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Islam and Muslim Society in South Asia

Francis Robinson Contributions to Indian Sociology 1983 17: 185 DOI: 10.1177/0069966783017002003 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cis.sagepub.com/content/17/2/185

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Islam and Muslim society in South Asia

Francis Robinson
Royal Holloway College University of London

There has been a tendency, in recent years, for some anthropologists, and those who feel they have anthropological insights, to emphasise that Muslim society in South Asia, particularly in India, is much more Indian in its beliefs and practice than has been thought in the past.* This tendency has its greatest protagonist in Imtiaz Ahmad, a professor of sociology at the Centre for Political Studies in New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. Since 1975, Ahmad (assisted by both Indian and non-Indian scholars) has been steadily revealing his vision of Indian Islam in what is to be a four volume series of essays. Three volumes have been published-Casre and social stratification among Muslims in India (1973), Family, kinship and marriage among Muslims in India (1976), and Ritual and religion among Muslims in India (1981). In the introduction to the third volume, a part of which has been published in Islam and the modem age (Ahmad 1981a), Ahmad sets out the main lines of his argument. He begins with what. for many Islamic sociologists, has come to be an almost obligatory attack on Islamicists. They know languages and texts, but they do not know how Muslims actually behave. They have, in consequence, projected a normative idea of Islam and have deceived us as to the great variety of Muslim practices throughout the world. The sociological or social anthropological understanding of religion,' we are told, 'is at once more comprehensive and more concrete' (Ahmad 1981b: 2). There is some truth in this. But we also sense a dismissiveness towards the achievements of other disciplines, as well as a jarring confidence in the superiority of the sociological vision. Ahmad pursues his point by emphasising the gulf which exists between Islamic law and Muslim practice in India. He observes that all the Muslims he has dealt with acknowledge the five pillars of Islam-creed, prayer, fasting, alms and pilgrimage-and in doing so, acknowledge their
*This article is an amended version of a public lecture given at the University of Cambridge on 14 February 1983.
Contributions to Indian sociology (n.s.) 17, 2 (1983) SAGE Publications New Delhi/Beverly Hills/London

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186 / FRANCIS ROBINSON

duty to follow the pattern for a perfect Muslim existence laid down in the Quran, the example of the Prophet, and the holy law. But, the Islam they practise 'is heavily underlined by elements which are accretions from the local environment and contradict the fundamentalist view of the beliefs and practices to which Muslims must adhere' (Ahmad 198lb: 7). Ahmad notes that, in the past, Islamicists and anthropologists have explained the contradictions between law and local practice by pointing to the historical development of Islamic society. According to them, such contradictions were inevitable for a faith which, by and large, had only slowly intruded into other societies, come to exist side by side with other systems of belief and practice, and often had to accommodate itself to them in order to survive. In such a situation, there were bound to be some who lived lives closer to the Islamic ideal than others, whose religious behaviour was profoundly influenced by local custom. Nevertheless, the tendency would be for local custom to give way before the slow but sure progress of the Islamic ideal in Muslim hearts and lives. So Aziz Ahmad, doyen of Muslim scholars of South Asia, considered the folk and syncretic elements in Indian Islam, the worshipping of saints, the barely disguised presence of Hindu godlings, the hint of pollution and the traces of caste, as mere temporary anomalies which would eventually be eliminated by the actions of Muslim reformers. So, also, the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz assumed that the process of Islamisation meant a similar victory of an orthodox, orthoprax great tradition over a heterodox, heteroprax little tradition. 'The typical mode of Islamization,' he declares, is: painfully gradual. First comes the Confession of faith then the other pillars, then a certain degree of observance of the law, and finally. perhaps, especially as a scholarly tradition develops and takes hold, a certain amount of learning in the law and the Quran and Hadith upon which it rests. The intricate norms, doctrines, explications, and annotations that make up Islam, or at least Sunni Islam, can be apprehended only step by step, as one comes to control, to a greater or lesser degree, the scriptural sources upon which it rests .... Islamic conversion is not, as a rule. a sudden, total. overwhelming illumination but a slow turning toward a new light (Ahmad 198Ib: 8-1 I). Ahmad does not accept that the insights of either Aziz Ahmad or Clifford Geertz apply to India. He notes the revivalist and reformist movements of nineteenth and twentieth century Islam in India (movements of a kind which Aziz Ahmad saw bringing eventual victory to the high Islamic tradition). but discounts their importance because syncretic
'Here Ahmad quotes (Geertz 1965: 96-97). Earlier he refers to Aziz Ahmad (1969: 51); he also places Faruqi (1978/1979) in the same category of thinking.

