Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
Movements
.
Lesson: Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh
Sabha Movements
Lesson Developer: Dr. Charu Gupta, Associate Professor
College/ Department: Department of History, University of
Delhi
Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
Movements
Table of Contents
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha Movements
Introduction
Context of reform amongst Muslims
Deoband school
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh movement
Muslim reforms and women’s rights
Singh Sabha movement
Interpreting reforms
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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Introduction
The spirit of reform did not leave other communities untouched. Muslims,
Sikhs and other religious communities too made efforts from the 19th
century to bring about reforms from within. In this section, we will discuss
some such movements.
Context of reform amongst Muslims
The colonial context was significant for the growth of reform movements
amongst the Muslims. British rule brutally removed much of the financial and
institutional support for Islamic society. There was elimination of a Muslim
judiciary, and higher administrative posts came to be reserved for
Europeans. In the wake of such a loss of power, many Muslims of the gentry
class came to bemoan their misfortune. There was a general anxiety about
how a Muslim society might be sustained without political power. Many
Muslim reformers felt that the new social reality could only be interpreted in
the light of Islam. A major concern of theirs was therefore to review the
Islamic knowledge handed down to them from the past, and to see how it
could be used to enable them to operate effectively in the present.
Also, colonial designs and exigencies, including the deployment of new forms
of classification like the census, gave further impetus to the Muslims to
redefine themselves. In response, there emerged broadly two trends
amongst the Muslim intellectuals. They can be divided into two categories revivalist, represented best by the Deoband movement and the reformist,
which was reflected in the Aligarh movement.
In the late 19th century, in north India particularly, there emerged many
Muslim intellectuals like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Maulana Azad, Altaf Hussain
Hali and Shibli Naumani, who came to exercise a great influence over the
Muslim imagination. In addition, institutions like Deoband, Firangi Mahal and
the Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh exercised a powerful
influence over the hearts and minds of Muslims not just in northern India,
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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but all across the Indian sub-continent, and beyond. Indisputably, these
individuals, institutions and trends helped in defining a certain Muslim
identity. At the same time, one cannot conceive of a singular Muslim
identity, as Muslims, like Hindus, were a fractured community. There was no
single entity united by religion called ‘a Muslim’ and markers of identity
within Islam and amongst Muslims were numerous and varied in the 19th
century. Muslim publicists defined themselves and each other as Sunnis,
Shias, Wahabis, Deobandis, Barelvis, Nechris, Ahle-Hadith, Ahle-Qur’an and
Ahmadiyya, and often called all those belonging to a sect other than their
own, as kafirs. Only they themselves were claimed as righteous, true and
the chosen ones. There were thus attempts by both revivalist and reformers
to carve out a more homogenous Muslim identity.
Value addition: Did you know?
Islamic movements and print
Like other reform movements, print was an important weapon of Muslim reform
too. During the 19th century, religious titles formed the largest category of Urdu
books. The town of Deoband was renowned for the number of its bookshops. The
reforming ulama were amongst the very first to use the printing press; rightly,
they saw it as the means to fashion and to consolidate their constituency outside
the bounds of colonial rule. The Qur’an and a large number of other important
Islamic texts were also translated into the regional languages of India. Muslim
publicists used print not only to spread their ideas on religious reform but also to
carry on public debates with Christian missionaries, with members of other Indian
religions and with members of their own faith.
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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Source: Original
One of the earliest manifestations of socio-religious reform movement by the
Muslims was the Wahabi movement. In the eighteenth century itself,
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab founded a puritanical movement aimed at
removing all erroneous innovations within Islam, including the worship of
saints, the use of a rosary, and the veneration of shrines. Though
suppressed by the Ottoman Empire, the Wahabi movement survived and
continued to be influential in the Islamic world (Jones 1989: 8). In India, for
example, various newspapers labelled all kinds of adversaries as Wahabis in
the 1860s and 1870s. The Ahmadiya movement, which took a definite shape
in the 1890 due to the inspiration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian,
opposed jihad, advocated fraternal relations among the people and
championed Western liberal education. We now turn to some of the more
powerful and sustaining Islamic reformist movements in 19th century India.
