Indian Muslims

Review: Review Essay: Modernity and Religious Change in South Asian Islam
Reviewed Work(s): Islam and Muslim History in South Asia by Francis Robinson; The
ʿUlama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia by Francis Robinson
Review by: Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Source: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Nov., 2004), pp.
253-263
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great
Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25188474
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Review Essay:
Modernity and Religious Change in
South Asian Islam1
MUHAMMAD QASIM ZAMAN
Over the course of the past several decades, Francis Robinson has done much to illuminate
facets of the history and culture of the traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars,
the culama, of South Asia. "For far too long," he writes, "[the] culama have been treated
as cardboard figures, caricatures of Muslim men of God_[CJolonial administrators, and
subsequently scholars, have rarely known enough to treat them as more than such; Western
educated Muslims, who have discovered new forms of authority, have often been concerned
both to mock and to distance themselves from the mediators of religious authority; and the
followers of culama have been concerned to impose upon them an image of an ideal teacher
and scholar at the cost of concealing aspects of their character, personality, and behaviour"
(The Ulama of Farangi Mahall [hereafter FM], p. 148). The cost of letting the caricatures
persist is high. In many instances, an understanding of the Muslim public sphere and of
religious thought in modern Islam remains at best incomplete without serious attention to the
culama. And important facets of religious change likewise remain elusive unless the evolving
discourses and the institutions of the culama are brought within our purview. When more
observers of Muslim societies come to recognise the ways in which the culama are integral to
the history of modern and not just of medieval Islam, it would be in some measure due to the
influence of Robinson's writings. Among other things, Robinson's work is significant for its
insistence that we consider how religious ideas, norms, and traditions shape politics instead
of treating them as little more than symbols employed by the political elite for purposes of
mass political mobilisation. At the same time, he has explored how religious identities and
institutions have themselves evolved in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. And with
the history and culture of the culama as his primary point of reference, he has brought to light
new perspectives on Islam in South Asia, as well as on the historical interaction between
South Asia and the Muslim world at large.
To Robinson, the Indian subcontinent has been "one of the most fertile and powerful
sites" of Islamic revivalist trends, with "South Asia's leadership at a peak in the Muslim
world" during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Islam and Muslim History [hereafter
IMH], pp. 4-5). This revival has had many different expressions. Among them is the madrasa
founded in Deoband, a small town in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) in northern
India, in 1867. The influence of the movement associated with this institution of higher
1 This is a review essay of Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Delhi, 2000), pp. x, 299;
and Francis Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (London, 2001), pp. xvi, 267.
Most of the references to these works will be given in parentheses in the body of the essay.
JRAS, Series 3, 14, 3 (2004), pp. 253-263 ? The Royal Asiatic Society 2004
DOI: 10.1017/S1356186304004109 Printed in the United Kingdom
254 Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Islamic learning extends, in its many permutations and the thousands of madrasas that follow
the same sectarian orientation, throughout South Asia and beyond. The Tablighi Jamacat, a
proselytising movement allied to the Deobandi orientation and with operations worldwide,
is another expression of South Asian revivalism (cf.IMH, p. 5). So too, and for all their
ample contradictions, are the movements leading to the establishment of Pakistan in 1947
as the homeland for the Muslims of South Asia and the subsequent career of this "Islamic
Republic". And colonial India and then Pakistan have been home to Sayyid Abu'1-A'la
Mawdudi (d. 1979), one of the most influential ideologues of Islamist or "fundamentalist"
thought worldwide.
A major stimulus to the emergence of revivalist trends, from the second half of the
nineteenth century, lay in the recognition by the Muslim cultural and religious elite that
British colonial rule could not be effectively combated by force of arms or political
resistance. Following the work of Barbara Metcalf,2 Robinson sees Deoband and several
other movements as representing an "inward turn" (cf. IMH, 115fF.) - an effort to preserve
and deepen individual piety and personal responsibility and thereby to secure the survival of
the community - at a time when Muslims had lost political power to the British and when
they had begun to see the threat of India's Hindu majority to their own community and
culture in a new and alarming dimension. New emphasis on the corpus of teachings (hadith)
attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were already in evidence before the onset of colonial
rule, but the need to anchor Muslim identity in Islam's foundational texts, and especially in
the hadith, became especially prominent under the bewildering conditions of colonial rule.
