Musli m Cosmopolita n ism

i n the Age of Empir e

Muslim
Cosmopolitanism

in the
Age of Empire

Seema Alavi

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2015

Copyright 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alavi, Seema.
Muslim cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire / Seema Alavi.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-73533-0
1. CosmopolitanismIslamic countries. 2. CosmopolitanismIndia.I. Title.
JZ1308.A4115 2015
297.092'254dc23 2014030725

For my parents, Roshan and Shariq Alavi

Con t e n t s

Preface ix
Map: Muslim networks in the nineteenth century xiii

Introduction

1 Muslim Reformists and the Transition to English Rule

32

2 The Making of the Indian Arab and the Tale of Sayyid Fadl 93
3 Rahmatullah Kairanwi and the Muslim Cosmopolis

169

4 Haji Imdadullah Makki in Mecca

222

5 Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan and the Muslim Cosmopolis

267

6 Maulana Jafer Thanesri and the Muslim Ecumene

331

Conclusion

368

Abbreviations 409
Notes 411
Acknowledgments 473
Index 475

Pr e fac e

I first became familiar with the Arabic script as a child in the north
Indian city of Lucknow. Although I could not read Arabic, I learned
to read the script, because I was taught to read the Koran by rote.
My teacher was a maulvi who came home every morning to read the
Koran with me. In the evenings I studied Persian and Urdu, written
in the nastaliq script, from my grandmother. My afternoons were
spent in the local Catholic missionary school, where I learned
English from an Irish nun.
Lucknow is the modern capital of the Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh. Indians today associate Lucknow with the courtly culture
of Awadh. The city, which is situated by the River Gomti and boasts
elegant architecture from a past era, also played an important role in
the violence that ensued during the uprising of 1857, an important
event that shaped the lives of the men whose stories I will draw on
in the following pages. Hindi, written in the devanagari script, is the
state language in Uttar Pradesh, and I learned that too. As I moved
from one culture to another, from the sounds and cadences of one
language to another, from the shapes of one writing system to
another, in the course of a single day there seemed to be no apparent
contradictions. I registered the differences. But they were collectively an integral part of my little world.

ix

PREFAC E

One of my childhood frustrations was that I could never make my

cultural world fit into the territorial and political contours of nationstates as marked in geographical maps. My childhood world was
both wildly cosmopolitan and disappointingly parochial. Although
I was multilingual, my ability to move from one place to another
was rather limited. I was no globe-trotting jetsetternor, really,
were most Indians during the 1960s, a time when international
tourism was within the reach only of the elite few. Was life experienced similarly by Indian Muslims in an earlier time?
This book is an attempt to understand the cultural world of Indian
Muslims in the Age of Empire. I have tried to place Indian Muslims
in the interconnected and vast Asian continent that was both carved
up and sewn together by the Western Empire. Moving beyond bina
ries such as nationalism and imperialism, the Muslim umma and the
European empire, Islam and Christianity, or simply the East and
the West, I want to show how the cultural universe of Muslims was
actually shaped. British, Ottoman, and imperial networks encouraged the creation of a pan-Islamic global public sphere. I call this
the new Muslim cosmopolis. Forged at the crossroad of empires, the
Muslim cosmopolis had a scripture-oriented core and a politically
reformist shell inspired by Ottoman tanzimatthe administrative
and constitutional reforms introduced between 1839 and 1876 to
modernize the empire. European imperial toolssteamships, the
telegraph, the printing pressmade the quick circulation of ideas
within the Muslim cosmopolis possible.
At the heart of the imperial assemblage that framed Indian
Muslim lives stood the key figurethe individual. In this book, I
have consciously shifted our focus away from hazy state policies and
administrations and foregrounded the individual. The trajectories
of the five lives we will follow reveal that pan-Islamism depended
more on imperial networks than on the caliph. The book traces
pan-Islamic networks forged by migrs who made use of earlier
merchant and Naqshbandi Sufi routes that linked the Ottoman
world to Mughal India. It shows how these early modern Muslim
connections intensified due to the support they received from
European empires. The dependence on the British and Ottoman
Empires lent an intellectually and politically reformist hue to this
x

PREFAC E

books Naqshbandi Sufi protagonists. The book elaborates on the

successes of individuals as they made imperial borders porous in an
age when international law hardened political boundaries. In the
chapters that follow, the spotlight is on the underbelly of empires
where Muslim cosmopolitans were most active. From this unusual
location, Indian Muslims questioned the straitjackets of religious
and territorial identities that British rule tried to impose upon them.
At the same time, individual actors exploited British imperial networks to build pan-Islamic connections that would one day outlast
the empire itself.
What did it mean for Indian Muslims to be part of this new global
Muslim community? This is a question that is rarely answered in
the current literature, which tends to emphasize an unending clash
between nationalism and pan-Islamism in Muslim South Asia.
Those who did not participate in the overdetermined clash, such as
the five Muslim men whose careers I follow, fell off the pages of history. History did not seem to be able to make sense of such characters. This, then, is the story of what happens offstage, off the page,
where a new Muslim network was born in the aftermath of 1857
buttressed by European empires, yet resolutely opposed to them.

xi

RR

RED

SEA

1600

BAY
OF
B E NG A L
Andaman
Islands

O C E A N

Haiderabad

I N D I A N

KERALA/
MALABAR

ARABIAN
SEA

NORTH-WEST
FRONTIER
Sittana
Lahore
Deoband
PUNJAB
Ambala
Muzaffarnagar
Meerut
Delhi
Aligarh AWADH
Agra
SINDH
Rae Bareilly
Hyderabad
Karachi
Patna
Bhopal
Calcutta
Surat
Bombay

C
AFGHANISTAN

ARAL
SEA

Muslim networks in the nineteenth century

Kilometres

800

Provinces

DHOFAR

Gulf of Aden

YEMEN

LF

Muscat

GU

P E R S I A

Baghdad

Aden

Mecca

Jeddah

Medina

Damascus

SY R I A

SIA

BLACK
SEA

SEA OF
MARMARA

A
Lebanon

SE

SUDAN

Cairo

Istanbul

BOSPHORUS
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A
CASPIAN S
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IT

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P A C I F I C
O C E A N

I N D O N E S I A

S EA O F
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I n t roduc t ion

Soon after the mutiny-rebellion of 1857 that shook British rule in

India, Haji Imdadullah Makki, the Muslim holy man from north
India, took refuge in the house of his disciple Rai Abdullah Khan, a
zamindar in the Ambala district. Wanted for his role in the 1857
unrest, he was on the run from the British police, who were hot on
his trail with an arrest warrant. As he sat hiding in a small shed next
to Rai Sahibs horse stable, the police zeroed in on him. On the pretext of buying a horse, they ordered that they be let into the stable
and the adjoining shed. Rai Sahib shuddered as he envisaged the
penal consequences he would face if the holy man were discovered
in his house. But when the door was unlocked, all that the police
found there were a prayer mat spread out on the bed and a water pot
with water for drinking and ablutions. There was no trace of Haji
Imdadullah Makki. Rai Sahib was visibly moved by this supernatural deed of his revered guest. The police made some inquiries and
left, apologizing for the inconvenience they had caused Rai Sahib.
When a much-relieved Rai Sahib reentered the shed, he found Haji
Imdadullah sitting on his prayer mat, completing the last recitation
of his prayers.1
A few days after this incident, Imdadullah bid a tearful adieu to
his disciples and fellow scholars and started on his journey to Mecca,
1

INTRODUC TION

where he wanted to seek permanent refuge. From the Punjab, via

Pak Patan, Hyderabad, and Sindh, in western India, he reached the
port of Karachi. Here he boarded a ship to escape to Mecca.2
In the 1860s, his fellow scholar Maulana Jaffer Thanesri, also
convicted of supplying money and men to the 1857 rebels, was not
as lucky. He was convicted, arrested, and deported to the penal
colony in the Andaman Islands. He described his journey to the
Andamans as follows:
After two days we were made to board a pedal boat on the river
Sindhu, 5 Kos from Multan. We sat in rows with our shackles
and handcuffs...and reached Kotarsi. From here we boarded
a train to Karachi...After a week in Karachi we got into a
sailing boat called Baglah to go to Bombay. The first thing that
struck us was the sea and a range of ships.3
According to Thanesri, the port at Bombay was like a jungle of
ships.4 He noted:
The ship that carted us from Bombay to the Andamans was
owned by the English...its entire staff of orderlies and officers were white. And none of them understood Hindustani.
The only interlocutor was one Anglophone convict called
Motilal Babu. The English spoke only to him. I did not understand a word of English. There were separate diets for the
Muslims, Hindus and Punjabis. There was dry fish, rice and
lentil for the Muslims, gram for the Hindus, and wheat bread
for the Punjabis.5
His excitement on seeing the sea and myriad ships at the Bombay
port became one of the most electrifying moments of his journey.
Thanesri was surprised to find that the ship had Muslim orderlies.
He was not at all surprised when in his words, They showered us
with utmost hospitality when they realized that we were religious
scholars.6
At about the same time, a very revered scholar, Maulana
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, similarly hounded by the police for his 1857
2

INTRODUC TION

anti-British activities, made a successful escape to Mecca. He, too,

had an arrest warrant issued for him, and an award of Rs.1,000 was
offered for anyone who gave information about him.7 He disguised
himself, changed his name, and left on foot from his home in
Kairana, near Meerut, for Delhi and then proceeded to Surat. From
there he took a sailing boat to Jeddah. His huge estate in Kairana,
where both his family and workers lived, was confiscated by the
British and put up for auction.
The British clampdown on Muslim men of religion after the 1857
mutiny-rebellion saw many fugitives like Imdadullah Makki,
Thanesri, and Kairanwi sail across the Indian Ocean and the Bay of
Bengal to escape the arm of British law. Since the 1830s, the port
city of Bombay had become a popular gateway to Mecca, Cairo, and
Istanbul for scores of Muslim notables and religious scholars. As
these men fled India following the northwest frontier disturbances
that had made the British suspicious of men of religion, ships from
Bombay carted them across the Indian Ocean to Ottoman cities.8 In
the decades that followed 1857, many fugitive scholars with arrest
warrants avoided Bombay for fear of being caught and instead
boarded ship from Surat. But those that did visit Bombay were mesmerized by its charm. Its sailing ships excited them, and the sheer
scale and number of docked ships waiting to depart intimidated
them, invoking the metaphor of the jungle. Additionally, they were
worried about the direction of the wind, which determined whether
these ships would even be able to sail across the Indian Ocean.9 On
board, the Muslim orderlies of the English ship owners introduced
them to the new dynamics of the British-Indian relationship.
Crossing the seas was hazardous as well as enchanting. It transformed lives for good. The ships that carted these Muslim holy men
and religious migrs offered them the material experience of travel
in the Age of Empire. Sea journeys afforded them access to the
long-standing mercantile networks between the Ottoman and
British Empires. These networks, though increasingly controlled by
the diplomatic efforts of legal and political experts, intersected with
the web of brokers, agents, entrepreneurs, pilgrims, and holy men,
as well as the families of religious scholars. The journey across the
Indian Ocean familiarized them also with imperial fault lines,
3

INTRODUC TION

particularly as enacted in anti-British protests in Jeddah and Cairo,

and also with Islamic intellectual hubs in the Mediterranean world,
all of which they tapped to further their agendas and widen their
political vision.
The fact that the imperial networks that connected British India
with Ottoman cities facilitated much of this port life made the ship
itself the conduit to the new and exciting world that was being forged
between empires. Its importance as a critical connector that lent a
special agency to the individual was heightened by the conjunctural
moment at the end of the centurya moment that brought existing
commercial links between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean
worlds in close correspondence with shared anti-British sentiments,
and at the same time elicited a call for individual moral reform to
meet the challenges of the age.
The easy mingling of the seafaring cultures and the religious,
economic, and political networks that were specially visible at harbors and ports is an apt metaphor for the cosmopolitanism that each
of the migrs that this book discusses embodieseach in his own
specific way. Harbors and ports from where migrs departed (like
Bombay, Surat, and Karachi on the western coast of India) and cities
where they relocated (Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul) are the obvious
sites of this conjuncture. Within India, the penal colony at the
Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, where the arrested convict migrs were lodged, constituted the eastern, sea-facing site of
their cosmopolis; and the rugged northwestern frontier bordering
Afghanistan, where many of them collected to strategize, constituted its nonseafaring end. It is across these sites that scholar fugitives and unlucky convicts constructed a vast cosmopolis, both
within India and in the interstices of the British and the Ottoman
Empires. This book explores the specific kind of cosmopolitan sensibility that defined this new cosmopolis, which was itself sustained
by international trade and the economic networks that stretched
across the Indian Ocean.
It details the making of this sensibility via the stories of five Indian
Muslim men of religion who were on the proverbial wrong side of
the 1857 mutiny-rebellion against British rule in India. These
included a famous Moplah rebel of Arab origin and Sufi background
4

INTRODUC TION

in the Malabar region of south India accused of murder and rioting

in the 1852 Moplah revolt; two clerics known for their provocative
public debates with Christian missionaries on matters of religion;
the nawab of the princely state of Bhopal, accused of writing seditious religious literature; and a rabble-rouser reformist activist from
the Punjab. Condemned as outlaws or fanatics by the administration, they escaped from India and moved across the Indian Ocean
world. Once outside the borders of British India, their stories fell off
the pages of South Asian history. This book picks up where other
stories end and shows how the 1857 experience moved across empires
via refugees and migrs. It picks up their trail as they dispersed and
networked across various imperial fault lines in the decades that followed 1857.
It analyzes their journeys as they traveled out of India, either literally or in their imagination, and paused at the Asian intersections
of nineteenth-century empires. The constellation of the British and
Ottoman Empires is viewed as an imperial assemblage, and it provides the context within which to study Muslim interconnectedness
as forged by these migrs. Bringing together their biographies,
written reflections, journeys, images of the port city and of their
lives on the ship, intellectual networks, and imperial politics, the
book highlights the ways in which runaways carved out a Muslim
cosmopolitanism at the cusp of the British and Ottoman Empires.
This cosmopolitanism was partly traditional in that it derived
from the Korans precepts and from the prescriptions of the Hadith
(Traditions of the Prophet), it invoked the Islamic principle of consensus to reconcile cultural differences among Muslims, and it positioned itself in the Islamicate centers of Cairo and Istanbul and in
the Islamic heartland of Mecca. However, this cosmopolitanism was
also new because it built on an Ottoman imperial vision as articulated in the global aspirations of Caliphs Abd-al Aziz (r. 18611876)
and Abd-al Hamid II (r. 18761909), who were the patrons of many
of these Indian migrs. And it used the printing press and Ottoman
intellectual energy as deployed by the reformist bureaucrats and
moderate ulema in response to the political and financial crisis faced
by the empire. The reformists advocated political and moral reform
in sync with contemporary ideas of science, reason, and rationality.
5

INTRODUC TION

These men, ousted from the core of the empire by Abd-al Hamid II,
who had little patience with them, located themselves in its Arab
provinces, where most Indian migrs landed. At the same time,
Muslim cosmopolitanism also remained dependent on British imperial webs, transportation systems, and modes of communication and
information dissemination. This transimperial cosmopolitanism
was articulated as a cultural and civilizational view: a universalist
Muslim public conduct based on consensus in matters of belief,
ritual, and forms of devotion.10
This cosmopolitanism was unique because it conceptualized the
Muslim cosmopolis as an intellectual and civilizational zone that
transcended political borders, territorial confines, and cultural particularities. And yet its protagonists were very aware of its imperial
framing. They sought to encompass the imperial assemblage
within their capacious global cosmopolis. Self-driven and career
oriented, its creators were individuals who were well aware of its
specific socioeconomic dependence on imperial networks and the
imperially framed commercial world that sustained them.
This cosmopolitanism was neither pan-Islamic in a caliph-centric
way nor entirely anti-British. Its protagonists were as much a part of
the Ottoman liberal reformist circles as they were aware of their
dependence on imperial networks. Indeed, it was the entanglement
of the Muslim cosmopolis and world empires that made this cosmopolitanism attractive to Caliph Abd-al Hamid II, who used it as the
bedrock of his pan-Islamism. It was neither inspired by Western
Enlightenment, nor was it a component of secular, colonial modernity. This was a cosmopolitanism of the age of empires that had its
own claim to a universalist ethics and even notions of hospitality
(pace Kant), but based on Islamic scripture and a tanzimat-inspired
notion of proper public conduct, and embedded in nineteenth-
century imperial politics and economic frames of reference. It at
once transcended imperial borders in unconventional ways and yet
was derived from them. Indeed, it did not reject entirely the territorial borders that continued to define the identity of its protagonists.
This is precisely why the twentieth-century nation-states that
altered both international commerce networks and recast the imperial terrain in new avatars offered a space where elements of this
6

INTRODUC TION

cosmopolitanism could linger, waiting for the right moment to

ignite. Indeed, it soon became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility that competed with the increasing power of the idea of the
nation in the period of high nationalism. Hence we may think of it
as the basis for or the prehistory of the idea of transnationalism in
the twentieth century.

The Indian Arab and the Muslim Cosmopolis

The book begins the story of its transimperial actors with the Arab
diaspora in India that emerged between the British and Ottoman
Empires and that contributed to the making of the Muslim cosmopolis. Labeled by the British as Indian Arabs, these individuals
carved out an ecumene between British and Ottoman societies,
exploiting to their advantage the imperial rivalries and fault lines
of the time. They forged intellectual and political webs between
empires and made imperial borders porous.
Diaspora studies centered on South and Southeast Asia have
looked at immigrants in these regions from Iran, Afghanistan, and
the Hadramawt area of the Arabian Peninsula. These wide-ranging
studies have enriched our understanding of the premodern trans-
Asian cosmopolitan world that was knitted together by merchants,
warriors, scholars, and Sufi saints. Identities were hybrid, fluid, multiple, and contingent on the specific dynamics of diaspora societies.11 Most diaspora scholars view the European colonization of host
societies as having fissured the premodern cosmopolitan world. As
colonial regimes ordered societies into a legal-political format,
the identities of immigrants were strained as they delinked from
their cultural matrix. They were increasingly defined in distinct
ethnic terms.12
But were immigrants in the nineteenth century mere pawns in
the hands of colonial powers that refashioned their host societies?
Did colonial categorizations and ethnic markings sever their wide
trans-Asian connections? Was an imposed indigenization from
above the only option for them? Or did they continue to operate in
the trans-Asian region but in new roles as transcultural diplomats,
7

INTRODUC TION

brokers, and people who used their new ethnic marking to further
their own ambitions?
This book looks at some of these issues as it tracks down Muslim
men of Arabic extraction or orientation, located in India, for whom
the Indian government constructed the novel category of Indian
Arabs. At one level, this categorization was a forced indigenization
from above. It marked their difference from Indian society in terms
of their ethnic uniqueness. Itinerant Arabs were suspect in British
India for various reasons: they allegedly preached a reformist form
of conservative Islam; they were seen as Ottoman subjects; and most
important, they maintained links with the world outside, nurtured
global aspirations, and did not correspond neatly to the legal definition of the Indian subject. Indian Arabs unmindful of British
attempts to territorially root them continued their forays outside
India, which they in no way viewed as contravening their subject
status within India. Indeed, they considered their unique trans-
Asiatic legacy emblematic of the connected histories of the British
and Ottoman societies.
The case study of Sayyid Fadl, a fugitive from the Malabar region
of south India, shows how in the late nineteenth century these
Indian Arabs used the new imperial networksthe transportation
and communication highwaysand tapped into imperial rivalries
to spread their own networks across Asia. They kept their scripturebased core intact and cannibalized the repertoire of modern
empires to carve out an ecumene that stretched across the British
and the Ottoman Empires. Far from being pawns or the unsuspecting victims of the forced indigenization of their British masters,
such men made careers using both the old and the new referents
that connected the Western empires in Asia. They maintained their
stake in the older kinship, trade, commerce, and information networks, which had from the premodern age knitted together the
political economies and cultures of the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean worlds. But they cleverly used the new imperial networks as well. The nineteenth-century trans-Asian rivalries between
Britain on the one hand and Russia, Persia, and the Ottomans on the
other proved particularly useful for them. They cashed in on the fear
psychoses of the British administration in India and used imperial
8

INTRODUC TION

fears and anxieties to further their careers. Also noteworthy was

their engagement with the new bargaining chips that functioned as
liaison points between empires: the office of the political resident
and that of the consul. The story of Sayyid Fadl shows how the use
of the new while holding on to the old allowed these men to subvert
British efforts to tame them. By the late nineteenth century, they
had spread their networks across Asia and had forged global links.
Their networks flourished because British colonial rule benefited
from them. The fact that these runaway Indian Arabs and
fanatics were British subjects gave the administration official
sanction to meddle in their trans-Asian affairs. At one level, British
interest in them was couched in the more genuine concern for the
activities of British subjects overseas. But the monitoring of their
activities and the intervention in their affairs also provided entry
points into the larger imperial politics that framed them. Particularly
significant was the issue of British interference in Ottoman rights to
sovereignty in the trans-Asian region. The British countered the
Ottoman claim to political sovereignty in the region by voicing
their concern for the Indian Muhammadan subjects located in
their territory. Their protection of the Indian Arabs went a long
way in denting the pan-Islamic undertones of Ottoman political
sovereignty.

Muslim Cosmopolitans on the Move

Chapter 1 lays out the intellectual environment in post-Mughal
India that made individuals migrate and become crucial connectors
in the imperial assemblage. It maps the specific intellectual context
that powered the movements of such migrs. Most of these men
traced their intellectual genealogies to the Delhi Naqshbandi Sufi
Shahwaliulla. They interpreted his eclecticism and compromise
between the Sufi Ibn-i-Arabis inclusive wahdat-ul-wajud (unity of
being) and Sirhindis conservative wahdat-ul-shahud (unity of existence) to refashion their lives. Many of them collected at the northwestern frontier and fashioned their activism in tandem with the
Sikh, Afghan, and Persian societies that they accessed with ease.
9

INTRODUC TION

The last of these multilingual gentlemen legatees of the Mughal

Empire aspired to careers outside Hindustan when the going got
tough for them in British India. They wished to forge Muslim unity
across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world so as to set up
an alternate cultural imperium that would challenge the Western
predominance in the region.
This global thrust was a consequence of the Mughal crisis and the
readjustment of the Mughal scholarly elite to British rule. What
facilitated their mobility was the legacy of global networks forged
during the thirteenth century by Naqshbandi Sufis, networks that
had in fact knitted together early modern empires. Mughal India
was very much integrated in these networks, which stretched across
Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Arab world in the
Indian Ocean area.13 Sufis and texts straddled the Indo-Persian and
the Ottoman cities with ease. In the fifteenth century, Abd ur
Rahman Jami of Herat (14141492), one of the finest commentators
on Ibn-i-Arabi, was widely read and popular in both the Ottoman
world as well as in India.14 His status as an honorary Ottoman in
the sixteenth century was confirmed when Taskoprizadet (d. 1561)
included him in his biographical compendium of Ottoman scholars.15 And evidence of his Indian following is indicated by the fact
that the Arabic translation of his Nafahat al-Uns was prepared by an
Indian Naqshbandi scholar, Taj al Din Zakariya Dehlavi (d. 1640).16
Indeed, by 1802, Khalid Naqshbandi, of Kurdistan in north Iraq,
who boasted of the influential madrasas and networks he had established throughout Ottoman society, visited the Delhi madrasa of
Shahwaliulla and studied with his son, Shah Abd-al Aziz.17 The significance of India in this global Naqshbandi network was again evident when Sulayman Saduddin translated Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani,
the Persian work of the Indian Naqshbandi sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi,
into Ottoman Turkish in 1751. Such movements of Sufi intellectuals
and texts underlined the intellectual ferment that welded together
early modern empires.
Naqshbandi global networks facilitated the mobility of Mughal
legatees in the aftermath of 1857. And Shahwaliullas legacy of consensus and compromise, in the context of a diverse Indian society,
became an asset in their relocation in Ottoman cities. Indeed, they
10

INTRODUC TION

exported their accretive Shahwaliulla tradition to the Mediterranean

world and wrote consensus literature with greater confidence from
the security of their new location. Indeed, cities like Istanbul, with
a tradition of producing consensus literature in the context of the
growth and social diversity that characterize urban centers, allowed
them to write uninhibitedly about the unity of the umma, or community. Their integration into the Mediterranean world was evident in the circulation of many printed Arabic and Ottoman Turkish
translations of Indian Naqshbandi literature originally written in
Persian. An Ottoman Turkish translation of Sirhindis Maktubat was
published in Istanbul in 1866, and Muhammad Murad al-Manzalawis
Arabic translation of the same text, Maktubat al-Durar al-Maknunat
al-Nafisa, was printed in the city in 1899.
Because they were multilingual gentlemen, the Indian migrs
were able to carve out an intellectual niche for themselves in the
Arabic-speaking Mediterranean world. They were proficient not just
in Mughal Persian, but in Arabic as well as in the north Indian vernacular Urdu. This gave them an edge over others in an age of
unprecedented mobility. It made it easy for the last of these gentlemen scholars to straddle the Indo-Persian Urdu-speaking societies and the Middle Eastern Arabic world with ease.
The books subsequent chapters use the biographies and written
reflections of people living and moving between empires to bring
the individual to the forefront of the discussion of the making of
Muslim cosmopolitanism. This archive also enables a rare insight
into the workings of imperialism. It reveals how official borders
were made porous by the initiative of individuals who used the
infrastructure of modern empires to intensify and make more pronounced the earlier Naqshbandi global connections. The hitherto
untold tales of fugitive mullahs and runaways as they negotiated
imperial fault lines and borders reveal the workings of imperial politics from belowan aspect that remains ignored in mere political
economy analyses of imperialism. Indeed, the book retells via individual tales the story of imperial politics and the making of a cosmopolitan sensibility across its assemblage.
Current scholarship on modern Indian social and cultural history
has moved beyond both a nation-state-centric colonial-nationalist
11

INTRODUC TION

frame of analysis and a metropolis-centric imperialist historiography.18 The influential subaltern school of South Asian history has
brought the nationalist frame closer to the local peasant societies,
and C. A. Bayly and other revisionist scholars have narrowed the
gaze on the interstices of the state and society to unravel the nuances
of British rule.19 In recent years, the history of modern India has
increasingly been of interest to empire studies. Historians of the
British Empire have brought the colony and the metropolis into the
same analytical frame and argued that colonizers and colonized
were mutually constituted.20 They have argued for a more complex
understanding of imperialism as it unfolded in Asia and Africa by
focusing on the webs of empire as they intersected across Britain
and its controlled territories.21 Imperial history has also focused on
the individual as the key connector between the multiple spatial
sites of empire. David Lambert and Alan Lester, Maya Jasanoff, and
Dane Kennedy have focused on imperial careers across empire,
bringing colonized spaces and the metropolis into the same analytical frame without privileging either.22 Others have highlighted
the potential of the biography to become the archive for writing
global history.23
And yet in the new imperial history of empire, despite the stress
on the spatial mobility of the individual and the salience of global
moments, the canvas remains the British Empire and its preoccupation with the tightening of its imperial borders, via land surveys,
scientific knowledge, cartography, consular webs, official postings,
unprecedented bureaucratization in governance practices, and documentation networks.24 This hegemonic frame of empire is accepted
as a fait accompli and shapes models of modernity, cosmopolitanism,
and global history.25 Indeed, the historiographical myopia is not only
geographical but also racial: the individuals with careers usually all
end up being Britonswith a few obvious exceptions.
This book shifts the focus away from the British territories and
puts the spotlight on the intersticesthe overlapping space between
British and Ottoman societies. It argues that the contours of global
history need to be redrawn at the porous intersection of the British
and Ottoman Empires. It questions empire-based global history
and puts the spotlight instead on a world shaped by networks forged
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by migrs who were beyond imperial control.26 It rewrites global

history by focusing on British subjects (rather than Britons) as key
individual players who by virtue of their roles at the imperial interstices are able to offer refreshing insights into the working of empires
from the inside. Indeed, the very careers of transimperial subjects
who straddled imperial regimes, either physically or even in their
imaginations, problematize selfhood and identity, political subjecthood, and religious affinities. Transimperial subjects who invoked
knowledge of their parent territory and used kin, religion, and
ethnic networks in host regimes were the critical connectors between
empires.27 They became part of imperial politics, exploited the
institutional overlaps in competing regimes, cashed in on political
rivalries, and shaped their own careers, marking borders where none
existed and undoing the established political and legal boundaries.
This larger politico-cultural and socioeconomic context between
empires is the canvas on which the role of transimperial subjects as
agents of change in the long history of imperialism stands out.
Chapters 2 to 6 foreground the individual in the connected histories of the Ottoman and British Empires, writing the story of imperialism from below.28 They narrate the stories of individual Muslim
careers so as to decenter both the European narrative of imperial
expansion as well as the Eurocentric way of studying cosmopolitanism as a constituent of colonial modernity and Enlightenment
ethics. Each of these chapters puts the spotlight on an individual
scholar: Sayyid Fadl, Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Maulana
Imdadullah Makki, Siddiq Hasan Khan, and Maulana Jafer Thanesri.
These men are the cosmopolitan actors of the bookmen who
moved across the imperial assemblages and used the imperial knowledge, strategies, and rivalries of the nineteenth century to their
advantage. They carved out a spiritual and civilizational space
between the British and the Ottoman Empires and projected it as
their cosmopolis. Here, they articulated a cosmopolitanism that was
in sync with the reformist and scientific spirit of the times. This was
a cosmopolitanism that forged widespread Muslim connectivity. It
derived both from British as well as Ottoman commercial, transportation, counselor, communication, and print networks. Indeed,
imperial networks offered the base on which earlier forms of Muslim
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connectivity and its repertoire of knowledge and communication

skills were easily grafted: diplomacy, kinship ties, and the writing of
commentaries on Islamic theological works and its sacred texts.
Their lives detailed here offer a fresh perspective on politics and
society in the high period of Indian nationalism and global imperialism. They draw our attention to a global history that does not
necessarily correspond to the contours of the British Empire.
While this connective-history methodology of looking at global
history is pioneering for the study of the Age of Empire, it is not
so novel for historians of the early modern world. Shifting the focus
away from Portuguese and Spanish imperial strides in the sixteenth
century, the Ottomanist Giancarlo Casale has argued that the
period was the turning point where Ottoman and Mughal global
aspirations and political maneuverings made the political history of
the century a wider-ambit world history.29 Others, like Cemal
Kafadar, critique the nationalist and simplistically ethnic Turkish
identity narratives of the early Ottoman Empire by locating early
modern Turkish self-representations in the elastic and competing
physical and cultural geographies of the Eastern Roman Empire
Rum. These shifting and competing notions of the lands of Rum
produced a layered identity for the Turks that mirrored the global
reach of their empire. It defied the later simplistic nationalist narratives of reified Turkish identity often produced in response to the
globalization drives of the twentieth century.30 Other early modernists have focused on the individual as a key connector who laid
out the contours of the global imperial gaze, made transimperial
connections possible, and produced layered cultural and ethnic
identities. Natalie Zemon Davis, for example, examines the writings
of al-Hasan al-Wazzan, the sixteenth-century North African traveler and diplomat from Fez who was captured and presented to Pope
Leo X in Italy by a Spanish pirate. Davis argues that al-Wazzans
work reflects his negotiation of two cultural worlds: he used techniques taken from the Arabic and Islamic repertoire and combined
them with European elements to carve out a niche for himself
between two rival imperia. In the process, he made simple ethnic
representations of his identity problematic.31 Muzaffar Alam and
Sanjay Subrahmanyam have argued that South Asian studies should
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focus similarly on connected histories as mediated by individuals

who traveled to India from the European, Iranian, Central Asian,
and Ottoman worlds, and vice versa.32 For Europeanists, the pioneering work of Natalie Rothman is significant as it makes a strong
critique of studying early modern European history without also
examining the crucial institutional, political, and cultural overlaps
with Europes border-sharing neighbor, the Ottoman Empire.33
And Mana Kia and Stefan Reichmuth have similarly pointed at
careers in the early modern Iranian world and at the case of the
eighteenth-century Arab intellectual Zabidi, respectively, to reflect
on the workings of an embracive non-European worldview that has
often been ignored in our predominantly British- and European-
centric global history map.34
For modern Indian history, it was Leila Fawaz and C.A. Bayly
who first offered the conceptual frame for studying nineteenth-
century identity formation and politics in the larger geopolitical
and sociocultural interstice of British and Ottoman imperial rivals.
They pioneered the idea of viewing the Indian Ocean and Medi
terranean interstice as the locale in which to study the wider history
of nationalisms in the Age of Empire. They focused on the imperial
networks of the steamship, the printing press, and the telegraph,
along which, post 1850, nationalism was globalised. Borders were
redefined and reworked and identities reformulated as individuals
negotiated the interstices between the Middle East, Europe, and
South Asia.35 Later, Sugata Bose invited us to view the Indian Ocean
as the interregional arena that bridged the geographic and conceptual gulf between the British and the Ottoman Empires and enabled
people to move across imperial formations. His Indian Ocean exploration makes us rethink issues of patriotism and nationalism from
the viewpoint of the diasporic public sphere.36
This book picks up the lead of this recent scholarship to capture
the making of Muslim cosmopolitanism as migrs from British
India sought refuge in the Ottoman world at a moment of acute political crisis. It takes its cue from Dutch and Middle Eastern scholars
who have begun to study imperialism and nationalism via porous
borders that were negotiated both officially and surreptitiously by
individuals. The hugely influential thesis of Eric Tagliacozzo on the
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porous borders between the Dutch Indies and the British-controlled