Deoband school
The emergence of British power threatened the power of the ulama
(teachers and interpreters of Islamic religious law), who had once received
land grants and jobs in government. They now turned to society at large to
sustain them in their role, and came to believe that their class interests
rested with the fortunes of the Islamic community rather than the state. The
majority of the ulama thus searched for a new world of purified Islam,
reflecting the voice of Islamic revivalists. This view was best exemplified by
the Deoband school, which was at the heart of Islamic revivalist movements
in north India.
Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi (1833-77) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (18291925) were the leading lights of the Deoband school. They both came from
the ulama class and the intellectual life of Delhi had a profound impact on
them. The two settled in the Doab in 1867. Their major concern was to
spread knowledge of their reforming message as widely as possible. They
felt the best way to do so was through educational institutions, especially
the madrasas. They thus founded the first Deoband madrasa in 1867 at
Chattah Masjid in the Doab. The Deoband school replaced the casual and
personal teaching style, used for centuries, by a permanent teaching staff.
Further, it shifted the emphasis in its madrasa curriculum from theology and
philosophy, and the triumphs of medieval Persian scholarship, to the Qur’an
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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and hadith and those subjects that made these central messages of Islam
socially useful. In the past, schools had been supported by the institution of
waqf (an endowment of land for charitable purposes). The Deoband
madrasa, by contrast, was supported by public subscriptions and donations
alone, which were usually in the form of annual pledges. This model became
the most accepted and respectable one for the establishment of a school.
This education system spread and by 1880, over a dozen Deoband schools
had been established throughout the Upper Doab and Rohilkhand. The
Deoband seminary was the centre of the system. By 1900, Deobandi
ideology had spread far and wide in the north from Peshawar to Chittagong,
and in the south-east to Madras. From such institutions came the teachers
and scholars who provided the knowledge and the guidance to enable
Muslim society not just to survive but also to entrench itself further.
There was an emerging puritanism among the Deobandis. While accepting
Sufism in part, they attacked many of its customs in practice. Thus they
opposed many of its ceremonies and the authority of the pirs. PilgrFigure 6.s
to tombs of saints, and annual fairs held around them were declared as
debased Islamic practices. By the same token, there were assaults on
indigenous customs that had come to be incorporated into Islamic practice,
for instance, following the Hindu custom of not marrying widows.
Value addition: Interesting details
Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi and Bihishti Zewar
The Deoband school expressed its views on how to be a Muslim. It made it clear that there
was no intercession for man with God. Muslims were personally responsible for the way in
which they put His guidance to them into practice on earth. Thus, the leading Deobandi
reformer, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi, in his guide for women (but also men) in the tradition, Bihishti
Zewar (The Jewels of Paradise), which is said to be the most widely published Muslim
publication on the subcontinent after the Qur’an, painted a horrific picture of the Day of
Judgement and the fate that would befall on those who had not striven hard enough to
follow God’s guidance. To help believers avoid this fate he instructed them in regular selfexamination, morning and evening, to ensure purity of intentions and to avoid wrongdoing.
Thus, those in the Deobandi way were made powerfully conscious that they must act to
sustain Islamic society on earth, if they were to be saved.
Source: Original
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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Figure 6.3.1: Bihishti Zevar
Source: http://www.786books.com/images/desc/bahishti-txt-ashraf-ali.gif
The Deoband school was designed to prepare students for their role as
members of the ulama. It greatly attracted students from the ashraf class,
as they saw it as a way of upward mobility, by asserting a new status for
themselves in the colonial state. There were repeated manifestations around
‘purification’ of ritual practices as part of the movement. The Deobandis
made special appeals on the celebration of various Muslim festivals. They
used print effectively to spread their ideas and also entered into public
debates with other Muslims, Christians and Hindu critics of Islam, to defend
and explain their ideology. With its new style of Islamic education, the
impact of Deoband grew steadily. However the movement, while challenging
existing social order and expressing the desire for upward mobility, also
encouraged religious orthodoxy, articulated in a discourse of improvement.
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh movement
However, the Deoband school represented only one strand of Muslim reform.