Colonial rule also brought about new technologies that made the dissemination of these
foundational texts possible in ways that were not only unprecedented but which also proved
to be inseparable from the further development of the revivalist trends; it also helped forge
new contacts with Muslims elsewhere in the world.
Intellectual contacts between India, Central Asia, and the Arab and Ottoman lands were
nothing new, of course, as Robinson has himself clearly demonstrated (FM, chapter 8).
The important works on hadith by Shaykh cAbd al-Haqq Muhaddith of Delhi (d. 1642)
owed something to his years of studies in Mecca, just as the reformist thought of Shah
Wali Allah (d. 1762) - and of many others after him - was influenced by direct exposure
to intellectual currents in the Hijaz (FM, 2,i\?). But the onset of colonial rule in India
created new possibilities both for more extensive and sustained contacts with the greater
Muslim world and for greater awareness of the challenges Muslims faced elsewhere. Many
leading Muslim scholars had migrated to Arabia in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857,
yet they often continued their contacts with their students and disciples in India. Later,
the declining fortunes of the Ottoman Empire contributed even more significantly to the
political mobilisation of the Muslims of India in the first quarter of the twentieth century
than the end of Muslim rule in India itself had. Revivalist trends were not necessarily or
even primarily "political" in their goals; but when they did acquire political and even radical
dimensions, early in the twentieth century, the new contacts with the greater Muslim world
may, Robinson suggests, have had much to do with it.
2 Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-igoo (Princeton, 1982). Idem., Perfecting
Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar: A Partial Translation with Commentary (Berkeley, 1990).
Modernity and Religious Change in South Asian Islam 255
Robinson is much less interested, however, in how new technologies facilitated intellectual
exchange between India and the larger world than he is in exploring how print and
other technologies helped foster new religious sensibilities, for example by way of
weakening long established forms of religious authority and calling forth a new sense of
personal empowerment and a concomitant individual moral responsibility. The culama had
considerable misgivings about what the broad dissemination of religious works in print
would do to a conception of knowledge whose authority rested firmly on a person-to
person transmission. Yet print offered them unprecedented opportunities to disseminate their
own discourses in defending Islam against what they saw as urgent challenges?opportunities
they came to find irresistible. It was not simply a matter of reaching larger audiences,
however. Inasmuch as the Deobandi 'ulama had turned inwards on a path of moral and
religious cultivation of the individual self, printed texts were crucial to instruction on that
path. Nevertheless, in the long run, Robinson sees print as having undermined the culama\
authority in irreparable ways: the culama might remain insistent that even printed texts ought
to be read under the guidance of religious scholars, but not everyone could see why that had
to be so or, for that matter, why the culama had a privileged claim to the production of such
texts. To Robinson, the technology of print underlies the very condition for the possibility
of Islamist as well as other new religious movements, and it has been crucial to the broad,
sometimes global reach of such movements.
Robinson's work on the impact of print is one among several examples in the essays
gathered in the two volumes under discussion of how he sees processes of religious change
in modern Islam. But even as he underscores the significance of these processes in bringing
about major transformations in conceptions of the self, styles and institutions of learning,
and loci of religious authority, he is keen to stress the continuing influence of Islamic norms
in shaping the possibilities open to members of the community at any given time. Three
of the nine essays that comprise his Islam and Muslim History in South Asia are devoted
to critiquing the "instrumentalist" view of how the Muslim political elite of northern
India may have mobilised their community and consolidated their own authority over it.