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Islam and Muslim society in South Asia I 187

and folk beliefs are still widely found in Indian Islamic practice. He cannot find Clifford Geertz's pattern Islamisation in India because he finds the orthodox and orthoprax living harmoniously side by side with the heterodox and heteroprax. Ahmad can discover no dynamic situation in which a high Islamic tradition is steadily eating into local customcentred traditions. Nor, for that matter, does he discover one in which custom-centred traditions are edging into the territory of a high Islamic tradition. He would rather talk of co-existence. High Islamic and customcentred traditions peacefully 'co-exist as complementary and integral parts of a single common religious system'. They do so, and have done so, because of 'the constraints of Islam's own struggle for survival in an alien environment'. Muslims came to India bearing a distinct religious tradition characterised by a vigorous iconoclastic zeal; 'they would probably liked to have conquered the indigenous religious traditions wholesale'. But, he declares, 'this coutd not be possible to achieve because the indigenous mores and traditions were already an integral part of the life of the people and their total displacement could be achieved only at the cost of Islam's own rejection' (Ahmad 198lb: 15). The suggestion seems to be that the co-existence of high Islamic and custom-centred religious traditions developed in the past, is established in the present, and is the distinctive, unique. pattern of Indian Islam which will probably persist into the future. Those who know their map of intellectual India will probably have a shrewd idea of where Ahmad might be located. His anthropology of Muslim India seems to have much in common with scholarship long associated with the Jamia Millia lslamia. He offers a picture of IndoMuslim society which seems similar to that of Indo-Muslim history painted by Muhammad Mujeeb, Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi. and now by Mushirul Hasan. 2 It emphasises that Indian Muslims have their roots deep in Indian society, that they are natural inhabitants of an Indian world. It implies that there is no reason why they should not be good and loyal citizens of the Republic of India. Just as there is a sense in which all history is contemporary history, so there is also one in which all sociology is contemporary sociology. This is not to suggest that Ahmad, or any of these scholars, have a political purpose but merely that they have a distinctive angle of vision. Ahmad's perspective, moreover, is important, because it is crucial that Islam should be understood in its Indian, indeed, in its Hindu context. It is a context too long neglected. Further, he has powerfully stated his perspective by drawing together the work of many who share in it. Nevertheless, the investigations conducted so far do not seem to have
l"fhis position is reflec:ted jpartic:ularly in some of the specific statements and the under lying concerns of Mujeeb (1967), Faruqi (1963) and HIII8D (1979a, 1979b).

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188 / FRANCIS ROBINSON explored the subject to the full. They appear limited in understanding, place and time; these limitations raise doubts about Ahmad's conclusions regarding the nature of Indian Islam. I shall examine the nature of these limitations, and put forward alternative conclusions which emerge from investigations conducted along a broader front. One limitation concerns the style of investigation that Ahmad and his followers have adopted. Much of their purpose is devoted to showing how Muslims actually behave, and how this behaviour is at variance with preferred Islamic practice, indeed is similar to much Hindu practice. In one sense, this emphasis on behaviour is correct because none of the revealed religions place as much emphasis on right conduct (as opposed to right thinking) as Islam. But, if the investigator goes no further than behaviour, understanding of the extent to which genuine shifts in religious orientation may have taken place must be limited. Men often maintain old customs but, as time passes, attach different meanings to them. Some of the problems of perception of the mere observer of religious practice are illuminated by a passage adapted from one of Basil Davidson's many books on Africa. He makes an African describe what he heard and saw on a visit to Coventry cathedral. The African reports that: The English claim to have some notion of a high God, but in fact this God is thought of as a man. They claim not to worship images but with my own eyes I saw many kneel before a huge image which filled the east end of the cathedral. They claim only to worship one God, but I counted at least three not to mention many lesser Gods whom they call saints. They claim not to be cannibals, and that their communion rite, in which we have long suspected cannibalism, is and always was symbolic, and that what they eat is only bread and wine. I observed the rite myself and at least on this occasion they were telling the truth (Davidson 1969: 168--69). Anthropologists who give little weight to the written word, one senses, are likely to suffer some of the same problems as Davidson's apocryphal African. Ahmad and some of his fellow scholars make much of Muslim attendance at saints' shrines. Although the possibility of injecting old forms with new content is acknowledged (Ahmad 198lb: 16; Fruzzetti 1981), it is always referred to as 'saint worship' and regarded, despite attendance at shrines in every other Muslim society, as an essentially Hindu institution absorbed within Indian Islam. Not once do they refer to the important distinction between the worship of a saint and the worship of God in a saint's presence which is to be found in the writings of the Indian ulama and sufis. Many who attend saints' shrines are, of course, either worshipping the saint or begging him to intercede for them with God. But there are others who do none of these: they are praying to God

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Islam and Muslim society in South Asia I 189

