The argument

This is the story of ‘little men’ between big Empires. It looks at careers of ‘outlawed’ Indian Muslim men of religion as they journeyed out of India and paused at the Asian intersections of nineteenth century Empires: the British, the Ottoman and the Dutch. The paper refers to the constellation of nineteenth century empires as ‘imperial assemblages’ and uses this as the context to study Muslim interconnectedness. Bringing biographies, journeys and imperial politics together, it highlights the ways in which Muslim ‘outlaws’ carved out a transnational world by moving across the imperial assemblages and using imperial knowledge, strategies and rivalries of the nineteenth century. The survey of British consular reports alongside Urdu texts produced by the actors reveals how Muslim transnationalism was carved at the cusp of the imperial and the Islamic repertoire of communication skills. British colonial rule, being an important spoke in the imperial wheel, enabled much of this transnationalism to weld together. Indeed, imperial networks offered the plank on which earlier forms of Muslim connectivity and its repertoire of knowledge and communication skills were easily grafted: diplomacy, kinship ties, the writing of commentaries on Islam and its sacred texts in unique ways, madrasa, and student contacts.

The nineteenth century transnational networks that emerged were different from the earlier connections Muslims had forged. These were less geared towards profits of trade and flow of Sufis and littérateurs, and instead exemplified the ‘history of international relations of ordinary individuals’ as they heeled into the ‘history of international relations of Empires’. This transnationalism was not narrowly anti-colonial in tone. It was not in a hurry to connect with other forms of diasporic nationalists, nor can it be reduced to an aspiration towards pan-Islam. It is hard to categorize precisely because it derived from a complex inter-play of imperial ‘international moods’ and rivalries. It was inclusive and inspired by the tanzimat inspired reformist zeal in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire that stamped nineteenth century ideas about the salience of the individual, science, politics and governance with scriptural legitimacy. The paper shows how this alternative Muslim ‘international’ linked with Muslim politics rooted within India.

Syed Fadl Alawi (1824–1901): a profile

Sayyid Fadl Alawi ibn Sahl Pukoya Tangal (1824–1901) was born in Malabar to a Hadhramaut Sufi family. He was the son of Sayyid Alawi (1749–1843) who had migrated from the Hadhramaut area into the Malabar region of South West India at the age of 17. Sayyid Fadl's father had joined the Alawiyya (Alawi) tariqa (Sufi order) established in Malabar by two Alawi leaders, Muhammad Hamid al Jafri and Sheikh Hasan al Jafri. The Alawi tariqa was located in Tarim, in southern Yemen, but it had originated outside Hadhramaut in the Iraq region from where migrants brought it to Tarim. In the thirteenth century the shifting of trade routes in the Indian Ocean, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea area, enabled the expansion of the tariqa out of Tarim into the larger trans-Asian diaspora.Footnote ¹⁷ The shift to the Red Sea opened new trading zones and linked cities in fresh ways all the way from China to Europe. Trade links enabled the mobility of religious scholars and ideas.Footnote ¹⁸ Scores of Hadhramaut immigrants travelled these pathways and settled in India.Footnote ¹⁹ But contacts with their homeland remained, not only hypothetically and genealogically but also physically. For instance some of them, like Sayyid Jafri, returned to Arabia and became muftis in Mecca.Footnote ²⁰

It is along these networks of trade and ideas that the family of Sayyid Fadl mapped its entry into India.Footnote ²¹ Sayyid Fadl's father headed the tariqa in Malabar after the death of its founders, the Alawi brothers. His father is considered one of the greatest saints of Malabar and the founder of many mosques in Ernad and Walluvanad. His shrine at Mambram became the site of pilgrimage and rituals that ranged from individuals being blessed as shahid (martyr) after an act of violence, to being celebrated once they had died in the cause of Islam.Footnote ²² In the 1840s–1850s, Fadl was quick to use this family clout to politically mobilize Muslim peasants to violent, religiously sanctified, protest against their British supported Hindu landlords.Footnote ²³

Sayyid Fadl wrote 19 tracts in Arabic during his lifetime. These ranged from religious ones, to more political exhortations in support of the Caliph, to ones more socially embracive written to glorify the Alawi Sufi tariqa. His writings reflected the wide canvas that he moved along. In 1852 the Indian Government, on the recommendation of the Malabar Commissioners H. V. Conolly and Thomas Strange, deported Fadl to the Hijaz. He was penalized for allegedly having incited Muslim peasants to violent protest against the British land tenure system and its beneficiaries the Hindu landlords. Later Fadl was also accused of being complicit in the murder of Conolly.Footnote ²⁴ Hijaz, one of the critical intersections of modern Empires, offered a new life to Fadl. It launched him as a middleman broker. As he straddled between the Hijaz and Istanbul he thrived on old and new networks of contacts. He is identified in British records as the ‘Moplah rebel’, an ‘outlawed fanatic’ and a ‘seditious wahabi’. And yet his remarkable career and ability to cash in on the British, Dutch and Ottoman rivalries in the region made him a sought after middleman for all Empires.

Sayyid Fadl in the Hijaz-the ruler of Dhofar

Fadl's politics were framed in that exceptional moment when modern Empires intersected in Asia opening rare opportunities to middlemen and brokers. The late nineteenth century was an extraordinary conjuncture where the push of modern capitalistic enterprise and its pitfalls came together in remarkable ways: travel, consulates, disease, death, war and diplomacy. This conjunction brought modern Empires to interesting cross-sections in the Arab provinces of Ottoman territory.Footnote ²⁵ The Hijaz area was one such critical site in point that offered amazing opportunities of imperial contestations as well as cooperation. The most glaring flashpoints were: the foregrounding of the Muslim subjects as they became significant referents for Empires eager to tide away domestic legitimation crises; the softening of subject people towards European nation states that was triggered in reaction to the bitter experience under the Ottoman administration; the constant European fear of hostile trans-Asiatic Muslim secret societies; and the discussions in these societies that brought the debate on Islam's temporal head and religion into the international public domain. This mosaic of imperial interstices energized men like Fadl. He tried to cash in on it to forge links with his new world and grafted onto it older notions of connectivity that derived from family, tribe, ethnicity and religious ritual.

In the Hijaz, Sayyid Fadl gained visibility via his political moves to become the ruler of Dhofar. Dhofar is a tract of country in Hadhramaut, in the Yemen. The Sultan of Muscat, an ally of the British, claimed to be its political sovereign. In 1876 Sayyid Fadl occupied Dhofar and declared himself its ruler claiming the sanction of the Ottoman government for his rule. Fadl's rule exemplified a remarkable state-building process at work that used both ‘modern’ imperial diplomatic know-how and strategies as well as older forms of Islamic and tribal idioms to carve out a political niche and transnational contacts. This combination of older notions of welding power with the rules of the new imperial assemblages enabled Fadl to become the independent ruler of Dhofar. It is noteworthy that the Asiatic imperial rivals: Britain, which claimed him as her subject; Istanbul, the Muslim seat of material power; and Mecca, the seat of spiritual power, were all complicit in catapulting him to power.

Fadl had acquired power in the region taking advantage of tribal feuds in which he was invited to partake by one faction, the Al Ghurrah, to ‘settle’ matters. He had met his hosts at Mecca where the pilgrimage was a meeting point not just to sort out spiritual but also political matters.Footnote ²⁶ F. Loch, the British Political Resident at Aden, was of the view that Fadl had used his Sayyid descent and his Sufi spiritual upbringing to make himself appealing and credible in the eyes of the local tribes, even though he was an outsider. At the same time his propaganda about his alleged proximity to the Porte (Ottoman government) and their sanction for his political ambitions created a favourable view of his wide political influence in the region. Loch wanted a British vessel to dock itself near Dhofar so that the people who had been ‘deceived’ into believing him would get a real sense of how the world outside regarded him.Footnote ²⁷

Loch's misgivings notwithstanding, it is significant that once Fadl had used both the spiritual and the material markers of Islam he began to consolidate his hold by playing politics with the feuding tribes in the region. He used the Dhofar people to fight the Garah Bedouins of the interior. He also extended his influence over the Mahrah tribes for a considerable distance westward. He ruled over the entire Al Ghurrah tribe who were located between Daurghot to the west and Rasmus to the east. Inland, about three days journey from the coast, there were about 3,500 of this tribe who also acknowledged him as their ruler. The Kathris, numbering about 2,000, in the northern frontier of the Al Ghurrah, also acknowledged his rule. But the independent Kathiris tribe (about 30,000) who occupied the country up to the confines of Soor did not acknowledge him. He also had friendly relations with the Mahrah tribe. He had no contact with the tribes eastward of Dhofar. The Bedouins did not acknowledge him either.Footnote ²⁸ Once he consolidated his hold in the region he made the town of Salahah his capital.

