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  • Shia Islam in Colonial India

    Religion, Community and Sectarianism

    Interest in Shia Islam has increased greatly in recent years, althoughShiism in the Indian subcontinent has remained relatively unexplored.Focusing on the inuential Shia minority of Lucknow and the UnitedProvinces, a region that was largely under Shia rule until 1856, thisbook traces the history of Indian Shiism through the colonial perioduntil Independence in 1947. Drawing on a range of new sources, includ-ing religious writing, polemical literature and clerical biography, itassesses seminal developments including the growth of Shia religiousactivism, madrasa education, missionary activity, ritual innovation andthe politicization of the Shia community. As a consequence of thesesignicant religious and social transformations, a Shia sectarian identitydeveloped that existed in separation from rather than in interaction withits Sunni counterparts. In this way the painful birth of modern sectari-anism was initiated, the consequences of which are very much alive inSouth Asia today. The book makes a signicant contribution to theglobal history of Shiism, and to understandings of inner-Islamic con-icts in the colonial and post-colonial worlds.

    Justin Jones is Lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Exeter.

  • For my parents, Celia and Keith, and my wife, Aleksandra.

  • Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society 18

    Editorial board

    C.A. BaylyVere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History,University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St Catharines College

    Gordon JohnsonPresident Emeritus, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

    Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society publishes monographson the history and anthropology of modern India. In addition to itsprimary scholarly focus, the series includes work of an interdisciplinarynature which contributes to contemporary social and cultural debatesabout Indian history and society. In this way, the series furthers thegeneral development of historical and anthropological knowledge toattract a wider readership than that concerned with India alone.

    A list of titles which have been published in the series is featured at theend of the book.

  • Shia Islam in Colonial India

    Religion, Community and Sectarianism

    JUSTIN JONESUniversity of Exeter

  • cambridge university pressCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City

    Cambridge University Press32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa

    www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107004603

    Justin Jones 2012

    This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place without the writtenpermission of Cambridge University Press.

    First published 2012

    Printed in the United States of America

    A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

    Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataJones, Justin, 1980Shia Islam in colonial India : religion, community and sectarianism /Justin Jones.p. cm. (Cambridge studies in Indian history and society ; 18)isbn 978-1-107-00460-3 (hardback)1. Shiah India History. 2. Shiah Customs and practices. 3. Lucknow(India) Religious life and customs. 4. Uttar Pradesh (India) Religiouslife and customs. 5. Islam and politics India. 6. Islamic sects India. 7. Religiouslife Shiah. I. Title. II. Series.bp192.7.i4j66 2011297.802095409034dc22 2011001005

    isbn 978-1-107-00460-3 Hardback

    Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence oraccuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred toin this publication and does not guarantee that any content on suchWeb sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  • Contents

    List of gures and maps page viii

    Preface and acknowledgements ix

    Frequently used abbreviations xiii

    Note on transliteration xv

    Select glossary of terms xvii

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 1

    1 Madrasas, mujtahids and missionaries: Shia clericalexpansion in colonial India 32

    2 Mosques, majalis and Muharram: Marketplace Shiism 73

    3 Anjumans, endowments and Indian Shiism: The makingof Shia society 114

    4 Aligarh, jihad and pan-Islam: The politicization of theIndian Shia 147

    5 The tabarra agitation and ShiaSunni conicts in latecolonial India 186

    Conclusion and epilogue: Shiism and sectarianism inmodern South Asia 222

    Appendix: Select Shia ulama of colonial India 243

    Select bibliography 251

    Index 267

    vii

  • Figures and maps

    Figures

    I.1. Asa mosque and Asaf-ud-daula imambara, Lucknow. page 9

    1.1. Sultan ul-Madaris madrasa, Lucknow. 36

    1.2. Maulana Sayyid Najm ul-Hasan, mujtahid. 48

    1.3. Maulana Sayyid Aqa Hasan, mujtahid. 49

    1.4. Maulana Sayyid Muhammad Baqir Rizvi, mujtahid. 50

    2.1. Maulana Sayyid Sibte Hasan. 84

    2.2. Taziya procession, Lucknow. 96

    2.3. Dargah of Imam Husain and karbala ground atTalkatora, Lucknow. 101

    3.1. Husainabad imambara, Lucknow. 127

    4.1. Shia College campaign deputation toLieutenant-Governor James Meston, 1916. 163

    5.1. Tabarra agitation protest, Lucknow, 1939. 195

    5.2. Maulana Sayyid Ali Naqi Naqvi, mujtahid. 211

    Maps

    I.1. Major Muslim sites and institutions of colonial Lucknow. 9

    I.2. Major Shia centres of the colonial United Provinces, India. 11

    viii

  • Preface and acknowledgements

    This book has its origins in a number of research visits to the libraries,religious institutions and older neighbourhoods of the city and Shia spiri-tual centre of Lucknow, undertaken over the course of the greater part of thelast decade. Shiism in north India has long been misunderstood, portrayedas the relatively homogenous religious confession of a small Muslim minor-ity, or associated with the high cultures and graces of Nawabi Lucknow.By examining the workings of Shiism in one regional context from theinside, exploring the shifts and nuances within the alleged Shia community,this book seeks to bring to life a living, reective and changing Shiism, onescarcely bound by memories of its past. If this book can give a sense of thevigorous debates, differentiations and indeed internal contestations devel-oping under the aegis of a united Shia revival, it will have served its purpose.

    Over the obdurately long time that it has taken to bring this studyto completion, I have accumulated many debts, and it gives me pleasureto acknowledge many of them here. First mention is due to the Artsand Humanities Research Council, which funded the original incarnationof this work as a doctoral thesis, as well as to the Society of SouthAsian Studies for additional research support. Latterly, I was fortunateenough to take up the Smuts Research Fellowship in the Centre of SouthAsian Studies, Cambridge, which gave me the opportunity to rework thisresearch project into a book. Tremendous thanks are due to KevinGreenbank, Barbara Roe, Rachel Rowe, Jan Thulborn and Anna MariaMotrescu-Mayes for makingmy years at the Centre of South Asian Studiesso enjoyable, and for keeping me going on such an alarming quantity ofcaffeine. I was attached to Pembroke College, Cambridge, throughoutthis time as a doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher alike, andI am immensely grateful to all staff and Fellows for their support. I alsoowe much to my friends and contemporaries in the eld with whom Ishared many of the joys and otherwise of the academic experiencewhilst working on this project, among them Rachel Berger, Kaveri Gill,

    ix

  • Ben Hopkins, Humeira Iqtidar, Magnus Marsden, Eleanor Newbigin andSarah Wilkerson.

    Over the last few years, many academics in the eld have kindlyoffered me invaluable guidance and advice on aspects of this research.Particular mention is reserved for the late Raj Chandavarkar, underwhose supervision I thoroughly enjoyed working in the short two yearsfrom 20042006. I can only hope that he would have been at leastpartially pleased with this nal work. Special thanks are owed to ChrisBayly, who has offered all kinds of invaluable support and encourage-ment over a number of years, and to William Gould, who has helped mein every conceivable way since my early days as a graduate. FrancisRobinson and Avril Powell have both provided advice and counsel wellabove and beyond the call of duty. For helpful conversations and sugges-tions or for their interest in aspects of this project, I owe additional thanksto many, including Arshad Alam, Seema Alavi, Hayden Bellenoit, NandiniChatterjee, Joya Chatterji, Michael Dodson, Robert Gleave, MushirulHasan, Gordon Johnson, David Lelyveld, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, BarbaraMetcalf, Rosalind OHanlon, Francesca Orsini, Shweta Sachdeva Jha,Radhika Singha, Rais Suleiman, Anita Weiss, Akbar Zaidi and JohnZavos. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript fortheir constructive comments and suggestions.

    As of more recent months, I am grateful to my colleagues in the HistoryDepartment at the University of Exeter, who have provided me with a verypleasant and welcoming environment for the text to be nalized. I have alsobeneted much from the helpfulness of all at Cambridge University Press,especially Marigold Acland, Regina Paleski, Mary Starkey and Joy Mizan.

    The length of time taken to complete this book is matched only by thelist of archives and libraries in which it was researched, in both theU.K. and India. My thanks to all of the following libraries, colleges anduniversities: the British Library, London; the libraries of the University ofCambridge and School of Oriental and African Studies; the NehruMemorial Library, New Delhi; the National Archives of India, NewDelhi; the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow; Kitab-Khana ShibliNumani of the madrasa Nadwat ul-Ulama, Lucknow; the library ofJamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; the Azad Library, Aligarh MuslimUniversity, Aligarh; the Tagore Library, Lucknow University; and theAmir-ud-daula Library, Lucknow. I would additionally like to ac-knowledge the invaluable help of the teachers and administrators ofthe following extant Shia madrasas and religious organizations inLucknow, from which I drew important source material: Nazimiya

    x Preface and acknowledgements

  • Arabic College; Sultan ul-Madaris; the Nor-i-Hidayat Foundation; andTanzim-ul-Makatib.

    My research trips to India would not have been as enjoyable or as fruitfulwere it not for the contributions of the following. For such a warmwelcomeduring some or all of many trips to Delhi, I am thankful to Shakti Sidhu andfamily, to Suneet Mani Aiyar and family, and to Sarfaraz Ahmad, NaseemAkhtar andMuhammad Shahnawaz. Particular gratitude is held for Kazim,Zakia and Ahmad Zaheer, for a huge amount of assistance of all personaland professional kinds in both Delhi and Lucknow. In Lucknow, NirmalaSharma and Naheed Varma both provided me with a warm and friendlyplace to stay, and the legendary Ram Advani offered me the same excellentcompany, conversation and cups of tea as he has many researchers beforeme. Thanks also to the staff of the American Institute of Indian Studies inLucknow, for their initial help with my orientation in their city. Researchstints in Aligarh were enhanced by the good humour of Farhan and FauziaMujib, and Ataur Rehman.

