Barbara D. Metcalf

Making Muslim space in North America and Europe

CONTRIBUTORS: Rachel Bloul Robert Dannin Moustapha Diop John Eade Victoria Ebin Gulzar Haider Ruth Mandel Aminah Beverly McCloud Barbara Daly Metcalf Laurence Michalak Regula Qureshi Vernon James Schubel Susan Slyomovics Pnina Werbner

Travelers' Tales in the Tablighi Jamaat

The extensive Islamic missionary movement of Tablighi Jamaat, which originated in colonial India but is now worldwide, encourages participants to go out on small group tours to invite others, primarily nominal Muslims, to return to faithful adherence to Islamic teachings, above all the canonical prayer. At the conclusion of a tour, participants should report back, orally or in writing, their experiences to the mosque-based group (local, regional, or national) from which they set out. A sample of these reports, called karguzari, are the basis of this article. The reports reflect two discourses: one of jihad, in the sense of the nonmilitant “greater jihad” focused on self-discipline; and one of Sufism, embedded in the efforts of the charismatic group rather than in institutional tasawwuf.

A Concise History of Modern India: CAMBRIDGE CONCISE HISTORIES

These include the third edition of, british colonial rule and sustained transformed india. His zeal boils over in synopsis. As a major player in india list of modern and more than player! Or as a major player in world metcalf is an integral to the country. Established seller since it was first under social and political theme of chicago the last decade. A whole city block with questions, of india first published in the best survey. Illustrations preface to the national wealth authors.

Narrating Lives: A Mughal Empress, A French Nabob, A Nationalist Muslim Intellectual

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.

A Concise History of Modern India: Democratic India at the Turn of the Millennium: Prosperity, Poverty, Power

We are a free and sovereign people today and we have rid ourselves of the burden of the past. We look at the world with clear and friendly eyes and at the future with faith and confidence. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, broadcast from New Delhi, 15 August 1947 The hopeful words of any nations founding fathers are likely to be read with some degree of irony decades later. If the words of the founding fathers at times rang hollow, they also, in fact, predicted many successes, not least Indias proud claim to be the worlds largest democracy (Plate 9.1). By the turn of the millennium, more than a dozen general elections and hundreds of state elections had produced a high degree of politicization extending to those long outside the political system. In 1997, at the conclusion of free Indias first half-century, K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005), Dalit by birth, was sworn in as the countrys president, a powerful symbol of the progress and aspirations of ‘untouchables’. The role of president, importantly, had already earlier on three occasions been assumed by a Muslim and, most poignantly, at the time of Indira Gandhis assassination, by a Sikh. The Supreme Courts activism – for example, indicting top government and political leaders for bribery and corruption as well as favouring public-interest litigation – strengthened the effective exercise of civil liberties. Indias press continued to be renowned for its independence and vitality. Economic liberalization had stimulated the growth of a prospering urban middle class and brought about for India a major role in the global software industry. ‘Bollywood’ films and a culture increasingly open to the larger world, together with Indias traditional role as a site of tourism and a producer of the arts, wisdom, and handicrafts, delighted ever-increasing numbers of consumers worldwide. Yet the country continued to be weighed down by seemingly intractable poverty, in the countryside and in urban slums alike. The millennial years were also marked by substantial violence directed against Muslims as well as others, among them Christians, tribals, and Dalits. In 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu militants was followed by an anti-Muslim pogrom that left at least a thousand people dead; an orchestrated campaign of even greater violence followed a decade later in Gujarat.

Religion and Governance in India—A Comment

The papers in this collection were stimulated by debates in Indian public life during the last two decades over the nature of the Indian state and, specifically, the challenges posed to India’s implementation of secularism in the face of aggressive and exclusionary Hindu nationalism. ‘Secularism’ as mandated by the Indian constitution calls for government neutrality in relation to religion and religious community. Debate, both public and academic, has therefore revolved around the two key terms in the title of this collection, ‘religion’ and ‘governance’. The debate offers competing visions of the nature of the state as well as contestation over the place of India’s varied religious traditions and those who follow them.

Revolt, the modern state, and colonized subjects, 1848–1885

The revolt of 1857–8, which swept across much of north India in opposition to British rule, has conventionally been taken as the dividing point that marks the beginning of modern India. Historical periodization is, however, always somewhat arbitrary. With greater distance from the colonial period, when the searing chaos of the uprising was understood either as ‘Mutiny’ to the colonial rulers or as the ‘First War of Independence’ to many nationalists, it is possible to focus on substantial, long-term transformations rather than on a single event. Such an emphasis, moreover, places India in the context of changes taking place in the larger world, not just in terms of events and personalities in India itself. Far from modernity ‘happening’ in Europe and then being transplanted to a country like India, many of these changes took place in relation to each other. Modern technological changes, among them canals, railways, and telegraph, were introduced into India within years of their introduction in Europe. Changes essential to the modern state, including the unification of sovereignty, the surveying and policing of the population, and institutions meant to create an educated citizenry were also, broadly speaking, introduced during the same period in India and in parts of Europe. Indeed, certain modern practices and institutions were either stimulated by the Indian experience or originated in India itself. Municipal cemeteries, as noted above, appeared in India before they did in England; the same is true of English literature as a curricular subject, and of state-sponsored scientific and surveying institutions. The colonial relationship with India was essential, moreover, as Gauri Vishwanathan recently argued, to one of the fundamental characteristics of modern states, namely the practice of state secularism. At the same time, new religious organizations in both India and Britain shared the common pattern of an unprecedented involvement of the laity. In both countries too, the spread of electoral politics was accompanied by debate over the place of religion in public life. Above all, the economic lives of both countries were profoundly, and increasingly, intertwined.