Dhofar had immense agricultural potential. The area produced gum, olibanum, myrrh, aloes and cotton. The yearly produce of olibanum was valued at US $30,000. It also produced sufficient wheat, bajri, jowari and pulses to feed its people. But expertise was needed to exploit it to the fullest. Fadl tried to use his trans-Asian contacts to do just that. Thus, for instance, the country had an abundance of rubber trees but no one who knew how to make rubber. Fadl asked his wazir, Sayid Abdal Rehman bin Hosain bin Sahl, to go to British India and use his family contacts to bring back people who knew the procedures for the manufacture of rubber. He was not shy of tapping his former British masters if it suited his interests. Thus, eager to earn commercial profits, he sent his wazir to Bombay to urge the British to send their steamers to dock at his ports once a month as they moved from Aden to Bombay. He was happy to negotiate with other European Companies also for these benefits. And as an inducement for the British Agent at Aden to agree to this arrangement he said that if the amount of freight on each ship load of cargo did not amount to US $200 he would make it up to that sum. And in the event of the freight exceeding that amount all of it would be paid to the Company.Footnote ²⁹

Fadl relied on the profits from trade at the harbours dotted within Dhofar. He charged a duty of 5 per cent ad valorem on all imports and exports at each of the ports. There were about 60 civil and military persons scattered in various villages who acted as tax collectors.Footnote ³⁰ It was also reported to Loch that even though people resented paying this tax they paid it because the, ‘Sayid is considered a learned man’ in the area.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, his wazir always referred to Fadl as a ‘saint’ and a ‘holy person’ especially when he was urging someone to pay heed to him.Footnote ³²

While using imperial strategies of tax collection he never ceased to cash in his ‘holy man’ card—a family legacy. He relied on various versions of Islam for state-building—indeed, using it as it suited him best to further his temporal ambitions. Thus in 1877 when he found that people were suffering from scarcity of food, price rise and economic hardships because of the spread of a fatal disease in cattle and drought conditions, he explained it to the people in religious terms. He said that had they paid the 2.5 per cent alms in accordance with the precepts of the Koran they would have been saved from these troubles. Using this religious card he went on to make economic benefits as he began collecting alms from the people. The use of this religious ploy also helped him stall the march of some of the distressed who were looking towards the Sultan of Muscat to come and salvage them.Footnote ³³ Following a very reformist and monist interpretation of Islam he showed no tolerance for tribal customs of magic and sorcery. Thus in 1878, 80 individuals of the Al Ghurrah tribe (Fadl's main supporters) were imprisoned on charges of practising magic. They were put to torture until they confessed.Footnote ³⁴ And this of course triggered tribal resistance,Footnote ³⁵ as did his efforts to interfere in the political economy of the region.Footnote ³⁶

However, despite the Al Ghurrah turn around Fadl did not meet the same brutal fate as Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of the North West frontier.Footnote ³⁷ This was largely because he played on his trans-Asian contacts and his loose idea of the extraterritorial. This included spreading propaganda about the support he received from the Ottoman Government and the friendship he maintained with the British. Thus the tribes, like the Kathiris, who were in the minority compared with the Al Gurrah, stood by him. They allied to Fadl in self-interest and supported him, remaining steadfast in their support because he had convinced them that he had contacts both with the British and with the Ottomans.Footnote ³⁸ However, the clash of the tribal notions of temporal power with those upheld by Fadl became his ultimate undoing. The rivals allied with the sultan of Muscat and succeeded in ousting him from Dhofar in 1879.Footnote ³⁹ Fadl had to take refuge in Istanbul.

The Politics of the extra-territorial: Sayyid Fadl in Istanbul

Modern empires depended on consulates as they reached out worldwide. Consuls often resented the restrictive regulations imposed on them by host countries and the accountability and responsibility that framed their operations.Footnote ⁴⁰ In contrast, the politics of extra-territoriality, when played via a broker like Sayyid Fadl, seemed remarkably seamless and free from such concerns. This made people like Fadl both an asset and a liability for modern Empires that competed for his assistance. The British, too, used Fadl even though their political rhetoric about him as a ‘fanatic’ and ‘outlaw’ continued. They always panicked when reports arrived of Ottoman overtures towards him. This was more than evident in the first few British reactions to reports on the career of Fadl.

The first report, conveyed by a Khojah merchant, of Ottoman sanction for Sayyid Fadl's rule in Dhofar created alarm in British circles. The Foreign Department at Simla urged the Secretary of State for India to confirm with the Porte if Fadl's claim of their support were correct. W. F. Prideaux, the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, conveyed to the Government the Sultan of Muscat's counter claim to Dhofar. He wanted to take immediate action against Fadl as he found him more despicable than the wahabis. A man ‘whose tenets go far beyond wahabeeism, and whose aims and views are, if I may use the expression, those of an irreconcilable to Christianity and British rule, cannot but prove prejudicial to British interests in south Arabia’.Footnote ⁴¹ And yet, so significant and crucial was the role of middlemen like Fadl that Prideaux was against any move that would permanently antagonize the ‘dangerous fanatic’. He therefore negated and questioned all claims of the Sultan of Muscat and urged the Government of India to move cautiously and refrain from aiding the Sultan of Muscat to re-establish his suzerainty over Dhofar.Footnote ⁴² Loch, the Political Resident, also advised caution. He wanted the Porte to clarify their stand on Fadl as that would also help dent Fadl's authority and call his bluff.Footnote ⁴³

Official misgivings about him notwithstanding, neither Fadl nor the imperial powers were willing to sever relations with each other. They lived a parasitic existence leaning on each other for digging their heels deep into trans-Asian politics. Indeed they had entangled ‘histories of international relations’. For the Ottomans, the post Crimean War (1856) period saw the unfolding of a series of domestic and foreign problems. Immediately after the war British attitudes towards the Ottomans shifted from friendship to anti-Turkey sentiment. This was because of the ebb of Russophobia in London following the Russian defeat at Crimea. The loss of this key European ally went hand-in-hand with the tanzimat reforms of the period. These were motivated to get the Empire good press and allies in Europe by welding the Empire around a non-denominational ‘secular’, inclusive ideology: being Ottoman rather than Muslim. A universal law and equality for Muslims and non-Muslims before it were the cornerstones of this new identity. As was the idea of archaic constitutionalism as reflected in the effort to consult leaders of communities in decision-making. However, by the mid 1860s it was clear that the tanzimat reforms had their shortfalls: they created a crisis of legitimacy for the centre and paved the path for autocracy. They threatened also the religious lobby which revived and demanded Islamic constitutionalism with Islamic jurisprudence—fiqh— at the centre of any uniform law.

This turmoil was compounded by the additional task of combating Britain's increasing influence, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, in what were Ottoman fringes: the Yemen and Persian Gulf and the Southern rim of the Arabian peninsular. The fear of Britain and the foreign relations debacle in the Turko-Russo war (1877–1878) coupled with the looming financial crisis gave both Caliph Abd al-Aziz (1861–1876) and his successor Abd al-Hamid II (1876–1909) the justification to lean on Islam as a quick-fix solution to their problems.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the 1880s Abd al-Hamid brought back Islam as the legitimating ideology to check the rising tide of ethnic nationalism at home and British and Dutch imperialism abroad. He hyped the pan-Islam card and used it as a banner to unite the Empire and reach out to Muslims globally to tide away his deficit of legitimacy at home.Footnote ⁴⁵ As the Ottoman gaze shifted away from the Levant into hitherto peripheral Arab provinces of Empire and beyond, brokers like Fadl had a field day. Fadl played these imperial tensions to his advantage.

He made his way into the upper echelons of Ottoman society using his contacts with Ottoman Sultan's Chamberlain, Osman Bey. While he enjoyed the hospitality of the Ottoman Pasha he remained in contact also with the British Resident at Istanbul, who, in 1880, reported his meeting with Sayyid Fadl and made a note of the friendly overtures he made towards the British. In fact Fadl said that he was desirous of establishing commercial relations between Dhofar and India and in drawing British shipping to his ports. But most noteworthy was his praise of the British government in India as an exemplar of the ‘respect’, ‘justice and protection’ it offered to Muslims.Footnote ⁴⁶ He said he had reported this to the Ottoman Sultan and familiarized him with the efficient redress mechanisms via committees and enquiries that operated in India with regard to any acts of oppression against the Muslims. He had urged the Sultan to follow the British model in Istanbul.Footnote ⁴⁷ Fadl was playing interesting politics here, given that the protection of Muslim subjects globally was the key to imperial games being played out at critical geographical cross-sections in Asia.

Indeed Fadl played on the British critique of the Caliph as well. In the process he transformed himself from a dreaded ‘outlaw’ to a useful Muslim subject whose authority was used by the British to sanctify their view of the Caliph. Thus, even as he leaned on the Ottomans for legitimating his power, he made it clear to the British Resident at Istanbul that he had come to meet him because he was sceptical of the future of the Ottoman Empire that had a good Pasha but a corrupt administration. It was significant that he projected the British as the preferred political sovereign in the Muslim world in the likely event of the Ottoman collapse. He said: ‘the condition of the Turkish Empire was very critical, and in the event of a general collapse taking place he wished to have the friendship and to be under the protection of England, to whom all the Arabs looked as a just and righteous power’.Footnote ⁴⁸

But, more importantly, by faulting the Ottoman Pasha in his duties as Caliph which he defined specifically as providing ‘justice and impartiality to all classes of his subjects’, and praising the British government on precisely these fronts, he questioned Ottoman claims to global superiority on the grounds of it being an overseer of Muslims globally—the highest reference point of authority.

