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The Pious Self is a Jewel in Itself : Agency and Tradition in the Production of 'Shariatic Modernity'
Usamah Yasin Ansari South Asia Research 2010 30: 275 DOI: 10.1177/026272801003000304 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sar.sagepub.com/content/30/3/275

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www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/026272801003000304 Vol. 30(3): 275298

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH

Copyright 2010 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC

THE PIOUS SELF IS A JEWEL IN ITSELF: AGENCY AND TRADITION IN THE PRODUCTION OF SHARIATIC MODERNITY
Usamah Yasin Ansari1
Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Canada abstract This article historically situates Ashraf Ali Thanvis Bahishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) as a manual for the production of pious dispositions. Written in 1905 for Muslim women in north India, this Urdu text teaches women how to train themselves to be pious and provides an ideal picture of the well-formed woman, selfreective of how her actions correspond to the Divine will. Brought up as a Muslim, she has already been socialised into subordination to this will. Becoming self-reective, linked to a critical rite of passage of an individuals life, involves more regulated, arduous and deliberate reiterative work on the self. Without advocating that women should be managed through religious idiom, the analysis presented here challenges euro-centric perceptions of modernity and tradition and proposes that we need to think through more carefully what kind of agency is actually involved in consolidating the Muslim subject who submits to Divine will in a framework of shariatic modernity. This discussion carries immense relevance for current debates about how Muslim women may address the challenges of living in the West. keywords: agency, Deobandi, eurocentrism, Islam, modernity, Muslim women, piety, private-public, secularisation, shariatic modernity, Urdu, women

Introduction: The Bahishti Zewar and its Message

Would our understanding of agency posit a self that emerges as one that needs to be undone, whose presence as a sedimentation of reiterative practices needs to be disrupted in a process of desired change? What do we do with agentive action that trains ones own body to submit? What happens to the body that carefully follows injunctions like When speaking, do not make excessive gestures with your hands, and When walking, pick each foot up completely?

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Sab se achcha paon ka zewar ye hai noor basre/ Tum raho saabet qadm har waqt raah-e-naik par// Seem-o-zar ka paon main zewar ho to dar nahin/ Raasti se paon phisle gar na meri jaan kahin// The best adornment on your feet is the Divine light, So keep your steps xed at every moment on the road of piety. Do not fret if silver and gold adorn your feet, If your feet will not stray off the path of Truth, my dear.

These are the last two couplets of the opening poem of the Bahishti Zewar, a book commonly given to new Muslim brides in South Asia (Metcalf, 1990: 3).2 The image we are left with is of a body trying to walk the right path, itself a familiar central idiom of sharia. This is not only symbolic, as Thanvi actually refers to bodily comportment, here the foots movement. Indeed the body that has been trained to walk in such a way that her feet will not stray from the right path has no need for adornments of gold or silver. One must probe into how a subject is trained to know which path is right, and how to move the body to make sure this path is followed. If we think of the body in the couplets as linked to a subject being formed as a pious self, as one whose body has been trained so that her being is disposed to Gods will, it becomes clear that the work involved in becoming pious is arduous and cannot be conceptualised as emerging from within the self without guidance. We see the bodys outward faculties conceptualised as important aspects of piety. If the foot is not trained properly and strays from the right path, the pious self has failed to be formed. To understand both this particularly comported foot and its path, one must map the historical conditions that give them their currency. We shall see that this has much contemporary relevance. The Bahishti Zewar can be considered a manual for how women can train themselves to be the type of pious self imagined in the quoted couplet. Written in Urdu in 1905 by Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi (18631943), a prolic Muslim thinker embedded in the Deobandi reform movement in north India, this text attempts to dene the appropriate bodily and social behaviour for women as well as the methods for their inculcation. Thanvi meticulously outlines how women can have destinies equal to men if they are able to control their lower selves by articulating appropriate behaviour. He imagines a pious self made receptive to the Divine will through sets of nely tuned dispositions inculcated by following and reiterating the right type of actions, ranging from utterances to bodily comportment and outward appearance. Performing the right kinds of actions, then, does not simply produce a faade of piety. Rather, proper reiterations are both the means to attain, and the characteristic of, a particular mode of being pious.3 The discussion in this article is more modest in scope than trying to map the mode of being (and the method of becoming this being) that Thanvis injunctions imagine. It merely uses the text to examine how imagining this mode of a pious self may have emerged historically. After introducing the text, it reects on the Deobandi

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reform movement, which helps to situate the importance and inuence of this text in dening proper Muslim feminine etiquette in South Asia, as well as transnationally. Discussing the thinking of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi then problematises the thesis that he somehow refuted modernity. Situating Thanvis discourse as emerging out of historically positioned social transformations in colonial India, it is argued that it can be seen as articulating an alternative type of modernity, which I refer to as shariatic modernity. Situating the text in this way, one can hope to map the type of pious self imagined by Thanvi himself.