    The key ideas and arguments of this study, while based on historicalrecord and documentary evidence, were inevitably largely shaped andinformed through conversations with inuential members of the contem-porary Shia community of Lucknow. Special mention is reserved for allthe following, many of whom are descendants of the key gures examinedin this book, for the remarkable helpfulness and goodwill they showedto an outsider with a rather odd curiosity in their personal views andfamily histories. In view of their great willingness to share informationwith me and their frequently candid openness, I would like to take theopportunity to make clear that all arguments within this book are mineand mine alone.

    For his introduction to the ways of western Lucknow and access touseful sources, I thank Sultan Ali Sadiq and family. Muhammad AmirMuhammad Khan, the current Raja of Mahmudabad, was extremelygood-humoured and hospitable. The staff of the Shia PostgraduateCollege were very welcoming, especially Bhaskar Srivastava and theprincipal Dr Naqvi. In particular, a number of active Shia clergy withinLucknow were remarkably helpful and accepting of my interests, and thisstudy would have been much different were it not for their assistance.For taking the time to speak with me, thanks to Maulanas Agha Roohi,Kalb-i-Jawad, Jamu Mian, Mirza Muhammad Athar and Sa Haider.MaulanaHamid ul-Hasan, principal of Nazimiya Arabic College, togetherwith Dr Taqvi and Farid ul-Hasan, were endlessly helpful and a greatpleasure to have met on several occasions. Among the Shia religious

    Preface and acknowledgements xi

  • community in Lucknow, my main gratitude goes to two scholars of excep-tional generosity. Maulana Sajjad Nasir Abaqati, the descendant of someof the key characters discussed in this book and the closest I could have toan ustad, furnished me with much of his wisdom and generosity. Heand his relatives Kazim Jarwali, Jamal Kazim and Daniyal Kazim toge-ther provided me with a virtual second home and plenty of chai in theirresidence in Nakhhas, Lucknow.MaulanaMustafa Husain Asif Jaisi alsotook me under his wing, allowing me access to his knowledge, home andbookshelves over a number of weeks, and facilitating my visit to some ofthe rural outposts of Awadhi Shiism such as Jais and Nasirabad. Thisstudy simply would not have been possible were it not for the tremendouscollections of material that he made available to me. I ammuch indebted tohim and to his nephews KazimMehdi and Ali Mehdi for their formidableassistance.

    My greatest thanks, however, remain with those family and friendswho have offered the encouragement to complete this work. Were it notfor the unconditional support of my parents, Celia and Keith, and of mywife Aleksandra, whose faith in this project and patience during theinterminable nal stages of writing have been remarkable, none of thiswould have been possible. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

    Justin JonesExeter, 2010

    xii Preface and acknowledgements

  • Frequently used abbreviations

    AMU Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim UniversityCSAS Centre of South Asian Studies, CambridgeCUL Cambridge University LibraryGAD General Administration Department les, UPSANAI National Archive of India, New DelhiNML Nehru Memorial Library, New DelhiOIOC Oriental and India Ofce Collections, LondonUPNNR United Provinces Native Newspaper Reports, L/R/5, OIOCUPSA Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow

    xiii

  • Note on transliteration

    For the sake of simplicity and elegance, long vowels are marked withdiacritics (as below) in the titles of referenced texts only. In the maintext, words have been written according to their pronunciation. In quota-tions from other transliterated sources, words are rendered as they appearin the original text.

    a t b z p t gh t f s q j k ch g h l kh m d n dh v, w, o, u z r h, or a at the end of a word r e, , y z s s sh s z

    xv

  • Select glossary of terms

    ajlaf the indigenous castes of Muslims, asopposed to ashraf.

    akhlaq moral or mannerly correctness.alim (pl. ulama) a scholar of Islamic knowledge.amir (pl. umara) social or political leader; a nobleman.Amir-ul-mominin leader of the people, a title used by the

    Shia to refer to the rst Imam Ali.anjuman a voluntary public association or society.Ashra the rst ten days of Muharram.ashraf the high-caste, respectable Muslim

    communities, consisting of Sayyids,Sheikhs, Mughals and Pathans,descended from the Prophets familyor from Muslim ruling classes.

    Ashura the tenth day of Muharram, uponwhich the death of Husain iscommemorated and taziyas buried.

    atabat-i-aliyat the Shia holy shrine cities of Iraq atKarbala, Najaf, Kazimain andSamarra.

    azadari the practice of mourning for ImamHusain observed during Muharram.

    azan the call to daily prayer.Bara-Wafat the anniversary of the birth (and also

    death) of the Prophet.begam a married sharifMuslim woman.bida innovation.bila fasil without interruption, a phrase used

    periodically by the Shia to describeAlis succession of Muhammad.

    xvii

  • biradari endogamic kinship group.Caliph (Khalifa) the personages charged with rightful

    succession of the Prophet accordingto Sunni Islam, the rst and mostimportant of whom are Abu Bakr,Umar, Usman and Ali.

    char-yari four comrades, the names of the rstfour Sunni Caliphs.

    chauk the central market area of a city.dar-ul-ulum an abode of knowledge, a madrasa.dargah tomb of a saint, shrine.dars-i-kharij the course of study in some cases

    followed to become a mujtahid.dars-i-nizamiya the curriculum of learning of many

    madrasas in north India, associatedprimarily with Firangi Mahal ofLucknow, with a particularemphasis on rational disciplines andsciences.

    deen religion.dua prayer, recitation.duldul efgy of the steed upon which Iman

    Husain was mounted at Karbala.fatwa (pl. fatawa) a legal pronouncement issued by

    a mufti.fazil distinction, glorication, often denoting

    the degree gained from educationwithin a madrasa or under anelevated alim.

    qh the science of Islamic jurisprudence.rqa sect, faction.hadis the written traditions of the Prophet and

    his Companions or, in Shiism, ofthe Imams.

    haz one able to recite the Quran frommemory.

    Hana the branch of Sunni jurisprudencedominant in South Asia,encapsulating the Deobandi,

    xviii Select glossary of terms

  • Bareilvi, Firangi Mahal andNadwat ul-Ulama schools.

    hawza circle of scholars, denoting a place oflearning (e.g. Najaf).

    hazrat Muslim notables, elites.husainiya alternative term for an imambara.ibadat worship, religious practice.ijaza (pl. ijazat) certicate authorizing its recipient to

    exercise ijtihad.ijtihad the autonomous religious effort of a

    qualied mujtahid on a point ofshariat.

    ikhtilafat contradiction, disputation, opposition.ilm (pl. ulum) science/knowledge.Imam in Shiism, one of the descendants and

    legitimate successor of the Prophet,beginning with Ali and ending withthe twelfth Imam; the personages atthe doctrinal and devotional heartof Shiism.

    imambara the edices in which Muharram isobserved, and eulogies for ImamHusain recited.

    Isna Ashari Twelver, the branch of Shiism thatsubscribes to the authority of thetwelve Imams, the two majorbranches of which are Usuli andAkhbari Shiism.

    ittehad unity.jhanda ag, standard.jihad effort or struggle, often used in the

    context of holy war in defence ofIslam.

    juda/judagana separate/separateness.juloos taziya procession, enacted during

    Muharram.kalam the discipline of dialectical theology.karbala a piece of ground symbolic of the land in

    Iraq upon which Imam Husain was

    Select glossary of terms xix

  • martyred, where taziyas are buriedduring Muharram.

    khatib sermonizer; one who delivers thekhutbah from the mimbar afterFriday prayers.

    Khilafat ofce of the Caliph.khutba the sermon or oratory delivered together

    with Friday prayers, and on otheroccasions. It generally containsArabic exaltations of God, theProphet and other personages, afterwhich its content is left to thediscretion of the khatib delivering it.

    khwani narrative rendition of the Karbalatragedy, offered in some majalis.

    madrasa an educational institution of the Islamicsciences, training ulama.

    majlis (pl. majalis) council or gathering, or in the case ofShiism congregations of mutualmourning for Husain.

    mantiq the discipline of logic.marja one who is seen as qualied to provide

    guidance in all points of religiouspractice and law by ordinaryindividuals. According to someinterpretations, only one individualat any one time is entitled to thisstatus, and becomes a universalisticleader (Marja ul-Taqlid).

    marsiya a mostly Shia genre of poetry associatedwith Muharram and especiallyfamous in Lucknow, in which theglories of Husain and the otherImans are recited and their sufferingevoked.

    mashk a replica of the empty leatherwater-carrier said to have beencarried by Husains daughterSakina at Karbala, a replica of

    xx Select glossary of terms

  • which was a feature of Muharrampossessions in some U.P. towns,carried upon a tir.

    masjid mosque.maslak sect, school of thought.matam(dari) (the practice of) self-agellation in

    mourning for the Imans. Whenblades are used, it is sometimesknown as chako ki matam.

