The Qur'an in South Asia

Hermeneutics, Qur'an Projects, and Imaginings of Islamic Tradition in British India

Kamran Bashir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

The book investigates modern Qur'an commentaries in South Asia and engages with how Muslim scholars have imagined and assessed their past intellectual heritage. The research is focused on British India from the time of the Mutiny of 1857 to the moment of the Partition of united India in 1947.

Offering critical scrutiny of Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an in North India, the study especially focuses on the Qur'anic thought of Sayyid Ahmed Khan (d. 1989), Ashraf Ali Thanawi (d. 1943), and Hamid al-Din Farahi (d. 1930). The volume challenges widespread assumptions of an all-pervasive reform and revivalism underlying the academic study of Islam. Instead of looking for Muslim revivalism and reform as epistemological foundations, it stresses the study of modern Qur'an commentaries, in particular local and cosmopolitan contexts. Departing from the oft-repeated explanations of Muslim scholarship and modern Islam through the lens of traditionalism and modernism, it discovers how Muslim scholars viewed themselves in relation to the Islamic tradition, and how they imagined and assessed their past intellectual heritage.

Studying the history of the interpretation of the Qur'an in the multiple contexts of nineteenth and early twentieth-century British India, the book will be of interest to readers of Qur'anic studies, modern Islam and South Asian studies.

1 Pre-modern and early modern Qur’anic hermeneutics in South Asia

The main aim of this chapter is to develop a broad understanding of the nature of Qur’anic hermeneutics in the century prior to the Mutiny, a period in which the pre-modern intellectual culture still prevailed. For this purpose, an acquaintance with pre-modern Qur’anic exegesis in South Asia in general helps one in making sense of the continuities and changes in the modern period. My purpose here is to identify the development of ideas and their patterns over a substantial stretch of time. It is, thus, based on existing scholarly work on the history of pre-modern Qur’anic commentaries and hermeneutics. As a consequence, the conclusions in this chapter are mostly qualitative in their character. The chapter is devoted to outlining the major findings and conclusions of studies by investigating three sources of data (whose details and references can be found in Appendix A). The first of these sources are the histories of early tafsīr and translations of the Qur’an. There is no systematic study so far that analyses this intellectual historiography that traces commentaries and ʿulūm al-Qurʾān works written in the South Asian region. Findings here are mostly based on a review of current scholarship on Qur’an commentaries from before 1857. Second, I examine pre-modern and early modern trends in Qur’anic hermeneutics in South Asia and how these trends prefigured, influenced, or shaped the interpretive thinking of the later period. For this purpose, a sample of key pre-1857 tafsīr works, in both printed and manuscript form have been studied. In considering these sources, my focus is mostly on authors’ introductions to their commentaries. This approach helps one gain an acquaintance with the way pre-modern exegetes positioned themselves in their historical contexts and with the key principles they used to interpret the Qur’an. Finally, I attempt to trace the post-1857 reception history of this earlier South Asian intellectual heritage centred on the Qur’an. The focus here is on those post-1857 writings that reflect on the early South Asian exegetical legacy. The study examines how later scholars were thinking about the quality and import of earlier works particularly those that originated in North India. My general purpose is to see how a local South Asian tradition of Muslim Qur’anic exegesis was developing over a long stretch of time.

General insights from the historiography of South Asian Tafsīr

A glimpse at the nature of exegetical activity in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (which can be seen in detail in Appendix A) leads us to certain initial historical and hermeneutic insights regarding these histories of Qur’an translations and commentaries. What emerges, first, through the study of this literature is the very Arabic character of Qur’anic exegesis in South Asia before the Mutiny. Despite the presence of Qur’anic works in Persian and Urdu, Qur’anic thought seemed to have generated more in Arabic than in other languages. Even after the post-1857 period, the pressure to write about the Qur’an in Arabic continued to some degree, and the motivation to do so remained strong.¹ For that reason, later Qur’an commentators like Ḥamīd al-Dīn Farāhī, Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī, and the Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholar, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (d. 1890)² kept on using Arabic as the main medium of expression in their works on the Qur’an and other Islamic sciences.

Second, these histories incidentally present us with useful knowledge about the nature of the early exegesis of the Qur’an in South Asia. Although the stress in such works was on tracing an exegetical lineage, the historians of this literature attempted to characterize the earlier commentaries in broad strokes. We come to know through their works that early commentaries had a clear stress on the principles of naẓm (“coherence”) and rabṭ-i āyāt (the “inter-connectedness of verses”),³ such as in the works of ʿAlī bin Aḥmad al-Mahāʾimī (d. 1431), Muḥammad bin Aḥmad Miyānjiyū (d. 1547), and Mubārak bin Khiḍr Nāgorī (d. 1001), father of Fayḍī and Abū al-Faḍl.⁴ We also find commentators interpreting Qur’anic verses as a way of highlighting the underlying tone, in the scripture, of eulogizing the Prophet’s good traits (manāqib).⁵ A palpable emphasis on uncovering mystical aspects of the divine word is also found in many commentaries, including those of Muḥammad bin Aḥmad Thānēsarī (d. 1417),⁶ Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥasan Gēsū Darāz (d. 1425),⁷ al-Mahāʾimī, and Mīyānjiyū. Moreover, we come across writings that are reminiscent of standard works of ʿulūm al-Qurʾān along the pre-modern lines of al-Zarkashī and al-Suyūṭī. This is manifested in the extant writings of Nāgorī and Fayḍī. Similarly, there were works in both the pre-modern and early modern traditions that gave preference to interpreting the scripture according to the Ḥanafī school of Islamic law. This was done by Kalīm Allāh Jahānābādī (d. 1728),⁸ Thanāʾ Allāh Pānipatī (d. 1810),⁹ who is usually introduced as a student of Walī Allāh, and others. Reflecting on these insights, we may provisionally argue that these writings were not making radical departures from the early and medieval Arabic tafsīr tradition of the larger Islamic world, a point that is corroborated in the next aspect of this literature.

