Religious leaders

Here I am concerned with the strategies of authority of those who, from the nineteenth century, strove to provide religious leadership, most of whom were ulama. The issue was, of course, how to fashion an Islamic society without power: the connection between din (faith) and daula, (state power) which had existed from the first Muslim community at Medina, had been spectacularly broken. The key changes in the scene are well known. The British resumed many revenue-free grants which supported families of ulama; they stopped funding madrasa education; they increasingly insisted on government servants having qualifications from government schools; and from 1865 administered their Anglo-Muhammadan form of the sharia without the advice of muftis. From the annexation of Awadh in 1856, the Shia mujtahids of Lucknow faced the same prospect. These were desperate times.

One response was to develop a new relationship with the authority of the past. However, not all religious leaders followed this route. The ulama of Farangi Mahall, those following Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi, and, as far as I understand them, the Shia mujtahids of Lucknow, maintained the full panoply of classical scholarship, the transmitted sciences and the rational sciences, those that had hailed from the great Arab traditions and those which had come from the Greeks and had been elaborated by the Persians. Their authority, moreover, was authenticated in the traditional way of oral transmission, certified by an ijaza (a written authorization to teach a book) with its isnad, (list of authoritative transmitters) going back to the original author of the book, and indicating how this piece of knowledge was deeply-rooted in the Islamic past.

Other religious leaders made the following two changes in whole or in part. The first, supported by all those involved in reform from the Deobandis and the Ahl-i Hadith through to the modernist Saiyid Ahmad Khan and the Islamist, Maududi, was a significant shift in learning from the rational sciences to the transmitted sciences, that is to those which specifically surrounded and supported the Quran and Hadith. This was part of a great shift taking place in Indo-Muslim civilization away from the great traditions developed in the Iranian, Timurid and Mughal worlds, and towards the pristine inspiration of Arabia and the first community at Medina. It was a process which arguably had its early phases in the work of Abd ul-Haqq Muhaddith and the family of Shah Waliullah, and for which the destruction of Mughal rule and the coming of British power created the opening for success. The second change, which arguably was even more significant than the first, involved the complete rejection of the scholarship of the past, as the Ahl-i Hadith, Saiyid Ahmad Khan and his modernist followers, and Maududi and the Islamists focussed once more, like the founders of the schools of law, just on the Quran and Hadith. The rejection of the authority of classical scholarship, and the ijazas that came with it, meant that authority would have to be found elsewhere: for the Ahl-i Hadith in their aristocratic background, their high levels of education, their Arabian connections, and perhaps their emotional and sectarian devotion to their maslak (creed); for Maududi in his aristocratic background, his reputation for scholarship, his vast output of published work and his personal courage in pursuing his ends; for Saiyid Ahmad Khan in his aristocratic background and his abundant sincerity, but his flank was left wide open by his reliance on Western science. These qualifications, relied upon to exercise ijtihad (personal effort in interpretation) on the sources of the faith, seem a poor replacement for the authority of a great scholarly past. It would be interesting to know how the traditional ulama rated the authority of Maududi. Saiyid Ahmad Khan from the point of view of many had no authority; he attracted fatawa of kufr (infidelity) from Mecca.

The new emphasis on Hadith was a symptom, although a mighty one, of the way in which the Prophet as the perfect model for human life came to play a larger part in South Asian Muslim piety. One example was the Sirat (biographies of the Prophet) movement which Iqbal tells us was kicked off by the influence of the Ahl-i Hadith. ‘Probably’, Cantwell Smith informs us, ‘more lives of Muhammad appeared in every one of the years between the two World Wars than in any of the centuries between the twelfth and the nineteenth’.Footnote ¹ It was to be expected that the authority of the Prophet would have a heightened presence in the thought and practice of religious leaders.Footnote ²

This was almost as much the case for those who resisted reform as for those who espoused it. In the nineteenth century, for instance, Farangi Mahallis became much involved in maulid (birth of the Prophet) ceremonies during the first twelve days of Rabi al-Awwal; by the twentieth century these ceremonies had come to attract large gatherings. Moreover, a Dar-al-Hadith had been constructed in the Farangi Mahall muhalla. Family biographies reveal the growing centrality of the Prophet in their piety. Moving to the Barelvis the evidence suggests that the Prophet was even more central to the piety of Ahmed Raza Khan. For him, as Barbara Metcalf tells us, the Prophet was ‘pre-eminent’. He wrote 16 books on his life, composed Urdu verse in his praise, wrote on Hadith and on the Prophet's family and companions. He made much of the Sufi doctrine of nur-i Muhammadi, the idea that there was a light of Muhammad, derived from God's own light, which had existed from the beginning of creation. Of course, he gave great importance to maulid ceremonies.Footnote ³