territories that made contraband smuggling a major avenue for
making careers and forging identities has revealed the limitations of
working within the official frames of empires. Tagliacozzos thesis
highlights the role of the individual in studies that explore the history of imperialism bottom-up. Within the field of Middle Eastern
studies, Julia Clancy-Smiths study of contraband economies in
nineteenth-century Tunisia and Algeria reveals a subterranean
world of transactions running counter to the aims of imperial states
and to those of North African elites.37 Her case study examining the
remarkable career of Khayr al-Din al-Tunisian Ottoman Mamluk
of Circassian slave origins who was posted in Tunis and who rose to
become the major modernist reformist intellectual and educationist
of French Tunisiais revealing. It shows the potential of the individual in brokering empires and shaping society and politics from the
shadows of empire.38
Making a similar case for South Asian history, this book shows
that individuals made impervious borders porous, dented claims of
foolproof paper tiger empires, and shifted action to the shadows of
empire, where they used imperial politics to their advantage. Chapter
2 shows how Sayyid Fadl played the rules of extraterritoriality in
very unconventional ways. His interesting life, which straddled
British India, the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and
Istanbul, reveals the significant role ethnically marked and legally
stigmatized Muslim subjects could play in shaping both British
Indias relations with its Muslim population at home as well as its
politics with its Asian imperial rivals abroad.
The mid-nineteenth-century global momentfamously known
as the era of worldwide revolts that rocked imperial cities ranging
from British Delhi, Agra, and Meerut to Ottoman Jeddah, Cairo,
Damascus, Alexandria, and Tunisoffered a tailor-made occasion
for mobility and transimperial support. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on
Muslim migr scholars who made the most of the opportunities
that emerged in the age of revolts. They operated at the cusp of
empires, negotiated imperial fault lines, made borders porous, and
shaped the history of imperialism even as its heavy fist impacted
them. This larger ambit of spatiality and the imperial littoral renders
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weak the claims of both the British new imperial histories and the
nationalist narratives to offer wide analytical frames, even if they
expand their ambit from the core-periphery confines to the larger
analytical frame of the webs of empire. It also makes the claim
that the history of the British Empire is the paradigmatic history of
the world look very hollow.
The lives examined here, when taken together, show how what
can be called the spirit of 1857 played out in a global context.39
Very much like the diasporas of Loyalists in North America who
used the defeat of 1776 and the spirit of 1783 to carve out global
careers that were self-driven and diverse and that both mirrored and
shaped the complexities of the British Empire, the 1857 migrs also
used imperial highways of communication and shaped imperial politics, stamping it with what we can call the spirit of 1857.40 The life
and times of each actor in the book show that 1857 may have been a
war lost for the rebels but that it generated not simply a widespread
anti-British mood but also a public debate on the interpretation of
religious scriptures and tradition and discussions on individual
authorship, literary styles, appropriation of scientific inquiry, public
service, and definitions of loyal subjecthood. It brought home the
value of new forms of communication technology like the telegraph
and the printing press. The conjuncture of new communication
technology and political revolution also meant that 1857 became
global news in a very short time.41
As news of this cataclysmic event spread globally across the telegraphic cables and via steamships and newspapers, its impact was
felt in other British colonies. Responses varied and triggered many
new debates on power relations between the colonies and London.
Jill Bender explores the career of Sir George Grey, the British colonist in the Cape Colony who sent troops and help to colleagues in
India to quell the rebels without Londons permission. His independence triggered official debate on the relations between imperial
career diplomats and the government. Later, in New Zealand, he
tried to curtail and control the Maori locals using the Indian experience of his colleagues who handled the aftermath of 1857 with
proven highhandedness.42 Again, Britain had to handle the Irish
nationalists who, inspired by 1857, mobilized against British rule.43
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Britain and its colonies were not the only sectors that felt the heat
of 1857. Its tremors were felt also in the Russian Empire. Czar
Alexander II tried to exploit this moment of British weakness for his
own imperial designs in Persia and India.44 More importantly, discontented subjects in the Ottoman cities of Tunisia, Cairo, Damascus,
and Istanbul were inspired to get into political action by Hindustani
migr rebels as well as by news items on the Indian unrest published
in national dailies.45 The rebels of 1857 and runaway militant Sufis
in Egypt (like the Sufi Ahmadullah Shah, who was prominent in the
1857 revolt in Lucknow, or Shaykh Ibrahim, also a militant Lucknow
Sufi, who settled in Asyut in north Egypt) lent to Ottoman territories the Indian anti-imperial experience. Such rebels, to use Juan
Coles phrase, fought 1857 in Egypt. They and their literature
continued to be welcome in Egypt in the two decades leading up to
the fall of Egypt to the British in 1882.46
Indeed, 1857 precipitated a moment of unprecedented connectivity between the Ottoman and the British worlds. Indian Muslims,
dislocated during the mutiny-rebellion, were at the forefront of this
connectivity. They experimented with educational, political, reform
ist, and social packages that were being tried out by subject populations in the Ottoman Arab and African provinces in a period aptly
called the Age of Revolutions. The Ottoman bureaucrat scholar and
Tunisian intellectual Khayr al-Din al-Tunisis tanzimat-inspired
reformist Fundamental Pact was perfected in 1857, and his educational project inspired the Indian educationist Sir Sayyid Ahmad
Khan. This made it more than evident that at certain moments in
the long nineteenth century, the ideas and actions of career brokers
such as Tunisi could have global resonance.47
In the intellectually agile postmutiny context of political and
moral reform in India, it was no surprise that news of Khayr al-Din,
in distant Tunisia, became more relevant than at any other time.
This conjunctural moment ensured that Tunisis 1867 major Arabic
work on constitutional reforms, Aqwam al-Masalik li Marifat Ahwal
al-Mamalik (The Surest Path to Knowledge of the Condition of
Countries), written with an eye to an audience in the European and
Ottoman world, impacted Indian reformists as well. The Indian
educationist reformer Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, located in distant
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Aligarh and Delhi, found Tunisis ideas compelling.48 Given the

range of languages into which this book was translated, and the
large number of Ottoman and European cities in which subsequent
editions of this book were published, its ideas reached India in no
time. The commercial and intellectual links between India and
European and Ottoman circles must have enabled this transmission
with ease: the book was serialized in Istanbul newspapers, and a
shorter introduction to the bookmuqaddimapenned by Tunisi
soon had French, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and English translations for a widespread audience.49 Tunisis career revealed the critical role such individuals played in the connected histories of empires
spread over diverse geographies.
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan was impacted by these Ottoman reformist
ideas even if he remained steadfastly located in India as a loyal
British subject. But there were others, like the protagonists of this
book, who experienced such currents firsthand as they relocated them
selves in Ottoman cities. Such fugitive scholars became the prin
cipal carriers of the 1857 mood outside British India. Paradoxically,
the spirit of 1857 only firmed up in the decades that followed the
crushing of the mutiny-rebellion. In this period of increased surveillance, the expanded print culture and transport facilities not
only sustained the public debate on freedom and the intricacies of
empire, but enabled migration and exported the 1857 mood to the
Ottoman territories.
Ottoman caliph Abd-al Aziz and his successor Abd-al Hamid II,
driven by their own imperial ambitions, hosted Indian migrs and
energized their networks. Muslim migrs used their new location
and royal patronage for their own careering. They emerged as cosmopolitan actors who pushed the umma to unite as a universalist
civilizational force at the intersection of empires. This constituted
their cosmopolis. The coming together of the Muslim cosmopolis
and world empires offered a perfect global canvas that made pan-
Islamic networks inviting for Caliph Abd-al Hamid II, and not only
for reasons of piety. Muslim migrs exported their brand of cosmopolitanism back to Hindustan via immigrant traders, scholars, pilgrims, and publishers who maintained a steady link between British
India and the Ottoman cities. The cosmopolitanism nurtured between
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the two empires hugely impacted seminaries and Muslim politics in

India. Its principal craftsmen, the Hindustani migr scholars, made
the most of their location at the cultural melting pot of Mecca to
reach out to both their intellectual peers back home as well to the
wider audiences outside the British territories.
Chapters 3 and 4 put the spotlight on two fugitive Muslim scholars
Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi (18181900) and Imdadullah Makki
(18171899)who escaped to Mecca in the aftermath of the mutinyrebellion and used Istanbuls hospitality and imperial rivalries, as
well as the anti-British sentiment in the region, to create their own
political space in the area. Imdadullah used his new location in
Mecca, tapped its long history of intellectual and economic connections with South Asia, and exploited the mid-nineteenth-century
imperial moment to fashion his cosmopolitanism as an urbane
civility based on universalist Muslim virtuous conduct. This conduct was derived from both the Islamic scriptures and its tradition
of consensus. He invoked Islamic consensus to bring the local diversities of practice and custom onto one platform. The public conduct
that he advocated was the standardized version of varied customs
and sectarian traditions; also noteworthy was its outward-looking
scientific orientation, which characterized the Ottoman reformists
of the time. While he tapped into this Ottoman legacy, he also
brought his own Naqshbandi brand of inclusiveness to bear on
the region. This enabled him to carve out an intellectual niche for
himself.
His teacher and close associate Kairanwi similarly grafted his
cosmopolitanismitself a unifying, universalist, civilizational
entityonto the imperial networks that framed his new geographical space in Mecca and Istanbul. Chapter 3 shows how he used to
his benefit his position in Mecca as well as the citys earlier contacts
with Indian Naqshbandis to fashion a cosmopolitanism that had the
scriptures as its base and that was informed by a very tanzimat-
inspired pragmatic and scientific outlook. This cosmopolitanism
offered a readymade template for attracting Muslims as it stretched
as a discursive civilizational space between the British and the
Ottoman Empires. It offered an alternate civilizational world with
which to counter the British imperial design. Thus Hindustan
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continued
to be Kairanwis main focus even though he located in
Mecca and had a global orientation. Intellectual ideas, disseminated
via books from Hindustan, sustained his cultural ecumene. His
newly founded madrasa, Saulatiya, and its students and scholarly
productions played a pivotal role in sustaining his intellectual and
political world. The madrasa became the nodal point from which
books written in India circulated, via itinerary teachers and students, in the Hijaz, the Ottoman Arab provinces, and as far as
Southeast Asia.
These chapters show how Indian cosmopolitans gravitated to
Istanbul primarily for the advantages that it offered as the fulcrum
of temporal power. Their moves made it clear that the caliph was
also viewed as the sultan of an exceptionally vast and religiously and
ethnically diverse subject population. His clout derived from his
political significance and not merely from his perceived spiritual
position. His non-Muslim Greek and Armenian Christian subjects
may have variously viewed the Muslim identity of the sultan.50 But
there was no doubt that the empire had an international reputation
for ethnic and religious inclusion even when Sultan Abd-al Hamid
II, for reasons of political expediency, waved the caliph card and
pushed to the fringes the tanzimat reformists who lent a legal frame
to inclusion. Not only did the Ottoman sultan have Greek and
Armenian bureaucrats, but his Christian delegates also defended his
civilized rule during the 1893 Chicago World Parliament of Reli
gions.51 This international image of tolerance and accommodation
explains the drift toward Istanbul of Muslim cosmopolitans like
Kairanwi and Imdadullah, who fled from British tyranny. They
flocked to Ottoman cities to strategize their moves in tandem with
the liberal intellectual currents and with the support of its globally
influential Muslim sultan. On his part, Sultan Abd-al Hamid II
viewed migrs from British territories as potential assets in his
imperial designs. He was always welcoming to them.
The spirit of 1857 fired the Muslim imaginary and made even
those who could not physically escape to the Ottoman world connect to the intellectual and civilizational cosmopolis between
empires. Chapter 6 focuses on Maulana Jafer Thanesri (18381905),
who spent eighteen years as a convict at the penal colony in the
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Andaman Islands (18661884) for leading a group of rebels in Delhi

during 1857. On his release, he relocated and established himself as
a scribe in the Punjab administration. Unlike Kairanwi, he did not
manage to escape to the Ottoman territories. But this did not stop
him from envisaging a Muslim cosmopolis stretched across empires.
The mutiny located him at the intersection of the British imperial
networks and its cultural web as reflected in the power of the English
language, British styles of decorum and conduct, and the Islamic
intellectual imperium. The latter became more accessible than before
because of the growing networks of transportation, communication,
and print culture that were increasingly available to subject people.
Thanesris idea of homeland (mulk) developed as he straddled these
worlds with easenot physically but via news from visitors, literary
productions, and other communication avenues available to him
because of his status as a British convict in the Andaman penal
colony. The chapter shows how his imaginary straddled empires and
how he envisaged an embracive civilizational space that spilled out of
British India. Because he exhorted Muslims to unite globally, he
posed a challenge to the colonial regime. Thanesris brand of cosmopolitanism and his sense of self as a member of a larger worldrooted
firmly within and yet reaching outside British Indiaremained
dependent on imperial networks. This made his responses to the
British presence more than a narrow anticolonial political struggle.
Indeed, the interplay of both the imperial and Indo-Arabic repertoires shaped his Indo-Persianate sense of self and complicated his
nuanced struggle against British rule.

Imperial Cities and Muslim Cosmopolitans

This book brings the Ottoman imperial cities that offered refuge to
1857 Muslim fugitives center stage in the discussion on the making
of Muslim cosmopolitanism: Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul. Via the
study of individual careers located in these cities, the book shows
how in the Muslim perspective such non-British-controlled centers
called the shots in determining the course of global politics and
world history. Shifting the gaze away from London and the British
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imperial centers such as Delhi and Calcutta, the book proffers a new
definition of the global as something that was non-British or non-
Eurocentric.
Azyumardi Azra portrays the Ottoman-controlled cities, Mecca
and Medina, as epicenters of Muslim intellectual networks that
knitted together the religious scholars of the British, Dutch, and
Ottoman Empires. These were sites where the moral and cultural
reconfiguration of Muslim thought and vision was attempted via
fresh interpretations of the Hadith tradition.52 This had a long history going back to the thirteenth century. But the nineteenth-
century challenge of Western imperial expansion intensified this
urge for moral reform. Egyptian and Indonesian scholars in Mecca
contributed to the trend as they too sought to reconcile differences
between different intellectual currents within Islam and looked for
remedies for the ills of their respective societies. They brought textual Islam, as represented in the Prophets tradition of the Hadith
studies, and Sufi Islam, as represented in the varied tariqas or brotherhoods, into close union.53 Indian reformists located in Mecca were
also part of this endeavor for moral reform. Indeed, the Mecca-based
Indian reformists trained many of the scholars from the Dutch
Indies and Ottoman Egypt. For instance, Sibghat Allah, the Indian
Sufi scholar who exported to the Arab world both the Shattariyyah
and the Naqshbandi Sufi orientations that reconciled the Shariat to
Sufi practice, had students (including Ahmad al Shinawi) from Cairo
as well as scholars from Acheh.54
Michael Laffans description of the Jawi or Indonesian scholarly
ecumene that originated in the city reveals the agility of Meccas
intellectual life. The two seventeenth-century Jawi scholars in
Mecca, Ibrahim al-Kurani and Ahmad al-Qushashi, trained a host
of students in one popular form of jurisprudence associated with
Imam Shafaithe Shafi jurisprudence. They reconciled this form
of juridical tradition to mysticism.55 This trend only intensified in
the nineteenth century with the specter of modern empires loom
ing as a grave civilizational challenge to the Muslim world. Banten
in Java and Acheh in Sumatra became the feeders for intellectual
migrants in Mecca. Muhammad Al-Nawawi of Java, who migrated
to Mecca in 1855, represented one such reformist neo-Sufi case in
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point.56 Ahmad Khatib, who landed in the Hijaz in 1881, was initiated into the Naqshbandi order, and studied with the Meccan cleric
Ahmad Dahlan, was another such case in point.57
Similarly oriented migrant scholars from Istanbul, Cairo, and
Delhi were present in Mecca, and collectively they made the region
an intellectual hub. Their location in Ottoman-controlled Mecca,
where they enjoyed the patronage of Caliph Abd-al Hamid II,
known for his welcoming stance toward transimperial Muslim
scholars, also exposed them to the global aspirations of the Hamidian
imperial vision. Their cosmopolitanism emerged as a neat balance
between the Arab intellectual thrust toward the scriptures and the
Ottoman reformist pull toward a scientific modern orientation
with its Hamidian imperial frill. They attempted to unite the community, or umma, as a civilization that was both rooted in scripture
and embedded in imperial networks that crisscrossed the Ottoman
and British Empires. Indeed, these nineteenth-century networks,
grafted as they were onto earlier connections forged by scholars,
Sufis, and traders, enabled Muslim cosmopolitanism to reach out to
societies across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world.
Chapters 3 and 4 bring out the critical role of Mecca in the making
of Muslim cosmopolitanism. Chapter 3 reflects how on reaching
Mecca, Kairanwi discovered that the city already had a rich Indic
intellectual legacy that laid the groundwork for a Hadith-centric
reconciliation of mysticism and jurisprudence.58 This enabled him
to extend an embracive arm that stretched across the imperial divide
to unite the umma as a civilizational force. At the same time, he was
lucky that the anticaliph resentment in the citywhich grew as pilgrims and travelers suffered Hamids inept administrationgave
him a much-desired conduit through which to ally with the caliphs
political adversaries and intellectual critics. He used these adversaries to bargain for concessions from Istanbul and to cushion his
fugitive existence. Indeed, he used them to access Caliph Abd-al
Hamid II and in turn use him to his advantage. The collapse of the
constitutional tanzimat reforms in the 1830s had been followed by
the coming together of religion and a scientific, forward-looking
reformist project in many of the African and Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire. Students, bureaucrats, and religious scholars
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impacted by this post-tanzimat effort to bring religion back onto the

agenda of secular reform critiqued the caliph as they tried to make
sense of the political and financial crisis of the empire. Caliph Abd-al
Hamid II had shunted many reformists, including the Salafis, out of
Istanbul and away from the core of the empire. The Salafis collected
in the Arab and African provinces, and their presence created the
perfect political and intellectual terrain for similarly oriented Indian
reformists like Kairanwi. Not surprisingly, Kairanwis own efforts
were hugely informed by the intellectual energy and activity of the
caliphs adversariesthe modernist reform that was emanating
from the Arab and African provinces of the empire (Cairo, Syria,
Lebanon, and the Hijaz). Indeed, he lent his voice to their political
critique of the caliph so as to make himself recognized in the intellectual circles of Ottoman society. At the same time, he continued
to use Caliph Abd-al Hamid II as a patron whose association offered
him clout vis--vis both the British and the local Hijaz administration, which was under Ottoman rule.
Chapter 4 reveals how Mecca also became a crucial site for
Imdadullahs cosmopolitanism. The connected worlds of the British
and Ottoman Empires offered an arena of new possibilities, which
Imdadullah used at Mecca. From the vantage point Mecca offered,
he developed his relationships with his intellectual peers in
Hindustan, connecting with and influencing them in new and complex ways. The chapter discusses the making of several of his texts
in Mecca in close intellectual consultation with his colleagues in
India. His peers visited Mecca under different pretexts and carted
his manuscripts back home for revision and publication. His literary
productions reveal his unique thought process in bringing Muslims
together around a standardized mode of conduct.
Indian scholar migrs and their ideas also found wide appeal
and circulation in the intellectual circles of Ottoman Cairo. Juan
Cole and Michael Laffan have highlighted the emergence of
nineteenth-century Cairo as yet another intellectual metropole
where the role of Islam in carving out the modern world became
a hot topic of scholarly discussion. The famous cosmopolitan Persian
scholar-traveler Jamaluddin Afghani and his student Abduh used the
Cairene intellectuals Parisian intellectual experiences to advocate
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positivist and rational, moral, and political reforms that centered on

the individual self and that were in sync with the Koran and the
Hadith. They argued that this would unite Muslims as a civilization
across the globe. This echoed the reformist ideas that were being
voiced in Mecca by the post-tanzimat Salafi intellectuals and by
Indic-impacted Indian reformists Rahmatullah Kairanwi and
Imdadullah Makki.
The nineteenth-century Indic reformist idea about the rational
individual who legitimated science and reason with scriptural sanctity and offered an inclusive political platform rubbed shoulders in
Cairo with the Hamidian imperial vision of modernity. Abd-al
Hamid II, his overtly Islamic profile notwithstanding, leaned on the
politically pragmatic reformist project of the liberal intellectuals
and the moderate ulema that brought religion and scientific rationality together. Ottoman and Indic reformists also shared this predicament with their Southeast Asian counterparts in the city. And
for each one of them this sentiment could either spill into nationalism or else spread out of territorial borders and carpet itself across
the imperial divide to weld together the Muslim global cosmopolis.
In the case of the Jawi intellectuals in Cairo, it boiled down to a
form of nationalism.59 Jawi intellectuals trained in Mecca, like Ahmad
Khatib, sent their sons to Cairo to shape this intellectual project of
national unity. But after the fall of Cairo to the British in 1882 the
city also became the epicenter of Malay and Indonesian intellectuals
who stopped here en route to the Hijaz and worked out new ideas of
Jawi unity as a nationalist project.60
The protagonists of this book show that for the Indian migr
scholars Cairo was a center for articulating more than a simplistic
anti-British nationalism. The city was different from Mecca as it
carried the political legacy of its rebel Ottoman military commandant and self-styled khedive (independent ruler), Muhammad Ali
(17691849), who had strived to establish the regional autonomy of
Egypt and the surrounding areas of the Eastern Mediterranean. He
had wanted to break away from the Ottoman Empire and emerge as
the leader of an independent regional power. His economic, educational, and political reforms had sought to establish state monopolies and had looked toward France and the Western model of
26

INTRODUC TION

enlightenment for inspiration. His political aspirations had been cut

short by the Ottoman Empire. Yet Cairo remained both a seat of
liberal reform as well as a hotbed of regional aspiration that posed a
political challenge to the Ottomans throughout the long nineteenth
century. The lasting legacy of Muhammad Ali was the very relaxed
intellectual climate in Cairo, where Islamic reform was most closely
aligned with scientific reason and rationality. Indian scholar migrs used Cairos reformist and revolutionary energy to spell out a
more ambitious transimperial civilizational space for Muslims.
They hoped that this space would compete with the formidable
British and Ottoman imperia that carpeted the region.
Chapter 5 looks at Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan (18321890), nawab
consort of the begum of the princely state of Bhopal, who was an
important figure in the scholarly circles of Cairo. His books, with
their transimperial gaze, fit in well with both the anti-British political mood as well as the reformist sentiment in the city. He was not
in the good books of the British administration and was accused of
seditious writings. Despite being under surveillance, he did not
escape from India. He did not feel the need to do so. He was not
convicted in any court of law and had the advantage of his royal connection. Although he was located in India, he nonetheless plugged
into and contributed to Imdadullah and Kairanwis transimperial
cosmopolitanism. His intellectual ambit extended to Cairo.
He used the challenges and opportunities of nineteenth-century
imperialisms and reconfigured them to suit his own particular interests. The new imperial and maritime world of his age firmed up the
earlier intellectual contacts between Hindustan and West Asia and
expanded his long-distance reach. He used his Indo-Persianate
intellectual legacy, his regal family connections, as well as imperial
networks to construct an embracive cosmopolitanism that straddled
the British and Ottoman Empires. The chapter shows how this
scripture-based cosmopolitanism, energized by his literary productions, connected to the civilizational ambits of Imdadullah Makki
and Rahmatullah Kairanwi in the Ottoman territories. It shows,
moreover, how this cosmopolitanism contributed to the growing
strength of the notion of universalist Muslim public conduct and
how this conduct emerged as a welding force across empires. Siddiq
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INTRODUC TION

Hasan fashioned his own international relations using his distinct

Arabic learning and gentlemanly status. He connected to trans-
Asian intellectuals by flaunting this special status. His reformist
ideas found resonance in the anti-British and religiously surcharged
atmosphere of Cairo. With his knowledge of Arabic and his reformist
religious training, his books became part of the Cairene intellectual
circles. Scholars from Cairo and Mecca sent their sons and students
to Bhopal to train with him.
The careers of Muslim intellectuals like him, when viewed from
outside the lens of the influential British Empire and its cultural and
intellectual ambit, raise questions about the definition of what constitutes nineteenth-century global history when considered solely
from the vantage point of British imperial history. His career brings
to the fore the multiple imperial centers outside British-controlled
territories, which became defining hotspots of action in the age of
modern empires. Chapter 5 thus argues that being outside cultivated Britishness offered greater space for maneuvering. Siddiq
Hasans long reach to imperial centers like Cairo in the Ottoman
territory revealed the crucial role of cities outside the British Empire
in calling the shots in world history. The lives captured here thus
enable us to understand the new contours of world and global history as articulated from the Ottoman imperial centers of Istanbul,
Mecca, and Cairo. In the imperial assemblages of the late nineteenth
century, Arabic rather than English was the universal lingua franca.
The knowledge of Arabic offered a longer rope to connect with
Muslim subjects of other imperial powers, the Dutch and the
Ottoman in particular.
The careers charted in this book fill very important lacunae in
Ottoman studies as they highlight the role of Istanbul and other
imperial cities like Mecca and Cairo in the fashioning of a non-
European model of modernity. Ottomanists have paid little attention to the critical role of their imperial centers in carving out an
alternate modern world. The incorporation of nineteenth-century
Ottomans into the world economy, albeit as a peripheral partner,
has been suggested as their early brush with the modern economy.61 If so, it was one that led to the peripheralisation of
the Ottoman empire as older networks, the ethnic and religious
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INTRODUC TION

equations that sustained them, and the connections with political

class were radically altered.62 This peripheralization thesis has been
hotly contested.63
Tom Reiss has highlighted how the modernism of nineteenth-
century Istanbul was reflected in its racial and ethnic mixits
nightclubs, mosques, and literary societieswhich endeared itself
to Jewish Orientalists (including, notably, Arminius Vambery) who
earned the honorific of pasha from Sultan Abd-al Hamid II for their
scholarly services in the city. Indeed, the post-tanzimat modernism
reflected in their writings encouraged later Jewish Orientalists like
Lev Nussimbaum, a Russian migr Jew in Istanbul, to lament the
death of the empire in the wake of the single-minded nationalism of
the 1920s. And yet so struck was he by the modernity of Istanbul
that he adopted the exotic yet modern Muslim-prince identity and
later converted to Islam in the Ottoman Embassy in Berlin in the
final days of the empire (1923).64
The new works on Ottoman modernity critiqued the Western-
style modernity projects of political elites. But they kept religion out
of the new models that they offered.65 This book picks up the lead
from Selim Deringil, who introduced Islam into the political reform
of modernity with a discussion of Caliph Abd-al Hamid IIs project
of social engineering. This forced people to subscribe to a normative standard of values that were a mix of old notions of loyalty to
the caliph and new migrant notions of loyalty to the country (vatan).
Traditional religious motifs and vocabulary, alongside an emphasis
on science and progress, went into the making of the Ottoman
modernity project. The post-tanzimat education system propagated
such hybrid ideas and claimed Islamic origins for them.66 The
making of the new Ottoman subject showcased Istanbul and other
cities as symbols of Ottoman modernism.
The protagonists of this book fit into the Islam-driven modern
imperial vision of the late nineteenth century that appropriated
moral and political reform and attributed to it Islamic origins and
history. Indeed, the experience of Indian reformists fit into the
Hamidian project of social engineeringand that explains Hamids
constant invitation to all the protagonists of this book to help in
his project. Indeed, Kairanwi became a royal guest in Istanbul on
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INTRODUC TION

various occasions, and as Chapter 3 shows, wrote one of his most

influential books, Izharul Haq (The Truth Revealed), which articulated his cosmopolitanism, in Istanbul under royal patronage. Even
when he returned to Mecca, his brother remained in the city as the
librarian of the imperial library. Chapter 2 shows the famous Moplah
Sayyid Fadls wide-ranging intellectual and political contacts in the
upper echelons of Istanbul society. And both Imdadullah Makki and
the nawab consort of Bhopal, Siddiq Hasan Khan, were widely read
in Istanbul, as they were in other Ottoman imperial cities like Cairo.

Cosmopolitanism Hijacked?
This book offers a unique take on the nineteenth-century global
embrace of Muslims. It brings 1857 fugitive men of religion, who
located in the Ottoman territories or else remained confined within
the surveillance structures of British India, center stage to the creation of Muslim cosmopolitanism. It argues that the transimperial
networks they created were a response to the official nationalism
sponsored by the British Empire that imposed territorially rooted
subject identities and borders in Asia via the passport, census and
land surveys, and legal and consular regimes.67 Over the decades,
Muslim connections shaped and acquired a momentum of their own
as individuals harnessed both the experience of the Indo-Persianate
cosmopolitan gentleman and the long tradition of commercial and
intellectual contacts between Hindustan and the Middle East to the
new imperial highways of communication and print capitalism.
Careers of individuals like Siddiq Hasan, Rahmatullah Kairanwi,
Imdadullah Makki, and others discussed in this book show that
Muslim cosmopolitanism was entrenched in the challenges and
opportunities offered by nineteenth-century imperialisms. It was
constituted of individual attempts to reconfigure these imperialisms
so as to better align them with self-driven particularistic interests.
Historians of the British Empire have shown through the study of
individual careers that the British imperial experience and its intellectual legacy and networks continued to guide careers and had crucial postcolonial trajectories.68 But what is less known is that the
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INTRODUC TION

individual-driven Muslim cosmopolitanism also left a compelling

legacy that continues to shape the politics of the contemporary Arab
Muslim world.
The cosmopolitanism of the multilingual, Indo-Persian Mughal
elite, with its Arabic scriptural core and modern orientation, could
spin out of control and be used by political elites for their vested
interests. In the twentieth century, the Wahabi-oriented Muslim
regimes in Saudi Arabia hijacked it and used its scriptural core to
spin a hardened version of Islam. Its most obvious ramification was
the leveling of its multilingual character and the spread of a narrowly tailored, exclusive Wahabi reformist tradition across the Islamic
societies of twentieth-century nation-states. Madrasa Saulatiya, estab

lished
by Kairanwi as the center of an embracive reformist Islam
with a strong Indic intellectual strand, is today the center of disseminating a very purist form of textual Islam that is patronized by
the Abd-al Wahabimpacted Saudi ruling house. The new predicaments of the Arab world and the looming American challenge of the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries both intensified the
Arabicization of the eclectic Muslim cosmopolis and hardened its
core at the expense of its tanzimat-inspired modern orientation. And
in classic dialectical fashion, the American war against Wahabism
has only served to strengthen (and ideologically tighten and globally
elevate) that which it fights. And yet, as the recent spurt of Muslim
responses in the Arab Spring shows, the fringe was never completely extinguished. Across the globe, it continues to connect and
inspire Muslims waiting for the right moment to ignite.

31

1
M usl i m R e for m is t s
a n d t h e T r a nsi t ion
to E ngl ish Ru le

During the late eighteenth century, the Naqshbandi Sufi

Shahwaliullas madrasa at Delhi became the center of Arabic learning
of both the religious and secular kind. Even though heavily influenced by the trends streaming in from Arab lands, the seminary
continued to uphold the eclecticism of the Indo-Persianate literary
culture. Reformist scholars of the seminary, often labeled by the
British as Wahabis,1 produced texts in Persian like the Sirat-i-
Mustaqim, which combined the Sufi doctrine with the monist doctrine of tauhid or belief in one Allah and His Prophet. Their
literature catered to the Persian-knowing elite and called for the
moral reform of Muslim society to meet the challenges of the time.
In the early nineteenth century, reformist literature increasingly
spilled out of its elite encasement and became accessible to ordinary
people. While the Persian Sirat was translated into the north Indian
vernacular Urdu, a range of new texts were also written and printed
in this local language. However, in its popular printed form, new
Urdu texts like the Taqwiyat al-Iman and the Nasihat-i-Muslimin
(18231824) forefronted the Koran, the Hadith (Traditions of the
32

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

Prophet), and the individual as the ideal interpreter. The Sufi dimension of the original doctrine with its stress on the mediatorthe
spiritual leaderwas either sidelined or was conspicuous by its
absence.2
This chapter argues that the sidelining of the interlocutor, the
shift to the canon, and the focus on the individual was part of a
larger process of Mughal crisis: the disintegration of the Indo-
Persianate imperium of the late eighteenth century. As the Mughal
Empire and its successor states moved into oblivion, so did the
Indo-Persianate concept of the royal body and court society as the
embodiment of knowledge of all kinds. In this period of transition, both religious and scientific knowledge spilled out of their
bodily trappingsroyal, sacred, and profane. There was a greater
stress on the individual and his ability to create a doctrine that
ensured universal appeal. British presence of course made it politically expedient that the doctrine be premised on easy accessibility,
simplicity of style, and rationality, which enabled global connections.3 The Arabic-scripture-based tradition thus came to the forefront of South Asian religious discourse as a template whose universal
appeal could meet best the new requirements of the early nineteenth
century.
The Delhi Naqshbandi Sufi Shahwaliulla best epitomized this
Indian brand of Arabic orientation. He and his multilingual disciples produced texts in Urdu that exemplified the Hindustani elites
interpretation of the Arabic tradition. He signatured a specific brand
of Arabicism that stressed Muslim exclusivity via unity and compromise between the more liberal Sufi saint Ibn-i-Arabi and the conservative Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi. This formula of
compromise produced an India-specific Arabic tradition with its stress
on the individual, scriptures, monism, and social leveling, even as it
left the space for intermediariesnow cast as spiritual mentors
who mediated between the individual and the text. However, the
forefronting of the scripture and the individual meant that religious
knowledge was slowly disembodied from its hitherto inaccessible
encasings: the person of the king, the body of the Sufi saint, and
single-copy Persian manuscripts. Religious dictums now came in
easy-to-read Urdu printed books and pamphlets that were open to
33

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

individual interpretation. They were a far cry from the Persian

reformist texts, like the Sirat, as their tenor was Arabicist: individualcentric, austere, simple, prescriptive, exclusive, and with a claim to uni
versality. Arabic (and all that it embodied), which had so far enjoyed
only symbolic significance as a language of rituals and scholarship,
was disseminated into society via Urdu texts.
The familiarity with and signification of Arabic language and tradition had always existed in the subcontinent. It had always been the
language of Islamic scholarship in the eighteenth-century madrasas
of Hindustan, and one of symbolic ritual observance. Now it was
brought center stage as the new referent that enabled the individual
to envisage a new Muslim global imperium. Indeed, the regal,
hyperbolic, eclectic Indo-Persianate world of the late eighteenth
century was slowly giving way to the Arabicist tradition of the early
nineteenth century, characterized by a relatively somber, prescriptive exclusivity within Hindustan combined with a desire for a
global hegemony via the universal appeal of the scriptures.
Thus the stress in reformist ideology on a singular Allah is not
just a case of a response to corruption in society or Islam, or to
British presence.4 Rather, it is symptomatic of larger societal churnings related to the disintegration of the Indo-Persianate culture and
of the attempt to forge an alternate political imperium for Muslims
via the universal appeal of the scriptures and individual agency. This
is best reflected in the fact that the religious and moral prescriptions
in these texts often use the royal court by way of illustrations and
allegory. Very much like the intentions of a typical royal court, the
Urdu literature too created a discourse of unity. However, this was
no longer structured on the Persianate norm of the king maintaining an efficient social balance in an eclectic society, but on an
aggressive Arabicist prescriptive Islam, which unified via compromise and leveling rather than balancing. The idea of social leveling
stood in contrast to the Persianate idea of social balancing.5 Social
leveling was committed to create a unified umma, or community.
The Islamic textual dictum of tauhid was the key conceptual leveler.
This became the main ideological plank of the reformists.
Early nineteenth-century authors like Khurram Ali and Ismael
Shahid justified this ideology using the verses of the Koran. Thus
34

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

the Arabicist tradition disseminated by elite Urdu reformers is

heavily textualmainly Koran oriented with a focus on only select
Hadiths. It is Protestant in the sense of urging people to establish a
direct link with Allahwithout interlocutors. It believes in the
undisputed supremacy of Allah over all prophets and other intermediaries. And it is critical of any efforts to place any interlocutor in a
position above Allah. Such efforts are defined as shirk (heresy) and
are seen as sinful. Elite reformers of the Urdu texts upheld
Shahwaliullas compromise formula but leaned more toward the
conservative Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi side of exclusivity rather than toward Ibn-i-Arabis brand of eclecticism.
The shift in reformist literature from a Persianate inclusivity to
an Arabicist exclusivity was gradual. The drift can be discerned as
we move from one of the earliest compendiums of early nineteenthcentury reformist literature in Persian, the Sirat-i-Mustaqim of
Sayyid Ismael Shahid, to his later more definitive Urdu text, Taqwiyat
al-Iman, and finally to the more derivative, shorter text of Khurram
Ali called the Nasihat-i-Muslimin. These surveys of Urdu reformist
literature also unraveled the critical significance of the multilingual
Mughal legatees, as they were able to use their exceptional linguistic
range to reach out to the Arabic tradition and popularize it in the
local language, Urdu. In so doing, they tapped into the hitherto
unused global referents in their last-ditch effort to survive.