    Maulana designation of religious distinction andauthority.

    maulvi religious speaker or preacher; learnedman.

    mazhab religion, faith.medan ground.Mehdi in Shiism, the absent twelfth Imam,

    whose revelation is awaited.mela fair.millat religion, community.mimbar the stand from which preachers speak in

    a mosque.minhaj path, system.miraj the ascension of the Prophet.mominin followers, often used in juxtaposition

    with the leading sadat of Shiism.muadar a holder of revenue-free grants of land.muballigh (pl. muballighin) missionary.mufti one entitled to issue a fatwa.muhalla neighbourhood.Muharram the rst month of the Muslim calendar,

    observed by both Shias and Sunnisin distinct ways, during whichthe martyrdom of Imam Husainand other personages iscommemorated.

    mujtahid one qualied to perform ijtihad. InShiism, the title denotes the leadingreligious authorities, qualied tomake rulings on the sharia and

    Select glossary of terms xxi

  • subjects of allegiance for the Shiacommunity.

    munazara/munazir religious disputation or debate/debater.munsif judge.muqallid the individual adherent of a chosen

    mujtahid or marja.muta a form of contractual temporary

    marriage sanctioned by Shiareligious law.

    mutawalli the trustee of a waqf or, sometimes, ofanother religious institution.

    nechri/nechriyat atheist, materialist/atheism, materialism.nisab the curriculum of an institution of

    Islamic learning.peshnamaz leader of congregational prayers.purdah the veiling or seclusion of women.qasba the Muslim-dominated rural towns and

    settlements of the North WesternProvinces and Awadh.

    qaum/qaumi community or nation/the adjectivalform, communal or national.

    rais rural landholder.risala (pl. rasail) treatise, tract.sadat see sayyid.sadr president, principal.sadr-i-sadoor chief justice, the term used in Awadh to

    refer to the chief mufti of a city.sahaba denotes the Companions of the Prophet,

    including the Caliph.sajjada nashin successor to the leadership of a religious

    establishment.sarparast(i) leader(ship).satyagraha form of civil disobedience, practised by

    Gandhi and evoked during thetabarra agitation of 1939.

    sayyid (pl. sadat) a descendant of Muhammad via theImams, the sharif community fromwhom all Shia mujtahids and mostIndian Shia elites originate.

    xxii Select glossary of terms

  • shahid/shahadat martyr/martyrdom.shajra/shajra-i-nasb genealogy/family tree, usually charting

    the lineage of sayyids to theProphets family.

    sharia(t) the law of Islam.sharif denotes ashraf status.soz lyrical or musical dirge for Husain,

    associated with Muharram.swaraj independence, self-rule.tabarra the Shia cursing of the Sunni Caliphs for

    their usurpation of Iman Ali.tabligh dissemination/proselytisation of Islamic

    knowledge.tabut a Shia custom performed in some towns

    such as Lucknow, in which a horseis adorned as the steed of Husainand led in the juloos.

    tafriq sectarianism, partisanship.tafsir the science of Quranic exegesis.takhlus the name of authorship.talif compendium of the writings of

    exalted past scholars, distinct fromtasnif.

    taluqdar a large-scale landowner whoseproprietary rights were establishedby the British after 1857.

    taqiya in Shiism, the concealment ordissimulation of true religiousbeliefs in circumstances of potentialdanger or humiliation from otherreligious communities.

    taqlid deference/submission; in Shiism, theemulation of or subservience to achosen mujtahid in matters ofreligious law; deference to theijtihad of another.

    taqrib ecumenism, the project of constructingcross-confessional unity.

    tarjuma translation.

    Select glossary of terms xxiii

  • tasawwuf Islamic mysticism/Susm.tasnif newly authored tract, distinct from talif.tauhid the oneness of God.tawaif courtesan, a female entertainer

    associated with the Awadh Court.taziya/taziyadari an efgy of the tomb of Imam Husain,

    symbolically revered and sometimesinterred during Muharram/thepractice of carrying the taziya in aprocession to its site of burial,conducted during Muharram.

    taziya-khana a space in a home or imambara in whicha taziya is kept.

    tazkira a genre of biographical writing in Arabic,Persian and Urdu.

    tehrif alteration, corruption.tehsildar collector, revenue collector.tehzib culture or etiquette, a term heavily

    associated with Lucknow.ulama see alim.ulum see ilm.umara see amir.urs the death anniversary of a Muslim saint.ustad (pl. ustaden) religious teacher.Usuli the dominant branch of Isna Ashari

    Shiism since the eighteenth century.It differs from Akhbari Shiism inthat it accepts forms of intellectualand analogical reasoning aslegitimate methods ofjurisprudence, and in consequencehas come to imbue its religiousleaders with a greater degreeof legal and charismatic authority.

    Wahhabi a reformist school dating from theeighteenth century, renowned fortheir zealous and uncompromisingopposition to any custom deemed toundermine the oneness of God.

    xxiv Select glossary of terms

  • waiz (pl. waizin) preacher.waqf a religious endowment directed towards

    the upkeep of institutions such asmosques,madrasas and imambaras.

    wasiqa/wasiqadar pension agreement offered by thegovernment of India/in Lucknow,the disenfranchised former nobilityof the Nawabi Court.

    wazaif charity.zakir one who remembers God by reciting his

    names and praises; in Shiism, theterm often refers to a preacher whorenders the signicances of theImams during Muharram.

    zamindar landholder.ziarat in Shiism, most commonly denotes

    pilgrimage to the shrine cities, or avisitation to other sacred ground.

    zikr the remembrance of God; the practiceof reciting the names of God and, inthe case of Shiism, of the Imams.

    Select glossary of terms xxv

  • Introduction

    Writing on Indian Shiism

    Whatever the differences between the manifold movements of Islamicrenewal and reform that developed in north India during the second halfof the nineteenth century, scholarship has been unanimous in identifying thecataclysmic events of 18568 as a dening moment. The annexation of newterritory by the East India Company, the removal of the key gureheads ofMuslim rule, the seizures of inherited landholdings and the imposition ofWestern education all induced a sense of disenfranchisement and humil-iation (zillat) among the Muslim elites of the region, and spurred them todevise new forms of Islam which could endure outside the framework ofMuslim political control and state patronage.1 Yet, while the Rebellion haslong been proven collectively important for the Muslims of north India,the case could be made that it was of particular signicance for the Shiaminority. One of the most signicant casualties of the events was Awadh, aShia-governed princely statewhich incorporated a swath of north India from1722 until 1856. As a rich literature on Awadh has shown, not least JuanColes masterful study, the ruling Nawabs, a dynasty of Nishapuri Persianorigins, heavily co-opted Shiism as a dominant ideology of governance,and an agent of state legitimization. Throughout the early nineteenth century,and in the 1840s50s in particular, a formal religious establishment of Shia

    1 Classic works in this regard include Aziz Ahmad, Islamic modernism in India and Pakistan,18571964 (London, 1967); Francis Robinson, TheMuslims of Upper India and the shockof theMutiny, in Francis Robinson, Islam andMuslim history in South Asia (Delhi, 2000),pp.13855; Barbara Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 18601900(Princeton, 1982); Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge, 1972); DavidLelyveld, Aligarhs rst generation: Muslim solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978).

    1

  • clerics and courtiers was built up. Shia cultural, religious and welfare insti-tutions were richly fostered by the state and used to extend its outreach, whilea new and increasingly powerful circle of ulama were recruited as juriscon-sults and advisers to the Nawabi court.2 Indelibly associated with Nawabigovernance, in much of north India it was Shiism, and the relatively smallpopulation that formally identied themselves as adherents of the religion,that wasmost bound upwith the established securities of state patronage andservitude.

    The 1856 deposition of Wajid Ali Shah, the nal King of Awadh, andthe exile of much of his staff toMetiaburj in Bengal, brought to an end oneof the worlds most signicant post-Safavid Shia kingdoms. Thereafter,with courtly patronage all but dead, the two decades after 1858 provedespecially ruinous for Shiism in north India, especially in the city ofLucknow, the former Nawabi capital. The Awadh court was dismantledroot and branch by the British, disenfranchizing many of its former advis-ers, while others were bought off with small pension agreements.3 Thechief mufti (jurist) of the city in the last years of the Nawabs reign, theexalted scholar Mirza Muhammad Abbas, had his personal librarydestroyed in the 1857 violence, and was forced into self-imposed exile.4

    The Urdu newspaper Tilism commented that the rites of Muharram, theannual commemorations for the martyred Shia Imam Husain and hisfamily which dominated Lucknows municipal calendar, experiencedheavy depletion in tandem with the fortunes of the Nawabi elite and therealities of British policing: The doors of fortune are closed. The re ofsuffering is at its height. The imambaras (mourning halls) look deserted.5

    The citys largest Shia mosque, the Asa masjid, and the adjoining Asaf-ud-daula imambara, Lucknows most imposing religious building, wereconverted into British military garrisons, their religious functions shutdown; over fty other city mosques were appropriated to uses includingofces, police depots, medical dispensaries and stables for livestock.6Newland-settlement policies, rewritten in 1858 around principles of perceived

    2 Juan Cole, Roots of north Indian Shiism in Iran and Iraq: religion and state in Awadh,17221859 (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 1267, 21718.

    3 Ibid, pp. 2712.4 Sayyid Murtaza Husain, Matla-i-Anwar: tazkira-i-Sha afazil-va-ulama, kabar-i-bar-i-saghr-i-Pak-va-Hind (Karachi, 1981), p. 77.

    5 Faruqui Anjum Taban, The coming of the revolt in Awadh: the evidence of Urdu news-papers, Social Scientist 26 (1998), pp. 1920.

    6 Veena Oldenburg, The making of colonial Lucknow, 18561877 (Princeton, 1984),pp. 357; Shakil Hasan Shamsi, ShaSunn qazya: kitna mazhab kitna syas?(Lucknow, 2005), pp. 814.

    2 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • loyalty to the British Raj, shut off the stipends of inherited land revenueon which many noble Shia families and religious scholars had depended.Meanwhile, with the kings of Awadh no longer representing a solid sourceof patronage for Shia scholars and preachers, the transnational clericaltrafc between Iraq, Persia and India largely evaporated. Visits to India byArab and Persian scholars, artists and physicians, commonplace under thenawabs, became less so, while the prole of Indian ulama in Shia clericalcentres such as Najaf reciprocally dried up.

