Defending Muḥammad in Modernity

SherAli Tareen

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268106720
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelv?-Deoband? polemic. The Barelv? and Deoband? groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world.

Defending Mu?ammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelv?-Deoband? polemic was instead animated by what he calls "competing political theologies" that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.

part one

Competing Political Theologies

chapter one

Thinking the Question of Sovereignty in Early Colonial India

Sometime during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the prominent North Indian Muslim reformer Shāh Muḥammad Ismā‘īl was teaching a lesson on the Ḥadīth while seated in the courtyard of the famous Jāmi‘ mosque in Delhi. A crowd of people carrying relics of the Prophet (tabarrukāt) swarmed the mosque, chanting reverential hymns and prayers in praise of the Prophet. Ismā‘īl was unmoved by the spectacle and continued his lesson. His lack of response, however, did not please the people associated with the procession. “Mawlānā, what kind of behavior is this?” one of them scolded Ismā‘īl. “Please stand up and show your reverence for the Prophet’s relics.”¹

Ismā‘īl, however, remained unfazed. His continued indifference incensed the crowd. They repeated their demand, this time in an even harsher tone. Ismā‘īl finally responded by saying, “First of all, these relics are artificial; they are not real. Second, at this moment, I am serving as a delegate of the Prophet by performing the obligation of transmitting his message. Therefore, I cannot stand up.” This scornful response further agitated an already angry crowd. An all-out brawl was prevented only because Ismā‘īl’s loyalists at the mosque were as numerous as his detractors. Their skirmish was thus limited to a lively verbal duel and an exchange of verbal abuse.²

Severely offended by Ismā‘īl’s behavior, the procession holders lodged an official complaint against him to Akbar Shāh (d. 1837), the Mughal emperor in Delhi at the time. They accused Ismā‘īl of insulting the Prophet and requested Akbar Shāh to punish him for his unruly attitude. The emperor summoned Ismā‘īl to his court and demanded an explanation for his actions at the Jāmi‘ mosque on the day of this incident.³ While at the court, Ismā‘īl admitted that he had said the relics were artificial and that he was not inclined to venerate them. Akbar Shāh rebuked him, saying, “How impertinent that you call them [the relics] artificial.” Ismā‘īl smiled and responded mildly: “Sir, I only used words to say they were artificial, but you believe them to be so and also treat them as such.” Akbar Shāh replied in bemusement, “How so?” “Sir, every year,” Ismā‘īl explained, “the procession of relics comes to visit you in your court, but you never leave your court to visit the relics.” This response left the emperor speechless.

Ismā‘īl then requested a minister at the court to bring a Qur’ān and the Ḥadīth collection of Bukhārī. When these two books were brought to him, he held them in his hands for a few moments and then returned them. He then proceeded to deliver a speech to those gathered at the court. In this speech, Ismā‘īl again emphasized first, that it was debatable whether the relics were real or artificial. “But,” he continued, “even if we were to accept their authenticity, the sacrality associated with objects such as a piece of garment or sandals worn by the Prophet is not deserving of personal or substantive honor [sharaf-i­zātī]. On the other hand, there is no doubt about the Qur’ān being the word of God. Similarly, Bukhārī’s book of Ḥadīth is undeniably the word of the Prophet; it is the most revered book in the tradition after the Qur’ān. There can be no doubt that the word of God and the word of the Prophet are more sacred than a garment once worn by the Prophet. But despite all this, when a copy of the Qur’ān and Bukhārī’s Ḥadīth came before you, none of you stood up in reverence! From this it becomes apparent that all of you venerate the Prophet’s relics not because of their sanctity but merely because of your addiction to established customs [rasm­parastī].”⁴

As shown in this narrative, by the early nineteenth century, intra-Mus lim contestations on the legitimacy of customs and traditions inspired by prophetic authority became centrally visible in the North Indian public sphere. Shāh Muḥammad Ismā‘īl, the protagonist of this story, personified an emerging reform movement that vigorously critiqued long-established customs and conventions, calling them inessential if not out-right harmful to religion. Venerating the Prophet’s relics, for instance, was an unnecessary distraction that undermined the essentials of the religion. The material relics bore no imprints of the Prophet himself; they were mere objects devoid of any access to prophetic charisma. They lacked what religion scholar Robert Orsi would call the Prophet’s “real presence.”⁵ In addition to zealously separating the real from the material, reformers like Ismā‘īl also vigorously protested monarchical modes of life and politics that in their view encouraged a morally sluggish public. A politics of aristocracy, they argued, nourished a religious ethos that encouraged the entrenchment of superstitious customs in the public sphere and that undermined divine sovereignty. This antiaristocratic sentiment is clear in the above narrative’s connection between the “addiction” of the masses to entrenched customs and the moral ineptitude of the Mughal emperor at the time.

