The central concern of Sher Ali Khan Tareen’s book, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, is to question the facile binary of legalist-sufi Islams that has characterised Western scholarly and media discourses on Islam in the recent decades. Tareen provides a theoretically informed account of the theological conflict between the Deobandis and the Barelvis in the Nineteenth Century India. By demonstrating how both sides deployed arguments from the same Islamic legal sources and made references to sufi precepts, Tareen seeks to upend the deep-rooted notion that the Deobandi school is defined by strict adherence to texts, legal codes and ethics while the Barelvi school represents a more loose and flexible ‘folk religion’ that emphasises sufi-oriented teachings and devotional practices. If, as Tareen has shown, both sides drew from the same (Hanafi) legal tradition and the same repertoire of sufi-ism, what exactly is the difference between the two? The difference, Tareen argues, lies in their conflicting conceptions of the sovereignty of God and the resulting question of the authority of the Prophet (peace be upon him).

Deobandis believe that God’s sovereignty is absolute, and that’s why they emphasise the humanity of the Prophet (peace be upon him) — that the Prophet (peace be upon him) was just a human, even if the chosen one. Barelvis, on the other hand, exalt the status of Muhammad (peace be upon him) to an extent that, in the eyes of Deobandis, approaches the status of God and hence constitutes shirk.

This Deobandi insistence on divine sovereignty also entails that God is the sovereign legislator, and any act or ritual prevalent in society that is not commanded in the Quran (the word of God) or the Sunnah (the prophet’s way) constitutes bid’a, (‘innovation’ or adulteration). Tareen provides a fascinating account of Ashraf Ali Thanwi’s reasoning behind condemning certain South Asian Muslim practices — most notably the mawlid, or prophet’s birthday celebration — as a bid’a. While Thanwi conceded that there’s nothing wrong with conducting gatherings that honour the memory of the prophet (peace be upon him) on the 12^th of Rabi al-Awwal, the mawlid, he argued, had become so ritualised that people now observed it with the same devotion and discipline that’s required for mandatory acts like prayers and fasting and censured anyone who didn’t take part in these celebrations. When voluntary acts started simulating shariah by assuming the force of repetition and prevalence that should only be reserved for shariah-enjoined mandatory acts, Thanwi argued, an otherwise pious and harmless act like mawlid becomes bid’a because at that point it sought to parallel God’s law and challenge God’s sovereignty. This separation of ‘simply permissible’ and mandatory acts in law remains at the heart of the Deobandi project, and the eternal bone of contention with the Barelvis.

The Barelvi response to these theological assaults came in the form of Ahmad Raza Khan’s polemics. Raza Khan, a polymath credited with the founding of the Barelvi denomination, came to the defence of practices like mawlid through this logic: the “normative validity of an act depends on its inherent goodness or lack thereof, not on the period in history in which it occurrs”. Insofar as mawlid was an inherently good and pietist activity, as even the Deobandis had conceded, the practice should continue even if it lacks precedent from the time of Prophet (peace be upon him). Raza Khan cited a prophetic saying that likened the Muslim community, the ummah, to rain and stated that it’s impossible to tell “which is better, the beginning of a rain shower or its end”. In other words, he rejected the Deobandi view that all non-prophetic time, and the believers dwelling in it, were at risk of moral failure and needed to stay steadfast and continuously affirm the practices of the prophetic time by following them to the last detail. While for Thanwi each successive generation risked slipping into a moral decline and needed to be rescued by the religious leaders of that time, for Raza Khan each generation was adding to the inherent goodness of the practices of the prophetic time: Khan in fact used the analogy of a garden whose roots and foundations were laid down by the Prophet (peace be upon him) and his Companions (with whom Allah was pleased), and then each generation had added to the beauty of that garden through pietist practices that were inherently good.

Other than this radically different view of time and its relationship with the possibility of piety and salvation, Raza Khan also refuted the Deobandis on a second front. He argued that to delegitimise a practice like mawlid, his opponents needed to demonstrate where in the textual sources such a practice had been explicitly forbidden. Raza Khan, in other words, turned the tables on the Deobandi rationale of scriptural validation by arguing that anything not explicitly forbidden is to be taken as permissible on the merit of its piety, and to ban what the texts themselves did not explicitly ban would be tantamount to making a parallel law to that of shariah, hence tantamount to challenging God’s sovereignty.