The primary representative of this view here is Paul R. Brass, a political scientist who has
written extensively on politics in modern and contemporary India. As Brass had argued in
a book published in 1974, "what stands out in the history of Muslim separatism is not the
ineluctable movement of events on an historically predetermined course, but the process of
conscious choice by which men decide, because it suits their interests to do so, to emphasise
the differences rather than the similarities between people."3 Robinson sees such views
as ignoring the highly complex ways in which the colonial state shaped the world of the
Muslim elite as, indeed, it did of everybody else in South Asia. To this extent, Robinson
reiterates an argument he had developed at length in his own 1974 book, Separatism among
Indian Muslims.4 But, in a departure from some of the conclusions ofthat book, Robinson
has also come increasingly to underline the very considerable constraints that the religious
tradition, history, and culture of the Muslims imposed on the choices available to the Muslim
3 Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge, 1974), p. 179; quoted in Robinson,
Islam and Muslim History, p. 159.
Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces' Muslims, 1860?1923
(Cambridge, 1974).
elite.5 Against Brass' "instrumentalismism", Robinson refers to the "extreme" form of the
position he endorses as "primordialist"; and despite his discomfort with this label because
of its deterministic connotations (cf. IMH, p. 13, 204Q, he remains perhaps the best known
representative of this position in South Asian studies.6
A certain determinism does seem to lurk in Robinsons argument that "the ideal that
Muslims should form a distinct religio-political community" predisposes them towards a
certain kind of politics; and, indeed, that there is a "fundamental connection between Islam
and political separatism" - and not just in India.7 Among other things, positing such a
"fundamental connection" raises questions about the many prominent scholars of Deoband,
the so-called "nationalist culama\ who had argued against the demand for a separate Muslim
homeland and in favour of a composite nationalism in India. Quite apart from his suggestion
that more religious scholars, of different sectarian persuasions, may in fact have supported the
demand for Pakistan than is usually recognised, Robinson believes that even the arguments of
the nationalist culama against Pakistan do not really constitute an exception to his argument.
Following the important work of Peter Hardy on the thought of the prominent nationalist
culama,s he argues, for instance, that these culama did not really envisage an immersion of
the Muslim community into the larger, Hindu-dominated Indian nation, but rather only a
political arrangement in which they would be able to secure a largely autonomous existence.
There is, indeed, considerable evidence for this interpretation of how the nationalist
culama - and their successors - saw the future of Islam in an independent India. And yet
Robinson's interpretation of how the nationalist culama fit into his theory about Islam
and political separatism might derive from an insufficiently nuanced view of the Islamic
religious and especially the juridical tradition and the ways in which it has continued to be
both interpreted and invoked by the culama in modern times. I have shown elsewhere that
the position of colonial India's nationalist culama has parallels with pre-modern juridical
discussions about the permissibility of Muslims residing in predominantly non-Muslim
lands.9 This is not to say, of course, that the nationalist culama wanted to see the Muslim
community lose its distinct identity and culture in independent India; they clearly did not,
and to that extent Robinson's thesis about Muslim separatism obviously holds. The point is,
rather, that the Islamic tradition provides varied options and justifications for political action;
and that these justifications cannot be simply subsumed under any "fundamental connection
between Islam and political separatism". Indeed, even when a particular position, such as that
of the nationalist culama, can be shown to have a "separatist" dimension to it, the question of
how, and with what resources, that position is arrived at or justified remains worth asking.
Nor is it simply a matter of an insufficient or incomplete acquaintance with their ideals or
5 For a rethinking of some of his earlier positions, see Francis Robinson, "Introduction to the Paperback
Edition", in idem., Separatism among Indian Muslims (Delhi, 1993), pp. xiv-xxv.
6 For Brass' response to Robinson, see Paul R. Brass, "Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity
among the Muslims of South Asia", in David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (eds), Political Identity in South Asia (London,
1979), PP- 35-77
7 Robinson, "Islam and Muslim Separatism", in Islam and Muslim History, pp. 177-209; the quotations are from
pp. 186 and 204 respectively.
8 Peter Hardy, Partners in Freedom ? and True Muslims: The Political Thought of Some Muslim Scholars in British India
1912-IQ47 (Lund, 1971).
9 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, 2002),
pp. 31-37
with their tradition that, as Robinson suggests, accounts for the different ways in which that
tradition might shape Muslim political practices (cf. IMH, i85f). Rather, as the culama have
repeatedly demonstrated, there are varied ways in which the resources from the tradition can,
in fact, be put to use; and this may be so not in ignorance of other positions or possibilities
but precisely in an awareness of their existence.
