Session Abstract

From the era of the Mughal Empire to the high colonial period of the British Raj, political and cultural Islam in the Indian subcontinent underwent a number of significant new trends and transitions. As considerable recent research has shown, South Asia -- which had always been a major hub of the Indian Ocean and global trading systems -- became ever more entangled with the wider world during the Mughal and colonial periods, especially as what has lately been dubbed the ‘age of steam and print’ took hold. This panel attempts to build on these recent insights by bringing together historians and scholars of religion to examine some of the important concepts, thinkers, and institutions that helped shape Muslim attitudes toward the unfolding of modernity in South Asia, as well as the role of South Asian Islam in shaping the contours of global modernity itself. 

We begin by revisiting the legacy of Mughal approaches to pluralism, tolerance, and civility, as embodied in the concept of sulh-i kull. Often translated ‘peace with all,’ the term is widely recognized as a kind of shorthand for the Mughal state ideology of tolerance. But as our first presenter Rajeev Kinra argues, there is actually still a lot we don’t know about the semantic range of the term in Mughal usage. A renewed examination of the theory and practice of concepts like sulh-i kull within the larger context of global early modernity, Kinra suggests, may give us a better understanding not only of Mughal culture and politics, but also the precise nature of the transformations of later centuries, specifically under British colonial rule.

The remaining two papers both address the contours of reform discussed and debated in Muslim intellectual circles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ingram’s paper revisits the seemingly opposing positions of ‘modernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ schools of thought in Indian Islam, epitomized in the writings of Syed Ahmad Khan and Ashraf `Ali Thanvi. As he shows, while these two icons of the ‘modernist’ Aligarh and ‘traditionalist’ Deoband movements were in fierce disagreement in many respects, they were unified in their view that Indian Muslim society was in ‘decline’ and that popular customs and ‘superstitions’ were to blame for this trend. As Ingram argues, moreover, they both predicated their critique of popular religious practices on distinctly modern ideas of freedom and agency.

Purohit’s paper follows a similar exploration of how European ideas shaped the ways in which modernists defined the parameters of Islam in the nineteenth century. Specifically, she argues that Protestant critiques of charismatic and intercessory authority were instrumental to the development of canonical modernist conceptions of religion in South Asia, but also in the Middle East. She reads the writings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiya movement, to show how arguments for Muslim charismatic leadership—neglected in the historiography of modernism and dismissed in the writings of modernists—were formulated in the distinctly colonial cultural milieu.