To put it differently, both sides accused each other of modifying or adding to the shariah: the Barelvis were accused because they upheld rituals that had no precedent in Islamic law, and the Deobandis were accused because they forbade rituals that were not explicitly forbidden by shariah. This debate on mawlid, Tareen argues, demonstrates how both groups were grounded in Islamic law while also being appreciative of sufi devotional approaches as they debated the boundaries of faith by defining what constitutes a bid’a. While Tareen has shown that Raza Khan’s arguments were as anchored in the law and textual sources as that of the Deobandis, one cannot help but notice that Khan’s reading of these jurisprudential sources tended to be more literary than legalistic as he drew on the metaphors of rain and garden to make his point.

The mawlid celebrations gave rise to another controversy as some of the participants in these celebrations, in their particular state of a deep spiritual experience, claimed to have witnessed the Prophet (peace be upon him) appearing in these ceremonies. For the Deobandis, such a belief was polytheistic as it ascribed divine attributes to the Prophet (peace be upon him0 — only God is omnipresent, and the Prophet (peace be upon him) being a mere human can’t be present in multiple locations. The problematic of presence, however, was turned into the problematic of knowledge: could the Prophet (peace be upon him) know the multiple locations in which mawlid was being celebrated, or does this knowledge rest only with God, the All-Knowing. Barelvi scholar Abdul Sami argued that knowledge is not bi-polar (divine knowledge possessed by God vs non-divine knowledge possessed by everyone else) as the Deobandis seemed to believe; instead, knowledge is graded, with God possessing absolute and total knowledge of the unknown, the Prophets (peace be upon them) possessing some specific knowledge of the unknown, and all other mortals possessing no knowledge of the unknown. Since Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) only made appearance at some specific mawlid locations, Sami argued, this demonstrates he has some knowledge and not total knowledge, and his appearance then does not challenge the sovereignty of God, who knows everything and is present everywhere.

These arguments over the sovereignty of God, Tareen notes, erupted in a milieu where the Muslims of India had lost their political sovereignty to the British. In that moment of political crisis, defining the boundaries of religion became the foremost challenge. This act of defining was carried out through the dialectical constructions of limits and transgressions — of what constitutes the limit of the law (sunnah) and what constitutes a transgression of these limits (bid’a). This brings us to the second major contribution of this book: the concept of political theology.

While traditionally, the framework of political theology has been used to illuminate the theological underpinnings of the modern secular state, Tareen uses this concept in an inverse manner: to study how “political imaginaries, assumptions, and aspirations [are] reflected in seemingly theological discourses and debates”. He highlights Carl Schmitt’s claim that “the metaphysical image that a particular epoch forges of the world parallels the structure of its political organisation.” To access the ‘political imaginaries’ that undergirded the Deobandi-Barelvi theological debates, Tareen turns to Margrit Pernau’s discussion of the remaking of Muslim ashraf (nobles) in British India.

According to Pernau, at the dawn of colonial modernity, nobility went from being the exclusive domain of the landholders and the scholarly class to a much more open possession accessible to any Muslim who could cultivate piety. This shift was a consequence of ulama becoming increasingly confined to the limited sphere of religious knowledge in the face of the emerging colonial institutions of secular knowledge. The emerging middle classes captured the mantle of nobility by opposing ashraf lifestyles and embarking on projects of religious reform that untethered nobility from inheritance. If, on the political level, this emerging group was dismantling the ashraf and concentrating nobility in pietist activity that anyone could undertake, on the theological level these classes sought to undermine the authority of saints, pious figures and even the Prophet (peace be upon him) to restore the absolute sovereignty of God whom a pious individual could access directly without mediation. Deobandi scholar Shah Ismail even drew a parallel between God and worldly monarchs, arguing that God isn’t so disconnected from the people as to require mediating viziers (ministers), princes or nobles. Moreover, the Deobandis argued, divine sovereignty could only be affirmed by everyday practice, and it was the role of the ulama to continually guide the masses and clarify the bounds of tradition. The task of the ulama, then, was to construct a moral order devoid of not just bid’a but also hierarchies of caste and lineage that fostered the idea of intercessory figures between God and men. In Tareen’s words, while the Deobandis stood for a sort of “radical democracy” in terms of access to God, the Barelvis held a worldview of hierarchies wherein removal of intermediaries would unravel the moral order.

