Abstract
This is a study of the networks through which people moved between the British Indian and the Ottoman empires in the nineteenth century, in the process fashioning a shared culture of ideas, religious commitments, books and institutions. Those involved in this activity were all enterprising, colourful and learned men; and they could be as ‘slippery’ as the networks facilitating their movement. British colonial and Ottoman officials viewed them with considerable misgivings. And yet, as Seema Alavi shows, these empires—their mutual rivalries, their cultural centres, their threats of punishment and promises of patronage, their technologies—were central to the careers of the individuals in question and to the cosmopolitan world they, in turn, helped create and sustain.
Alavi focuses on five key Muslim figures in this book. Among them is Sayyid Fadl, an Indian of Arab origin and the son of a noted Sufi from Malabar. He was exiled from India in 1852 for his role in instigating a peasant uprising in Malabar, and he spent a good part of his subsequent career trying to establish himself as the ruler of Dhofar (in present-day Oman). This effort brought him into contact with Ottoman authorities, and he showed much adeptness at playing the Ottomans against the British while seeking to promote his own interests. For their part, British and Ottoman authorities, too, were willing to set aside their suspicions to put his multifaceted networks to use in cultivating Muslim opinion in their favour.
Three others of this book’s central characters—Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Haji Imdadullah and Jafer Thanesri—were all involved in the Mutiny of 1857. Kairanawi, who had gained distinction in India by virtue of his disputations with Christian missionaries, settled down in Mecca, where he eventually established what became a notable madrasa. He also continued to produce polemical writings on Christianity, which brought him to the notice of the Ottoman sultan. Haji Imdadullah, too, made Mecca his home in the aftermath of the Mutiny. He was the mentor of the founders and early associates of the famous Deoband madrasa, though his influence as a Sufi master of the Chishti order goes well beyond the ranks of the Deobandis. Imdadullah was a much sought after guide for a steady stream of pilgrims from India, and they served on their return to India as conduits for his writings and teachings. Thanesri, for his part, paid a heavier price for his anticolonial activities; he spent 18 years at the penal colony on the Andaman Islands. Yet, as Alavi shows, his travels through India while being transported to the Andamans gave him an unusually vivid sense of the country under British rule, as did the quasi-ethnographic contrasts between India and the Andamans that he was able to observe and record. Unlike the other Muslim protagonists of Alavi’s story, he also learnt English while living in the penal colony, came to serve as a clerk in its judicial bureaucracy and became so good at helping his fellow convicts draft their petitions that the British subsequently forbade other Indian officials there from doing anything similar (p. 352).
The fifth key figure Alavi examines is Siddiq Hasan Khan, a learned scholar of the Ahl-i Hadith orientation who came to acquire unprecedented opportunities to promote the influence of his ideas through his marriage to the ruler of the princely state of Bhopal. Though the charge of being a ‘Wahhabi’—a follower of Muhammad ibn ‘Abdul Wahhab, whose alliance with a local ruler in central Arabia had provided the ideological underpinnings to the first Saudi state in the eighteenth century—had been directed at many of those that the British suspected of subverting colonial rule, Siddiq Hasan had the highest profile among such figures. His prolific writings were scrutinised intently for evidence of his hostile designs vis-à-vis the British, and the fact that his intellectual networks straddled British and Ottoman territories and involved the well-funded movement of suspect books and people caused much anxiety in colonial circles.
The nineteenth century cosmopolitanism that Alavi describes was anchored in books—in their writing, publication and dissemination. Siddiq Hasan had agents in leading intellectual centres across the Muslim world acquiring books for him and promoting those he had written or whose publication he had sponsored. Imdadullah, though not a scholar in the manner of leading Deobandi ulema, took an active interest in the publication of his books and gave detailed instructions to his disciples for their distribution in India. Thanesri gave expression to his imagining of India through a travelogue as well as other writings. And Kairanwi’s Izhar al-Haqq is a classic in the genre of anti-missionary polemics. Alavi makes an important contribution in highlighting and documenting the book-centred nature of this cosmopolitanism as well as the circles of patronage that helped sustain it.
A central concern of this study has to do with the agency of the individual and the ways in which it both created and was facilitated by intellectual, commercial and religious networks. This is the story of innovative and enterprising ‘cultural brokers’ and of their ability to cross political and cultural borders. In marked contrast to the paranoia of colonial officials, this was a world whose connectivity centred on such reformist individuals rather than on the person of the caliph, though he, too, was part of the picture and an important source of patronage for many of the people discussed in the book. This is an important argument, though precisely how the transregional connections were forged by such individuals often remains unclear. The slipperiness of the cosmopolitan individuals and their networks goes some way towards accounting for this lack of clarity. But it is also the case that the writing and publishing of books sometimes appears to take on a life of its own in Alavi’s account, giving the impression that such activity sufficed, by itself, to establish particular networks. Likewise, one can come away with the impression, notably with reference to Imdadullah, that all it took to foster a consensus-based Islam was to simply write about it. Exactly what Islamic reform meant to the various people described in this study—the context and content of the reformist concerns—also requires a rather more careful treatment than Alavi gives to it.
