Narrating Decline: Critiquing “Custom” at Aligarh and Deoband

In the colonial era, narratives of mass ‘decline’ became ubiquitous in Indian Muslim poetry, historiography, and literature. In addition to the well-known anxieties of post-Mughal political decline, a dominant trope throughout these narratives maintained that India’s Muslims had become mired in customary practices, ranging from ‘excessive’ reverence for one’s ancestors to the ‘worship’ of Sufi pirs. A shared concern for reforming ‘customs’ informed arguably the two most important Muslim reform movements of colonial India –Aligarh and Deoband – which are typically presented as diametrically opposed, the one self-consciously ‘modernist’ and other ostensibly ‘traditionalist’. This paper explores how the two respective icons of the Aligarh and Deoband movements, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), were united in their view of popular customs as a 'problem', and attempts to discern the social imaginaries that inform their reformist projects. I draw on Khan’s influential journal Tahzib-i Akhlaqand other works, and Thanvi’s Urdu and Arabic writings on popular reform. At first glance, the differences between these two are striking: Khan’s understanding of ‘customs’ was informed by self-consciously modernist narratives of moral ‘progress’ (taraqqi)  that the Deobandis rejected in their critiques of Khan. Moreover, whereas Thanvi saw the preservation of legal allegiance (taqlid) to the Hanafi school of Islamic law as an essential feature of public reform, Khan believed taqlid itself was among those reactionary customs that had to be jettisoned for Muslims to progress socially and morally. However, I will argue that both of these thinkers predicated their ideas of public reform on distinctly 'modernist' notions of freedom and moral agency; that is, they both believed that public reform hinged on freeing individual Muslims from custom's entanglements.