For modernist thinkers, from Saiyid Ahmad Khan through to Iqbal and beyond, the Prophet was central both to their piety and their thought. For Saiyid Ahmad Khan Muhammad was the ‘uniquely qualified guide for giving tauhid (the oneness of God) adequate expression in practical life’.Footnote ⁴ His love of the Prophet was expressed in much of his writing from his early tract designed to improve maulid practices through to his defence of Muhammad against the wanton attacks of William Muir.Footnote ⁵ Who can forget his nat (poem in praise of the Prophet) which begins:

Ameer Ali in his Life and Teachings of Muhammad or the Spirit of Islam made Muhammad both a man to be proud of and a truly modern man, bringing his authority to support change and progress.Footnote ⁷ For Iqbal the Prophet lay at the heart of his thinking from his early nationalist poem, Tarana-i Milli—‘The caravan leader for us is the prince of Hijaz,/By his name our soul acquires peace’.Footnote ⁸—through to his very last collection of poems entitled The Gift of the Hijaz. The Prophet's authority came to be deployed in support of new visions of life from the socialist through to the bourgeois capitalist.

It goes without saying that the authority of the Prophet was particularly important for the ulama reformers. Barbara Metcalf has left us in no doubt as to the reverence for the Prophet which existed in the early Deobandi community; one story has Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi walking barefoot the whole way from Mecca to Medina.Footnote ⁹ But more important was the central role of Hadith in Deobandi education and in their constructions of authority. So all six canonical collections of Hadith were taught to students in the space of one year, a practice which continues to this present day, in Pakistan, and which has given South Asia a particular prominence in Hadith scholarship in the modern Muslim world.Footnote ¹⁰ Hadith commentaries might be used, as Muhammad Qasim Zaman has shown, as a powerful way of bringing an author's voice from the past into the present.Footnote ¹¹ Or yet more pertinently they might be used, as in the case of a 21-volume commentary by Zafar Ahmad Uthmani, to demonstrate, against the charges of the Ahl-i Hadith that they were based on mere opinion, that the legal doctrines of the Hanafi school were firmly based on the traditions of the Prophet.Footnote ¹² Or, as in the case of one volume of this mighty work, Zafar Ahmad Uthmani might use Hadith to refute the arguments of his colleague, Husain Ahmad Madani, in favour of composite nationalism. The example of the Prophet was too powerful a resource to ignore.Footnote ¹³

The elitism of this type of Hadith scholarship should not blind us to the major change for most institutions, practices and cultural forms in this era, and that is the need to find roots in society at large. Muslim religious leaders, whose financial support the utilitarian British were concerned to reduce in every possible way, were not exceptions to this rule. The key means for doing this, as Barbara Metcalf has shown us, were the translation of the Quran, the collections of Hadith and the great books of the classical Islamic era into Urdu and the making of them widely and cheaply available through print, which was adopted by Muslims only from the early nineteenth century. The process began with the writings of Muhammd Ismail Shahid of the Mujahidin, who wrote in his introduction to the Taqwiyat ul-Iman that he had translated the key quotations from the Quran and Hadith, supporting his argument, into ‘simple and easy Urdu so that they would be comprehensible to all who read or heard’.Footnote ¹⁴ The process continued into the late nineteenth century and beyond with religious publications in Urdu forming a large proportion of all published work. The newspaper press operated most powerfully in support, as it has continued to do. This shift from the elite language of Arabic and Persian into Urdu (and indeed other vernaculars) represented a profound indigenization of the classical materials of the Islamic tradition.

