it is true, as this article has argued, that he wrote it to support the Indian nationalist campaign, then his fatwa was a radical religious intervention in a political movement—an innovative ideological attempt to use Islamic legal rhetoric to inspire Muslims to challenge the British Empire. Furthermore, his fatwa differed from “premodern” fatwas in one extraordinary way: it was endorsed by multiple local authorities, the Bombay signatories. This departure from conventions was likely due to the fatwa's political aims. The movers and shakers who signed it in effect turned an individual mufti's ruling into a collective call to action. The only precedent for such a use of Islamic law was the 1920 non-cooperation fatwa, which was also endorsed by an assembly of Muslim authorities devoted to the cause of Indian independence. It is worth noting, too, that one of the Bombay signatories, the preacher of the Friday sermon at Masjid al-Jāmiʿ, relied on modern scientific evidence to certify the fatwa's relation to alcohol as “correct” or “sound.”Footnote 113 This evaluation did not conform to old methods for assessing the validity of Islamic rulings. For all of these reasons, it is best to see Shafīq al-Raḥman and his supporters as religious authorities who participated, like Riḍā, in the reinvention of Islamic traditions.
Reformist ideals shaped Riḍā's reaction to the Bombay fatwa. But they do not fully explain it, because it would not be difficult to find historical explanations for a hypothetical fatwa by him against alcohol. Had Riḍā partially endorsed Shafīq's rulings, historians could argue that he did so for several reasons. First, he despised public drunkenness. A leading voice for temperance, he railed against the evils that had befallen Egypt due to alcohol consumption.Footnote 114 Second, he spent his entire career preaching for Islamic unity as an ardent anti-colonial activist. Two years earlier, he had represented the Syrian cause for independence before the League of Nations. By the end of 1922, he was furious about the French and British scramble for the Arab provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire.Footnote 115 In addition, he was busy at this juncture finishing his famous treatise on the caliphate.Footnote 116 This work brought him into close alignment with the Khilafist party in Bombay, which had initiated the anti-British boycotts. Riḍā had good reasons, then, to support Shafīq's fatwa and forge a unified “pan-Islamic” front against the British Empire.Footnote 117
Of course, he had ruled in the past that alcoholic medicines were good and pure, so he was predisposed to continue justifying them. Still, he did alter his rulings with significant changes to the political landscape. Tellingly, he invoked his early Islamic heroes, the Salaf, to make first a case for and then against Muslims adopting European styles. Before World War I, when Arab and Egyptian nationalists had yet to rally behind the banner of economic patriotism, he wrote about the advantages of European military attire and defended Muslim men's (not women's) freedom to wear “Frankish” clothes. In contrast, during a nationalist economic awakening in the late twenties, he depicted articles of European dress as a conspicuous threat to Arab-Islamic traditions.Footnote 118 Along these lines, he might have ruled that Muslim patients should prefer Muslim doctors and that synthetic paint was a superfluous, unnecessary luxury whose consumption enriched the colonial powers. Therefore, Riḍā's 1922 fatwa in favor of alcohol's many uses cannot be adequately explained by simply referring to past rulings.
The striking thing about the battle of fatwas is the indisputable chasm that separated the Bombay and Cairo jurists. Although both used Islamic law to assess the same set of products, they made radically different judgments. Why was that? The urban and political contexts in which they operated were in many ways comparable. Both Cairo and Bombay were large urban conglomerates with a heterogeneous population and a robust international presence. Both cities had long been subject, either formally or informally, to British rule. They resembled each other, too, in the fact that their citizens embarked more or less synchronically on self-determination movements that included campaigns of non-violent consumer resistance.
Boycotts of English goods and services were a central part of Cairo's nationalist movement, too. Early in 1922, before the battle of fatwas began, Britain announced an end to protectorate rule and Egypt achieved a semblance of independence. But Britain continued to “protect” the kingdom's foreign interests and control many of its commercial and political affairs. Nationalists resented the banishment of their leaders, censorship of the press, and martial law. A committee of Egyptian women launched a series of boycotts in 1922 that targeted English goods and services.Footnote 119 The concurrence of boycotting movements in Cairo and Bombay further suggests that the cities were on parallel trajectories.