Urdu Reformist Texts and the Interpretation

of the Arabic Tradition
In 1818, Ismael Shahid compiled the Persian text Sirat-i-Mustaqim.
This was a compendium of the sayings and guidance of his spiritual
mentor and the foremost reformist of his time, Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid. Harlon O. Pearson claims that the first Persian version was
published in 1825, during the lifetime of Sayyid Ahmad.6 Its fuller
versions and editions in Urdu, however, were published after the
death of the Sayyid Ahmad in 1838. The text represents Sayyid
Ahmad Shahid and his Tariqa-i Muhammadiya (The Muhammadan
Way) as transoceanic therapy for the social and political crises facing
35

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

Muslim society. It is also significant because the author invokes the

Islamic tradition of Itedal (mutual trust) and ijma (consensus) to
extend a long embracive arm to all four Sufi sects even as he highlights the salience of the scriptures and tauhid as the core around
which the global community of Muslims would unite.
The Urdu rendition of the text, completed in the first half of the
nineteenth century, continues with the Persianate eclecticism of the
original version. Shah Ismaels preface claims that the work is a
compilation of Sayyid Ahmads sayings as heard and related to him
by his companions. The text also includes essays based on Sayyid
Ahmads sayings memorized and penned by his companion Maulana
Abd al-Hai. What is more important is that the author underlines
the fact that even though the book stresses the exceptional status of
Allah and the Prophet and the love and devotion of the individual to
them, it does not ignore the Sufi brand of love mediated via the
spiritual mentor. Indeed, the text devotes an entire section to the
forms of devotion of the Chishtiya, Qadariya, and Naqshbandiya
Sufi orders and attempts to arrive at a consensus in their devotional
practices.7 Thus the Urdu translation upholds the eclectic tenor of
the original Persian text, with its closeness to the elite Indo-Persian
genre of literature that stressed social inclusivity, while it maintains
the power balance in society.
As we move from the masterpiece Sirat to Ismael Shahids own
more definitive Arabic/Urdu text Taqwiyat al-Iman, the change in
stance toward a prescriptive exclusivity is evidentand so too is the
sharpened focus on the individual as the interpreter of texts and the
maker of his destiny. Written in 18251826 as a popular reader in
Hindustani, the Taqwiyat is an easy-to-read text of 141 pages.
Originally penned in Arabic, it was translated by Ismael Shahid
himself into Urdu. In sharp contrast to the Sirat, it trims the
reformist tradition of its Persianate Sufi eclecticism. It uses the
Koran and the Hadith to dismiss local custom and rituals, labeling
them as shirk or heresy. Instead, it invites people to believe in one
God (tauhid). According to the author, the relationship between the
individual and the holy texts is the singular frame to fit all social
action. And tauhid was the only solution to end the ignorance of
Muslim society in India.8
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

The book has an introduction that speaks to ordinary people who

think that they are not knowledgeable enough to understand the
books of Godthe Koran and the Hadith. Ismael Shahid strived to
make the scriptures user friendly as a way of popularizing his interpretation of the Arabic religious canon. He resolved to popularize
the scriptures and thus chose to write in the local language of Urdu
despite his firm intellectual rooting in Persian and Arabic. He disembodied religious knowledge hitherto locked in esoteric languages:
Persian and Arabic. The result was the production of his text the
Taqwiyat al-Iman in the simple, easy-to-read vernacular Hindustani
or Urdu.
In the text he demystifies the canon and reiterates that to know
the Koran one does not require any special scholarly skills. Indeed,
he uses excerpts from the holy book to project it as a great social
leveler. He invokes the relevant Koranic verses to dismiss the popular idea that the holy books are difficult to understand by ordinary
people. He cites the Koran again to argue that God had said that it
was not difficult to understand the holy book but hard on the conscience to follow it. He quotes the Koranic verse Jamiah, which
underlines the fact that the holy book was revealed for ordinary
people. He argues that the Prophet had arrived with the Koran to
guide the innocent, to make the ignorant understand, and to impart
knowledge to the non-knowledgeable. He concludes that the sacred
books are user friendly, as God sent his Prophet with them to purify
the impure, make the ignorant knowledgeable, drive the fools
towards sanity and put the derailed back onto the right path of
faith.9 Shahid warns that if despite this Koranic injunction pointing
to the socially embedded nature of the holy book people continued
to distance themselves from such literature, it would amount to
denying Gods words and declining His blessings.
Ismael Shahid defines faith (iman) as comprising tauhid and Itbai
Sunnat (the belief in Prophet Muhammad). According to Shahid, to
include others in the company of God is shirk; to deviate from Sunnat
is biddat.10 He states in the introduction that his book is a compilation of verses from the Koran and the Hadith that explain tauhid
and Sunnat and elaborate on the ills of shirk and biddat.11 The
Taqwiyat is divided into two parts: the first focuses on tauhid and
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

highlights the consequences of indulging in shirk; the second

explains Sunnat and urges people to stay away from biddat. The text
offers a compelling critique of rituals and spiritual mentors. It lends
agency to the individual as the maker of his destiny.
The text is interactive in tone, and the narrative is in the form of
a questionnaire. It opens with a section titled Tauhid Va Shirk Kei
Bayan Mein (Explaining Tauhid and Shirk). Here Shahid lists things
that comprise shirk: dependence on pirs (holy men); spurious prophets,
imams, and angels; and christening children in ways that socially asso
ciate them with holy men, saints, and prophets. According to Ismael
Shahid, naming someone Ali Baksh (disciple of Ali), Pir Baksh (disciple of any holy man), Hussain Baksh (disciple of Hussain), or Ghulam
Muhiuddin (slave of Muhiuddin) amounts to shirk.12 He explains
that many people who lean on holy men (or maulvis) and referents
other than Allah for spiritual succor say that they should not be
slotted in the shirk category because they do not equate their mentors with God. Instead they see these holy figures as creatures of
God who they merely use to access God. To such arguments Ismael
Shahid replies that if people hold onto only the books of Allah and
His Prophet they will not need anyones mediation in their reach
to God.13
In the next two sections, Ismael Shahid lists certain rituals that
can be performed only for God. He argues that customs like sijda
(prostration), standing with hands folded, spending money on the
name of anyone else except Allah, and fasting for anyone else except
Allah amounts to shirk, as these are rituals exclusively reserved for
Allah. This exclusive package also includes the Islamic pilgrimage
haj. This spiritual journey is only to the house of Allah in Mecca
the kaaba. The circumambulations (tawwaf) ritual is also done
exclusively around the kaaba. Pilgrimages, offerings, and circumambulations around any other house or grave amount to shirk.14
There are sections in the book called Afsal Shirk Sei Bachnei ka
Zikr (Ways to Protect Oneself from Shirk). Here Shahid elaborated on how one can inadvertently slip into the wrong sideshirk.
According to him, Islam is a way of life and should constitute the
daily routine of the individual. The everyday life of Muslims can
be easily framed in tauhid and protected from shirk. Tauhid protects
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

the individual from a range of sins: forgetting the Muslim prayer

nama (the fasting regime), not observing Islamic dietary codes,
being discourteous to parents, and denying ones wife and children
their due.15
Urdu texts that derived from the Taqwiyat sharpened the spotlight on the individual as the agent of change. The Nasihat-i-
Muslimin is an important case in point. It can be called a derivative
text that is heavily influenced by the social-leveling trend as reflected
in the vernacular reformist literature of its age. Written in 1825, at
about the same time as the Taqwiyat, it too exemplifies the tauhid-
based social-leveling process that dented the Persianate social balancing tradition of the Mughal era and inaugurated the Arabicist
interlude of the early nineteenth century. Authored by Maulana
Khurram Ali, a disciple of the Delhi Naqshbandi Shah Abd-al Aziz,
this is one of the early reformist doctrinaire texts, written in simple,
easy-to-read Hindustani-Urdu. Its target audience is society as a
whole and not just Muslims. It catered to jahil (ignorant/illiterate)
Muslim youth, as well as to idol-worshipping Hindus. The author
urges readers to read the text out loud and to spread the message far
and wide to those who cannot read and to those who indulge in
ahmaq (insane) activities. Such activities are defined as the customs
and rituals of Hindus, belief in esoteric texts and inaccessible fulcrums of power, venerating Sufis saints, regional cultural observances of Muslims, and Persianate eclecticism in general.
The Sufi aspect of the Persianate ideological legacy of Shahwaliulla
and Shah Abd-al Aziz is conspicuous by its absence. Instead tauhid
belief in only one Allah and turning to him as the sole provideris
the central pillar of the text. The text quotes select Koranic ayats, or
injunctions, to justify its reliance on tauhid. It is a diatribe against all
embodiments of sacred knowledge: saints, Sufis, and cult worship. It
designates worship of such knowledgeable men as shirk, or anti-
Islam. Allah is the sole embodiment of all knowledgesacred and
profane. Thus only He is to be worshipped. Significantly, even the
prophets, including the last one, the Prophet, are demystified and
humanized, and located firmly below Allah in the hierarchy of
power. The reliance on the Koran as the word of Allah is salient in
the text. Only select Hadith that are in conformity with the Koran
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

and Shariat are seen as credible. The text lays out the new Arabicized
reformist orientation with its individual-centric gaze at its best. It
divides the world between the insane (ahmaq) and the sane. The
former are those who deviate from the path of tauhid. They are to
be brought to the right path (sirat-i-mustaqim). Predictably, the
ahmaq population is largely concentrated in the subcontinent, where
they are said to have gone astray due to the Hindu cultural influence. Not surprisingly, the text focuses on this geographical space
as the hub of reformist activity.
The sixty-nine-page printed text is divided into five sections. The
first section, provocatively titled Shirk Kis Ko Kehtei Hain (What
Is Called Shirk), explains the concept of shirk to mean the worship of
and dependence on many referents of authority. Ali defines it against
tauhidbelief in one God. He elaborates on its meaning by quoting
instances of the adulation of pirs and prophets. Also defined as shirk
are individuals claims to creation and sharing with Allah what are
His exclusive roles: procreator, producer of food and rain, and protector.16 Ali argues that that Koran was revealed to counter shirk and
that the prophets of God fought battles with the infidel to wipe out
this menace.17 He quotes the Koran to show that Allah created all,
and even angels and prophets can never speak or know more than
He. Thus the position of Allah is all powerful and supreme, and
mortals in seeking help for their problems should approach no one
else except Him.18
The second section, written in an interactive question-and-answer
format, ridicules those who commit shirk. Titled Shirk Karnei
Walon kee Himaqat ka Bayan (Description of the Foolishness of
Those Who Do Shirk), it calls Muslims who turn to dead saints for
help jahil (ignorant/illiterate), and it uses common logic to ridicule
their acts by pointing out that those they venerate were themselves
dependent for their existence on Allah. Ali wonders how such people
could determine life-and-death issues of others if they were themselves not in control of their own lives.19 Ali asks: Who in fact are
the jahils, or the ignorant? And why does the Koran prohibit seeking
help from idols but not from auliyas (holy people) and pirs (Sufi masters)? To this self-posed question Ali replies that the Arabic word for
Koran is Min-dun-i-allahthat is, dont ask for help from anyone
40

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

except Allah. And this injunction extends to all helpers: idols, proph
ets, and auliyas. He further clarifies that God himself said that even
the Prophet had no power over his own life.20 Ali challenges the
spiritual mentors of jahils to cite a single creation of their own as
compared to the entirety created by Allah. Deviants (that is, those
who have strayed from the Koran in belief in one Allah) are seen as
bereft of intelligence, and their actions are derogatorily called fool
ish. The text advocates a social regime centered on Allah to bring
society to the proper path. This is laid out in the form of prescriptive norms that are to be observed exclusively for Allah: sijdah (prostration), rozah (fasting), zabah (the slaughter of animals), and mannat
(the promising of specific certitudes so that ones prayer will be
granted).
The third section compares Gods exceptional status as the sole
referent of Muslim rituals to the exclusive privileges that kings held
in medieval times. Ali draws on this regal allegory to argue that just
as a king alone can sit on the throne, Allah too is unique in His
exclusivity. And just as a king will lay out a prescriptive regime,
Allah has advocated a cultural regime that underlines His position
as the highest reference point of legitimacy for Muslims. Thus the
act of prostration can be observed only in reference to Him. Ali
cites the Koran to say that such an act of reverence could not be
observed in reference to the sun, moon, or to anyone who did not
have the power of creation. Keeping in view the Hindu influence on
Indian society, he forbids prostration at graves and bowing to
Muharram taziyas (replicas of tombs of Shia imams). Ali also reprimands those Muslims who, influenced by Hindu rituals, observe
the fasting regime not just in observation of Allahs wish but in order
to reach out to the prophets and saints. According to him, fasting
in the name of people other than Allah or for certain hours in the
day is a Hindu custom and thus heresy or shirk.21 Again, replying
to a popular query of misguided people who ask why they should
be prohibited from the ritual of sijda (prostration) when the angels
had bowed to Adam, he draws on Islamic history. He argues that
earlier sijda was a valid ritual to be observed freely, but that later,
in the days of the Prophet, it was banned and reserved only for
Allah.22
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

The text devotes an entire section to Hindu-inspired customs

that are listed as shirk and need to be avoided. This section, called
Rusumat-i-Shirk ka Zikr (Discussion of Customs That Can Be
Described as Shirk), once again spell out Koranic injunctions in
relation to Indian society. It lists some of the common customs
observed in Hindustan that amount to shirk, for example, finding
auspicious dates for marriages from Brahmins or ideal dates for
travel. Also forbidden are names that announce a person to be the
murid (follower of a prophet or saint). Such discipleship as indicated
in names makes a person defy the Koran. And for such a person
there is only hell after his death.23 Ali hits out hard at the Hindu
influences that he feels have increased instances of shirk in Muslim
society. He targets the Brahmins for having led Muslims astray. He
argues that the innocent get carried away by the predictions of
Brahmins. Referring to Brahmins in a disparaging way, he notes
that they forget that if they were really all that knowledgeable about
the future then they would have first taken care of their own welfare
and not be seen in tattered clothes going door to door for alms and
help. He also cautions people against reciting mantras from the
Hindu tradition like the Hanuman Chalisa and Loha Chamar
eulogies.24
The final section lists the punishments given to people who
commit shirk. According to Ali, the future of such people is only in
hell.25 Titled Shirk ki Buraai aur Shirk Karnei kee Saza ka Bayan
(The Ills of Shirk and Punishment for It), this section lists shirk as
one of those sins that Allah rarely forgives. It calls it an evil and
argues that its harmful effects are listed in the Koran and Hadith.
He concludes that he is pained to see people in Hindustan wallowing
in un-Islamic customs. It is for their moral reform that he made up
his mind to write this book in an easy-to-read Hindustani script. He
has even translated the relevant Koranic and Hadith verses in
Hindustani so that the ignorant could benefit.26 In order to make
the text easy to understand and popular he has appended to it a few
verses in praise of the Prophet, as he feels that those will enhance its
appeal.
The Hindustani elites interpretation of Arab Islamic tradition
narrowed and trimmed Arabic tradition to tightly fit the Koran and
42

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

certain Hadiths. Through the use of the vernacular Urdu and an

interactive, question-and-answer approach focusing on Indic rituals
and customs, Alis text incorporated the South Asian version of Arab
tradition into Indian society. This literary style ensured that the
text was not confined to elite scholars. In his conclusion, Ali appeals
to all Muslims to read the Nasihat-i-Muslimin and spread its message
to those who are illiterate. He also lays out the etiquette to be
observed by readers for dissemination of the text far and wide. He
wants them to read it with polite decorum and affection and to
explain it gently, slowly and patiently to the audience. He was convinced that if they observed this style it would have an impact on
society. People would understand tauhid and stay away from shirk.27
He exhorts instructors to carry on their mission with dedication, as
doing so would earn them more dividends in the house of God than
even their namaz and rozah. He concludes his book by emphatically
reiterating that the literate and the scholarly (alim and fazil) had the
responsibility to carry the message of tauhid to society. If they failed,
the jahil would take over and destroy religion.28

The Reformist Ecumene and Political Entrepreneurship

The salience of the individual in the reformist literature lent a newfound agency to ordinary people who interpreted the Arabic canonical texts, the Koran and Hadith, to suit their local interests and
aspirations. Indeed, the reformist literature freed people from the
shackles of ritual and figures of religious authority. It empowered
them with interpretative powers that enabled Muslim networks to
spread across the Indian subcontinent and beyond. The reformist
ideal of tauhid retained its centrality in these networks. But even as
this ideal energized individuals to connect to Muslims globally,
other forcesprivate trade interests, political brokerage, and career
concernspushed Muslim reformists to spread their networks
across South and Central Asia and the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire.
Muslim networks upheld the Arabicist-reformist Islam. But the
reformists were not only in the business of upholding or indeed
43

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

propagating tauhid. They performed multiple roles: they could

preach to earn a living. At the same time, they were not entirely
bereft of political ambitions and interpreted the Arabicist tradition
to further their own temporal ambitions. They acted as power brokers ready to assist their political patrons, and they provided a handy
pool of military labor for state-building. Within India, the Tonk
state relied on their services completely. And on the northwest frontier they played no small role in the imperial rivalries between
Russia, Persia, and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the British
Empire on the other. Indeed, reformists constituted the crucial link
that connected the politics of the Central Asian region to that of the
subcontinent and, moreover, that defined British relations with the
Sikhs and with Afghan rulers.
No doubt the reformists were energized to engage in political
activism by the Arabicist endeavor to create a universal umma united
by tauhid. This in turn energized their followers to engage in political activism. New reformist knowledge that gave agency to the
individual and that fired his imaginary to forge a global Muslim
communityummahad been streaming into India from the Arab
lands since the late eighteenth century. The Naqshbandi Delhi Sufi
Shahwaliulla opened doors both to such ideas and to men from the
Arab lands. By the early nineteenth century, learned Arab men had
set up learning centers as far south as Mysore and Bangalore. They
established an intellectual connect between India and the Arab
lands, which contributed to the making of the Arabicist worldview
in India. Thus, for instance, in 1839 Subedar Muhiuddin, a soldier
who was examined because he had converted to the monist fold,
revealed that he had enjoyed the company of many learned men of
Islam, including one in Bangalore named Sibhukutullah Shah, who
had come from Arabia and had settled first in Mysore and then
moved to Bangalore. Shah clarified that this Arab was not a trader
but a hafiz (one knowledgeable in Koran, which he could recite from
memory) who traveled around reading the Koran for God. He was
respected for being a hafiz and accepted whatever money people
passed on to him. Subedar Muhiuddin had been indoctrinated into
the Sunnat jamat (those who accept only the sayings of the Prophet)
by the likes of the Arab visitor.
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Evidence of knowledge of the Arab world that streamed into India

from the late eighteenth century via migrations of Arab learned men
was most apparent when Muhiuddin claimed that he was aware of the
Arab reformer Ab-dal Wahab, from whose name the word Wahabi
was derived. Muhiuddin stated that he had no knowledge of all of his
reforms, but he did approve of the ones where Abd-al Wahab ordered
all houses and tombs at Mecca to be built lower than that of the Kaaba
and the Prophets tomb. In all probability, Muhiuddins close association with the Arab learned man Sibhukutullah Shah had made him
aware of Abd-al Wahab and his reforms. Interestingly, Muhiuddin
was happy to be called Wahabi because it was an Arabic word and
according to him an epithet of God. He was aware too that it was
used reproachfully in regard to his people, but he did not mind since
it was the name of God and he was proud of it.29
The idea of contributing to the making of a united umma fired
the imaginations of many Muslims. The early nineteenth-century
reformists led by Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae Bareilly were charged
with this fervor as well. Even those among their ranks who did
not agree with the antiritual agenda of the reformists, like Shah
Muhammad Ishaq Dehlavi, were keen to participate in the political
battle for the creation of the umma. Dehlavi participated in the
jihad of Shah Ismael and Sayyid Ahmad against the Sikhs even
though he disagreed with aspects of their rigid monist ideology.30
Since the reformists aimed to create a united umma that was welded
together by tauhid, the new political culture they espoused was both
global and Arabicist in its orientation. However, the drive toward
this alternate culture also opened up spaces for personal advancement, profits from trade and diplomacy, and the fulfillment of temporal ambitions. These private interests lent reformist activity a
special momentum and trans-Asian appeal.31
After the assassination of Sayyid Ahmad at the hands of the Sikhs,
the larger goal of establishing a universal umma may have temporarily receded. But the Arabicist orientation and the material dividends that it offered continued to be attractive. This ensured that
the Arabic canonical literaturethe Koran and the Hadith
remained the highest reference point of authority, knowledge of
Arabic language and literature became desirable for a gentleman,
45

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

and the Prophet along with his twin cities of Mecca and Medina
retained their exceptional status. During the 1830s, these reference
points were harnessed to market-driven ideas of profit making and
earning dividends, ideas that energized reformers. Indeed, to participate in the market of trans-Asian diplomacy and to trade knowledge of the Arabicist religious tradition and that of the Arab lands
became an asset. It offered instant connectivity to the world outside
and was used by reformist entrepreneurs to fire imaginations and
recruit clientele to further their temporal ambitions. More than
ever before the Arabicist tradition attracted popular attention.
In the early nineteenth century, reformists cashed in on this
Arabicist worldview. Religion for them was not so much doctrinaire
preaching and proselytizing but the upholding of an Arabicist tradition with its alternate notion of an ideal society. By the 1830s, they
had become one more active contestant in ongoing contestations
over multiple notions of politics and society that engaged Persian
ate, Arabicist, and European players. Their participation energized
the subcontinental market, already riveted with older notions of
Persianate politics and state-building and newer European ideas of
social and political sustenance. The reformists emerged as a critical
trans-Asian military labor force whose movement and career choices
expanded the space the Arabicist tradition had come to occupy in
the region.
This wider framing of the religious reformers in early nineteenthcentury geopolitics demystifies them and makes them ordinary
human beings with career and profit concerns that marked the
market-driven politics of the time. It puts into context the poaching
of sepoys of the Madras army by Wahabi reformist preachers in
1839. These preachers wooed sepoys as they too needed professional
armed soldiers to enhance their clout in the military labor market.32
In the same year, the magistrate of Nellore reported that parties of
reformist Muslims from his area, led by ex-servicemen of the administration, left for Sindh to fight for the amirs after hearing sermons
at the local mosque that instigated them to fight the infidels.33 He
also intercepted many Persian letters sent to people in his district by
their reformist friends and relatives urging them to quit their present
masters and join other regional armies to fight the infidels.
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The fact that temporal ambitions and benefits rather than merely
religion determined reformist choices was most evident when recruits
had no qualms in joining the Company army as sepoys if it suited
them. Thus the followers of Nasiruddin, an important reformist
leader, joined the Bengal army when they were left in Shikarpur
while their master marched with his contingent to Kabul. The
English Company regiment was in the area to fight and defeat them.
But they joined its ranks because all of them at that time were in
need of food and employment.34 In this labor market, there were
also cases of white military officers who switched sides and joined
the reformist contingents. Thus one white military officer convert
rechristened Muhammed Sadauk became a Muslim at Haiderabad
and joined the reformist contingent as it marched to Sindh on the
frontier. He later became a gunner in Shuja-ul Mulks army.35
The reformist movement in the early nineteenth century was like
a moving labor camp that disseminated an Arabicist worldview as it
straddled across and then expanded beyond the subcontinent.36 T.E.
Ravenshaw, in a memorandum on the reformists, whom he called
Wahabis, insisted on seeing them as religious bigots who took their
name and inspiration from Abd-al Wahab of Nejd in Arabia.37 But
their activities as significant contestants in the fluid political culture
of the period reveal that they were certainly a more complex phenomenon. They reinvented the Arabicist tradition with a range of
motivations, and challenged the older Persianate encasements of
knowledge and power. They not only threatened Company power,
but opened new possibilities for regional satraps both within and
outside Hindustan to consolidate power using the military and ideological arsenal they offered.38 The regional polities of Haiderabad,
Arcot, and Mysore in the south and Tonk in central India emerged
as their main patrons. Outside India, Afghanistan, Persia, and Russia
patronized them. This nonreligious impetus, which was mutually
beneficial to both the reformists and regional satraps, laid out the
Arabicist network far and wide. The state of Haiderabad is one such
case in point.
In Haiderabad, the nizams brother Mubarazdaula emerged as the
patron and financier of reformist migrants. It was a well-known fact
that his interest stemmed purely from temporal ambitions, and he
47

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

patronized their Arabicist worldview in exchange for their support

of his political ambitions. He needed their assistance in his maneuverings to take over the reins of the state. Haji Ismael, one of the
reformist loyalists referred to in the records as Wahabi, made
Mubarazdaulas intentions very clear:
MoobarizooDaulah ordered Mahomed Abbas [the nephew of
Maulvi Salim who had converted him to Wahabism] to go and
reside in Secundrabad...He also ordered Mahomed Abbas to
excite and entice the men belonging to the regiments and others
into joining this sect. The object of this was that whenever
MoobarizooDaulah rebelled and sallied forth, all these people
might be called together and at his command be prepared for
this holy war and assist him in seizing on the Assuphea state.
And whatever time he might wish to set forth from his house,
the whole of these persons might be with him.39
Mubarazdaula had been converted to the reformist doctrine in
the 1830s by one Maulvi Salim, who visited him from Hindustan.
His quick and easy entry into the reformist fold revealed that he
understood the political advantage of extending patronage to this
vast labor resource. Indeed, from his palace in Haiderabad he ran a
virtual subpolitical culture dependent solely on his reformist followers. He had recruits like Haji Ismael employed at a salary of
twenty rupees per month. Maulvi Salim, who had introduced him
to the spiritual and temporal wonders of the doctrine, received a
salary of one hundred rupees per month. An additional fifty rupees
per month was given to him to run his madrasa. Others, like Sayyid
Abbas, received thirty rupees per month. Large gatherings of
reformists were often invited for banquets hosted by Mubarazdaula.
Their support boosted his strength and political confidence. Indeed,
his patronage to them was part of his larger political plan to seize
the nizamat for himself and declare war against the nizam. Thus
Haji Salim, one of his loyal supporters, notes that in addition to collecting the reformist migrs as his private militia, he arranged to
assist them in the event of a war: he procured 18 horses and had
them trained in order that when he mounted they might be able to
48

M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

go 3040 cose. Ismael reports that Mubarazdaula had also bought

two male and female camels with the same objective, and trained
these animals personally.40 He was also in the business of poaching
soldiers, infiltrating the sepoy regiments located at Secundrabad
and Nagpur so as to get professionally trained sepoys to defect to his
army. He used the reformist doctrine to bond with them.41
His obsession with political power was most evident when he
obtained a silver seal and had it engraved, announcing his title as the
Raeesul Musalmanthat is, the head or protector of the Muslims.42
It was more than evident that his patronage of reformists was part of
a larger game to fulfill his temporal ambitions. He was confident of
the support of the nawabs of Kurnool and those of Tonk. He said
that they were his allies and that they had pledged their support to
him both in his local battles regarding the Haiderabad state and in
his larger ambition of becoming the king of Hindustan by defeat
ing the English Company. When asked about what he would do with
the nizam when he became king, he replied, I will kill him or confine him and allow him something for his subsistence.43 Despite
all the rhetoric of unity of the umma and the social uniformity
of the tauhid doctrine, the power equation between the patron
Mubarazdaula and the reformist recruits was hardly that of equals.
The disconnect between Mubarazdaulafueled by his uncontrollable political ambitionand his recruits was evident when his supporter Haji Ismael reacted to Mubarazdaulas political desire to
slaughter the English...and establish the true faith and become
King by explaining, I am a poor man and...I could say nothing
to this plan.44
The British resident in Haiderabad, I.S. Fraser, saw Mubarazdaulas
actions in purely political terms. He saw him as a political threat to
both the nizam and the English Company. This had been the general view of his predecessors as well. However, they had seen his
activities as harmless in the immediate term because he was focused
more on religious reform and missionary activity than on politics.
Thus despite the nizam bringing it to their notice, they had chosen
not to interfere. But in 1834 Fraser was forced to take serious notice
of Mubarazdaula because of the intensity and scale of his reformist
recruitment and political mobilization. Fraser was also particularly
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

concerned because Mubarazdaulas actions had a close similarity

and chronological proximity to the recent incident at Balakot in
which Sayyid Ahmad Shahid had lost his lifebut only after he had
whipped up substantial anti-British hysteria in Hindustan.45
Fraser played down British hysteria over the religious indoctrination and proselytizing activities of the reformists. His main concern
was the immense political value and resource base such reformists
provided for the political ambitions of regional satraps, many of
whom, like Mubarazdaula, were attempting to fill the vacuum created by the cracks in the Indo-Persianate tradition.46 Fraser was
aware that both within India and outside it there were many contenders for the resources the reformists offered. He thus saw them
as a political force creating sedition and disturbing public order.
He observed: I make a distinction between the religious and political parts of this question, and desire it to be generally known that
my disapproval is directed not to the conversion of men from other
modes of faith to that of the sect of wahabees, but to the political
intrigues and designs under whatever cloak they may be carried on
to disturb the peace and tranquility of the country.47
He ordered the removal from all cantonments in his jurisdiction
the faqueers, moulvees, and others who have introduced themselves
there in considerable numbers, and have been endeavoring to seduce
the Sepoys to wahabeeism and conjointly with it in all probability to
sedition.48 Fraser impressed upon the nizam that his brother
Mubarazdaula was not at fault due to his religious orientation. But
he had to pay a price for his political ambitions and the threat to
Company power and public peace that these ambitions posed.
Fraser was alarmed at the energy reformist recruits added to the
vibrant labor market that was tapped for state-building by all
regional satraps. He knew that in the course of serving their many
employers they had laid out a cultural network that was Arabicist in
its orientation. This cultural grid was ever expanding and corresponded to the temporal map of their physical movement within
and outside Hindustan. He thus invested time, money, and energy
to investigate fully the activities of what he called the wahabi confederacy. The confederacy was dangerous not because it was simply
anti-British. Rather, its more far-reaching implications scared
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

Fraser. He saw it as laying the foundation of a new cultural gridan

Arabicist imperiumto counter the English imperial frame.
In the nizam he found a supportive ally. But he also deputed his
assistant, Mr. Malcolm, as special investigator. Significantly, Malcolm
was assisted by his trustworthy confidanta Persian who was a
resident agent at Haiderabad for a Bombay merchant. This was no
casual choice. Fraser seems to have understood the Arabicist underpinnings of the Wahabi menace. Their networks could be best
spied upon and dented by someone from the rival and competing
Persianate imperium. Fraser never failed to remind his bosses that
his choice had paid off, as the Persian agent had managed to get
information of the Wahabis that no other native of Haiderabad
could have equaled.49 Fraser always kept the Persian happy, awarding
him with Rs. 2,000 for his findings and paying another Rs. 1,000 to
his subordinate.
The nizam played a delicate balancing role as he came under pressure from Company officials to clamp down on Mubarazdaula and
lock him up as a state prisoner in the Golconda fort. He issued orders
for his removal to the fort. But Mubarazdaula refused, as the air of
the fort did not agree with him. He was willing to be under arrest at
any other place. Significantly, he denied all allegations, and in the
true mold of a jobber entrepreneur showed no concern about how his
arrested fellow reformists (maulvis) were to be treated. He said he
had no connection with them and thus he was not concerned.50 He
continuously urged the nizam to prove the charges and promised to
walk to the Golconda fort himself once the charges were proven.51
The nizam was furious and ordered that Mubarazdaulas supply of
food and water be stopped. He also had many of the maulvis associated with Mubarazdaula arrested and the seal engraver seized. A
massive hunt was also launched for all the correspondence that passed
through this reformist network.52
However, the nizam had taken on a difficult task. Things were
tough for him not only because Mubarazdaula was his brother and he
was concerned about his health and comfort. The nizam also realized that Mubarazdaula was an important link in the network of
regional satraps who were knitted together by the Arabicist cultural
grid laid out by warrior reformists who doubled as traders and
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military
labor. These included the nawabs of Kurnool in the Tamil
territory, of Arcot in the Karnatak region, and of Tonk in Rajputana
area.53 The issue was not just about one man but about the Arabicist
tradition and the fast-expanding networks that this man epitomized.
Fraser understood this more than anyone. The Wahabi sedition
was not just about taming a bunch of religious bigots and containing
the anti-British hysteria. It was a far more colossal task of confronting
an alternate imperium that challenged the Western imperial frame
with its call for the global unity of Muslims. In the process of serving
the temporal ambitions of regional satraps, the reformists had disseminated an Arabicist worldview that called for a united umma and
that laid out a cultural grid that offered an alternative third front in
the face of the declining Persianate and rising European imperia.
Reformists were not just power brokers and commanders. They
doubled as traders and merchants as well. Indeed, it is no coincidence
that their traveling routes from northern, eastern, and southern
India to the northwest frontier corresponded with important trad
ing routes that linked Central Asia to India. Indian reformists connected Calcutta, Patna, Delhi, and Tonk in the northern belt, and
Haiderabad, Vellore, and Mysore in the south to Central Asia via
their hubs in the northwest frontier. On these routes they identified
themselves more as traders and military labor than as ghazi (religious
warriors). The ghazi was primarily an identity imputed to them by
the British records, as indeed was the label Wahabi. And no matter
how much the British records reiterate the Wahabi desire to have
ghaza preached and the Muhammedan sway re-established in India,
their agendas were not so noble, selfless, or simplistic.54 In a letter
addressed to an important reformist leader, Hussein Ali Khan of
Azimabad (Patna), the writer identified as Ikramullah, located in
Sittana on the northwest frontier, refers to his party of warriors as
the kafileh (trade caravans) and the Hindustani reformists from
Azimabad as the Toojar Mushruk (or tajir mashriq, merchants from
the east). He directs them to come with their muiouzar (implements).
Significantly, the journey to the northwest frontier region of Swat
where the supposed fight for the rule of Islam was to reach its culmination is referred as toojaruth or tijarath (trading).55 In 1852, P. Melvill,
secretary to the Board of Administration, referred to them as
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traders, and hastened to clarify that for such they call

themselves.56
This is not to argue that in the early nineteenth century the
mobilization for a holy war on the frontier was absent. But there
were other interests and contacts of a commercial nature that were
also being welded that sustained the interest in the holy war.
These economic ties across Hindustan, the frontier, and beyond
increased the bargaining power of the reformists, provided an economic base to their Arabicist orientation, and energized their military prowess in the region. In the words of the actors themselves,
the routes they moved on from east to west were easy to access
because of the support and sustenance they received from weavers,
traders, rich merchants, and the trading agents of their political
patrons: nawabs of Tonk and Arcot and the nizam of Haiderabads
brother, Mubarazdaula. These financiers, their commercial networks, and hundi agents (dealers in mercantile notes of credit) provided the economic underpinning to reformist networks. Their
political mentors also sent donations to the Sittana region on the
pretext of maintaining the tomb of Sayyid Ahmad.57
Abdul Karim, a discharged sepoy in the Haiderabad region who
had become a reformist convert, described the financial support he
received as he traveled from Haiderabad to the frontier region,
Sindh, and back. Most of the help came from his trade contacts:
Abdul Hadee [his companion] received a hundi on Bombay for
Rs. 1000from Mubarazdaula...After a few days we reached
Poonah, and halted for five days at a makan [house]...and
dined with Sayyid Aslama carpet maker, a friend of Abdul
Hadee...His chief friends in Bombay were Muhammad Saleh,
a Bora, now in the city, a hakim named Mahomed Cassim...
Few hundred yards distant from Sholapur we [were told] that
Saib [English] would seize Hadee...Abdul Hadee went by a
round about road to the house of a weaver [ julya] a Musalman
whose name I do not know.58
He concludes that it was finally with the help of the weaver and
his servants that his party could clandestinely get back to Golconda.
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Reformists, doubling as merchants, traveled the trade route with

arms, food, and women from Patna (Azimabad). They moved via
Delhi, Meerut, Tonk, Bombay, Pune, and Karachi to Rawalpindi,
Sittana, and the Swat region on the northwest frontier. From the
northwest frontier they traded with Central Asia and liaised with
Afghan and Persian colleagues. In separate studies, Stephen Dale,
Muzaffar Alam, and Claude Markovits have shown the existence of
a vibrant trade network between Central Asia and India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The presence of Hindu and Muslim
Multani merchants, Khatri traders, and Afghan Lohani trading
communities knitted the Central Asian khanates of Samarqand and
Bukhara to Hindustan in the early modern period.59 Arup Banerji
has demonstrated that Indian merchants were present in the Russian
trade towns of Astrakhan and Moscow. These resident communities
of merchants had moved to Russia via Iran in the early modern
period.60 They traded in Russian leather and fur with Persian carpets and fruits. Slaves, calico, and indigo from India were traded for
Central Asian fruits and horses. The activities of these trading communities were facilitated by sophisticated banking networks that
relied on hundis, or mercantile notes of credit, as the mode of transaction. Benjamin Hopkins has shown evidence of the continuation
of a vibrant slave trade during the nineteenth century between the
Punjab, Central Asia, and Company territories.61
In the nineteenth century, reformists tapped into these established
commercial networks and emerged as important players in the
ongoing trade. Trade in military implements, food items, and slave
women kept their religious networks bustling with activity. This is
understandable in view of the support the reformists were bound to
receive from the Indian Muslim mercantile diaspora that was already
in residence in the Central Asian khanates and Russiaand indeed,
that had been there since the sixteenth century. The earliest available accounts of Multanis in Central Asia recount two Muslim men
of religion: Maulana Omar Multani ibn maulana Abd-al Wahab
Multani and Baba Multan ibn Ali. Both held immovable property in
Bukhara. The financing of textile production in the Samarqand area
was also in the hands of Muslim traders of similar background. Janab
Sheikh Saadi Multani was one such case in point.62
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