    Given the iniction of these numerous catastrophes upon Shiism, therefollowed perhaps unsurprisingly a diminishment of the funding, visibilityand popular support that the religion had previously enjoyed in northIndia. The two or three decades after 1857 were, as remarked in 18712by Ahmad Ali, one of the citys leading scholars, an era of religiousweakness and disorder (mazhabi kamzori, tna-parwazi) for IndianShiism. He lamented widespread misgivings (shubhat) among the pop-ulation, their disregard for the ulama (Muslim clergy), and the self-interest (khud-rai) which meant that Shias had no sense of commonbrotherhood with one another.7 No meaningful organization, he com-plained, existed to serve or represent the Indian Shia.

    Now let us jump forward a few decades, to around the 1910s, and onecan see that a new Shia organizational apparatus has come to exist in thecitys public life. The great mujtahids (religious scholars) of Lucknow areonce again vocal public gures, using a series of new podiums and organ-izations to reclaim their public prole and social relevance in a way unseenin decades. A series of madrasas (religious schools) have recently beenestablished, creating a refreshed, functional body of ulama. Specialistpreachers vie for invitations to offer sermons and dirges for the Imams inprivate and public, while a number of Shia publishing-houses offer a new,Urdu-literate audience unprecedented access to religious knowledge. A newShia conference organization invites dignitaries to Lucknow from acrossIndia and beyond, and offers a wider matrix for bringing a diffuse array ofShia organizations into contact. Shia orphanages, charities and welfareinstitutions exist in numbers, while several campaigns for new religiouscolleges are making headway. Simultaneously, relations between the citysShia and Sunni Muslim communities have deteriorated rapidly, with theoccasional theological arguments of earlier decades having given way toorchestrated seasonal clashes, and taken on newly political intimations.

    7 Habib Husain ibn Ahmad Husain, Sawanih-i-umr-i-Ghulam Hasnen Kintor (Lahore,1904), pp. 1858.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 3

  • This apparent expansion of what one maulvi described in 1910 as afresh religious life (nai mazhabi zindagi) among north Indias ShiaMuslims,8 one which apparently took root in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, forms the foreground of this book. This studyhas two central objectives. First, it presents an examination of religious andsocial change among the Shia of colonial north India. Examining newforms of religious learning, participation and practice, this book discusseshow Shiism was dissociated from its background of state power, andreconstructed anew as a systematic religion, entailing new forms of engage-ment both with its adherents and with the historical setting in which itfunctioned. The second objective, heavily intertwined with the rst, is tointerrogate the growth during this period of Islamic sectarianism, a termthat I use broadly to refer to an enhanced discourse of religious andcommunal difference between the members of Islamic groups or schools.

    While offering reections relevant from 1857 until the present, thebooks main empirical focus is a rough six decades from the 1880s to the1930s, a period which saw the formation of many signicant Shia insti-tutions, and themost consequential attempts at religious transformation. Itis comfortably bookended by, in the earlier dates, the formation of severalsignicantmadrasas, the emergence of a new generation of activist ulama,and the institutionalization of manifold variations in religious practices;and in the later years, the extreme violence of the 1939 tabarra agitation,Indias most signicant instance of ShiaSunni political conict to date.So, the rst task of this introduction is to offer at the outset an overview ofthe Shia societies and the region at the heart of this study as they stood onthe point of British annexation. It then offers a survey of the key themesand arguments at issue, contextualizing the study and its lines of enquiry inthe existing historiography on Shiism, and Muslim sectarianism, in mod-ern South Asia.

    sayyids, nobles and cosmopolitans: shiismin north india

    Shia Islam has had a long history in the Indian subcontinent. Of earli-est inuence and importance were the Shia-informed dynasties in the

    8 Lucknau ke masbat-zada Sunnon k faryad aur vaqa asbab-i-masbat (Lucknow, c.1910), a pamphlet contained in GAD No. 366/1911, Uttar Pradesh State Archives,Lucknow (UPSA), p. 2; Shamral ud-din Ahmad, Shikast-i-azm bai-ada-i-Quran-i-karm (Lucknow, 1920), p. 3.

    4 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • Deccani south, such as the sultanates of Bijapur (c. 14891686), Golconda(15181617) and Ahmadnagar (14961636); indeed, it was here, ratherthan in north India, that many established Shia cultural forms, such as themajlis sermon andmarsiya poetry, rst developed.9Over time the religionalso came to be associated with segments of the Muslim urban and landedelites in Bombay, Sindh, Punjab, Bengal and elsewhere.

    Indeed, many studies of SouthAsian Islam in its broadest senses, from themedieval period onwards, have demonstrated how these many historicassociations with ruling Muslim dynasties have given Shia cultural andreligious traditions a permeating inuence on religious practice and custom,even at those levels of societywhere theywere not formally acknowledged asbeing exclusivist Shia identiers as such. For instance, study after study hasdocumented participation by diverse religious communities Sunnis,Hindus and others in the nominally Shia Muharram festival, held incommemoration of the martyred Imams. The veneration of the thirdImam, Husain, and the manifold explorations and reworkings of the mar-tyrdom motifs embedded in the Karbala story in South Asia, is testament tothis long-standing Shia inuence in a diverse range of cultural settings.10

    Equally, many studies of those Su orders (tariqas) most inuential in SouthAsia, such as the Chishtiya and Qadiriya, have demonstrated how norma-tive Su practice has shared certain synergies with Shiism. Such orders,most of which trace the lineage of their saints back to the Imams, havehistorically sanctioned devotion to the family of the Prophet as an act ofpiety, and at local levels Su cults of devotion to Ali and his descendantshave often overlapped with popular Shia practice in a way that entirelybelies the construction of difference between traditions at the level of someformal clergy.11Hence, scholarship has largely been in agreement that Shia-derived cultural norms and practices have had a historical and social impacton South Asian Muslim culture and societies more broadly, out of allproportion to the sum of formally declared Shia adherents.

    9 Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian subcontinent (Leiden, 1980), pp. 5162; OmarKhalidi, The Shiites of the Deccan: an introduction,RivistaDegli Studi Orientali 64, 12(1991); Franco Coslovi, Shiisms political valence in medieval Deccani kingdoms, inAnna Libera Dallapiccola and Stephanie Zingel-Av Lallemant, Islam and Indian religions(Stuttgart, 1993).

    10 E.g. David Pinault, Horse of Karbala: Muslim devotional life in India (New York, 2001);Syed Akbar Hyder, Reliving Karbala: martyrdom in South Asian memory (New York,2006).

    11 E.g. Richard Eaton, Sus of Bijapur, 13001700: social roles of Sus in medieval India(Princeton, 1978); S.M. Azizuddin Husain, Su cults and the Shias, in Anup Taneja, ed.,Su cults and the evolution of medieval Indian culture (Delhi, 2003).

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 5

  • In view of this pervasive cultural inuence across the subcontinent, it isimportant to impose some initial limits on this study. This book is solelyconcerned with the IsnaAshari branch of Shiism (also known as Twelversor Imamis, for their belief in the Twelve Imams as successors to theProphet). It bypasses entirely communities such as the Ismaili andDaudi Bohra often categorized under the Shia umbrella, with whom theIsna Ashari shared few associations of family, region, religious belief orpolitical action at least during the period under discussion here.12

    This book will also conne itself tightly to the swath of north Indiaencompassing Awadh, Rohilkhand and Doab, latterly known from 1901as the United Provinces. By the eighteenth century Nawabi rule had givenShiism an entrenched presence in this region, and from the peak ofNawabi power and patronage in the late eighteenth century onwards,Awadh has often been perceived as the intellectual, nancial and psycho-logical heartland of Shiism in India. This book is located entirely in theShia societies of this region, examining the communities of the largertowns and rural townships (qasbas) dotted across the Gangetic plains.The reason for the largely local setting of this study is that, rather thanresorting to the grandiose generalizations and tendencies to essentializa-tion common to many studies of Shiism, it seeks to assess evolving con-structs of Shia identity through an analysis of those environments inwhich it was most immediately lived and experienced. However, in noway is this regional focus intended to limit the scope of the study. Instead,the books description of how Shiism was recrafted following the depri-vation of its political power, the construction of new notions of religionand religious community, and the growth of a systematized Shia sectari-anism, are all stories with powerful resonances in other settings and in themodern world.

    For many observers, the elite social milieu and historical proximity togovernance meant that it was still honour and respectability (adab orizzat) whichwere identied asmost characteristic of Shiism in this region.

    12 On these communities see Farhad Daftary, The Ismailis: their history and doctrines(Cambridge, 1990); Jonah Blank, Mullahs on the mainframe: Islam and modernityamong the Daudi Bohras (Chicago, 2001). Most studies have agreed that religiousboundaries between Imami and Ismaili Shias were more rmly consolidated in Indiaduring the 1840s1850s, on account of Usuli Shia consolidation in Nawabi Lucknow,and the simultaneous resettlement of the Ismaili leader Hasan Ali Shah, Aga Khan I, inIndia from 1843. Judging from the sources consulted throughout this book, most northIndian Imami Shia saw themselves as having little in commonwith the Ismailis during theperiod under discussion.