Further means of building a constituency were by education, and in the case of the reforming Deoband tradition we know that by its centenary in 1967 it had taught 7,417 students in its own Dar ul-Ulum (House of Knowledge), but claimed to have established or affiliated a further 8,934 institutions. All of this, moreover, was achieved by popular subscription; Deobandi education, as with that of the other nineteenth century ulama traditions, only survived if it provided a service which people wanted. One of those services was religious guidance, which came from its Dar al-Ifta, its Fatwa Office, and the regular publication of collections of fatawa (legal opinions). In meeting this popular demand for guidance Deoband was not only broadcasting its authority widely but also bolstering the concern of its ulama that Muslims should follow their understandings of the sharia and not those of their rivals or of the British courts. In this great revolution in the basis of Islamic society in India, from primarily a top-down one to a bottom-up one, the authority of individual ulama remained supported by their ijazas, but it was now increasingly supported by a brand, and the public recognition of that brand, the Deobandi brand, the Barelvi brand, or perhaps at a stretch for the modernists, the Aligarh brand.

A similar development can be seen amongst the Shia ulama, who have been too-long neglected. I base my comments on the excellent recent work of Justin Jones on the Shia of nineteenth and twentieth century India, in particular those in Lucknow. The Shia mujtahids, that is, those who had been given an ijaza to exercise ijtihad by an established mujtahid, had in principle much greater authority than their Sunni colleagues. The victory of the Usulis over the Akhbaris in West Asia and India in the eighteenth century enabled them to use reason and consensus, as well as the Quran, Hadith and the guidance of the Imams, in reaching legal decisions. Under the Awadhi regime they exercised considerable public functions, in addition to their religious roles, and were closely tied to the interests of the nobility and the state. This elite position was destroyed by the annexation of Awadh and the subsequent Mutiny uprising. They were stripped of their offices, lost much of their financial support, and suffered the humiliation of having their premier religious site, the Bara Imambarah (Lucknow's great focus for mohurram ceremonies) with its Asafi mosque, turned into a barracks for British soldiers. Like their Sunni colleagues they had to find new ways of bolstering their authority. One way was serious scholastic endeavour. But more important, and also driven by financial need, they began for the first time to reach out to the Shia community at large and fashion a constituency for themselves. Mujtahids began to pay especial attention to their personal followers, their muqallids; they paid serious attention to gathering as many students as possible; they devoted much time to issuing fatawa, subsequently published by the Newal Kishore press. Towards the end of the nineteenth century they founded two madrasas, negotiated successfully with the British for the return of the Bara Imambarah and the reinstatement of Friday prayer at the Asafi mosque. Then, in 1901 they founded the Anjuman-i Sadr-i Sudoor, whose purpose was to provide worldly as well as religious leadership for Shias throughout India, its purposes embracing everything from madrasa foundation to business support. By the 1890s, Jones argues, the mujtahids had gained an ‘unprecedented level of public exposure and authority. . .[indeed] public involvement replaced scholarly reputation or the familial name as the crucial basis of clerical authority’.Footnote ¹⁵

At the same time as the Shia mujtahids were adding to their authority by forming an organization, and by playing once again a prominent role in public life, so were the Sunni ulama. The three decades from the 1890s saw their attempts to develop organizations in order to assert their authority. The first was the foundation of the Nadwat ul-Ulama in 1894. At its inaugural meeting Shibli Numani declared: ‘a very large part of the national life is in the ulama's right of ownership. . .and they alone have or can have absolute sway. . .over it’.Footnote ¹⁶ The process continued through Abdul Bari of Farangi Mahall's revival of the Majlis Muid ul-Islam in 1910 to the foundation of the Jamiat ul-Ulama-i Hind, of which he chaired the first meeting in 1919 and which has remained the authoritative representative body of the Indian Sunni ulama. Since independence one might ask how far the authority of the ulama has come to be transferred to the two Personal Law Boards. Moreover, we should also note that the authority of the Islamists (Maududiyat) has come to be embodied in Maududi's Jamaat-i Islami organization. This said, it is evident that from the late 1890s we can see the migration of religious authority, not in total but certainly in part, from the ijazas of the ulama to the organizations they founded, the brands they represented. Indeed, these organizations played a key role in expanding the reach and weight of their authority.

