The transnationalization of Islam

The politics of transnational Islam has been analysed extensively with respect to Sunnism as well as Shi’ism.Footnote ⁶ But non-ideological, intellectual and educational flows have not benefited from the same attention. The Islamic legacy is particularly rich in this domain primarily because of the role that prestigious universities have played, similar to those of European institutions of the same kind during the medieval and modern eras when Salamanca, Coimbra, Sorbonne, etc., attracted scholars from distant provinces and countries to learn and debate in Latin. Al Azhar is a case in point. Founded in the tenth century, this Islamic version of the universitas has attracted Muslim students from all over the world and has taught them Islamic law, astronomy, philosophy, medicine and logic in Arabic. In 1961, new, secular and modern subjects were added to the curriculum after Al Azhar was established as an official component of the Egyptian university system by Nasser, an evolution suggesting that such a transnational institution recognized all over the Muslim world was also part of a national arrangement.

Whilst Al Azhar is the most significant example of this kind in the Middle East, there have been others in Asia—the meta-region on which this Special Issue concentrates. The Aligarh Muslim University is a case in point, even though it does not carry the same prestige.

The Aligarh Muslim University harks back to the ‘Aligarh movement’, named after a small town near Delhi where it took shape in the nineteenth century, in reaction to the trauma that the 1857 Revolt had been for the erstwhile dominant Muslim community.Footnote ⁷ Through this movement, elite groups have invested in education in order to reinvigorate their community.

The architect of the Aligarh movement, Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) reacted to this trauma by reforming his community intellectually, assuming that Western science was not at all incompatible with Islam. With this goal in mind, he founded the Scientific Society in 1864. However, his action did not fully begin to develop until five years later when, finally retired, he made a trip to England to visit Oxford and Cambridge. He returned home with a plan to modernize education that would be embodied in the ‘Aligarh movement’, named after the city where he held his penultimate post and where he founded a school in 1875, and the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College two years later.Footnote ⁸ Modelled after Cambridge, this institution—which became a university in 1911—had an English department and an ‘Oriental studies’ department, symbolizing Syed Ahmad Khan's philosophy of reform, to achieve a synthesis of knowledge that would allow his community to enter the modern era without losing its soul. Aligarh gradually attracted foreigners. Amongst its alumni, Aligarh Muslim University, boasts a Turkish Ambassador to Afghanistan, a Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka, a Senior Vice President of the African National Union from Zimbabwe, the Managing Editor of the Jeddah-based publication, Aran News and the Managing editor of another newspaper of Jeddah, the Saudi Gazette.Footnote ⁹

Lately, Aligarh Muslim University has been connected to the Muslim world because its professors have started to teach in the Gulf countries, rather than because of its attractiveness to Muslim students.Footnote ¹⁰

Parallel to the ‘Aligarh movement’, another movement developed in reaction to the repression of the 1857 Revolt in Deoband, another town again situated not far from Delhi. Education was also its driving force in order to reinvigorate the Muslims of India, but the Ulema who initiated the madrassah of Deoband followed a revivalist agenda. However, these men were keen to defend Islam by using new methods. The Deoband seminary promoted knowledge of hadith, the sharia (Islamic law) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), Arabic and Persian grammar, Greco-Arab medicine, the history of Islam, philosophy, medieval geometry and astronomy. But the language of instruction was Urdu—more accessible than Persian or Arabic—and the Deobandis followed a British-style educational system: their institution was not attached to any mosque (much to the discontent of local clerics, especially when an edifice specifically devoted to teaching was built in 1876). The seminary was divided into departments and classes with a permanent faculty following a predefined curriculum, and written examinations. Student dormitories on campus were modelled after British universities.

The Deobandis were in direct contact with the Arab world, which their members visited regularly—particularly to make the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj)—and which provided an increasing number of students. They did not view Indian Muslims as a separate community but as participating in the Umma.Footnote ¹¹ Prestigious teachers of Deoband travelled to Egypt, for instance Syed Rasheed Reza who was particularly under the influence of the Egyptian pattern, Al Azhar remaining a role model. After staying there he recalled:

The movements of Aligarh and Deoband suggest that education-centred reactions to a feeling of vulnerability like the one that prevailed amongst Indian Muslims after 1857 can be of different kinds, either modernist or revivalist.