    6 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • Most north Indian Shia communities conceived themselves as being ofsayyid genealogy, one of several sharif (noble) castes in Indian Islam andone linking them directly to the Prophet via the family of Ali.13 In Shiismespecially, the conviction that religious authority was vested in the familyof the Prophet has meant that the status of sayyid has long carried con-notations of religious and cultural authority even in contemporary mani-festations; the most senior ulama are by necessity identied with it, as aremost of the umara, lay nobles and dignitaries. For all that has been saidabout the breakdown of traditional ashrafajlaf caste structures in Islam,in practice most Shia in colonial India were members of particular sayyidclans or kinship groups (biradari), whose distinguished ancestral statuswas jealously guarded through endogamic marriage, social segregationand purity of religious practice. Many of the Shia writings consulted forthis study, right into the twentieth century, include shajra-i-nasb, genea-logical trees which charted the lineage of their authors, tracing them backthrough the generations to the Imams and hence drawing sustained legiti-macy from their own perceived ancestral authority. The association ofShiismwith forms of nobility, both in terms of sayyid descent andNawabicultural pedigree, was equally obvious to outsiders, and became the deni-tional feature of Shiism to colonial observers. The rst Census of India, aswell known for informing the self-image of segments of the Indian pop-ulation as much as it catalogued them, declared the Shia religion to bethe more fashionable and the more richly endowed . . . the greater part ofthe higher classes among the Muhammadan community belong to it.14

    The single setting closest to the heart of this study is the city of Lucknow,the former capital of the Shia nawabs, and until today the South Asian citymost intractably associated with Shiism. Even after the destruction ofthe Nawabi state, Lucknow would remain by far the most importantShia spiritual centre in north India. The city was home to a signicantShia population at all social levels. Many of north Indias mostsenior Shia scholars, known as mujtahids, originated in Lucknow orsurrounding districts, and were largely resident in the city. There werealso those Shia who were left behind as part of the old Nawabi courtlynobility. Of these, around 1,700 or so belonged to a group known aswasiqadars. These, the pensioners and dependants formerly attached to

    13 On the denition and signicance of sayyids see esp. Barbara Metcalf, ed.,Moral conductand authority: the place of adab in South Asian Islam (London, 1984); Cole, Roots ofnorth Indian Shiism, pp. 7284.

    14 J.Charles William, The report on the Census of Oudh, Volume I (Lucknow, 1869), p. 76.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 7

  • the Awadh court, continued in British India to draw tokenistic alms fromthe huge Nawabi religious endowments (waqfs) established to provide forthem in perpetuity. The pensions they received were often very small, andincreasingly so with the subdivision of this revenue among their descend-ants over successive generations. As such, they were often described bygovernment as a backward community, clinging to an outdated lifestylein their ancestral homes in Lucknow. This impoverished and decliningclass of persons, crowding Lucknows oldmuhallas to the citys west suchas Kazimain, Daulatganj and Saadatganj, became interpreted by theBritish administration as symptomatic of all that was wrong with the oldregime, and rarely did colonial administrators miss an opportunity tocastigate them for their assumed backwardness, their inability to mod-ernize and their attachment to a life of leisure. Lucknows DistrictGazetteer evoked these pensioners and dependants as a people mostly indebt, and lead[ing] a wretched hand-to-mouth existence, which also seemsto have a demoralising effect on their fellow citizens,15 while oneCommissioner of Lucknow described them with disdain as a fecklesslot, who are degenerating.16 They were stereotyped as shunning educa-tional and commercial enterprise, and instead spending their time engagedin court cases and fratricidal feuds as they fought claims over inheritedtitles and access to rapidly sub-dividing pensions.

    The presence of the Shia clergy, landed elite and old aristocracy inLucknow, combined with a residual nostalgia and memory of the cityshistorical signicance, thus gave the city a particular signicance as aconvening point, publishing hub and religious and cultural centre for theShia more widely in early colonial India. Indeed, the fact that Lucknowitself dominates much of the narrative of this book is representative of itsimportance in north Indian Shiism in general. In view of the great diversityof Shia culture and leadership, both beyond and even within the region ofnorth India under discussion, it would be entirely facile to suggest that theLucknawi Shia were representative of the Hindustani Shia in totem andthe guardians of the religion as a whole. Nevertheless, in many of the Shia-authored tracts and speeches consulted for this volume, they certainlywrote and spoke as if they were.

    15 H.R. Nevill, District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, volumeXXXVII: Lucknow (Allahabad, 1904), p. 65.

    16 R. Burn toHisHonour, 27 September 1912, Political FileNo. 42/1913, UPSA; cf. Lovett toChief Secretary, 31 January 1913, ibid.

    8 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • figure i .1 . Monuments of Nawabi Lucknow: the Asa mosque and Asaf-ud-daula imambara, photographed c. 1895 (MacPherson Collection, Centre of

    South Asian Studies, Cambridge).

    map i.1 . Major Muslim sites and institutions of colonial Lucknow.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 9

  • Leaving Lucknow aside, Shiism was also prominent in many of therural Muslim townships, or qasbas, in surrounding Awadhi districts suchas Barabanki, Rae Bareili, Bahraich and Fyzabad. Many of these town-ships had been established by sayyid lineages from the Arab or Persianworld who traced their arrival in India back as far as the tenth or twelfthcenturies, but often became Shia somewhat later. With the Nawabi courtfrom the eighteenth century onwards enhancing its reach outside Lucknowitself through the cultivation of ties with the landed Muslim gentries ofthese towns, many sharif families accentuated their visible commitment tothe Shia religion, or even converted to Shiism anew, for the advantages ofland grants or courtly patronage, giving Shiism a widespread and well-documented inuence in the Awadhi countryside. Some qasbas were asso-ciated with powerful Shia magnates, of which the Rajas of Mahmudabadin Sitapur district, a family who converted to Shiism in the 1820s30s,were perhaps the most famous and inuential Shia landlords (and, later,political gures) of north India. Other qasbas became known as seats oflearning, producing well-known religious authorities who drew their sus-tenance from land and professional ties to the court at Lucknow. As can beseen from the Appendix to this volume, a few key townships such as Kintor(Barabanki district) and Nasirabad (Rae Bareili district) became the seatsof esteemed clerical families. Under the Nawabs of Awadh, these lineagesof scholars had received preferential land settlements (nazrana), and hadbeen heavily co-opted by the state as court advisers, educators and thetestators of endowments. As we shall see, with these functions abolished in1856, they were soon to have to seek new moulds of public relevance andlegitimacy.

    Other signicant Shia populations existed in those parts of the UnitedProvinces further aeld from Lucknow, in districts which had been cededto the British in 1775. Among these were the cities of Allahabad andJaunpur, which had some of the largest and most inuential Shia pop-ulations in the province, often local landholding gentries resident in neigh-bourhoods on the peripheries of these towns or rural outposts in theirhinterland, such as Kajgaon, Baragaon and Machhlishehr (outsideJaunpur), or Dariyabad and Phulpur (outside Allahabad).17

    Another cluster of Shia populations was consolidated within the divi-sions of Rohilkhand and the Doab to the west, a region that had been

    17 E.g. JohnHollister, The Shia of India (London, 1953); Nevill,District Gazetteers, volumeXXVIII: Jaunpur (Allahabad, 1908), pp. 845, 257; C.A. Bayly, The local roots of Indianpolitics: Allahabad 18801920 (Oxford, 1975), p. 41.

    10 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • under Nawabi control until 1801. The districts of Moradabad,Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor and Saharanpur had sizeable, and highly inuential,interlinked landowning Shia biradaris. One prominent example were thesayyids of the town of Amroha in Moradabad district, a landed clique ofNaqvi (descended from the tenth Imam) sayyids who traced their lineage tothe towns founder, Shah Wilayat Sharf-ud-din Ali, a Su pir (saint) whocame to Amroha from Wasit in Iraq in the thirteenth century.18 Anotherlineage of Shia,Zaidi sayyids descended from the fth Imamwho also datedtheir ancestral entry into India to the thirteenth century, were scatteredacross small qasbas in Meerut, Bijnor and Bareilly districts. The mostprominent branches of this familymatured into two especially distinguishedlineages: the sayyids of Barha, a community settled primarily at Jansath andBehra Sadat qasbas in Muzaffarnagar district, and the sayyids of Bilgram

    map i.2 . Major Shia centres of the colonial United Provinces, India.

    18 For the history of Amroha and its important Shia sayyid community see S.M. AzizuddinHusain, Medieval towns, a case study of Amroha and Jalali (Delhi, 1995); Justin Jones,The local experiences of reformist Islam in a Muslim town in colonial India: the case ofAmroha, Modern Asian Studies 43, 4 (2009); Mahmud Ahmad Hashmi, Tarkh-i-Amroha (Delhi, 1930); Jamal Ahmad Naqvi, Tarkh-i-sadat-i-Amroha (Hyderabad,1934).

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 11

  • near Hardoi.19 Also in the region were the inuential Nawabs of Rampur,originally a clan of Sunni Rohilla Afghans who converted to Shiism aslate as the mid-nineteenth century.20 Having supported the British during1857, their native state of Rampur retained its autonomy thereafter. Itbecame a seat of exile for a number of disenfranchised scholars and ofcialsof the former courts in Delhi and Lucknow, and the Nawabs of Rampurplayed a consistently prominent role in north Indian Muslim social andpolitical affairs beyond the connes of their state throughout the colonialperiod.

    Most of these Shia lineages across north India thus fall into a particulartrajectory: early sayyid immigrants from the Perso-Arab world into India,who had historically switched their religious or sectarian allegiancesaccording to the shifting preferences of Mughal, Rohilla, and ultimatelyNawabi overlords, for advantages of land grants and government employ-ment. Ultimately, receiving preferential land settlements and patronagefrom Lucknow during the Nawabi period, many of these various Shiagentry families and lineages across north India over the course of thenineteenth century evolved into inuential philanthropists, proclaimingand portraying themselves as the guardians of sharif Islamic scholarshipand culture even after 1857. All aunted their ancestral excellence andupheld a rich Indo-Persian Islamic educational and institutional life, intheir own towns and beyond.

    By the colonial period Shiism was thus certainly the religion of a small,though highly inuential, section of the United Provinces Muslim elite.Holding on tomany of the agrarian advantages they had secured under theNawabs, the Shia constituted a signicant element among the taluqdars,the reconstituted landowner class who increasingly made Lucknow theirmetropolitan centre in the 1860s70s, and who dominated much of thecitys public and political life during these decades.21 Equally, the formerties of many sharif families to court service ensured that, after 1856, manywere able to re-craft themselves as a professionalizedMuslim middle class,and Shias thus became generously represented among the deputy collec-tors, municipal administrators, registrars and representative politicianswho comprised the steel frame of the colonial administration in the latenineteenth century. Indeed, in parts of districts such as Lucknow,

    19 H.R. Nevill,District Gazetteers, volume III: Muzaffarnagar (Allahabad, 1903), pp. 1606;H.R. Nevill, District Gazetteers, volume XLI: Hardoi (Allahabad, 1904), p. 68; H.R.Nevill,District Gazetteers, volume XIV: Bijnor (Allahabad, 1908), pp. 1013.