Ornaments of Piety: A Sketch of the Text

Reading the text, it becomes clear, rst of all, that Thanvi is writing for a general audience, not just the learned ulema, religious scholars and legal experts. He speaks particularly to women, putting a burdensome responsibility on them to engage in managing themselves in an appropriate manner. He uses a vernacular Urdu, not Persian or Arabic, which is usually associated with ulema writing. Metcalf (1990) has produced an impressive English translation and introduction to the Bahishti Zewar. Out of the ten chapters (or Books) that comprise this text, she has only partially translated half (parts of Books One, Six, Seven, Eight and Ten). She has also not translated the Bahishti Gauhar (Heavenly Gem), an appendix aimed more specically at men (Metcalf, 1990: 9). To provide an overview of the text (Thanvi, 1960), I use my own translation and summations of chapters that have not been covered by Metcalf.4 Thanvi outlines normative rules for ritual and social life common to Hana Sunni Muslims and a specic temperament of piety and moderation (Metcalf, 1990: vii). To Metcalf, the idea is to produce a common standard of practice for Muslims by citing the sharia (the Divine Code), comprised of the Quran, hadith (sayings of the Prophet) and selective interpretations of Hana jurisprudence ( fiqh). I would add, as illustrated below, that this common standard would be recognisable only when a type of self is cultivated through certain methods outlined by Thanvi. Metcalf (1990: 1) situates the text as part of the spiritual reform movement in north India at the turn of the century. She notes that women had previously not been considered bastions of tradition until these reform movements of the twentieth century. Indeed earlier religious texts generally spoke to public men regarding their affairs. Topics like management of the household and training womens intimate life-worlds are not characteristic of classical Islamic texts and qh (Abu-Lughod, 1998; al-Hibri, 2000; Ali, 2005). For Metcalf (1990: 2), the basic principle of the Bahishti Zewar is that women must be instructed if they are to act properly. The historical context for this push to regulate womens conduct in north India reects the end of Muslim political dominance and the emerging presence of British rule that encouraged religious identities, given that a range of alternative cultural values were in circulation (Metcalf, 1990: 4). Another important situating factor is that the ulema were banished from the colonial political arena and started thinking about the need to manage womens private worlds South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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and supposedly erroneous customs through emphasis on organising self-control (Metcalf, 1990: 89). Thanvis text reveals a type of scriptural authority entering womens realms. With this entry comes a notion that local custom had poisoned womens ability to reason (aql ). This is not reason emerging from a transcendental subject, but rather the ability to conform to Gods will by proper appropriation of the sharia by discerning between good and bad actions (Metcalf, 1990: 33). To rene this aql, Book One outlines basic principles of belief, prayers and general legal matters. Thanvi also discusses writing letters and even offers an alphabet. The reader is taken through a number of steps where women learn to read and pronounce letters, and then how to write letters addressed with proper etiquette. Thanvi moves on to using allegory through several stories from the Prophetic tradition and illustrates sins to be weary of. I agree with Metcalf (1990: 39) that Book One is congested with every kind of argument he could make to convey the seriousness with which he regarded literacy and religious education for girls. Books Two and Three are concerned with the specic form Islamic rituals are supposed to take, while Books Four and Five begin to paint the picture of a conjugal family and matters relating to marriage, divorce and nance. Book Two centrally covers how to pray particular types of namaaz (or salaat, ritualised prayers at appointed times or events) and how to prepare the dead for burial. Thanvi also discusses proper pronunciation of Arabic words for the purposes of worship and notes that one should repeat these words until proper pronunciation is achieved. This reveals the centrality of training the body properly for acts of worship, in this case the ability to move the mouth appropriately. Similarly, Book Three is concerned with ritual matters like fasting, sacrice, charity, pilgrimage, oaths and so on. By outlining forbidden and acceptable items, Thanvi attempts to produce a disposition that can better discern between what should be consumed or enacted and what should not. For example, he denes acceptable clothing and veiling (libaas aur parde ka bayaan). Books Four and Five seem more relevant to how newly married women are being remade, with concerns about household management and conjugal bliss. Book Four focuses on marriage rights, divorce and custody. Thanvi even claims that it is best to have your own conjugal space (aise jagah diyowe jis main shohar ka koi rishtahdaar na rehta ho). In fact, it is best if that space is empty, so that husband and wife can live without feeling awkward (be-takallu ) and can raise their children comfortably. As al-Hibri (2000) claims, classic Islamic juridical texts never discuss any obligation for wives to do housework or rear children in the manner outlined here. Thanvis advice must thus be considered as a reformative effort seeking to transform social relations, and not as imposition of an anachronistic type of Muslim family.5 This issue will be discussed at length later. This chapter also outlines the rights (huquq) relating to the husband, his relations and other Muslims. Briey, it also covers how women are to eat and behave in a congregation. Book Five is more concerned with nancial matters like purchases and loans. These two sections reveal an interest in producing women who can create a

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tranquil, well managed household; they are almost readable as an effort in empowering women to be skilled homemakers. In Book Six, Thanvi begins to outline why womens practices have thus far been problematic to producing a managed household and a healthy Muslim community. Metcalf (1990: 79) claims this section is primarily interested in seeing if particular customs are acceptable according to the sharia. Thanvi feels able to make moral statements through citing the authority of the sharia, doing so, however, without much explicit jurisprudential Hana qh argument, since quoting and generally referring to the Quran and hadith (the Prophets conduct) is considered sufcient for a non-specialist audience. Metcalf (1990) translates the title of Book Seven as On Comportment and Character, Reward and Punishment. The Urdu title is aadaab aur ikhlaaq aur sawaab aur aazaab ke bayaan main ibadaton ka sunwaarna, which I translate as Rectifying Worship Through a Discussion on Comportment, Character, Reward and Punishment. This section constitutes the most detailed discussion on how feelings and dispositions can be transformed and may be produced through certain practical techniques. The title itself reveals how external and bodily practices are central to cultivating the pious inner-self. Metcalf (1990: 164) discusses the centrality of aql in Thanvis discussion: the ability to discern between right and wrong. This ability, shared by humans and angels, is the way to control the lower and rebellious self, the nafs. It is only through repeated correct behaviour (Metcalf, 1990: 164) that the nafs can be subdued. To this end, Thanvi provides do and dont lists, so that appropriate behaviour may be inculcated and one can be disposed to discern right and wrong actions. These lists relate to matters of the heart, the tongue and the whole body. The section on reforming the heart is particularly important in producing the right type of person, because the heart symbolises the totality of personhood (Metcalf, 1990: 165). One must remove vice from the heart to realise important principles of worship, human interaction and habit. Removing vice is always linked to practices one can articulate with conscious deliberation, often body movements or forms of utterance. This means that outer behaviour is both the cause and the fruit of the inner self; therefore ritual action is transformative (Metcalf, 1990: 167). In my own reading of the Urdu text, I nd Thanvis discussion on the harms (burai) of and cure (elaaj ) for anger most telling. Anger is often considered a passionate kind of emotion which we usually assume comes from within. Thanvi, however, points to the way anger can be controlled through certain outwardly actions. By becoming overly angry, a person can lose sight of her limits and is no longer aware of the outcomes of actions (anjaam sochne ka hosh nahin rehta). To control this anger, then, one should leave the presence of the object of anger. The person should think that she, too, has the same kinds of faults in the sight of God as the object of her anger. She should then repeatedly recite I seek refuge in God (auzobillah), drink water and make ritual ablutions. Though this task is arduous, after some days of repeating these actions, her South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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temperament will change and anger will be banished from the heart (chand roz is tarhe ghussah rokne se phir khud-ba-khud qaabu main aajaegadil se nikal jaega). Book Eight is relevant to modelling the right person in that it provides a list of a hundred signicant women in Muslim history. Metcalf notes that there is no ideal woman because each biography is distinct. What connects these accounts is how women must use reason to rene their characters. For example, Thanvi references the Queen of Sheba (Bilqis) to illustrate that if one is informed on some point of true religion, one should not resist it out of modesty or the customs of family (Metcalf, 1990: 26869). As a subtext, these biographies are telling an audience that the work of creating a pious self is a type of wilful work that any woman can articulate. The ornaments, or rewards, that the correctly trained self can hope for are in many ways symbolised by these biographical personalities. Book Nine is quite different from these biographies and largely focuses on health matters. Vanzan (2000) articulates a telling commentary on the type of hygiene Thanvi envisions. He is obsessed with levels of cleanliness, common illnesses and their cures and the well-being of the body. Vanzan (2000) claims that Thanvis advocacy of unani (Greek) medicine, commonly associated with Muslims, was a type of resistance articulated by the ulema against British attempts to control medicine. It became a part of the Deoband curriculum, and the ulema there also saw unani as a type of knowledge that could intimately reach the population. Thus, medicine becomes a type of piety, whereby consciousness of the Divine also involves vigilance towards hygiene and bodily well-being. Women must thus be instructed on matters of health and bodily well-being, so that the community as a whole will not fall ill.6 According to Metcalf (1990: 315), when rst encountered, Thanvis Book Ten looks like a hodgepodge.7 Yet I found that it provided some of the most valuable insights into the type of training Thanvi imagines. It contains a number of essays and lists that outline again the correct type of feelings, movements, controls, behaviours and practices of household management like sewing and making soap. The rst list refers to everyday common sense. The second focuses on common decits in women. As will become clear, this does not mean this decit is necessarily innate, because it can be overcome with proper training. For instance, Thanvi includes a chart about how to pronounce words in Urdu properly because mispronunciation is also a type of weakness ( ghalat bolna bhi aik ayb hai ). Pronunciation will become better if one consciously repeats correct pronunciations. A third list focuses on specic mechanisms as means of achieving self-control and the fourth is interested in rearing children. The fth list articulates the right kind of behaviours to be practised towards others in appropriate social contexts. Book Ten is an important window into Thanvis overall methodology because it sums up the type of person that can be produced by following the instructions he outlines in the preceding chapters (Metcalf, 1990: 327). It provides a picture of the well-formed woman in which self-control is centrally important: a woman who does

