The time of the Prophet and the future of the community: Temporalities in nineteenth and twentieth century Muslim India

Abstract

The comparison of the present to the time of the Prophet could mean very different things at different times and for different people, in spite of the finite authoritative sources, the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. The article argues that the time of the Prophet and the comparative standard it offered not only changed depending on the concerns of the present from which the authors wrote and the future they imagined, but also affected the present and the future of each community referring to it. In the colonial contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth century, this temporal comparison met with and integrated the model of the stages of development. Comparisons with Europe, standing in for modernity, became central for the location of the community on a scale of progress, but also for attempts to change this position by catching up, educationally, economically, and politically. They went hand in hand with a strong appeal to the emotions: The successful reform of the community or nation was what would make the difference between honor, hope, and pride on the one hand and despair, humiliation, and shame on the other, and it was the responsibility of the present generation to gain or lose the future. The article investigates two comparisons of the present with the early Islamic past, Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas, a long poem on the Ebb and Flow of Islam (1879), and the speeches Bahadur Yar Jang delivered in Hyderabad in the 1930s and 1940s. Both, though in a noticeably different way, show a Prophetic time, which is not only situated in the past, but also the age of the most perfect form of progress ( taraqqi). Reverting to the past thus also means advancing toward the future; comparing the present to the Prophetic times is an indication how far the community is ready to face the challenges of the future.