The policies and actions of the ulama organizations illuminate this purpose. Their overwhelming concern was to ensure their control over the sharia. Their mastery of the jurisprudential traditions of Islam needed to interpret the sharia lay at the heart of their claims to authority. This is what Shibli meant when he said that ‘a very large part of the national life is in the ulama's right of ownership. . .and they alone have or can have absolute sway. . .over it’. As we might expect, this concern of the ulama was manifest whenever the state came to address aspects of the sharia. So in the colonial period the ulama ran successful campaigns to achieve the amendment of the Waqf Validation Act in 1913 and to remove customary law from sharia practice, a process culminating in the Shariat application Act of 1936. They were less successful, however, in the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939. After independence their concern was displayed in 1985 in Saiyid Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi's intervention as President of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board in the Shah Bano case, and also by the view of the Pakistani ulama that they had no objection to the codification of the sharia, providing they were in charge of the process.Footnote ¹⁷

The overwhelming concern of the ulama for the sharia is also manifest in their political vision and the practical actions they press forward. Their proposals for political progress under the British, whether it was those made by the Majlis Muid ul-Islam to Montagu in 1917 or the Badaun proposals of the Jamiat ul-Ulama-i Hind of 1921, or their Saharanpur formula of 1931 all sought what Peter Hardy called a ‘sharia protectorate’, a form of jurisprudential apartheid.Footnote ¹⁸ This vision has also been echoed in the practical measures they urged and adopted from time to time. It is present in the Amir-i Shariat organization, a legal system apart from the colonial state which, following the Badaun proposals, was established in Bihar by the Khilafat non-co-operation movement.Footnote ¹⁹ It is present in Ashraf Ali Thanawi's attempt to devise a structure of Islamic legal authority under colonial rule, which has its legacy, so Muhammad Qasim Zaman tells us, in the Compendium of Islamic Law published by the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board in 2001 and the Board's insistence that Muslims should resort to privately-constituted sharia courts.Footnote ²⁰

The relationship between the sharia, and ulama authority as its interpreters, is also revealed in their responses to madrasa reform. In Pakistan, government reports of 1962 and 1979 recommended that madrasas should be brought within the educational mainstream, certainly regulated and perhaps even integrated into the state educational system. Such proposals were resisted, in part because of the danger of subordinating the religious sciences to Western sciences, but in part, too, because ulama argued that religion was part of a separate sphere which needed to be preserved. An attempt to devise a curriculum for all sectarian affiliations—Deobandi, Barelvi, Shia and so on—was further resisted on the grounds that the authority of scholars was in part dependent on sectarian identity (their brand). The bottom line, of course, was that the emasculation of the madrasas would lead to the emasculation of the authority of the ulama as interpreters of the sharia.Footnote ²¹

Two further strategies of authority have been adopted by religious leaders. The first involves forms of oppositional engagement with other groups ranging from well-structured debates through to vicious sectarian struggles. Public debate was a feature of nineteenth-century north India, as Barbara Metcalf has demonstrated in an excellent section in Islamic Revival. Their functions, however, were not genuine intellectual exchanges; little attempt was made to listen to the other point of view or to understand it. The major object was to build up the authority of the leading contenders, say Muslim, Arya Samajist or Christian, in the eyes of their followers. It was the same for sectarian divisions within a particular faith. So Barelvis, Deobandis and Ahl-i Hadith assailed each other with accusations of kufr and their followers took pride in the combative role of their leaders.Footnote ²² Examining the Madh-e Sabha and Tabarra conflict in 1930s Lucknow, Justin Jones has concluded that, alongside the political and social changes of that decade, the key dynamic behind the outbreaks of Shia-Sunni animosity was generational change in the leading two families. So Abdul Shakoor Faruqi stoked up the Madh-e Sabha agitation to be able to claim his father's authority as champion of Sunni polemics, and a younger Kinturi mujtahid kept the tabarra agitation going to enable him to seize the lead from the senior Kinturi mujtahid.Footnote ²³ Turning to Pakistan, Sayyid Vali Reza Nasr has argued that sectarianism was the outcome of one group of Deobandi ulama trying to assert their authority over the country's religion and politics. These were the followers of Husain Ahmad Madani, who had opposed the creation of the state. To rehabilitate themselves and to assert their authority, they played leading roles first in the agitation against the Ahmadiyya and then in that against the Shia.Footnote ²⁴