A Concise History of Modern India: The 1940s: triumph and tragedy

On 3 September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared India, alongside Britain itself, at war with Hitlers Germany. Two months later, in protest against this unilateral act, which appeared to Indians as a reassertion of high-handed British imperialism, the Congress ministries in the provinces resigned. In March of 1940, taking advantage of what they saw as a fortuitous ‘deliverance’ from Congress rule, the Muslim League, at its annual meeting in Lahore, enacted the Pakistan Resolution, with its ill-defined demand for independent Muslim states. The stage was set for the crises that were to dominate the decade of the 1940s – the war, the Congresss final movement of non-cooperation, the rise of Muslim nationalism, and then, finally, in 1947 independence, with the devastating partition of the subcontinent into two states. The unilateral declaration of war, a provocative act of the sort that had so often characterized British policy in India, was a tactical blunder. So too, arguably, was the resignation of the Congress ministries, which set in motion a protracted series of negotiations and acts of civil disobedience that were to culminate in the climactic August ‘rising’ of 1942. During the later 1930s Britain and India had been drifting slowly towards an amicable parting of the ways. Britains stake in India had been declining as economic nationalism took hold around the world, while on the political front, after 1937, Congress politicians had demonstrated an ability to govern that augured well for an independent India. The coming of the war, with the resignation of the Congress ministries, changed everything. Now, suddenly, with its back to the wall, fighting first Hitler, and then from December 1941 the Japanese as well, the British were desperate to retain access to the resources, in men and materiel, as well as the secure bases that India supplied. The Indian Army was increased in size tenfold to fight in the Middle East and South-East Asia, as well as to protect the homeland as the Japanese in 1942 advanced on Assam. As the British endeavoured to feed, clothe, and arm this immense force, they consumed their investments in India; by the end of the war, no longer Britains debtor, India had piled up sterling balances in London of over 1,000 million pounds.

A Concise History of Modern India: Sultans, Mughals, and pre-colonial Indian society

Imagine a time traveller standing in Mughal Delhi, amidst the splendor of the emperor Shah Jahans (r. 1627–58) elegant, riverside city, in the year 1707 (plate 1.1). News had come of the death of Shah Jahans long-ruling son, Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) in the distant Deccan, where he had been engaged in arduously extending his vast empire. The traveller, understandably wondering what the death of a mighty monarch would mean, might first have looked back in time a century, say to the death of Shah, Jahans grandfather, Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Had he done so, he would have seen the key institutions in place that had made the Mughals, in the intervening century, the most powerful empire the subcontinent had ever known. It was far greater in population, wealth, and power than the contemporaneous Turko-Mongol empires with which the Mughals shared so much: the Persian Safavids and the Ottoman Turks. The Mughal population in 1700 may have been 100 million, five times that of the Ottomans, almost twenty that of the Safavids. Given the trajectory of continuity and growth that had taken place in the seventeenth century, our time traveller at the turn of the eighteenth century might legitimately have imagined a Mughal future to match the glorious past. But if, Janus-faced, the traveller then looked ahead a century, say to 1803, he would have found not continuity but extraordinary change.

Book Reviews : FRANCIS ROBINSON, The 'Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 267:

This volume will be of interest to anyone concerned with the role of the traditionally educated Islamic leadership, the ’lama, in colonial India. It is comprised of eight articles, of which one, &dquo;Abd al-Bari and the Events of January 1926’, is new to this volume; the others were published between 1984 and 1997. Five of the articles focus on the Lucknow-based Farangi Mahalli family of llama. For these Robinson utilises official sources as well as the rich sources of family memory and written records, including a short-lived journal and Urdu biographies and biographical dictionaries composed in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Three of the articles have a larger focus. One deals with India as part of a larger ’PersoIslamic’ cultural area. Another compares the roles of the lama in Dutch Indonesia and British India. The third identifies the shared scholarly and mystical worlds of the early modern Muslim empires. The studies are informed by the great breadth and learning Robinson has honed over the years, not only through his specialised research on modern Indian history, but also through his production of two excellent encyclopaedic works, the Atlas of the Islamic World since 1500 ( 1980) and the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (1997). The articles on Farangi Mahall deal with the family’s intellectual and spiritual role, the institutions that supported them, and their activities as leading national political figures in the decade after the First World War. Although present in India since the early years of the Delhi Sultanate, Farangi Mahallis emerged as intellectual leaders in the early eighteenth century. Early in the century, they received