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not say anything or do anything before she carefully reects on its outcomes; a woman who is ordered and systematic.

Ornaments of Reform: Thanvi and the Deobandi Movement

To understand the context for the imagining of this type of systematised woman, I trace the Deobandi reform movement Thanvi was embedded in. Metcalf (1982: 5) outlines the basic motivating principles for Islamic revival movements in north India at the turn of the century. These included, rst, the interpretation of problems facing the Muslim community as religious; second, presenting problems related to individual moral destitution and thus desiring to fashion a new type of person for a new type of society; and nally, ghting against practices deemed outside of scriptural justication. These three principles are mapped onto the pages of the Bahishti Zewar. Furthermore, the texts referencing of hadith illustrates that reform movements in the modern era claim that the Prophet and the generation following the Prophet provide the best typography for behaviour (Metcalf, 1982: 4). This encompasses two ideas, that of tajdid (trying to be like the Prophet) and jihad (the effort required to conform to Gods will). Thus the Bahishti Zewar is situated within a wide array of reformist projects but specically encased within the Deoband seminary. The Dar-ul-Ulum at the Deoband seminary in Uttar Pradesh was started in 1866 by Maulana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Maulana Muhammad Qasim and Maulana Nanautavi (Rizvi, 1980). It has trained teachers and scholars who have spread Deobandi thinking around the world (Metcalf, 1982: 8). Many students come from a number of different countries (Ahmad, 1996: 27) and it has even been called a transnational phenomenon because schools afliated with the seminary are found around the world (Reetz, 2007). It has a series of departments with a complex bureaucratic system. By the twentieth century, the Deoband University had eighteen afliated colleges from Chittagong to Peshawar and had issued 269,215 fatwahs in its rst century (Dryland, 1993). After its rst century, there were 8,934 Deobandi schools (Metcalf, 1982: 136). The primary purpose of founding the school was to train ulema who could articulate a uniformly reformed Islam in India. Branch schools were subject to central admission, with formal admission requirements and sometimes even inspections (Metcalf, 1982: 100, 125). With so many schools in place, the ulema were in a position not only to educate elites and bureaucrats as they did before (the government schools were open for them), but could now also inuence the standards of piety and belief of a large number of individual Muslims through sermons and the circulation of texts. Furthermore, the widely popular and transnational Tablighi Jamaat missionary movement has been largely inspired by its teachings and has thus been an important agent in widening the audience of Deobandi thinking. These teachings focus on the reformation of Muslim selves and on inculcating proper modes of appearing and South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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behaving as Muslims through holding seminars and door-to-door initiatives (Chatterji and Mehta, 2007; Gaborieau, 2000; Masud, 2000; Sikand, 2002 and 2006). Clearly this is an inuential institution whose ideas have an important currency for Muslim communities in South Asia and beyond. The schools curriculum is organised along four stages of development, where students would be trained in subjects such as Arabic, Persian rational sciences, jurisprudence logic, hadith sciences and Quranic sciences. There is even a physical education department (Rizvi, 1980: 202). Burke (1994) describes a highly structured and regimented routine that students are made to follow. The curriculum outlines the texts to be taught and in which year. Western sciences and English are not present in this curriculum (Masud, 2000). Importantly, instruction is in Urdu and thus serves as an important repository of Urdu in the face of Hindis post-Partition dominance in the region (Ahmad, 2000; Brass, 1974; King, 1994; Rahbar, 2003). The use of Urdu by the ulema can also be linked to the British discouraging the use of Persian in north India (Naeem, 2004). Before the Deoband seminary opened, students of madrassahs received religious instruction with an alim (scholar) they chose and studied without a central library or classrooms. These facilities have become key to the Deoband institution (Burke, 1994: 80). Funds for religious institutions came from endowments and through the state. The Deoband has always been free for students and is not funded through the state. Indeed it never accepted funds from either the British administration nor from any subsequent national governments (Dryland, 1993; Rizvi, 1980: 219). The organisational structure is clearly distinct from classic forms found in the madrassah and reects transformations in structures of religious authority. This point will become important in challenging the idea that the school is a bastion of traditionalism. Metcalf (1982: 7) has focused on the importance of the seminary to the Deobandi movement and shows that the school emerged out of the loss of Muslim political power following the ghadar (revolt) of 1857. She claims that the catastrophic revolt situated the emergence of many Islamic revival movements in India and also reected the ulemas loss of public political inuence. Metcalf (1982) discusses how the punishment of Muslims and particularly the ulema after 1857 spelled disaster for seats of religious authority. The ulema dealt with this by producing schools, trying to inculcate Islamic qualities into individual lives and it became more and more preoccupied with trying to reform the self. Another effect of the revolt was that Delhi was in ruins. Many ulema thus left for qasbahs scattered along northern India.8 Deoband was one such town (Devji, 1991; Metcalf, 1982: 91). If Deoband was part of a movement that aimed to reform private selves, then one important way of reaching individuals was through the circulation of print media. It is thus important to reect briey on how the circulation of Urdu texts to a more general audienceas opposed to Persian and Arabic texts aimed for specialist ulemaplayed an important role in a gendered Muslim revivalism. Devji (1991) tracks how, following the Revolt, there emerged a number of texts concerned with Muslim womens literacy,

