The spatial imaginaries of Mujaddidī Sufis and political integration in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article identifies two comparable teaching and learning lines of the reformist Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya Sufi order in the Indo-Afghan borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the strategies of social engagement of the mobile mullās of the Akhund Ghaffūr-Haddā Mullā line and those of the pīrs of the khānqah (Sufi lodge)-centered line of Khwājāh Usmān Dāmanī. The concurrent establishment of these two Sufi lines in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India was an important historical phenomenon inspired by a ‘reformed’ Mujaddidī practice and the two Sufi lines were comparable because of their roots in Mujaddidī reformism. I argue, however, that the two Sufi lines must also be differentiated because of the loci of their participation in and mediation of the day-to-day affairs of practising communities. Members of the Haddā Mullā’s line dispersed among the Pashtun borderland communities to enforce religious priorities from day to day, while members of Usmān Dāmanī’s line consciously confined their activities to the khānqah. The patterns of activity of the members of the two Mujaddidī lines suggest a new framework for understanding the relationship between Islam and politics in the Indo-Afghan borderlands: it was not the ideological approach to Islam, but the spatial imaginaries employed by the frontier Sufis which produced their respective political agendas and impact.