Yet we should be wary of importing "instrumentalism", so to speak, into the "pri
mordialist" camp itself. For long, but especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001,
much has been written on the need for a radical reform in Islam in the interest of
fostering democratic and pluralistic norms among Muslims and of realigning their thinking
in directions that are more in consonance with modern, liberal values. The severe constraints
involved in "reforming" aspects of the Islamic tradition are often not sufficiently recognised,
however.10 For even when resources within the Islamic tradition seem to lend themselves
to a reformist project, there is no simple or straightforward recipe for putting them
together in a coherent and convincing way. The history of how religious ideals and
norms have been articulated often significantly shapes future directions without, of course,
that history predetermining those directions and even as that history itself preserves many
different formulations of the norms in question. Here Robinson's notes of caution against
instrumentalist approaches to Muslim politics, despite the caveats noted above, acquire
great contemporary relevance, and not just for an understanding of Islam in South Asia
itself.
How have the culama, as representatives and guardians of the community's religious and
cultural norms, fared in modern times? In a number of articles, Robinson has explored this
question, as well as many other facets of the history of the culama, with reference to one
distinguished family of religious scholars, the culama of Farangi Mahall in Lucknow. These
articles, most of which have been published before, are now conveniently gathered in the
second of the two books under discussion here.
The activities of the Farangi Mahall culama ? a family whose name derives from the house
of a European ("farangi") merchant in Lucknow that was bestowed on it by the Mughal
Emperor Awrangzeb in the late seventeenth century - are remarkably well-documented
over the past three centuries. A great deal of this documentation comes from biographical
works written by members of the family, about their own ranks and about other culama. But
with more than 700 works to their credit, the prolific writings of the Farangi Mahall culama
also provide extensive resources for the intellectual history of Islam in South Asia. The Dars-i
Nizami curriculum used to this day in madrasas of India and Pakistan has undergone many
changes since the eighteenth century, but it owes its origins to Mulla Nizam al-din (d. 1748)
of Farangi Mahall, whose name it still bears. The broad dissemination of this curriculum
was a product, Robinson suggests, not only of its suitability to the concerns of the madrasas
in pre-colonial India, but also of the extensive networks of which the Farangi Mahall 'ulama
were long part. These networks were based on ties established through the transmission of
learning, through Sufi lineages and practices which were always centrally important in the
career of this family, and through kinship ties which remained strong even when members of
For a discussion of this point, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, "Pluralism, Democracy, and the Ulama", in
Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Remarking Muslim Politics (Princeton, 2005 [forthcoming]).
the family were widely dispersed. The family was also active in politics during the first half
of the twentieth century, and Mawlana cAbd al-Bari (d. 1926) of Farangi Mahall was one of
the most visible figures in various movements in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Later, members of the family were to play a prominent role in supporting the demand for
the establishment of a separate Muslim homeland. The culama of Farangi Mahall were as
prominent in late colonial politics as they had been in their scholarly pursuits; and theirs was
not the only instance when the prestige in the latter sphere reinforced their leadership in the
former.
There were indications, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which pointed to
a serious grappling with the challenges of modernity on the part of this family of scholars.
Mawlana cAbd al-Bari's concern to work alongside Muslims educated in modern, westernised
institutions of learning (cf. FM, p. 171) or his apparent openness to changes in the curriculum
of the madrasa run by the Farangi Mahall scholars in Lucknow pointed in that direction.
Equally impressive was the recognition of the need for flexibility and adaptation to change
in the juridical writings of one of the most distinguished scholars of the nineteenth century,
Mawlana cAbd al-Hayy of Farangi Mahall (d. 1886). Yet, as Robinson notes, far from the
promise of rethinking Islam in conditions of modernity being realised, the scholarly tradition
of the Farangi Mahall itself withered away over the course of the twentieth century. Ironically
for a family with as rich a history, the madrasa that cAbd al-Bari had founded in Lucknow
in 1905 lasted only until 1969, and its orientation towards modern learning was much more
short-lived than its own existence. More strikingly, and already from the first quarter of the
twentieth century, "members of the family [themselves] began to turn away from Islamic
pursuits and to seek their fortune in the Western and secular world raised up under British
rule. By the 1940s and 1950s all were being educated after a Western fashion" (FM, p. 128).