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household management and ending their engagement in folk practices. Key works included Nazir Ahmads novels, Mumtaz Alis journal for women (Tehzib-e-Niswan), publications of the Aligarh Womens Zanana and of course Ashraf Ali Thanvis (1999) Bahishti Zewar. Trying to understand Thanvis text, it is important to note that all these other texts, playing a part in producing a type of selves for Muslims in north India, were also particularly concerned with women as signiers of the communitys health. Deeming the community ill, women were seen as needing education. Devji (1991: 141) notes, however, that there was also a worry that though educating women would improve the community, it could lead to moral problems with more women entering the public sphere. I argue that Thanvis work importantly provides a way out of this predicament by providing a manual for women with mechanisms that can produce a trained pious self while remaining within the home.9 Devji (1991) also notes that the Bahishti Zewar is itself an entire curriculum for women, including letter-writing and home care. It is distinct from the other texts he mentions, though, because it evokes the sharia as the central authority for trying to train women. But this does not assume that the text, because it is citing religious authority, was not embedded in political and social transformations. Indeed, Robinson (1993: 234) notes that the circulation of Urdu religious texts like the Bahishti Zewar meant that traditional authority over the transmission of Islamic knowledge was itself being transformed. Thus in the madrassah system, one would receive an ijaza (a certicate of permission) to teach a particular text, which would include all the names of those who had transmitted the text. Thus the adoption of print by the ulema meant that traditional transmission structures were being altered and subsequently individuals were becoming responsible to approach text themselves. Tracking these emergent texts, Devji (1991: 142) identies that revivalist movements that were circulating religious texts were particularly important for urban or qasbah service professionals, whom he terms shurafa (singular: sharif ). The ulemas use of print was thus an important aspect of producing a sharif identity as distinct from the agrarian classes and from the aristocratic classes, allowing the sharif to cite religious orthodoxy in producing their sense of self. Devji outlines how this identity became based on types of adab (etiquette) which were expected to be articulated by women as well. Before this period, Devji (1991: 141) claims, adab was necessary for certain classes of men and courtesans, but not for wives and other women. As Metcalf (1984a and 1984b) argues, this adab went beyond trying to form a sharif self, becoming prescribed as the main way one can control their lower selves (nafs ) through inculcating correct behaviour. Clearly the Bahishti Zewar was concerned with this aspect. In fact, Book Eight is preoccupied with illuminating historical examples of women who successfully controlled their lower selves through using their reason (aql ) and thus became fully formed pious persons. Naim (1984) thus comments that the Bahishti Zewar is the rst adab literature directed to women. South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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Another important aspect of revivalist texts that tried to reach into the very intimate lives of women centered on new notions of the privatepublic boundary. Devji (1991: 148) claims that movements like the Deoband had to interest themselves with the private realm of the community and focus on self-forming, because the British had already constituted the public realm. Furthermore, the notion of religion in the private sphere was itself a legacy of a colonial reshaping of traditional structures of spatial authority where Muslim religious institutions had once had certain signicance. Thus the shurafa had to re-create themselves by utilising religious idiom in their private conduct. Print media like the Bahishti Zewar became central in mediating this process (Devji, 1991: 148).10 Indeed, if the private was to become an Islamic fortress because public institutions of religious authority had been disbanded, then pagan elements had to be purged from it. These were elements often associated with local cultures and with women. A new interest in remaking women thus emerged for the ulema that went beyond thinking of them merely as a source of social strife ( fitna) who needed to be secluded from the public (Devji, 1991: 153). Chatterjee (1993) discusses how nationalist movements rst carved a space of sovereignty within colonial society in the spiritual/inner realm before contesting imperial power in the political landscape. Anti-colonial nationalism divided the world of institutions and practices into two distinct spheres, the material outer realm and the spiritual inner realm. The outer realm is where the West has proven its superiority and where this superiority must be studied and emulated. The inner realm, on the other hand, has the essential marks of cultural identity (Chatterjee, 1993: 6). In this interior realm a modern national culture was produced, but one that claimed not to be western. In thinking through Chatterjees framework, one must note that unlike the nationalists, the Deobandi movement did not wish to eventually seize sovereignty in the public domain, because the Deobandi movement was not interested in state power or public institutions (Engineer, 2006; Metcalf, 1982; Naeem, 2004). Thus the formation of a pious self was itself a coveted private goal and primarily a means to improve the community. Chatterjees discussion excellently illustrates that transformations in the private lives of women also became important in dealing with colonial power in public institutions. The Deobandi movement also emerged in relation to other movements trying to work out issues of Muslim identity in the north. Much scholarship has focused on Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khans response as trying to disseminate European arts, sciences and social graces through the Aligarh School (Masud, 2000). There is, however, little focus on the ulema, because they are often dismissed as mere traditionalists (Naeem, 2004) and because they turned away from the state. However, as Sanyal (1996) shows, various groups of ulema emerged at this point with varying discourses. Ahmad (1996) and Dryland (1993: 55), for example, discuss the Deobandi movement as emerging alongside the Barelvi Ulema, the Ahl-e-Hadith and the already established Farangi Mahal in Lucknow. The Deoband was thus trying to win hearts away from these other

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ulema, while also competing with Hindu reform movements. Indeed the Deobandi focus on problematising decadent practices, superstitions and saint worship (Ahmad, 1996: 28) shares currency with the Hindu reformist Arya Samaj (Dryland, 1993; Gupta, 2001). Claiming, then, that the Deobandi movement was merely a bastion of traditionalist thought misses how it was positioned within a rich colonial eld where a number of contending discourses were trying to produce new types of selves. The circulation of texts associated with Muslim reform movements was central in producing the subjectivity of a shurafa class (Devji, 1991) within a discursively rich historical moment. Metcalf (1982) claims that the Deobandi movement appealed so much to sharif Muslims because it hinted that a distinct identity could be produced through cultivating appropriate language, ways of being in social gatherings and some degree of religious familiarity. The Bahishti Zewar, then, serves as a manual for fostering a Muslim ethical personality distinct from the British, the Hindu and other Muslim classes. Metcalf (1984b) notes that the Deoband and other ulema at the turn of the century wanted to set standards for Muslim identities beyond certain classes (like the shurafa) with the hope that such manuals would change the wider population as well. This brings us to Foucaults (1990) discussion on how the deployment of sexuality operated as a way of self-afrmation for the bourgeoisie by using the technology of sex to preserve and cultivate their own body and their own species/being before deploying its technology to the working classes. This shows parallels to how the ulema used religious discourse to produce the shurafa sense of self and then set certain standards of behaviour for the entire community. For Foucaults European context, the discourse of sexuality was necessary to differentiate the self from the aristocracy, who were dened by blue blood, and the working class, who had (at rst) no sex because their welfare was not a project (Foucault, 1990: 126). We see a parallel string of arguments when conceptualising how the Deobandi circulation of religious manuals helped produce a sharif identity that cited religious orthodoxy to distance itself from the agrarian classes and the aristocrat classes (Devji, 1991; Metcalf, 1982), with the hope of eventually altering the entire community. The Bahishti Zewar also reveals how animating women in particular ways could become central to imagining these emerging selves.

