Product Description
The essays in this volume, written over the course of the last quarter century, are intended to contribute to understanding the role that Islamic symbols and identities have come to play in Northern India and, since 1947, in Pakistan. Above all these essays offer a challenge to current negative stereotypes of the Muslim faith, demonstrating that the religion is not characterised by political militancy nor dominated by static traditionalism.
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Preface of the book
meaning within Buddhism? Even if we adopt Nagarjuna’s stance in maintaining that samsdra is no different from nirvana metaphysically, we still need to work out its implications ethically.
I would recommend that to get the best out of this book a reader should first read an essay and then jump to the relevant section in Magliola’s afterword in order to see Magliola’s analysis of that piece, as well as his often spirited challenge of the author’s blind sights in his/her interpretation of Buddhism and vigorous defense of the Derridean deconstruction project.
doi:10.1093/jaarel/10044 Tao Jiang
Advance Access publication January 29, 2007 Rutgers University
Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan. By Barbara D. Metcalf. Oxford University Press, 2004. 373 pages. $35.00.
All but one of the chapters in this fifteen-chapter book, which may best be described as the record of Barbara Daly Metcalfs intellectual journeys, are previously published essays that span from 1978 to 2002. The book bears witness to the years Metcalf has spent working with and reflecting upon materials and issues pertaining to modern and contemporary South Asian Islam. In her introduction, she shares the profound insights that can only emerge after one has worked so trenchantly in a specialized field such as hers (Indian subcontinental Muslims), and on a population often marginalized by the Middle East-centric study of Muslim societies. Her objectives are to show first, “Muslims, especially the so-called, ‘mullahs,’ as engaged with issues of the modern world and not simply as [sic] blind reactionaries, as they are conventionally described” (1). Second, “that the traditionally educated Muslim leadership in the colonial period, far from being ‘fanatic’, were pragmatically driven in their socio-political activities, acting ‘within the complex world of opportunities and constraints, motivations, and tastes they [typically] shared’ with non-Muslims as well” (1). These statements are eminently borne out throughout the book, but especially in the chapters constituting parts II and III that examine Islamic cultural and political life.
Noting that the Pakistan movement, which was the largest Islamic movement to emerge in the Indian subcontinent, was a movement focused on internal spiritual renewal, she rightly observes that the emergence of more recent jihad-oriented movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan “should not eclipse what have been more enduring and more pervasive patterns of Islamic activity in South Asia” (2). She suggests, instead, that the stories of the group that has been her own focus of study, the Deobandis, and of other South Asians demonstrate the way in which South Asian Muslims have chosen to guide and justify their behavior, and reveal an astonishing array of diverse opinions ranging from what constitutes correct ritual behavior to which political strategies ought to be adopted at particular historical moments (3).
Recognition of such diversity is expressed in the use of the word “Contestations” in the title, which “points both to actual debates among Muslims and to the multiple dialogues with Islamic texts and symbols undertaken by individuals and groups” (3). Indeed, such diversity reveals the sense of responsibility felt by subcontinental Muslims as they sought to address how Islamic institutions and symbols were to be interpreted in a changing historical and social context, despite the oft-held view, articulated by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that “Islam” is to be interpreted in a singular manner. For example, the second chapter, “Two Fatwas on Hajj in British India” explores Deobandi attempts to define correct practices within the context of a plurality of available Indian Muslim interpretations on any given issue including the hajj, on the one hand, and on the other, attempts to work out what it meant to be Muslim under British colonial rule.
The essays in the book show then how difficult it is to make generalizations about Islam and Muslims given the proliferation of intellectual positions and ideologies developed within a context of social, cultural, and political change even in as specific a region as the Indian subcontinent. Further, “[T]hey challenge the stereotypes that Islam is inevitably politically militant, that Muslim women are particularly oppressed, or that Islam is a static tradition, sunk in medievalism” (3). Not that militancy, women’s oppression, and stasis do not exist, but simply put, they do not tell the whole story. Chapter four, “Reading and Writing about Muslim Women in British India,” shows the range of positions taken by traditionalists, social reformers, and Islamists, respectively, in their consideration of women’s proper roles and their engagement with western critiques of Muslim women’s status and western women as a model for Muslim women. The Deoband or “traditional” position is shown to be surprisingly far more enlightened than other Muslim and non-Muslim approaches towards women’s place in society in its disavowal of essential differences between men and women that could be utilized to proscribe women to predetermined social roles. Moreover, the essays reveal that the traditionally educated, vernacular Muslim thinkers such as those found in the Deoband movement were intimately aware of and attempted to address issues current among the English-speaking elite, and sought to address “concerns relating to authenticity and individual self-realization that permeated cultural life…” (4).
Metcalfs discomfort with the depiction of Deoband as “traditional” in contrast to Aligarh, considered a modernizing, westernizing, educational institution led to the research conducted for her dissertation. Such a depiction, despite the fact that Deoband was founded in 1867 to signal a clear departure from “earlier patterns of education” led to her interest in studying the school “as a possible case for a critique of modernization theory, which argued that all peoples everywhere were moving toward a form of society, politics, and culture whose script had already been written in the West, and that progress’ was stimulated only by contact with the West on the part of societies that had, heretofore, been largely stagnant and unchanging” (8).