The final strategy involves authority and relationships with the government, here restricted to the colonial government. This paper is not concerned with the Islamic modernists, who derived important dimensions of their authority from engagement with Western scholarship, and who, although in some cases willing to speak the truth to power, were also willing to accept honours from the British. It is concerned with the ulama and what must be described as a somewhat ambivalent relationship to the British as a source of authority. I well remember Barbara Metcalf's horror when I mentioned to her that I had seen a file in the National Archives of India about the award of Shams ul-Ulama titles to two Deobandi ulama. This could not be; Deobandis rejected all such baubles from the colonial power. And in this case they did so—the file was just a record of the government's consideration of the matter. Indeed, Deobandi authority rested on their keeping their distance from the colonial power, accepting no grants from it, urging their followers not to use the British courts, and in the last 30 years of British rule going openly into opposition. The main group of Farangi Mahalli ulama adopted a similar policy; they had only contempt for those members of the Bahr ul-Ulum faction in the family who accepted titles of Shams ul-Ulama during the Khilafat-non-cooperation movement.Footnote ²⁵ But matters were not quite so simple. When in the 1890s a faction in Deoband town tried to take over the Dar ul-Ulum, making a series of accusations in the process, the school Council called in a retired Hindu government servant and the British collector of Saharanpur to testify to its integrity.Footnote ²⁶ When in 1908 the Nadwat ul-Ulama opened in Lucknow, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John Hewitt, presided over the ceremony with the leading Farangi Mahalli of the day present.Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, the new style of madrasa education provided in Deoband from 1867 with its classrooms, central library, students admitted for a fixed course of study, with regular examinations, prizegivings, and annual reports on institutional performance, as well as that offered in the new Farangi Mahall madrasa from 1905, derived its authority from the colonial model which it followed.Footnote ²⁸

Two further points need to be made about religious leadership and authority. The first involves Sufi leadership. I recognize that many ulama derived their authority in part from the spiritual dimensions of their lives, but here focus is on those leaders who are primarily Sufi. Compared with the ulama they have been less troubled by the challenges and disruptions of colonial rule. They did not break, as some ulama, modernists and Islamists did, the chains of authority reaching back into the Islamic past; their shijras (genealogical trees) still take their line of authority back through the founding saints of their order, to Ali, and thence to the Prophet. Secondly, they did not have to realign the bases of their support under colonial rule. While some Sufis have always benefited from government patronage, the majority have always depended on popular support. As the saying goes: ‘It is not the saints that fly, but their disciples who make them fly’.Footnote ²⁹ Then, like the ulama they have had little difficulty in adopting forms of modernity to their causes, whether it be print in the early twentieth century or the internet in the late twentieth century. On the other hand, the past two centuries have brought some serious challenges to their authority; the assault of Islamic reform on many Sufi practices, indeed, on Sufism itself. In response, Ashraf Ali Thanawi, arguably the most influential South Asian Sufi of the twentieth century, set out to anchor Sufi doctrines in the Hadith, and spent much of his career in demonstrating the concordance between Sufi and sharia norms. Indeed, such were the elaborate rules, order and disciplines he required of his disciples that he was described as having an ‘English’ sense of organization.Footnote ³⁰ In a similar way the Chishti-Sabiri Sufis of Pak Pattan, in navigating the harsher, often Wahhabi-inspired, rhetoric of contemporary Pakistan, insist that theirs is the path rooted in the Prophet's sunna and the sharia. They, and not the Ahl-Hadith, the Wahhabis, the Jamaat-i Islamis and the Tablighi Jamaatis, are the rightful heirs to the Prophet's legacy.Footnote ³¹ Their strategy of authority is that they have the greatest right to speak for Islam, a claim with particular resonance in the Islamic Republic.Footnote ³²

The second point involves one of the ironies of the strategies of the religious reformers. The fracturing by some of them of the traditional systems for establishing authority; their translation of the Quran, collections of Hadith, and many other works into vernacular languages; their encouragement of literacy so that individuals could engage with the sources themselves; their assault on all ideas of earthly intercession for man with God; their great emphasis on the individual moral responsibility of each believer, summed up in the idea of man as the Khalifat Allah, God's trustee on earth, which gained wide currency in the twentieth century; indeed, the fashioning of the individual human conscience as the platform on which an Islamic society would be built, opened the way towards a ‘priesthood of all believers’ and a reduction in the authority of religious leaders, in particular the ulama. It is a moot point how far such developments have gone, or may go. Arguably, they are well-developed amongst Muslim communities in the West, but in South Asia they are surely confined to the highly educated, for instance, those who might participate in preaching or reading groups.Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, this strategy of authority may in time weaken what it set out to support.