He could swing to the Ottoman side too when it suited him. In 1888 he created a stir in the British official circles with the news that he had brokered a deal between some Indian Muslim merchants of Bombay who lived in Medina and the Porte by which the former had offered to influence the Indian hajis not to use any other steamships except Turkish ones to travel to Mecca. This was seen as a way of denting British commercial interests in the region. A Bombay merchant, Abdullah Arab Moonuffer, who originally lived in Bombay but had recently become a Turkish subject and resided in Medina, visited Istanbul. Here, he used Fadl's influence to reach the Sultan and proposed that if he received his sanction and help he ‘could induce the head of the Mahommedan community in India to advise their co-religionists not to come on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and [not] to take passage in any but Turkish steamers’. These he argued could be dispatched by the Porte to Bombay and Calcutta for carting pilgrims.Footnote ⁴⁹

Abdulla Arab, in conjunction with Fadl, was not content with only sabotaging British commercial interests, he also hinted that he could help in restoring the waning authority of the Caliph as the spiritual head of all Muslims. He proposed that Indian pilgrims, once on Turkish ships, should be ‘considered under the protection of the Turkish Government and treated as its own subjects’. Abdulla Arab played on the Pasha's wishful thought that his authority as the Caliph drew all Muslims to him despite his corrupt administration and apathy towards their problems. He convinced the Pasha that British Indian subjects would happily become subjects of the Porte, as ‘they would be glad to be under the special protection of the head of the Muhomedan religion and would have nothing to do with the British government until their return to India again’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Of course this latter suggestion touched the ambition of the Pasha to be called the ‘Caliph of the faithful’. He happily agreed to send Turkish steamers and extend protection to Indian pilgrims if Abdullah Arab could first go to India and obtain the cooperation of the chiefs of the Muslim community there. Sayyid Fadl, with his wide network of contacts in India, supplied him with letters of introduction addressed to all important Muslim heads of regional states and Abdulla Arab proceeded with these to Bombay. A clearly alarmed British Foreign Office appealed to the Government of India for help. It said, ‘[we] trust the Indian government will take such measures as they may think proper in dealing with this man. . .his object is not only to deprive British shipping of Indian pilgrim traffic but [also] to undermine the influence of the British Government with its Mahomedan subjects in India’.Footnote ⁵¹

Indeed, the India Office always feared that the Porte was inclined to use Fadl in the Arab area ‘as an agent’.Footnote ⁵² For instance, Fadl's claims that the Ottomans would help him with ships and troops to re-establish his hold over Dhofar in the Hadhramaut area was viewed by the India Office as a way by which the Porte would extend Ottoman sovereignty over the region using Fadl as a ploy. Even though the claims of the Sultan of Muscat, who had wrested back Dhofar from Fadl, was something the British did not support entirely, yet they were with him and against Fadl on this issue. This was because they saw Fadl as a conduit for Ottoman political expansion.

At the same time Fadl's friendly and encouraging overtures towards the British as he brokered between them and the Ottomans only complicated matters for the Porte and made it anxious. In 1878 Fadl caused a flutter in Istanbul when he sent an appeal to Francis Loch at Aden appreciating the efforts he was taking to extend British administrative control to those parts of the Arabian southern rim where the Ottomans had failed to provide any effective control. He spoke in particular about the ships with Turkish red flags that were unregistered and had owners who claimed Arab descent, and who visited free ports and indulged in loot and plunder. These big ships also ransacked small ships (buggalows) that had wrecked and plundered goods. Fadl complained that they, ‘even sell those whose skin is black’. Perfecting his diplomacy to its best he sarcastically said that British intervention in this part of Arabia was welcome as it will, ‘lead to the advantage of the High Government (Turkey) in the latter[’]s dominion where it does not organize any government, as the peninsula of Arabia; and we thank the English Government for offering its good offices and exertions in the advantage of the High Government Turkish nation’.Footnote ⁵³

But despite these political digs he was too important a broker to be dumped. In Istanbul Fadl was no ordinary visitor or clandestine spy. Instead, he flaunted his high status (Sayyid-card) and was the royal guest of the Pasha and stayed in the house of the Imperial Chamberlain, Osman Bey.Footnote ⁵⁴ His regal reception on arrival made headlines in the local press and caused much anxiety to the Bombay government who monitored his every move. Francis Loch from Aden was quick to report the details of the welcome Fadl received in Istanbul. He wrote: ‘Captain Mehmet Bey, one of the sultan's Aides-de-camp, went on board to receive him on behalf of his majesty and he was conducted at once to the imperial villa at Kloiz Kiosk, where he had an audience of the Sultan. . .he is a guest of his majesty during his stay in the residence of the Imperial Chamberlain Osman Bey’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Resident at Istanbul was urged to confirm the veracity of these reports. But he pleaded helplessness as the Sayyid, or descent from the Prophet, tag that Fadl carried made him a man of status in Istanbul and no one was willing to report on him.Footnote ⁵⁶

Fadl's transnational contacts: pan Islamism or Muslim transnationalism?

Fadl's career shows that Muslim transnationalism was not simplistically Caliph-centric. Rather, it was embedded in imperial forms and strategies, and straddled Empires even as it continued to tap into older forms of Islamicate contact-making.Footnote ⁵⁷ Fadl's trans-cultural contacts were expansive. In 1880 the British Resident at Istanbul was worried not just about his political contacts in the city but also about his contacts with English commercial agents in Istanbul via whom he wished to form a trading company for making money.Footnote ⁵⁸ Fadl straddled also over the vast trans-Asian military labour market as a military entrepreneur who could recruit with ease men from the labour markets as far east as Aceh, in Indonesia, Egypt and Morocco in North Africa, Kabul in Afghanistan, Istanbul, the Arab tribes in the Persian Gulf area and immigrant labour from India. In each of these places local entrepreneurs via whom he could influence Muslims were tied to him through marriage relations or professional deals and sometimes by bonds of tribal and Islamic welding.

The well known Acheh rebel Sayyid Abdul Rahman-ul Zahir, the principal instigator of the 1876 Acheh rebellion, was a Hadhramaut Arab by descent. He was introduced to the Ottoman officialdom by Fadl with whom he was connected by marriage. He emerged as an important individual in Acheh politics who, like his mentor, brokered for the Javanese Muslim with the Ottomans. Soon Acheh's dependence on him increased and the Caliph-centric pan-Islamic bubble gave way to a more embracive internationalist approach to solve problems.Footnote ⁵⁹ But Zahir faced a set back when Turkey gave only token support and no substantial help to Acheh.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Dutch moved in and crushed his rebellion and made him a pensioner with a monthly stipend of US $1,000. Zahir's supposed Ottoman clout was exposed. But he had shifted the popular discussions away from the Caliph as the universal referent of Muslims to career brokers like himself. In Penang and Singapore the Muslim community followed Acheh developments with interest. In both settlements financial and material help for the Achenese and middlemen brokers like Zahir was always forthcoming.Footnote ⁶¹

As the focus in Indonesia shifted to middlemen like Zahir the British had reason to worry. After all people like him were the ‘small men’ in the chain of transnational contacts Muslims ‘outlaws’ forged as they straddled modern Empires. Echoes of Acheh developments travelled across their networks and had the potential to stir trouble in India. In 1879 Francis Loch reported Zahir's visit to Aden and his transit to Mecca where he proposed to stay for a year. Loch had news from his Residency Interpreter, Saleh Jaffer, that Zahir while at Aden was in touch with Fadl and that he had also with him a huge retinue. Loch feared that as the two shared the same, ‘restless and active spirits and natures’ and as they were related in marriage they might pool together their men and resources and create a problem in the Dhofar region.Footnote ⁶²

For similar reasons the British Resident at Istanbul also worried about Fadl's network in Afghanistan. He was particularly worried when Fadl's predictions about ‘troubles’ in India and his convictions of Amir Abdur Rahman's inability to maintain himself unaided at Kabul proved correct in newspaper reports.Footnote ⁶³ But of most concern was the fact that Fadl had substantial contacts in India. In the Hijaz he was in constant touch with visiting Malabar Muslims. The British Resident at Aden, Captain Haines, felt that the deportation of Fadl to Arabia had helped him as it made him a living martyr. He was known to have carried on a correspondence with people in Malabar as late as 1900.Footnote ⁶⁴ Haines also reported that when Fadl was at Mocha (north west of Aden) Indian Muslims regularly arrived there to pay him homage. Later when he shifted to Mecca the British Vice Consul reported that he exerted a huge influence on pilgrims from India and Hadhramaut.