A Doctor for the Ages? Ashraf Ali Thanvi and Shariatic Modernity
Who were these thinkers trying to animate women like this? Thus far I referred to the Deobandi movement and the ulema without thinking of particular alim (singular of ulema). I now turn to the author of the Bahishti Zewar to obtain a sense of how Deobandi reformist sentiment was sedimented in a particular thinkers work. This will help us further situate the Bahishti Zewar and the movement that birthed it. Thanvi was a Farouqi Sheikh from Thana Bhavan. 11 According to Saeed (1999: 24) he strictly followed a regimented set of rules in his daily bodily conduct. South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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Aside from the Bahishti Zewar, he published almost a thousand books in Urdu, Persian and Arabic (Naeem, 2004). Thanvi was a student of Maulana Fateh Muhammad Thanvi, one of the Deobands rst three graduates (Rizvi, 1980: 32). Fateh Muhammad Thanvi was associated with the Khanqah-e-Imdadiya, which Rizvi (1980: 35) claims was a hotbed for anti-British organising before the Revolt of 1857, while Metcalf (1982: 82) questions whether ulema members of the Deoband took part in the revolt from Thana Bhavan, arguing that this is not established in primary sources and is a narrative that emerged only after the 1920s. Fateh Muhammad Thanvi is perhaps best known for translating the Persian commentary of the Hizb al-Bahr (Litany of the Sea) into a style of Urdu which is not overly literary and technical. We see a similar style employed by Ashraf Ali Thanvi in the Bahishti Zewar. Ashraf Ali Thanvis fame exceeded that of his teacher after he completed his training at the seminar. Indeed Rizvi (1980: 33) claims that there are very few houses of educated Muslims in the Subcontinent in which Thanvis one or the other book may not be available. He earned the title of Hakim al-Ummah (The Doctor of the Faithful) because his eyes fell on the particulars of births, marriages, sorrow and other occasions, and, testing them on the criterion of the shariah, he separated the genuine from the spurious (Maulana Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi, cited in Rizvi, 1980: 34). The Bahishti Zewar is the most popular of his texts, with a huge readership (Devji, 1991; Metcalf, 1990). Because Thanvi made his books public and free for anyone to copy, print or publish, there is no single publishing house credited for popularising the text (Rizvi, 1980: 34). Another famous work of his is the Bayaan al-Quran, a partial translation of the Quran with a commentary (tafsir). Though Thanvi was not ofcially a mufti, a specialist designated to issue nonbinding religious rulings known as fatwah, and was not a member of the Dar al-Ifta (House of Legal Rulings) at Deoband, he did issue many popular fatwahs (Rizvi, 1980). Masud (1996: 193) interestingly situates the proliferation of fatwahs at the turn of the century, with the British occasionally asking individuals making petitions in court to prove the authoritative Muslim position on an issue, and reports that Thanvi was approached like this more than once. The public circulation of fatwahs must be seen in light of British attempts to govern Muslims through the Muslim Personal Law (Masud, 1996: 195). Thanvi began writing fatwahs in 1884 under the supervision of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, one of the founders of the Dar-ul-Ulum at Deoband. His fatwahs published between 1887 and 1943 were collected in a monthly journal, Al-Nur, from Thana Bhavan and were later published in a collection called Fatwah Ashrayah (Masud, 1996: 198). The public circulation of such fatwahs meant that they reached a wider audience and inuenced the type of authority muftis articulated in the community. Devji (1991) discusses that this was part of an emerging urban Muslim identity that relied on certain print technologies to produce its sense of self and moral grounding, since the public institutions of religious authority were being transformed in a colonial context.

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Thus Thanvi was wielding a distinct type of authority by issuing texts that contained legal opinions and would be widely circulated, such as the Bahishti Zewar. Individuals were seen as responsible for reading and living up to the norms he outlines. This kind of guidance must be considered alongside traditional structures of religious authority being transformed in the wake of colonialism and other changes in India. Yet many scholars have argued that Thanvi somehow refuted modernity and instead articulated a seemingly backward-looking traditionalism (Burke, 1994; Hamid, 2005; Naeem, 2004). One needs to problematise this argument and the binary it assumes between tradition and modernity, and also the way the Deoband school has been produced as traditionalist as opposed to the Aligarh school as modernist. Clearly the existing analyses of Thanvi have not worked out why notions of modernity must be linked with explicitly western modes of being as espoused by Sir Sayyid Ahmeds Aligarh movement. Burke (1994), for example, presumes a clear binary between the Deoband seminary as traditionalist and the Aligarh movement as modernist. He claims that the rigid ulema became more inuential after the nineteenth century. But this ignores the earlier incorporation of the ulema within the Mughal state apparatus (Hamid, 2005). The Aligarh movements leader, Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, was loyal to the British, but did acknowledge a distinct Muslim identity. Sir Sayyid wanted Muslims to think for themselves (Hamid, 2005: 76) and saw the ulema as dangerous to free thought and an instance where people put blind trust in religious leaders. Sir Sayyid thus wished to purge educational institutions of the ulema and consequently modelled the Aligarh Muslim University after western institutions. He believed that appearance should be westernised and wore trousers with a Turkish fez (Hamid, 2005: 78). This is signicant because the Deobandi movement and the Tablighi Jamaat that grew from Deobandi thinking is very interested in conrming Muslim styles of dress and appearance (Chatterji and Mehta, 2007; Masud, 2000; Sikand, 2006). As discussed earlier, the Deoband itself can be imagined as a modern institution produced out of a historical context that also birthed Aligarh. For instance, though the Deobandis were not interested in teaching western sciences, they still depended on an institutional structure distinct from traditional madrassah styles. Finally, I question the assumption that non-western modes of appearance are necessarily traditionalist when mobilised as a type of reform. Adopting the binary dened by Burke (1994), Hamid (2005) claims that Deobandi thinking was a traditional response in the face of modernity. He conceptualises the notion of training hearts and minds through dening the right practices as a purely traditionalist notion. Modernity in Hamids discussion is reied and can be refuted on a conscious level by actors. Thus, though the Deoband was organised as an institution with novel bureaucratic structures and distinct models of pedagogy, it is still supposedly a bastion of traditionalist thought (Hamid, 2005: 17). However, if the resources the Deobandi movement utilised, such as emerging print media, circulation of texts South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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and fatwahs to a larger population and a seemingly modernist concern with selfmanagement and responsibility, depended on transformation of certain structures of religious authority, how can this movement be outside of the modern structures and transformative relations it was embedded within? To develop this critical point further, it is important to examine Naeems (2004) thesis that Thanvi categorically refuted modernity, a thesis that again reies modernity as something that can be studied objectively and then refuted. For Naeem (2004: 80), modernism emerged out of the Renaissance and was a revolt against religion through rationalism, while traditional Islam is Quranic revelation, the sunnah (practices of the Prophet) and the activities of the rst community. To Naeem, then, Muslims cannot be modern without abandoning their heritage. Naeem never considers the possibility of competing or alternative modernities (Gaonkar, 2001; Gle, 1996) where tradition is articulated in contemporary movements to produce types of subjectivity rooted in modern xations on authentic personhood. Naeem (2004) saw three distinct routes after the revolt: either to join the British cause, as Sir Sayyid advocated, which means embracing modernity according to Naeem, to oppose the British through nationalism, or to transform traditional knowledge, as Thanvi did. If Naeem (2004) is willing to concede that tradition was being transformed by someone like Thanvi, and if we note a context of competing denitions of Muslim identity, then how could Thanvi be perceived as refuting modernity simply because he cites religious tradition? Naeem (2004) focuses largely on another text, al-Intibaahaat al-Muda an al-Ishtibaahaat al-Jadida (The Benecial Implications Regarding the Newly-Formed Doubts),12 to ground his idea that Thanvi responded to modernity by refuting its principles. Without providing a denition of modernity, Naeem (2004) assumes that principles of rationalism, humanism and secularism, which supposedly characterised the European experience of modernity and resulted from a coherent European tradition, encase the totality of modernity. If Thanvi refers to these principles and challenges some of their universalist foundations, he is not necessarily refuting modernity, neither is he somehow outside of it. To consider this, one must rethink the relationship between values associated with modernity and the European experience. Dussel (1998) illustrates how many of the concepts situating a European experience of modernity, posited as universal, are themselves emergent from colonial relations. Denying this articulates a Eurocentric conception of modernity, exclusively rooted in European experience (Dussel, 1998: 1). This conceptualisation posits modernity not as a phenomenon of Europe as an independent system, but of Europe as centre (Dussel, 1998: 4, emphasis in the original), and thus a central part of the world system. The assumed centrality of Europe within the world system is, however, not the sole fruit of an internal superiority accumulated during the European Middle ages over [and] against other cultures (Dussel, 1998: 45), but is the effect of the colonisation and incorporation of Amerindia, which eventually allowed Europe to colonise Asia and the rest of the world. The management of this world system allowedand continues to permitEurope to posit itself as

