Islamic Pasts in Modernist Indian Thought

The late nineteenth century saw the expansion and consolidation of historicism in Europe and – we have often been told – those parts of the world that were forced to reckon with Europe’s dominance. Historicism’s corollary – progress – has been seen as a trope either consciously adopted or one that seeped, fugitively, into the political thought of the colonized, so that the burden to demonstrate neat, linear, unidirectional movement of a people through homogenous time became widespread in this period. Muslim thinkers, reflecting upon the problem of the temporal decline of the last Islamic empires, experienced heightened exposure to historicism by virtue of their embrace of print and foreign travel. Those who did not fit into this narrative were left behind and became anachronisms in the age of converging temporalities.

My paper argues that, despite surface similarities, little convergence took place in reality. Even those we might describe as ‘modernist’ thinkers did not display the historicist disposition that modernity was supposed to bring. This paper focuses on the thought of a series of leading Muslim writers hailing from north India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These figures – among whom the historian and jurist, Sayyid Amir Ali, is a key example – challenged historicism’s conceit by substantially complicating European, Orientalist understandings of what the Islamic experience in world history represented. These writers narrated not simply intelligible pasts commensurable with Europe’s own, but ones that were in fact curious and unfamiliar. This suggested not only that the ‘Islamic past’ was neither singular, fixed, nor linear – since it could be returned to for new lessons that emerged co-constitutively with the experiences and needs of the present – but that history itself was full of parallel pasts, exposing the lie at the heart of European historicism.