But as the crowd’s opposition to Ismā‘īl for his refusal to venerate the Prophet’s relics shows, the banner bearers of this reform movement met fierce resistance. A rival group of scholars vigorously challenged their authority and staunchly defended the traditions they had attacked. For this opposing group, practices like honoring the Prophet’s relics were an ideal way to exalt and keep alive his memory. Therefore, anyone who challenged the normative validity of such rituals was guilty of detracting from the Prophet’s exceptional status and charisma.

These contestations over the normative limits of tradition and prophetic authority were enabled by a conjuncture in Indian Muslim history marked by a crisis of sovereignty. In the decades following the death of the last recognized Mughal emperor, ‘Ālamgīr Aurangzeb, in 1707, the political fortunes of the Indian Muslim elite plummeted. By 1757, after more than two hundred years of Mughal rule, a new imperial power had come to dominate the political landscape of the country, the British East India Company. Akbar Shāh, the Mughal emperor mentioned in the story above, was only a titular monarch whose effective authority was limited to the capital city of Delhi. He was among a series of Aurangzeb’s descendants who “reigned” over an India in which sovereignty was gradually yet decisively shifting toward the British.⁶

This shift in political sovereignty also provided the conditions for intensified contestations on the question of sovereignty in the theological realm. Underlying these contestations was the question: What imaginaries of the political should inform the conceptualization of the relationship between God, the Prophet, and ordinary Muslims? Was this tripartite relationship organized in the form of a hierarchy whereby accessing the sovereign divine was possible only through the mediatory charisma of the Prophet? Or was the divine-human encounter founded on a politics of radical democracy that resisted any notions of hierarchy? What imaginaries of everyday life and practices did these contrasting political theologies demand?

Such questions generated a number of polemics and debates among the Indian Muslim intellectual elite during this transitional political moment. This section analyzes such a moment of polemical activity in the first three decades of the nineteenth century that brought into view competing understandings of the relationship between divine sovereignty and prophetic charisma in Islam. The actors who participated in this polemic were two prominent Sunnī scholars in Delhi, Shāh Muḥammad Ismā‘īl (featured in the narrative above) and Fazl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī.

Their polemic centered on the normative limits of prophetic intercession (shafā‘at) in Islam, and on the twin theological problems of God’s capacity to lie (imkān-i­kizb) and produce another Prophet Muḥammad (imkān-i­naẓīr). Shafā‘at or intercession refers to Prophet Muḥammad’s role as an intercessor between God and human sinners on the Day of Judgment. By petitioning to God on behalf of sinners, the Prophet helps absolve their sins and hence secures them a place in heaven. The Prophet’s capacity for intercession is well documented in traditional sources of normative authority in Islam, such as the Qur’ān and the Prophet’s sayings. However, the scope of that capacity and its implications for divine sovereignty have remained subject to intense debate. For instance, in premodern Islam, scholars attached to the Mu‘tazilī school of theology rejected the doctrine of intercession. The Mu‘tazilītes found intercession an immediate threat to divine sovereignty.⁷ Similarly, as Shaun Marmon has shown, the question of how one distinguished worldly or imperial intercession from eschatological intercession was keenly debated by Muslim scholars in medieval contexts like Mamlūk Egypt.⁸

In more recent times, proponents of the Wahhābī school of thought in Arabia have attacked the doctrine of prophetic intercession with much fervor. The most dramatic example of such an attack came in 1925 when the Saudi authorities destroyed the tombs of the Prophet’s family and his closest companions, on the grounds that the masses had turned these tombs into sites of active worship, thus undermining divine sovereignty. The dispute between Ismā‘īl and Khayrābādī described in this chapter occurred exactly a century before the Saudi destruction of the Prophet’s family’s tombs. In many ways, then, their polemic represents the beginnings of an ideological conflict that turned into a hurricane of debates and polemics in the following decades, often resulting in very material consequences, such as the destruction of tombs and shrines. While no bricks were broken, the outcome of Ismā‘īl’s and Khayrābādī’s dispute was equally dramatic.

Khayrābādī charged Ismā‘īl with anathema/unbelief (kufr) for insulting the Prophet and declared him an unbeliever who deserved to be killed. Ismā‘īl, in turn, accused Khayrābādī of perpetuating a moral order that undermined the exceptionality of divine sovereignty and encouraged the proliferation of heresies and corruptions among the masses. Their hostility metastasized into a monstrous ideological battle among rival North Indian Muslim scholars in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as discussed in the following sections of this book. Before further discussing the intellectual careers of these actors, the texture of their debate, and the significance of their disagreement, in this introductory chapter to this section I want to highlight certain pivotal features of the politico-conceptual space in which this debate between Ismā‘īl and Khayrābādī unfolded. I will do so through an exploration of the ways in which the idea of political theology might be productive in illumining the stakes and context of this conflict. I will follow that by sketching a brief genealogy of key shifts in the conceptual career of sovereignty in the transition from Mughal to British India as a way to set the contextual stage for the next chapters in the section.

