Islamic Thought in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent and the Middle East

Abstract

THE relationship of Indian Islam to that of the Islamic heartlands can be studied historically in terms of the actual impacts from the Middle East and vice versa. So far as Islamic thought in the subcontinent is concerned, its major source up to the seventeenth century lay in the north-Iran and Central Asia.2 The main religious disciplines cultivated in this period are law and mysticism. Beginning with the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this picture becomes modified. With the opening of the direct sea route to Arabia, certain Indian scholars began visiting the Hijaz for the purpose of study. As a result of this orientation, the characteristic orthodox Arabo-Islamic science of Hadith was introduced and propagated in India, its monumental champion in the seventeenth century being Shaikh CAbd al-HIaqq of Delhi, called Muhaddith, or traditionist par excellence. This development coincides with a vigorous reassertion of Islamic orthodoxy and a bid for the recovery of a purist Islam from the compromises to which Islam had been subjected in India through the growth of certain popular forms of Sufism as mass religion. In the present paper, we shall not be concerned too much with the external historical relationship of Indian Islam with the Arab Middle East, but with the efforts of the Indian Muslims, in the realm of thought, to respond to the challenges and tensions created by the existence of Islam in a Hindu majority India. Hence, in the process we are dealing with, Islamization and orthodoxification become identical. As will become apparent presently, the terms of the resolution of this challenge are set within India and the emergent product is an Indian Islam, but with a definite reference to and with a source of inspiration from the outside at two levels: the ethos of Islam as it was shaped by the Prophet and the Qur'dn and the theologians of the early centuries, and the consciousness that Muslims in India are a part of the World Muslim Community with the Middle East as its natural center, as it were. The leadership of the Muslim Community in India was first shocked into an acute awareness of the precarious situation of Islam in India by the religious attitude and policies of Akbar. The Bhakti Movement,3 which was essentially a massive mechanism to revivify Hinduism against the threat of Islam by minimizing the rigors of the caste system, and of the purely ritual aspects of the Brahmanic religion, and heavily stressing