In his essay on "Problems in the history of the Farangi Mahall family of learned and holy
men" (FM, chapter 4), Robinson underscores the importance of investigating the reasons
for this disintegration of the family's scholarly tradition. He does not quite attempt a full
exploration of this crucial problem anywhere in this book, though scattered throughout
his essays are a number of important indications that partially address it. A long history
of Farangi Mahall's dependence on the patronage of Indian princes and rulers is among
these indications. The broad dispersion of members of this family throughout India was
the result of their seeking such patronage; and the early orientation of the Dars-i Nizami
curriculum, as Robinson sees it, had itself been towards training students for judicial and
other administrative careers in the service of princely rulers. Even under colonial rule, many
Indian princes and other Muslim notables had continued to support scholars of Farangi
Mahall. But these sources of patronage finally dried up with the emergence of independent
India in 1947, imposing severe constraints on the family's learned tradition (FM, pp. 127
128). That many Farangi Mahall culama had been active in support of the movement for
a separate Muslim homeland may also have exacted a price for the family's fortunes in
post-independence India, though Robinson does not explore this possibility. He does note,
however, that the migration of part of the family to Pakistan meant that those who left were
now effectively cut off not just from their ancestral home but also from the Sufi shrines and
the scholarly networks that had given them a great deal of their authority (IMH, p. 208,
n. 68).
Yet the decline of the family precedes the partition of India and, as Robinson suggests, it
also has much to do with the challenge posed to it by revivalist and reformist trends such as
those represented by Deoband. Deobandi reformism was highly critical of the sort of Sufi
devotional practices that were the very trademark of the Farangi Mahall culama. Further,
while Deobandi madrasas have continued to follow the Dars-i Nizami curriculum, they have
brought a new emphasis on the study of hadith to it - an emphasis that itself has roots in
eighteenth-century revivalist trends in South Asia and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The
traditional Farangi Mahall focus on the "rational" sciences such as logic and philosophy,
as studied in madrasas, had served it well in an earlier age; but, at a time when revivalist
movements drew inspiration from a new salience of hadith, Farangi Mahall was less than
successful in competing with Deoband or in adapting to change. This is ironic because the
Farangi Mahall's rationalist emphasis was meant precisely to allow greater flexibility in how
the scholars accommodated themselves to changing needs (cf. FM, 172). Yet the "rational"
sciences were, at the hands of the Farangi Mahall culama, themselves seen and studied as
a tradition and, though Robinson does not make this point, the reformist culama may have
been more successful in making their interpretations of the foundational texts relevant to the
times than the Farangi Mahall scholars were in adapting themselves and their "rationalistic"
texts to change.
Deobandi reformism looms large in the background against which Robinson explores
the history of Farangi Mahall. Yet, as with the question of Farangi Mahall's decline, he
does not systematically explore the contrast between the culama of Deoband and those of
Farangi Mahall. What he does point to in this regard is nevertheless worth serious attention.
Where the Deobandis chose an inward turn as a way of preserving and defending Muslim
identity, the Farangi Mahall 'ulama became known for "fighting for issues in public life"
(FM, pp. 120, no). Both were ways of defending the interests of Islam in colonial India,
but Robinson seems to be suggesting that the path the Deobandis had adopted proved,
in the long run, to be the more viable one. Deoband's hadith-bzsed reformism likewise
differentiates it from Farangi Mahall's shrine-based authority, as already noted. And in sharp
contrast with the Farangi Mahall, the Deobandi 'ulama sought their support not from princes
and the landed elite but rather from ordinary believers. This again goes some way towards
accounting for their differing fortunes: there were almost 9,000 madrasas belonging to the
Deobandi orientation all over South Asia around the time that the Farangi Mahall madrasa
founded by cAbd al-Bari was itself closing down in Lucknow in 1969.11
These are suggestive contrasts. As for what Farangi Mahall and Deoband have in common,
Robinson's view is that they both illustrate facets of secularisation. How Islam in South Asia
illuminates or qualifies Max Weber's theories of secularisation is the topic of a stimulating
essay in Islam and Muslim History;12 and, though Weber is not explicitly invoked in his book on
the Farangi Mahall itself, Robinson returns to the theme of secularisation in various contexts.
