Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

Shi'ism between Pakistan and the Middle East

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469649801
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi'is and their religious competitors in this "Land of the Pure." The notion of Pakistan as the pinnacle of modern global Muslim aspiration forms a crucial component of this story. It has empowered Shi'is, who form about twenty percent of the country's population, to advance alternative conceptions of their religious hierarchy while claiming the support of towering grand ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq. Fuchs shows how popular Pakistani preachers and scholars have boldly tapped into the esoteric potential of Shi'ism, occupying a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of contemporary Islamic thought. They have indigenized the Iranian Revolution and formulated their own ideas for fulfilling the original promise of Pakistan. Challenging typical views of Pakistan as a mere Shi'i backwater, Fuchs argues that its complex religious landscape represents how a local, South Asian Islam may open up space for new intellectual contributions to global Islam. Yet religious ideology has also turned Pakistan into a deadly battlefield: sectarian groups since the 1980s have been bent on excluding Shi'is as harmful to their own vision of an exemplary Islamic state.

CHAPTER ONE

All-Indian Shiʿism, Colonial Modernity, and the Challenge of Pakistan

The annual meeting of 1940 was an exception for the All India Shiʿa Conference (AISC). Since its foundation in 1907, delegates had usually met in North Indian cities of substantial size, such as Calcutta, Lucknow, or Lahore. For the 1940 session, though, organizers around the Shiʿi notable Navab Nisar ʿAlikhan Qizilbash (d. 1944),¹ had set their eyes on uncharted territory. They had decided to gather that fall in the small qasba of Dokoha in the Punjab, a settlement of predominantly Shiʿi Sayyids located outside of the city of Jalandhar.² The preparation committee was bent on staging a splendid affair and relied mostly on the largess of the Qizilbashes and another, even more affluent Shiʿi landholding family of North India, the Mahmudabads.³ Accordingly, they erected an entire new, if only temporary, city of tents and canopies next to a pond outside of Dokoha, covering approximately five hectares and guarded by an imposing concrete gate.⁴ The distance between the entrance and the main canopy was lined with colorful electrical lights,⁵ visible not only to conference attendees but even to railway passengers traveling at night on the Jalandhar-Ludhiana line.⁶ The flag of the AISC proudly flew at a height of forty feet. It depicted against a green background Imam ʿAli’s famous sword Dhu ’l-fiqar along with a stylized sun, representing the Prophet Muhammad as the “sun of the message” (shams al-risala), and emitting twelve rays that stood for the twelve Shiʿi Imams.⁷ The stage of the conference offered seating space for five hundred delegates who would enjoy precious carpets under their feet. The area below them could accommodate two thousand visitors, who would find themselves surrounded by flags and banners of the 128 Shiʿi voluntary organizations affiliated with the AISC.⁸ The gathering was also an opportunity to showcase the activities of the Conference: its daily newspaper, Sarfaraz—named after its former president Navab Sarfaraz Husayn⁹—was represented by a tent. The Shiʿi orphanage in Lucknow had its own showroom where one could buy handicrafts produced by orphans fostered there.

With all these preparations in place, disaster struck. The night before the grand opening of the Dokoha session, strong winds and rain lashed the camp. The small pond turned into an unexpected menace. The bamboo structures of the canopy snapped and many of the colorful lights were smashed. While roughly three hundred men of the qasba were at hand to clear up the most serious mishaps early the next morning, the meeting had lost some of its elaborate luster. And the next disappointment was not far off when it became clear that far fewer participants than expected would come to attend.¹⁰ The organizers tried to make sense of this poor showing, blaming a lack of propaganda activities, the decision to schedule the convocation on a workday, and the inclement weather, which had rendered traveling difficult.