By the mid-nineteenth century, many of the important merchants

on this route were maulvis converted to the reformist fold. In 1852,
two head merchants, Maulvi Rabi Abdulla and Maulvi Rubboo
Abdul Majeed, created a stir in their circle when they went missing
en route to Rawalpindi from Ludhiana. They were carrying a cargo
of implements of all sorts...and a cart full of women. They were
supposed to return after selling the cart and the bullocks along with
their cargo at Rawalpindi.63 The same year, Maulvi Mian Ali and
Maqsud Ali of Patna set off from the city with merchandise toward
Ludhiana en route to the northwest frontier. Their contingent
included Maulvis Diyanutullah, Abdul Ghumeree, Muhammad
Nazir, and Abdul Karim. They all carried a large quantity of arms
and gold mohurs.64
The merchant reformists also carried handwritten letters, which
were of paramount importance. These vital documents contained
information about family members, espionage reports, and confidential news from reformist networks that linked Indian polities to
the world outside. The reformist and commercial networks were so
entangled that these personal letters were delivered at designated
trade depots or commercial spots and shops. Thus, for instance,
Khurram Ali, a trading agent at Rawalpindi, instructed his contact
in Ludhiana to address his next letter to the following address: In
the town of Rawalpindee; the mundee bazaar, near the shops of the
cloth merchants; at a tailors shop. He advised his contact that the
envelope addressed in this way might be delivered to Munshi
Bukshullah, and that only if he received a positive response from
him should he then venture to send letters to the merchants at this
address.65
Rawalpindi was the nodal point for dak (post or mail) from
Hindustan. Here one Maulvi Khoom Ali, a native of Azimabad who
was a tailor and had taken to trade in perfume along with working
at his tailors shop in Rawalpindi, acted as the main collecting point.
He handled the correspondence between Patna and Sittana along
with his tailoring and perfumery business. According to him,
Maulvis Fayaz Ali and Kurur Ali at Sittana corresponded with
Maulvi Ilahi Baksh, father-in-law of Maulvi Vilayat Ali of Patna,
and with many others in the city. Khoom Ali had a well-organized
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

system by which letters came to him by dak. The maulvis would

deposit three to four rupees with him to handle their dak. He had
employed one Karimuddin, who carried the dak from Rawalpindi to
Sittana. Indeed, there was a well-laid-out network of correspondents
along the trade route from Patna to Sittana in the Swat region. Most
correspondents were traders as well, and came from locations
throughout the region:66
Allahabad
Maulvi Abdulla
Ambala
Maulvi Mugheesuddin, who taught at a madrasa
Amritsar Syed Akbar Shah, who lived in Sundhoo musjid
Bara Tabureed Khan
Benares A tailor who had a shop near the Burmah Bridge
Delhi
Mirza Amir Beg, who operated from near the
Akbarabad mosque
Dewal Hakim Magheesooddeen
Farukhabad Maulvi Khuda Baksh, near Cantonment Bazaar
Jullundar Golshera Khan
Kapurthala Kah Khan, a sepoy in the Rajas service
Karnal Hafiz Qutubuddin
Ludhiana
Maulvi Abbas Ali of Dacca
Merut
Mundar Baksh
Khoom Ali also maintained that arms such as swords, a few matchlocks, and pistols, all concealed in bales of goods (khoorjee), passed
through this trade route.67
The 18641865 trial in Patna of one of the Wahabi reformists,
Maulvi Ahmadullah of Sadiqpur, and its review by the High Court
in Calcutta confirmed the fact that a vibrant political economy sustained the Arabicist worldview of the reformists. Maulvi Ahmadullah
was sentenced to transportation for life by the High Court on
grounds of abetting a religious conspiracy to wage war against the
queen. The conspiracy was allegedly hatched in Sadiqpur in the
Patna region by a bunch of maulvis. They had conspired to supply
money and arms to the followers of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, who
after their leaders assassination had formed a colony outside British
India in the Sittana area of the Mahabun Hills on the northwest
frontier. The case was a perfect example of a reformist using British
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

banking, print, postal, and transportation networks to establish his

trans-Asiatic links and to mastermind a political economy that furthered his Arabicist worldview.

The Political Economy of the Reformist Networks

The trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah, a lower-level functionary in the
British administration, revealed the intersection of the Islamicate
and imperial networks that fueled the political economy of the
reformists. Ahmadullah was tried first in the lower court at Patna
and later at the Calcutta High Court for his role in collecting money
and men from Hindustan and inciting a jihad against the British
government on the frontier with Afghanistan. He was convicted
and sentenced to life imprisonment. The model trial of Ahmadullah
confirmed the worst fears of the British officials about the nexus of
trade, information, politics, and religion. Recruits, money, letters,
and books moved across Hindustan into the northwest frontier
using both the older financing systems, based on networks of family,
servants, and kinship, as well as the new postal, banking, and print
networks introduced by the British administration. Many even
exploited the privileges of rank held in the government to energize
these networks.
In 1853, Ahmadullah had been appointed a member of the Patna
Committee of Public Instruction. He continued to be a member of
various government committees until 1860 when he was appointed
deputy collector and income tax assessor at a salary of Rs. 250 per
month. In the words of T.E. Ravenshaw, magistrate of Patna,
Ahmadullah was in office during the greater part of the time this
treason was being carried on. Ravenshaw was horrified that the
business of the committee of treason at Sadikpore was carried on
simultaneously with his employment as Deputy Collector.68 During
the Ambala trials, which took place in 1864, Ravenshaw became
suspicious of Ahmadullahs role in sustaining a political economy
that itself sustained reformists in Sittana. At the trial, several of his
relatives and close associates were clearly implicated in supporting
the network of men, money, and books that linked the core of British
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

rule in Bengal to its outer peripheries in Sittana in the northwest

frontier. These included his brother Yahiya Ali; his nephew Abdul
Rahim; his banker, Elahi Baksh; and Abdul Ghafur, his confidential
servant and treasurer.69 The handwriting in many of the letters
compared with that of Ahmadullah. This correspondence indicated
his role in transactions between Hindustan and the frontier involving
both money and recruitment. It also indicated the working of networks that offered possibilities to make money and earn profits even
as preparations went on for the holy war. Thus a letter addressed
to Ahmadullah from an opium gumashta (commercial agent), Yusuf
Hussain, refers to him as the custodian of a Zakat Fund and urges
him to make a donation from it to a third party on the frontier.
Another letter, found at the house of Jafer Thanesri, clearly mentions a dishonored draft of Rs. 500, which was money collected by
him in Patna for remittance to Sittana.70 The links of Ahmadullah
to the Ambala convicts became clear when a search of his house
revealed the entire proceedings of the trial, along with forms for
providing counsel and the preparation of defense for his colleagues.
The discovery of all the relevant government papers on the trial,
which he had obtained from Patna officers by using his official position, revealed how dependent such networks were on the colonial
infrastructure. Subsequently, Ravenshaw had Elahi Baksh, the
banker and main agent of the reformists implicated in the Ambala
trials, transferred from the Ambala jail to Patna, as his name
appeared in almost every letter. He became the chief witness on
whose evidence Ahmadullahs complicity in the conspiracy was
proven and punishment accorded.71
The trial of Ahmadullah became famous for the detailed evidence
upon which it was based. This included proof about collection of
money, religious sermons, letters written and destroyed, and handwriting samples of the Sadiqpur maulvis in Patna. Substantial evidence existed that linked activities on all these fronts to the war on
the frontier. Evidence also suggested that the people involved in this
political economy were not just full-time maulvis. Rather, it included
those who combined their religious fervor with their other roles as
merchants, bankers, middlemen, brokers, and traders. The trial
became a precedent or model to be followed in all future convictions
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

of maulvis from Bengal and other regions. The British viceroy to

India, Lord Mayo, who was determined to put down the Wahabi
menace, believed that by the sheer transparency and weight of evidence that underpinned it, the Mahomedan community approve[d]
of the action of Government.72 He regretted the delay in bringing
other such men to trial for want of sufficient evidence of the Patna
kind.73 In 1868, R. Thompson, officiating secretary and the official in charge of legal affairs, feared that in the case of the Malda
and Rajmahal reformists, or Wahabis, even though the government had evidence of money collection in Bengal, it did not have
evidence to prove its transmission to the frontier. Thus it was difficult to conduct the trial of the maulvis after the pattern of the
Ahmadullah trial.74
Despite the evidence of sophisticated banking, commercial,
postal, and print networks that constituted the reformists political
economy, British officials like T.E. Ravenshaw, the Patna commissioner, believed that in the final analysis the movement was driven
by the Koranic injunction that he who believes and leaves his village to fight for God will be respected. Ravenshaw believed that
the reformists, whom he called Wahabis, interpreted this to mean
that they were bound to go to the frontier to wage jihad, and thus
they combined this sacred injunction with the information-gathering
strategies of modern empires to expand their networks. An exasperated Ravenshaw wrote in his memorandum that the problem of
the frontier had its roots in Patna whence these frontier disturbances ha[d] been fomented and supplies of men and money regularly transmitted to the Hills by the family of maulvis residing in
Sadikpore whose influence and agencies have extended over the
greater part of the Lower Bengal, Behar, the North West Provinces
and the Punjab.75
The reality of the reformist web, and the mobility of the reformists, as we saw earlier, was far from the simplistic assumptions of
Ravenshaw. The reformists networks thrived because of varied
incentives. The religious and material interests of people were not
necessarily separate. People used their businesses, rank, and professional status in the colonial bureaucracy to engage in what was seen
as religious work if it suited them. Indeed, imperial networks
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enabled them to dig their heels deeper into new terrains within and
outside India. It was the combination of the imperial and the
Islamicate niches and openings that shaped their success in both the
material as well as the religious spheres. For instance, all the letters
from Bengal used the British postal service but were not addressed
to or received directly by the person concerned. Instead, they were
received through the shop of one Sheikh Aman or Amanee, a bookseller of Patna. They were addressed to him under feigned names.
For instance, letters for Ahmadullah used the aliases Ahmad Ali or
Muhiuddin. Likewise, letters from up-country or friends on the fron
were received through the shop of Elahi Baksh.76 Ahmadullahs
tier
cook, Hussain Ali Khan, was a key person to whom many letters were
covertly addressed.77 Maulvi Jafer Thanesri, a petition writer for the
lower courts in the Punjab, and Mahomed Shuffee, meat contractor
to the British regiments, were the chief agents who coordinated correspondence to and from the frontier.78
Reformists were quick to tap the mercantile and banking networksconnections forged during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that continued to sustain the commercial links between India
and Central Asiato their advantage. Merchants, bankers, and
moneylenders already involved in the commercial ecumene provided the readymade ground needed by the multitasker reformists.
Elahi Baksh, the main banker of the core committee of the maulvis,
was a shoe merchant, and he doubled as a financier and remitted
money to the frontier at great profit. He went to Delhi on his own
business and was often requested to diversify his plans and travel to
Thanesar to remit money to Maulana Jafer Thanesri.79 Thanesris
account books had entries for all remittances received.80 Elahi Baksh
remitted to Sittana gold mohurs and hundis valued at Rs. 4,000.
These were credited to the accounts of Delhi merchants Samunt
Ram and Sheo Baksh.81 Indeed, Manohar Das, a Delhi shroff who
had turned witness, revealed to the High Court that he had given
Elahi Baksh hundis for more than Rs. 100,000. The money for these
had been received from Ahmadullah. Information regarding hundis
and updates on their creditworthiness or lack of it went back and
forth between Patna, the Punjab, and the frontier using the newly
laid postal and telegraph networks. The reformers also employed a
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M USLI M REFOR M ISTS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENGLISH RULE

network of false names and aliases to guard against detection while

using these imperial information highways.82
In 1865, Jafer Thanesri, the chief conduit for hundi transfers at
Ambala, sent information via dak regarding hundis he had sent to
Patna to enable his men to buy fruit and supplies. He used the telegraph to convey his anguish over an uncashed hundi of Rs. 500.83
Merchants of AmbalaKunj Lal and Sobun Lalcashed hundis
received from Delhi.84 Ravenshaw was convinced that colonial information and money-remitting networks that had kept the older commercial routes energized had now made it easy for the reformist
networks to function. The money transactions were large, as revealed
by Elahi Bakshs account books. A large sum of Rs. 26,000 in drafts
was sent through him, independent of other remittances, in gold
mohurs that were delivered by private messengers.85
Alongside imperial networks, connections based on religious
injunctions on piety and charity also underpinned these networks.
Ravenshaw, the Patna commissioner, reported a sophisticated method
of money collection adopted by agents of Ahmadullah who worked
at the district level. Donations came from the devout under the
Islamic charity categories of zakat (alms given as charity accord
ing to Koranic injunctions), khyrat (deeds of charity), fitterah (alms
given on the occasion of Eid), and afeefa (charity given to seek for
giveness).86 Skins of goats killed at festivals were also sent as zakat.87
J. OKinealy, officiating magistrate at Maldah, detailed the moral
economy that framed the money transactions. He reported that in
Bengal subscriptions were of four kinds: mote, phetra [ fitterah], zakat,
and a subscription at a higher rate subscribed to by those who desired
to lay claim to extra-ordinary zeal. He noted that mote, meaning a
handful, was a term used to express the voluntary contribution of
two handfuls of rice per day for the support of jihad. Ultimately the
rice would be sold and the proceeds devoted in part for the intended
purpose. Fitterah was a yearly subscription paid on the day of the
Eid festival. It was supposed to represent the price of two seers
of wheat for each member of the family. Zakat was a yearly voluntary contribution by a Muslim of two and a half percent of his
property value in money and was paid at about the same time as
fitterah.88
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The deposition of a recruit, Asmatula Sheik, also revealed that

collections were meticulously organized, keeping the status of the
families in mind. An organized village-and district-level collection
system operated with subordinate sirdars who worked for the chief,
called Nasir sirdar. He in turn passed the collections on to his boss,
Ibrahim Mundal of Islampur.89 Not just supplies but money, recruits,
and books, along with clothing for wives who were at the frontier,
also moved across this sophisticated network, which sustained the
moral and political economy of men of religion. Thus, for instance, on
the day after Ramzan it was customary for Nasir to gather from each
Muslim family the price of two seers of wheat per headfitterah. But
if a family was very poor then it paid the price of two seers of barley,
and a family of average wealth paid two seers of wheat. The rich paid
zakat at two and a half percent on their goods. They also made a
donation called Ilahi.90
Networks of Islamic charity intersected with intellectual circuits
that energized the movement of reformists across the subcontinent
and beyond. Witnesses from Bengal revealed that they stopped at
Patna en route to Sittana, where they were promised a meeting with
one elusive imam: at Patna they camped in the house of Abdul
Rahim for intellectual uplift. This house was referred to as the
kafileh (caravan). The name resonated the critical correspondence
between the commercial routes and the spread of the Arabicist
worldview across the territory they carpeted.91 Abdul Rahims house
was connected by a private passage to the house of Ahmadullah. He
also heard many of the religious discourses and lectures delivered by
reformist preachers. From Patna the Bengali recruits made their
way across imperial highways to Sittana. Throughout their journey
they were supplied with money and help from agents like Abdul
Ghafur at Patna and Muhammad Jafer Thanesri at Thanesar in the
Punjab. Other agents took charge of them as they moved via Rawul
Pindi and Mulka to the frontier. The eastern Bengal Wahabi leaders
held meetings and discussions on religious controversies with the
Patna leaders. Long consultations were held and books and strategies exchanged. The reformist textbook Tutwaa was widely circulated in the region. Written in easy-to-understand Bengali and
authored by Haji Badruddin, who supported the Patna maulvis, and
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Maulvi Mirza Jan Rahman of Dacca, this book was published in

1851 and spoke of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid as imam and gave the history of his war on the frontier. It urged all Muslims to follow the
commands of the imam.92 Other books included Tusseer Moradiya,
printed at Misrigunge in East Bengal in 1863. This was a commentary on aspects of the Koran exhorting people to move in the manner
of the Prophet if they had to contend with unbelievers.93
And this Islamicate intellectual connectivity did not in any way
dilute the inspiration derived from the organizational format of the
British military regiments. A sophisticated English-military-inspired
regimen of drill, clothing, and commissariat marked the disciplin
ing of reformist recruits as they assembled at the frontier. Most
of them were drilled and armed.94 On reaching the frontier, many
were compelled to work as tailors, water carriers, woodcutters, and
mule drivers. They constituted the commissariat that supplied
varied services to reformists on the move. Many could not take the
hard labor and ran away.95 Lall Muhammad, a witness questioned by
W. Ainslie, judge at the sessions court at Patna, revealed that while
en route to Sittana he followed a regimentalized routine. He stopped
at the Sadiqpur house of Maulvi Wilayat Ali and attended religious
lectures. His next stopover was at Thanesar, where he and his companions were each given two rupees by Maulana Jafer Thanesri.
After this long journey, in which food, money, and religious discourse flowed freely, he reached Sittana. Here, he was happy to
stitch clothes for the recruits. Others in his troupe were similarly
drilled and trained.96 Another witness, Ayenuddin, also reported a
similar passage to Sittana. He also noted that two-thirds of the two
to three thousand people at the frontier were Bengalis who were
trained in military drill.97 The same impression emerges from the
depositions of Sadruddin Sheika Bengali recruitwho deposed
to J. OKinealy, the magistrate of Maldah. He ended up as a cook in
Sittana, where, he observed, 1000 men with guns and canons drilled
regularly.98 At the time of the destruction of Sittana in 1858, British
officers were struck by the regimentalized existence of the Hindustanis.
Lieutenant Colonel Mason commented years later that all were
dressed in their best for the occasion, mostly in white but some of
the leaders wore velvet cloaks.99 He was surprised to find that they
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were drilled on [the British] system and somewhere clothed like the
Sepoys of the old Indian army.100
And very much like the urban spacesthe cantonmentsof the
British army, the reformists, on the move, also built their townships
in the Mahabun Hills. At Malka, they had a maulvis hall of audience, barracks for soldiers, stables, and a powder manufactory. And
of course, Sittana, their colony on the Mahabun Hills, had an old-
style fort.101 Their regimented organization, which functioned
under the autocratic command of its leader, corresponded to a military regiment. The sect had a khalifa, who functioned as the commander. Yahya Ali, the brother of Ahmadullah, was made the khalifa
when Shah Muhammad Hussain (a disciple of Sayyid Ahmad) died.
They also had a manager, very much like the military commissariat
officer, who looked after their finances and logistics. Ahmadullah
was made the general manager of all the property and expenses of
the reformists. However, he had to improvise the system and work
under false names because all this while he continued to hold the
position of income tax assessor for the British government. He
therefore managed the money under the names of his agents Elahi
Baksh and Abdul Ghafur. In 1860, when Elahi Baksh was sent to
discuss the modalities of financial transactions with Jafer Thanesri,
even he used a false name to conceal his real identity. They burned
letters when they heard of potential raids and worked their way
through imperial networks, sabotaging them along the way to serve
their ends.102 The well-knit committee that ran the show included
Maulvi Ahmadullah, president and general manager; Maulvi Yahiya
Ali (Ahmadullahs brother), priest and correspondent; Abdul Rahim
(a relative), assistant to Yahiya Ali; Abdul Guggoor (Ahmadullahs
confidential servant), treasurer; and Elahi Baksh, the banker.103
Elahi Baksh deposed that no money in his hands could move without
the orders of Ahmadullah.
Poaching men and materials from the British military regiments
posted in the area was commonly reported. The Fourth Regiment
of Native Infantry at Rawalpindi was frequently tampered with.
The regiments munshi, Mohamed Waliullah, who had allegedly
joined the reformists, was tried and convicted.104 He was from
Fuarrukhabad, where he said that he had been approached in a
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mosque by a man who urged him not to go to the frontier on duty

but should instead think about the mission he was being sent on.
The man also gave him two stacks of letters to mail. Waliullah later
said that since he was a government servant he did not mail these
but just kept them in his house.105 Eventually these letters got him
into trouble. He was found in possession of the stacks of letters;
these were from Hindustan and had been sent to soldiers, exhorting
them to desert and to join the Sittana congregation. However,
Waliullah confessed to being a disciple and gave vital information
about Wilayat Ali and his ideological commitments on the frontier.
Other public servants, like Badrul Islam, who was attached to the
army at Hoshiarpur as an extra assistant, also figured in these letters. He denied having any links with the men moving from
Hindustan to the frontier, but he was known as a fanatical Wahabi
who had threatened the orthodox Muslims of a mosque in Hoshiarpur
who disagreed with his ideology. He had said that he would forcefully enter their mosque and storm it with a regiment of Muslim
soldiers of the irregular cavalry if they opposed him. No proof,
however, of his links to the migrs from Hindustan was ever established.106 The migrs also attacked the Guide Corps camp in order
to obtain supplies and men.107

Reformists, Asiatic Empires, and Tribal Polities

During the 1830s, reformist networks both within and outside India
had relatively less success in spreading their reformist ideology, and
more in projecting themselves as power brokers in larger trans-Asian
imperial politics. Their long arm extended beyond the northwest
frontier into Central Asia, the Sikh territory, Kabul, and Persia. This
was familiar terrain, as from the sixteenth century both Hindu and
Muslim merchant diasporas, originating from India, existed all across
Central Asia, Russia, and Persia.108 Reformists derived their confidence from these preexisting trade networks between India, Central
Asia, and the Lohani Afghan mercantile community. In 1852, their
settlements in the Sittana area of the Swat region were mainly sustained via trade with the Yusufzai tribes. Captain James Abbot, the
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deputy commissioner at Hazara, repeatedly reported on these activities with concern, noting, for example, the large supplies of wheat
taken daily from the Yusufzyee country on camels to Sittana where
godowns ha[d]...been made for its reception.109 The Yusufzaees
often helped reformists, like Ursula Khan, to kidnap merchants and
plunder their caravans. Despite the outward show of support to the
British by some clan chiefs, the perpetrators were able to get away
because of the popular support they had in the region.110
Reports of money and goods for the reformistsand strategic
ties and alliances with themalso came from the amirs of Kabul
and Sindh and the Maharaja Gulab Singh of Punjab and Russia.111
These trans-Asian imperial players tapped the reformists to fight
their geopolitical battles. During the late 1820s, Britain had invested
in Qajar Iran so as to control overland access to India. But the
Persian-Russian peace process in the 1830s soured these relations,
and the British turned to Afghanistan as a buffer state between
Russia and their territory in India. Thus in the l840s Persia and
Russia were very much united over Qajar Irans designs on Herat.
They were aware that the reformist resource base, if effectively
tapped, would be an asset. Similarly, the rivalries between the Sikhs
and Afghanistan also fueled the military and economic bargaining
power of the reformists. Additionally, the general anti-British sentiment that encased these trans-Asian imperial rivalries ensured the
wide range and the longevity of the reformist grid.
Since the 1830s, reformists from Patna had found a safe haven in
Sindh. For instance, Maulvi Nasiruddin and his contingent were a
bone of contention between the British resident at Sindh and the
Sindhi amir. The British threatened to break off all assistance to
Sindh until Nasiruddin was expelled. Even after he was officially
expelled, there were reports that he still operated on the borders of
Sindh with the tacit support of the amirs.112 Again, in 1841 the
Persian court at Isphahan made news when an agent from the amirs
of Sindh was spotted there pleading with the king for an anti-British
alliance and for commercial contacts, on the grounds of their shared
Arab lineagethe Prophet. Revealing his reformist thrust, the
agent invoked the Prophet as the universal referent to unite the
Muslims: You are now the King of Persia, and of the faithful and
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our Prophet is the same as yours. Why should people of a foreign

religion and more specially the British be allowed to insinuate themselves into our country?113 He promised help from his side in the
Persian occupation of Herat in Afghanistan in case Persia was
willing to assist the amirs of Sindh. Persian assistance also meant
having the help of its ally Russia as well.
Indeed, the fear that the reformists could provide fodder not only
for the temporal ambitions of regional satraps within Hindustan but
for those of Britains more menacing Asian imperial rivalsPersia,
Russia, Afghans, and the Sikhsgave Frasers fear of localized sedition caused by the reformists a wider trans-Asian mapping. Abbot,
the deputy commissioner at Hazara, was worried that a few hundreds of these enthusiasts in the strong country of Huzara and joined
by all the dis-affected here [might] at any moment of trouble from
Sikh or Doorani prove a serious nuisance and expense. In 1849, he
reported the arrest of an Afghanan agent of the Durraniswho
was mingling with the reformists and openly instigating them to
rally behind their leader in his political fight against the British. The
Afghan played on their hope of establishing a united umma, claiming
that all the Muhammedan powers ha[d] conspired to attack Peshawar
after the fast of Ramzan. He hoped to mobilize support by playing
the unity card. Abbot was thus convinced that old conspirators were
not at rest and that the presence of the reformists had only fanned
their political ambitions.
Abbots fears were not entirely unfounded. Trade, strategic politics,
and most important, the invocation of a shared Arabicist-scripturecentric tradition did constitute a formidable trans-Asian cultural
grid. Captain Burnes, on a mission to Kabul and Central Asia, spent
most of his time writing voluminous reports on the intrigues
between Persia, Russia, and Kandahar against the British. According
to Burnes, Kandahar was an important hotbed of these confabulations. The exchange of envoys between these courts always heightened his frenzy. But he was most disturbed when he viewed the
possibility of these powers tapping the reformist networks for their
political gains.114
In 1839, M. Cubbon, the commissioner at Bangalore, reported
that even before the British defeat in the Anglo-Afghan War a
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general
impression existed across south India that the government
was in imminent danger from enemies on the northwest frontier
and beyond. The fear of a Russian invasion topped this rumor chart.
But this invasion was also expected to take place in conjunction with
Franceand in some versions of the rumor, with Turkey, Persia,
and Kabul. Equally strong was the feeling that there was an internal
confederacy that encouraged the enemy. And all fingers pointed to
the agile labor market constituted by the reformists.115 People were
convinced that once the invasion was complete older dynasties
would be restored and land assessments and revenue demands would
be reduced to one-tenth of their current level. Cubbon believed that
the south was particularly prone to such rumors because of the
constant intercourse, which is carried on between the Persian Gulf
and the coast of Malabar.116 He was clearly alluding to the Arabicist
economic and cultural grid that from the eighteenth century had
linked the trader-warrior reformists of India to the intellectual and
economic networks that operated from the Arab lands.
Sittana, nestled in the Mahabun Mountains in the northwest
frontier region of Swat, confirmed the worst fears of the British as
far as the trans-Asian potential of the reformists was concerned.
Soon after Sayyid Ahmad Shahid embraced death at the battlefield
in Balakot, this region became the congregating point for reformist
Hindustanis: they would walk all the way from Patna in the east,
cross the Indus at Attock, and travel to this spot. The Utmanzais
had given this village as a muafi grant to the sayyids of Tiringi on
their first appearance in the region. Sayyid Akbar Shah, who was a
highly respected man in the area and viewed as an enemy of the
Sikhs, held it.
He was linked to Hindustani men of religion as he had served as
treasurer and counselor to Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae Bareilly.
Thus, after Shahids assassination, Akbar Shah allowed his followers
to congregate around him. They soon established a colony and constructed a fort near Sittana called Mandi. The spiritual leader, the
akhund of the region, proclaimed Akbar Shah the king of Swat soon
after the British annexation of the Peshawar valley. Thus the
Hindustani colony under Akbar Shah posed a challenge to the
British. During 1857, activity in Sittana only confirmed British
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fears. Indian rebels flocked to the mountains of Swat and supported