Third, our study of the pre-1857 exegesis brings to light the dominant influence of pre-modern Arabic commentaries, in particular Tafsīr al-Bayḍāwī and Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, in the works of the authors discussed above. The great impact of these two Arabic works is also corroborated by studies undertaken on the history of Muslim education in South Asia.¹⁰ Furthermore, recent attempts to revisit the historiography of Arabic tafsīr in other Muslim lands suggest their influence in South Asia as well.¹¹

In addition to the above observations regarding the earlier exegesis in South Asia, histories also tend to accentuate a few other pre-Mutiny aspects of the genre of exegesis. In terms of the geographical locale of these works and their authors, the Delhi–Agra–Lucknow nexus served as the centre of this interpretive activity, despite the fact that there had been other established intellectual peripheries, such as Bhopal, Gujarat, and areas in western and southern Punjab. Moreover, these histories give the impression that courtly patronage during the Sultanate period in general, and the Mughal era in particular, fostered the writing of Qur’anic commentaries. Historians see in Nāgorī and Fayḍī development of a kind of court-patronized tradition of tafsīr. This later trend seems to have accelerated under the Mughal Emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. This patronage continued later as the Mughal Emperor Shāh ʿĀlam II supported projects of Urdu translation too. Apart from geographical centralization and courtly patronage, the particular genealogies of exegetes reflect the centralization of this hermeneutical activity either around Sufi schools or around the scholarly trio of ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm al-Siyālkotī (d. 1656), Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1624), and the famous theologian and Ḥadīth expert, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlawī (d. 1642).¹² These three influential luminaries flourished between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Mughal India. The intellectual origins of different works and the Qur’anic hermeneutics underlying them depict genealogies reaching to these three persons. The impact of this scholarly trio can also be assessed in the later reception history of these scholars’ works that gives the impression that these three were seen in post-1857 traditionalist circles as the custodians of an “orthodox” tradition established in earlier centuries, before the rise of Walī Allāh and his family. In other words, the exegesis originating from these centres was later perceived as being in safe hands in those times.

In sum, three features seem to dominate the character of this exegetical literature: 1) its Arabic character both in terms of the medium of writing and its reliance on the classical tafsīr tradition, a character that did not change till the rise of Urdu exegesis after the Mutiny, and that too evolved only slowly; 2) the particular geographical locale of Mughal urban centres and its related pattern of seeking courtly patronage; 3) and finally, the rootedness in pre-modern tradition of scholarship produced by the three seventeenth-century luminaries mentioned above.

In addition to the above, a critical survey of the histories of exegetical literature in Urdu reveals further historical tendencies. The steady rise of the printing press from around the 1820s made more opportunities available for educated people to render the Qur’an into Urdu. This tendency, however, was still developing and was not comparable to what we see with the emergence of publishing houses, such as Naval Kishore Press (est. 1858), in the post-Mutiny period.¹³ Another tendency was the reproduction of an old pattern of state and institutional patronage for such kinds of religious literature. We see Mughal Emperor Shāh ʿĀlam II (r. 1760–1806) continuously patronizing translations of the Qur’an into Urdu. Linked to this imperial patronage were initiatives like the translation of the Qur’an completed in 1804 by a team of Muslim scholars commissioned at Fort William College in Calcutta under the supervision of Dr. John Gilchrist (d. 1841).¹⁴ In addition, regional kings and rulers, like the Nawab of Awadh, were also encouraging scholars under their patronage to write translations of the Qur’an. Moreover, these histories throw light on the issue of the authenticity of a translation in the decades before 1857. In general, the major feature of the era was the struggle between rendering an idiomatic translation and pursuing a stricter phraseology that remained loyal to the original Qur’anic Arabic text. The overall reception of these works as outlined by these histories also points to the fact that works produced in the family of Walī Allāh were not automatically considered authoritative from the beginning. The establishment of their authoritative status seems to have been a post-1857 phenomenon or something promoted by Deoband’s scholars close to the end of the nineteenth century. In short, there are hints that indicate fluidity in the reception of the works of Walī Allāh’s sons, ʿAbd al-Qādir and Rafīʿ al-Dīn. As Sharf al-Dīn’s history of Urdu tafsīr suggests, there remained other competing works that continued to gain acknowledgement for their linguistic and religious merit and that remained in print for a long time.¹⁵

Qur’anic hermeneutics in pre-Mutiny India

In addition to engaging with the historiography of earlier tafsīr works, directly studying some key primary sources of Qur’anic exegesis from the pre-Mutiny period can help in charting new trends in Qur’anic hermeneutics. In methodological terms, the first task for an intellectual historian who is trying to make sense of a vast mass of literature is to develop a working periodization in order to map the continuities and changes in hermeneutical thought preceding 1857.¹⁶ In th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Note on transliteration
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Pre-modern and early modern Qur’anic hermeneutics in South Asia
• 2 The Qur’an and the context of British India
• 3 Introducing Muslim Qur’an commentators and commentaries in British India
• 4 Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (1817–1898)
• 5 Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī (1863–1943)
• 6 Ḥamīd al-Dīn Farāhī (1863–1930)
• 7 Qur’anic hermeneutics in the twilight of colonial India: Muslim intellectual responses to modernity
• 8 Qur’an projects and Muslim imaginings of Islamic tradition
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index