in the presence of the saint. The late eighteenth century holy man of Firangi Mahal, Anwar al-Haq, always used to empahsise the importance of prayer in the family graveyard; prayer in the company of those who were already close to God was much more likely to be efficacious (Wali Anah n.d.: 43-44). There is, moreover, considerable literature devoted to conduct at saints' tombs, particular forms of behaviour indicating the proper difference in attitude towards the saints and towards Goc. It is not good enough to bundle all attendance at saints' tombs into the category of 'saint worship'. Even a cursory acquaintance with the fatawa and malfuzat literature indicates that very few Muslims see anything wrong in such activity. What is crucial is the intention with which it is pursued and the manner in which it is done. 3 Study with the help of interviews would help reveal the intentions of those attending shrines; study with the help of texts would illuminate the significance of different forms of behaviour at shrines. What often might seem to be saint worship would reveal a range of Islamic understandings, a range of positions on the gradient of Islamisation. While the thoughts of some still sought the benefit of old superstitions, those of others were coming to be riveted on God. A second limitation flows from Ahmad's concentration on Indian Muslims alone, which I suspect may have eased his progress towards hinting that Indian Islam has something of a unique quality. in which orthodox, orthoprax Islam co-exists with heterodox, heteroprax Islam as complementary and integral parts of a single common religious system. Of course, Islam in India is unique in one sense; it is only here that we might find a sufi shrine ordering its festivals according to the Hindu calendar, as at the shrine of Hajji Waris Ali Shah of Deva, it is only here that a Hindu festival might be included with Islamic festivals in the celebrations of the year, as atNizam al-Din Awliya of Delhi; or, again, that we might find many features common to Hindu and Christian festivals. as Susan Bayly has found in the celebrations of the Urs of Shah Hamid of Nagore (Bayly, forthcoming). But all Islamic societies contain a mixture of local pre-Islamic practice and high Islamic culture. In Java Muslims are known to pray to the Goddess of the Southern Ocean as well as to Muslim saints and to God himself (Ricklefs 1979). In Ottoman Turkey the Bektashi sufi order, which was powerful in the Balkans and Anatolia and closely associated with the famed Janissary corps of once Christian slave soldiers, recognised an Islamic Trinity of Allah, Muhammad and Ali, and included a version of the Christian communion service in their rites (Birge 1937: 210-18). Further, in nineteenth century southern Arabia the Swiss Arabist and traveUer, Johann Burkhardt, noted that the Bedouin still observed the pre-Islamic practice of sexual hospitality (Burckhardt 1829: 453).
3 For a {alllwa on this subject delivered by a mufti of a reformist school of thought, see Lajpuri (n.d.: 258-60). On the attitude of the ulama of Firangi Mahal towards behaviour at saints' ibrines see Robinson (forthcoming).

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190 / FRANCIS ROBINSON

Even in long great Islamic centres many dubious customs and beliefs could be found flourishing within earshot and eyeshot of paragons of Islamic right conduct. Consider the picture Snouck Hurgronje paints {)f late nineteenth century Mecca, the recorded behaviour of its women, the many visits to saints' tombs; the inhabitants of that holy city had every right to fear Wahhabi rule (Hurgronje 1931: 39-93). Consider, too, the picture painted by Edward Lane of mid-nineteenth century Cairo; here within a muezzin's crv of ai-Azhar he finds every kind of superstition and belief in magic flourishing with vigour (Lane 1871: 281-347). Snapshots of these Muslim worlds taken by investigators at various times in the past two centuries reveal pictures not dissimilar in form from those recently taken by Ahmad and his associates of Muslim communities in India. Far from being unique, the shape of Indian Islam, the relationship between law and a~tual practice, seems to have much in common with Islamic societies elsewhere. Mention of the snapshot technique, or what is sometimes called the synchronic view, introduces a crucial third limitation to Ahmad's work which is the little weight he gives to moving film-the historical dimension-a dimension to which scholars as varied as Aziz Ahmad and Clifford Geertz attribute great importance. In the long-run we can only understand the relationship between Islam and a particular society by investigating what is happening to that relationship through time. To do this, it is worth digressing to understand how Islamic history moves. Islam offers a pattern of perfection for man to follow. It is contained in the Quran, the word of God spoken to man through the Prophet Muhammad. It is also contained in the traditions which relate what the Prophet, who is believed to have been divinely inspired, said and did. It is summed up in the law, in which the divine guidance for man is gathered together in a comprehensive system of rules designed to direct all human activity. Although the law came to be formed in the two hundred years following the Prophet's death, and drew on the customary practice of the time, most Muslims have believed that it was fashioned quite independently of historical or social influences. It is known as the Sharia, a word derived from Arabic meaning 'the straight way leading to the water'. We should not be deceived into thinking that there are strongly conflicting patterns of perfection by the fact that there are four mazhab or ways of Sunni law. There are only minor differences between them and, from the eighteenth century at least, many Muslim scholars, Hanbalis apart, have had little problem drawing from all four. Moreover, we should not be deceived by the fact that in many societies non-Islamic practices had acquired the force of law in Muslim minds. This is often a matter of imperfect knowledge or temporary expedient, although temporary in this sense may well be several hundred years. Neverthless, such is the desire to follow the true path, a desire noted by many anthropologists, that, as knowledge of