Education-based networks amongst Asian Muslims are equally diverse today. On the one hand Dini Madaris (singular, madrassah) continue to play a major role, as is evident from their attractivity in Pakistan, be they Deobandi or not. In 2004, 34,500 foreign students had registered in the Dini Madaris of Pakistan, including more than 16,500 Afghans.Footnote ¹³ Among these Koranic schools, the religious complex known today by the name of Jamia Uloom ul Islamia in Binori Town (a merchant neighbourhood of Karachi) was founded in 1953 by a Deobandi cleric after whom it was named: Maulana Muhammad Yousuf Binori (1908–1977).Footnote ¹⁴

This maulana was later appointed to the Council of Islamic Ideology by General Zia. During the jihad in Afghanistan his madrassah became a bastion of resistance to the Soviets. It would appear that Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai—director of the institution at the time—was even responsible for the first meeting between Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden in Binori Town.Footnote ¹⁵

As early as February 1980, Binori Town sent students to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan—via Peshawar—where they created the Jamiat ul-Ansar (League of Partisans), which in 1988 spawned the Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, a jihadist movement formed to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁶ Binori Town attracted Afghan students, and three members of the Taliban government which was formed in Kabul in 1996 were trained there.Footnote ¹⁷

But, of course, Dini Madaris based in the Pashtun part of Pakistan trained an even larger number of Afghan Mujaheedins. Founded in 1947 by Maulana Abdul Haq, Haqqania madrassah in Akhora Khatak, on the road from Islamabad to Peshawar expanded considerably under the auspices of his son, Samiul Haq. In the 1970s, it had the capacity to accommodate about 1,500 students. A number of Mullah Omar's lieutenants studied there.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1985, 60 per cent of the madrassah students were Afghan, and nine ministers of the 1996 Taliban government were trained there.Footnote ¹⁹

Besides networks of Dini Madaris (there are many others amongst the Shias, Wahabis, Barelwis, etc.),Footnote ²⁰ other educational institutions rooted in Islam and reaching out to Asian students rely on a more modern repertoire, as is evident from the trajectory of the movement of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish spiritual leader whose organization has spread across Asia. Gülen inherited from the legacy of Sait Nursi a Turkish Sufi revivalist born in 1876 who created the Nurcu movement whose purpose was to re-Islamize the Muslims (especially when they lived in non-Muslim countries) in the pietist way. The Nurcu reading circles spread over Central Asia, especially after the break up of the Soviet Union. Nursi died in 1960, whilst Fethulla Gülen worked as an imam in Izmir and conceived a similar project to reform Muslim society through spiritualism and, innovatively, through education. He developed an educational network, the Hizmet (i.e. Service) movement, whose Muslim identity was not explicitly displayed. Instead, he promoted—in the name of his ‘total education project’—the need for an inter-religious dialogue as well as universalistic and humanistic values. Whilst movements like the Tabligh-i-Jama’at rely on the notions of dawa and tabligh, Gülen placed the stress on temsil, that is, the personal example of his disciples who form a cemaat (community) of believers, and who do not necessarily present themselves as Muslims.

This modus operandum has allowed the Hizmet movement to establish educational institutions—including High Schools and Universities—in about 150 countries, mostly in the Middle East and in Asia (including Central Asian Republics,Footnote ²¹ India and Japan),Footnote ²² where they are mostly known as ‘Turkish schools’ (rather than as ‘Muslim schools’) and are famous for the quality of their teaching and organization.Footnote ²³

In contrast to the Jihad-oriented Dini Madaris mentioned above, the Hizmet movement has always condemned anti-western terrorist actions. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Gülen wrote many texts against this kind of action.Footnote ²⁴ Other Sufi leaders have done the same. The Pakistani-born spiritual leader, Tahir-ul Qadri, whose transnational network spreads from Canada to Hong Kong, offers a similar illustration, though without a similar educational network.

Universities, Dini Madaris and schools like those developed by the Hizmet movement (modernist, revivalist or fundamentalist) are not the only building blocks of which learning networks are made. The papers which follow explore other dimensions pertaining to transnational Islamic organizations, personal charisma and pilgrimage.

Varieties of transnational Islam

The five papers which make up this Special Isssue illustrate different facets of the networks of learning and dissemination of religious knowledge which developed in the Muslim world across the Middle East and Asia.