    20 Ahmad Ali Khan Shauq, Tazkira-i-kamilan-i-Rampur (Delhi, 1929).21 ThomasMetcalf,The aftermath of revolt: India, 18571870 (Princeton, 1964), pp. 13473.

    12 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • Moradabad, Allahabad and Jaunpur, Shias were perceived as comprisingfamily circleswho held a virtual local stranglehold over land revenue andgovernment careers, and who were widely perceived as able to directgovernment administration to their own ends.22

    In the United Provinces, as for all regions of South Asia, the Shia areoften described, by themselves and others, as being a Muslim minority.Despite being one of the most signicant footholds of Shiism in India,most colonial Census records andDistrict Gazetteers estimated the Shia ofmost districts of even this region to comprise only around 3 per cent of theMuslim population, though with considerably higher proportions in thosecentres with which they were most associated (in Lucknow, for instance,the Shia numbered perhaps a quarter or more of the citys Muslims).23

    However, such dry gures are scarcely meaningful as a starting-point foranalysis. In the Awadh region, as in other parts of South Asia, the historicallinks between Shiism and state power meant that Shiism maintained aprofound inuence on sharif Muslim life and society in general. In theNawabi period, Shiism had existed as a particular Muslim subculture, aseries of symbols, rituals and customs associated with the Muslim elite. Itwas linked to the project of governance, and inseparable from the culturallives of many of those closest to the Nawabi court, regardless of theirformal confession. The very different concept of the Shia as a separate,clearly dened religious minority community makes sense only against thebackground of colonial knowledge and the politics of enumeration, bywhich the colonial administration attempted from the 1870s1880s todenitively classify Indias population on the basis of homogeneous reli-gious categories.24

    This rejection of conceiving the Shia in Nawabi Awadh as a clearlydelineated minority brings us to one of the tropes through which Lucknowespecially, and Awadh in general, have long been seen: their much-venerated composite culture, embodying accommodation and interactionbetween all religious communities. Indeed, an ever-expanding interest and

    22 E.g. Bayly, The local roots of Indian politics, pp. 245; and C.A. Bayly, Empire andinformation: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 17801880(Cambridge, 1996), pp. 7980.

    23 Census of India 1881, North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Part I: Report (Allahabad,1882), p. 74.

    24 E.g. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India(Princeton, 2001), pp. 198227.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 13

  • literature on themes of Muslim cosmopolitanism in South Asia25 maywell cite Nawabi Lucknow as one of its most vivid and archetypalexamples. Much of the inspiration for this view lies with the inuentialLucknawi essayist Abd ul-Halim Sharar. His nostalgic ruminations onlate Nawabi Lucknow, rst serialized in an Urdu periodical in 1913 butlater published as a single volume under the name ofGuzashta Lucknauya mashrq ke tamadun ka akhir numana (lit. Old Lucknow: the lastphase of an Oriental civilization), has become an endlessly inuentialstatement on the citys incorporative Islamicate high culture. Shararpresents a city in which the mixed Shia and Sunni Muslim elite engagedculturally and socially, in which no-one knew who was a Sunni and whowas a Shia, and where the nal king, Wajid Ali Shah, could state in oneof his poetic compositions: Of my two eyes, one is Shia and the other isSunni.26

    This idealized rendering of Lucknow might well be seen as part myth,representative of the efforts of later intellectuals to retrospectively reclaimand reify Indias imagined pre-colonial past. Indeed, our knowledge ofNawabi Lucknow, having lled out to include ShiaSunni riots duringMuharram, the holding of acrimonious ShiaSunni clerical debates andthe routine dispensation of preferential treatment to Shia landowners andcourt employees, would all suggest that all within Lucknows legendarytehzib (culture) was not as harmonious as Sharar would have us believe. Atthe same time, evidence does suggest multiple aspects of ShiaSunni amityand accommodation among the Muslim ashraf. For this was a city wherethe secretaries and ofcials serving the later nawabs were often Sunnis aswere, remarkably, even those charged with the management of Muharramand guardianship of imambaras and Shia waqfs (religious endowments).It was a city in which intermarriages between Shia and Sunni sayyidlineages were far from unknown; and where Shia and Sunni studentstook classes in certain aspects of philosophy and religious educationtogether in the Sunni Firangi Mahal seminary. Numerous accountsdescribe how Shia, Sunni and Hindu city residents participated togetherin Muharram, and how the greatest marsiya poets and khwanis (sermon-izers), hired by the nobility to lead commemorations for Imam Husain,

    25 E.g. Muzaffar Alam, Competition and co-existence: Indo-Islamic interaction in medievalnorth India, Itinerario 13, 1 (1989); andMuzaffar Alam,The languages of political Islam:India 12001800 (Chicago, 2004).

    26 Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: the last phase of an oriental culture (London, 1975[1913]), pp. 745.

    14 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • were recruited from all religious communities.27 This lauded Islamic cos-mopolitanism has informed much academic writing and popular culturaldepiction of Lucknow and, signicantly, has been widely portrayed asenduring comfortably into the colonial period.28

    An entirely analogous perspective has consistently informed our under-standing of the rural qasbas, the ancestral outposts of so many Shiafamilies. Studies have usually described these settlements in a similarlanguage of cultural pluralism and a syncretistic local culture, an idealqasba society bound together by cross-communal Urdu literary and poetictraditions and often heavily tinged with Shia emblems and symbols iden-tied with their elites.29 The festival of Muharram, patronized by thelandowning ashraf of these towns, elicited participation across commun-ities of different religious confessions, with Shia, Sunni and Hindu alikeoften taking part. In a similar vein, studies have shown how local dargahs(shrines to Muslim saints), often the focal points of these townships,incorporated certain Shia elements under Nawabi inuence. The shrinecompounds of, for instance, Takiya Sharif at Kakori, Shah Wilayat atAmroha, or Dewa Sharif near Barabanki, were attended by many Shias,and incorporated imambara halls for the commemoration of the Imams onAshura and other holy days. Equally, branches of the families of theirsaints were Shia, as were some of the members who sat on the shrinestrust committees.30

    This study, it is worth mentioning here, paints a somewhat contrastingpicture of these environments. It depicts the deterioration of this allegedassimilationist culture of Lucknow and the nineteenth-century Muslim

    27 This perspective on Nawabi Lucknows Islamic cosmopolitanism is evident in a combina-tion of primary and secondary accounts. See ibid., passim; Mrs Meer Hasan Ali,Observations on the Mussalmauns of India (Karachi, 1978 [1832]); Mir Babar AliAnis, The battle of Karbala: a marsiya of Anis, introd. David Matthews (Delhi, 2003),pp. 133; Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore, 1961), pp. 58; JamalMalik, Islamische gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien: entwicklungsgeschichte und tendenzenam beispiel von Lucknow (Leiden, 1997); Cole, Roots of north Indian Shiism, passim;Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Lucknow under the Shia Nawabs 17751856, in Anna LiberaDallapiccola and Stephanie Zingel-Av Lallemant, eds., Islam and Indian religions(Stuttgart, 1993).

    28 E.g. The citys history was characterised by . . . a continuation of the communal harmonyof the Nawabi period: RamaAmritmal Laws, Lucknow: society and politics 18561885(Ph.D. thesis, University of South Wales, 1979), p. ii.

    29 E.g. Mushirul Hasan, From pluralism to separatism: qasbas in colonial Awadh (Delhi,2004); C.A. Bayly, Rulers, townsmen and bazaars: north Indian society in the age ofBritish expansion 17701870 (Delhi, 1983), pp. 18993.

    30 Claudia Liebeskind, Piety on its knees: three Su traditions in South Asia in modern times(Delhi, 1998), pp. 1879, 20817, 2524.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 15

  • qasbas into a series of more rigid, compartmentalized equivalents, thosewhich reect a heightened consciousness of inner-Islamic sectarian differ-ence taking root in colonial India.

    shiism as an indian religion

    Inuenced by recent events in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and other countries,recent years have seen a burgeoning of scholarly interest in Shia Islam.This said, advanced studies of the fate of the Shia under colonial rule inIndia have lagged behind. The remit of Coles expert telling ends withBritish annexation, and while for the later period some sweeping historicaloverviews and sociological descriptions of the Imami Shia exist,31 surpris-ingly little work on renewal and reform in Shiism has been conducted tocompare with the rich scholarship on the Sunni and modernist reformmovements that emerged in colonial India. The scriptural revitalizationof the Hana Sunni dar-ul-ulum (seminary) at Deoband after 1867; thefusion between Islamic sciences and Western knowledge initiated in 1875at Aligarhs Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (Aligarh College);Ahmad Raza Khans Barelwi Su devotional movement; the Nadwatul-Ulamas attempted Islamic renaissance; and the lay Tablighi Jamaatmovement have all been the subjects of excellent studies,32 while the Shiaof the very same region and period that spawned these movements havenot been researched with comparable rigour.