He is mindful, of course, that Weber's theories largely spring from his study of historically
Christian societies, and given that "the orientation of Islam to the world is different from that
of Christianity... its pattern of development will be so too" (IMH, 130). And Robinson's
Robinson, Farangi Mahall, p. 37, citing Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 136.

Robinson, "Secularisation, Weber and Islam," in idem., Islam and Muslim History, pp. 122-137.
26o Muhammad Qasim Zaman
own work has done much to show that for all the inroads of modernity, the modern state,
mass education, and various technologies have themselves helped broaden the reach of the
sharica in the Ufe of many Muslims (cf. IMH, pp. 131-133). This important recognition
and many other caveats notwithstanding, however, modern Islam's secularising turn seems
to him to be unrelenting. Even Islamist movements, in drawing on new conceptions of
a "willed" and "this-worldly" Islam, have potent seeds of secularisation embedded within
them: "[W]illed Islam would appear to be a two-edged sword. It can release great religious
energy and creativity, as it has done in South Asia and elsewhere. But, on the other hand,
it opens the door to unbelief. Muslims, who can choose to believe, can also choose not to
believe, and become Muslims merely by culture. Once belief goes those mundane areas of life
which reformist Muslims cherish in the name of God - work, home, family, relationships,
sex - could become prime theatres of meaning in themselves" (IMH, p. 118). But if this
is true of Islamist movements, which draw primarily on the support of the college- and
university-educated and the urban bourgeoisie, it is, in Robinson's view, no less true of the
traditionally-educated religious scholars.
The gradual decline of the mystically-oriented Farangi Mahall in the face of the
"rationalisation" that other religious and political trends had come to typify in colonial
and post-colonial India, and the turning away even of the family's own members from
their centuries-old scholarly tradition, would seem to be a case study in Weberian
"disenchantment". Deoband's revivalism, with its thousands of madrasas in South Asia and
beyond, might appear, on the other hand, to be a counter argument against the inroads
of secularisation. Yet Robinson sees Deoband not as an aberration but rather as a central
illustration of "subjective secularisation": with its cultivation of a new sense of selfhood
anchored in the foundational texts, Deoband, like many other religious movements in the
modern Muslim world, represents a "Protestant" Islam ? an Islam "which is rationalising
in the sense of making religion self-conscious, systematic and based on abstract principles"
(IMH, p. 127).13
There are, however, some uncertainties here. As Peter van der Veer has observed, the
parallel with Protestantism (which Robinson is hardly the only scholar of South Asia to
favour, nor is it limited only to Islamic examples) is usually predicated on the assumption
that, when foundational texts come to find a new meaning and resonance in people's lives,
these texts are approached and they function in ways that are broadly alike across religious
traditions. But this crucial assumption itself remains insufficiently examined.14 Further,
though Robinson acknowledges that "Protestant" Muslims did "not, in the main, reject saints
and Islamic mysticism", his contrast between an increasingly beleaguered mystical orientation
and a growing sense of "the world [as] a cold, bleak, disenchanted place... [which] in
Protestant Christianity many see to be preparing the way for secularisation" (IMH, p. 127)
seems overdrawn. "A sense of this more demanding, disenchanted, world is expressed,"
Robinson continues, "in the famous guide for women... published by the Deobandi scholar,
Ashraf Ali Thanawi, at the beginning of the twentieth century ..." (IMH, p. 136, n. 19).
13 Robinson is clearly fond of the image of a Protestant Islam, and he returns to it often. For examples, see Islam
and Modern History, pp. 7, 11, 78, 83, 96, I26f, 133, 151, 218.