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the sole producer of the many values, discoveries, inventions, technologies, political institutions, and so on we associate with modernity (Dussel, 1998: 5). While in reality, these are the effects of the management of the centre of the world-system, modernity is the fruit of the management of the centrality of this planetary system (Dussel, 1998: 13). Values one associates with modernity, like rationalisation, then cannot be divorced from colonialism. We see now that Naeem (2004) articulates a very narrow Eurocentric conception of modernity, because for him modernity and its values like rationalism emerge from the European Renaissance, as though European history is an internally coherent cultural system and historical experience. For example, Thanvi claimed in al-Intibaahaat that just because you cannot prove something exists, that does not mean it is not in existence (cited in Naeem, 2004: 98). If Thanvi is critiquing the positivist foundation to certain scientic assumptions through engagement with those principles from within the modern world system itself, is he really just refuting modernity? Dussel (1998) identies that thinking of Thanvis discourse as embedded within the modern world system, but providing an alternative and critical analysis of certain interpretations of concepts universalised as standing in for modernity, is more fruitful. It is problematic to assume that questioning the centrality of observation in proving that something exists simply means that one refutes science, rationalism and modernity. This approach xes what these concepts mean to a particular mode of being modern, but it misses how Thanvi might be critiquing positivism as a requisite for the concepts of science, rationalism and modernity. Another example can be found in Thanvis discussion of time in al-Intibaahaat. Thanvi discusses the notion that time is created and thus argues for the temporality of matter because to say time is eternal is to attack the oneness (tawhid ) of God (Naeem, 2004: 103). This is because only God can be eternal. For Naeem, this is evidence that Thanvi refutes modernity because he cannot conceptualise modern time. I argue that Thanvi is commenting on the different modalities of thinking time (European and sharia-inspired, for example) being articulated in India at the time. Indeed Thanvi juxtaposes these two conceptualisations of time and argues that European claims of time as eternal contradict the sharia. He thus illustrates a position not outside of modernity by arguing with notions of time being espoused as universal within a colonial mission. Naeem (2004), then, assumes that only European conceptions of time can be modern and implicitly claims that to use the religious idiom to ground discussions of time is inherently anti-modern. This assumption is further problematised through an analysis of the Bahishti Zewar. Though the text is largely grounded in religious idiom, always citing the sharia, it is a manual for appropriate conduct and household management that also deploys certain tropes not found in classic Islamic jurisprudential sources. I nd it difcult to conceptualise this text as a bastion for traditionalism, as Burke (1994) and Naeem (2004) do. For instance, Book Tens interest in household management (it even contains a section on how to make soap) and making women responsible for South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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themselves and for the well-being of their families is not entirely dissimilar to reform movements occurring in Europe and elsewhere that one often refers to as modernising movements (Abu-Lughod, 1998). Indeed, the idea that women are obligated to do housework is not supported anywhere in recorded classical Islamic jurisprudence, so that the wife is under no duty to do any housework (al-Hibri, 2000: 63). When Thanvi (1999: 253) claims that [w]hen a child is born it is essential for the mother to suckle the baby, this may be a commonsensical assumption, but Al-Hibri (2000) again nds that nowhere in classical jurisprudence is this claim supported. Ali (2005) claims that this does not signify a privileged position for women, but instead reveals that normative Islamic juridical frameworks conceptualise marriage primarily in terms of an exchange, involving sexual access to a woman for a dower (mahr). Another example is found in Thanvis discussion on how to sew and prepare certain basic food recipes (in Book One and Book Ten). As al-Hibri (2000) outlines, the responsibility for household management is quite novel and cannot be considered normative in classical Sunni qh. Instead, the minute management of the household and the training of womens bodily comportments to this end can nd many parallels in a modern Victorian mode of the conjugal family being deployed in colonial situations, as Ali (2005) and Abu-Lughod (1998) indicate. When Thanvi cites the shariah to legitimise his type of conjugality, it is almost as though the shariah becomes the vector through which modern management can inltrate womens actions and the home. This citing of the shariah means, then, that Thanvi is not simply re-articulating types of familial and womanly conduct as recognised by Victorian colonial discourses with a stitched-on Islamic grammar. Manis (1989) discussion on how debates on tradition and modernity during colonisation could not help but appropriate similar lexicons is helpful to make sense of this debate. She claims that the conceptions of tradition as deployed in debates about sati cannot be divorced from colonial discourse. To her, tradition was being reconstituted under colonial rule, so that Brahmanical scripture and women became interlocking factors for its re-articulations. Women furthermore became emblematic of tradition, so that reworking of tradition occurred through debates about women. Debates surrounding sati, including Hindu reformist, Brahmanical and colonial elements, were not interested in the well-being of women, but were actually about what constituted authentic tradition (Mani, 1989: 90) and were thus representations of women as tradition (Mani, 1989: 91, italics in the original). The debates around proper Islamic conduct for women that preoccupied Deobandi and other reformist thinkers are not entirely different from the situation Mani (1989) describes in working out the very notion of tradition. This also problematises the notion that tradition exists as an unchanging entity that can be cited at will or may be used to refute modernity. But there are important differences between Manis analysis and Thanvis animation of women. In the Bahishti Zewar, Thanvi is in fact speaking to women. Their actions are the objects of his project; training them will bring back a state of authentic Islamic subjecthood and will give birth to a pious self