Akbar Shah. He also received help in the form of men and money
provided by rebellious princes and recalcitrant individuals from
Hindustan. Six hundred sepoys from the Fifty-Fifth Native Infantry
stationed there also joined the reformist colony in Sittana.117
Akbar Shah worked under the authority of a tribal head: the
akhund. The latter was the fountainhead of tribal custom and religious authority, and his writ prevailed in the region. Political power
rested with Akbar Shah. He was an influential character who was
popular with the reformists. He was widely believed to be the
recruiting and diplomatic agent of regional satraps, notably the
Sikhs (led by Chuttar Singh), the Durrani Afghans, and the nawab
of Tonk, Muhammad Khan. British officers in the region, like Major
H.P. Burn, feared that Akbar Shah could use the Sittana base to
assist the Sikhs in their anti-British endeavors. Referred to as avaricious and intriguing, Sayyid Akbar was keenly observed by the
British as a key player in the trans-Asian imperial rivalries.118
Religious preaching may have encouraged the migration of reformists to the frontier. But these migrs were successful because they
plugged into and benefited from tribal politics. They assisted with
tribal state-building by providing support to chiefs who resisted
making revenue payments to the new British authorities. Thus in
1857 Mubaraz Khan, of the Khundu Khel tribe, invited the Hindustani
migrs and Maulvi Inayat Ali to his village in Chinglai. At this time,
some of the disaffected border villages that had defaulted on revenue
payments appealed to Mubaraz Khan and the Hindustanis to come
to their aid and begin a war for Islam.119 The defaulting village of
Sheikh Jana was accordingly occupied by 250 Hindustanis reformists
who arrived there on orders from Mubaraz Khan of Chinglai. The
village of Narinji also enlisted the support of these men in their fight
against the British. It is not surprising that when the British destroyed
and occupied the village they discovered a reformist maulvi from the
north Indian town of Bareilly well entrenched in the local tribal society.120 After the British takeover and destruction of Panjtar, Chinglai,
and Mangal thanas, it was discovered that Hindustani reformists
had been allowed by the tribal chiefs to construct fortifications of
large stone and fine timber. They lived in the security of these
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fortifications along with their leader, Inayat Ali, who also had a separate fortified house here.121 And once dispersed from Sittana, after
its destruction by the British army in 1858, they continued to survive in the region, taking sides in tribal feuds to carve out a niche for
themselves.122 This was most evident when, after being refused permission by their former hosts, the Utmanzais, to reoccupy Sittana,
they were welcomed by the Amazai tribe in the village of Malka,
located close to Sittana on the slopes of the Mahabun Hills.123 And
by 1861 they had regrouped with local support in a village called Siri
just above Sittana. From there they pillaged Hindu traders in the
Hazara area to sustain their political economy.124
In 1863, they reoccupied Sittana and started negotiating with the
chiefs of Ambala in British territory, provoking the Indian government to dispatch the Ambala expedition. And so entrenched were
they in local politics that even after this British-led campaign, which
expelled them from Malka, dispersing them, they found refuge in
the area by making payments for their settlements in the Tangor
and Batora regions. Significantly, they were welcome as long as they
contributed to the economy through their payments and offered
military support when needed. But their new hosts did not let them
build there and took money from them. The reformists resented
this, as the British clampdown on their financial networks across
Hindustan had created a cash shortage for them.125 Again, after the
akhund of Swat expelled them from the region, they continued to
find support in different tribal factions as they were seen as a source
of useful labor that could be of use in tribal warfare as well as in
combating the British. Thus in 1868 Judba and Tikari chiefs offered
them help. The latter wanted their help against the British and gave
them asylum in his fort and land in the Tikari valley.126 Finally they
settled on payment of rent of Rs. 800 a year at Maidan near Palosi.
The Hassanzais tribe allowed them to stay and erect buildings that
were surrounded by a mud wall and flanked by towers forming a
kind of fort. About six to seven hundred of them lived there on the
condition that they pay rent and help in the tribal expeditions against
the British.127 But in 1888, at the time when the Hassanzais wanted
their support during the Hazara expedition, the reformists backtracked, as they could not fight breechloaders. And once their military
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backbone was broken, the British moved in to burn down their fort
and settlement in Maidan without a blow being struck in its defence.
But all was not lost. Aware of their critical value as sources of labor
and money, the Amanzais offered them a home. They settled on the
slopes of the Mahabun Hills after they had lost their material and
political clout.128
These reformist migrs were sustained by a remarkable political
economy that they had crafted with the help of their political patrons
within and outside India. More than the message of religious reform,
it was the attraction of being integral to a market tapped by both
Indian and trans-Asian satraps that kept intact both their own
interest in the frontier and others interest in them. Continuous
supplies of information, food, and arms kept their settlement
growing and indeed knitted them into the politics of trans-Asian
powers. Their towering leaders, Maulvis Wilayat Ali and Inayat Ali
(brothers and blood relations of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid) worked
zealously in the Sittana region and were keen on obtaining material
benefits and a principality for themselves on the Indus. Lieutenant
Colonel Mason noted that Inayat Ali derived a rich income from all
the contributions that he appropriated from India.129 But more
importantly, via recruitment and conciliation the reformists wanted
to participate actively in the trans-Asian politics at the frontier to
enhance their material and career prospects.130 Indeed, Sittana was
the melting pot for the trans-Asian rivalries, and Indian reformists
were very much at the center of it.
Abbot was convinced that the Sittana recruits were in the service of one Sayyid Abbasan active agent of both the Sikhs and the
Durranis.131 Many Afghan clan leaders had joined the congregation along with their cavalry contingents, as they constituted an
important military labor market that regional satraps tapped.
Gul Muhmmad Khan, Omar Khan, and Deedar Azam Khan were
some of the important Afghans who had joined the reformists with
their cavalry contingents; these included anywhere from five hundred to six thousand horsemen and large numbers of footmen.132
H. B. Lumsden, the commanding officer of the Corps of Guides,
had time and again intercepted their correspondence with the
Russians as well.133
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The Sittana reformist colony bothered the British not only

because their trans-Asian rivals and regional satraps tapped into it.
More alarming was the report that the reformists were happy to sell
their services to anyone who cared to restore the Mughal emperor.
Many of the reformists promised to restore the emperor if there
were enough incentives to do so. One maulvi, Abdullah Pirzadah
of Amroha, in Hindustan, was particularly active in stirring up
the people in the Hazara area and his religious brethren to act for
the Mughal emperors restoration.134 He whipped up his recruitment drives in the region by displaying Mughal parwanas (decrees)
that claimed the help of Dost Muhammad of Afghanistan. The
reformists flaunted the parwana as proof of their influential connections in polities outside British India. They argued that they had
agreed to help the amir of Kabul obtain his wizarat (imperial fiscal
ministry) in light of his efforts to restore the Mughal emperor to his
throne.
Like Fraser, the Haiderabad resident, the British top brass too
saw the reformists issue not merely as one more instance of religious fanaticism. They were concerned because of its political implications. They viewed the Arabicist orientation of the reformists as
an alternate, if objectionable, political culture and less as an aspect
of a religious tradition per se. Thus when they used the word
fanatic to refer to the reformists, it had a political connotation
rather than a religious one. Lord Dalhousie, the governor general of
India in 1852, was clear that the local magistrates in Hindustan and
the northwest frontier had misplaced and exaggerated fears about
the religious dimension of the frontier problem. He advised them
not to take any hasty action against people on religious grounds.
Underlining the insignificance he attached to the religious dimension of the reformists proselytizing efforts, he remarked: The
party at Sittana whose insignificance of which I have expressed my
conviction is rather confirmed than otherwise by all that is now
transpiring are no doubt doing their best to induce Musalmans in
India to join in a holy war. They have been doing so for years. And
letters now detected seem to me to show that their efforts have met
with little success...nevertheless I have not treated the affair with
disregard although I attach little importance to it.135
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H.P. Burn, the deputy secretary to the Board of Administration,

also cautioned the deputy commissioner of Lahore, Major Abbot, to
act calmly and to distinguish between the real political offenders
and peaceful pilgrims en route to Sittana. He advised Abbot, We
should not only be tolerant but openly show that we do not look to
seats or distinction of creed, but simply deal with men as loyal or
disloyal, as friends or hostile to us.136
The Fort St. George government in Madras reflected a similarly
cautious approach to what it saw as a political rather than a religious
issue.137 Indeed, it did not wish to be harsh on public servants suspected of Wahabi leanings, lest any measures of proscription
such as withdrawal of pensions or interdiction from employment in
public service might be colored by the disaffected as to appear in the
light of a religious persecution.138 The governor general approved
this plan of action. But reiterating its bracketing of the issue of
fanaticism as a political matter, it recommended serious action
against sepoys and army personnel involved in such fanatical
endeavors. These were to be viewed as acts of sedition in the military and warranted court-martial. The government also recommended a review of the existing military laws to deal with the cases
of roving offenders, like the Wahabi preachers, who could not be
pinned down to any one cantonment.139 In the civilian administration, reformist activities were also handled as a public order issue
that merited charges of sedition and disloyalty.
However, the disturbances to public order and acts of sedition
were difficult to control because the trader-warrior reformists entan
glements energized the political economy of the region. Military
campaigns proved ineffective. In 1872, the men of the Kubbal and
Judoon tribeswho had earlier allied with the British to prevent
Sittana from resurfacingburned it down completely. Gujjars and
other cultivators occupied the few remaining huts temporarily.140
Later, however, it was discovered that the Gujjars and the Hindustani
migrs both benefited from intratribal wars between the Kubbal
and Judoon. Neither of the tribes honored their agreement with the
British, and when it suited them they encouraged the reformers
to rebuild their huts, a mosque, and a hamlet in the northern part
of Sittana. And they were quick to reestablish a political economy.
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Residing in the hamlet were six Tinawals, six Gujjar families, a

Tur Khan, and Lohar. They cultivated the land and passed on a
share of the produce to the reformists, popularly called sayyids.141
migrs benefited also from tribal feuds related to the political
ambitions and family wars of the ruling family of the neighboring
Swat region. The Shah family had been the original owners of
Sittana and had given it to the reformists. Mubarak Shah, the son
of the former ruler of Swat, and his nephew Shah Mahmud were at
war over their share of the proceeds of the lands at Sittana. Shah
Mahmud, who wanted to make headway for himself in the region,
encouraged the Gujjar and other tribes to resettle in the area. Kubbal
Jirga, who was connected to Mubarak Shah by marriage, warned
him of Shah Mahmuds plans. This family feud resulted once again
in the destruction of Sittana. Mubarak Shahs men burned and
destroyed Sittana to free it for occupation.142 And as late as 1895,
Lieutenant Colonel Mason echoed earlier fears that the reformists
were still, as he put it, a factor for mischief in any complications
which may arise with independent tribes in the Peshawar and Hazara
frontiers.143

The Reformists, the Arms Trade,

and the Imperial Networks
The reformists on the frontier also used imperial transportation,
technology, and information highways to attach themselves to the
Indian Ocean political economyin particular the arms trade.
Possession of sophisticated arms not only strengthened their military labor potential on the frontier but also offered them support
across the Indian Ocean world, where European and local arms firms,
merchants, dealers, brokers, and middlemen flourished because of
rising demand for their goods. The frontier warriors obtained access
to the new rifles and military technology of European powers via a
network of profit-seeking European firms and their local collaborators. And thus paradoxically the commercial networks of modern
empires sustained the reformist ecumene, even as private European
firms maximized their profits and expanded their business by tapping
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into earlier networks of trade that linked the Central Asian, Russian,
and Persian region.144
TimothyRobert Moreman has argued that in the 1880s and 1890s
a huge demand for modern rifles on the northwest frontier stimulated a lucrative arms trade in which ammunition and rifles arrived
from a range of sources, including Afghanistan and the Persian
Gulf. A domestic arms industry was also growing within the tribal
territory.145 A series of punitive expeditions in the post-1857 period
and subsequent enlistment of tribals in the Indian army and the
Punjab frontier police had familiarized people with modern rifles
and made them appreciate their value. The exposure to colonial
armies had also opened up new contacts that enabled the theft and
smuggling of arms from the government arsenals to the frontier.146
The Persian Gulf connection to the frontier shows that the
warrior-trader reformists did not merely rely on contacts in the government within India but that they had access to wider trans-Asiatic
imperial networks. A 1899 report on the arms trade, written by
L.H.E. Tucker, the inspector general of police in Punjab, and
Colonel W. Hill, assistant adjutant general for musketry, revealed
that rifles made in London, Brussels, Germany, France, and Italy
were easily available in the frontier region. Hill describes an instance
when a man brought a rifle to him with Fracis Times & Company,
27 Leaden Hall Street, London stamped on it; according to Hill,
the man said that he [could] obtain any number of same pattern
price of trade mark rifles delivered at Maskat in between 4050
Rupees. The man claimed that the selling price of the rifle in the
frontier would be Rs. 300. They could be put into any bundle or bale
of goods suited to camel or mule transport and carted.147 Most of
these rifles came from the Muscat sultanate in the Indian Ocean.
Tucker was told in the Tank area of the frontier that local traders
have no difficulty in proceeding by rail and sea to Maskat or Makran
coast to purchase arms.148 Indeed, in the Gulf, Muscat was the
principal emporium where European arms dealers stored their
wares. From Muscat, the arms were shipped in dhows across the
Gulf to waiting caravans on the Mekran and Persian coasts for
transit further northward into Afghanistan and the northwest frontier markets.
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The Indian Ocean trade route for arms did not work in a vacuum.
It was framed by imperial networks of steamships, consulates, legislation, and politics. And it was powered from within by a network of
European commercial firms and their string of local traders, dealers,
middlemen, and brokers. If political dividends and rivalries marked
the imperial frame, the commercial networks were driven by profits
from trade. And these many networks, taken together, constituted
an ideal web that frontier warriors used to energize their own transAsiatic networks.
In 1897, the British government seized two thousand rifles of
Belgian origin at the port of Bushier in southern Persia. These rifles
were built to size so as to fit the cartridges used in British rifles. The
officers had reason to believe that these rifles were being sent to the
Persian Gulf for the ultimate use of the northwest frontier tribes.
The trade was called illicit, and the Belgian government was asked
not to protect it. However, the Belgians said that the rifles were
sporting ones and hence harmless. It was soon discovered that the
rifles had been manufactured in Liege, Belgium, on the order of a
British firm, Messrs. Fracis Times and Company. Based on that
information, the Belgian government claimed that it was unable to
stop the manufacture of the rifles.149 British officers like F.R.
Plunkett reported of other British firms who had placed similar
orders at Liege and said that the supply from England of solid cartridges of the British government pattern was in great demand.150
Firms like Messrs. Eley Bros. Limited, an ammunition manufacturer of London and Liege, supplied the Belgian firm Messrs.
Dresse, Laloux & Cie with three thousand solid 577/450 cartridges
of the British government pattern for the purpose of trying the
rifles they had made or were making.151 British shipping companies,
seeking to profit from the arms trade and unmindful of imperial
politics, continued to ship rifles to Muscat and then Persia en route
to Afghanistan and the northwest frontier. The British steamer
Baluchistan was active on this route, carting cargo of as many as five
thousand rifles and one million cartridges for illicit importation
into Persia.152 And despite British-imposed restrictions on arms
traffic in Persia, the trade continued because of the tax revenue that
it generated for the local government and the employment that it
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created.153 The main distribution point was Shiraz; in 1896, thirty

thousand rifles were reportedly distributed there.154
The profits of trade were attractive not only for Persian traders
and the local government, but for European and Asian arms firms.
They struggled to keep the trade alive. Since 1884, A. & T.J. Malcolm
had been the sole importers of arms, but others now crowded the
lucrative market: Fracis Times entered the market in 1891, followed
in 1894 by Livingstone, Muir and Company and H.C. Dixon and
Company. Another firm, Malcolm Brunker and Company, reportedly bought arms in England for native importers.
Fracis Times was the largest of these companies, and started as
agents for Persian firms. As the business became profitable, they
expanded and grew, and they soon took over as direct importers.
They flourished as they energized local commercial houses. They
competed with them as well as used them as local associates. The
first local house to enter the trade was Haji Ali Durbash, which did
business with A. & T.J. Malcolm and another firm, J.C.P. Hotz
and Son. Other local firms included Sayyid Ghulam Ali; Khal Nejaf
Bin Ghalif in partnership with Sayyid Shoban Koreh; Sayyid
Muhammad Reza; Mirza Golam Hussein; and Muhammad Sheffee.
Of these, Ghalif was the largest importer. Their orders were placed
through H. C. Dixon, who also worked for several other smaller
businessmen. Other independent Persian importers also bought
arms through firms in England, including H.C. Dixon and Com
pany, Fracis Times and Company, David Sasoon and Company,
C.J. Sassoon, Livingstone Muir and Company, and J.C.P. Hotz
and Son. The firms chiefly exported their wares from ports in
Manchester, Liverpool, and Cardiff; very few steamers were loaded
with arms in London. The exported rifles were generally Martinis
and Lee Metfords and were marked as hardware. The ships did
not go via India because of its strict vigilance. Rather, goods were
sent to the Persian port of Bushier and checked by the customs office
there.155
A fascinating commercial network that was powered by Western
capital and imperial networks and that depended on Asian economic,
social, and political camaraderie made the arms trade a success story.
The history of operations of one of the oldest British firms in this
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trade, Fracis Times and Company, reveals the wide ambit of commercial networks that were sustained by both local and imperial
institutions and that ensured the arming of the northwest frontier
tribes. All the efforts by the British government to put an end to this
trade failed, as the entanglement of private profits and imperial priorities were complex. Fracis Times and Company included three
partners: Fracis Times, of England, and Nassarwanji Dossabhoy and
Dorabji Edalji Dharwar, both originally from Bombay. Nassarwanji
generally traded between England and the Persian Gulf and had
offices in Bushier and England. Times and Dharwar were located in
England. The firm was also a commissioning agent. Their Indian
contact in Bombay was a man called Dadabhai Chothia, a Parsi and
an independent merchant whose office was in Hornby Road Fort.
The firm used a string of steamersthe Turkistan, the Afghanistan,
and the Baluchistanfor its operations in the Gulf. At its major ports
or importing stations it relied on local merchants and traders for its
operations. Thus in Bunder Abbas its staff was almost entirely composed of Persian subjects, including Haji Muhammad Sharif Alavi,
Sayyid Abdur Rahim Awazi, Haji Ali Aga Hussain Lari, Haji Mehdi
Lari, Haji Hussain Galadari Awazi, Haji Nakhoda Ali, and Aga
Hussain Lari. The staff also included three people from Shikarpur:
Kishandas, Sakaram, and Lakhu. In Muscat, Fracis Times relied on
a string of British Indian subjects: two that have been identified are
Ratansi Parshotam, a Kutchi Bhattia, and Damodhar Dharamsi,
whose caste is not known. The Bunder Abbas Persian merchants
moved via a chain of agents and contacts between Bombay and Persia,
selling their wares and taking orders along the way. Thus the merchant Aga Hussain Lari traded in Bunder Abbas but also lived in
Bombay and carried on his transactions in Bunder Abbas via his
agent from Shikarpur, named Tekchand (alias Waliram).
These merchants and their agents joined with caravans of Afghan
traders at Bunder Abbas once a year and at Kirman and Yezd every
month. The goods then passed via Meshd and Herat into Afghanistan.
They were concealed in other goods so as to escape the restrictions
imposed by the Persian authorities. Afghan traders carted dry fruits
and ghee to Persia for sale, and in return bought tea, sugar, cloth,
and so forth. But the principal trade was in arms and ammunition,
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which reached Kirman and Yezd from Bushier. The merchants also
went to Bunder Abbas from Muscat, Bushier, and Lingah in native
boats. It was believed that they smuggled arms into the boats concealed in bags containing dry limes. Fracis Times and Company
had no direct dealings with Bombay. They traded only with the
Persian Gulf, and the arms transacted by this firm reached the frontier only via Persia.156
English firms like Fracis Times were not the only ones that operated across such trans-Asiatic networks. Indeed, others who dealt
with consignments from non-British subjects also operated with
relative ease across these networks, as most of the restrictions on the
carting of arms were placed only on British and Persian subjects. In
1898, the case of a German trading company based in Bremen,
Germany, came to light when its goods were confiscated at Muscat.
Its manager explained that these should be released as they were the
consignment of one J.D. Barth of Bremen, a German subject. He
had shipped them to Gopalji Walji, his agent in Muscat.157 Walji was
able to retrieve this consignment after he had clarified that he was
not dealing with a British subject but a German one.158 Both English
and European firms and their local agents as well as private entrepreneurs relied on a variety of local middlemen who belonged to a
range of ethnicities and religions. Thus one Ghulam Khan, a British
subject, carried on his trade between Bunder Abbas and Persia with
the help of two Hindu Indians, one of whom was named Hind Raj
and another whose name was not known, and one Muslim called
Abdul Rasul, who was a native of Hyderabad, Sind. They spanned
out between Shikarpur, Muscat, and Bunder Abbas. They had contacts with agents in Tevaz, located a few miles from Bunder Abbas.
These men helped them transport arms to the northwest frontier
via Baluchistan.159
Arms also moved from Muscat to the other side of the Arab coast
bordering the Red Sea. Kuwait and inland Arabia were the destinations for this trade. These were also the entry points for the arms to
enter Afghanistan. Even though this trade was on a small scale, it
also involved a string of British and non-British subjects. Najaf-binGhalib, a Kuwaiti wholesale trader, took advantage of not being a
British subject and spearheaded this trade.160 In this sector of the
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arms trade, small dhows operated very often with Mogul or Indian
Muslim nakhodas (operators). And thus Captain Cox, a British army
officer posted in Muscat, reported that one of the nakhodas of
Ghalibs dhow was called Ibrahim, a Mughal, and the other was
also a Mughal, called Ahmad.161 Similarly, Somali traders with
French protection kept the arms afloat on the west coast of Africa.162
Jibuti, in the control of the French, offered a safe haven for the arms
traffic between it and the ports of the African and Arabian coast.163
Italian and Ottoman attention was drawn to the importation of
arms from Arabian ports under their control.164 Although British
subjects were involved in this trade, the trading zone was largely
under French and Ottoman control. This made it difficult for the
British to restrict it.
This free flow of arms across imperial highways and the Indian
Ocean commercial networks ensured that most of the tribes of the
Persian region became armed, and it was they who passed the arms
on to Afghanistan and British India. The British vice consul relied
on the Persian government to curb the traffic, and the latter deputed
their own man, Malik Tujar, to assist the vice consul. In one such
joint search at Bushier, 4,826 rifles and about 1 million rounds of
ammunition were seized.165 The Persian sadr-i-azam noted that he
was one with the British in this antiarms trade campaign, as his
tribals were becoming more heavily armed than his army. He maintained that his government ha[d] always sought to prevent the
arming of the tribesmen as well as the inhabitants of the towns and
frontiers.166 And yet the war minister of Persia, Nahib-es-Sultaneh,
encouraged the imports for his own use as arms intended for the
use of the Shahs government.167
Not content with restrictions at Persia, the India Office pressured
the Foreign Office to impose restrictions at Muscatthe port from
which the arms went in dhows to Bushier and southern Persian
ports. The consul at Muscat was empowered to make rules that
made it compulsory for British subjects to register at the consulate all arms imported or owned by them.168 C.G.F. Fagan, the
consul at Muscat, notified all British subjects that the importation of
arms into Persia and British India was forbidden and illegal. He
threatened offenders both with confiscation of their wares and with
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punishment.169 The independent kingdom of Bahrain was brought

on board with its chief, Esa bin Ali Al Khalifa, agreeing to have
British and Persian warships searched and to confiscate arms in
ships bearing the Bahrain flag and other vessels using Bahrain
waters.170 And indeed, one set of confiscated arms from Fracis Times
and their Parsi partners indicated the magnitude of the imports:
3,800 rifles valued at 12,000 and other arms worth 700, all seized
on board the ship Baluchistanand this was independent of a stock
of arms seized at Muscat, valued at 9,000.171 Efforts were also made
to get Kuwait and Turkey to join the antiarms effort, and especially
to at least make Turkey declare that importing arms to its territory
was illegal. This would strengthen Muscats efforts to stop its subjects from indulging in the traffic under the excuse that the arms
were intended for Turkey.172
But still as late as 1901 camp diaries of British army officers in the
frontier region indicated that Afridis could move across Afghanistan,
reach Muscat and buy arms with no difficulty, and get back to their
homes.173 Officers revealed a clandestine route that traders in Muscat
adopted to dodge the British-imposed ban on arms trade. Dealers
obtained permits from Muscat authorities. And under cover of these
permits the arms were put on board native craft, which landed surreptitiously at unfrequented places near Linga, Bandar-i-reig, Jask
Bundar, Ormuz, Bundat Abbas, and Kishni and Gwadar. At these
places the rifles were sold to tribesmen via whom they found their
way into Baluchistan and Afghanistan. At Bunder Abbas traders hid
these rifles in their compounds until they were required for sale to
Afghan and other traders. And once the deal was set they were
secretly taken and handed over to the purchasers.174
This network was sustained with an eye on profits. Business
houses did not wish to be drawn into imperial wars, even as they
made a fortune traversing imperial highways. Steamship companies
were quick to plead ignorance about the contents of their consignments if they were accused of violating rules and carting forbidden
items. They were also clear that they were nonactors in the imperial
rivalries that framed much of the arms traffic. Thus the Anglo-
Arabian and Persian Steamship Company of Bishopgate Street,
London, which carted many of the Belgian-made rifles to the Gulf,
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when accused by the British and Persian governments of transporting arms despite restrictions, was quick to wash its hands of any
controversy. The company quickly declared that it had no knowledge of the contents of their containers and that it had, as they
reported, no wish to be parties to landing in Persia goods which
the Government of Persia does not wish to have imported.175 The
same was the case with Bucknall Brothers of Leadenhall Street,
London, which also said that it ha[d] no other interest or concern
in the matter other than to collect the freight due on the shipment.176
Indeed, in 1899 representatives of numerous bodies of arms manufacturers and traders in Britain who traded with Persia and other
parts of Asia complained to the Marquess of Salisbury about the
hardships they faced because of British strictures against their businesses abroad. They lamented that their businesses had suffered
because, as Bucknall Brothers put it, their property in Persia and
elsewhere was taken possession of by Representatives of the British
Government without...any valid ground.177 Fraciss Parsi partner
Gopalji Walji and his colleagues in Muscat, Damoder Dhurmsee
Ruttonsee Pushotum, K.P. Lodhavalla and Company, and Dhunjee
Morarji, petitioned the consul about their hardships, noting the
trade they had lost to Arab hands due to the introduction of new
regulations on British subjects in the arms business. They revealed
that since they were now required to make weekly reports on the
sale of their arms and ammunitions, listing the quantity and quality
of the imports along with the names, residences, and nationalities of
buyers, they were losing customers who sought anonymity. The
Arab dealers had to give weekly reports to the sultan, but they did
not need to divulge the locality or nationality of the buyers, and
thus customers preferred to transact with them. Gopalji regretted
that the result of British policy had been, as he reported, to drive
the trade away from us and thrust it upon other adventurers who are
day by day getting firmly established in the trade as manifested by
monthly imports.178
Complaints also poured in from manufacturers of sports guns in
Britain whose businesses in Persia had also been affected by the new
stringent measures enforced on British subjects dealing in arms in
the region. In 1899, C.G. Bonehill pleaded that his business in
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Persia be exempted, as his guns, as he described it, were purely

sporting arms, such that are never made for military purposes and
are totally different from military rifles, being for purpose of
shooting furred and feathered game.179 H. M. Durand, in the
Foreign Office, reminded him that as per the Persian governments
rule even the import of such sporting guns was illegal.180
And thus it was on the networks of trans-Asiatic commerce
involving British, European, and Asian capital and proceeding along
imperial highways that arms reached the northwest frontier colonies
of Wahabis. According to a statement of Ghazi Khan Inayatullah
Khan, a head constable, several Pathans arrived at the port of Bunder
Abbas, where he was then camped, and bought rifles with ease.
He reported that a Pathan named Ghulam Khan purchased two
Martini-Henry rifles and four hundred rounds of ammunition from
a Memon named Haji Muhammad Hasan, who paid 280 Irani rupees
for them. Another Pathan, named Hakim Khan, also purchased a
Martini rifle and two hundred rounds of ammunition from Ghulam
Khan, paying 140 Irani rupees for them. The constable also reported
roving caravans of traders with as many as forty rifles that were up
for sale in areas like Meshed. These could be bought by anyone, and
he too bought two from one such caravan for 320 Irani rupees.
However, the constable reported that due to the strict new measures
it was difficult to smuggle these into Afghanistan as the wazir would
not allow it. The kotwal at Herat, Afghanistan, also confiscated his
rifle.181
Both L.H.E. Tucker, inspector general of police at Punjab, and
Colonel W. Hill, assistant adjutant general for musketry, argued in
their reports that European arms and ammunitions reached the
northwest frontier tribesmen from the Persian Gulf and Muscat.
They reported twenty packets of ball ammunition with a Brussels
label in the house of one Mir Sakathe headman of Pasni in
Makran. On analysis at the DumDum small arms factory, these
were found to have been manufactured in Brussels. Similarly, three
arrested Pathans at Ormara near Karachi had in their possession a
Martini-Henry carbine and several rounds of ammunition. These
belonged to the Powindahs tribe near Ghazni, which said they had
purchased twenty rifles in Muscat but had been attacked in Makran
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and lost them.182 Hill reinforced Tuckers findings, and added that
the profits were so high in this trade that the price of a rifle delivered in Muscat was between Rs. 40 and Rs. 50, and its selling price
on the northwest frontier about Rs. 300.183And Captain Roos
Keppel, posted on the northwest frontier, revealed that the trade
was carried on by Ghilzai and Kabul traders who had large consignments of these rifles as they moved downward in the winter months
in their caravans. Keppels investigationsconducted via an Afridi
orderly who posed as a buyerrevealed that the price of a rifle
ranged from Rs. 600 to Rs. 450 depending on the supply. Most were
manufactured by firms in Britain and Europe. The two bought by
Keppels orderly were manufactured by Fracis Times and the British
South Africa Company. It was these critical traders who supplied
the arms to the northwest frontier tribals in British India.184

The Making of the Market-Driven Reformist Doctrine

The reformists, while performing multiple roles, reinvented the
Arabic-scripture-driven tauhid doctrine to suit their market-driven
interests. This created an India-specific Arabicist cultural grid that
corresponded to the networks of their political and commercial
activity. It was spread out like a net from Calcutta and Patna in the
east, to Delhi, Tonk, Haiderabad, Vellore, Madras, Mysore in the
south, and to Swat, Sittana, and Sindh in the northwest. By the midnineteenth century, this grid had expanded to connect to the Central
Asian region, as a result of the reformists participation in the imperial rivalries of Britain, Russia, and Persia; and it had stretched as
well to the Hijaz and Ottoman regions as the reformists migrated
there in the postmutiny period. Here, as we will see in subsequent
chapters, it connected with similar kinds of Arab and Ottoman
intellectual currents.
The nineteenth-century Arabicist grid had the self-interpretation
of the scriptures and tauhid as its core. But as it expanded in response
to political ambitions, profits of trade, the trans-Asian market for
military labor, and engagement with British colonial rule it also
began to embrace the cult of the saint. In combining the reformist
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protestant core with the significance of the saint the Arabicist grid
of the Indian brand reflected the original Naqshbandi formula of
Shahwaliulla: compromise and accretion to unite the umma. Para
doxically, this trans-Asian Arabicist grid forged by migr reformists was more in line with the elite Persian Sirat-i-Mustaqim than
with the later derivative Urdu reformist literaturewhich reduced
its eclecticism to a narrow definition of tauhid that was both antisaint and anticustom. But unlike the elite reformist literature, the
inclusivity of the Arabicist grid was based on the concept of social
leveling; in this sense, it differed as well from the Persianate model
of inclusivity, which was based on social equilibrium.
The urge to learn Arabic acquired heightened intensity as individuals inspired by the idea of self-interpretation became primary
movers of change. One of the most evident impacts of reformist
activism was the centrality of the individualthat is, the migr
reformer who popularized a way of life and action that was constructed via his response to the political and social pressures of the
military labor market. This activism was an on-the-spot individual
construct rather the product of dictates issued from above by elite
literate leaders and pedantic texts. Such a flexible and accommodative means of social and political engagement, which had scriptural
sanctity as well, stood in contrast to the rigid and exclusive regime
articulated in normative Urdu texts like the Nasihat, discussed at the
beginning of this chapter.
Thus in 1839 one Muhammad Ali, a Tamil speaker, migrated from
Nellore to Haiderabad, as the latter offered a more conducive locale
in which to learn Arabic. He registered at the school of Mubaruzdaulah
Bahadur in Haiderabad, and in two years he became proficient in the
language. At the madrasa he heard of the recruitment drives of
Maulvi Nasiruddin of the Shah Abd-al Aziz family and his march to
Sindh to fight the amirs and establish the Arabicist stronghold. The
thought of temporal power and privileges so charged Muhammad
Ali that he set out to join Maulvi Nasiruddin. He justified using all
fair and foul means to achieve victory at the battlefront by reinventing the Koranic injunctions on war ethics. He explained his
rationale in a letter to his cousin: They [Muslims] should quit the
places of their enemies [where they reside and work], abandon their
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peace and pleasures, undergo toil and render themselves worthy of

Gods regard. For God has ordered the robbery of the property of
these infidels and the carnal enjoyment of their daughters without
nikah. What injustice is there in this country that those who do such
things should be made criminals and punished.185
This ideological orientation was a far cry from Koranic war ethics
as espoused in the Urdu reformist literature on the subject. The
only two reformist texts on jihadthe Risalah I-Jihad by Khurram
Ali and the Targhib-I-Jihad by a maulvi of Kanoujboth urge the
reader to take guidance from the Koran and the Hadith when at war
with the infidels. And neither of these texts advocates the injunctions put forth by Muhammad Ali. Indeed, even the Sirat-i-Mustaqim
mentions the duty of jihad only incidentally along with other basic
duties of Islam.186 Muhammad Alis contribution to the making of
the reformist doctrine thus evolved in the context of larger political
contestations that had a global extraterritorial hue, and in which he
was an active contestant.
And he was not the only participant in the creation of such an
ideology. The same year Abdul Qadir, a dismissed sepoy of the
Nellore region, complained to the magistrate that he was exhorted
and threatened by reformist preachers (he too called the reformists
Wahabis); these preachers brought pamphlets from the local
mosque urging people to pursue jihad and promising that those
who acted thus, God would exalt, that God would give them celestial nymphs in heaven, and the daughters of these infidels might be
enjoyed without nikah. Readers were further assured that by so
doing fame will be acquired in this world and in the next. Qadir
complained that these men threatened him that they would neither
follow his corpse nor allow him a decent burial if he did not join
them. He said that he had information that these preachers had the
support of the nawab of Haiderabad, who was luring them with
money to the tune of Rs. 10,000 and inviting them to Haiderabad to
consolidate under him and fight the infidels.187
And the reinterpretation of the doctrine was not just restricted to
jihad. Another deposed sepoy, a Wahabi convert, invented a novel
concept of pure and impure Muslim to justify his son reading
the khutba in a mosque. In response to objections being raised about
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people reading the namaz behind him (as they were asadullahs, or
those who had not directly descended from the Prophet, in contrast
to the sepoy namazis, who could claim direct descent from the
Prophet), he replied that a pure Muslim was one who had suckled
his mother only after she had bathed (ghusal) after sexual intercourse
with her husband (that is, the persons biological father). Only his
son met this test and thus he was the pure Muslim.188 Likewise, an
anonymous letter circulating in Ludhiana in 1852 interpreted the
Koran to justify the recruitment drives of a reformist entrepreneur.
It said that it was binding on all Muhammedans to leave their wives
and children and come join [the reformers]. And it exhorted, Those
who cannot come should join us with their wealth and protect the
families of those who come.189 It concluded by underlining that the
Wahabi doctrine stated that those who give to ghazis are themselves ghazis, and those who protect ghazis are ghazi.
The historicization of reformist doctrine as it evolved in the nineteenth century reveals its particularistic Arabicist flavor: it is monist
in its many variations and yet saint and cult oriented; it swings
between sainthood and prophethood; and it is driven by the prospect of a universal umma while at the same time remaining rooted
in local authority structures like the Sufi silsilahs (brotherhood).
With their stress on individual action in matters sacred and profane,
the reformist texts are by all standards this-worldly. The Koran and
the Sunnat are continuously invoked and interpreted by the reformists to justify their individual actions, which are geared toward
acquiring power, prestige, and profits. And the cult of the saint is
created to garner greater support for their market-oriented polit
ical and military agendas. It is this unprecedented agency that the
reformists give to the individual that propels their doctrine far ahead
of the normative Urdu textswhich, paradoxically, had introduced
the salience of the individual in interpreting scriptures. Indeed, the
reformist texts themselves pale in front of the individual and his
interpretation of them. In the ultimate analysis, the interpreter
acquires greater credibility in society than even his own text.
In 1839, H. Montgomery, superintendent of Astagram in Mysore,
stated that the reformist doctrine had limited appeal when disseminated via the literature of Maulvi Ismael (who had compiled the
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Sirat) and the Urdu literature that derived from it. The Urdu texts
were popularly perceived to be so Allah-centric that they even
rejected the salience of Prophet Muhammad. One man, Mahomed
Ali Sahib, in charge of the gumbaz in Bangalore, said that he was
incensed at the reformists, claiming, [They] reject the Prophet
Muhmmad and think him no better than any other man. And they
are enemies to all mankind except their own.190
It was thus not surprising that when a Bombay maulvi named
Akbar Ali quoted a reformist author and his texts in his sermons at
Bangalore he was treated with such disapprobation from the
assembly that he was obliged to disavow the sect and join the rest of
the company in cursing all who belonged to it. Ultimately, the sermons of a fakeer in Mysore proved more successful than the dissemination of literature by the maulvi. The fakeer did in fact enlist
one hundred or so followers, but he too was generally detested.191
Again, one maulvi from Rampur, Maulvi Muhammad Sayyid,
recruited many followers for the Wahabi sect in Mysore because
he instructed disciples not so much in textual tauhid as in fakeeree
Ilum (exercise of devotion and self denial).192 Indeed, reformist literature and the people who cited its austere dictums were so resented
in parts of south India that people turned hostile to them and refused
to offer namaz behind those who were rumored to be reformists or
Wahabis.193 In light of this hostility, fakeers, saints, and mahdis
had to be harnessed to reformist doctrine to make it popular and
appealing. Beginning in the 1830s, the warrior monist-traders circulated rumors, pamphlets, and letters about martyred reformist
leader Sayyid Ahmad Shahid across Hindustan and beyond; in doing
so, they created the cult of the saint for him. In sharp contrast to the
strict monist ideals and long dictums against cult and saint worship
in the Nasihat (1825), the pamphlet literature of the 1840s and 1850s
(coupled with rumor mongering) indicates that the movement was
kept alive precisely as a result of the cultivation of sainthood for
Sayyid Ahmad.
As far south as Madras and Bangalore, the stories of Sayyid
Ahmads haj and of conflicts in Hindustan made the rounds in
various versions. Some projected him as a seditious character.194
Others glorified his valor and supernatural powers. In 1849, James
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Abbot, the commissioner of Hazara, collected information about

people flocking to Sittana to ascertain if, as per a rumor they had
heard, the martyred Sayyid Ahmad of Balakot had really come back
to life. Abbot reported that a few years earlier a similar fable had led
to a large-scale movement of people in the direction of Khozan,
where the sayyid had been slain. An inflated goat hide dressed out
with a turban and cloak was exhibited to the devout in the obscure
twilight of the cavern and passed off as the sayyid. Nobody was
allowed to approach the figure as it was said to cause offence to the
martyr. The gathering was dispersed only when a nonbeliever dared
to violate the injunctions, moved close to the figure, and tore off the
turban to reveal the impostor.195
In 1852, a letter ostensibly written by the dead Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid from the other world to his followers Inayat Ali, Wilayat Ali,
and Nassiruddin and to Muslims in general found wide currency
across Hindustan and in the northwest frontier region. One of the
key features of the letter was that it presented the sayyid as the interlocutor and chief intermediary between man and Allah. This was a
far cry from the kind of direct individual relation the sayyid himself
advocated between man, God, and his Prophet. Speaking in a manner
reminiscent of the Sufi malfuzat (conversations), the sayyid (who
refers to himself as the fakeer) explains to Muslims his assessment
of Allah and the Prophets sentiments toward the people of Hindustan
and his own critical role as the go-between who clarifies Allahs and
the Prophets false impressions and ensures that they will unleash
their bounty on the Muslims of Hindustan. In the Persianate style,
God is projected as a king, the embodiment of all sacred and profane
matters, and the sayyid is the chief lieutenant who helps God maintain social harmony by clearing up all of his misconceptions. Thus
the sayyid writes in the letter: For a long time this faker (I) has
seen that the Prophet is displeased with people of Hindustan. God
forgive them. Do not be dis-heartened for want of cash. Collect man
and appoint people to collect money and now there will be no difficulty from want of money as God will provide me from his secret
treasury.196
Very much in the tauhid tradition, the sayyid also urges people to
gather together for prayers as commanded by God. He recommends
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as preferred the prayer of tu-ujjud, offered four hours before daybreak; makes mandatory both morning prayers and prayers of dependence; and urges people to recite the kalima (belief in Allah and
Muhammad as his Prophet). At the same time, in the shirk tradition
that is critiqued in the Sirat, he issues a challenge to his friends, and
in particular one Khuda Baksh: he tells his friends that if they doubt
his existence, he can prove it by restoring to Baksh a penholder that
he had given him when he was alive and at Muzafarnagar.197 The
sayyid also refers to his contact with the Delhi Sufi saint Nizamuddin
Chishti, who figures in the letter as a significant observer who does
not approve of dissension within Muslim ranks.
Depositions of public servant converts like munshis and sepoys
suggest that the reformist leaders had painted Sayyid Ahmad as a
mehdi (savior who would emerge to rectify all ills of society). And this
cult of the saint, or mehdi, who would one day surface and solve all
the problems and issues of Muslim society, was kept alive by the
reformists to retain the support of the masses and make them endure
the temporary hardships of living in tribal areas, often under tribal
authority and customs. Thus one munshi, Waliullah of Farrukhabad,
claimed that the reformist leader Wilayat Ali while at the frontier
was always waiting for his peer and that he [did] not get along
with the akhom [religious authority] of Swat, but [was] making a show
of friendship. He concluded that the akhom wanted Wilayat Ali to
serve the political leader of Sittana Sayyid Akbar but that Wilayat
Ali and his clan were wait[ing] for some great man to come.198