    Part of the reason for this may be the continued and intractable associ-ation, in scholarship and popular culture alike, of north Indias Shiaminority with its Nawabi incarnation. Just as colonial ofcials tended todescribe Shiism in the imagery of aristocracy and antiquity drawn fromperceptions of the heyday of Nawabi rule, so later histories have somewhatpresumptively evoked the persistent memories of Nawabi Lucknow as thefoundation of a distinctive Shia cultural identity in colonial India. Onemight recall an article by Sarojini Ganju, arguing that the Muslim elites ofLucknow continued to see and dene themselves in terms of the historicaland religious background of the city and a considerable inuence from

    31 E.g. Hollister, The Shia of India; Nadeem Hasnain and Sheikh Abrar Husain, Shias andShia Islam in India: a study in society and culture (Delhi, 1988); Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi,A socio-intellectual history of the Isna Ashari Shiis in India (Delhi, 1986).

    32 E.g. Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India; Lelyveld, Aligarhs rst generation; UshaSanyal,Devotional Islam and politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and hismovement, 18701920 (Delhi, 1996); Yoginder Sikand, The origins and development ofthe Tablighi-Jamaat: a cross-comparative study (Delhi, 2002).

    16 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • the past, echoing the themes of romanticism and continuity typical ofmuch writing on Lucknow.33 Associated with pre-colonial religious struc-tures and courtly nostalgia, Shiism has rarely been framed in the terms ofinnovation and experimentation comparable with those that have helpedus understand parallel Sunni and modernist Islamic reformist movementsduring the same period.

    A second possible hindrance to studies of Shiism in modern South Asiahas been a continued emphasis upon the supposed geographical heartlandsof Shiism in the Middle East. Shiism has often been interpreted within amould that privileges discussion of Iran and the atabat-i-aliyat, the shrinecities of southern Iraq, over other regions in which it exists. Much of themost authoritative recent scholarship on Shiism, inuenced by ever-growing commitments to globalized history, has emphasized modes ofunderstanding according to a rmly transnational context, with Shiismas a religion bound together by global networks of education and pilgrim-age linked to particular shrine cities and educational centres, especiallyNajaf (or Qom after 1979). Chibli Mallat, for instance, has identiedNajaf as the centre of a web of clerical and institutional connectionslabelled the Shii International, implying the existence of a globalShiism unconstrained by national borders.34 Indeed, this identicationof the shrine cities of southern Iraq as the religious, educational and geo-graphical nexus of the Shia world applies acutely to much of the periodcovered by this book, namely, the late nineteenth century. According toconventional understandings, while religious learning sank in formerAwadh following its annexation in 1856, Najaf and Karbala were estab-lished as the foremost global centres of Shia knowledge and juris-prudence.35 The impression created is of a centralization andmonopolization of Shia leadership in the atabat, a concentric circlesapproach depicting religious authority emanating from a centre outwardsto the farther corners of the world.36

    33 Sarojini Ganju, TheMuslims of Lucknow, 19191939, in Kenneth Ballhatchet and JohnHarrison, eds., The city in South Asia: pre-modern and modern (London, 1980), pp. 279,2945.

    34 Chibli Mallat, The renewal of Islamic law: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, Najaf and the ShiiInternational (Cambridge, 1993), passim.

    35 This new status of the shrine cities in global Shiism is attributed to the immigration ofulama from Iran, the relative autonomy of southern Iraq from the Ottoman administrationin Baghdad, the growth of pilgrimage to the shrine cities, generous patronage and anexpansion of popular Shiism among the Mesopotamian tribes. Meir Litvak, Shii scholarsof nineteenth-century Iraq: the ulama ofNajaf andKarbala (Cambridge,1998), pp. 1618.

    36 Ibid., p. 45.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 17

  • Such a perspective, of course, risks relegating India to the periphery ofthe Shia mental and religious universe. Indeed, it is signicant that eventhe most authoritative work on Indian Shiism has highlighted these linksto a wider, transnational religious infrastructure. Coles work on thepre-colonial era emphasizes the idea of a cross-territorial Indo-Persianmilieu, bound together by the Persian origins of the Nawabi dynasty, andthe movements of scholars, pilgrims and corpse-trafc between India,Persia and the atabat.37 Many other studies have implied a rathermono-directional approach by which, to quote one author, ideas by andlarge travelled from the Shia heartlands to India rather than vice versa.38

    Hoping to challenge these several assumptions, the central purpose ofthis study is to present an account of religious transformation in IndianShiism for the colonial period. If, as I suggested above, Shiism in NawabiAwadh constituted a series of particular beliefs, cultures and practicesassociated with sections of a sharifMuslim elite, or existed as a particularlegal tradition indelibly enmeshed with the practice of Nawabi gover-nance, then, I argue, it was in the years after the fall of Awadh that wesee something of an elemental redenition of Shiism itself in India. Isuggest that it was primarily in the colonial period, and especially afterthe 1880s, that a cluster of doctrines, rituals and cultural identiers wererationalized into a systematic Shia religion. A series of recent studies haveargued that the idea of free-standing religionswas very much a constructthat emerged during the nineteenth century. Identiable religious systemswere created as a result of the formalization and standardization of creedsand rites; the wider engagement with local, regional and transnationalreligious publics enabled by new technologies of travel, communicationand public organization; and the inuence of European Orientalism inimplanting senses of internal homogeneity within religious communities.39

    Through these same processes, this study argues, Shiism was graduallyobjectied, reconceived as a uniformized and universalistic religion whichexisted independently of the social, cultural and literary norms with which

    37 Cole, Roots of north Indian Shiism, passim; Juan Cole, Iranian culture and South Asia,15001900, in Nikki Keddie and Rudi Matthee, eds., Iran and the surrounding world:interactions in culture and cultural politics (Seattle, 2002).

    38 Francis Robinson, The ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic culture in South Asia (Delhi,2001), p. 26.

    39 C.A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world, 17801914: global connections and compar-isons (Malden, 2004), pp. 32565; TomokoMasuzawa, The invention of world religions:or how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism (Chicago,2005).

    18 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • it had previously been associated. This, I argue, was a shift that took placein conjunction with, and was profoundly inuenced by, concurrent reno-vations of religious, communal and national constructs of identity incolonial India. It was also one that encumbered Shia individuals withnew ethics of personal agency and moral duty, and which brought aboutideas of religious community quite new to Indian Shiism.

    This central theme has several signicant strands. First, attempting tomove away from the stereotypes of Nawabi antiquity and sharif respect-ability in which north Indian Shiism has often been framed, this bookemphasizes how Shiism as a religion evolved distinctly contemporarymanifestations. Far from being bound by pre-colonial norms and its aris-tocratic setting, it documents new forms of Shiism that took shapethrough decidedly modern institutions such as religious schools, printing-presses and public forums. A fruitful recent literature on print capitalismand middle-class identity formation in colonial Lucknow has revealed tous a budding public sphere culture, one which necessarily had profoundramications for the way in which religions were transmitted andreceived.40 Likewise, this study largely deserts the establishmentShiism of the old Nawabi nobility to focus upon this largely bourgeoispublic sphere of Shia publishing and public organizations. So, we considernot simply how Shiism acquired a new foundational apparatus and widersocial base, but also how it was renovated in wholly original ways by theemergence of abundant, often conicting, actors seeking to assert theircustody over its traditions. In tandem with many studies of Shia religiouschange, much attention in this study is given to the ulama (formallytrained religious scholars), and their efforts to claim sustained legitimacyand social leadership over the Shia community. But just as important arethose who have been termed new religious intellectuals,41 a motley arrayof lay or informal writers, preachers, debaters and secular patrons, whoused new public forms of Shiism to stake their own claims to worth andrespectability at a time of massive social transition. With establishednoble patronage drying up after 1857, it was often these latter intellec-tuals who had the greatest inuence over the paths that religious changewould take.

    40 Ulrike Stark, An empire of books: the Naval Kishore Press and the diffusion of the printedword in colonial India (Delhi, 2007); Sanjay Joshi, Fractured modernity: making of amiddle class in colonial India (Delhi, 2001). Joshis account of the formation of middle-class religiosity has been useful for this study: see pp. 96131.

    41 Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori,Muslim Politics (Princeton, 1996), pp. 434.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 19

  • Second, this study seeks to move away from the idea of an Indo-Persianmilieu, and the assumption that modern religious developments in Shiismcan only be discussed with primary reference to globalization and theenhancement of ties to the IraqiPersian heartland. Suggesting that tropesof global Shiism cannot fully describe how the Shia of particular regionsconceived their relationship with the lands they inhabited, this study chartsthe emergence of self-consciously Hindustani or Indian forms of Shiism,territorially grounded in the Indian subcontinent, with their own religiousleadership and inventories of practice. It may be posited, quite rightly, thatthe Western-inspired category of the territorial nation-state is an unsuitablestarting-point for studying a religion with such heavy cultural and psycho-logical ties to the atabat and global networks of expertise and pilgrimage.42

    However, this should not equate to a neglect of geographical identiers. Toillustrate this point, one only needs to look to the pamphlet from which thisbooks cover image is taken. The caption to the portrait of Nasir Husain,one of the highest mujtahids of this period and a key character throughoutthis study, establishes him as attentive to the Shia of Hindustan (hindus-tani shion ke taraf mutawajuh kiya).42A This idea of a Hindustani Shiismneed not (and, as this study argues, does not) necessarily overlap with thecontours of British India, but it does illustrate the understanding of aparticular territorial grounding, one inuenced by a series of Nawabi,colonial and nationalist imaginaries of an Indian domain.

    None of this is to suggest any kind of complete severance from the widerShia world. Rather than discounting transnational connections, this studyseeks to emphasize how, for many among the functional clergy and laycommunity, Indian Shiism carried within itself many of the chief mechanismsfor its own regulation and renewal. Offering a framework for studies ofShiism in other alleged peripheral settings,43 it examines how, for manyShia, their religion was conceived as distinctively Indian and in many waysfunctionally independent from, rather than subsidiary to, a Shia International.

    the dynamics of sectarianism in colonial india

    Much of the literature produced on the embryonic Islamic reformist move-ments of colonial north India cited above has alluded to the atmosphere of

    42 Juan Cole, Sacred space and holy war: the politics, culture and history of Shiite Islam(New York, 2002), p. 1.

    42A Mazr-e-shahd-e-slis, Sajjad Nasir Abaqati Collection, Lucknow.43 Cf. AlessandroMonsutti, Silvia Naef and Farian Sabahi, eds., The other Shiites: from the

    Mediterranean to Central Asia (Berne, 2007).