At this point, let us review the strategies adopted in the religious sphere: there is the rejection of the Mughal/Persian inheritance (amongst the Sunnis); there is an embracing of Arab sources of authority represented in enhanced engagement with Hadith; and more particularly, there is the focus on the Prophet as the model. Alongside these strategies there is the revolutionary shift towards rooting authority in society at large; part of this process was the development of organization, which might embrace society, and project a brand. With the development of brands there came oppositional styles, sectarianism, and its role in boosting the authority of brands, or indeed individuals. Finally there was that ambivalent relationship with the authority of colonial rule.

Unani Hakims, medical leaders

Authority was just as central to the role of the medical doctor as it was to the religious leader. In considering the strategies of Unani hakims we find many echoes of those adopted by religious leaders. Excellent recent research on Unani hakims in nineteenth and twentieth century India has indicated the richness and complexity of the strategies adopted. I draw out three main strands.

The first involved a shift towards Arab cultural resources and the authority of religion and ultimately community. Thus, as Seema Alavi has shown so well, we note the abandonment of Mughal understandings of Unani Tibb supporting health as an aristocratic virtue, with its copious literature in Persian, in favour of the envisioning of Unani Tibb as a science, supported by a growing Arabic literature, often of a doctrinal sub-Wahhabi nature.Footnote ³⁴ In the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries this shift was enhanced by the East India Company, which welcomed Unani Tibb as a science. One would have thought that it would be but a short step for leading Unani hakims, working in an Arabic-dominated discipline, to incorporate the authority of that increasingly powerful contemporary model, the Prophet. But no, the drive here came from those Alavi terms ‘new hakims’, those from outside the great medical families, major users of newspapers to advertise their wares. They really needed the extra authority which the Prophet could bring to their work. Once the door was open, however, the Prophet's authority was quickly incorporated into Unani practice as a whole.Footnote ³⁵ By the twentieth century, Shibli Numani had taken the possible sources of authority one stage further, describing Unani Tibb as ‘Islamic Medicine’. This latter development was strongly resisted by the greatest hakims of the day, the Azizi hakims, the founders of the Lucknow school of modern Unani practice, and Hakim Ajmal Khan, the founder of the Delhi school of modern Unani practice. Their opposition, however, was not enough to prevent a medical tradition, once widely-shared by Hindu and Muslim, becoming an icon of Muslim identity and receiving its authority substantially from a Muslim past.Footnote ³⁶

The second strand of strategies flowed, as in the case of the religious leaders, from the decline of aristocratic and government patronage under the British, and the need to root Unani Tibb more firmly in Indian society—to indigenize it. Alongside this there was the need to defend it against Western biomedicine and the rationalizing practices of the colonial state. Print, the newspaper press and book publishing, played an enormously important role in mediating these changes, creating a medical public sphere in Urdu, indeed, becoming a source of authority itself. So Unani Tibb became the ancient medicine of Hindustan, its methods and prescriptions closely aligned to the local environment and Hindustani constitutions, as mulki medicine, so much more sympathetic to Indians than that offered by the British.Footnote ³⁷ So hakims set out to root their prescriptions much more deeply and widely in the wealth of medicinal plants offered by India. By the twentieth century, they were, like the ulama, forming All-India organizations, first in 1910 as a joint organization with the Ayurvedic practitioners, and then from 1911 in a breakaway conference led by the Azizi Hakims of Lucknow and focussed solely on Unani hakims. Both organizations had the same basic purpose of rationalizing their traditions and promoting their interests to government. Of course, the All-India Unani Tibb Conference of the Azizi Hakims was soon captured by Muslim communitarian purposes. The outcome was that a set of medical practices handed down through great families of hakims, from which they derived authority, came to be part of a national brand linked to the Muslim community, with much of its authority derived from its supposed indigenous roots, its national organization and its Islamic impress.