The Colonial Grid and the Reformist Diaspora

By the late nineteenth century, the Arabicist grid that originated in
India and that was constructed via individual action and response to
trans-Asian politics stood in sharp contrast to the reformist popular
literature in Urdu. Indeed, as we saw above, it completely ignored
the rigidly monist doctrine of the Urdu texts. In contrast, it had a
flexible, individual-centric interpretation of Koranic injunctions
and combined tauhid with a freshly constructed cult of the saint and
the mehdi. In terms of its inclusivity it was thus closer to the
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Persianate Sirat-i-Mustaqim, which also combined tauhid with Sufi

doctrines. But having been produced via individual actions as
reformists struggled with the new world order, it lacked the Sirats
pedantic and elitist Persianate style dictums aimed at maintaining
social equilibrium. Rather, the India-specific Arabicist grid aimed at
social leveling and thus went a step ahead of the Sirat in its inclusivity as it created and disseminated the cult of the saint and the idea
of a mehdi, or savioreven as it theoretically adhered to belief in
tauhid, the Prophet, and the critique of rituals. The Arabicist grid
fired the imagination of Muslims as being part of a global Arabicist
imperium.
In the late nineteenth century, it was this Arabicist grid as created
by South Asian intellectuals, merchants, and warriors that came
into contact with the colonial administration, as its actors were
identified as some of the main instigators of the 1857 mutiny-
rebellion. The British clampdown on these actors, their migration
to the Hijaz and the Ottoman Arab provinces to escape the British
administration, their new status as marked convicts who were transported across India and beyond to penal colonies, and the use of
their labor in penal colonies in the Bay of Bengal added fresh and
new dimensions to the Arabicist grid. Indeed, British colonialism
gave it a new lease on life.
During the late nineteenth century, British rule began to offer
physicality to the Islamic global imaginary. At one level, colonial
presence with its print capitalism, greater opportunities for travel
across sea and land, and wider communication networks facilitated
travel and access to Muslim cultures and made the Islamic imaginary physically real at least for the privileged. But this physicality
also brought home the reality that the global so far envisaged as the
empire of Islam had given way to the Western-dominated global.
This elicited envy as well as the urge to access this novoglobal
empire, which corresponded in terms of its sheer scale and political
influence to the Islamic imaginary. The fact that this empire was
colonial of course created its own dynamics for the Muslims. But
their take on it was also derived from the ambivalence in their minds
between an Islamic global imaginary and the reality of life within
the British Empire with its control of capital and culture. The
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reformers used the colonial infrastructural and intellectual grid,

along with its legal vocabulary, English language, print capitalism,
and political rhetoric, to access this new empire, to reach out to the
Islamic imperium, and to contest the imperial grid once they were
sufficiently fortified intellectually and politically.
Indian reformists were not the only ones who perfected this kind
of brokerage. The following chapter shows how Indian Arabs also
followed this route to make careers for themselves. Driven by the
nineteenth-century thrust on individual agency, such men laid out a
vast transimperial cosmopolis that was neither entirely caliph-
centric nor anti-British in its global reach.

92

2
T h e M a k i ng of t h e
I n di a n A r a b a n d t h e
Ta le of Sayy i d Fa dl

Most of the arabs living in India were from Hadramawt, Yemen.

They traced their genealogies to Tarim, which was known for its
long-standing tradition of Islamic learning, and whose residents
included ulema, Sufis, and sayyids, many of whom had overseas
links. The region had a long history of migration to Africa and Asia:
people would leave Hadramawt to engage in trade, to seek work as
soldiers, or to spread Islamic learning.1
During the sixteenth century, members of the sayyid families
established hospices in several Indian Ocean regions. In India their
presence was marked in Delhi, Gujarat, Deccan, and Malabar. They
soon established themselves as influential ulema in Indian society
because of their Arabic learning and their association with the sacred
sites of Islam.2 However, it was not uncommon to find Arabs in multiple roles: as traders, as warriors, and as Sufi saints.
In the late eighteenth century, Haiderabad, in the eastern Deccan
region, became the center of large-scale Arab immigration. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, the city attracted Hadramis both
from within India and from Yemen and had an Arab population that
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

surpassed that of any other Indian province.3 They enjoyed high

positions in the administration of the nizam as soldiers, mercenaries,
and scholars. For instance, al-Sayyid al-Mujahid Abd al rahman ibn
Muhammad al-Zahir became the jamadar in the nizams irregular
forces. Sayyid Ahmad al-Aydarus (18991962), rose to become commander in chief.4 And Habib Aydarus set up a school for Islamic
studies at Nanded.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a large body of Arabs were domiciled in the Haiderabad state. The nizam had a considerable force of
Arab soldiery that traced its origins to the Hadramawt region. Arabs
moved with ease between Haiderabad and their homes in the
Hadramawt area of southern Yemen. Many came to Haiderabad to
work, and then would send money to their families as well as visit
the Hadramawt area to invest in land and property. Salaries and
remittances always flowed back and forth. Family networks were
tapped to get fresh recruits for the nizams army. Many Arabs settled and married in the Deccan. Their descendants were called
Mowullud. Such Indian Arabs forged strong bonds between the
Deccan and the Hadramawt areas. Their links with Hadramawt
meant that they were also naturally drawn into the factional politics
and wars in their homeland.5
Haiderabad had four different classes of Arabs: those enrolled in
the regular levies of the native government and who had undergone
military training; undrilled members of the Arab infantry who were
in the service of the government; guards entertained by amirs and
private persons throughout the country; and, finally, those who
were not in anyones pay at all. According to Sir Salar Jung, the
prime minister of the nizam, there were more than eight thousand
Arabs in the state. Most of these were Deccani born.6 The Malabar
region too boasted several influential Hadrami families, such as
that of the famous Sayyid Alawi and his more famous son Sayyid
Fadl (18231901), who preached Islam and gained notoriety for
rebelling against the British. In the following section, we will
discuss Sayyid Fadls interesting career as a marked Moplah rebel,
considering it as an example of how these Arab immigrants used
British paranoia and trans-Asian rivalries and threats to further
their careers.
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The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 enabled the British to

exert firmer control over Persian Gulf commerce. For instance,
Britain now controlled Qajar Irans export and import trade, which
was integrated, albeit in a subordinate way, in the global economy.7
However, later in the century Britain felt the heat as its imperial rivalsRussia, Germany, and the Ottomansenticed Iran,
Baghdad, and other Asian powers to build railways so as to recapture and control trade in the Persian Gulf. Britain turned its attention toward the southwest rim of the Arabian Peninsula as imperial
contestations over the Persian Gulf ports intensified.8
Britain now wanted to control not just the Gulf but also the entire
rim of the Arabian Peninsula from Bab al-Mandab to the Gulf of
Basra. Two events signaled the beginning of the larger political net
that Britain intended to spread in the Arabian Peninsula region:
through clandestine deals with Mubarak al Sabah of Kuwait, the
kingdom of Kuwait was brought under British protection; and in
1889, through a brutal takeover, Bahrain was also brought under
British protection. These areas were significant as they had important harbors and ports for the lucrative slave trade. But they were
also attractive because they were arenas where the relatively weak
Ottoman political sovereignty could be dented, and thus they offered
huge political dividends. A proactive Britain hoped to tame the
ambitions of Russia, Germany, and France as it secured treaties of
protection with the smaller emirates that dotted the rim.
British interest in the southwest rim of the Arabian Peninsula
brought it in direct contact with Arab traffic across Asia. This
region, as we saw above, had a history of entanglements with the
political economy and geopolitics of India.9 The Hadrami diaspora
that originated from here was linked to India via trade, family ties,
saints, and politics. British Indian subjects of Arab Hadrami origin
had family, property, and emotional and political investments in
this area of the Arabian Peninsula. The connection of the Hadrami
Arabs to India offered Britain a readymade justification to intervene
in the region, ostensibly to protect the interests of its Arab Muslim
subjects. The Bombay government used the pretext of concern for
Muslim subjects of Arab origin to legitimize its active involvement
in the region. Its administrative ambit was extended to cover the
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Gulf so as to oversee and protect British interests in the region.

These interests included the monitoring of its Muslim subjects of
Arab origin whose lives were inextricably linked with the development of the Arabian Peninsulas politics. The Bombay government
and British Muslim subjects in particular thus became the chief
agents via whom British imperial rivalries were played out in the
Arabian Peninsula.
The Bombay government emerged as the chief player in this
imperial plot. Indeed, in 1839 the surreptitious way in which it
signed a treaty with the illiterate Lahj tribal chief of Aden, wrested
the harbor from Ottoman control, and brought the area under its
protection aroused international condemnation and concern.10 Both
the Ottomans and the Russians were outraged at the entry of Britain
into the already hotly contested arena of Asian imperial rivalries.
The British presence was marked by the creation of the new office
of a political resident at Aden who would oversee British interests in
the region.11 As the years rolled by, he was invested with increasing
power to interfere and mediate in the affairs of the Indian subjects
caught in Arabian feuds. Critics accused Britain of trying to control
the waterway and convert it into its exclusive preserve, and of
ignoring the fact that the whole Arabian side of it was under Ottoman
sovereignty. And they were not wrong. It was the issue of Ottoman
political sovereignty that had brought Britain into the region.
Indeed, the Mahomedan subjects became the medium via which
British imperial rivalries with the Ottoman played out.
By the late 1880s, British political designs had become so blatant
that the Ottomans were forced to react. In this period of economic
depression, they did not invest in a fleet or an armed presence to
counter British designs. Instead, because they were near bankruptcy,
they leaned on the authority of the caliph. They tried to influence
Indian Muslims via caliphal authority. The British reacted by
asserting their political sovereignty based on their stated aim of
protecting Indian Muslim interests.12
Muslims of Arab origin who lived in India became the main
agents by whom Britain was set to play out its imperial rivalries with
the Ottomans. The Bombay government was chosen to be at the
vanguard of this engagement. Its long administrative arm reached
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

Arab tribes in Muscat, Yemen, and the Arabian Peninsula. Its political agent at Aden monitored tribal activities. For instance, as early
as 1823 a large group of Arab tribals of the Beni Boo Ali Arab clan
had been deported to India to be lodged at the Bombay prison
because they had converted to Wahabism and posed a serious
menace in the Muscat region. They were therefore physically
removed and shifted to Bombay to prevent their damaging doctrine
from spreading in the Arabian Peninsula. As it happened, most of
them died in prison of cholera and smallpox.13
But during the late nineteenth century, British attention zeroed
in on the movement of Arabs between the Haiderabad region of the
Deccan and the southwest rim of Arabia. British interest in their
movement and routes began to create fissures in the Arabs vibrant
trans-Asian cosmopolitan culture, which, as we have seen, went
back to premodern times. The Hadrami Arabs in their capacity as
soldiers, merchants, scholars, and saints had a long history of interaction with Haiderabad. We saw above how their movements as well
as their intellectual and emotional investments in the Deccani state
of Haiderabad enriched its political culture.14 All this was set to
change.
The British administration coined the new category of the Indian
Arab to describe the problem of the huge number of Arabsboth
immigrant and Deccan bornwho resided in the Haiderabad region
and who had families and connections in Arabia. This categorization was accompanied by the negative stereotype that singled out
Arabs as the cause of all corruption and lawlessness in Deccani
society. This negative casting aimed in no small measure to mark
their difference with the native Deccani society that framed their
lives and identity. According to Charles B. Saunders, the resident at
Haiderabad, the Arabs not in the service of local polities were the
most truculent and dangerous specimens of humanity. But together
with those in the service of the nizam they could, he claimed, be
used as a formidable irregular force. This was because they were, as
he put it, hardy, fanatical, fond of plunder and equally regardless of
their own lives and the lives of others.15 They couldalong with
the Rohillas, Baluchis, and Africans who also lived in Haiderabad
inflict heavy losses on their enemies. They had an art of digging
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

vaults or rifle pits in the center of streets and squares in which they
could ensconce themselves in relative safety. And they were armed
with a variety of weapons: matchlocks, powder horns, rifles, pistols,
swords, spears, daggers, and knives.16 It was a well-known fact that
Sir Salar Jung had a useful body of organized Arab infantry in his
service. They were kept separate from the regular army of the state
about twenty-four miles from Haiderabad in a village called
Mahesaram.17
Saunders was of the view that Arabs had grown roots in Haiderabad
also because it provided them with opportunities for quick money-
making, often through fraudulent means: They roll property, lend
money at enormous rates of interest, and indulge in all kinds of petty
and illicit traffic with the result of growing rich and respectable
fast.18 Indeed, the nizams government itself had often borrowed
large quantities of money from them. Saunders pointed out that
many influential members of the community had risen to favor in
the service of the nizam or his minister. Chiefs like Ghalib Jang,
Mukaddam Jang, Barak Jang and his half brother Al Bin Umar were
some cases in point. In fact, it was because of the large amounts of
money that Arabs had loaned to the local government and the influence of many members of the Arab community that the extreme
step of deporting the whole race from the Deccan was postponed.
Saunders noted that the British resident as well as the nizams minister were tired of the plunder of towns and villages by roving
groups of Arabs.19 But the outright deportation of Arabs was prevented due to the entanglement of the Arab community itself in the
larger running of the nizamat.
Starting in 1872, special identity passes were issued to Arabs to
mark them out as separate from Deccani society. Measures were
taken to restrict the hitherto unrestricted entry of Arab immigrants.
Earlier immigrants could sail to Bombay without any documents
and on arrival obtain a pass from the police commissioner and
British resident in the city. This document permitted them to move
onward to Haiderabad. But beginning in 1872, the permission of the
Haiderabad government, conveyed through the British resident
posted in the city, as well as the sanction of the political agent at

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Aden became the prerequisite for any travel to India. Initially, these
regulations were difficult to implement. They remained limited to
matters of policy. In practice not a single Arab ever applied for a
passport via this method. Saunders was convinced that the introduction of the new railways in the region facilitated the illegal
immigration of Arabs into Haiderabad.20
Arabs, as Ottoman subjects, resorted to obtaining passports from
the Turkish consul general at Bombay in order to enter India and
move toward Haiderabad. The police officers at Bombay did not
recognize these as valid documents and instead looked for permission letters from the political resident at Aden. Even though a passport system for foreigners moving in India was not in force in India,
the Foreign Department had adopted some restrictive measures for
Arabs moving to Haiderabad because, as one official put it, When
they come they tended to stimulate and keep alive feuds of their
fellow tribesmen in Southern Arabia.21 The government of India
reiterated these rules each time the Ottoman consulate complained
about the harassment of Ottoman subjects by police officers in
Bombay.
There was little or no support for such regulations from the
nizam. He was not in favor of any restrictions on the movement of
Arab immigrants. He saw them as an integral part of Deccani
society. Indeed, he saw them as men of status because of their association with the sacred sites and the language of Muslims, and therefore he maintained that they required no special identification. In
fact, in 1890 he strongly resisted any move to equate the Arabs with
the Rohillaswho needed passes from police officers at the entry
point of every new territory they visited. The nizam agreed that
passes should be issued for Arabs seeking to enter British territory.
But he drew the line when it came to Haiderabad because he recognized the special status of Arabs as critical players in the political
economy of Haiderabad; and he regarded them as doubly valuable
because of their origins in the sacred soil of Arabia.22 He remarked
in a letter to the resident at Haiderabad: The Arabs on the other
hand who are generally wealthy men and hold the highest ranks in
the army hold jagirs and mansabs, are held in esteem by the

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Government and with regard to the connection which Mahomedan

have with the sacred soil of Arabia, the Arabs are held by all the
Musalman sects in veneration and esteem.23
However, toward the beginning of 1880s a new concern cropped
up: this was the exodus of the Arabs from India, with treasure and
military stores, to their own country. It was by monitoring Indian
Arabs when they returned to their home countries and participated
in the politics and society of the Arabian Peninsula that the British
obtained an entry point into the region. The returning Hadrami,
now a marked Indian Arab, was a British subject. He became the
agent through whom Ottoman political sovereignty, which in this
period of economic crisis leaned heavily on the caliph, could be
effectively countered. The concern for the Indian Arab also became
an important medium through which the nizams political economy
and power could be challenged.
It was quite evident that arms, money, and recruitment supplies
from Haiderabad were being used by Indian Arabs and other ambitious Arab residents, who tapped their networks to fight factional
wars in southwest Arabia, particularly in Makulla and Shehr in the
Hadramawt area. Some Arab chiefs with contacts in India were
trying to emerge as independent rulers of these estates and wished
to be treated like the independent regional princes of India. The
influential Jang brothers (Barak and Nawaz) in the government of
the nizam were one such important case in point. The Jang brothers
and other ambitious Arab chiefs shifted British attention away from
their intrigues within India and more toward their activities outside. As the British viewed it, the affairs of these men outside India
were being sustained by Indian contactsIndian Arabs who had
returned to their home countriesand thus had a bearing on developments in India.
The involvement of Indian Arabs in Arabian feuds provided the
British with a legitimate excuse to intervene in the region and to
fight its Asian rivals in a backhanded way. Here, British political
sovereigntywhich hinged on the protection of Indian Muslim
interestscompeted with caliph-centric Ottoman political sovereignty. Muslim subjects of Arab origin caught in the middle of the
imperial crossroad of competing sovereignties benefited as they
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made the most of both. As these two sovereignties competed, the

conduits for communication and contact between India and southwest Arabia only strengthened, both as a consequence of British
efforts to monitor Indian Arabs and as a result of the activities of
these men themselveswho relied on money and labor from Indian
contacts to fight their battles in Arabia. Moreover, Indian potentates, like the nizam of Haiderabad, took sides and pressured the
Bombay government to aid their Arab protgs.
Makulla and Shehr, two very important port cities in southwest
Arabia bordering Yemen in the Dhofar area, are important cases in
point. Both were riveted by battles for power and control as they
were very important depots for the lucrative slave trade that moved
from eastern Africa via Jeddah to the Western world. Makulla was
also an important coal depot. Therefore, the British and Ottoman
stakes in these cities were high. Indian Arabs who nurtured political
ambitions could exploit imperial rivalries in the region and carve
out a niche for themselves. Barak Jang Bahadur, an influential
member in the nizams service, had a brother in Shehr, Nawaz Jang,
who had ambitions of ruling the port city and taking over Makulla
as well. His career became a cause of concern for the British. They
wanted to have the sole right of monitoring and controlling Nawaz
Jangs activities, as this offered them a point of entry into the larger
theater of European empires that included Ottomans. When they
stepped in to help Nawaz Jang, they did not want his brother Barak
Jang or the nizam to have any role in the wars at Shehr. Thus Nawaz
Jang became the key player in the imperial rivalries in the region.
Indeed, his entanglement with the political economy and culture of
Haiderabad as well as with the geopolitics of the Arab region made
him the ideal individual around whom British-Ottoman and Britishnizam politics could be played out.
In 1877, Salar Jang, the nizams minister, admitted to a close contact between one of his officialsBarak Jangand his brother in
Shehr, Nawaz Jang. The latter, while flaunting political ambitions
in the Shehr region, maintained his Deccani links as he continued
to occupy a position in the Arab force in Haiderabad as well. It
was widely believed that Nawaz Jang depended on payments from
Indian Arabs, as they pumped money into the Arab economy, and
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on arms from Haiderabad in order to pursue his political ambi

tion of becoming the sultan of the port city of Shehr and to
expand into Makulla (which was under British protection) on the
Hadramawt coast.
Initially, the British mounted pressure on the nizams minister,
urging him to ensure that that his colleague Barak Jang would sever
all ties with Haiderabad. The minister deflated the pressure by
arguing that his colleague did not know of the political ambitions of
his brother, Nawaz Jang. Barak Jang, he argued, thought that his
brother was merely residing in Shehr with his elder brother
Abdullawho was the chief there. Despite repeated pleas from the
British, the nizam refused to take action against Barak Jang. Under
further pressure, he agreed to remove Nawaz Jang from the rolls of
the Arab force in Haiderabad. 24 He also warned Barak Jang to
refrain from fanning his brothers political ambitions. The nizam
was reminded of the prohibitory orders in force in the Hadramawt
region preventing any attacks on Makulla. He asked Barak Jang to
comply and to send any related information he might have so that
more explicit government orders could be issued if required. 25
Barak obviously refuted all charges against his brother, especially
one concerning money ($30,000) and men that Nawaz allegedly had
received from Haiderabad. He asked for an inquiry to uncover the
truth. He alleged that it was in fact the chief of Makulla and his
tribal allies who were wreaking havoc in Shehr. Repeated requests
from Shehr to the British agent at Aden to stop these attacks had
gone unheeded. Indeed, the British had pledged not to interfere in
the matter. In his efforts to resolve the problem, Barak appealed to
the British sense of justice.26 The British on their part reiterated
their concern about the flow of money and material supplies from
Haiderabad to Shehr. At the same time, they again pledged their
noninterference in the region. In the same breath, the British resident stated that the political agent at Aden could, if he desired,
mediate or intervene with friendly advice for the settlement of the
dispute.27
Indeed, the British resident at Aden was the nodal point for the
representation of British interests in the region. But his interven
tion in local disputes had the effect of fissuring the cosmopolitan
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trans-Asiatic world of Arab immigrants. His presence signaled an

abrupt disjunction in the well-knit world of the Hadramis, a world
in which they had straddled multiple Asian regions with ease. Their
resistance to the tearing apart of their world came in the form of
their insistence that the nizam of Haiderabad rather than the British
resident at Aden solve their disputes. Barak Jang encouraged this
sentiment and urged that the Haiderabad political setupthe government of the nizambe central to any resolution. He thus underlined and reaffirmed the links between the Deccan and the rim of
Arabia, as well as the long reach of Britains Muslim subjects. He felt
that the British suffered from amnesia or lived in denial of the historic politico-economic ties that knitted southwest Arabia to the
Deccanand that even if they recognized the connection, they
wanted to sever it. He also felt that his personal status would rise if
the nizams government were involved in the Arabian entanglements. But his plans failed, as the nizam did not back him. The
nizam urged him to sack Nawaz Jangto remove him from the
official roll of the military forceand also to sever all connections
with him as per the orders of the British government.28
The British were incensed at the temerity of Nawaz Jang and other
Indian Arab subjects who wished to become independent rulers outside British territory and yet retain their rights in India, maintaining
family ties, managing property, and retaining travel privileges.
British notions of territorial-framed subjecthood and neat ethnic
categorizations had no space for such extraterritorial forays of subject people. Indeed, their official categories created fissures in a hitherto cosmopolitan premodern world where to be Hadrami as well as
Deccani posed no problem. Indeed, the porous borders and the fluid
and well-knit political economies of the premodern world encouraged multiple identities. While this seemed natural to Indian Arabs,
it was unacceptable to the British government.
But the Indian Arabs too held on to their world and were unwilling
to give in just yet. Nawaz Jang, backed back by his brother in
Haiderabad, Barak Jang, played hide and seek with the political
agent at Aden, buying time and seeking permission for a visit to
Haiderabad. He said his visit was necessary as he wanted to round
up his affairs there and bring back his family to Shehr.29 He stated
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that he only wanted to profit from the gains he had made in the
war with Makulla and had nothing against the British. But his explanations did not satisfy the British. An angry British resident, Sir
R. Meade, suggested that if Barak Jang wanted to retain an authoritative position in connection with Shehr he should withdraw from
his current position in Haiderabad. C.B.E. Smith, assistant resident at Haiderabad, held a similar view: The evils of the state of
things will be enormously increased if [Arab Indians] leaders occupy
the position of independent chiefs in Arabia, and a political association is thus established between Haiderabad and that country which
may lead to serious difficulties and complications in the future.30
At the same time, Barak Jang was also warned by the resident that
only the political agent at Aden and the British resident there would
mediate and that Nawaz Jang should report only to them and submit
his case only to them. He was reminded that the Haiderabad government was no intermediary in the Arabian disputes, even if it was
interested in the affairs of their people.31 Throughout the 1870s,
FrancisA.E. Loch, the political resident at Aden, reported that
Barak Jang would not cooperate either by submitting the case of
his brother to the resident or by making his brother accept the
mediation of the resident. For his part, Barak Jang hedged: he was
always more inclined to involve Haiderabad in the resolution of the
dispute and wanted the British resident at Haiderabad to intervene,
but he also suggested that Nawaz Jang visit Haiderabad to explain
his case.
Even as Nawaz Jang and his brother resisted British attempts to
crack their connected worlds, they did not hesitate to make the most
of the imperial highways and the new forms of connections that
they offered. And this was possible because Nawaz Jang tied his foreign relations into the international power games of modern
European empires. And thus despite almost disowning Nawaz Jang
for challenging their political sovereignty, the British were happy to
use him to dent Ottoman political sovereignty in the region. And
Nawaz Jang, sensitive to this British imperial agenda, was happy to
play along as long as it suited his purpose. Aware of British imperial
interests in the region, he underlined the fact that he had rejected
friendly overtures from the Ottomans as well as from the rebel
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Moplah chief Sayyid Fadlthe self-styled chief of Dhofar who was

hostile to the British.32 This did not stop British demands that
Nawaz Jang relinquish his official position in the nizams service,
restrict his visits to Haiderabad, and have his family return to Shehr.
They wanted him to sever all ties with India as a consequence of his
becoming an independent chief of an Arabian state. Yet these
demands did not stop the British from using him in their trans-
Asian political games. Thus in November 1877 the British used
Nawaz Jangs services to get information about the real deal between
Sayyid Fadl and the Ottoman government.33 And while they used
Nawaz Jang, they were also happy to extend him help in his political
fights. They offered him assistance in his local battles and feuds for
supremacy in Shehr. They agreed to prop him up as the chief agent
over his brother in the city.
Notwithstanding the neat ethnic categorization of Indian subjects, the harsh reality was that Indian Arabs were part of the wider
imperially embedded Muslim networks that knitted together
Western empires in Asia. The British recognized the connect
between the Mahomedan population in India and the wars in the
southwest Arabian Peninsular rim. In 1878, Loch, the political agent
at Aden, wanted the Shehr-Makulla dispute to end and offered
British help to the latter because, as he put it, he did not want these
disputes to have ripplers effect in the Muhammedan population in
India.34 Paradoxically, there was at one level an acceptance of the
connect, while at the same time administrative acumen and the
demands of governance in India required that it be ignored. It was
considered politically expedient that the British ask for the severing
of relations between southwest Arabia and India. And yet people
like Nawaz Jang who connected the two worlds were both a liability
and an asset. As an Indian Arab, Nawaz Jang could be used to
counter the claims that the Ottomans had a monopoly over Muslims
both in India and elsewhere. But in order to justify interventions in
his affairs, the British had to legally frame him as an Indian subject;
this meant that he had to be delinked from his larger ancestral
moorings and his life and career in his homeland, which stretched
beyond India. Significantly, the interventions of the British political resident in the disputes of Shehr and Makulla amounted to
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intrusions in what was basically the Arab rim of the Ottoman territory. These interventions happened with the aid of Indian Arabs,
like the Jang brothers, who were mediators between the British and
Ottoman imperial rivals. Indeed, meddling in their affairs increased
the clout of the resident. But if Loch depended on such little men
to gnaw into Ottoman political sovereignty, the Ottoman government (the Porte) also leaned on them for support. Loch was concerned that the Porte would use Sayyid Fadlthe deported Indian
Arab Mopilla rebel from southern Indiaas their agent to counter
British endeavors. After all, the events in Makulla offered an ideal
imperial flashpoint of the sort that career brokers like Fadl loved to
exploit. Lochs fears were aggravated on news that Fadl was in
Istanbul, and more important, that at the request of the nakib of
Makulla the port town had been placed under his supervision.
Lochs report was that Fadl was on his way to Makulla.35 Such imperial contests offered a boost to the careers of middlemen like Nawaz
Jang and Fadl.
In the late nineteenth century, the British campaign for the suppression of the slave trade diminished the authority of slave merchants and notables in the region. It made the independent Arab
chief vulnerable. This was the best time for British intervention in
the region. It is no surprise that in the 1870s their political agent at
Aden was encouraged to take an active interest and mediate in the
affairs of the Indian Arabs. This also meant it was a boom time for
middlemen like Nawaz Jang, who could now play a useful role in
furthering British politics vis--vis the Ottomans. The Bombay
governor, Richard Temple, also thought this was the time to extend
help to the chiefs and buttress the power of the agent at Aden and
that of the Bombay government itself.36 It was widely believed that
Ottoman expansion in the southern rim of Arabia could be controlled by propping up independent Arab chiefswith Indian connectionslike Nawaz Jang. His kingdom, Shehr, was seen as a
potential ally. The British drew their confidence from their experience with a similar independent Arab stateMakullathat had
been saved by Loch, the political agent at Aden, from Turkish
troops.37 Since 1878, Makullas allegiance to the British had been
complete. But the British always viewed with concern the slightest
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vacillations of Makulla toward any other political power, including

the British ally Muscat. Indeed, it was Nawaz Jangs invasion of
Makulla that triggered British intervention in his affairs.
The Shehr-Makulla dispute paused with a British-induced two-
year truce. In this period, Barak Jang agreed to have the Aden resident serve as mediator. But he also was able to have introduced a
clause that allowed him to appeal to the Bombay government if he
was not satisfied with the outcome of the case. This was his last-
ditch effort to balance his flexible extraterritorial politics with the
more territorially rooted system that the British were putting in
place in India.
In 1881, the English were once again actively involved in the
affairs of these two port kingdoms because the chief of Shehra
figure they supported and to whom they had given a military title
because of his critical role in their imperial rivalries in the region
attacked the port of Broom and wrested it out of the control of
Makulla. A truce was called through the intervention of the British
resident at Aden, and the chief, or nakib, of Makulla was asked to
pay the Shehr chief $5,000 yearly. Makulla agreed to the British
diktat, but its chief was not keen to let his enemies, the Al Kaieti
tribes, take over Broom. The port town was then forcibly taken over
by the British and an agreement was signed between the Kaieti
tribals and the British; this agreement bound all members of the
Kaieti family not to sell, mortgage or otherwise dispose of the least
portion of the territories now or hereafter subject to the Kaitie
familyabove all to any foreign power.38 A second agreement made
it obligatory for the Kaieti family to pay to the ousted nakib of
Makulla, at the request of the British government, such sum as
they determine, the necessary funds being made available by the
payment of a lump sum (from $100,000 dollars available in the government treasury, controlled by the British), which was to be kept
aside for the nakib.39 By intervening in Broom affairs, the British
became the arbiter of disputes in what was basically Ottoman
domain. This was a political gain that also carried with it the baggage of related problems.
The followers of the deposed nakib of Makulla became a liability
to the British. While the sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Bargash, offered
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