14 Peter van der Veer, "Secrecy and Publicity in the South Asian Public Arena", in Armando Salvatore and Dale
F. Eickelman (eds), Public Islam and the Common Good, (Leiden, 2004), pp. 29-51, at 38-39.
But Thanawi's (d. 1943) career shows Sufism to be anything but beleaguered. His influence,
as Robinson is well-aware (cf. IMH, p. 198; FM, $jf.) derives as much, if not more, from
his teachings as a Sufi master as it does from the exegetical, juristic, or other reformist
endeavours that made him the most distinguished Deobandi scholar of his age. As a Sufi,
Thanawi's project clearly was to reconcile mysticism with the shari'a norms, and devotional
practices of the sort favoured by the Farangi Mahall usually fell outside the extent to which
Thanawi was prepared to go in this reconciliation.15 And yet, the countless people who
regularly flocked to his Sufi lodge did so precisely to better deal with their "cold, bleak,
disenchanted" world; and if some of Thanawi's own reformist writings had contributed
to the disenchantment of the world, it is to him that many also returned for antidotes
to it.
Deobandi Islam has, moreover, been able to accommodate many different religio-political
orientations within itself. Both sectarian militancy in Pakistan during the last quarter of
the twentieth century as well as the emergence of the Taliban have roots in Deobandi
madrasas, and it is hard to assimilate either to familiar modes of secularisation. What these
different trajectories - within Deobandi Islam or in comparing Deoband with the Farangi
Mahall - mean for our understanding of Deoband, Farangi Mahall or other 'ulama, or for
theorising secularisation itself, remains elusive in Robinson's discussion. My point here is
not that all 'ulama are necessarily averse to secularisation any more than all Muslims are,
by virtue of their faith and culture, necessarily political separatists.16 Indeed, many even
among Pakistan's Deobandi 'ulama often seem to accept the implications of secularisation
in the sense of a differentiation of social spheres.17 The point is, rather, that there is no
neat, overarching manner of characterising the 'ulama as a whole, for they have often been
remarkably adept at following different yet often simultaneous political or other paths.18
Further, as Robinson is aware, secularisation itself can connote many different things. While
some senses of secularisation (as signifying what sociologist Jos? Casanova refers to as the
"privatisation" and even the "decline of religion") might fit 'ulama such as those of the
Farangi Mahall, the career and religio-political roles of other 'ulama seem to necessitate that
we ask how "public religions" have come to function in contemporary societies ? sometimes
On Thanawi's reformist project as a Sufi, see Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The
Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York, 2002), pp. 120-123.
How Robinsons argument about Islam and political separatism, as briefly described above, fits his argument
about secularisation is not altogether clear in either collection of the essays reviewed here.
17 Cf. Zaman, The Ulama, pp. 60-86.
In some of her recent work, Metcalf has characterised the Deobandi 'ulama's view of politics as "an empty
'box', filled expediently and pragmatically depending on what seems to work best in any given situation." See
Barbara D. Metcalf, 'Traditionalist' Islamic Activism: Deoband, Tablighis, and Talibs (Leiden, 2002), p. 3 ana passim. This
"empty box" model - which posits the lack of "a theoretical stance in relation to political life" - helps explain,
she suggests, why the inwardly oriented late-nineteenth century 'ulama and the Taliban can both belong to the
Deobandi orientation (cf. ibid., i^?.\ quotation from p. 14). Yet, despite the radicalisation of important strands of
Deobandi Islam, her overall view of this multifaceted reformist orientation is largely the same as set forth in her
earlier work on Deoband: "... the historical pattern launched by the Deoband 'ulama for the most part treated
political life on a primarily secular basis, typically, defacto if not de jure, identifying religion with the private sphere,
and in that sphere fostering Islamic teachings and interpretations that proved widely influential" (Ibid., p. 16). The
tension, however, between this view of religion as properly belonging to the private sphere and the "empty box"
model, with which to make allowance for religio-political activism of various sorts as and when expedient, remains
largely unresolved here.