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Islam and Muslim society in South Asia I 191

the law has grown more widespread, its provisions have tended to oust false practice. Ideally, then, the law stands above society as a pattern of perfection, a standard which all should strive to reach. The more completely a man follows the law in his life, the greater his chance of salvation at the Day of Judgement. The more completely the law is realised in society, the greater the chance that society will be healthy, powerful and just. There is continual tension in Islamic history between the need to strive to realise the pattern of perfection and the necessities of ordinary human life. The pattern of perfection has been preserved down the ages, and exemplified and administered to Muslim peoples by learned and holy men. The learned men are, of course, the ulama, those with ilm (knowledge), men learned in the Quran, the traditions and the law, and skilled in ways to make these precious gifts to man socially useful. The holy men are the sufis, or Muslim mystics, men expert in techniques of spiritual development, who teach Muslims how to make God's revelation live in their hearts. I will treat ulama and sufis as different human beings, although often the two functions they perform are united in one man, being no more than the two sides of a fully rounded Islamic personality. But, whether one or two, both are concerned to guard and to broadcast Islamic knowledge in their time, and to raise fresh guardians and transmitters of the central messages of Islamic culture. When a teacher finished teaching a particular book, and was satisfied with his pupil's progress, he gave him an ejaza or licence to teach, and on that licence were recorded all the previous teachers of the book back to its author many hundreds of years before. The pupil could see how he had become the most recent bearer of Islamic knowledge transmitted down the ages. Similarly, when a sufi master, or shaikh, decided that a follower was suited to be a disciple, he gave him a shijra or mystical genealogy which stated the stages by which mystic knowledge had passed down from the Prophet to the founding saint of the order, and from the founding saint to his shaikh, and thence to him. The gratitude, love, respect, veneration of pupil for teacher, and disciple for master was boundless; they knew the central importance in Islamic life of the responsibilities which had been bestowed upon them. Their connections, criss-crossing regions and continents, form throughout most of Islamic history the essential moulding framework of the Islamic community. We might regard them as the scaffolding of the Islamic community; this is, for instance, how Peter Holt has described them in the Sudan (Holt 1967: 5). However, I prefer to think of them as the network of arteries and veins along which the life-giving blood of knowledge has flowed through time, and along which it is pumped to the corners of the Islamic world. The central themes of Islamic history focus on the activities of learned and holy men, or their interactions with each other and with the world in which they move.

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192 / FRANCIS ROBINSON These themes are-their attempts to bring Islamic knowledge to pagan and lslamising societies; their relationships with the state, which are often difficult because ideally the state exists only to put the law as they interpret it into practice; and their connections with each other, in particular the flow of ideas and of knowledge along the connections of pupils and teachers, and of disciples and masters, through time and throughout the Islamic world. The more widely Islamic knowledge was known and acted upon, the more widely Islamic society would be realised on earth. The extent to which the pattern of perfection is realised in Muslim societies is always changing. There will be learned and holy men eager to raise Muslims to a higher Islamic standard; there will be Muslims who will know that, whether they like it or not, this is what they ought to be striving to achieve. But the fate of such a process does not, of course, depend merely on the leadership of learned and holy men or the deepening religious vision of those claiming to be Muslim. It interacts with the wider context-social, economic and political-and it is factors such as these which need to be considered to understand how Islamic knowledge might come to be spread more widely and applied more vigorously. They also suggest how its forward progress might on occasion be checked, and put into reverse. Consider, for instance, the impact of the social roles which holy men often used to play. They were the pioneers and frontiersmen of the Islamic world, men who from the thirteenth century played the crucial role in drawing new peoples, pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, Shamanists, into an Islamic cultural milieu. According to tradition, nine saints introduced Islam to Java; wandering holy men, we are told, first brought Islam to West Africa. What the holy men did, it appears, was to find points of contact and social roles within the host community. They shared their knowledge of religious experience with men of other spiritual traditions. They helped propitiate the supernatural forces which hemmed in and always seemed to threaten the lives of common folk. They interpreted dreams, brought rain, healed the sick and made the barren fertile. They mediated between rulers and ruled, natives and newcomers, weak and strong. In fact, by accommodating themselves to local needs and customs they gradually built a position from which they might draw people into an Islamic milieu, and slowly educate them in Islamic behaviour. It is a process which Richard Eaton has demonstrated in one of the most original tecent books on South Asia, in which we see sufis at this very task around the shrines of India's Bijapur from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries (Eaton 1978). Consider, too, the significance of increasing contact with cultures which are thought to represent more fully the pattern of perfection, cultures in which Islamic knowledge is more widely spread and manifest.

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Islam and Muslim society in South Asia I 193