refuge to the nakib and his family in his country, he did not want
the nakibs followers and slaves. And since it was dishonorable for an
Arab to abandon his retinue, the nakib could not accept the invitation.40 As the British ship carrying this troupewhich included
about seven hundred peopledocked at Aden, the Bombay government panicked. It was determined not to let this Arab retinue disembark there. J. B. Peile, the acting chief to the government of
Bombay, was so eager to ship these people out of Aden that he suggested they be shifted back in dhows to Makulla and the Jemadar
told to protect them until a home was found for them.41 Loch, also
worried about the outbreak of cholera in the region, implemented a
dispersion plan. He boarded the members of the retinue in eight
buggalows and sent the fleet to anchor off Little Aden. The
remaining followers of the nakib were moved to Huswah. Out of
these, seventy were sent back to Makulla, twenty were allowed to
remain in Aden, and 550 migrated on their own to Lahej. The sultan
of Lahej welcomed them, as many of these men were good farmers.
Others were slaves with families whose labor could also be used in
farming; some slaves were also employed as soldiers. One hundred
and fifty of the 550 followers entered Aden and dispersed.
Of the settlement money left with the British by the chief of
Shehr, the nakib was given Rs. 5,000 in cash. A sum of Rs. 16,500 of
the settlement money had been used to pay for food for the retinue
while they were docked in Aden. Loch took another Rs. 30,000 from
the settlement money, in payment for six buggalows. He concluded
that the remaining Rs. 166,000, if invested in the government,
would give the nakib an income of Rs. 500 per month.42 Loch
regretted that the nakib, in violation of his promise, had finally
landed with a portion of his followers in Zanzibarmuch to the
chagrin of the sultan.43 But he was confident that he would not let
any help flow from the British side to the nakib. He enforced a
blockade in the region to prevent the nakib of Makulla from
obtaining any supplies and, what was more important, to stop
anyone landing especially Sayyid Fazl.44
The temerity of the resident in intervening and hoisting a British
flag in both Broom and Makulla after the truce was noted with
disdain and alarm in the Arab press. News items protested his
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intervention,
as these areas were part of Ottoman territory.45 They
were particularly incensed when it was decided that in any future
fights the resident at Aden would have the last word.46 The Arabic
newspaper Burham, published in Alexandria, noted in its issue of 6
October 1881 that the British had seized Broom. It observed, [The
British] hoisted their flag there and at Makulla, where they store
coal, although they are not ignorant of the rights of the Porte in the
Arabian Peninsula which contains many Holy places consisting of
the Hijaz.47 The newspaper lamented that this was not the only
instance of this kind. It regretted that they have done many others
like this, the remembrance of which brings burning in the heart. It
blamed the aggression on the resident and expressed its hope that
the English government [would] agree with [their] opinions and
blame the resident for his interference in affairs in which he ha[d]
no concern. It appealed to the Porte to take notice of the residents actions and to pay heed to the governor of Makulla, who, it
said, had asked the Ottoman government with a firman [for] a flag
to be hoisted in this country.48 The British officers remained alert
to the contingency of the Turkish flag being hoisted at Makulla
and Broom.49
As tempers flared, the Indian Arabs increasingly became key
players in the imperial contestations around Shehr and Makulla.
They dipped their fingers in these muddy waters and made the most
of imperial fault lines. They played critical roles as middlemen brokers. Their actions established vast Muslim networks in the shadow
of the imperial infrastructure. The Jang brothers had enabled the
British to set foot on the fringes of Ottoman territory in the Arab
Peninsular rim. But intervening in the Jangs affairs also put the
British on the trail of another Indian Arab: Sayyid Fadl. Pursuing
Sayyid Fadl allowed the British to enter into the politics of the
gateway to Istanbul: the Hijaz.
In 1881, it was widely believed in British circles that Sayyid Fadl
the Indian Arab the British had deported to the Hijaz in 1852 for
inciting peasant rebellion in Malabar in southern Indiawas in
Istanbul. Indeed, he had been chosen by the Porte to be stationed at
Makulla to counter British political sovereignty in that port town.
Loch, the resident at Aden, reported in a letter to the Bombay
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

government
that he had news that the Porte had appointed Fadl as
governor of the Hadramawt region, in which Makulla and Shehr
were located. Loch further noted that with an eye to assert its own
power in the region through Fadl that the Motasarif at Hodeida
had been directed by the Moshir of Taiz to salute Sayyid Fadl on his
arrival [t]here.50
A series of telegraphs regarding Sayyid Fadl that were sent
between the Aden residency and the government of Indias Foreign
Department indicate the importance Britain attributed to the little
men in imperial politics. Their movements were continuously
tracked. Through telegraphs, Loch was in touch with merchants in
Jeddah, who reported that Fadl was still in Istanbul. His son, located
at Mecca, had said that his father would leave for the Hadramawt
area only after Haj Eid.51 Loch was worried because at the same
time it was rumored in Hodeidah that Fadl had actually left Istanbul
for Yemen, with instructions to enquire into the administration of
that country and of the Hadraumat. In another communication to
the Bombay government, Loch reported that he also had heard that
the Porte was in touch with Fadl via telegrams and was keeping him
informed of political moves in the area. Loch indicated that Fadl
had been asked to halt at whatever place the telegram [might] reach
him and there await further instruction.52 C. Gonne, chief secretary to the government of Bombay, summed it up best: The only
orders at present given with reference to Sayyid Fadl are that in
common with all others he shall not be permitted to land at either
of the blockaded ports.53

Sayyid Fadl (18241901)

Sayyid Fadl, the outlawed fugitive Indian Arab, played the British
and Ottoman rivalries to his advantage. His interesting lifewhich
took him into India, Arabia, and Turkeyshows the significant role
ethnically marked and legally stigmatized Muslim subjects could
play in shaping British Indias relations both with its Muslim population as well as its European imperial rivals in Asia. It also reveals
the vast networks such individuals could establish between empires,
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

thereby making hollow the claims of these empires to have foolproof borders.
Sayyid Fadls own son, Sayyid Ahmad Fadl, recorded the life and
times of his father in an important book called Al-Anwarul Nabwiyatwal-Asrar ul Ahadita (Light of Prophet and Secrets of Hadith).
Expressing his deep desire to produce a written genealogy and history of his family, Sayyid Ahmad Fadl remarked that he was keen
to record the famous events (ahwal) of his fathers times so that they
become part of history.54 According to this biography, Sayyid Fadl
Alawi ibn Sahl Pukoya Tangal (18241901) was born in Malabar in
1824. He was the son of Sayyid Alawi (17491843), who had migrated
from the Hadramawt area into the Malabar region of southwest
India at the age of seventeen. Sayyid Fadls father, Sayyid Alawi had
joined the Alawiyya tariqa (a Sufi order) established in Malabar by
two Alawi leaders, Muhammad Hamid al Djafri and Sheikh Hasan
al Djafri. The Alawiyya tariqa originated outside Hadramawt in the
Iraq region; from there migrants brought it to Tarim in southern
Yemen. From Iraq the tariqa picked up the ideas of Prophetic descent
and an organized Sufi way, and made them its defining features.
Sayyid Ahmad Fadl offers a genealogy that traces the family to
Imam Husain and his father, Hazrat Ali.55 To this were added the
local customs, rituals, and the saint culture of Tarim. The Alawiyya
tariqa thus constituted an amalgamation of traditions picked up in
the course of its journey across the Middle Eastern world. It flowered in the mosques, shrines, music, and landscape of Tarim. As it
came to be identified with Tarim, the region was slowly converted
from the Alawis destination, as Enseng Ho has put it, to the seat
of their origin.56
In the thirteenth century, the shifting of trade routes in the
Indian Ocean from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea area enabled the
expansion of the Alawiyya tariqa out of Tarim into the larger transAsian diaspora. The shift to the Red Sea opened new trading zones,
linking cities in fresh ways all the way from China to Europe.
Significantly, the key players involved throughout the Asian areas of
this route were Muslim merchants who operated from Muslim polities: Alexandria, Cairo, Jeddah, Aden, Cambay, Calicut, and Pasai.57
This route thus quickly became identified with Muslim merchants
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

and states. Enseng Ho has shown that this transcultural Muslim

ecumene and its cultural exchanges were crucial to the formation of
the Alawi way both at home and in the diaspora. Trade links enabled
the mobility of religious scholars and ideas as well.58 Scores of immigrants settled in India. But they continued to have contact with their
homelandand not just hypothetically and genealogically but
physically. For instance, some of them, like Sayyid Jifri or Jufri
Tangal, returned to Arabia and became muftis in Mecca.59
It is along these networks of trade and ideas that the family of
Sayyid Fadl thrived. They bridged these routes and made careers as
transcultural men who manipulated the politics of this trans-Asian
world. The family represented one of the many cases of Hadrami
religious men who moved to India during the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries to become teachers and scholars of the
Shafi jurisprudence. The Zamorin welcomed them, and many set up
institutions of learning in Malabar even as they maintained their
ties with their home. Indeed, many received honorific titleslike
tangalfrom the Zamorin and rose to positions of high status in
local society.60 Fadls father, Sayyid Alawi, headed the tariqa in
Malabar after the death of the founders, the Alawi brothers. Sayyid
Alawi is considered one of the greatest saints of Malabar due to his
learning, piety, and miraculous deeds. He was also the founder of
many mosques in Ernad and Walluvanad. His shrine at Mambram
became a site of pilgrimage and rituals that ranged from individuals
being blessed as shahids (martyrs) after an act of violence to being
celebrated once they had died in the cause of Islam.61 The shrine
soon became a pilgrimage site, and the Fadl family its patron saint.
Presiding over its many rituals gave the Fadl family a level of
authority akin to that of the local clergythe ulema. Sayyid Fadl
was thus born into this religiously influential family.62 As an adult,
he was quick to use these contacts to politically mobilize Muslim
peasants to violent yet religiously sanctified protest against their
British-supported Hindu landlords.63
In 1852, the Indian government, on the recommendation of Malabar
commissioners Henry Conolly and Thomas L. Strange, deported Fadl
to the Hijaz. He was so penalized for allegedly having incited Muslim
peasants to violent protest against the British land tenure system
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

and its beneficiaries, the Hindu landlords. Later Fadl was also
accused of being complicit in the murder of Conolly.64 In the Hijaz
and later at Istanbul, he thrived on a huge trans-Asiatic network of
contacts. He is identified in British records as the Moplah rebel,
an outlawed fanatic, and a seditious wahabi. He nurtured the
political ambition of becoming the independent ruler of Dhofar, a
semi-independent region in southwest Arabia whose tribes accepted
the political sovereignty of the sultan of Muscat. This brought him
in close contact with the Ottoman government, which he hoped
would support him with an eye on extending its own control in
southwest Arabia. These plans predictably brought him into confrontation with the British, who viewed his involvement in the area
as an Ottoman ploy to challenge their hold in southwest Arabia.
Caught at the cusp of two imperial rivals, Fadl made it his career
to play on their fears, phobias, and political ambitions. His career
blossomed because it corresponded with a new phase of trans-Asian
tension among imperial powers: Britain, the Ottomans, and Russia.
In the late nineteenth century, the preCrimean War (1856) bonhomie between the British and the Ottomans was fading and giving
way to anti-Ottoman sentiment in London. The defeat of Russia in
the Crimean war considerably lessened what had been the escalating
Russophobia in British minds, and thereby decreased the political
relevance of the Ottoman Empire. For many years the Ottomans had
been British allies, mainly because the British feared the Russians.
The Ottomans were seen as a bulwark against Russian expansion.
The loss of a key European ally was bad enough for the Ottomans,
but worse was to follow on the domestic front. The late nineteenthcentury tanzimat reforms that aimed to find a place for the Ottoman
Empire as a secular polity in the league of European nations triggered a serious backlash. Both in the core as well as on the fringes
of the empire the removal of religion from government and the intro
duction of uniform laws and equality for all gave rise to ethnic
nationalisms and upheavals that pitted bureaucrats (the Porte)
against the imperial court (the sultan).65
Both the internal and external problems fragmented the central
administration. This led to corruption, as decentralization, coupled
with weakened institutions, enhanced the power of governors and
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

military commanders in the outlying provinces of the Balkans,

Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt. As the economic crisis loomed, the
tussle between the bureaucrats and the imperial court intensified.
Riveted by internal and external problems, the Ottoman gaze shifted
sharply from its core Levant area to the Arabian Peninsula and the
Persian Gulf. Much of this area had always been under the indirect
governance of the Ottomansleft to local governors (sheriffs) with
little central control and scant official attention. But if the opening
of the Suez Canal in 1865 made the area very attractive to European
and Asian powers, the Ottomans too turned to it for their own
advantage. This region attracted their attention more than before as
they battled the conservative backlash at the core and ethnic nationalisms in the eastern European part of their empire.
This new arena of imperial contestation became what we might
call a dealing ground for Fadl, who was above all a transcultural
broker. He used the Ottoman and British tensions to further his
ends. While he tried to negotiate the best deal for himself with
these trans-Asian imperial rivals, they saw him as a transcultural
broker and middleman whose wide networks and contacts they
could tap to further their ends. In the process Fadl became an
important transcultural figure whose career and writings embodied
the larger trans-Asian ramifications that Indian outlaws could bring
to politics.
He wrote some nineteen tracts in Arabic during the course of his
lifetime. These ranged from religious ones, to political exhortations
in support of the caliph, to ones more socially embracive that were
written to glorify the Alawiyya Sufi tariqa. In other words, his writings reflected the wide canvas of his operations. Thus the two texts
he wrote while in Malabar, The Fundamentals of Islam and Learning
to Avoid Unbelievers, reflected his purist and exclusionist beliefs that
sanctified the kind of violence that he was inciting at that period in
Malabar.66 Later works written from Istanbul on the Alawi tariqa
and his fathers miracles were more inclusive. Out of these two, the
Tarikat al-Hanifa (first edition published circa 1878; second edition
published 1899) and Tanbih al-Ukala (1881) are more politically
opportunist. Located in Istanbul, where he enjoyed royal patronage,
he refers to Abd-al Hamid II as the caliph of Islam. In Tanbih
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

al-Ukala, at the bottom of each of the first eighteen pages he cites

two traditions about the need to obey the caliph. He states, Whoever
despises the Sultan is despised by God. Whoever betrays the Sultan
is betrayed by God. In the margin on page 13 he says that to obey
Sultan Abdul Hamid is religiously necessary for he is the Caliph of
God on earth.67

The Runaway Arab as the Transcultural Broker

In separate studies, Stephen Dale, K.N. Pannikar, and Conrad Wood
have focused on Sayyid Fadls Indian career in the Malabar district of
modern-day Kerala (18241852). They see Fadl more in the mold of a
pan-Islamic visionary who, like Jamaluddin Afghani in north India,
had a focused anti-British stand based on a pan-Islamic ideal.68 These
studies see both him and the British commissioners who evicted him
from India, Henry Conolly and Thomas L. Strange, as being single
minded in their agendas: the latter saw Fadl as the disrupter of peace,
and the former was convinced that his agenda was to uproot the
British-supported Hindu landlords and land tenures in Malabar.
Fadls career after 1852, when the Indian government deported
him to the Hijaz (from where he moved to Istanbul), reveals that his
mission was not that simplistic. Fadls pan-Islam was neither simply
Muslim welfare oriented nor merely caliph fixated, anticolonial, and
anti-European. It was also not necessarily linked to any exclusive
identity at cross-purposes with territorial nationalism.69 Ayesha
Jalal has compellingly established that pan-Islam and territorial
nationalism coexisted, as in the case of Afghani.70 But brokers like
Fadl moved beyond these issues to embed their pan-Islamic activism
and identity in trans-Asian networks that derived from imperial
politics and commerce. Fadl built a symbiotic relationship between
trans-Asian European empires and the Muslim cosmopolis. Examin
ing his career enables us to move beyond thinking of the cultural
empire of Muslims and Western political and commercial empires
in terms of a simple dichotomy. The Asiatic careers of transimperial
subjects like Fadl show that the wide contacts that these men had
in various Muslim societies across Asia were neither consistently
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

anti-European nor territorially patriotic. These men were also not

exclusivist to the extent of advocating the establishment of a universal caliphate.71 Bereft of any explicit political agenda (such as
promoting territorial nationalism or Muslim universalism) and oper
ating totally within a late nineteenth-century historical context
of imperial rivalries, such men were at best opportunistic. They
effectively embedded their international relations within those
of imperial powers in order to carve out a trans-Asiatic niche for
themselves.
Thus Fadl made the most of the tensions generated both within
and between modern empires as large parts of Asia came under
European colonial influence. Like most individuals coping with the
European presence, Fadl too tapped into the Muslim normative
theory that privileged the caliph as the temporal and spiritual head.
Indeed, his fellow Hadramis displaced from their homeland had
tended to lean on Ottoman help to legitimize their hold on foreign
soil. Michael Laffan has shown how Hadramis in colonial Indonesia
leaned increasingly on the Ottoman caliph to create a niche for
themselves in Indonesian Muslim society. They needed the caliphal
shoulder as they were marginalized as foreign Orientals both by
the Dutch and by local Muslims, who were not impressed by their
claims to Arab sayyid superiority.72 Fadl too used the caliph in similar self-aggrandizing ways.
Unlike theorists and intellectuals who combined territorial
nationalism with Islamic universalism to fight imperialism, Fadl
remained noncommittal to both. He moved across the Muslim
world from Acheh to Morocco, Egypt, Hijaz, and Turkey, tapping
not just the normative imaginary of Muslim subjects but playing
also on similar sentiments of Asian rulerslike the caliphwho
had huge political ambitions. Indeed, he played with the global
ambitions of Britain as well when he urged it to step in as the overseer of Muslims. Thus Fadl tuned his own individually driven international relations to those of modern empires and carved out a
vast trans-Asiatic ecumene.
The transimperial cosmopolis that he carved out flourished
because imperial powers depended heavily on his networks. Indeed,
they leaned on him because he could be an asset to their diplomatic
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

maneuveringa skill that he himself perfected at the consulates.

Indeed, his role as a professional broker ensured that Fadl, despite
being stigmatized as a fanatic and an outlaw by the British commissioners in Malabar, was never completely discarded by them.
They realized his potential and leaned on him heavily to navigate
the politics of the transimperial Muslim world empires that he very
aptly represented. Similarly, the Ottoman governmentat a time
when it was in the midst of serious domestic upheavals brought on
by the financial crisiswas keen to use him as its agent to negotiate
its international relations. Fadls career and his amazing trans-
Asiatic contacts reflect the operation of a Muslim cosmopolis that
was propped up on trans-Asiatic networks of diplomacy, brokerage,
kinship, and the profits of trade. The intellectual underpinning of
this grid lay in the Arab version of Islam that venerated the holy
texts as well as in people who were linked to the sacred genealogy of
the Prophet and who had contacts in the sacred geography of Arabia.
This intellectual underpinning was not simplistically caliph-centric.
Fadls slippery movements across Asia were successful because he
moved beyond the caliph to seek help for his Asian careering. As
Ayesha Jalal has shown, there never was any consensus on recognizing the caliph as the undisputed head of the Islamic umma.73
Indeed, his status, even in normative Muslim thought, became
increasingly ambiguous, as traffic to his territories increased and
Muslims experienced hardships under his rule. As colonial regimes
improved travel as well as contact between Muslim subjects and the
Hijaz and Istanbul, Muslims hopes that the caliph would become a
global leader were dashed. And the inability of the caliph to match
up to the expectationsindeed, the fantasiesof Muslims provided
the perfect vacuum that career middlemen like Fadl rushed to fill.
Fadl tapped into the international relations of imperial powers and
used their networks and strategies rather than looking to the caliph
for help.
In the late nineteenth century, the Arabian Peninsula was an ideal
ground for runaways like Fadl for other reasons as well. In this
period, the Ottoman gaze had shifted away from the Levant and
toward the Arabian lands. Sultan Abd-al Hamid II (18761908),
after his success in the Russo-Turkish war, turned his back to the
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

West and concentrated on Asia as a new arena in which to realize his

political ambitions. Faced with the conservative reaction to the
secularizing tanzimat reforms, and the loss of territory to European
powers later in the century, he made the caliphate and back to
Islam the pillars of his rule. By promoting himself as the center of
religious-political authority for Muslims throughout the world, he
hoped to entice Muslim subjects of European powers to recognize
his authority. He turned his political gaze to the Hijaz, and in particular to its neighboring Ottoman territories, and to Istanbul
important sites for these Muslim subject populations. And as these
Muslim subjects of European regimes became the focus of Fadls
attention, he hoped that the regimes would be cautious in their policies toward the Ottomans.
The diversion of the Ottoman gaze into Asia was not good news
for either the British or the Dutch colonial regimes. The opening of
the Suez Canal in 1869 had made this region attractive to European
powers. Predictably, the area soon became a hotbed of imperial tensions and competing political sovereignties. It was here that the
European powers, the Ottomans, and the Arabian polities competed
over Muslim subjects, seeking to showcase their benevolence for
Muslims globally and to earn dividends locally. In addition, the
Indian Muslim population in the area drew the interest of the Indian
government to the Arabian Peninsula. Ironically, Fadl proved to be
an asset in Britains imperial politics in the region.
Fadls outlawed status notwithstanding, he was a highly prized
Mahomedan subject and Indian Arab whose transimperial profile and wide influence was both despised and used by the British.
His many trans-Asian contactslocated across the region from
Acheh in Indonesia, to India, to Morocco, and to Istanbulmade
him an ideal subject over whom Ottoman and British political
sovereignties and contested claims of responsibility for Britains
Muslim subjects could be both tested and showcased. At the same
time, Sayyid Fadl, well aware of the imperial contest over his identity, subjecthood, and transcultural reach, made the most of his
unique context. He furthered his career and became the independent ruler of Dhofar and maintained his administration, exploit
ing the trans-Asian imperial rivalries over him. When eventually
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

ousted from Dhofar, he played an even more central role as a broker.

In this capacity, he often assumed greater significance than the consular staff, who were constrained by ethical codes of conduct. Fadls
extraterritorial ties had yet greater influence, for they put in place a
vast network that was later open to use by a range of ideologues
across Asia.

Sayyid Fadl as the Ruler of Dhofar

In 1876, Sayyid Fadl occupied Dhofar and declared himself its ruler,
claiming the sanction of the Ottoman government for his rule.
Dhofar was a tract of country in Hadramawt, in Yemen, not far
from Shehr where, as we have seen, Fadl had played the role of a
mediator.74 Dhofar exemplified how the trans-Asian networks
worked, with myriad players that ranged from imperial powers to
tribal chiefs. Sayyid Fadls remarkable journeyborn and brought
up in a Malabar Sufi family of Arab descent and rising to become an
independent ruler of an Arabian principality, a leader who commanded respect in both Meccan and Istanbul high societywas
enabled by the connections he forged early on between British and
Ottoman societies. And he established these connections using
imperial networks as well as his religious and kinship ties.
Ironically, the imperial rivalsBritain, which claimed him as her
subject; the Ottoman government; and Mecca, the fulcrum of spiritual powerwere all complicit in building Fadls exceptional political career. He first acquired power in the region by taking advantage
of tribal feuds in which he intervened on the invitation of one factionthe Al Ghurrahto settle matters. He had met his hosts at
Mecca, where the haj pilgrimage was a meeting point not just for
spiritual camaraderie but also for sorting out political matters.75
Loch, the political resident at Aden, later expressed the view that
Fadl had used his Sayyid descent and his Sufi spiritual upbringing to
make himself appealing and credible in the eyes of the local tribes,
even though he was an outsider. At the same time, Fadls propaganda
about his alleged proximity to the Porte and their approval of his
political ambition reinforced the popular impression that he was a
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

man of influence in the region. Loch in fact had wanted a British

vessel to dock near Dhofar so that the people who had been deceived
into believing him would get a real sense of how the world outside
regarded him.76
Lochs misgivings notwithstanding, Fadl consolidated his hold
by playing politics with the feuding tribes in the region. He used
the people of Dhofar to fight the Garah Bedouins of the interior. He also extended his influence over the Mahrah tribes for
a considerable distance westward. He ruled over the entire Al
Ghurrah tribe, which was located between Daurghot to the west
and Rasmus to the east. Inland, about three days journey from the
coast, there were about 3,500 members of this tribe who also
acknowledged him as their ruler. The Al Kathiris, numbering about
2,000, in the northern frontier of the Al Ghurrah, also acknowledged his rule. But the independent Al Kathiri tribe, with about
3,000 members and occupying the country up to the confines of
Soor, did not acknowledge him. He had no contact with the tribes
eastward of Dhofar. The Bedouins did not acknowledge him either.77
Once he consolidated his hold in the region, he made the town of
Salahah his capital.
Dhofar had immense agricultural potential. The area produced
gum, olibanum, myrrh, aloe, and cotton. The annual production of
olibanum was valued at $30,000. Dhofar also produced wheat, bajri,
jowari, and pulse sufficient for the wants of the people. But expertise
was needed to exploit it to the fullest. Fadl tried to use his trans-
Asian contacts to do just that. For instance, the country had an
abundance of rubber trees but no one who knew how to make rubber.
Fadl asked his wazir, Sayyid Abdal Rehman bin Hosain bin Sahl, to
go to British India and bring back people who knew the procedures
for the manufacture of rubber. Similarly, eager to earn commercial
profits, he sent his wazir to Bombay to urge the British government
in India to send their steamers to dock at his ports once a month as
they moved from Aden to Bombay. He was also happy to negotiate
with European companies for these benefits. And as an inducement
for the British agent at Aden to agree to this arrangement, he said
that if the amount of freight on each shipload of cargo did not
amount to $200, he would pay that sum regardless. And in the event
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

of the freight exceeding that amount, all of it would be paid to the

shipping company.78 Indeed, D.F. Carmichael, the chief secretary
to the government of Madras, reported that he had information that
Fadl was turning his attention to the useful development of the
resources of the country [Malabar]. He had obtained specimens
of minerals as well as manufactured products from Malabar, articles such as stone axes, coconut scrapers, arrow root cloth etc.
Carmichael was happy with this development and in fact felt that it
was quite unnecessary and indeed undesirable that he should be
disturbed.79
Fadl relied on profits from trade at the harbors that dotted Dhofar.
He charged an ad valorem duty of 5 percent on all imports and
exports at each of the ports. There were about sixty civil and military persons scattered in various villages who acted as tax collectors.80 It was also reported to Loch that even though people resented
paying this tax they paid because, as he put it, the Sayid [was] considered a learned man in the area.81 Indeed, Fadls wazir always
referred to him as a saint and a holy person, especially when he
was urging someone to pay heed to him.82
Fadl loved to play on the holy man card. He relied on various
versions of Islam for state-building. Indeed, he used it as it suited
him best to further his temporal ambitions. Thus in 1877 when he
found that people were suffering from a scarcity of food, rising
prices, and economic hardships because of the spread of a fatal disease in the cattle and because of drought conditions, he explained it
to the people in religious terms. He said that had they paid the two
and a half percent alms in accordance with the precepts of the Koran
they would have been saved from these troubles. Using this religious card, he went on to benefit economically as he began collecting
alms from the people. The use of this religious ploy also helped him
stall the march of some of the distressed who were looking toward
the sultan of Muscat to come and rescue them.83 Following the
Islam of the Koran and the Hadith to the letter, Fadl ended up
imposing on the people a very austere and monist form of Islam
associated with the Naqshbandiya Sufi order in Indiawhich
offered no space for alternative modalities like magic and sorcery.
Thus in 1878 some eighty individuals of the Al Ghurrah tribe
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

Fadls main supporterwere imprisoned on charges of practicing

magic. In accordance with the narrow juridical interpretation of
Islamic law, they were put to torture until they confessed.84
Fadl faced tribal opposition, very much like the case of the more
famous Naqshbandi Sufi warrior of the northwest frontierSayyid
Ahmad Shahidwho earned the wrath of the frontier tribes once
he began to impose on them his monist Islamdriven political culture. Indeed, the Al Ghurrahto this point his hosts and loyal supporterswere so incensed by the torture of their members on
charges of practicing magic that they revolted. A few of their leaders
assembled at Morbah and arranged a meeting of the tribe at Thakah.
They agreed to test the waters by committing small outrages in
order to ascertain if any steps would be taken to prevent such acts.
First they killed some twenty to thirty head of cattle, which went
unnoticed. Finally, they took the extreme step of slaying one of
Fadls she-camels. Fadl was sufficiently provoked and clamped down
on them heavily.85
Again, very much as with Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, antagonism
with the tribals also developed because Fadl began to interfere in
their tribal political economy. Thus, for instance, at the heart of his
conflicts with the Al Ghurrah tribe was the digging of a canal in
order to water his fields. This meant diverting a river to his advantage. The angry Al Ghurrah tribe rebelled, as their lands were
deprived of water supply. They were suppressed. But Fadl never
again dared to reopen the channel for fear of provoking their
anger.86
However, despite the reaction of the Al Ghurrah tribe, Fadl did
not meet the same brutal fate as Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of the northwest frontier.87 This was largely because Fadl played on his trans-
Asian contacts, his loose idea of an extraterritorial grid, which in
this case encompassed his propaganda about the support he had
from the Porte as well as his friendly overtures to the British. And
thus tribes like the Al Kathiris stood by him. The Al Kathiri tribals
were smaller in number than the Al Ghurrah. They thus allied
themselves with Fadl out of self-interest and supported him. They
remained steadfast in their support because he had convinced them
that he had the support of the Porte.88 However, the clash of the
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tribal notions of temporal power with those upheld by Fadl became

Fadls ultimate undoing. His reliance on his extraterritorial contacts
also backfired.
The rival tribal chiefs looked to imperial powers in the region to
garner support against Fadl. Since he had flaunted the idea that he
had Ottoman support, they turned to Britains ally, the sultan of
Muscat, to protect them from Fadls atrocities. They hoped to cash
in on British-Ottoman rivalries to further their ends. The chief
of the Al Kathiri tribe, Awadh Bin Abdulla Sayid Bin Mobarak ul
Shamfari ul Kathiri, appealed to Lochs translator, Saleh Jaffer, for
help. He detailed Fadls atrocities toward the Al Kathiris and how
they in turn had dethroned him and driven him away. But Awadh
Bin Abdulla said he was afraid of Fadls Ottoman connections and
feared his return. He wanted the British to send them a cannon, a
gunner, ammunition, powder, lead, and some money so that they
might defend themselves and their subjects. He said that the English
would obtain a reward from God for these favors they would do to
the Musalmans. 89 The sultan of Muscat was always willing to play
upon any fears the tribal chiefs had about Fadls huge trans-Asian
influence, especially with regard to the Porte. He never failed to
remind the chiefs about his misconduct in Malabar, his lies and
deceptions and his expulsion from India because of his conduct. The
sultan reiterated that Fadls present doings [were] in accordance
with his habits. With these warnings he once again affirmed that
Dhofar and its people were under his protection.90 In 1879, when
Fadl was on one of his many trips to Istanbul, some local chiefs
urged the sultan of Muscat to move into Dhofar. He obliged. And
this resulted in Fadls formal expulsion from his kingdom.91
Soon after, the sultan of Muscat swiftly moved in his people and
put in place his administration. He sent two officers to Dhofar to
assist the sheikh in restoring order. One of them, Suleiman bin
Sowey, was to remain at Dhofar as vali (governor), of course with the
approval of the chiefs.92 He was later replaced by another man,
Mussullim bin Bedwee, who was familiar with Dhofar, having lived
there earlier. The new vali was asked by the sultan to undo the damages inflicted on the tribals by Fadl. These included reduction of
custom duties, repair of irrigation canals for the use of the people,
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and the utilization of the collected revenue in Dhofar, rather than

being remitted to Muscat.93
The expulsion made Fadl a permanent fixture in Istanbul. Once
located in the city, he exploited the global aspirations of Sultan
Abd-al Hamid II to be regarded as the caliph of the Muslim world.
He tailored his international relations to that of both Britain and
the Ottomans to further his interests. At the same time he never
stopped cashing in on his high sayyid status and kinship ties to
spread his net far and wide.94

Sayyid Fadls Cosmopolis

Premodern Asian empires (Russia, Ottoman, and Mughal) had
ambassadors posted in each others courts to maintain diplomatic
ties. At the same time their news writersthe akhbar nawisfanned
out in society and kept their ears to the ground so that they could
report on a range of matters to their parent courts.95 In the nineteenth century, benign court ambassadors gave way to European and
British consuls and vice consuls with special rights and privileges, as
the modern empires reworked international relations within new
norms of responsibility and accountability. In this period of heightened trans-Asian commercial and political contactcontacts mediated by Europeansspecial amnesties or favors had to be offered to
facilitate economic and political cooperation. This was the capitulatory era of favors granting economic, commercial, judicial, and per
sonal liberties to foreign nationals who traveled, traded, and resided
in the vast trans-Asiatic Ottoman, Russian, and Indian territories.
Consuls soon began to give away these rights and privileges to their
protgs. The protgs served as guardians, governors, and judges
of their consular districts.96
The British consulates assumed fresh significance in Ottoman
territories like the Hijaz, where British and European Muslim
subjects from South and Southeast Asia milled around on a daily
basis, formed permanent enclaves, and congregated in large numbers annually for the haj. The consulates emerged as critical sites
where the Ottoman, Arabian, and European empires competed over
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