Ho Wai Yip's case study focusing on the Muslims of Hong Kong exemplifies the migration-related issues mentioned above. The Hong Kong-Muslims were primarily transported by the British colonizers from one part of British Raj in India to their Chinese ‘possession’. The subsequent waves of Muslim migrants, including Chinese Hui refugees from World War II onwards, and, more recently, the Indonesian maids, were more numerous but have not shown the same interest in religious education. Only the South Asian Muslims developed an ‘inter-Asian madrasa network’ which relied on Pakistani clerics who spoke only Urdu. Ho Wai Yip, therefore, concludes that ‘the three diasporic Muslim groups express Islamic piety differently’, the Chinese Hui being in fact more socially integrated and eager to show ‘loyalty to the sovereign state’, which precluded transnational allegiance.

Kristian Petersen's paper illustrates another type of network: the traditional connection maintained by the litterati regarding the Middle Eastern sacred space and the Arabic language as the anchorage points of Islamic identity. Petersen's entry-point in this problematique is the career of a Chinese scholar, Ma Dexin, who travelled to Saudi Arabia in the nineteenth century to promote not only the hajj—he went himself to Mecca as a pilgrim in 1841—but also ‘Arabic as a crucial linguistic instrument for gaining Islamic knowledge . . .’. That was part of an effort to integrate Chinese Muslims in a global Islamic community, against the natural tendency of his compatriots and co-religionists to remain immersed in Chinese culture.

This tension between the desire to identify with a transnational umma and the irrepressible trend towards the vernacularization of Islam has been equally problematic for those movements which preach Islam across borders. On the one hand they adhered to the purity of their message; on the other, they had to adapt to the national (and sometimes local) contexts of their targets in order not to alienate potential followers. This dilemma is illuminated in the paper by Eva Nisa on the Tablighi Jama’at in Indonesia. She shows that to ‘gain access to Indonesian society, the Tablighi Jama’at has been particularly original in choosing a uniquely Indonesian institution as its entry point: the peasantren (Islamic boarding schools)’. This strategy was at odds with the direction that the founder of the organization, Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas, had shown since he did not believe in the effectiveness of Koranic schools and seminars. But it was successful, especially amongst young female Tablighis who have gradually ‘experienced the feeling of being a part of global umma not only from their attachment to this transnational reform movement but also from their experience of meeting fellow Muslims from other countries who belong to the same network’.

The papers by Radhika Gupta and Simon Fuchs introduce the networks of religious learning of a sub-set of the umma: the Shi’a. Gupta highlights the impact of the 1979 Revolution on the Shi’a of Kargil (India). Relations between Indian Shi’a and the sacred cities of Najaf and Qom hark back to the pre-colonial era when kings of the Awadh dynasty patronized shrines and urban developments in Najaf. During the Raj, Shi’a of Kargil continued to attend seminaries at Najaf and Karbala to become clerics and remained followers of Iraq-based mujtahids (authorities in jurisprudence). Circumstances changed after the Iranian revolution when a new generation of students was attracted to Iran—and by the Iranian government's eagerness to export Khomeini's revolution. Gupta emphasizes the rivalries between the Anciens et les Modernes in Kargil, after a new seminary influenced by the Iranian revolution started to propagate a reformist version of Shi’ism, a virtually political stand. She concludes that ‘networks of learning act as conduits not only for the dissemination of religious knowledge but also [as] socio-political discourses and ideologies from West Asia, which Kargilis had strong historical links with’.

Fuchs makes a similarly powerful point whilst studying the career of an Iraqi scholar, Mahdi al-Khalisi (1890–1963), whose attempts to combine Islam and social sciences in order to emulate the West bring to mind the educational reforms of Syed Ahmed Khan. Except that Fuchs shows that this son of a Najaf's cleric did not only engage with Western, Christian scholars in a cosmopolitan perspective, but also was primarily ‘influenced by the specific social and political climate in Iran’ where he had been exiled by the British in 1922. This is where he became interested in ‘reconciling new insights in the field of medicine with religion’. Khalisi went further East, to Pakistan, where his reformism again impelled intellectual debate and controversy. Simon Fuchs therefore concludes that the students of transnational flows of ideas would be well advised ‘to pay close attention to the particular contexts in which reformist teachings emerge rather than restricting our inquiries solely to transregional trends’.

This recommendation is congruent with that of Roland Robertson who refused to disconnect the global from the local and therefore recycled the word of ‘glocalization’ (coined by marketing experts) to capture the intersection of both notions.Footnote ²⁵ The networks scrutinized in this Special Issue, although they are not global but intra-Asian only, are no exception: to make sense of their dynamic, one needs to consider the situation of the receiving society—which is never a tabula rasa—and not only the flows emitted by some other external milieux.