Such contact often seems to draw men towards higher Islamic standards, and often, though not always, the stronger and more frequent the contact, the greater the impact on local Islamic practice. One crucial source of contact between the central and the further Islamic lands has been trade. From its inception in Arabia to the growth of European seaborne commerce, it was Islam's great good fortune that its main cultural centres lay on the trade routes of the world. Indian and Arab Muslim traders first brought Islam to the port cities of island Indonesia; it was their continuing activity which sustained its development. So northern Sumatran Atjeh, where Arab Hadramauti traders have settled and where associations with the Gulf, Arabia and Egypt have been most close, has always been the most Islamised of Indonesian lands. We can see a similar process in sixteenth century West Africa where great entrepots at the end of trade routes, East-West across the savannah and North-South across the desert (Ngazargamu, Kano, Jenne, Walata and Timbuctoo), were also leading centres of Islamic learning. To this day the gaunt, sticklebacked mosques of Timbuctoo remain eloquent reminders of a time, four hundred years ago, when it was renowned for its libraries and madrassas, and its scholarship was known and respected from Egypt to the Maghrib. A second source of contact can be found in the pilgrimage to Mecca, a subject which has only just begun to be studied seriously. Neverthless, we know enough already to have some idea of its Islamising effect. For instance, in the case of nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia, the tremendous increase in the performance of the Meccan pilgrimage had a great impact on spreading Islamic knowledge in the area and on establishing new standards of Islamic practice (Roff 1970: 172-73; Benda 1970: 182-83). Then, the idea should be taken further to consider the new forms of contact and communication which have become available through technological advance and the spread of education. There is the great, but as yet unmeasured, influence of printing in the Islamic world, introduced during the nineteenth century, which, combined with the vigorous publishing activity of the ulama and the spread of popular literacy, has meant that for the first time millions of Muslims have been able to discover for themselves what the pattern of perfect Muslim life should be. The power of the state has had its part to play, even though Muslim rulers have often found raison d'etat running counter to the demands of revelation. If learned and holy men have been supported in their work, Islamic knowledge has had a chance to spread more widely in society. If the state has patronised scholarship and teaching, Islamic knowledge may have grown, the number of people transmitting it, perhaps, increased. If the state has enforced the the holy law, there have been inducements to proper Islamic behaviour, in public acts at least. From the late sixteenth century, Bornu came to be the most Islamised society south of the

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194 / FRANCIS ROBINSON Sahara, because its rulers gave the holy law uncompromising support: 'evil went and hid herself,' declared a local chronicler, 'and the path of righteousness was plainly established without let or hindrance' (Adeleye 1971: 500). Where some form of the holy law has come to be applied by the modem state, with all its great coercive force and power of social penetration, we may be sure that large groups of Muslims have probably come closer to the pattern of perfection than ever before. In Indonesia, in spite of the determination of the national leadership to stand against an Islamisation of the state, the institution of a Ministry of Religion in the 1940s has led to the Islamic provisions concerning marriage, divorce and inheritance being more widely enforced than ever before (Lev 1972). In Iran and Pakistan, despite the distaste which some Iranians and Pakistanis may have for their governments' recent and powerful support for forms of the holy law, the result has already been a shift towards Islamic as opposed to western or other forms of behaviour. Yet if the power of the state has played its part in spreading Islamic knowledge, so paradoxically has its decline; indeed, the Islamic response which it evoked has provided one of the strongest boosts to the process of Islamisation in the past two centuries. In the eighteenth century, Muslim power was waning: the Safavid empire was in shreds, the Mughal empire restricted to Delhi, the Ottoman empire in sickly decline, the sultanates of Java and Sumatra were pale shadows of their former selves, the great Islamic cities of West Africa's upper Niger were under heathen rule. Learned and holy men in their different societies, but also increasingly in contact with and influencing each other, responded by striving as never before to promote a purer vision of Islamic life and society. If Muslim power was weakening, if the fabric of Islamic society was breaking down, the feeling seemed to go it was because Muslims had deserted the straight path towards perfection. By and large they went back to the first principles, the Quran and the traditions, and rejected much of the scholastic superstructure built up as Islam had encountered other cultures through the centuries. Whether it was the movement of Muhammad Abd alWahhab in Arabia or that of Imam Shamil in the Caucasus, that of Usuman dan Fodio in North Nigeria or Dipanegoro in Central Java, men with economic, social and political grievances were swept into campaigns to create a new Islamic order in which they hoped, often after a millenarian fashion, that a just order would rule the land in which they lived. Many such movements were violent jihads (holy wars): some were peaceful. They all had the effect of spreading Islamic knowledge and bringing about a wider observance of Islamic law. The results of many have been felt right down to the present (Robinson 1982: 11~29). However, great historical processes should not lead us to ignore the special chemistry of personal contact, or the influence of learned and holy men whose lives were thought to demonstrate command of outward

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Islam and Muslim society in South Asia I 195