There also existed the voices of Islamic modernists, revealed most
powerfully through the Anglicism of the Aligarhists. A section of Muslim
political elites, immediately concerned with answering the challenges of the
West, attempted to reshape Islamic knowledge and institutions in the light of
western models, a process described as Islamic modernism and reformism.
A part of Islamic reform both opened the way to modernity and then worked
with it. It destroyed much of the authority of the past, making possible a
more creative engagement with the present. It also helped set off a
rationalization and reification of Islam, which, amongst other things,
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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prepared Muslims to engage with a broad-based political identity and
conceive of their faith as an entity, even a system. The Aligarh movement
was a powerful example of this.
The Aligarh Movement was led by modernist Muslim gentlemen. It was
spearheaded by the dynamic personality of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (181798). He was born in a prestigious family of Delhi. He was fluent in Arabic and
Persian, and was equally taken in with western science, mathematics and
astronomy. He worked as a jurist for the British East India Company and
gradually earned a reputation as a distinguished scholar. He lived through
the 1857 Rebellion, which had a deep impact on him, even though he
remained loyal to the British, and was noted for his actions in saving
European lives.
Figure 6.3.2: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
Source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3057/2666425999_3df3564786.jpg
Sir Sayyid wanted to restore a debilitated and defeated Muslim community,
as he wished for its survival in British India. He argued that the future of
Islam rested with the fortunes of Muslims, particularly those in north India.
He found a variety of public forums to express his ideas. He supported
British rule and highlighted the decadence of Muslim society in comparison
to the British. He believed that the future of Muslims was threatened by the
rigidity of their orthodox outlook. He urged that some of the characteristics
of English society like discipline, order, efficiency, and especially high level of
scientific education must be adopted by the Muslim community. He argued
that Islam was not a threat to British interests. He also tackled the ulama,
who dismissed the British as enemies of Islam. In 1866 Sir Sayyid created
the British-Indian Association of the North-Western Provinces as another
expression of his desire for closer relations with the British.
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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Value addition: What the sources say
Islam and education
To prove that Islam was rational and not irrational, Sayyid Ahmad stated: ‘The Muslims
have nothing to fear from the adoption of the new education if they simultaneously hold
steadfast to their faith, because Islam is not irrational superstition, it is a rational
religion which can march hand in hand with the growth of human knowledge’.
Source: Original
Sir Sayyid called for a new theology and stressed the need for the
emergence of new Muslim leaders. His profile and stature, combined with
the fact that he was acceptable to the British as the face of an ashraf
Muslim, accorded him the authority to ‘speak for the Muslim’. However, his
ideas were opposed by the orthodox Muslims. His support for scientific
knowledge and belief was seen as antithetical to many of the Islamic ideals
and the Qur’an. Opposition to him grew along with his popularity. Sayyid
Ahmad used the word qaum or nation for painting and defining the new
Muslim society and community. He wished to unite the dispersed Muslims
into a single qaum, a community no longer divided by sectarian strife, class
tensions and linguistic pluralism. However, when Sir Sayyid talked of Muslim
unity, he largely meant ‘the gentle-born north Indian Muslims’, the ashrafs,
thus excluding others from consideration.
By the end of 19th century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan was confronted with the
spectre of an aggressive and expanding Hindu elite in north India, who had
become commercially prosperous. Publications of Hindu religious literature
proliferated. This was also the time when the language movement, positing
Hindi vs Urdu was emerging, along with cow protection movements.
Aggressive Hindu leaders were demanding a ban on cow slaughter,
especially during Eid. Ahmad recognized the threat that was posed to Urdu,
and promoted its adoption as the lingua franca of all Indian Muslims. He
came to regard Hindus and Muslims as two separate communities, though he
compared them to two eyes of a pretty bride.