    20 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • antagonism existing among them. It has narrated at length the episodes ofpolemical debate, fatwa controversy and periodic public conicts whichcame to typify relations between ascendant schools such as the Shia,Deobandi and Barelwi Sunnis, Ahl-i-Hadis, Ahmadis and others, portray-ing a perhaps inherent combativeness to the Islamic revival taking place incolonial India. Much earlier literature on these reformist movementsassumed that they were primarily framed against a non-Muslim Other,be this an aggressive Hindu revivalism or the colonial state; and thisassumption arguably sometimes offered the impression of degrees of con-tact and concomitance within a tangible Islamic revival as various groupsattempted to reinvigorate Islam and the community attached to it. A seriesof more recent studies have perhaps attributed greater signicance to theexistence of sectarianism between these movements. They have arguedthat modern organs of Islamic renewal have been less concerned withwidening Muslim consensus and identifying points of agreement, andmore with the production and reproduction of specicmaslaki (sectarian)identities. It was not a non-Muslim Other, but this enemy within, thosealternative schools of thought within Islam, who were portrayed as themore signicant challenge to true Muslims, on account of their claims to arival legitimacy.44 The impression is thus given that what often appearedto outsiders as a relatively integrated Islamic revivalwas, from the inside,experienced as a combative series of sectarian rivalries between opposingindividuals and groups,45 all locked in perpetual competition and claimingfor themselves singular authority over Islamic tradition.

    As such, alongside the examination of the transformation of Shiism,the second major theme addressed by this study is the growth of ShiaSunni sectarianism. ShiaSunni conicts were increasingly apparent incolonial India in the form of sporadic public violence, especially during theMuharram festival. They also occurred in the form of polemical writing,the violence of the word and the mutual branding of respective groups asnon-Muslims (qaziya-i-munh, takr); and in various forms of public andsocial segregation and political differentiation. To put it another way,

    44 Arshad Alam, The enemy within: Madrasas andMuslim identity in north India,ModernAsian Studies 42, 2/3 (2008), pp. 607, 624.

    45 For one example of how one particular local sectarian confrontation within Sunni Islambecame more conspicuous to the Hindu population of the city who, often unable todistinguish one Muslim section from another, interpret the process as being general, seeMary Searle Chatterjee, Wahabi sectarianism among Muslims of Banaras,Contemporary South Asia 3, 2 (1994), p. 88.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 21

  • sectarianism developed as both a practice, manifested around particularacts and events, and a discourse, by which the identifying features separat-ing Shia and Sunni were increasingly emphasized in religious, cultural andpolitical language and transactions.46 At least until the nal chapter, themain focus of this book is on Shiism rather than Islamic sectarianism; butso important is the latter to understanding the construction of the formerthat it is a theme pervading this work, and is elaborated upon throughout.

    The use of the term sectarianism here takes its lead from a variety ofstudies which have used it to denote a similarly diverse array of conictsbetween Islamic communities in contexts of somewhat tense Islamic plu-ralism, such as contemporary Iraq or Pakistan. Certainly, this term doesnot come without its problems. On one hand, the term is so diffuse that itrisks forging links between a variety of unconnected or localized disputesby bringing them under the same abstract meta-narrative. On the otherhand, as this book demonstrates, the colonial period represents what wemight describe as the foundational period of sectarianism in South Asia,for it was during these years that sectarianism came to exist in its contem-porary form as an abstract phenomenon. This study discusses how avariety of inner-Islamic47 conicts, sparked by a variety of issues and indifferent social and geographical locations, often appeared to coincide andmutually inform each other, being bound in developing relationships ofinteraction andmutual effectuation. Sectarianism (or its equivalent tafriqin Urdu) thereby came to be perceived, in both the colonial mind andindeed theMuslim public sphere, as something transcending the individualquarrels and episodes within which it was manifested.

    This said, the parameters according to which inner-Islamic sectarianismin colonial South Asia has been analyzed have often been somewhatlimited. Treatments of the topic have predominantly portrayed it as aseries of sporadic religious quarrels, such as debates over theologicalminutiae, or conicts over practices such as the rites of Muharram.48

    Certainly sectarianism has not been assessed with the same levels of

    46 Cf. Ussama Makdisi, The culture of sectarianism: community, history and violence innineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon (London, 2000), p. 6.

    47 The phrase is used by Rainer Brunner, Islamic ecumenism in the 20th century: the Azharand Shiism between rapprochement and restraint (Leiden, 2004), e.g. pp. 434.

    48 Most studies of ShiaSunni conicts in pre-independence South Asia have focused pre-dominantly on Muharram violence. See e.g. Imtiaz Ahmad, The ShiaSunni dispute inLucknow, 19051980, in Milton Israel and Narendra Wagle, eds., Islamic society andculture: essays in honour of Professor Aziz Ahmad (Delhi, 1983); Mushirul Hasan,Traditional rites and contested meanings: sectarian strife in colonial Lucknow, inViolette Graff, ed., Lucknow: memories of a city (Delhi, 1997).

    22 Shia Islam in Colonial India

  • attention or sophistication as has the grandiose notion of South Asiancommunalism, usually taken to refer primarily to HinduMuslim con-ict, which has been examined in a vast canon of literature spanning local,provincial and national levels, as a religious and a secular phenomenon,and indeed as an alternative to a secular-leaning Indian nationalismitself.49 In view of the ongoing emphasis on the HinduMuslim divide asthe most frequently observed and historically consequential aspect of thecommunalization of colonial India, inner-Islamic conict has often beentreated as a secondary or subsidiary component of this process, indistin-guishable from other communal conicts in its manners and methods.50 Itis, however, a key argument of this study that inner-Islamic sectarianism isa phenomenon distinct from HinduMuslim communalism in its manifes-tations and the functions it performs, and it hence needs to be interrogatedon its own terms.

    In contrast to colonial India, the subject of ShiaSunni sectarianism inSouth Asia has gained a far greater level of attention when looking for-wards, to more contemporary Pakistan. I return to this subject in theconclusion, but as has been well documented in academic and mediacoverage, Islamic sectarian conict across categories of Shia, Sunni,Ahmadi, Wahhabi and other Islamic subdivisions has been in the ascend-ant since the late 1970s, to the point where it has become amajor challengeto Pakistans political and civil stability.51 However, while these modernconicts differ in important ways from their precursors, it is worth remem-bering that inner-Islamic sectarianism in South Asia found its rst maturedforms not in late twentieth-century Pakistan, but in late nineteenth-centurynorth India. In many ways it was the period and geographical theatrecovered in this study, namely the colonial United Provinces, that providedmodern sectarianism with its familiar vocabulary of maslaks (sects or

    49 Most signicantly, Gyanendra Pandey, The construction of communalism in colonialnorth India (Delhi, 1990). The term of sectarianism has been used in a comparableway in scholarship on the Middle East, in which it signies a schismatic ideology antithet-ical to state-led national coexistence: taiyya as opposed to taayush.Makdisi,The cultureof sectarianism, pp. 1667.

    50 According to Sandria Freitag, sectarianism tap[ped] the range of organisations andideological appeals that had been created for the political expression of HinduMuslimcompetition: Collective action and community: public arenas and the emergence ofcommunalism in colonial north India (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 24950. Comparable are thewords of Imtiaz Ahmad: a consideration of the conict between Shias and Sunnis . . . willshow that the structural similarities between it and the conict between Hindus andMuslims are . . . remarkable: Perspectives on the communal problem, in Asghar AliEngineer, ed.,Communal riots in post-independence India (Hyderabad, 1984), pp. 1501.

    51 See below, pp. 235242.

    Introduction: Writing on Indian Shiism 23

  • schools), and in which many of the major themes of sectarian polemic(munazara) were formulated. It was here that an organizational apparatusof sectarian organizations, religious colleges and political groups was rstdeveloped; and in which the most signicant pre-independence sectarianviolence occurred. Thus, it is hoped that this study will provide some usefulreections for understanding the forms of inner-Islamic conict at work inSouth Asia today.

    Despite its growth in colonial India, sectarianism was a phenomenonwidely misunderstood, and very frequently dismissed, as an outdatedirrelevance. Colonial observers tended to describe it as something manu-factured by fanatical divines or priests, and a means by which theycontrolled the ignorant masses; concerns were raised at the Muslim rankand le obeying their directions and rendering unquestioning obedi-ence.52 Such descriptions, of course, equated sectarianism with its twintropes of bigotry, violence and extremism which characterized much col-onial language about Islam after the perceived Muslim role in the 1857Rebellion.

    But just as signicant is the fact that many Muslims of the periodinterpreted sectarianism in a similar way. As is well known, the period ofaround 1870 to 1940, into which this book largely falls, was in globalterms signicant for the development of modernist movements withinIslam, during which a number of attempts were made by intellectuals andthinkers to construct forms of their religion better adapted to the modernworld.53 Modernist Islam is primarily associated with such tasks as theliberalization of Islamic knowledge, educational awakening and projectsof social and political empowerment. However, one of the features com-mon to many of these movements was their desire to shake off the oldlegacy of ShiaSunni conict and build bridges in pursuit of inner-Islamicunity. Indeed, following this take on Islamic modernism, the early twen-tieth century has been recently, and importantly, described as a moment ofrapprochement or ecumenism (taqrib), an inter-confessional movementwhich attempted to develop new avenues for ShiaSunni dialogue. Thismovement was most clearly embodied by the