and inner Islamic knowledge, whose community thought them to be models of true Islamic life. Thus one mid-nineteenth century biography of an Indian learned man declares that: Muhammad Yaqub was not only learned in the revealed and rational sciences, but he was a sojourner on the mystic path .... He was not only a doctor for spiritual ills, but for bodily ills as well. All in his family, young and old, considered him their elder. Indeed, not only his family. but the entire city accepted the influence of his dignity and majesty .... He was a man of great perfections and a recipient of revelations. He had hundreds of disciples and pupils (Metcalf 1982: 138). Indeed, the instant in which a man might suddenly acquire from another a fuller understanding of what an Islamic life might be is often recorded in the malfuzat literature. So Abd ai-Razzaq of Firangi Mahal was afraid to pray behind his uncle Abd al-Wali, fearing his mystical tendencies. However. one day he was late for prayers and found that he had to pray behind his uncle if he was not to miss prayers altogether. He did so and 'enjoyed these prayers more than ever before'; he now began to add spiritual understanding to his command of formal religious knowledge (Qidwai n.d.: 8). We should never forget the power of personal example and personal contact in the many small communities in which most Muslims lived. All these processes, and more, have helped in the diffusion and application of Islamic knowledge. It is, as Geertz reminded us in the passage quoted earlier. a painfully slow process. Small changes in the culture of island Java between 1500 and 1800, for instance, mark its slow shift in orientation from a Hindu-Buddhist towards a Muslim world. Men stopped cremating their dead. women danced with more modesty, batik patterns became more formal. the devil-shaped kris handle became stylised. and an Islamic story was included amongst the cycles of the Wayang theatre (Robinson'l982: 92-93). Important new work by Richard Eaton, using the genealogies of the Sial tribe (which has been associated with the great Punjab shrine of Baba Farid at Pak Pattan over six centuries). suggests a similarly slow rate of change. He follows the technique pioneered by Richard Bulliet in Iran of noting the shift towards the use of Muslim names as an indicator of lslamisation (Bulliet 1979). Between 1200 to 1400 he found no Muslim names; they were all Punjabi secular names. From 1415 to 1580 the proportion of Muslim names moved from 10 per cent to 30 per cent, from 1580 to 1782 from 30 per cent to 60 per cent. and from 1782 to 1862 it moved from 60 per cent to 100 per cent. At least six centuries of Islamic contact was required for all the members of the tribe to cross that important threshold and give a

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196 / fRANCIS ROBINSON Muslim name to their children (Eaton, forthcoming). But if this process is slow, we should also recognise that the combination of many such processes, wherever Islam has gained a footing, from the seventh century to the present, has brought, as Marshal Hodgson declares, perceptible movement towards similar beliefs, similar forms of behaviour and similar religious practice (Hodgson 1974, 2:329--68). This said, we should note that the progress of Islam has never been triumphant: the drives behind Islamisation have faltered and been thrust back. Take, as a simple example, the impact of that remarkable medieval traveller, Ibn Battuta, on the Maldives. The arrival of this paragon of high Islamic culture had an immediate Islamising effect. He was made a judge and began to impose the holy law, forcing women to cover their breasts and beating men who were late for prayers. Soon the people grew restless and the Wazir asked him to leave (Ibn Hattuta 1859). Following this, we can be sure the islanders quickly fell back into their old ways. Consider southern Java in the eighteenth century, after Mataram was cut off from the more highly Islamised northern coast, as Merle Ricklefs observes, Muslims began to slip back into their old Hindu-Buddhist ways (Ricklefs 1974). Consider, too, the impact of modernisation after a western fashion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although, on the one hand, few processes can have done more to spread Islamie-knowledge widely in Islamic societies, on the other hand, it has also nourished powerful rival cultures and raised rival systems of knowledge. Men have gained power in Muslim societies who are Muslim only by culture and who have striven to impart the knowledge and the outlook of the West wholesale: the number of learned and holy men has declined, their authority has waned. Islamic history, therefore, offers abundant evidence that there is a dynamic relationship between Muslim societies and the pattern of perfection transmitted and exemplified by learned and holy men. More often 'than not, over the past fourteen centuries, Muslim societies have moved towards a greater realisation of that pattern of perfection; on occasion, when they have been cut off from sources of otJ.lturalleadership, or when have been faced with powerful rival cultures, they have slipped away from it. The crucial point is that some form of traffic is always taking place between visions ofthe ideal Muslim life and the lives which Muslims lead. Indian Islam is no exception to this rule. Consider what has taken place in the past two hundred and fifty years. This may not appear to be a period of great vigour in Islamic life. There is the decline of Mughal pow~r, the rise of the Marattas, the British and the Indian nationalist-a world where Muslim culture and power went hand in hand, comes to be dominated by a culture in part western, in part secular, and in part Hindu. But, in fact, this has been a period of extraordinary, probably unprecedented, vitality in Indian Islam. Albert Hourani, whose perspective is from the central

