Indian Roots of Modern Islamic Revivalism

Abstract

19 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVI, No.4, Summer 2013 Indian Roots of Modern Islamic Revivalism** Itzchak Weismann* In the Muslim geographical imagination the Arab world is conventionally regarded as the center. This rests on the fact that the Arabian Peninsula was the cradle of Islam: there at the beginning of the seventh century the Prophet received the call and thence his followers spread the new faith to West Asia, North Africa, and the rest of the globe. This image has been sustained throughout the ages in the consciousness of the umma by the direction of the daily prayer to Mecca (qibla), the annual pilgrimage (hajj), and the privileged status accorded everywhere to the alleged descendents of the Prophet (sada, ashraf). It seems to have been further strengthened in premodern times through students who flocked from all directions to the prestigious al-Azhar university in Cairo, the increasing claims to universality of the Ottoman Sultanate-Caliphate, and the spread of the Arabian puritan Wahhabi creed. This article argues that, contrary to this image, in modern times in some important respects the Indian subcontinent has superseded the Arab countries as a center of the tightening network of the Muslim umma. A relative latecomer to the community of believers, and long at its edge, from the seventeenth century on, and more evidently in the nineteenth and *Itzchak Weismann is Professor of Islamic studies and Head of the Jewish-Arab Center at the University of Haifa. His research interests focus on modern Islam, particularly fundamentalist and radical Islamic movements and Sufism. He is the author of Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus, Leiden: Brill, 2001, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition, London and New York, 2007, and co-editor of Ottoman Reform and Islamic Regeneration, London, 2005, and Islamic Myths and Memories: Mediators of Globalization, forthcoming. He also published numerous articles on Islam in modern Syria, the Arab East at large and India. As head of the Jewish-Arab Center, Prof. Weismann works to promote good relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Itzchak can be contacted at Weismann@research.haifa.ac.il **An earlier version of this article was presented in the conference at Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studied in Kolkata and published in Priya Singh and Susmita Bhattacharya (eds.), Perspectives on West Asia: The Evolving Geopolitical Discourses. New Delhi: Shipra Publishers, 2012. 20 1 Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 7-9. twentieth centuries, Indian Islam became a major source of influence for the Arab and other Muslim regions in both terms of reformist thought and new modes of collective organization. The rise of South Asia as a major center of Islamic revivalism took place in the setting of the political and cultural crisis of Indian Islam—from the disintegration of the Mughal Empire to British imperial rule to partition, and was facilitated by the introduction of new means of communication and transnational exchange. Since the crisis was felt earlier and deeper than in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, the Indian men of religion were quicker and more profound in responding to the challenge and in formulating new ideas and institutions to meet it. These would later be adopted and adapted by their counterparts in the Middle East and other part of the Muslim world. The article begins with a brief theoretical discussion in the Muslim context of the major components of my conceptual framework: the center, the edge, and the network. I then demonstrate the influence exerted in the past two centuries by some major Indian Islamic trends and movements on their counterparts in the Arab world. Their evolution reflects the range of modern Islamic revitalization efforts, from shari’a-minded Sufism through the Modernist and Salafi trends to moderate and radical Islamism. In the last part I consider the factors that led to the ascendency of Indian Islam in the modern era and offer some preliminary observations about the reconfiguration currently underway in the worldwide Islamic network under the impact of globalization. Center, Edge, and Network Two views have been suggested in...