Political Theology: Between the Global North and South Asia

Recently, the category of political theology has generated much debate and discussion in the Euro-American academy. Much of this discussion has centered on exposing the theological underpinnings of modern secular politics, especially of the modern state — an insight most often traced to the German theorist Carl Schmitt’s influential 1922 publication Political Theology.

In this work Schmitt famously argued that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”⁹ The modern state, while purporting to have overcome and eclipsed theology, is in fact deeply theological in the constitution of its sovereignty. In a probing recent study of Schmitt’s thought, Paul Kahn sums up Schmitt’s argument as “The state is not the secular arrangement that it purports to be.”¹⁰ Rather, the sovereignty of the supposedly secular state is homologous to that of the divine sovereign, hinging on the capacity to enact an exception to the normal rule. This suggestion has provoked the attention of a number of scholars who in different ways have extended, reworked, and critically engaged Schmitt to question the self-congratulatory narrative of a modern secular break from previously theological political orders. Such a line of inquiry, invested in fracturing the assumed exceptionalism of liberal secular politics, has been conducted in multiple domains of knowledge and life. For instance, notice the capaciousness of the way Graham Hammill and Julia Lupton approach the category of political theology as “the exchanges, pacts, and contests that obtain between religious and political life, especially the use of sacred narratives, motifs, and liturgical forms to establish, legitimate, and reflect upon the sovereignty of monarchs, corporations, and parliaments.”¹¹

On this account, political theology as a concept is not only relevant to religion. In fact, as Hammill and Lupton state emphatically at the outset of their book, “Political theology is not the same as religion.”¹² Rather, political theology presents an important conceptual key to unlock the operations of secular power in such varied yet interconnected discursive avenues as religion, law, literature, politics, science, and economics. I am indebted to scholarship that has sought to mobilize the idea of political theology to highlight the tensions, contradictions, and theologies of secular power. In this work, though, I approach political theology with a slightly different emphasis.

I am interested less in the theological underpinnings of the political than in the political imaginaries, assumptions, and aspirations reflected in seemingly theological discourses and debates. My concern is the mutual imbrication of theology and politics, as reflected in discourses and debates on divine sovereignty. What are some of the ways in which theological debates and arguments about the nature of God’s relationship with humanity are reflective of and informed by shifting understandings and manifestations of political sovereignty?¹³ This in a nutshell is the question I pursue in the following chapters.

The problem space occupied by this question in many ways draws from another of Carl Schmitt’s observations in Political­Theology, namely that “the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.”¹⁴ He further argued that the transition from conceptions of transcendence to those of immanence represents one of the key developments in European political theology from the early modern period. Through a radical “pushing aside” of the sovereign as the sole lawgiver of his kingdom, a democratic notion of legitimacy came to replace a previously monarchical one. The epoch of royalism came to an end because legitimacy no longer existed in the traditional sense. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Schmitt argued, were dominated by the idea of the sole sovereign in the domains of both theology and politics. Schmitt, in effect, claimed that the metaphysical image that a particular epoch forges of the world parallels the structure of its political organization. Therefore, as conceptions of immanence increasingly influenced the political ideas and the state doctrines of the nineteenth century, they undercut monarchical authority, which was eventually supplanted by an order of radical democracy.¹⁵

The decisive quality that distinguished this new consciousness of democracy from its older monarchical counterpart was its complete intolerance for the state of exception, which in theological terms signifies miracles and dogmas that transcend human comprehension and critical doubt. As Schmitt put it, “Democracy is the expression of a political relativism that is liberated from miracles and dogma.”¹⁶

Of course, as historian David Gilmartin has best elucidated, no conception of sovereignty, divine or state centered, can escape the irresolvable conundrum of representing a form of power that stands outside the realm of politics and everyday life and yet actively engages with them. Sovereign power exists simultaneously inside and outside its sphere of operation. Gilmartin captures this conundrum through the distinction between what he calls “legitimation,” “a claim to authority transcending the everyday,” and “governance,” “the mundane process of actually managing and bringing order to society.”¹⁷ At the risk of getting a bit ahead of myself, one may note here that Gilmartin’s observations on the conundrums of sove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword, by Margrit Pernau
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction
• part one Competing Political Theologies
• part two Competing Normativities
• part three Intra-Deobandī Tensions
• Epilogue
• postscript Listening to the Internal “Other”
• appendix Suggestions for Teaching This Book
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author