Yet there were profound dissimilarities. For one thing, alcohol was not a principal target of Egyptian nationalists. There were temperance societies in Egypt and their members held anti-imperialist views. But boycotters did not blacklist all alcoholic drinks regardless of their country of origin, and temperance activists were disappointed by the lack of nationalist support for prohibition.Footnote 120 In the second place, it made little sense in the Egyptian context to identify pharmaceutical products containing alcohol with the British Empire. Cairo did have a number of English pharmacies, and boycotters placed English doctors and pharmacists on their list of targeted professions, but the city also had French, German, Italian, Greek, Syrian, and Armenian pharmacists. Furthermore, foreign patent medicines in sealed packages entered the country freely, and it so happens that France was the main supplier of drugs and perfumes.Footnote 121 In Cairo, nobody thought of resisting British rule by boycotting French goods.
There were other differences. In India, nationalists preached self-abnegation and self-sufficiency. They were committed to swadeshi as an economic strategy. In Egypt, a nationalist movement to develop a domestic industry and favor its products began gathering steam in the aftermath of the world war. But there were relatively few Egyptian alternatives on the market in 1922. Cairo's bourgeois boycotters had to content themselves with substituting French or Italian for English merchandise. A “Buy Egyptian” campaign emerged later, in the 1930s.Footnote 122
Muslim nationalists in India and Egypt participated in very different regional cultures. In India, they campaigned for independence in a predominantly Hindu environment and belonged to associations such as Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind and the All-India Muslim League that represented Muslim interests. This situation fostered the elaboration of specifically Islamic justifications for the principles of satyagraha and the politics of non-cooperation. In Egypt, there was no system of separate electorates to reflect and promote religio-communal distinctions. Egyptian nationalists collaborated with greater ease across religious lines than did their Indian counterparts. Joining hands in Cairo, Muslims and Copts made a united vow to the same God that they would boycott the British “usurper.”Footnote 123 They made no discernible effort at the time to develop a specifically Islamic or Christian rationale to justify or defend this mode of protest. Instead, they elaborated a more secular political discourse, celebrating the pharaonic past.
Riḍā sympathized with both the Indian and Egyptian nationalist causes, but his political activities centered on Syria and the Ḥijāz. He lived at the end of the imperial era, and his political vision was in many respects an imperialistic one. During World War I, he dreamed of founding an Arab-Islamic empire, a vast decentralized state that would cover the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, and the Arab provinces of the eastern Mediterranean. This empire would have two leaders, a caliph and a president; and two capital cities, Mecca and Damascus.Footnote 124 He continued to entertain this Arab-Islamic vision after the war. But he was a pragmatist. He was perfectly willing to scale down his ambitions and support, in line with interwar trends and opportunities, specifically Syrian and Ḥijāzī kingdoms as opposed to a sprawling empire.Footnote 125 As a politician, he embraced compromises. He argued for Christian-Muslim equality in the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria. Although it assigned Islamic law no role, he tacitly endorsed this monarchy's secular liberal constitution.Footnote 126
Both before and after the world war, Riḍā was greatly preoccupied with power. He wanted Muslim individuals, whether they lived under Islamic rule or not, and Muslim states, existing or envisioned, to become powerful. European nations and empires were his models of success. Admiring their political and military strength as well as their economic, industrial, and scientific advances, he was especially interested in encouraging Muslims of all ethnicities and regions to rise to their level. As a religious and legal authority, this meant a profound commitment to interpreting Islamic law so as to facilitate all sorts of things, from projects of constitutional reform in the Ottoman Empire to plans by Muslims to profit from forbidden goods in China.Footnote 127 The ultimate goal, which motivated his vigorous defense, was for both Arab and non-Arab Muslims to flourish with the power of alcohol and eventually build powerful states.
In broad strokes, then, these were the central distinctions between the muftis’ nationalistic experiments with Islamic law. Like Deobandi and Brahmin reformers in late colonial India, as well as many other Muslim and Hindu activists for home-rule, Maulvi Shafīq al-Raḥmān was dedicated to both ritual purity and national purification. Turning his back on the founder of his school of law, Abū Ḥanīfa, who had permitted Muslims to purify their bodies in preparation for prayer with date wine, Shafīq al-Raḥmān decided instead to expand restrictions on using alcohol. He advanced this ritual ideology while simultaneously supporting a political strategy—in effect encouraging Indian Muslims to boycott all alcoholic products and thus subvert British economic interests. Meanwhile Rashīd Riḍā, as a Syrian-Egyptian Salafist, scoffed at supposedly backward attitudes to ritual impurity. He believed that Islam in its original form was an easy religion that allowed Muslims to adopt European innovations in industry and science, and he was above all devoted to the Arab and Muslim acquisition of sources of power. These predilections made a world of difference when the pair of muftis turned to think about Islamic law, independence strategies, and industrial alcohol.