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Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha
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For Ahmad, the answer to the present dilemma of Muslims lay in education,
particularly for the sons of respectable ashraf Muslims. He stated that
elements of English knowledge needed to be taught within an Islamic
context. This led him to establish the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College
of Aligarh in 1875, which was renamed the Aligarh Muslim University in
1920. He attempted to model it on Cambridge University. Between 1882 and
1902 Aligarh had sent up 220 Muslim graduates. Sir Sayyid envisioned the
college as serving the Muslim qaum. The college faced various problems and
tensions. Due to rivalries with Sayyid Ahmad, some leading lights left the
institution, but for Sir Sayyid it remained his most important cause. He was
suspicious of the Indian independence movement, and denounced the
Congress. He urged Muslims to avoid joining it.
Sir Sayyid was indeed one of the most prominent public men in 19th century
northern India. He was a prolific writer and one of the greatest thinkers of
the period. His voluminous works include volumes on the interpretation of
the Qur’an, on the history of the architecture of Delhi and a biography of
Muhammad, on the causes of the 1857 Revolt and on Muslims who stayed
loyal through it, as well as hundreds of articles written on education, culture
and history. His work gave rise to a new generation of Muslim intellectuals
and politicians who came together under the Aligarh movement to secure
the political future of Muslims in India. The movement was a profoundly
political enterprise, to construct and consolidate among the Muslim elite the
mentality of belonging to a single qaum.
Muslim reformers, while undoubtedly responding to British colonial
discourse, nevertheless inherited a similar discourse of moral decline and
renewal from their own religious tradition. Muslims saw themselves as
former rulers, who were displaced by the British. This gave them a more
fraught relationship with Westernization than their Hindu counterparts.
Because they had been in power, there was an impulse to use a
reinterpreted and reformist Islam to make up for the relatively greater loss
in status.
Muslim reforms and women’s rights
Let us now turn to a different aspect of Muslim social reform. Like the Hindu
reformers, many of the Muslim reformers too were concerned with the
women’s question, but they too revealed an ambiguity regarding it. For
example, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s educational enterprise was largely aimed at
elite Muslim men. He stated that women should be mainly educated within
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their homes, observe purdah, and education for them should be aimed to
make them better companions and mothers. Broadly, most of the Muslim
reformers wanted women to be educated to protect the ‘purity’ of Islamic
religion, to improve individual and familial piety and to purify household
rituals.
However, in spite of various limits, the reforms did pave the way for some
Muslim women towards greater education. We will discuss this through the
example of the Muslim reformer Sayyid Mumtaz Ali. He was affiliated with
the Deoband school and was also inspired by the Aligarh school. His
intellectual heritage thus combined both the elements, which shows us that
there can often not be a neat split between revivalism and reformism,
tradition and modernity. He became a great supporter of women’s
education, even if garbed in the form of religious education. Though he was
careful to defend himself against accusations of ‘westernization’ and based
his assertions squarely within the tradition of Muslim religious reformism, he
constantly re-interpreted Qur’an to put forth his views.
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Value addition: Interesting details
Mumtaz Ali and women’s rights
In the late 1890s within the Muslim community, the dual challenge of British colonization
and Christian proselytizing inspired the Muslim reformer Sayyid Mumtaz Ali to respond
using the tools of his own cultural, political, and religious tradition: the interpretation of
the Qur’an. Since both colonial justifications for political control over Indian society and
Christian arguments for conversion focused heavily on the ‘backward’ status of women in
Indian society, Mumtaz Ali decided to redeem Muslim culture and Islam on the same
grounds. He played a pioneering role in Urdu journalism for women. In 1898, he published
Huquq un-Niswan, or The Rights of Women. In it he returned to the Qur’an to find an
interpretation not only compatible with, but supportive and expansive of the rights of
women. He thus suggested a model for ‘progressive’ social development from within
Muslim India, delegitimizing the ‘civilising mission’ Britain employed to justify their
colonial rule.
Source: Minault, Gail. 1990. Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and Huquq un-Niswan: An
Advocate of Women’s Rights in Islam in the late Nineteenth Century. Modern
Asian Studies, 24: 147-72.
