Search Results

This Chapter first appeared as the lead article in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 September 2014. It is a review of the historian Michael Cook’s Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic case in comparative perspective and Akeel Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. According to Cook, Islam has a greater tendency towards politicization than other religions, whereas Akeel Bilgrami is more disposed to find fault with Western policies than with Islam. Bilgrami underlines the need to listen to reformist voices from within Islam rather than the voices of outside critics. This leads the Chapter into a brief consideration of the prospects for large-scale institutional reform instigated by Muslims themselves, as opposed to sporadic reformist initiatives that do not crystallize into organized movements.

This chapter examines whether and to what extent there was a long-term tendency towards secularization, towards religion becoming a specialized subsystem which was distinguished from the other subsystems with regard to its institutions and the specialists involved. It also looks at how this development related to the growing importance of religion, particularly within the reformist Islamic movement. The first section explores this by contrasting the two most important Muslim colleges in northern India. The second section then traces the development of Delhi’s religious centres and the development of Madrasa Rahimiya’s teachings. It also looks at the retreat of Mirza Jan-e Janan’s successors from the public sphere and their rapprochement with Sufism. The final section focuses on efforts to secure the position of Muslims by developing an elaborate network of associations where spokespeople from the middle classes were now the authoritative representatives of the community of Muslims.

In this chapter the author presents a variety of religious views and the different devotional practices and communities to which they gave rise, as well as the boundary lines and the crossing of boundaries between them. The first section uses the establishment of an annual procession to the shrine of the Sufi Qutb ud Din at Mahrauli to present the devotional culture, the social basis, and the community building of the Chishti Sufi order. The second section looks at the Naqshbandi Sufi order and the reforms in Muslim devotional practice led by Mirza Jan-e Janan and his successors. The third section discusses the school of Shah Wali Ullah and the beginning of a new hardening of the boundaries between the religious communities and shifts in focus and priorities within the communities of Muslims in the nineteenth century.

Gender history so far had laid a focus on the reform movements from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. This chapter attempts to push the boundary backward to the developments of the first half of the century. The first section claims that at least the women of the nobility had a much stronger position before colonial rule. It was the intervention of the colonial power which curtailed their possibility to inherit pensions and revenue and strengthened the position of the head of the family, thereby reducing them to a dependent status. The second section examines courtesans, who occupied a space on the threshold between the public and private spheres. The third section shows how reformist Islam addressed women through the medium of fatwas and tracts, looking at the text Tuhfa uz Zujain, the ‘Gift for the Spouses’, by Nawab Qutb ud Din.

This chapter looks at Lisa Oettinger's trunks, the contents of which unravel not one but two family stories, which Lisa purposefully joined: her own German-Jewish past and that of her husband's family, which is rooted in reformist Islam. The suitcases are therefore filled with the relics of German/Jewish/Muslim/South Asian bourgeois life and reflect one woman's efforts to make sense of her displacement by collecting objects from Germany and South Asia that “matched” or mirrored one another. Indeed, the carefully preserved intimate items are the material traces of a quite extraordinary migration story. Ultimately, Lisa Oettinger's collection saved two families from being forgotten: the Oettingers from Marienwerder and the Ur-Rahmans from Lahore. The collection allows them not only to live on in their things but also to join their family traditions in one box. For that reason, her collection is neither specifically Jewish nor specifically Muslim. It is in-between.

The chapter discusses the exceptional case of the mid–19th-century Muslim woman ruler Sikandar Begum in the princely state of Bhopal in central India, whose mother had also been the regent of Bhopal state and whose daughter followed her as ruler. The author depicts this as transition from an earlier local form of Islamic statecraft that did not shy away from the use of force and relied on a decentralized structure, to a new mode of more centralized administration following the British model. Instead of engaging in Sufism or in reformist Islam, Sikandar Begum personally practised what the author calls a protestant-style Islam, without, however, attempting to curb other denominational observances. There was no idea yet of a distinct ‘Muslim world’, rather a fusion of traditional and what was considered modern (administrative) practices from the top down, appropriating Mughal paraphernalia, without raising the issue of religious identity in any emphatic sense.