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Islamic lands and whose concern is with ideas rather than with power, has no doubt about this vitality. He is said to rate India as the leading force in the Islamic world at the time (Metcalf 1982: 9). He has good reason to do so-it was from India that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries new drive had been put into the Naqshbandiyya, the sufi order most prominently involved in Muslim revivalism throughout Asia; India supplied leading teachers to the great cosmopolitan centres of eighteenth century Islamic scholarship at Mecca and Medina; India's contributions to Islamic scholarship were causing comment in Cairo's al-Azhar; and in the nineteenth century Indian textbooks were comiing to be used in many parts of the Islamic world. 4 This period of extraordinary vitality coincides with the time when learned and holy men were stronger and more prominent than ever before in Indian history. Cantwell Smith has reminded us that generally, in Islamic history, the ulama do not emerge until much later than is usually supposed, and that in India they were not consolidated as a group until almost the modern period (Smith 1963: 42). It was at this time, when Islam had lost its hold on power in India, that paradoxically the ulama were best placed to lead their fellow Muslims and to spread knowledge of the faith. Their efforts to respond to Muslim political weakness, and the dangers which it threatened, are the prime source of the vitality of Indian Islam. They explain, for instance, both the new vigour in branches of the Naqshbandi and Chishti orders, and the great attempts of Shah Wali Allah to create the intellectual and doctrinal bases of unity for Indian Muslims. But, most important from our point of view, they explain how learned and holy men strove as never before to bring the pattern of a perfect Muslim life to each individual Muslim. how in fact there came to be a revolution in the availability of Islamic knowledge. One way in which learned and holy men sought to spread Islamic knowledge more widely was through aggressive movements of revival and reform. These were similar to the movements taking place throughout the Islamic world in the nineteenth century; indeed, they had some connections with them. There was the Mujahidin movement of Saiyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli. Saiyid Ahmad aimed to rid Islam of Hindu practices, to end belief in the intercessionary power of saints and to establish an ideal Muslim community where Muslims could live according to the holy l? w. The movement became a jihad and Ahmad himself was killed in 1831, although his followers continued to create a stir in many parts of India till the end of the nineteenth century. There was also the Faraizi movement of Hajji Shariat Allah in Bengal; its aims were similar
It is interesting to note how at the same time the Indian branch of another community spread throughout the world, the Armenians had also assened a temporary intellec:tual leadership (Walker 1980: 50-51).

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198 / FRANCIS ROBINSON to those of the Mujahidin; it also became a violent movement whose organisation existed at least until the end of the nineteenth century. But these Indian militant movements had little success as compared with those of Usuman dan Fodio in West Africa, Muhammad Ahmad alMahdi in the Sudan, or even Sultan Sulaiman in south-western China. The main way in which learned and holy men spread Islamic knowledge more widely was by developing a whole new range of new methods of transmission and broadcasting; in doing so they were quick to exploit new forms of organisation and new technological developments. They founded schools. Up to this time, most had taught informally in their homes Now schools, maktabs and madrassas began to be established, institutions which were greater than individuals. Most nineteenth century movements had their schools, but by far the most important were those of Deoband, whose movement has recently been so well described by Barbara Metcalf. The first school was founded in 1867; by the 1880s there were twelve schools, by 1900 forty odd, and by the centenary in 1967, there were apparently 8,934 (Metcalf 1982: 136). All taught a reformed Islam. All, as far as we know, were supported by public subscription, and owed nothing to the state. The Deobandi ulama, moreover, also established an office for issuingfatawa, or decisions on debateable points of Islamic law. Over the years it has published its decisions. Indeed, the custom of publishing their collected fatawa has grown up amongst the most leading ulama, offering guidance as never before to their less expert colleagues and to the community at large.:; Another new method of communication stemmed primarily from sufi practice. In India, as in many parts of the Islamic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was growing emphasis on the person of the Prophet as the exemplar of perfect human life, and the presentation of the sufi shaikh or pir as the model of the Prophet in the current generation. So one leading pir of the early twentieth century declared: The pir is the gateway to absorption in the Holy Prophet. Through him we reach the congregation of the Prophet, and to reach this congregation is to become close to God .... Before the arrival of the Prophet, these spiritual physicians were Prophets themselves, and since the arrival of the Prophet they succeed him, wearing his cloak (Abd al-Bari 1926: 15; Schimmel1975: 98-116, 236-39). Side by side with this new emphasis there developed a great new interest in mawlid ceremonies, that is ceremonies of each of the first twelve days
Amongst the more influential collections were the Fatawa-i Azizi of Shah Abd al-Aziz of Delhi, the Fatawa-i Rashidiyya of Mawlana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi of Deoband, and the Majmua-i Fatawa of Mawlana Abd al-Hayy of Firangi Mahal.

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of Rabi al-Awwal, and culminating with the Prophet's birthday, in which the lives of the Prophets would be told. Firangi Mahalis introduced this practice in Lucknow, Allahabad and Madras: it was a new way of communicating Islamic knowledge to the masses. The process of guidance, moreover, was supplemented by the publication of lives of the Prophet, biographies of learned and holy men, and tazkiras, collections of such biographies. H Yet another new method was to make Islamic knowledge immediately comprehensible and readily available. As was happening elsewhere in the Islamic world at the time. learned and holy men were translating Islamic knowledge into languages everyone could understand. In India the Our an was translated into Persian in the early eighteenth century, into Urdu in the early nineteenth century, and into Bengali in the late nineteenth century. By the 1870s several competing Urdu translations of the Quran were circulating. The major works of the reformist Mujahidin were written in Urdu, so were major guides to Islamic behaviour. Then, this new readily comprehensible presentation of Islamic knowledge was harnessed to the lithographic printing press, which at last made it possible to mass-produce works in Islamic scripts in the way that it had been possible to reproduce European Christian works since the fifteenth century. Imagine the limitations on communication when restricted to word of mouth, copying by hand, and the labour of an expert few. The ulama leapt at the opportunities provided by the lithographic press; some made it the basis of big business. Everything was published large-scale, from Islamic classics to the simplest textbooks, from significant achievements of seventeenth and eighteenth century Indian scholarship to the biographies and collections of fatawa through which the ulama hoped to provide new guidance for the community. In 1871 the government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh noted that 23,000 Qurans had been published in the previous year; in 1877 that 70 per cent of all religious titles were Muslim, although Muslims were only 13 per cent of the population (Metcalf 1982: 202-3). 'Now God has been gracious in providing books,' rejoiced Mawlana Nazir Husain in 1895. 'Books which one could not see in dreams or conceive of in imagination are now available for cowries' (ibid.: 205). No development made a greater contribution to the availability of Islamic knowledge. Evidently, something remarkable was taking place in nineteenth century Muslim India. Learned and holy men were developing many new ways of making contact with the Muslim masses; Indian Muslims were
6 For instance, much of the malfuzat literature generated by the saints of Firangi Mahal and of Bansa was published for the first time in the early twentieth century. In Sumatra, moreover, Siegel notes how the Atjehnese journal Penjoeloeh began to feature biographies of the ulama in the 1940s at a time when they were particularly concerned to give their community Islamic leadership (Siegel1969: 12S-29).