Mumtaz Ali’s interpretation of the Qur’an articulated a version of Islam quite
apart from the dominant view among the conservative ulama, or Islamic
scholars, of the day. In 1890 the interpretation of Qur’an had been co-opted
by conservative, patriarchal forces within the all-male Indian Muslim elite. As
a result, the dominant reading of the Qur’an saw women as agents of fitna,
or ‘potential disorder’, whose behaviour and especially sexuality had to be
controlled so that the fabric of Muslim society and the integrity of the Muslim
family could be protected. Mumtaz Ali, on the other hand, argued that
women were inherently equal to their male counterparts, systematically
dismantling each of the common instances in which the Qur’an had been
read to suggest the opposite.
Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and his vision for expanding rights within Islam thus
arose to challenge the dominant reading of the Qur’an and opened up a new
discussion of women’s position in society. In other words, Mumtaz Ali,
though subject to all of the criticisms of the early reformist movement in
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India, exploited the social and economic instability of the second half of the
19th century and the deep ambiguity of authority over women and their
rights, to force a new, progressive argument into an ossified and dominant
discourse. He challenged established notions about women, which he
maintained, were based on social customs that went against the true spirit
of the Islamic message. He brought together a number of intellectual
antecedents that included the Deoband school with its emphasis on studies
of the Qur’an and hadith, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s religious reformism, and
the heated debates among spokesmen for different religions that Mumtaz Ali
witnessed while a student. This example shows that social reforms amongst
Muslims had a potential for multiple interpretations, even if based within
Islamic traditions of controversy and internal reform.
Singh Sabha movement
The Singh Sabha movement first emerged in Amritsar, Punjab in the late
19th century, to articulate a distinct Sikh identity. The Arya samaj campaign
in Punjab, especially its attacks on Guru Nanak, played a key role in its
emergence. A larger context behind its rise was the emergence of a small
Sikh elite in the 19th century who were indignant about the relative
exclusion of the Sikhs from education and employment in Punjab. Christian
missionary campaigns, growth of other reform movements and colonial
stereotypes of Sikhs also contributed to the growth of the Singh Sabha
movement. Its intentions were to restore Sikhism to its past purity, to
publish historical religious books, magazines and journals, to propagate
knowledge using Punjabi, to return Sikh apostates to their original faith, and
to involve highly placed Englishmen in the educational programs of the
Sikhs. Between 1880 and 1900, 115 Singh Sabhas were founded, mostly in
Punjab.
Some of the Singh Sabha reformers set up the Khalsa Tract Society in 1894
and published a large number of tracts, pamphlets and books in Gurmukhi.
They were aimed at forging a Sikh identity but actually covered a wide range
and revealed the peculiar mind-set of an emerging middle class, high caste
society in Punjab, who had their own phobias and insecurities. They also
revealed the experiments undertaken by the Singh Sabha reformers with the
Punjabi language in order to standardize it, and evolve a puritan, modernist
prose. The evolution of the Punjabi language was closely tied with the
construction of the Sikh identity. There were attempts to not only
standardize the language, but also to cleanse it of its ‘vulgarities’. This was
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part of a discourse on what should be the ideal behaviour of a Sikh person,
including an attempt to structure the day of an average ideal Sikh person.
Interpreting reforms
The socio-religious reforms that emerged in colonial India in the 19th
century had a rich and complex nature. The literary sphere, print and
pamphlet wars were critical to the activities of various reformers. Like the
reforms initiated by the Hindus, those by Muslims and Sikhs too have left us
with a mixed legacy. Reform movements amongst Muslims and Sikhs too
affected a small percentage of the population, up until the 1930s. Further,
they too were male dominated. At the same time, even amidst various
limitations, they opened up unexpected spaces for educated classes,
including for some women. Among the Muslims, movements like Aligarh
became the torch bearers of a rational and modern outlook. The Singh
Sabha movement too brought a new dimension of the inner life of the Sikh
community through various intellectual and cultural processes.
At the same time, with these reform movements, combined with other
factors, to be a Hindu, Muslim or a Sikh took on new meanings with the
clarification and definition of religious terms, creeds and rituals. In a multireligious society, the drive to establish or re-establish a purified form of
religion led inevitably to the rejection of behaviour and beliefs attributed to
other religions. Consequently, the distance between religions grew and
religious lines and identities hardened.
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