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Strategies of Authority in Muslim South Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2012

FRANCIS ROBINSON
FRANCIS ROBINSON*
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London Email: f.robinson@rhul.ac.uk
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Abstract

Starting from the position that authority is constantly a work in progress, this paper examines authority in Muslim South Asia at a time when Muslims felt the challenge of rule by another civilization. It examines the strategies in sustaining their authority: of religious leaders, of Unani hakims and of literary leaders. In all three areas there is a rejection of the Persianate Mughal past and an embracing of Arab models, of the Prophetic model, and in various ways a drawing on British models and British authority. The paper also looks at the strategies of the rulers noting, amongst other things, how the British drew heavily on Mughal models just as Indian Muslims were letting them go, and how, since independence, Muslim rulers have drawn on a mixture of Western, Arab and Prophetic sources. There is also a running discussion throughout the paper of the revolutionary shift towards rooting authority in society at large, and the development of techniques to do so.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

An amended version of the keynote address given at ‘Muslim Voices: Traditions and Contexts’, a conference in honour of Barbara Daly Metcalf, 11–13 September 2009, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan.

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2 Not all religious leaders were willing to accept the authority of the hadith. For an excellent discussion of the rejection of the hadith as a source of authority by Khwaja Ahmad al-Din Amritsari, the founder of the Ahl-i Quran, see Qasmi, Ali Usman, ‘Islamic Universalism: The “Amritsari” Version of the Ahl al-Quran’ in Journal of Islamic Studies, 20, 2, May 2009, pp. 159–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 Ibid., p. 229.

7 Ibid., pp. 230–231.

8 Ibid., p. 256.

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12 Ibid., p. 41.

13 Uthmani was refuting the argument of Madani, the Principal of Deoband and leading supporter of Indian nationalism, in his Muttahida qaumiyat aur Islam [in italics] ‘Nationalism and Islam’. This has been translated under this title by Muhammad Anser Hussain and Hasan Imam and introduced by Barbara D. Metcalf (Manohar: New Delhi, 2008).

14 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 200.

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30 Zaman, Ashraf, pp. 89–92.

31 Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism, pp. 34–36.

32 Ibid., p. 37.

33 For this process at work amongst a women's preaching group in Sri Lanka see Haniffa, Farzana, ‘Piety as Politics amongst Muslim women in Contemporary Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies, 42, 2/3 (2008), pp. 347–375CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and amongst a women's reading group in Bangladesh Maimuna Huq, ‘Reading the Qur'an in Bangladesh: The Politics of ‘Belief’ Among Islamist Women’, Ibid., pp. 457–488.

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35 Ibid., pp. 216–228.

36 Ibid., pp. 321–333.

37 Ibid., pp. 265–278.

38 Alavi, Islamic Healing, pp. 100–153.

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40 Ibid., p. 128.

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46 The first introduction to the Musaddas is reproduced in Shackle, Christopher and Majeed, Javed trans. and introd., Hali's Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (Oxford University Press: Delhi, 1997), pp. 88–97.Google Scholar The precise reference is on p. 93.

47 The metre was a variety of mutaqarib, which was not favoured for large-scale poems in Persian and Urdu. Shackle and Majeed, Hali's Musaddas, pp. 29–30.

48 Ibid., pp. 60–62.

49 See the Musaddas verses 21–54, Ibid., pp. 109–123.

50 Ibid., pp. 76–77.

51 Pritchett, Networks, p. 34.

52 Ibid., p. 47.

53 Ibid., p. 143.

54 Ibid., p. 168 and Ansari, Khizar Humayun, The Emergence of Socialist thought Among North Indian Muslims (1917–1947) (Mustafa Waheed: Lahore, 1990)Google Scholar.

55 Washbrook, David, ‘After the Mutiny: From Queen to Queen-Empress’, History Today, 47, 9, September 1997, pp. 10–15.Google Scholar

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58 Khan deals with this process most effectively in the latter stages of his thesis devoted to Shia-Ismaili motifs in Indus Valley architecture. Hasan Ali Khan ‘Shia-Ismaili Motifs in the Sufi Architecture of the Indus Valley 1200–1500 AD (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 2009).

59 Rozehnal, Robert, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2007), p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.