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to remedy an ailing community. Thanvi is acting on an object to produce the desired subject; his text is about womens actions. Women are not merely the ground on which the idea of tradition can be worked out. Thanvis interpretation of the shariah has already provided a standard of correct tradition; the task now is to actualise it through womens actions. I point in this regard specically to Book Six, which focuses on educating women on which customs are problematic and which are sanguine to the production of a pious self and a reformed community. Book Six produces a gradient of right and wrong customs, dening which bring good, are inconsequential or are sinful; indeed he provides a calculus for deciding how sinful they are. Thanvi is interested in explaining which traditions that women are already known to articulate are acceptable or not according to the shariah. He cites the authority of the sharia (mostly the Quran and hadith and less often qh) to legitimise his injunctions on how women are to behave according to his notion of authentic religious tradition. Thus, reading prayer facing a grave is deemed an incorrect tradition that women are known to articulate. Womens actions are thus the object, and constitute the material through which the desired subject (a pious self ) can be cultivated. Women are necessary to actualise his notion of tradition through their actions; they are not merely the ground on which what is authentic tradition and what is not may be worked out. Through training womens actions, educating them along Thanvis denition of correct behaviour, one may actualise the pious self. Mani (1989: 90) claims that all sides in the sati debate equated tradition with scripture, which is an effect of colonial discourse. The Deobandi movement as a scriptualist movement concerned with how behaviour relates to scriptural injunctions (Masud, 2000; Metcalf, 1982) seems to conrm Manis notion. But if we think of how the ulema had always been interested in interpreting and applying canonical text, we need to rene our analyses of how scripture is being cited in a particular way by Thanvi. We also need to consider how colonial administration had transformed the structures of religious authority. Thus the ulema, who turned away from the state and from public institutions they were once embedded in, had to deploy texts to a larger population and focus on reforming private selves. As Devji (1991) and Robinson (1993) mention, texts on religious scripture were more widely circulated because the structures that had supported the ulemas public authority as specialists in scriptural analysis had been altered. Manis (1989) discussion problematises the idea that concepts like tradition and modernity have an a priori existence not subject to historical relations. This helps us challenge the notion that Thanvi was simply refuting modernity and endorsing tradition by seeing how Thanvi was using the shariah in a way dependent on newly transformed structures of religious authority to actualise his notion of authentic tradition in the actions of Muslim women. As outlined earlier, the seminary he was associated with itself depended on these relations for its own production, and was organised around South Asia Research Vol. 30 (3): 275298

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a type of bureaucratic and pedagogic structure not common to the madrassahs that predated it. It thus becomes difcult not to think of Thanvi as articulating a type of modernity, even though he cites religious tradition. Chatterjees (1993) discussion of how the private realm was produced as a space of sovereignty for anti-colonial nationalism has been mentioned already. His work is also relevant in how we may think of new types of modern community. Chatterjee makes it clear that there can be alternative modalities of modern organisation, which can help us think of Thanvis work as also imagining new types of personhood leading to a transformed community. Considering the Indian anti-colonial nationalist movement, Chatterjee (1993) identies specic areas within the inner sphere that were transformed. In terms of the family, for example, a new patriarchy was produced that was distinct from traditional patriarchy, while still describing itself also as distinct from the western family. Furthermore, the popular question of how must women behave in these changing times (Chatterjee, 1993: 140) is answered by producing womens lives as organised around married life that now stands for conjugal love, and thus happiness (Chatterjee, 1993: 146). Thus there is a desire to form new women as signs of both the nation and its seless spirit (Chatterjee, 1993: 131). Though Thanvi is not interested in advocating state sovereignty for Muslims or a state sponsoring Muslim modes of being, Chatterjees discussion reveals that Thanvi shared with nationalists an interest in producing new women or remaking women (Abu-Lughod, 1998) as a way of imagining different forms of modern community. To assume that because Thanvi is citing religious tradition he is unable to imagine modern community is to assume tradition can actually be locked into the past, and evoking tradition cannot itself be a way to produce new modes of being. Instead, this discussion on the production of the Deobandi movement reveals how Thanvis discourse was rife with modernist concerns around remaking women and reforming selves, while also grounding itself in religious idiom. Ultimately, then, the idea of reforming women and making them sites of instruction who can improve the health of their communities is hardly just a traditionalist response, simply because it cites religious authority, here the sharia, through Quran, hadith and jurisprudential qh texts. Perhaps, then, we can consider Thanvi articulating a modality of modernity, with a corresponding mode of family and gendered subjectivity that actually depends on citing traditional authority. This could be referred to as shariatic modernity. Thus the pious self which is produced through articulating the right type of reiterated action is not a type of self produced through traditionalist dreams or rigid adherence to tradition. Indeed it is dynamic, offering the means for enactment and reiteration of the right type of ritual tradition, of meticulous attention to self-conduct and regulating styles of reecting on the self. It is actually a particular attempt to imagine an alternatively modern form of self and community. If we assume that modernising reform must necessarily be linked with secular ethos, then this notion of shariatic modernity becomes quite absurd, it becomes a forbidden modern (Gle, 1996). It depends of course also on what is meant by secular. If, on

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the other hand, we can consider the citation of religious discourse as itself necessary to imagining new types of personhood and communities, then perhaps the concept of shariatic modernity has analytical power and much more relevance than current scholarship recognises.

Conclusion: The Bahishti Zewar and Imagining a Type of Self

Though I began by thinking of the Bahishti Zewar in terms of how a subject is trained to know which path is right, and how to move the body to make sure this right path is followed, the study ultimately focused on how this particular text emerged out of a reform movement produced by a Muslim thinker associated with it. The rationale was rst to provide deeper insights into the context for the manual-like Bahishti Zewar to both emerge and gain its currency as a guidebook for Muslim women, and second to challenge the idea that Thanvi was refuting modernity. The irony is that the text emerged out of a situation rife with transformation and contending discourses within a colonial eld, but gained its authority by using religious idiom to claim the type of self imagined as always having been correctly comported and receptive of Divine Will. I have thus ultimately imagined Thanvi articulating a shariatic modernity. Let us then think again of the body in the couplets cited at the beginning of the article. The body trying to comport itself to walk the right path in the couplet then takes on a specic meaning. It is a body walking a path produced through certain historical relations, but a path that is the means to actualising a particular type of self, and also its product, because as a product it is a path walked on properly. This can aptly symbolise how the actions a body takes are both the character of and the means of becoming pious (Mahmood, 2006). Though the pious self as one who is receptive to Divine Will is something constant in many Islamic discourses long predating Thanvi, his particular technologies for walking the right kind of path by cultivating the body with the right kinds of trained actions cannot be divorced from the history I have tried to map out above. Thus the anklet-less foot comported in a way that it will not stray signals the imagining of a type of pious-self that has been rightly cultivated. Though the twinkling of anklets often betrays the coming of a particularly adorned body from afar, the coming of the pious body envisaged by Thanvi is signalled by the very absence of adornment. The sixth couplet of the opening poem of the Bahishti Zewar claries this scenario for us. Indeed, the pious self is the cultivated product of reiterated work, and thus a more precious adornment in herself than gold, silver and other embellishments could provide:
sone chaandi ki chamak bas dekhne ki baat hai/ chaar din ki chaandni aur phir andheri raat// The twinkling of gold and silver is but a pretty sight, A few ickers of moonlight and then eternal darkness.