Metcalfs research indeed revealed that both Deoband and Aligarh “shared in fundamentally modern transformations” and “were rooted in an indigenous pattern of religious reform” rather than stemming “from interaction with Western values or models.” Metcalf argues that “the very concept of ‘traditional’ becomes part of the self-definition of modernity… what is often taken as tradition turns out to be a relatively recent product of the colonial past” (10). The first chapter of the book, “The Madrasa at Deoband” charts the institutional history and structure of the Dar ul-Ulum of Deoband, the leading theological academy of modern India, and the roles played by its founders and funders in shaping the administration and curriculum of the school in an attempt to reform religious education. Chapters five and six turn to medical reforms undertaken by the influential political leader Hakim Ajmal Khan (d. 1928), who belonged to the Aligarh school of thought that valorized Muslim, and in Ajmal’s case, Hindu culture. In his attempt to rehabilitate traditional Muslim medicine, yunani tibb (also called Greek medicine) against the onslaught of British and Indian allopathic medical attempts to monopolize medical care, Ajmal Khan established a college after the first world war to train students in indigenous forms of medicine, both Ayurvedic and tibb, followed by a research center, established in 1930, while also including training in European medical techniques and surgical practices. These efforts, along with his political activities, are predicated upon the twin pillars of pride in South Asian identity including but not restricted to Muslim identity, and hence in indigenous sciences and arts, and a desire at the political level for respect and honor in the relationships between colonizer and colonized, and ruler and subject (129).
Observations made of the Deoband school’s teachers and guides shaped Metcalfs future work, focused on the “theories of the person and personal formation and transformation as taught by these scholars” in an attempt to show that they were “firmly rooted in the traditions of spiritual realization, usually termed ‘Sufism’, that pervade virtually all of Muslim life in the subcontinent” (11). Chapter three, “The Past in the Present,” explores the autobiographical writings of Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi (d. 1982) as an illustration of how one Deobandi scholar sought to tell stories of exemplary lives intended to instruct others in moral and spiritual development within his own interpretation of Sufi teachings and experiences. The essays included in part IV of this volume further extend her analysis of selfhood through her examination of Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s symbolism surrounding the Mosque of Cordoba, and of pilgrimage accounts in defining how South Asian Muslims sought to develop a vocabulary detailing “how being Muslim has been experienced and conceived” (312).
By focusing on adab, discipline or deportment, Metcalf sought to bring to the surface the underlying assumption that “by correct actions … the inner self would, with God’s grace, be transformed.” Metcalf set about translating a Deobandi text, the Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Jewels), penned by Mawlana Thanawi, an influential spiritual guide to thousands of Muslims, which was
often included in the dowry of a Muslim bride (interestingly, this text, with the sections dealing with practical domestic life left out, also serves as a guide for men) (106). In contrast to the Victorian view that women are fundamentally different, physically and morally, from men, this text suggests that women were not only “meant to practise the same kind of disciplines and self-control and focus on the same kind of self-realization as men,” but had the same religious obligations, read the same books, and should learn Arabic and become legal scholars, just like men (12-13). This translation was conducted within a larger project undertaken by SSRC/ACLS’s Joint Committee on South Asia that sought to “seek out patterns of meaning and organization from within South Asia’s own cultural systems” (11). Out of this initial project grew a series of other projects that encouraged “the study of Muslim populations and Islamic traditions outside the Middle East” (15) in order to provide a corrective to the notion that true Islam exists only in Middle East.
However, Metcalf rightly cautions us that a focus solely on Muslim discourses, vocabularies, concepts, and metaphors in a regional context, while valuable in shedding light on the observation that “Islam in South Asia is at once distinctive and Islamic” (14), also leads to the misperception that Muslims in South Asia owe their allegiance elsewhere, leading in practical terms to anti-Muslim violence. The fragmentation of the field of South Asian studies into specialists on Hinduism or on Islam, in their studies, for example, of social reform in South Asia, overlook the fact that these traditions “share so much in their basic impulse and agendas,” thereby calling for the need to study Hindus and Muslims within the context of the study of the Indian population generally, that is, within the “shared narrative on Indian history, not outside it” (15). Chapters seven and eight tease the reader into thinking about the complexities of labels such as “Hindu” and “Muslim” when considering works such as the sixteenth-century text, the Padmavati, as one example among many others that could be cited about the artistic, architectural, and discourse production undertaken by Hindus and Muslims alike—and likely other faith traditions—in the centuries of shared coexistence.
Overall, this volume offers a rich, complex, and thought-provoking set of essays that enrich our understanding of the diverse Muslim communities and positionalities in South Asia while calling upon contemporary scholarship to continue mining the specificities constituted by the religious pluralism and distinct histories and cultures of the region. While the volume as a whole is likely to be most useful for undergraduate and graduate level courses in South Asian history and culture of Islam in South Asia, individual essays are easily accessible for use in just about any undergraduate class on gender, aspects of contemporary Islam, South Asian and/or Islamic political movements, and South Asian/Muslim literature.