Despite Conolly's claims of having purged his family out of Malabar his circle of relatives was far too huge to be completely washed out.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is of course not to discount the rituals and ceremonies of martyrdom at Mambram that perpetuated and kept alive both his and his father's memory and ideology.Footnote ⁶⁶ His status in India loomed large also because of news and rumours of the importance he enjoyed in the Hijaz and Istanbul. Thus, even though Fadl had been deported from India, the security personnel in India understood the clout he wielded in the Hijaz and the networks that connected him across Asia. In 1881 Ahmed Gorukul Khan Bahadur, Inspector of Police in the Madras Presidency who had played a frontal role in cracking down on the ‘turbulent population of Malabar’ and thereby ‘incurring the enmity of Syud Fazl the deported priest’, feared for his life as he prepared to make a trip to the Hijaz. He submitted his passport to the Chief Secretary asking for adequate provisions for his ‘personal safety’ and ‘protection’ from Fadl. Fully realizing the seriousness of the problem his request was promptly forwarded to the British Consul at Jeddah.Footnote ⁶⁷ And Gorukul Khan had good reason for his concern. The Hijaz, especially Jeddah, was an arena where it was believed that Fadl had many contacts in the officialdom, local people and the visiting Indian population. Abd al-Rahman, his son-in-law, who frequented Mecca, and who was known to be ‘both active and intelligent’ was particularly instrumental in keeping these contacts alive.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the late nineteenth century improved facilities of travel to the Hijaz increased traffic in that direction. Travelling hajis, notables, ulema, merchants and all kinds of service professionals brought back to India stories from the region. These juxtaposed the corruption of the Caliph's administration and his callousness to visitors with the influence wielded by brokers like Fadl. Stories of the power and status he held in the upper echelons of Istanbul society always aroused interest in India. Many hoped that Fadl would nudge Ottoman Turkey to flex its political muscle vis-a-vis British India. He thus opened a window of hope and reprieve from the hegemony of the British. Very much like Javanese society, in India too people were getting more dependent on brokers and middlemen who offered reprieve from foreign rule.

In 1879 it was widely believed in India that Fadl was in touch with Indians in Istanbul, shared their anti-British sentiments and at one time had ‘contemplated going to Afghanistan to oppose the English’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Istanbul Fadl found an agile intellectual public sphere with which he was quick to connect. The city in the nineteenth century was a refuge of ‘runaway’ British Muslim subjects of all hues: mullas, rebels, renegades and runaway writers and newspaper editors. Again, in 1880 the Resident reported the huge influence Fadl had in Turkey where mosques were being used as recruiting grounds for him. He saw that in the mosque of Sultan Mehmet a Sheikh was preaching that for Fadl's assistance in recovering Dhofar, ‘every Mussulman should arm himself’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Reports of men and money pouring in from Morocco also sent a shiver down the India Office spine.Footnote ⁷¹

Fadl from 1880 until his death in 1901 contributed to the intellectual and political energy of Istanbul and helped project it as the hub of a vast Muslim network that was both Islamic as well as internationalist, and both Caliph-centred as well as diffused and heeled into imperial networks. The network was slippery and contingent on individuals, circumstances and institutions that used it. It oscillated between internationalism and tipped towards pan-Islamism depending on specific contexts. Thus Fadl could use this trans-cultural network to build his political career as an independent ruler of Dhofar. In doing so, as we saw, he could critique the Ottoman Caliph, suggest that the English could do a better job as protectors of Muslims, but at the same time superimpose Istanbul over Arab lands as the sacred space of Islam, and call it the ‘Empire of Islam’.

Even more striking was the contrast between at one level his praise of the British who he said were better than the Ottoman Caliph in protecting the religious and civil rights of Muslims and his simultaneous urgings to the Ottoman Sultan that foreign encroachments on Muslim territory would stop only by a ‘union of the people of Islam. By the aid of this great cause. . .we shall promote the patriotism of all Mussulmans and gain the admiration and approval of our co-religionists’.Footnote ⁷² This was indeed the best example of the tilting of the international networks to pan-Islamism. Indeed, in his writings from Istanbul his identification of the Caliph as the undisputed head of the Muslim networks was unquestioned. In two of his works, Tarikat al-Hanifa (1899) and Tanbih al-Ukala (1881), he refers to the Sultan Abd al–Hamid II as the ‘Caliph of Islam’ and praises his rule. In Tanbih al-Ukala he cites two traditions about the need to obey the Caliph. He says, ‘Who ever betrays the sultan is betrayed by God’.Footnote ⁷³

Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi (1818–1892): profile

Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi was born in 1818 in the qasbah of Kairana in the Muzaffarnagar district of modern Uttar Pradesh. He traced his intellectual genealogy to the Delhi Naqshbandiya Sufi Shah Waliullah and Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae Bareily.Footnote ⁷⁴ After an initial stint of home schooling with his alim father maulvi Khalilullah he moved to Delhi and Lucknow. At Delhi his private teachers were Maulana Imam Baksh Sahbai of the Delhi College. In Lucknow he was taught by mufti Saadullah. He also had contacts and initiations with numerous Chishti and Naqshbandi khanqahs.Footnote ⁷⁵ After the death of his father he set himself up in Kairana where he established a madrasa. In 1852, at the time of the Delhi College conversion controversy, he was requested by the ulema to take up the missionary challenge. This gained him political visibility and brought him to the notice of the local administration. He gained further notoriety in British circuits during the mutiny of 1857. Maulana Kairanwi was one of the rebel leaders from Kairana. At the Jama Masjid in Kairana every evening the mujahids assembled and before they were given any orders the following announcement was made: mulk khuda kaa. Hukm maulvi Rahmatullah ka (The country belongs to God. And the orders of Maulana Kairanwi are followed). Kairanwi's role in 1857 was therefore quite explicit and he was on the official hit list. But with the assistance of local Gujjar families he managed to flee and escape arrestFootnote ⁷⁶.

Kairanwi had an arrest warrant in his name and an award of Rs. 1,000/- for anyone who gave information about him.Footnote ⁷⁷ He wished to flee to Mecca, so he changed his name and travelled in disguise towards Surat via Delhi. From there he took a boat (badbani kishti) to Jeddah. In Kairana his huge riyasat where his family and workers (karindeh) lived was confiscated by the British and put up for auction. But Kairanwi started life afresh in the Hijaz. Moving between Jeddah, Mecca and Istanbul he spent a lifetime at the cusp of the British and Ottoman Empires in Asia. Indeed this unique imperial assemblage framed his life and became the template on which he built his transnational contacts.

Kairanwi wrote 18 books that were published from Delhi, Agra and Istanbul. He can be placed in the galaxy of early nineteenth century Muslim monist intellectuals who had used print and the Urdu vernacular to reach out to the Indian masses with advisory literature: individual adjustment to the new British political sovereigns.Footnote ⁷⁸ Like many of them, he wrote simultaneously in Arabic, Persian and Urdu with an eye to an audience outside India. Many of Kairanwi's writings, like his Persian text the Azalat al-shukuk (Destroyer of Doubts) published in Delhi in 1853, as well as the Urdu text Ibtalul Taslis (Demolition of the Trinity) also published in Delhi in 1876, were in the late nineteenth century Salafi intellectual tradition of Ottoman and Arab reformist thought.Footnote ⁷⁹ Very much like that literature he also aimed at inclusivity and used the scriptures as the accretive template which could accommodate diversity. He also was less interested in a narrow anti-colonial struggle, and more in a larger civilizational triumph for Muslims. He too was sensitive to the threat of Western ascendancy and tuned his writings towards achieving the transnational unity of the Muslim umma. He urged them to emulate science and rationality as these were not new but integral to their heritage.

Transnationalism at the cusp of Empires: Maulana Kairanwi straddles Mecca and Istanbul

Kairanwi grafted his transnationalism over the imperial networks that carpeted his new geographical space: the Hijaz and Istanbul. He used imperial fault-lines to manoeuvre British and Ottoman diplomatic and political repertoires to his advantage. At the same time he steadfastly held on to older forms of Islamic connectivity—the scriptures and oral traditions of their disseminations. In Mecca, Kairanwi attended the dars (lecture) of Sayyid Ahmad Dahlan who taught the Shafii jurisprudence. Kairanwi always asked him intelligent questions. Dahlan was so impressed by him that he met him separately one day to find out his background and details. This was the first time Kairanwi got an opportunity to narrate to him his public debates with Padre Pfander, and talk to him about 1857 and the problems of the Indian Muslims. Dahlan was so interested in this story that he invited Kairanwi and his companion Imadadullah Makki to his house the following day. Soon he asked Kairanwi to set up his own halqa-i-dars (circuit of lectures) at the haram-sharif (mosque at Mecca). As a mark of recognition he had his name included in the list of the ulema of haram. This not only gave Kairanwi a new found status in an international set up that truly Mecca was at this point of time, but it also made his financial situation in Mecca secure.Footnote ⁸⁰ Soon his dars became very popular, and his students obtained high positions. He remained continuously in touch with Indian affairs via pilgrims who came from there every haj season.