Alavi offers a useful demonstration of the point that the networks along which people and ideas moved were a combination of the old and the new. Yet she sees the new in rather more stark terms than might be merited. For instance, analysing the Qur’an, as Kairanwi did, in terms of its linguistic and rhetorical qualities is hardly to ‘secularise’ it; scholars of the Qur’an had done so for centuries before the nineteenth century. It is not quite accurate to say that Kairanwi presents it as a ‘positivist, rational text’ or that he needed to do so in order for it to ‘play the role of a connector in the larger civilizational victory that Muslims had to win over the West’ (p. 197). Precisely how the Qur’an served as some such ‘connector’ remains vague, too. Also lacking is any nuanced attention to the scholarly tradition that a Kairanwi or an Imdadullah drew on. Such attention would have allowed for a clearer sense of how the old was deployed in the service of the new, what sort of interpretive agency may have been at work in such cases, and why the enterprise appealed to particular audiences. Incidentally, there do not seem to be good grounds for thinking, as Alavi does, that Kairanwi had Salafi leanings, by which she means a ‘foreground[ing, in the Ottoman reformist vein, of] science and rationality as the frame for individual action’ (p. 170). Despite stereotypes, a traditional madrasa curriculum was not necessarily inhospitable to reason and science, and Kairanwi did not have to break with a longstanding scholarly tradition to be able to include logic, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy into the ambit of his students’ education. It is worth noting that it was from India that the texts relevant to those disciplines had been dispatched for the use of his students in Mecca (see Mahmud Ahmad Zafar, Mawlana Rahmatullah Kairanwi aur unke mu‘asirin [Lahore, 2007], 495, 517).
Related to the question of individual agency is the matter of what some of the figures examined in this book had intended to do through their activities. That their actions helped foster a cosmopolitan world is persuasively demonstrated in this book. Rather less persuasive are Alavi’s repeated assertions that, as she puts it with reference to Siddiq Hasan, ‘he sought to forge global unity across the varied empires…’ (p. 279). About Imdadullah, too, we are told that he ‘hoped to unite the umma [the Muslim community] across empires’ (p. 251). Though Alavi’s framework is defined in terms of empires, of course, she offers no clear evidence that Siddiq Hasan or Imdadullah, too, were thinking specifically in those terms.
The book has a fair share of factual and technical errors, too. For example, contrary to what Alavi suggests, the noted Egyptian reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh’s theological work, Risalat al-tawhid, is not a translation (or retranslation) into Arabic of the Taqwiyat al-Iman of Shah Isma‘il, a grandson of the famous 18th scholar Shah Waliullah (p. 418, n. 8). ‘Ubaidullah (Sindhi), a Deobandi scholar best known for his involvement in the abortive Silk Letter Conspiracy during World War I, is mischaracterised as the son of the Begum of Bhopal (pp. 321–22). On a different note, there is nothing surprising about the fact that Bukhari’s hadith-collection was taught at Kairanwi’s madrasa in Mecca (cf. p. 189), since the Sunnis, irrespective of the legal tradition to which they adhere, have long considered it to be among the most authoritative compendia of the Prophet’s teachings. Some theological debates, too, are described with considerable inaccuracy (e.g., p. 246, where imkan-i kazib does not mean ‘falsehood about the existence of anyone apart from Allah’ but refers rather to the controversy about whether God could tell a lie). The manner in which many book titles, especially those in Arabic, are transliterated also makes them virtually unintelligible (e.g., Siddiq Hasan Khan’s collection of sermons, al-Maw‘izah al-hasana, is transliterated as Mawaz-ul-Hasnota; and even the widely used hadith work, Mishkat al-Masabih, is rendered Maskutah wa al Masabih). Some of Alavi’s translations, too, are not entirely accurate. In such cases, the book needs to be used with caution.
Nonetheless, Seema Alavi has rendered an important scholarly service with this study. With extensive archival and other work, she paints an evocative picture of a highly literate Muslim cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century, and she effectively decouples it from caliphate-centred readings of that world, on the one hand, and Eurocentric ones, on the other hand. Even as the indebtedness of the new Muslim networks to conditions of imperial and colonial rule is revealed throughout, Alavi does not allow the agency of enterprising Sufis, scholars and educational entrepreneurs to be reduced to those conditions. Her study also has the great merit of bringing out figures such as Imdadullah, Kairanwi and Siddiq Hasan from the particular contexts in which they have been discussed so far—as Sufis, anti-Christian polemicists, Salafis—into a wider, shared and cosmopolitan framework. And her attentiveness to some of their writings is a useful step in the direction of bringing strands of social, intellectual and political history together. Scholars working on Islam, imperialism and Muslim networks in the nineteenth century will need to take careful account of this study.