Far more serious, though, were two other reasons cited by the general secretary of the Reception Committee, the pleader Sayyid Tajir Husayn.¹¹ He pointed to the infamous tabarra agitation in Lucknow of 1938–39, one of the most significant instances of Sunni-Shiʿi sectarianism during the colonial period.¹² In the aftermath of these events, Punjabi Shiʿis had turned their backs on the AISC and refused to come to Dokoha, accusing the organization of inactivity during this episode of united Shiʿi struggle. According to Tajir Husayn, Punjab’s Shiʿis regarded the gathering as a waste of their time. The Punjabis had also supposedly taken steps to no longer extend invitations for processions and mourning ceremonies to any of those ʿulama and zakirs (popular preachers) who had not wholeheartedly participated in the “battlefront of Lucknow” (mahaz-i Lakhnauʾ). Another major problem that drove down attendance at the 1940 conference was, according to its general secretary, the lack of participation by any ʿulama and mujtahids of repute.¹³ Such an open display of Shiʿi disunity came at a most unfortunate time for the AISC. As the organization saw it, the Shiʿi community was in dire need of a representative organization in order to forestall a brewing danger. Only a couple of months earlier, in March 1940, the Muslim League had passed its Lahore Resolution. This document called for the establishment of “autonomous and sovereign” units in the northwestern and eastern zones of India, meaning separate states in areas with a Muslim majority.¹⁴ Speakers at the AISC meeting found the prospect of Pakistan deeply troubling. They did not shy away from denouncing it as an oppressive vision of a Sunni Islamic state that would target Hindus, Sikhs, and Shiʿi Muslims alike.¹⁵

This vivid account of the 1940 AISC session leads right into the turbulent late colonial period, which is the temporal frame of this chapter. My goal is to explore questions of religious authority, Shiʿi identity, and sectarianism through three specific lenses. First, I map how the internal tensions between the ʿulama and Western-educated Shiʿis played out within the AISC and beyond. Second, I am interested in how Indian Shiʿis in the late colonial period positioned themselves vis-à-vis Sunni Islam. Such a concern with sectarian identity is intimately connected to the increasingly exclusive and purist vision of Pakistan as formulated by the ML and ʿulama affiliated with it. Third, I explore the international dimensions of Shiʿi thought during the last decades of British rule and investigate to what extent Indian Shiʿis were in conversation with events and Shiʿi scholarship beyond the subcontinent. In examining these three aspects, I draw extensively on the Annual Proceedings of the AISC, which have not yet been sufficiently studied.¹⁶

My discussion makes several major interventions with regard to existing scholarship. One contribution of this chapter is my suggestion to rethink the authority enjoyed by leading Shiʿi ʿulama in the first half of the twentieth century. Scholars have hinted at conflicts between modern educated activists and Lucknow’s clerics but have attributed challenges to the standing of the mujtahids primarily to external shocks like the Khilafat movement or sectarian strife. I argue that such a view falls into the trap of reinscribing the colonial gaze on religious developments in the subcontinent and fails to explore how and why this rift developed. The Proceedings of the All India Shiʿa Conference in particular grant us a unique window into these internal Shiʿi deliberations, involving personalities from all over North India. As chapters 2 and 3 explore in more detail, the modernist critics set the tone for challenging the authority of the jurists by attacking their general uneducated backwardness as well as the concept of taqlid, the obligation of a lay Shiʿi to follow the authoritative legal rulings of a senior scholar. This contestation partially explains the energetic efforts by Shiʿi ʿulama after the partition of British India to finally establish the duty of taqlid in the midst of the Pakistani Shiʿi community. Assaults on the authority of Lucknow’s mujtahids lead me to a related problem in the existing literature, namely its almost exclusive focus on this city as the center of Shiʿi Islam in North India. Lucknow undoubtedly was home to the most impressive architectural Shiʿi structures in the subcontinent, which it had inherited from its Navabi past.¹⁷ It was regarded as the seat of India’s leading Shiʿi Usuli scholars and boasted the most advanced Shiʿi religious seminaries.¹⁸ Nevertheless, it is problematic to let the city’s Shiʿi sphere speak with such an almost exclusive voice during the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, I suggest that the Punjab constitutes a new and exciting frontier for the future study of South Asian Shiʿi Islam.¹⁹

Second, I take issue in this chapter with the notion of Shiʿism developing as a “freestanding religion” during this time period. In my view, the Shiʿis of late colonial India were primarily concerned with presenting their practices and beliefs as a faithful expression of the “original,” “essential,” and “pure” nature of Islam. While they did not necessarily exclude the Sunnis from the fold of religion, they styled themselves as a spiritual elite that transcended the views held by the “common Muslims” (ʿamm musalman).