Kairanwi's presence in Mecca predictably drew the attention of the British Consulate. As he was in British records a marked 1857 outlaw—a mutiny convict with an arrest warrant. Significantly, his dars and later madrasa (1873) equally alarmed the Turkish officials who feared that continued British interest in the madrasa might make it their point of entry in the region. They feared that the madrasa may become the nodal point of foreign influence and pose problems for Turkish rule in the region. It could be used by the British to tweak Ottoman sovereignty in the Arab provinces, and thus this intellectual nest of a British subject became the flash point over which rival imperial sovereigns poised to assess each other.Footnote ⁸¹ There were, however, moments when the British and Ottoman officials agreed on the suspicious character of Kairanwi's madrasa and saw it as unacceptable and categorized it as the beginning of a ‘movement of a stranger who represented an outside country’ (ajnabi mulk kee tahrik). Such moments of collective concern happened when Turkish military men held positions of influence in the Hijaz. Thus in 1883 the Governor of Hijaz Nuri Pasha—a Turkish military man who always remained suspicious of Kairanwi's madrasa—in consultation with the British Consulate at Jeddah sent to the Caliph a damaging report on Kairanwi. The Maulana retaliated by sending his own version to the Caliph Abd al-Hamid II. Both for intellectual as well as political reasons Abd al-Hamid II was keen to hear Kairanwi, the troubled British subject. After reading both reports on him he invited Kairanwi to visit Istanbul, and asked the Governor to arrange for his travel.Footnote ⁸² Thus Kairanwi reached Istanbul in 1883 via imperial networks: consular cooperation.

In Istanbul, Kairanwi connected with the upper echelons of society and mastered imperial strategies to work his way through. He was already a familiar figure in Istanbul as he had visited the city in 1864 on the invitation of the Caliph Abd al-Aziz. The latter had invited him as he was curious to know his views on the missionary Pfander's claim that he had defeated him in a religious munazara in Agra. And this, as we shall see below, resulted in his writing Izharul Haq from Istanbul. In this second visit Kairanwi travelled to Istanbul along with the sadr mudaris of the madrasa-Maulvi Hazrat Noor, and his brother Maulana Badrul Islam. In his diary Kairanwi details the royal treatment he received as he travelled from the Hijaz to Istanbul, and how all the highest ranking Ottoman officials, like Nasim Bey, received him royally (shahnah istiqbal). He notes that he also received a khilat (robe of honour) from the Caliph and lived as a state guest. He was given a sum of money Rs 5,000 (1,000 qarash) and was given the title of payah harmain sharif. Finally, when he met the Caliph, it was quite clear that he was a state guest not only for the respect that the Caliph had for his scholarship and status as an ulema of the haram sharif, but also because he wanted to know via him the details of British rule in India. Kairanwi writes in his diary: ‘Jab main uthaa aur saamnei aaya Turki adab shahi kei mitabiq, phir kamal khushi sei uthkar meraa haath apnei haath mein pakar kei kahaa keih tumhaara haal sunnei kaa main mushtaq thaa.Iss liyei maine tumko bulayaa hai aur phursat mein main aur mulaqat achee tarah karunga aur kutch deir baatein karunga’. (The Turkish Sultan shook hands with me and said that he was very eager to hear about my circumstances and that is why he had invited me. And that he will talk to me in detail [about India and his madrasa] at leisure).Footnote ⁸³

Kairanwi, exonerated of all wrongdoing, returned to Mecca after several months of royal treatment in Istanbul. On this visit he established a direct link with the Caliph, and left behind a more permanent contact in Istanbul—his brother Badrul Islam Kairanwi. The Caliph honoured him with the charge of the Hamidiyah library (kutbkhaneih hamidiyah).Footnote ⁸⁴ Kairanwi himself returned to Istanbul several times for discussions, lived there for long stretches at times to have intellectual discussions with the ulema, to write and publish. But he always yearned to return to Mecca where he wanted to breathe his last.Footnote ⁸⁵ At the same time he never let go of his India connection and at one time requested to be sent back home just one last time.Footnote ⁸⁶ But his request was denied.Footnote ⁸⁷ He continued to be on the list of ‘disloyal’ people in the Meerut Police records,Footnote ⁸⁸ and with this new Istanbul connection the suspicion of the Foreign Office only increased. Colonel H. M. Henderson of the Foreign Department, quoted his spy in the Hijaz as reporting that the Ottoman Sultan had summoned Kairanwi to Istanbul to ‘intrigue with Indian Mussulmans’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Kairanwi straddled Mecca and Istanbul (1864–1900) and built his intellectual resources. In Mecca his focus remained his dars and madrasa. Kairanwi's lectures, writings and madrasa endeavours provided the intellectual underpinning to the imperially derived transnationalism of people making careers at the cusp of Empires. His intellectual engagements also exemplified a spoke in the larger trans-Asiatic wheel of intellectual reforms of the Islamic and western radical kind that was sweeping the Ottoman provinces in the late nineteenth century. This intellectual energy, often known as ‘Arab renaissance’ or ‘Ottoman tanzimat’ inspired reformist thought, was of course triggered in Istanbul and its Arab provinces (Syria, Lebanon, and Cairo). Here, from the late 1860s, reformist ulema and bureaucrat scholars reeled under the shock of the financial crisis and obstacles to reform posed first by Caliph Abd al-Aziz and then by Abd al-Hamid II. They attempted to understand the imperial crisis, the failed administrative (tanzimat) and constitutional reforms of the Empire, and the ascendancy of autocracy that legitimated itself with Caliphal authority. But reformists were energized by the more immediate threat of Western ascendancy in and around Ottoman territories especially after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878. Both the moderate ulema as well as the reformist bureaucrats who had lost favour in Abd al-Hamid II's Istanbul converged in the provinces (Syria, Lebanon and Egypt) away from the Ottoman core to fashion moral and political reforms that would connect Islamic societies, unite Muslims transnationally and highlight the accretive civilizational heritage of Islam. This more material and lateral connectivity rather than one that saw the Caliph as the normative figurehead was eventually meant to de-sacralize autocracy at Istanbul. The reformists in the provinces urged the ummah to unite politically and showcase its civilizational heritage: science, modernity, reason, interpretation and emulation. Differences of Islamic belief and practice had to be subordinated to this new reformist agenda and the scriptures were chosen as the ideal template on which Muslims could be united and within which their multiple beliefs framed. This meant not just demystifying the Koran and Hadith and opening it up to accommodate all, but it also meant de-sacralizing the Caliph.

Kairanwi used this great intellectual moment to harness Indian interests to this transnational or internationalist reformist cauldron. Indeed, he impacted it with some very India-specific reformist intellectual energy: Naqshbandiya Sufi tasawwuf with its efforts to bring a compromise between the more Sufi-inclined wahdat al-wujud (unity of being) and the relatively monist wahdat al-shuhud (unity of existence) ideologues, masnavis of Sufis, a range of Hadith texts used in India, and a de-mystification of the Koran as a book of not just revealed knowledge but of exceptional historicity, poetics, meter and rhythm. And he was not the only Indian scripturalist to be sucked into this intellectual project. Others like Siddiq Hasan Khan, the Nawab consort of Bhopal, plugged in happily into the intellectual ferment of the Ottoman provinces. Their books found wide circulation in Ottoman society and Arabic originals and Turkish translations were freely available. Thus Shihabuddin Alusis, the well known intellectual of Baghdad, travelled to Cairo and read the exegesis of Siddiq Hasan Khan. He also sent his son to India to train with him.Footnote ⁹⁰

Ottoman provinces in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt were at this time also the melting pot of other kinds of transnational reformist ideas. If Islamic reform and ideas of unity swept the region, so did French ideas of patriotism that showed the way to think of a united Muslim world comprising different nation states. Also noteworthy was the influence of western radical politics that urged people to rise transnationally, transcending religion and linguistic barriers and unifying against western capitalist ascendancy. Ilham Makdisi has shown the catalytic role the Arab theatre in Ottoman provinces played in triggering a unique kind of moral and political reform that also, like the religious reformists, aimed to push people to unite across class, ethnicities and sects. This kind of social mobilization connoted progress and the making of unity of all types of people—a social body. Popular theatre themes like the French Revolution radicalized thoughts in no small measure.Footnote ⁹¹ The translation drives and Arabic newspapers like the Al Hilal made Western ideas available in Ottoman Arab provinces. Reformists like Kairanwi who moved in the same area could not have been left out of these intellectual influences. It is worth speculating that the scripturalist reformists and the radical reformists were all imbued with the idea of transnational unity and progress intersected politically and strategically, even if they had their own very different ideological bases and material contexts for embedding the transnational. Indeed the pioneer of Arab theatre in the Ottoman provinces, Marun al-Naqqash (1817–1855), who introduced this western literary genre into Arab lands in the mid nineteenth century maintained close links with Jamal al-Din Afghani the most radical Muslim reformist of the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote ⁹²

Michael Laffan argues that it was in Cairo for instance that the ideas of Indonesian nationalism based on a modern Islamic state were conceptualized. The press and anti-British political movement in Cairo offered a more conducive conduit via which the deterritorial trajectories of the Indies Muslims could be seen as continuums of their various closures of space. Mere Caliph-sponsored pan-Islam failed to create the desired connect because the Caliph was too distant in space and language and not a part of Javanese political imaginary. Things had to happen over and above him in Cairo.Footnote ⁹³ In the case of India exiled ‘outlaws’ in the Hijaz and Istanbul offered a kind of transnational politics that deflected pan-Islamic aspirations away from the Caliph to more diffused networks that sprawled over and derived from both imperial and older forms of connectivity: political rivalries, consulates, print, telegraph, madrasa networks, pilgrimage, teachers, students, public debates, oratory and texts. Very much like the Indonesian case, Caliphal pan-Islam had little role in the creation of Muslim transnationalism. But unlike Indonesian runaway nationalists in Cairo, Indian ‘outlaws’ are hard to categorize as pan-Islamist or even as nationalists. And this is precisely because their transnationalism was contingent both on the history of imperial ‘international moods’ and their own self-driven ways of conducting ‘international relations’.