in unexpected ways within the overall framework of secularisation, on other occasions at cross
purposes with any such framework.19
So far as the history of the Farangi Mahall itself is concerned, Robinson's approach is
primarily that of a social historian. This means, in this instance, that while he repeatedly
mentions the intellectual stature of Mawlana cAbd al-Hayy, who "wrote over a hundred books
and pamphlets" (FM, p. 121), or the names of the family's many other leading scholars, or
the fact that some of their writings were read and admired far beyond India, we do not get
very much of a sense of their religious thought. We are offered, it is true, vignettes on cAbd
al-Hayy's approach to the writing of juristic opinions (fatwas) or cAbd al-Bari s views on the
need to reform his short-lived madrasa's curriculum. But the content and contours of their
intellectual tradition,20 the specific ways in which they may have sought to accommodate
their ideas to changing times, and why that effort ultimately came to naught, remain largely
outside the purview of this discussion.
There are several consequences of opting for this narrower focus. It means, for one thing,
that the vitality and richness of modern South Asian Islam, which Robinson underscores
throughout the two books under discussion, remains insufficiently documented. That the
culama are no mere "cardboard figures [and] caricatures of Muslim men of God" would,
likewise, be more persuasive if we had a clearer sense of what the culama\ world of learning
really consisted in. Then there are certain more specific uncertainties in his discussion.
Robinson suggests, for instance, that the Farangi Mahall orientation towards the "rational"
sciences had the potential for a "truly understanding interaction with other religious
traditions" (FM, p. 54), though he acknowledges further on that the potential for such
interaction appears not to have been realised after all (cf. FM, p. 66). This view of the
madrasas rational sciences posits what might be too sharp a contrast with the "dogmatic
and extreme religion" (FM, p. 54), which itself is apparently assumed to be based in the
foundational texts and the "transmitted sciences" that revolved around them. Robinson does
not ask whether even the "transmitted sciences" might leave room ? in the form, say, of
commentaries, through which extended arguments with the foundational and other texts
and with other scholars were typically carried on - for a diversity of evolving positions
in the scholarly tradition. Instead, he takes this contrast a major step further to suggest
that the Muslim "modernists" might be seen as the heirs of the madrasas rational sciences
(FM, p. 36) and, conversely, that the transmitted sciences came to provide a new basis
to Islamist or fundamentalist movements of the contemporary era (cf. FM, pp. 36, 239).
These connections, continuities, and contrasts are highly interesting, and they give a certain
unity to Robinson's view of the history of modern Islam; but their own viability remains
unexamined.
19 That "public religions" can, in fact, function within the overall framework of secular nation-states is a major
argument of Jos? Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994). Casanova has also done much to
clarify the different ways in which secularisation has often been understood (as decline of religion, as its privatisation,
or as the "differentiation" of social spheres), and he has offered a powerful defence of the continuing theoretical
and empirical validity of "secularisation as differentiation" (ibid., p. 212 and passim). My discussion here is much
indebted to Casanova's work. For a critique of Casanova, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, 2003), pp. 181-201.
20 For one recent example of this sort of work, though not with reference to the Farangi Mahall, see John
Walbridge, "Logic in the Islamic Intellectual Tradition: The Recent Centuries", Islamic Studies, 39 (2000), pp. 55
75; and cf. idem., "A Nineteenth-Century Indo-Islamic Logic Textbook", Islamic Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 687?693.
Robinson had apparently once intended to write a more ambitious book on the Farangi
Mahall than the essays collected in his volume on that topic (cf. FM, pp. 5-7). That book still
needs to be written, and it would be best written by Robinson himself. In the meanwhile,
what his essays on the Farangi Mahall and other themes provide in the two volumes discussed
here is an indispensable foundation, as well as numerous fertile directions, for the study of
the 'ulama, Muslim politics, and religious change in modern South Asian Islam.

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Review: Review Essay: Modernity and Religious Change in South Asian Islam

Modernity and Religious Change in

South Asian Islam1

MUHAMMAD QASIM ZAMAN

Robinson, Farangi Mahall, p. 37, citing Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 136.

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