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There is no rational reason why such adornment, which takes on a mental and psychological dimension rather than physically manifest signs of commitment to sharia, could not be seen as both traditional and modern. Hence the suggested notion of shariatic modernity makes deep sense in the present discussion. This concept also requires further analysis in current debates about how Muslims all over the world are expected to combine elements of tradition and modernity to construct a sustainable and sharia-compliant equilibrium in our postmodern times, yet without giving rise to religious diktat.

Notes
1. Usamah Yasin Ansari (19862008) was tragically killed in a car accident in April 2008 and this posthumous article was submitted by Michael Nijhawan of York University, his supervisor. Usamah had completed this text for publication in draft before his untimely death. Two graduate students, Kamal Arora and Saydia Kamal, in collaboration with the authors academic supervisor, made only minor editorial changes of purely stylistic and bibliographical nature to produce the present text. 2. An online advertisement for an English translation of the text implies that this book is still given as a wedding gift and also reveals that the internet has now taken up the task of disseminating the text globally: When Moulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi (r.a.) saw how uneducated the Muslim girls and women were, he decided to write this classic book on Fiqh & Masail (jurisprudence & regulations). The tradition is still holding on in the Indo-Pak to give this comprehensive handbook as a gift to a new bride. So, while her new life in a new family begins, she knows about the Islamic traditions, regulations and rituals. Women and men should get their own copy of this book. To have a look from what topics it ranges, here you can read it online (True Life Press, 2007). Mahmood (2006: 23) discusses how in the womens mosque movement in Cairo, the veil expresses modesty but is also the means by which modesty can be inculcated. A clear relationship is drawn by the movements participants between the norm (modesty) and the bodily form it will take (the veil). Ultimately, the body with a veil (the veiled body) becomes the necessary and reiterated means by which the norm of modesty is created and expressed. Women were concerned with desire for the proper realisation of the norm through the accumulation of reiterative acts. While Mahmood discusses a situation of Muslim women organising their own appropriation of religious texts to decide what kinds of techniques are sanguine to cultivation of the right kind of self, Thanvis text seeks to educate women on how to be able to train themselves through the techniques he outlines. The commentary on Book Nine in Vanzan (2000) has also been consulted. There are similar texts in Hindi and other South Asian languages that offer advice to newly married women or young girls on how to be a dutiful Hindu individual. This evokes Foucaults (1997: 242) discussion on the development of disciplinary technologies of power that centre on the body, shifting to a biopolitical emphasis on managing and optimising the species: from man-as-body to man-as-species (Foucault, 1997: 243). This emphasis involves wishing to take control over biological processes, to produce not

3.

4. 5. 6.

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7.

8. 9. 10.

only disciplined individualised and normalised bodies, but a population that is regularised and has optimised biological processes. Though Thanvi does not depend on a notion of population that would be taken up in the types of governmentality Foucault discusses and which would involve scientic discourses and public institutions, we see a similar concern for the health of a community as related to certain practices of hygiene and health. Indeed, Book Nine provides a nexus for both disciplinary and biopolitical concerns, being interested in the populations health by producing women whose own disciplined hygiene and family management will keep the communitys health safe. This ts well with Foucaults (1997: 251) discussion of medicine as a power-knowledge that can be applied to both the body and the population, having both disciplinary effects and regulatory effects. How Thanvi is articulating a type of medicine in this way, but through a religious idiom, goes beyond the scope of this article. It is signicant that Metcalf uses this particular word. Indeed it has been a struggle for me to unravel meanings embedded within particular Books because it is so difcult to identify Thanvis rationale in putting certain concepts together. For instance, as the title reveals, Book Seven is about etiquette and character and yet the last subsection is headed Important Issues Relating to the Day of Judgement (khas qayamat ke din ka zikr). One important act of reading, then, is not to think that Thanvi has no rationale in putting these items together, and merely produces a hodgepodge. Rather, considering that a mode of organising concepts different than ones we are used to recognising might allow us rst to realise that there are different logics when organising concepts, especially relating to religious conduct, and second, to be enriched by trying to unravel these differences. Indeed Mahmood (2006), discussing the architecture of the pious body produced in a particular Islamic revival movement, notes how the sequence of reiterating particular types of acts becomes important in how they are sedimented, and how the pious bodys production is imagined. Thanvis organisation of his concepts, then, might be relevant to the type of ethical formation he is imagining. A seeming hodgepodge could then actually have important signicance in how a particular regime of reiterated practice is to be organised. This is why I have not used Mohamedys translation very often (Thanvi, 1999), because he rearranges the text to follow what he claims is a more relevant thematic organisation for contemporary life. Thus matters relating to the Day of Judgment and etiquette would be housed in very different sections. Metcalf (1982) denes a qasbah (or kasbah) as a distinct type of town headed by elite Muslim families and with large Muslim populations. This implicates a class dynamic. Indeed those women who were already working outside the house are not worried about. Asad (2003) has discussed a similar situation with the privatisation of religious law in Egypt. He argues that since processes of secularisation articulated by colonial authorities are premised on the assumption that belief cannot be coerced, religion should be regarded by the political authorities with indifference as long as it remains within the private domain (Asad, 2003: 205). He traces certain social spaces that emerged within colonial dynamics in which secularism could be cultivated, which included the narrowing of the jurisdiction of the sharia (Asad, 2003: 208). This was one of the processes through which secularism could become thinkable in India. As Khan (2006) discusses, codication of the sharia into the Muslim Personal Law limited to the private realm froze certain Islamic juridical

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processes with ongoing disastrous effects on women. Thus the Bahishti Zewar must also be considered within these transformed structures of religious authority. 11. Sheikhs are one of the four ashraf (noble) classes of Muslims in north India who trace their lineage outside of India. The others are Syed, Mughal and Pathan. Farouqi refers to the particular biradiri (or brotherhood) that comprises each class. 12. The type of Urdu utilised in this text is quite distinct from the vernacular form used in the Bahishti Zewar. Its technical language makes heavy use of Persian words, which conrms that the Bahishti Zewar was produced for a wider readership, not limited to the ulema.

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Usamah Yasin Ansari (19862008) was a graduate student in the Sociology programme at York University, Toronto. Having completed his MA in Sociology, he had been accepted into the PhD programme in Religious Studies at the University of Toronto when he tragically passed away. At his young age, Usamah was an extraordinarily gifted scholar and poet. His work has been published in journals such as South Asia: A Journal of South Asian Studies and Critical Studies in Media and Communication. Usamahs research interests evolved around the performativity of the body, analysed on the basis of different colonial and postcolonial texts. Aside from examining popular culture, he focused on Urdu vernacular literature, investigating how pious selves are cultivated through religious advice literature for Muslim women. Contact address: Dr. Michael Nijhawan, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, 2146 Vari Hall, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J1PS, Canada. [e-mail: nijhawan@yorku.ca]

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