Kairanwi's career shows that he de-sacralized the Caliph and used him in his larger internationalist agendas as just another Asiatic imperial power. British colonial rule helped him in this task. The physicality that it provided to the Caliph in terms of enabling large numbers of people to travel and experience his corrupt rule in the Hijaz played a critical role in busting his imagined personal appeal. And yet, both British and Dutch governments continued to magnify the Caliph-centric pan-Islamic fears. The exiled ‘outlaws’ made use of this imperial time warp. They moved in to fill the gap created once the Caliph had been exposed and reduced in popular perception to just another indifferent Asiatic ruler. If this was one fault-line to be exploited the tensions within the Ottoman Empire also offered potential for transnationalists. Kairanwi exploited the friction between the Ottoman centre and the provinces. He derived more from the intellectual energy of the Caliph's adversaries-the modernist reform that was emanating from the Arab and African provinces of the Empire (Cairo, Syria, Lebanon and the Hijaz). And yet he continued to use Caliph Abd al-Hamid II as a patron whose association offered him clout vis-à-vis both the British administration and local Hijaz administration that was under Ottoman rule. His Madrasa at Mecca was sustained by his effective handling of imperial fault-lines both within the Empire and outside it. Its core nurtured older forms of Islamic connectivity, exemplifying the making of a social body based on the principles of unity, progress and civilization, all embedded in the divine scriptures, but also reaching out to referents in scientific and technical education, rationality, emulation and Sufi tasawwuf.

Madrasa Saulatiya: the Indic stamp on the transnational

What was Kairanwi doing in Mecca? In 1879 Abdur Razzack, the British Vice Consul, submitted a surprisingly non-alarmist report on Kairanwi noting that he had established a madrasa at Mecca from funds raised by donations of hajis and Indian notables. Razzack noted that both the madrasa and Kairanwi were highly respected not just by ‘people high and low’, but also by the Turkish Governor General of the Hijaz-Halat Pasha. On one occasion the Pasha visited the madrasa and ‘kissed the hands of the maulvi, who kissed him in return, and then shook hands with all who were standing’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1885 Razzack again reported that Kairanwi's private madrasa that had received funds from India stood out as a beacon of hope and light in the otherwise dismal state of education in the Hijaz region.Footnote ⁹⁵

Arriving in Mecca in the early 1860s as a fugitive from India, Kairanwi soon got involved in the affairs of the muhajirs (migrants) in the city. He was particularly incensed at the lack of educational facilities and absence of a standard syllabus in the Hijaz. Students read grammar, jurisprudence (fiqh), Quran commentary (tafseer), Hadith and yet did not show any intellectual sheen. They completed the text Tafseer Jalalain that is taught in Hindustan usually for a year, in seven years.Footnote ⁹⁶ Kairanwi was also intrigued that despite being regarded as the fountainhead of Islamic learning (deeni markaz), which attracted students and learned men from across the world there were no facilities at all in the Hijaz either for the intellectual growth or physical comforts of the muhajirs. Also missing were any adequate vocational and religious educational facilities for their children.Footnote ⁹⁷

Kairanwi, instead of reforming the existing system decided to set-up his own madrasa in front of the Kaaba. His critique of the intellectual grid of the Hijaz became the blueprint for the madrasa's objectives. He wanted his madrasa to be the pride of the world (markaziyat kee shan)—a truly international school that would hire ulema (religious teachers) proficient in different languages, admit students from all over the world, and boast of a syllabus that covered both religious (dini) and (dunyavi) worldly educationFootnote ⁹⁸. He wanted to set up a vocational school for muhajir children. Working towards this he held several meetings (ijtimah) with a cross section of people. Initially, he started a madrasa called Madrasa-i-Hindi in the mosque of the haram. Here he taught the Koran, Hadith and jurisprudence. One of his ardent disciples, Faiz Ahmad Khan, a rais of Aligarh, who attended his lectures (dars) at the mosque took the initiative and offered the first floor of his big house for the madrasa. Thus the foundation of the madrasa was laid in this house and an appeal was soon issued for donations. Since the house could not hold all the students only those who read the Koran and Hadith were transferred here and the rest continued at the haram sharif madrasa.Footnote ⁹⁹

Kairanwi's muhajir centric madrasa became popular with trans-Asian visitors and pilgrims to the Hijaz. Donations came freely from muhajirs, visiting hajis and Muslim landed elites in India who gifted him their properties in the area.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But the largest endowment came from a wealthy woman pilgrim—Begum Saulat un-Nisa. She was the widow of a Bengal zamindar, Latafat Husain, who in 1882 had inherited his entire property (jaidad). The madrasa thus got a new building built out of her donation and was named after her as–Madrasa SaulatiyaFootnote ¹⁰¹. She continued to send Rs. 50 per month, even after she had returned to India.Footnote ¹⁰²

The madrasa for muhajirs fitted into the intellectual initiatives of exiled Ottoman reformists and moderate ulema in the provinces of Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt that we noted in the section above. Like them, Kairanwi too used the scriptures as the template to which he was happy to add the knowledge of science and rationality that had the legitimacy of tradition. His madrasa was unique in the Hijazian context because its syllabus followed the rational sciences-oriented Dars-i Nizamiyya education format popular in the seminaries in Hindustan.Footnote ¹⁰³ And not surprisingly the madrasa soon became the centre of the characteristically inclusive India-specific Arabicist grid that was fast enveloping late nineteenth century trans-Asia. Most interesting was the transfer of the Naqshbandi brand of Sufi tasawwuf that combined the individual centric sirat-i-mustaqim (the right path which meant adherence to the Koran and the Sunnat) with the significance of the sheikh as the moderator of individual prescriptive practice, to the heart of the Arab land-Mecca. At its inauguration itself, apart from the Koran, readings were done by Kairanwi and his companion Imdadullah Makki from the Bukhari sharif and the Masnavi sharif—both popular in Hindustani religious circuits that combined monism with Sufi tasawwuf—but relatively less known in the Arab world.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Kairanwi was able to introduce the Naqshbandi tradition in the education system because the region had a familiarity with this Indic stream of thought.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Very much like the Arab and Turkish reformists of the Ottoman provinces Kairanwi too worked with the Islamic intellectual legacy that combined religious and rational sciences as a model for social change. Kairanwi made the syllabus broad and inviting with a view to forging the unity of the ‘enlightened’ umma. He integrated the study of scriptures with commentaries on law, lessons on planetary sciences (Ilm-i-Hayat) and technical education. Keeping pace with the late nineteenth century Ottoman and Arab reformist stress on combining religion and technical education he introduced technical entrepreneurial skills like craftsmanship (dastakari) in the madrasa. And like the eclectic syllabus taught at seminaries in Baghdad in the classical ages and subsequently across North Africa and South Asia, he also introduced rational sciences and a range of knowledge traditions (ilm). These included Ilm Riyazi, Ilm Al-munazara (debates), Ilm Al-mantaq (logic), Ilm-Al falsafa (philosophy) and ulum Falkiya (astronomy). He showcased the accretive Islamic heritage which had always accommodated eclectic learning. Thus making it clear that his innovations were neither western derived nor an innovation, but well within the realm of acceptable Islamic tradition. A notable addition to the syllabus were his own nineteenth century compilations like the Izharul Haq where he used the literary yardstick of ‘modern’ empires to frame religious texts like the Koran. This ‘normalizing’ the religious texts was his way of highlighting the transnational connectedness of the Koran and not only because of its revealed nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This foray into the nineteenth century repertoire of literary styles and benchmarks was a novelty of his madrasa.

Kairanwi broadened the scope of learning and also introduced a sprinkling of learning from all of the four Islamic legal schools of thoughts. In contrast to the tradition in Arabia where the syllabus focussed mainly on the Mu'atta of the legist Imam Malik, he introduced the teaching of a Hadith written by the Shaifite legist Imam Bukhari called the Bukharisharif. In Hindustan this Hadith is still regarded as the most authentic because it claims to be a compendium of only those sayings and observations of the Prophet that were narrated directly by him to his close companions, and were not passed on via several layers of interlocutors. The introduction of this text was even more interesting, given the fact that Kairanwi himself claimed to be a Hanafite. Other texts like the Masnavi sharif were also included. Lectures on the latter were given at the madrasa by Maulvi Imdad-ul-mulk. This was quite an eclectic intellectual spread. It clearly reflected the South Asian seminary tradition of never pronouncing as wrong any of the four schools of law prevalent in India even though followers could claim allegiance to only one of them. In the Hijaz this eclecticism proved particularly useful, as the idea was to introduce a curriculum that would have trans-Asian appeal. Kairanwi's audience were the muhajirs of all countries who spoke different languages, and whose religious (deeni) and worldly (dunyavi) requirements he had to take care of.

