Experiencing Time in the Deoband Movement

Bashir has critiqued the tendency for Western historians to view all of Islamic history within one, singular, chronological frame beginning with the life of Muhammad, noting several Persian ‘world histories’ that neither begin with Muhammad nor narrate in a linear vein. My paper will explore the phenomenon of Muslims in modern South Asia who, I argue, do understand Islamic history as a linear progression of time from the life of Muhammad to the present, but who do not do so with reference to Western historiographic models. Proponents of the Deobandi reform movement, the subject of my recent book, do in fact regard the era of the Pious Predecessors (al-salaf al-salih) as the “golden age” of Islam (without using that term, to be sure). And yet, Deobandis’ historical imaginary mines early Islam for morally edifying narratives about the Companions, and conceptualizes time through the transmission of what I call “prophetic affect,” the power of the Prophet Muhammad’s presence that is transmitted from him to his Companions, and from the Companions’ followers to others, until the present day, by way of Sufi lineages. That is, Deobandis see the march of history not in terms of key dates, events, or world-historical personages, but in terms of the affective attachments that a Sufi forms around his or her master, which are, in turn, a distant reflection of the original affect that inhered in the Prophet's very body. In other words, early Islam is indeed a “golden age,” but not for the reasons that Western Orientalists deem it to be so. I will make this argument with particular reference to two key Deobandi biographies, that of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (Tazkirat al-Rashid) and that of Ashraf 'Ali Thanvi (Ashraf al-Sawawih).