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able, as never before, to know the pattern of perfect Muslim life. Historical scholarship has only just begun to probe beneath the surface of political events to recognise this phenomenon: its overall significance has yet to be assessed. There is, however, enough evidence to suggest that it was accompained by a continuing process of Islamisation. There are examples of the process of Islamisation actually taking place. There is the impact of the 'Faith Movement' of Muhammad Ilyas, which drew its inspiration from the major streams of nineteenth century revival and reform on the Mewatis. and others, over the past fifty years. The Mewatis are described as building mosques, opening Arabic schools. growing beards, adopting Muslim clothes. and slowly abandoning unlawful customs (Anwarul Haq 1972). There is the detailed work in which Rafiuddin Ahmed decribes the lslamising of a Bengali world in the late nineteenth century, a process which built on the earlier activities of the Faraizis and the Mujahidin. He notes how Bengali Muslims no longer invoked God as 'Sri Sri Iswar' or as 'Sri Sri Karim' but as 'Allaho Akbar'; how they dropped Hindu surnames (Chand, Pal, Dutt) and adopted Muslim ones (Siddiqi, Yusufzai, Qureshi); how they stopped giving their newspapers Bengali names and began to give them all Arabic or Persian ones; how their desire to be identified as Bengalis lessened. 'Sir,' he quotes a Bengali villager addressing a government official some seventy years ago, 'only Muslims live in this village. There are no Bengalis here' (Ahmad 1981: 72-132). Other indicators ought to be taken into account. There is the fact that in the late nineteenth century, India, from time to time, supplied the largest number of pilgrims to Mecca (Metcalf 1982: 359). There is the enormous interest in pan-Islamic affairs, which led to an extraordinary increase in the circulation of Muslim newspapers whenever the wider Islamic world suffered crises, like the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, the Graeco-Turkish war of 1897, the Balkan wars of 1911-13, or the last throes of the Ottoman empire and caliphate from 1918 to 1924. There are the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Muslims who have supported from their own pockets the growth of the Deoband movement from one to over 8,000 schools, and who by their help towards diffusing Islamic knowledge have made a most positive statement in favour of Islamisation. Then, finally, there are the connections which have been made between movements of revival and reform and support for what in many ways must be the crowning achievement of Islamisation, the creation of an Islamic polity. Stephen Dale (1980) has demonstrated how a nineteenth century movement for Islamic reform in Malabar grew into a warlike attempt to establish an Islamic state in the 1920s, and into a political demand for the foundation of a Mappilastan from the 1930s. Likewise, David Gilmartin ( 1979) has shown how the eighteenth century Chishti revival in the Punjab bred a tradition of sufi leadership which was to be in the forefront in fighting for an Islamic state of Pakistan in the

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1940s. All this raises the general problem of the relationship between Islamisation and Muslim separatist politics. Here, it is enough to state that. although research has yet to indicate what weight it should be given, a connection undoubtedly exists. The evidence set out here raises doubts about Imtiaz Ahmad's conclusion that the high Islamic and the custom-centred traditions have come to be integrated 'to a point that they should come to co-exist as complementary and integral parts of a common religious system'. Rather, it would appear to support the positions of Aziz Ahmad or more especially of Clifford Geertz. In Islamic history, in general, there has been a movement towards. or occasionally away from. the pattern of perfection. In South Asia, in particular. over the past two hundred years, learned and holy men have shown unusual activity and imagination in spreading knowledge of that pattern more widely. The evidence suggests, moreover, that many Muslims have made steps towards realising that pattern more fully. It may be that over the past thirty-six years the process has continued more obviously in Pakistan and Bangladesh. It may be that in India the process has slackened, even gone into reverse. What there cannot be, as Ahmad asserts, is a state of equilibrium. He is able to make his assertion, one sense, because the case studies he has brought together embrace too short a period of time, because, perhaps. the sociological understanding of religion, and religious change, is not as 'comprehensive' as he would like to think. The historian's extended view suggests that there is continual. if sometimes slow and barely perceptible, movement between visions of perfect Muslim life and those which ordinary Muslims lead.

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