On a related point, my research also calls into question the supposedly ecumenical character of the Pakistan movement, which, according to such an understanding, easily appealed to Sunnis and Shiʿis alike. Instead, I give voice to the deep Shiʿi skepticism regarding the potentially oppressive and Sunni-dominated future Muslim homeland, concerns that have often been swept aside in the existing literature.²⁰ As the debate in the 1940s about the increasingly religious character of Pakistan heated up, Shiʿis expressed fear that a state built on “pure Islam” might be an entity that could not tolerate difference. As I show in chapter 5, this debate over the meaning and the implications of Pakistan was taken up again in the 1980 and 1990s when anti-Shiʿi sectarianism became an increasingly pervasive phenomenon in Pakistan. While fleshing out these continuities, I also hope to demonstrate that we encounter a variety of “sectarianisms” in the context of the colonial period and later in Pakistan. Sectarian discourses remained far from stagnant but were crucially shaped through the impact of the Iranian Revolution.²¹

A final topic I revisit in this chapter is the notion that before Partition Shiʿis in the subcontinent were almost exclusively focused on Indian concerns because these overwhelmed and drowned out attention paid to the Middle East. My goal is instead to bring back the crucial importance of transnational connections and to emphasize the strong and substantial ties which bound the Shiʿis of the subcontinent to events in Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula.

As the following pages show, contestations of religious authority, sectarianism, and transnational concerns do not form entirely discrete issues but are to a large extent interrelated. Before discussing these topics, I briefly engage questions of community formation and the sectarian situation in colonial Lucknow in order to set the scene for the following discussion in this chapter.

LATE COLONIAL INDIA: SHIʿI ISLAM AND THE FORCES OF SECTARIANISM, NATIONALISM, AND COMMUNALISM

The last decades of colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent gave rise to an unprecedented “publicness” of debates over “Muslim self-definition” that played out in newspapers, processions, mass meetings, and elections.²² Associations on a local, provincial, and national level promoted socioreligious reform and devised new models of educational institutions that combined training in modern sciences with the emphasis to “utilize them according to the will of the Almighty.”²³ Graduates of these institutions formed new generations of Western-educated Muslims who staffed the bureaucracy of the colonial state and administered the subcontinent’s princely states.²⁴ Contradictory universalizing and particularizing conceptions of Islam were on offer and performed in poetry or religious processions.²⁵ Notions of communalist arguments competed in the public arena with diverging visions of Indian society that emphasized nationalism as the only “forward-looking, progressive, ‘modern’ way” out of this downward spiral of increasing compartmentalization.²⁶ Appeals to nationalist sentiments did not necessarily require, however, that Indians should give up their particular religious identities and opt for secularist worldviews. Most prominently, the Khilafat movement was able to channel a seemingly exclusively Muslim cause, namely preserving the temporal power of the Ottoman sultan because it was crucial for fulfilling his spiritual role as “Caliph of Islam,” into a pan-Indian rallying cry espoused by Gandhi.²⁷ The latter conceived of the Khilafat movement primarily as an anti-British issue. For Gandhi, it was a means “to bring the Muslims into the nationalist movement, and a big boost to his plans to reorganize and redirect the Congress into a mass movement.”²⁸ Deobandi ʿulama affiliated with the Congress attempted to make the case for “united nationalism” (mutahhida qaumiyyat) in India. To do so, they stressed that a nation was not constituted by ties of faith. Religious solidarity was rather the basis of a religious community (milla) and in this regard Indian Muslims were not distinct because they were part of the universal Muslim community. This argument was meant to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Alternative Centers of Shiʿi Islam
• 1. All-Indian Shiʿism, Colonial Modernity, and the Challenge of Pakistan
• 2. Theology, Sectarianism, and the Limits of Reform: The Making of Shiʿism in the Land of the Pure
• 3. Projections and Receptions of Religious Authority: Grand Ayatollahs and Pakistan’s Shiʿi “Periphery”
• 4. Khomeini’s Perplexed Pakistani Men: Importing and Debating the Iranian Revolution since 1979
• 5. Longing for the State: Dialectics of the Local and the Transnational in Sunni-Shiʿi Sectarianism
• Conclusion: South Asia, the Middle East, and Muslim Transnationalism
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index