The third strand involves the relations of the hakims with the authority of their colonial rulers. They had in general a much easier and closer relationship than the religious leaders. From early on they worked effectively with the British in public health matters.Footnote ³⁸ The Ajmal Khan family of Delhi and the Azizi hakims of Lucknow, like the ulama of Deoband and Farangi Mahall, both institutionalized the teaching of their disciplines after British models by creating, as Barbara Metcalf has shown us in the case of Ajmal Khan, ‘formal schools with paid staff and fixed requirements to replace their personalistic informal settings of family homes and apprenticeship’.Footnote ³⁹ Anatomy and surgery were added to the disciplines covered by the Unani hakims, certificates marked the successful completion of the course, and inspection by government was encouraged. Powerful drivers behind the reshaping of the transmission of the medical tradition were not just the knowledge that government was increasingly concerned to regulate medical practice, but the need of the elite hakims to assert their authority over the host of ‘new hakims’ who had begun to practice. Most striking was the way in which both these great families of hakims drew on British authority to augment their own. British officials, as Barbara Metcalf tells us, graced every significant occasion in Ajmal Khan's institutionalization of Unani reform down to 1916 when Viceroy Hardinge laid the foundation stone of his Tibbi College in Delhi.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hakim Abdul Aziz purposely aligned the inauguration of his Takmil-ut-Tibb College in Lucknow with the day of the coronation of Edward VII in 1902.Footnote ⁴¹ This said, whilst noting the extent to which these elite hakims had reconfigured their authority, and drawn on their imperial rulers in doing so, we should note, as Guy Attewell has emphasized, that a degree from one of the new Colleges did not entirely displace the traditional forms of authority represented by the teacher's ijaza or by belonging to a great family of hakims. The fullest authority now rested on several pillars.Footnote ⁴²

Literary leaders

Moving into the literary sphere we find further echoes of the strategies of religious leaders and Unani hakims, as Muslim writers, robbed of aristocratic patronage and forced to relate to a more prosaic English-dominated world, set out to find authoritative modes of expression. At the heart of the process were those dominant figures in late-nineteenth century Urdu literature, Muhammad Husain Azad and Altaf Husain Hali. There was a reaction against Persian models, against the ornate and flowery products of a failed courtly culture. So, in the 1870s, Azad laments the heritage of artifice which Persian has left with Urdu and the problems it gives Indians in writing and translating English.Footnote ⁴³ So, too, Hali, while working on English-Urdu translations in Lahore, talks of his growing feeling for English literature as that for Persian ‘began gradually to diminish’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In these same years Nazir Ahmad produced in his Taubat-an Nasuh what C. M. Naim has described as one of the most appalling scenes in Urdu literature, when Nasuh piles his son's collection of old Persian and Urdu literature into the courtyard and burns it.Footnote ⁴⁵

There is also that shift towards Arab inspiration, which is well-expressed in Hali's great Musaddas, his elegy on the rise and fall of Islam. ‘Poetry’, he wrote in his introduction to the first edition, ‘has been bequeathed to the Muslims as a legacy by the Arabs for the purpose of awakening the community’.Footnote ⁴⁶ He forsook Persian rhetorical style in fashioning the elegy, as Shackle and Majeed suggest, for ‘the more virile model of Arabic’, favouring a distinctive (and unusual) Arabic metre.Footnote ⁴⁷ He filled the poem with quotations from the Quran and Hadith and adorned it with many Arab names, for instance, the great centres of Arab culture in Spain. He talks of the ‘rain of the Arabs’ making the desert green, as of course, he suggests, the British were also doing in contemporary India.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Prophet appears at the heart of the elegy as the active agent fashioning a new social and moral order.Footnote ⁴⁹ The model of the Prophet Hali presents, as Shackle and Majeed have astutely observed, owed ‘as much to Victorian values as to any putative Islamic ones’. Important was valuing frugality, cleanliness, sobriety, self-discipline, self-improvement and most importantly time. Thus, the Arab inspiration was deployed to reawaken the community and that of the Prophet to support a vision of the ideal Muslim as a Weberian Protestant.Footnote ⁵⁰