To sum up Tareen’s thesis: in order to move away from the law-sufism binary that pervades Western and even some Muslim scholarly discourses on Deobandis and Barelvis, we should conceptualise these two movements as competing “political theologies” that are advancing their particular views of divine sovereignty and prophetic authority. Furthermore, the theological positions of these groups are underpinned by their political imagination of an ideal public — ‘radically democratic’ in the Deobandi case, ‘monarchical’ in the Barelvi case. Tareen’s monumental contribution, then, is his theorisation of the theological conflict and its link to their political imaginaries. Drawing on a wide range of Urdu, Persian and Arabic sources, he has successfully demonstrated how these debates were a result of the destruction of Muslim political sovereignty and the Muslim effort to define their role in the newly constructed public sphere.

Defending Muhammad in Modernity performs two functions: theorisation of the aforementioned conflict and questioning the law-sufism binary. It is on this latter count that Tareen enters a contested terrain that threatens to undermine his achievement in the former. If Barbara Metcalf’s way of rescuing the Deobandis was to highlight the “interiority” (or inward turn) of their reformist project, one of the methods Tareen employs to push back against Western depictions of the Deobandis seems to be to demonstrate that the Barelvis are as politically charged and prone to violence as the Deobandis. This is evident in his opening of the book with three instances of Barelvi violence.

Tareen relies on the anthropological framework of studying Islam that has been established and popularised by Talal Asad. In Asad’s rendering, Islam is a “discursive tradition” that relates itself to the foundational texts of the Quran and Hadith. In this discursive approach, any scrutiny of Muslim activity or behavior must take into account the internal logic, frameworks and assumptions of the Islamic tradition. But, as Islamic studies scholar Kevin Reinhart has noted in his recent book Lived Islam, this focus on discourse in the study of Muslim societies privileges the scholar, the jurist and the preacher — agents who produce this religious discourse and inevitably emerge as authority figures in that discursive tradition. By privileging organised textual discourse over everyday practices of ordinary Muslims, Asad’s approach hands ulama the final authority in defining what Islam is and what constitutes normative Islamic conduct.

One of the consequences of Asad’s approach is the foreclosing of any possibility of critique from outside the tradition, for instance, on the basis of such universal categories as equality, justice or freedom. The discursive approach, for Asad, has been a way of pushing back against Orientalist, colonial and neo-imperial delegitimisation of the faith of Muslims, and their demonisation in what he calls the hegemonic liberal-secular discourses. But here’s a question that emerges at the end of Tareen’s theorisation of the Deobandi-Barelwi conflict: what is the position available for a person, either inside these denominations or outside, to critique these competing political theologies? If the possibility of coming from a universalist position is foreclosed, because that position serves neo-imperial hegemony as both Asad and Tareen seem to suggest, what space is available for ordinary Muslims from which they can mount a critique of the excesses of these political theologies? Is Tareen suggesting that the only possibility of critique emerges by engaging the deep theological precepts of these two traditions as their adherents did against each other? By focusing excessively on the Western constructions of these movements, the book misses the opportunity to relate these political theologies to intra-Muslim concerns of power and authority around such axes as caste, class and gender.

This bring us to another contradiction of this monograph: it seeks to dismantle a contemporary concern — the canonisation of religion by liberal-secular tendencies, which serves the neo-imperial hegemonic discourse — by presenting a time-bound study of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century India. Tareen does not deal with the contemporary manifestations of these two movements, even though the reductionist Western discourses he refers to have largely been a response to the contemporary politics of these groups (for example, the Deobandi link to the Taliban and other such groups). To put it differently, the questions posed and the answers furnished exist in, and deal with, two different epochs. But despite this temporal misalignment, Tareen’s monograph is an impressive contribution to our understanding of two reformist movements that came to dominate Sunni Islam in the subcontinent. This 500-page treatise can be conceptualised with the analogy of the kernel and the shell: it’s a history of the development of the Deobandi-Barelvi conflict wrapped in the shell of Tareen’s argument against the canonisation of Islam. Even if some of the assumptions and conclusions in the shell are debatable, the kernel itself is substantive and original enough to merit this book a place among leading works on South Asian Islam and inspire a long line of scholarship in its wake.

Defending Muhammad in Modernity

Author: Sher Ali Tareen

Publisher: University Of Notre Dame Press

Pages:506

Price:Rs.4246

The writer is a student of South Asia studies,  currently enrolled in a master’s programme at Dartmouth College