In tune with his style of building transnational connections, Kairanwi never let go of the older forms of connectivity. Thus for instance, the Islamic form of connections via the fann tajvid (mode of pronunciation), hifz (memorizing) and qirrat (recitation) became the focus of his attention at the madrasa. He appointed an Egyptian qari, who had been chosen in the time of Abd al-Hamid II as the best orator out of 500 contestants, to teach his Hindustani students the art of Koranic recitation– (qirrat). The students picked up the skill fast. One of his Hindustani students Qari Abdulla was certified by the Egyptian teacher as ‘being the best in the Arab world’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These oral traditions fanned out with travelling students across the world. They became the connectors in the Muslim transnationalism as it straddled the imperial assemblages. And most qaris in Lucknow, Bhopal, Deoband, Multan and other parts of India who are known for this talent (fann tajvid) owe their training to his madrasa.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Madrasa Saulatiya and the transnational: flows of texts, students and money

The madrasa, as we saw above, played a role in making books produced in India available in West Asia. It maintained a steady supply of books from Hindustan. Books printed in Cairo and Istanbul also arrived taking advantage of imperial networks and the rivalries that energized them. And thus a vibrant print ecumene underpinned the madrasa and made it the hub of the transnational networks that Kairanwi laid out. Books like the Ruh Nisar and those penned by Muhammad Ali Monghyri arrived at the madrasa from India. The Azaltah Alaawaham produced in India was also taught here.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Literature from India stamped the Indic seal on the nineteenth century reformist ferment that emanated from the Ottoman provinces in the Middle East. And this India stamp was characterized by the Shah Waliullah style of stress on compromise and accommodation. Indeed it was a momentous day when he began his dars on Shah Waliullah's book Hajutullah al baligha (detailed discussion) that talks about the wisdom of the Islamic Shariat and its accretive potential. He also lectured at length on astronomy (falkiyat) and Ibn-Khaldun's literature.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Also noteworthy as we saw above was the inclusion of his own books published in India and Istanbul that encouraged a dialogue between Muslims and the rest of the Christian world. Much of this dialogical literature Kairanwi had produced via his debates with Christian padres in Delhi, Agra and Istanbul. Thus his own masterpiece book, Izharul Haq, that compiled his debate with padre Pfander and alluded to the exceptional intellectual heritage of Islam was on the syllabus. Using this text he highlighted the Koran's exceptionality in terms of its poetic meter and rhythm rather than its mere revealed nature. This de-mystification of the Koran was also meant to make it this-worldly and thus enhance its innate potential as a transconnector. Books like Izharul Haq were clearly the product of Ottoman patronage to an Indian Muslim. And thus not surprisingly, the British Foreign Office saw the literary productions and print ecumene of Kairanwi not just as seditious but also fully supported by the Ottoman Sultan to challenge British political sovereignty in India. In 1888 Colonel Henderson said his spy confirmed that Kairanwi was summoned a second time by the Pasha to Istanbul, ‘and was instructed to again distribute seditious books among the pilgrims’. He also reported that the Sultan advanced him money to establish a press for printing such books.Footnote ¹¹¹

From the Hijaz books travelled via itinerant teachers and students who linked the madrasa to the larger Asian world outside. Students played a critical role in the formation of the transnational public sphere. These included some key ones like Kairanwi's own brother's grandson-Sayyid—whom he groomed to take over the charge of the madrasa after his death.Footnote ¹¹² But his ambit was not confined to family members. It reached out to learned ulema from Egypt, like Qari Ibrahim Saad, specialist in the Koran, who attended his lectures on the Bukhari Sharif with rapt attention, and taught the Quran. Notable students who fanned out into the world included Sheikh Alqara, Hazrat Qari Abdullah Makki and his brother Qari Abdul Rahman Allahabadi.Footnote ¹¹³ Sheikh Alqara—the reputed teacher from Egypt—remained associated with the madrasa throughout his lifetime. Javanese scholars from South East Asia attended his lectures, studied at the madrasa and went back home to set up madrasas that were similarly oriented.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat, the informant and close associate of the Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje, who had been deputed in the Hijaz area by his government to study the relationship of Hijaz to the Javanese, was a Naqshbandiya Sufi who had been educated in the tradition of Kairanwi via one of his students, Abd Allah Zawawi.Footnote ¹¹⁵ And he had many fellow Javanese students who were similarly trained. Indeed many of Kairanwi's students like Shaikh Abdulla Siraj and Shaikh Ahmad Ali Hasan became muftis and qaris and teachers in the haram sharif and other mosques and madrasas in Mecca, Taif, and in the madrasas of Hindustan and Karachi.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Branches of the madrasa were also established in Calcutta. In fact Begum Saulat un-Nisa went back to Bengal after her haj and established a branch of the madrasa in her own village in the district of the 24 Parganas.

Significant financial networks underpinned much of this trans-Asiatic intellectual energy. There was always a large number of Indians with property and money in the Hijaz who had influential contacts with Muslim notables back home. Indeed, notables like the Nizam of Haiderabd and Begum of Bhopal owned houses in the Mecca-Medina region. They were ever-willing donors. Thus for instance, the learned scholar (alim) Imdadullah Makki, an important student and companion of Kairanwi who also taught at the madrasa Saulatiya, was offered a house to stay in Mecca by the Haiderabad state which owned several properties in the area. Help generously flowed from other sources as well. And thus Imdadullah shifted from the Nizam's property when he had a better offer. He eventually decided to take up the offer of an Indian disciple of his who purchased a house for him in the residential area called Hartah Albab.Footnote ¹¹⁷ And of course every year hajis from India flocked to Mecca, made donations, and exchanged religious and political news with the scholars of the madrasa. Imdadullah not just met and exchanged news from ordinary hajis who always visited him in large numbers but once hosted a feast for a large contingent of ulema from Hindustan.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Kairanwi saw his trans-Asia forays as integral to and energized by the territorial closure of Hindustan. The links with India were not narrowly anti-colonial. Rather, Indian financial, intellectual and emotional resources were critical for a wider transnational civilizational battle of survival that he saw himself engaged in. Thus he also maintained a continuous correspondence with the ulema of Deoband participating in all their intellectual discussions and urging them to stay there as their ‘initiatives for the community (ijtimai kaam) were more valuable than their migrating to Mecca’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ At the same time he was always eager that the Deoband and Saulatiya madrasa at Mecca should work in intellectual camaraderie and have student exchanges.Footnote ¹²⁰ And this embracive ambit became his lasting legacy that was carried forward by his student and close associate Maulana Imdadullah Makki.Footnote ¹²¹

Madrasa Saulatiya and the transnational networks that emanated from it always created alarm in British circles. Complaints on Maulana Kairanwi too reached Istanbul and as we saw in the section above led to his visits there to explain his case to the Caliph. But the most crucial and stately visit happened in 1864 when he was invited to clarify Padre Pfander's claim that he had outwitted him in a theological debate at Agra. On this visit Kairanwi lived in Istanbul as a royal guest visiting the Caliph's majlis (gathering) every night after ishaan prayers and explaining to all present the details of his munazara with Padre Pfander. He would also relate to the Caliph the general state of affairs of the Muslims in India especially after their indictment by the British government in the 1857 mutiny-rebellion.Footnote ¹²² It is in the course of these discussions in Istanbul that the Caliph expressed a desire that it would be very beneficial if Kairanwi penned his experiences and discussions with the Padre in the form of a book. The Turkish administration offered to translate and publish the book in different languages once it was written. Kairanwi agreed. And thus was produced the Izharul Haq—the Truth Revealed. He began to write this book in 1864 in Istanbul.

Literary production at the cusp of Empires: the Izharul Haq

Kairanwi's writing career, as we saw earlier, had begun in Delhi and Agra. He wrote in Persain, Urdu and Arabic to reach out to audiences in India and the Middle East. It only flowered as he located himself at the Hijaz and Istanbul. These geographical spaces constituted critical cultural interstices of imperial networks. Through his writings he initiated public discussions on Islam and Christianity and tried to prove the former's superiority based on the unadulterated ‘authenticity’ of its texts. His books summed up his munazara with Christians where he questioned their beliefs about the Trinity, and the idea of Christ being God and Son of God using ‘logic, evidence, reason, rationality’. He upheld a very monist version of Islam. In this version the scriptures and the individual were supreme and there was no place for multiple intermediaries. And thus in a backhanded way he was denting a Caliph-centric pan-Islam and re-orientating the Muslim networks towards scriptures that were accretive and could accommodate diversity. He legitimated his scriptural ingenuity by underlining Islamic heritage—the exemplar of accommodative precedents.

Very much like the tanzimat-inspired reforms of the ulema and bureaucrats in Ottoman West Asia he used simple reason and logic to underline the superiority of the Islamic religious texts over the Christian ones. He questioned Christian beliefs like the idea of Christ embodied in bread. And explained the process of book production which as per the logic of its trade gave a license to the author/translator to introduce change (tehreef).Footnote ¹²³ And thus Jewish and Christian texts were adulterated because they were produced innumerable times and in many versions. According to him the Koran was different and privileged because it had never been subject to revision or multiple productions. Its one time edition and changelessness as compared with the tehreef (changes) introduced in the other texts confirmed it to the highest standards of authenticity. And therein lay its privileged status.