Hali may have stressed Arab inspiration in literature and life, but both he and Azad were no less keen in their field, indeed embarrassingly keen, on English models, much more so than were the religious leaders and Unani hakims. So, in a famous lecture given to Lahore's Anjuman-e Punjab in May 1874 Azad called for a new Urdu poetry based on English models.Footnote ⁵¹ And in his masterwork of 1880, Ab-e Hayat (Water of Life) refers to the ‘English language [as]. .a magic world of progress and islah for our literature’.Footnote ⁵² What Azad particularly valued was the directness of English literature (dare I say its Anglo-Saxon quality) which would enable Urdu literature to break out of tradition, artifice and self-reflexivity.Footnote ⁵³ Hali, in his Introduction to Poetry and Poetics of 1893, in which he intended to transform Urdu poetry, advocated the development of a simple ‘natural’ poetry, drawing on the authority of English writers, among them Milton and Macaulay. We do not know if he knew of Macaulay's notorious Minute on Education of 1835, with its lofty dismissal of all Asian literature. We do know, however, that in all the 83 chapters of his Introduction he does not refer once to the achievements of Persian poetry. Authority was only to be found in the West, and this was to continue to be the case into the twentieth century as ‘natural’ poetry metamorphosed into the socialist realism of the Progressive Writers Movement.Footnote ⁵⁴

Rulers

Finally, I turn to rulers, where we can see many of the same strategies of authority adopted but with one or two interesting twists. Let us consider the imperial British. After the Mutiny Uprising of 1857 their pretext of exercising power in the name of the Mughal emperor, whom they had held a virtual hostage, was stripped bare. They needed a source of authority greater than the declaration of November 1858, in which Queen Victoria, now Queen of India, undertook to mind the traditions and seek the improvement of her subjects. So, paradoxically, at a time when all forward-looking Indians were rejecting Mughal/Persianate forms, and embracing Arab, Islamic or Western models, the British chose the Mughal model as the face of their authority.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Mughal durbar, as Bernard Cohn explained in one of his most influential articles, became the arena in which British political authority was expressed, although its rituals were transformed from those of incorporation to those of hierarchical subordination. Durbars were held at all levels throughout India. Then, in the 1870s Victoria was aligned more specifically with the great Mughal/Timurid heritage of power being made Queen-Empress at a huge durbar, not in Calcutta, the British capital, but in Delhi, the old Mughal capital. The coronations of Edward VII and George V were celebrated at similar Delhi durbars in 1903 and 1911.Footnote ⁵⁶ Viceroy's, like Indian royalty of the past, would at ceremonial moments ride elephants; it was doing so, while entering Delhi in 1912, that Viceroy Harding was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb. With the adoption of Mughal forms to express authority, there came, as Tom Metcalf has shown us so well, the casting aside of European classical style in architecture and the adoption of the Indo-Saracenic style, as the means to represent political authority in stone. Arguably, the ultimate British claim to Mughal authority from the past was the decision, announced at the 1911 Coronation durbar, to move the capital of British India to Delhi. The irony was that Indo-Saracenic, the architecture of British appropriation of Mughal authority, was not found to be suitable for New Delhi.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the post-colonial states of Pakistan and Bangladesh most of the strategies of authority we have reviewed come into play. Both Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan and Zia ul-Rahman in Bangladesh, generals with the blood of their predecessors on their hands, sought legitimacy in programmes of Islamization, opening the door to vastly increased Arab influences and in the case of Pakistan's Auqaf department a Sunnification of its monuments.Footnote ⁵⁸ Both Zia ul-Haq and Zia ul-Rahman annexed the authority of the Prophet to their cause, the former gracing his Islamization programme with the title Nizam-e Mustafa, the Prophet's System, and the latter making Eid un-Nabi, the Prophet's Birthday, a national festival. Leaders have also sought to root their regimes more deeply in society. Thus, from the beginning of Ayub Khan's reign in Pakistan Sufi shrines, as Robert Rozehnal tells us, came to be ‘celebrated as sacred national spaces while pre-modern Muslim saints. . .[were] publicly embraced as poets, social reformers and protonationalists’.Footnote ⁵⁹ And then, between bouts of martial law, they have sought the authority of the people through the ballot box. There has been some resort to Western models of authority. Jinnah, in everything from his Savile Row suits to his constitutionalism, supported them. Arguably, so did Bangladesh's Mujib ur-Rahman in his vigorous secularism. But then, towards the end of the twentieth century, as politics indigenized and geo-political frameworks shifted, the authority of Western models seemed to fade, as they have been appropriated and reshaped by Muslim societies.