In about 18 books that he published from Delhi, Agra and Istanbul Kairanwi refuted the padre's claim of the textual superiority and authenticity of the Bible and the Torah and instead privileged the Koran. For Kairanwi the Koran was superior also because it was embodied in the hearts and minds of people via the Islamic tradition of memorizing (hifz). The unadulterated Koran embodied in the hearts of people had an endemic transnational potential. In his Persian book, Azalat al-shukuk (Destroyer of Doubts), as well as the Urdu text, Ibtalul Taslis Footnote ¹²⁴ (Demolition of the Trinity), he adorns the Koran with an exceptional historicity that was transnational because the Koran moved with people, embodied as it was in their hearts and memory. According to Kairanwi the idea of hifz (memorizing) and the production of hafiz i-Koran (those who had memorized it) made the Koran superior as its embodied nature gave it a unique protection from any tampering with its content. In contrast, the human agency that produced changes and many versions of the Bible and Torah disembodied their revealed knowledges and were thus vulnerable to corruption. Such disaggregated literature could never have a transnational connectivity. Most of the books of Kairanwi written in Persian, Arabic and Urdu for different sets of audiences develop this theme and underline the endemic transnationality of the Koran and its followers.

Kairanwi wrote the Izharul Haq in Istanbul in Arabic. The text is basically a compilation of the public discussion (munazara) between him and the German Padre Pfander where, in tune with his other writings, he asserts the superiority of Islam over Christianity and Judaism. But he does so by projecting the Koran as a positivist rational text that could play the role of a transnational connector in the larger civilizational victory that Muslims had to win over the West. Written in Istanbul from the cusp of the East and the West the book aimed to prove the exceptional status of the Koran and the Hadith on the basis of its historicity and prove the a-historical nature of the Bible, Torah and other revealed books. These were lower in the hierarchy of revealed texts as they lacked the sanctity of evidence and authority. The book lays out Kairanwi's use of the scripture (Koran) as the exceptional transnational connector, and the accretive template on which Islamic transnationalism could be showcased. Izharul Haq is thus a major effort to demystify the Koran by attributing to its revealed wisdom a worldly author—the Prophet, and wrapping it in this worldly evidence subject to historical scrutiny. The focus on the individual and the worldly context (dunyadari) was to become the signature of Kairanwi's networks as he allowed for flexibility of thought and action, even while acknowledging the exceptional powers of Allah and the Prophet.

Izharul Haq reveals Kairanwi's use of scientific objectivity to weigh the veracity of scripture. Here, he uses the late nineteenth century reformist language of Muslim intellectuals of South and West Asia that stressed reason, logic and scientificity to analyze religious literature of Christians, Jews and Muslims. According to him, judged by these ‘modern’ yardsticks the Koran outshines all other literature. Izharul Haq has chapters that talk about the making of a separate genre of religious textuality where the people of the book (ahl-i-kitab) prove the superiority of their texts via a distinctive norm. This is scientific, positivist and objective in tone and puts a premium on the authenticity, verifiability and veracity of facts and the accountability of the author.Footnote ¹²⁵ Kairanwi, very much like positivist history writers, is intolerant to any inconsistencies between the original documents (nuskhas) and the text itself, as also between different versions of the text. A superior text according to him is one which is unchanging-whose longevity is untarnished by the introduction of any form of changes in words, meanings or points of emphasis.Footnote ¹²⁶ And thus in this sense the revealed text of the Muslims (the Koran) seems to him to be most authentic as it has remained unchanged—based on words of God rather than on different versions of written documents (nuskhas) which were vulnerable to individual intervention.

Indeed he used this book to lay out the intellectual underpinnings of transnational Islam as an inclusive (combining territorial with de-territorial aspirations), rational, historicist constellation that is open to both scientific and historical scrutiny. In line with what Francis Robinson suggests the ‘individuation of religion’Footnote ¹²⁷ that defined Islamic reform in this period Izharul Haq became a major effort to de-mystify the Koran. Much more than the territory-bound reformers associated with Deoband or even Nadwat ul-Ulama in Lucknow, Kairanwi, in order to reach out to referents across the imperial assemblages, almost desacralizes the Koran by highlighting its exceptionality more because of its poetics, musicality, meter and positivist narrative style than its revealed knowledge. He calls it kalam-i-almi (book of the world) because of its exceptional scientificity, sweet melody, (kalam kee shaukat aur shirini), maturity of words, fine transmission (balaghat), embracive and appealing verse (fasih bayan) and poetics.Footnote ¹²⁸ According to him the poetical style surprises even the best of the littérateurs (adba kee aqlein hairan hain).Footnote ¹²⁹ This linking of science, reason, rationality, poetics and methodology to matters of religion emerges as one of the elements in the late nineteenth century Islamic diasporic literature from Istanbul.

Kairanwi and Fadl: the creation of a public sphere

The careers of Kairanwi and Fadl as the ‘little men’ who knitted a web of imperially derived and locally familiar networks across Asia was sustained by their effective plugging into the new print culture of their times. And this was despite their emphasis on orality, transmission and public debates. This was of course yet another example of their cannibalizing into the imperial strategies of survival, even as they held on to their own modes of connectivity. Both private and imperial printing presses thrived in the Hijaz, Cairo, Istanbul and India at this time. Books and periodicals could thus straddle imperial assemblages with as much ease as oral traditions of munazara, hifz and qirrat travelled with moving people.Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, book and periodical productions by Muslim ‘outlaws’, both in the British and Ottoman territories, thrived on the same imperial tensions that had made men like Fadl and Kairanwi carve out transnational contacts. As the threat of British occupation grew in Cairo before its eventual take over in 1882 so did the number of literary productions from its printing presses tapped by Indian Muslim subjects of the British Empire. Many of Kairanwi's books, including Izharul Haq, had print editions from there. So did much of the ‘seditious’ literature of the British eyesore and Nawab consort of the princely state of Bhopal, Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan.Footnote ¹³¹ Often access to imperial presses in Turkey were given to British subjects to irritate the British Empire. Thus for instance, in 1880, the British Foreign Department was alarmed at the publication from Istanbul of an Urdu newspaper called Peik-i-Islam by one Nusrat Ali Khan of Delhi. The British ambassador in Istanbul feared that this paper, published simultaneously in Urdu and Turkish, was meant to ‘excite Muslim feelings in India against England’.Footnote ¹³² Even though later it was discovered that its editor was fraudulent and the paper not ‘seditious’ yet they were concerned at the easy access their Muslim subjects had to the Ottoman imperial printing press from where the Peik-i-Islam had been printed. And the Foreign Office, as noted earlier, was convinced that the Ottoman Sultan had financed a printing press for Kairanwi in the Hijaz area. This was to encourage the publication of anti-British ‘seditious’ literature.

In many instances Kairanwi's publications benefited from the imperial tensions between the Ottomans and the British. Many of his 18 books were printed in Istanbul. For instance, during his stint there he interacted with Turkish ulema and religious scholars. He intellectually responded to their concern that the new generation doubted Islamic knowledge because of the influence of western education. In 1865 on their request he wrote a book on issues like the divine message and Prophethood (basharat wa nabuwat), revelations and Gods messages (hasar wa nasr nazur wa wahi). This book was called Tanbihat. This was published with the orders of Khairuddin Pasha from the imperial press.

Indeed the press cemented his contacts with the Pasha and firmed up his imperially derived transnational contacts. The Izharul Haq was the most important case in point. Written at the request of the Pasha and published from the imperial printing press at Istanbul in 1864 it was soon translated by the grand vizir, Hayruddin Pasha, into Turkish as well.Footnote ¹³³ Once out in Istanbul Izharul Haq travelled across the imperial grid to have many different lives in regions that corresponded to Kairanwi's transnational: British and Ottoman territories. Thus it was subsequently translated into Gujarati and Urdu in India. And had several editions printed simultaneously in Egypt. Its English translation launched it out of the Muslim world into the whole of Europe.Footnote ¹³⁴ In 1894 The Times in London wrote that, ‘As long as people continue to read Izharul Haq Christianity will never prosper in the world’.Footnote ¹³⁵

Sayyid Fadl too plugged into this print-driven public sphere that derived from imperial tensions. He had a long list of 19 publications to his credit in different languages and published in India as well as Istanbul. And the printing press helped him play his transnational politics and straddle the assemblage of imperial powers with ease. His books ranged from religious ones on his Alawi Sufi tariqa published in India, to more political ones from Istanbul where he tapped into the ego of the Caliph for his political gains. Thus the two texts he wrote while in Malabar, ‘The Fundamentals of Islam’ and ‘Learning to Avoid Unbelievers’ reflected his purist and exclusionist beliefs that sanctified the kind of violence that he was inciting at that period in Malabar.Footnote ¹³⁶ Later works written from Istanbul on the Alawi tariqa and his father's miracles were more inclusive. Out of these two the Tarikat al Hanifa (2^nd Edition 1899) and Tanbih al Ukala (1881) are more overtly opportunist.Footnote ¹³⁷ In these he praises the Caliph Abd al-Hamid II to the highest glories exhorting people to obey him as they would obey GodFootnote ¹³⁸.