Muslim subjects, each using these subjects to reveal a new, benevolent face to the world. This was a way to dent each others political
sovereignty. At the same time, the consuls acquired immense political powers, engaging in surveillance and espionage, as the pilgrim
traffic to the Hijaz made the region suspect in the European
imagination as a place of anti-West sedition and intrigue. They
carried on political espionage by hiring Muslim vice consuls and
dragomans.97
Britain had a range of consuls and vice consuls scattered all over
the Hijaz, Aden, and Istanbul. It spent vast amounts of money in
maintaining them and their network of agentsthe dragomans.
These were interpreters and translators who were often locally
recruited and who operated through their contacts across trans-
Asia. They protected British interests and aided the administration
in non-British territory. But these middlemen also played an important role in projecting the benevolent face of the government to the
Muslim population in India. Thus in 1882 when Abdur Razzack was
appointed vice consul at Jeddah he was seen as a multiedged sword.
The creation of the new position of the vice consul itself was meant
to showcase British concern in providing protection and aid to its
Muslim subjects performing pilgrimage to holy places of Arabia.
The appointment of a trustworthy Muslim to that post further
underlined the trust that Britain placed in its Muslim subjects.98 But
Muslim vice consuls were also tools via which trustworthy information about global Muslim networks was tapped and public
opinion molded. The secretary to the government of India clarified
to Razzack the nature of his job as follows: Her majestys Consul at
Jeddah to whom you will be subordinate may wish to avail himself
of your assistance in obtaining trustworthy information regarding
the course of affairs and of public opinion in Mecca and neighboring
places.99
Vice Consul Zohrabs report on the establishment of the consulate at Jeddah laid out the priorities of this office. He enumerated
his duties as being both political and commercial in nature. They
included suppressing the slave trade and assisting and protecting
Muslim subjects on pilgrimage. But it was his political duties that he
unabashedly privileged. Predictably, these centered on surveillance
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

of runaway Muslim fanatics and mutineers, all of whom, according

to Zohrab, had found refuge in the Hijaz. He wrote: The Hijaz
harbors many men who having become obnoxious to the government of their own countries have sought refuge in the province.
Many of the mutinous of 1857 escaped in this manner the punishment they merited. These political refugees should be all discovered
and their activities and movements watched.100
The diplomatic privileges enjoyed by the vice consuls were bound
within certain rules and ethics related to extraterritoriality and
accountability. Thus, for instance, Zohrab clarified that he had to
work within the parameters of the sheriff of Jeddahs administrative
rights and privileges. He observed: The Consul had to be in constant correspondence with high sheriff since his correspondence
bears more of a political character. To watch the actions and movements of suspected persons who have made the hijaz home. And to
watch course of events in his province which besides being under a
dual government is disaffected and is attached to the rest of the
Empire by a thread so weak that the slightest shock will sever it.101
In contrast, the politics of a broker, such as Sayyid Fadl, appeared
remarkably seamless and free from responsibilities and accountability. And this immediately made Fadl an asset to imperial actors
even though the political rhetoric that defined him as a fanatic
and outlaw continued. This was more than evident in the first few
British reactions to Fadls meteoric rise.
A Khojah merchant (from the western coast of India) who traveled the trans-Asian grid that stretched across India, Afghanistan,
the Arabian Peninsula, North and East Africa, and Istanbul visited
Dhofar in 1876. He reported to the translator of the political agent
at Aden on the excellent administration of Sayyid Fadl. He was
struck by the remarkable administration of justice in Dhofar that
was dispensed by Fadls son Saleh with ease. Commenting on the
popularity of Fadl within Dhofar, as well as his wide influence and
outreach, he said that one faction of the feuding tribal chieftains of
Dhofar had met Fadl in Mecca while on pilgrimage and had invited
him to settle the district. He noted that Fadl also indicated to him
his wide transimperial contacts: Fadl had said that even though he
had no idea why the British government was always inquiring about
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

him, he did know that he had the sanction of the Ottoman sultan for
his new administration.102
This report on Fadl, which represented him as the independent
ruler of Dhofar operating with Ottoman sanction, created alarm in
British circles. The Foreign Department at Simla urged the secretary of state for India to confirm with the Porte if Fadls claim was
correct. W.F. Prideaux, the political resident in the Persian Gulf,
conveyed to the government the sultan of Muscats counterclaims
regarding Fadls status in Dhofar. Even though Prideaux himself
was not convinced about Muscats claims, he was nevertheless
appalled at the temerity of one of their outlawed subjects in
becoming an independent ruler in southern Arabia.103 It is significant that it is from this moment of Fadls self-proclaimed independence that British records dropped the Moplah priest identifier
and begin to refer to Fadl as a dangerous wahabi, a dangerous
fanatic, and an outlaw. Indeed, Prideaux found him more despicable than the Wahabis when he said that Fadl, whose tenets go
far beyond Wahabeeism, and whose aims and views are, if I may use
the expression, those of an irreconcilable to Christianity and
British rule, cannot but prove prejudicial to British interests in south
Arabia.104
And yet so significant and crucial was the role of middlemen like
Fadl that Prideaux was against any move that would antagonize permanently the dangerous fanatic. He therefore negated and questioned all claims of the sultan of Muscat and urged the government
of India to move cautiously and refrain from aiding the sultan of
Muscat in reestablishing his suzerainty over Dhofar. In 1877, he
wrote: The presence of the Moplah priest Sayyid Fadhl in that district is objectionable for many reasons; but the influence of that religious leader will probably expire with his life; while the troubles
attendant on the sovereignty of Muscat being involved with the
rights of the Chiefs of Hadramant would in all likelihood be
perennial...[The chiefs] would probably resent any active efforts
on the part of Sayyid Turki to assert dominion over them.105 In
1877, the Foreign Department informed Marquess of Salisbury, the
secretary of state for India, that they saw no reason why they should
support the claims of the sultan of Muscat over Dhofar.106
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

And yet Loch, the political resident at Aden, wanted some action
in the form of stationing a British vessel near Dhofar so that the
tribes Fadl had deceived into believing in his widespread influence
would begin to doubt his claims. Loch was of the opinion that
British pressure on the Porte to clarify their stand on Fadl would
also help dent Fadls authority, call his bluff, and go far toward
checking the formation of a hotbed of religious fanaticismstrongly
imbued with intensely inimical feelings toward the British government in India.107 Loch understood very well that Fadl had developed his trans-Asiatic contacts and legitimated his rule in Dhofar
by his dependence on imperial networks. Loch wanted to send a
signal to Fadls clientele that Fadls claim of wielding clout with
the British was unfounded. He thus always declined to respond to
Fadls requests for help on the seas against Ottoman ships. By track
ing his movements and proposing to station a government vessel
in the neighborhood of Dhofar, Loch hoped, as he put it, to undeceive the Arabs of Dhofar and Morbat regarding the position
held outside of Arabia by their self elected ruler.108 Indeed,
C.V. Aitchison, secretary in the Foreign Department, went a step
further and thought even the stationing of a British vessel would
add to Fadls self-proclaimed status and importance in imperial politics. He suggested that it would be good if the resident at Aden
from time to time were to let the Arab tribes know, as he stated in a
letter, that the British Government can hold no communication
with an outlaw from British territories, who, if he were to return,
would be liable to detention as a prisoner.109 Luckily for Loch and
Aitchison, a tribal uprising in Dhofar, supported, as we noted earlier, by the sultan of Muscat, resulted in Fadls eviction from the
region a few years later.
British misgivings of him notwithstanding, neither Fadl nor the
imperial powers were willing to sever relations with each other.
Indeed, they lived a mutually beneficial existence, relying on each
other in their efforts to dig their heels deep into trans-Asian politics. If Fadls ecumene depended on imperial politics, the fact that
modern empires were leaning on him was equally striking. Indeed,
the dynamics of imperial politics, and particularly those between
Britain, Russia, and the Ottomans, shaped the career of Fadl in no
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

small measure. After all, he lived during the post1856 Crimean

War period when British attitudes toward the Ottomans had shifted
from friendship to antagonism; as discussed above, anti-Turkey sentiment had escalated in London because of diminished Russophobia
following the Russian defeat at Crimea. The loss of this key European
ally went hand in hand with the tanzimat reforms of the period.
These were intended to get the empire good press and allies in
Europe by uniting the empire around a nondenominational secular and inclusive ideology, one that emphasized being Ottoman
rather than Muslim. A universal law and equality for Muslims and
non-Muslims were the cornerstones of this new identityas was
the idea of integrating an older form of constitutionalism, as reflected
in the effort to consult community leaders in decision making. The
tanzimat reforms had their shortfalls: they triggered ethnic nationalisms in the peripheries of the empire and added fresh dynamics to
the already fragile link between the Ottoman center and the periph
ery. They threatened also the religious lobby, which demanded Islamic
constitutionalism with Islamic jurisprudence at the center of any
uniform law.
This internal turmoil was compounded not just by the loss of
Britain as an ally but also by the additional need to combat Britains
increasing influence, especially after the 1869 opening of the Suez
Canal in what were Ottoman fringes: Yemen and the Persian Gulf
and southern rim of the Arabian Peninsula. These areas, already
seething with ethnic nationalisms or at the least influenced by them,
offered a fertile ground for British intervention. Indeed, internal
and external pressures created a vicious cycle of problems. The fear
of Britain gave legitimacy to rulers like Abd-al Hamid II who wanted
to bring back Islam as a uniting force and to undo the progress
brought about by the reforms. In the 1880s, Abd-al Hamid II
brought back Islam as a legitimating ideology to check the rising
tide of ethnic nationalism. He hyped the pan-Islam card and used it
to unite the empire. This back-to-Islam propaganda suggested that
Ottoman power should lean on caliphal authority rather than on
economic or political might. This imagined political significance of
the caliph had more takers outside the Ottoman Empire than within
it. Particularly susceptible were the British and Europeans. Indeed,
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

Abd-al Hamid II played and manipulated British fears of a globally

embracive caliph to further his own political ambition.110
Sayyid Fadls career as a transcultural middleman was framed in
this larger trans-Asian context, when the Ottoman gaze was shifting
away from the Levant and into the hitherto peripheral areas of
empire: the Arab Peninsula and the Persian Gulf areas. This brought
it into a head-on collision with British political ambitions in the
region. Fadl developed his international career in this imperial
interstice. He played imperial tensions to his advantage. Even when
he was living in Istanbul (after his expulsion from Dhofar), he maintained his contact with the British resident in the city. In 1880, the
British resident in Istanbul, in a letter to the Marquess of Salisbury,
reported his meeting with Sayyid Fadl and made note of the friendly
overtures Fadl had made toward the British. In fact, Fadl had said
that he was desirous of establishing commercial relations between
Dhofar and India and in drawing British shipping to his ports. But
most noteworthy was his praise of the British government in India
as an exemplar of the respect and justice and protection it offered
to the Muslims.111 Fadl said he brought to the notice of the Ottoman
sultan the British niceties and familiarized him with the efficient
redress mechanisms for Muslims that operated in India. He urged
the sultan to follow the British model in Istanbul. It has been argued
that such overtures by Fadl were meant to please the British so that
they could help him reclaim Dhofar.112 But his political ambitions
far exceeded the control of Dhofar. Fadl was playing the part of a
transimperial broker. This promised huge dividends in the age of
imperial rivalriesan age when the caliph, Abd-al Hamid II, nurtured global aspirations and projected himself as the sole custodian
of Muslim interests. This brought him into direct conflict with
Britain, which had its own global appetite.
The fact that Fadl was consciously playing on these imperial tension zones was clear as he made his overtures to the British from
Istanbul. In Istanbul, Fadl sought political legitimacy for his rule in
Dhofar from the Ottoman caliph. Fadl had in fact come to Istanbul
after his ouster from Dhofar to renew a farman that would legitimate his authority in his kingdom and bring him firmly under
Turkish political sovereignty.113 He was also in need of additional
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

troopswhich he hoped to get from the Ottomansin order to

manage his affairs effectively in his kingdom. But that did not stop
him from complaining to the British ambassador at Istanbul about
the Omani governor at Dhofar who had hoisted the Ottoman red
flag with a crescent. Playing on the anti-Ottoman sentiment of the
ambassador, Fadl asked for his help to recapture Dhofar and fly the
national flag of Dhofar, green with a pentagonal centre.114 According
to Fadl, this was the best way to counter the red flag. Again, even
while he leaned on the British, he relied also on Ottoman support to
reoccupy Dhofar. He egged on the Ottomans to help him as a way
of reclaiming their own political sovereignty, which they had lost to
the British puppetthe sultan of Muscatwho now presided over
Dhofar.
In 1886, with the tacit approval of the Ottoman caliph, Fadl
attempted to reconquer Dhofar. This campaign was led by Fadls
son Sayyid Muhammad Fadl. He tailored his fathers policy of cultivating international relations to the global aspirations of the
Ottomans so as to expand his trans-Asiatic networks. He used both
the imperial networks as well as his fathers influence in the upper
echelons of power in Istanbul to spread out his political ambit toward
Dhofar. According to T.S. Jago, the British consul at Jeddah, initially Sayyid Muhammad was denied permission by the Turkish
governor general, Usman Pasha, at Jeddah, to proceed to Dhofar.
But he had traveled from Istanbul to Jeddah to complete this job
for his father. Interestingly, Sayyid Muhammad used the latest mode
of speedy communication between Jeddah and Istanbulthe telegraphto get in touch with his father in Istanbul. Fadl pulled rank
and used his contacts in Istanbul to pressure the governor general to
allow his son to proceed to Dhofar.115 And once permission was
granted, his son used the imperial transportation networks and
boarded a British pilgrim shipfilled with indigent pilgrims
with an armed party and military stores to be conveyed to Dhofar.116
This was a clever move because the presence of so many pilgrims on
board made action difficult for the British and provided Sayyid
Muhammad with a bargaining chip.
A weary sultan of Muscat appealed to the British for help. His
wali at Dhofar was ill equipped to handle Sayyid Muhammad. He
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

feared that a successful reconquest of Dhofar would lead to fresh

disturbances.117 The British government was sympathetic to the
sultans request, as Fadls family had the political clout with which to
reestablish Ottoman political sovereignty. A string of telegraphic
communications between the political resident at Aden and the
Bombay government revealed how seriously the British government
viewed this attempt to reconquer Dhofar. And this was because they
viewed Fadl as a middleman broker whose reconquest of Dhofar was
in effect an effort to restore Ottoman political sovereignty. A troubled Loch reported that the pilgrim ship carrying Sayyid Muhammad
had four hundred soldiers on board and that it intended to arrive at
Rasoot.118 The ship, the Metapedia, was loaded with arms and ammunition, and the Bombay government asked the resident at Aden to
stop it from leaving the port.119 A.G.F. Hogg, the political resident
at Aden, searched the vessel and found arms and ammunition of
European manufacture, as well as Arab matchlocks, swords, and
daggers.120 But the government agreed that the detention of the ship
was embarrassing, as the Metapedia was full of indigent pilgrims.
Nevertheless, the ship was detained on the grounds that it had no
doctor on board.121 The pilgrims grew mutinous due to the delays
and for want of rations, so the ship was supplied with 3,500 rations
in accordance with the manual for guidance of officers of ships carrying pilgrims in the Red Sea.122 Using a pilgrim ship for political
ends paid dividends for Sayyid Muhammad. The problems regarding
the pilgrims on board indicated that he had made a clever move.
Significantly, even while cleverly using imperial networks, Sayyid
Fadl never let go of his own repertoire of family, kinship, and soldiering contacts to establish his sway in the region. His retinue
included one hundred Arab soldiers who formerly had been in the
service of the sheriff of Mecca and whose unit had been recently
disbanded, as well as sixteen family members and personal attendants of his father, Sayyid Fadl.123
No number of excuses from Sayyid Muhammad that he was on
way to Dhofar to repair the watercourses there satisfied the British.124
Further telegrams from Loch indicated that Sayyid Muhammad
intended to establish himself at Dhofar under the [authority of]

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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

Porte.125 The political resident in the Persian Gulf was most worried
about Sayyid Muhammads use not just of imperial highways but
also of a British pilgrim ship. This was viewed as the ultimate use of
the imperial repertoire of resourcesin this case, used by Sayyid
Muhammad to carve out his own transimperial niche. The resident
wanted Sayyid Muhammad to be immediately prevented from proceeding in a British vessel to Dhofar. He recommended that Fadl
be sent back to Jeddah, as his filibustering expedition under British
flag would create the false impression of the countenance of the
British government to the proceeding.126 The tension only eased
when the resident at Aden reported that the Metapedia had been
searched and a large quantity of arms and ammunitions seized.
Section 26 of the Arms Act was invoked, and the resident reported
in a telegram that Sayyid Muhammad elected to land but ha[d] not
decided regarding his destination.127 Hogg, the political resident at
Aden, decided to keep Sayyid Muhammad on Flint Island until he
made up his mind about his return to Jeddah.128 British apprehensions about Sayyid Muhammad playing the broker for the Ottomans
was confirmed, as Hogg reported, when soon after electing to land
he declared himself an officer of the Turkish government sent specially to rule Dhofar under the Porte. Sayyid Muhammad stated
that he possessed firearms and orders to the above effect.129 Both
Sayyid Fadl and his sons Sayyid Muhammad and Sayyid Sahil Fadl
continuously moved between Jeddah and Istanbul, playing on the
imperial rivalries and networks that framed this region. As they
carved out their familys career as middlemen they exploited fault
lines, switched sides, and caused considerable unease to imperial
powers.130
The British government was particularly incensed by their moves.
Yet it never hesitated to use Fadl if it suited them. Fadl made use of
the British critique of the caliph. This changed his profile in British
eyes from a dreaded outlaw to a useful Muslim subject whose
authority was used to sanctify their critique of the caliph. Even as he
leaned on the Ottomans for legitimating his power he made it clear
to the British resident at Istanbul that he had come to meet him
because he was skeptical of the future of the Ottoman Empire:

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according to him, it had a good pasha but a corrupt administration.

It was significant that he viewed the British as the preferred political
sovereign in the Muslim world in the likely event of the Ottoman
collapse. He noted in a letter that the condition of the Turkish
Empire was very critical, and in the event of a general collapse
taking place he wished to have the friendship and to be under the
protection of England, to whom all the Arabs looked as a just and
righteous power.131 What is significant, however, is that by faulting
the Ottoman sultan in his duties as the caliph (which Fadl defined
specifically as offering justice and impartiality to all classes of his
subjects) and by praising the British government on precisely these
fronts, he questioned Ottoman claims to be the overseer of Muslims
globally. Indeed, the critique of the Ottomans as failed caliphs as
far as overseeing the Muslim populations of the world became the
key trope in Fadls interlocution with the British. Fadls son Sheikh
Seid Sachel [Sahil] Effendi, who carried a letter from his father to
the British resident in Istanbul, reiterated his fathers devotion to
England. Fadl emphasized in particular his admiration for her
rule in India. This was a country, he felt, where the Mahomedan
populations were treated with the most perfect justice and impartiality and were perfectly content with their state.132
This compliment was in fact an indirect indictment of the
Ottomans for failing to deliver on this front. But this did not mean
that all was lost for Fadl as far as the Ottomans were concerned. In
the same breath, Effendi revealed the honors and status that his
father enjoyed at the Ottoman court and the powerful influence he
wielded over the sultan. At the same time, he also was quick to add
that Muslims like him were attached to the British not only because
the civil and religious rights of Muslims were so well protected
under them but also because of the English governments sincere
friendship toward the Ottoman Empire, the only refuge of Islamism
on account of the caliphate and of the protection of the saints which
the latter has under its care.133 This balancing diplomacywhich
both used and critiqued the caliphwas to become the signature of
career transimperial subjects like Fadl.

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Debating the Caliph

Fadls remarkable balancing act also indicated how well he was
entrenched in both the British and the Ottoman worlds. Indeed, his
views on the caliph resonated across the imperial divide, where
Muslim subjects debated the ideal caliph profile. This was particularly true in the Hijaz, which was the melting pot of ethnic groups
who gave the region its cosmopolitan veneer.134 Indeed, the huge
Muslim congregations in the area, enabled by the discovery and
expansion of the steamships and railways, gathered there because of
the sacred geography of Mecca: pilgrims and visitors were attracted
to the area because of the tales of the Prophet as a saint, his miraculous powers, and the therapeutic healing properties of the water
from the holy fountain at Mecca (zamzam). This conjunction of
modernity and enchantment that brought Muslims from all over the
world together produced a lively debate on both religion and politics. This was bound to happen as the congregation itself had formed
as a result of the efficient management of Islamic pilgrimage by
modern empires.
The debates on politics had both territorially framed as well as
transimperial resonance. Predictably, they spilled into the religious
arena. And this indicated once again the centrality of religion in
technology and in capitalist-driven secular modernity, both of
which had enabled people in such large numbers, wearing the identities of territorially stamped subjects, to congregate. People discussed their experiences of living as colonial subjects with their
country cousinspeople they rarely met in such large numbers
back home. They compared their lives and circumstances to subject
populations of other empires. But they moved beyond their own
experiences to discuss the caliph and commented on his performance as the protector of all Muslims.135 Indeed, it was their
journey to the caliphs own seat in Hijaz that made him a subject of
physical scrutiny and review. Paradoxically, this close experience of
the caliphs administration was enabled by European powers who
facilitated travel to Mecca for their Muslim subjects. The failure of
the caliph to discharge his temporal responsibilities disappointed
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pilgrims from around the world. His inefficient officers and the
hardships in Mecca made pilgrims doubt his claims to lead Muslims
globally. Debates on the ideal caliph became a hot topic of discussion in the Muslim congregation at the Hijaz.
Debates regarding the ideal caliph were not new. Ever since the
inception of classical empires, philosophers, political theorists, and
jurists engaged with the issue in different contexts. The premodern
concerns had revolved chiefly around the ethnic origins of the caliph:
the Arab versus the Turk debate. These concerns continued even
when Muslims lost political sovereignty to European powers in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In India this disjunction
increased the symbolic significance of the caliph in normative
Muslim thought. He began to be perceived, more than ever before,
as the spiritual head of the umma. Indeed, the new technologies that
enabled speedier transportation and communication created a fresh
set of contingencies that pushed the old debates in new directions.
The debate now was about who would be the ideal overseer of Muslim
interests in the new world order of cosmopolitan modernity as represented in the Hijaz. This was the site where religion, politics, and
technological advancements had an interdependent existence.136
As the Ottoman caliph was reviewed, his monopoly was challenged, and not only as a result of the upsurge of ethnic Arabs in the
Hijaz. Rather, this challenge grew out of a new conjunction that
developed in the late nineteenth century, one that brought Islam
and capitalist-driven modern nation-states, represented by their
Muslim subjects, face to face at imperial intersections like Mecca.
The challenge that European nation-states posed to the caliph only
intensified, as every year the crowds in the Hijaz increased, drawn
there by additional means of transportation and medical facilities, as
well as by the offer of travel documents being offered by colonial
regimes who had tasted the profits of haj management.137 The
Ottoman caliph, as represented by his corrupt staff in the Hijaz,
paled in comparison to the protective overtures of the European
colonial rulers toward their subjects. The hajis of British India as
well as those from the Dutch East Indies shared their views on
Ottoman corruption. The caliph increasingly seemed inept in his
administrationapathetic and inefficient.138
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In the late nineteenth century, the caliphs management was up

for criticism in every possible account of the Hijaz. For the Indo
nesians and Malays, the corruption and inefficiency of his administration diluted their misgivings about their own Dutch colonial
rulers. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the German convert who
penned in detail his observations on the Hijaz, noted that the disillusioned Jawahs obey the officials of the local government...often
directly contrary to the wishes of the population. But here they are
Moslims and fear Allah...The illustrious power of the [caliphs]
government however displays itself much more brilliantly in
Constantinople than in Mekka.139 In Java, Muslim secret societies
mushroomed. These societies liaised with Medina-based societies
that were calling for the removal of the caliph, as, they claimed,
he had forfeited by his bad government and his indifference to
true Musalman interests all claim to the support of his core
ligionists.140
The Indian critique of the caliphs performance frames British
reports not just on pilgrim traffic but also on general affairs in the
Hijaz. From Zohrab, the British vice consul in Jeddah, complaining
about the Ottoman officers apathy toward stopping slave trade141 to
the more detailed tirade about Ottoman officers by his successor,
Abdur Razzack, the litany of grievances is endless. Razzack wrote
copious reports detailing the hardships of Indians on account of
corruption in the caliphs administration. Reporting on the cholera
epidemic of 1882 and the inefficient ways of quarantining pilgrims
by the Turkish government, Razzack noted: A great deal of heart
burning exists at the enforcement of this quarantine, and many a
future pilgrim will be put off coming to the haj until better times.
Complaining about the failure of the Porte to provide good ventilation, latrines, and luggage storage facilities, he remarked that the
Indian pilgrims were appalled and disillusioned by the sultan of
Rum (Constantinople). He felt that many more would have loudly
complained about this once they returned to India but ha[d] not
added their voices to swell the charges from apparent sympathy with
the Turkish government.142 Indeed, Razzack was so obsessed with
his critique of Ottoman corruption and apathy that he saw even
their positive gestures in a negative light. Thus he felt that Osman
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Pasha, the vali of Hijaz, who had made efforts to improve the water
supply to Jeddah, had done so not out of concern for people but
from a desire to perpetuate his name, his ambition being excited by
a proposal emanating from his adulator to call such an aqueduct by
his name.143
Razzack was infuriated that the officers of the grand sheriff were
extorting pilgrims. They not only picked on Indian pilgrims but on
the Malay and Javanese as well. He demanded the refund of pilgrim
money unduly taken on the pretext of taxation of their goods, camel
hires, and so forth.144 Ottoman custom officers refuted these charges
on the grounds that only goods brought by pilgrims for purpose of
trade were taxed. In 1893, Mohammad Arif, collector of customs at
Jeddah, argued with Razzack, claiming that the enormous amount
thus imported is well known to experienced persons like yourself
and to exempt these imports from duty would be to deprive the holy
places [Mecca and Medina] of their revenue...and it is well known
that with the exception of the Javanese all pilgrims sell in the streets
and markets of this place whatever provisions they bring with
them.145 As these charges and refutations flowed, Razzack became
involved in a heated tirade against the grand sheriff of Mecca, whom
he accused of encouraging corruption for his personal gain. In 1894,
an angry Razzack protested the reinstitution of the post of Sheikh
ul Mashaiekh, who took over the job of arranging camel hires and
steamers for all pilgrims. He was suspicious of the corrupt incumbents who currently held this post: Yousuf Kattan, deputed for
Javanese and Malay pilgrims, and Hassan Daood, deputed for the
Indians. He felt both were corrupt and worked as agents for the
sheriff, who, he maintained, was complicit in the illegal profits they
made by overcharging pilgrims for camel hires. With statistical evidence in hand, he complained about their brutality and inhumanity to British subjects and demanded their dismissal.146
The critique of the caliph foregrounded his role as the Ottoman
sultan as well. It brought to light the fact that notwithstanding his
spiritual authority he had failed in his managerial and administrative duties as the sultan who supervised haj pilgrim sites. European
nation-states encouraged public discussion of the caliph as the failed
sultan. They contrasted his performance to their own relatively
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efficient
management of pilgrims. Indeed, their freshly discovered
technologies in disease control, printing, and transportation (especially steamships), revolutionized connections to the Hijaz. As pilgrim traffic increased from the territories under their control,
the European nation-states stood out as patrons of their Muslim
subjects. They competed with the Ottoman sultan in the management of pilgrims and deflected attention from his spiritual persona
by highlighting his poor performance. On the basis of his shoddy
track record as the overseer of haj pilgrimage, they urged people
to ask what constituted an ideal caliph. As the temporal powers of
the caliph were embedded in religious claims it was indeed religious authority that was being discussed in a public space, a sphere
that itself was produced by the modernizing drives of European
nation-states. The good caliph was now seen as one who was not
merely a symbolic spiritual mascot but one who displayed managerial skills. This new definition of caliph opened the doors for many
contenders.
The debate about the caliph was steered in a new direction with
the coming together of technological advancement and the European
political management of spirituality. As efficiency, benevolence, and
proficiency became the new yardstick by which to judge the caliph,
the race for his position became very competitive. Compared with
the mismanagement and corruption of the caliphs government, the
modern European nation-states seemed beacons of light and hope.
The Ottoman caliph in his role as the administrative overseer of
Muslims paled when compared to the European colonial masters of
Asian Muslims. Nation-states were quick to lap up this sentiment
and used the welfare of Muslim subjects as a ploy to advance their
domestic political agenda. Thus, Abdur Razzacks bleeding heart,
showering concern for all pilgrims, was the perfect mascot for
British concern for the well-being of Muslims globally and Indian
Muslims in particular.
Even though initially European states favored the demand for an
Arab caliph, their support of him in this case was different because
it did not involve older ethnic tensions that were derived from the
perceived superiority of the Arab race. Instead, the Arab sheriffs
privileged genealogy notwithstanding, he was the preferred caliph
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

also because he was perceived to be a better, less corrupt, and more

efficient manager and overseer of Muslim material interests. Now
that so many Muslims physically visited Hijaz, the real rather than
the imagined efficacy of the temporal and spiritual head of Islam
was up for scrutiny. In other words, the conjunction of the modern
capitalist infrastructure and of European management of religion
and the sacred space of Islam posed new challenges and offered new
competition to the temporal and spiritual head of Muslims. The
Arabs were the preferred substitutes. But there was nothing to stop
the European modern nation-states from joining the race
In the new climate, the demand for an Arab caliph was the loudest.
Some British intellectuals invoked the old debate about the ideal
caliph, which was based on the ethnic origins of the holder of the
office: the Arab versus the Turk. They used Islamic history and
tradition to argue that precedent dictated that the caliph had to be
from the elite Quraish Arab tribe to which the Prophet belonged. In
1877, Neil. B.E. Baillie, the author of several books on Muslim law,
spoke at the Royal Asiatic Society, where he declared as Kharejite
heresy the acceptance of a Turk as the caliph. He sent his paper to
the lawyers of Bengal and the Northwest Provinces for a ratification
of his position.147 But within Muslim circles the debate about the
caliph was not due merely to matters of ethnicity, genealogy, or
sacredness. Such issues had become irrelevant as the Muslim imaginary acquired physicality via the infrastructural networks of the
European nation-states. For the Muslim subjects, the debate about
the perfect caliph was about his administrative efficacy. Such
demands now had a trans-Asian resonance, given the relatively
greater connectedness and shared experience of being a Muslim that
the cosmopolitan modernity of contemporary nation-states had
enabled. Thus, for instance, in 1881 an influential Javanese pilgrim
reported from Java that people in his country were disenchanted by
the bad government of the caliph and his indifference to the
Musalman interests. The people disliked the caliph and felt that
he had forfeited all claims to the support of his coreligionists. The
pilgrim added that the people were certain of the caliphs speedy
fall and the takeover of his empire by the Russians. The Javanese
concluded that people were dissatisfied not just with the current
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

pasha, Abd-al Hamid II, but also with the sultans who, he said, had
for some years past governed Turkey.148 The Javanese pilgrim
alluded to the fact that his disillusioned countrymen had been in
communication with a widely extended secret society embracing
Musalmans of all nationalities that was based in Medina. Its object
was to restore the caliphate to the Arabs of the Hijaz. Abdullah
Pasha had created the society when he was the sheriff. The present
sheriff, Abdul Mutalib, was not on its rolls. The society had a ritualistic regimen to ensure that its members would be welded into a
firm group. Each member on admission had to swear on the tomb of
the Prophet to maintain secrecy and to promote the objects of the
society.149
Such secret societies, with their trans-Asiatic connections, created an anticaliph mood across Asia. The societies were very political in nature. And they created a peculiar dilemma for the European
nation-states: how to control the public sphere produced by the
religion-centric modernity, a sphere that they themselves patronized. Thus, although the anticaliph discussions in the societies were
to be encouraged, the dilemma was where to put a halt to these discussions. Of particular concern to the British was the exchange of
opinions to discuss plans to criticize the action of European governments and form combinations to resist the supremacy of the
Christian powers.150 Not surprisingly, the British vice consul in
Jeddah was asked to keep an eye on the trans-Asian activities of such
societies.

Private Careers and Imperial Politics

Secret societies were the product of secular modernity and its
brush with spiritualism and enchantment. Propped up by the information and technological boom of the period and sustained by the
rapid movement of men, money, and ideas, they best represented the
centrality of religion in things modern. According to the consulate reports, these were suspicious zones of sedition where pan-
Islam as a religious reaction to European influence was perfected
and the search for a global leader of the umma launched. And yet
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

these were also the arenas where the caliph was critiqued and the
brokers who decentered him given a free hand. The extraterritorial
nature of these societies was anathema to the British consulates.
And yet there was an acceptance of their many uses. Indeed, it was a
challenge to curtail their networks, to tame them and at the same
time keep them alive.
Zohrab, the British vice consul, took the surveillance of Muslim
networks very seriously, as he was convinced that they were dangerous and that there was no other country offering such security
and facilities as the Hijaz for political discussions.151 He was convinced that whereas in any other country such a large congregation
of Muslim representatives from all over the world would attract
public attention and thus provoke fear in the minds of delegates, this
was not the case in the Hijaz. Here, as he noted in a letter, politics
was discussed without fear of betrayal and strategies were developed to resist the European Christian powerseven if the congregation was ostensibly a religious one.152 Zohrabs correspondence
reflected commonly held fears within the British administration
about the haj pilgrimage. And these fears, even though exaggerated,
were not entirely unfounded. It was well known that many rebels
from the 1857 mutiny-rebellion in India had found refuge in the
Hijaz.153 Zohrab was of the view that any such political refugees
who might stir up trouble be identified and their activities and
movements watched.154 The Foreign Department also believed that
most of these men, including, for instance, Maulana Rahmatullah
Kairanwi, were merely tools in the hands of others, that is, of
other powers.155
It is significant that Zohrab continued to stereotype these societies as cradles of pan-Islam, even though some of them were explicitly anticaliph and pessimistic about the establishment of global
Islamic rule. In 1879, Zohrab reported on the functioning of another
secret society from Mecca, which, like the one in Medina, was said
to have communication with every Musalman community through
out the world. This had on its agenda the replacement of the inept
caliph by someone more capable of protecting Muslim interests.
Zohrab was confident that its literaturewhich exhorted Muslims
around the globe to overthrow both the rule of Christians and that
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of the caliphhad heavily influenced the anti-British revolt in

Algeria. The society was definitely pro-Arab and composed of
sheikhs, mullahs, and sheriffs. An important item on its agenda was
to withdraw from the Sultan his title of the temporal head of the
Mussalman faith. The society was troubled by the failure of the
caliph to establish a good administration and couched its tirade
against him in vitriolic rhetoric that accused him of colluding with
the Christian powers in the Crimean War (18531856). The society
wanted the caliph to quit because it claimed that his new allies were
the European powers (Britain and France) with whose help Russia
had been defeated in the Crimean War. They saw him as a puppet
in European hands and thus insisted that he could not continue to
be the true representative of the Prophet. That mantle, they argued,
must be laid on other shoulders.156 Zohrab was pleased with the
anticaliph agenda of the society, even if he feared its anti-European
stance.
Indeed, so intense was the anticaliph mood in these societies that
they also discussed the shifting of the temporal seat of Islamic power
from Istanbul to Damascus. Damascus was, however, not found
suitable to be the future seat of the head of Islam on the grounds
that it was not a safe place because it was in easy reach of European
influence. Medina was preferred as the center of faith because of
its remoteness from Europe and above all because of the sacredness
of the city and the purity of its Musalman character.157
Similar reports of global Muslim networks that discussed alternate spaces locating the seat of Muslim temporal power, and alternate candidates for holding that seat, streamed in from Dutch
subjects in Mecca and from Turkish officers in the region. One such
officer told Zohrab that the Turks were aware that the authority of
the sultan was now only nominal. He predicted, on the basis of
bazaar gossip picked up by his wife, that grave events leading to a
massacre of Turks would soon take place in Arabia. The officer had
sent away his family to Istanbul anticipating trouble.158 Indeed, local
agents informed Zohrab that the caliph was considered so unacceptable in Arab areas that if he dare[d] to suppress the trade [in slaves]
there would be serious trouble. But if the high sheriff, the spiritual
head, did so, the Bedouins and others would obey him and carry out
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

his wishes without any resistance. The Arabs, the officer added,
hate[d] the Turks. But they venerate[d] the high sheriff.159
These ideas posed a peculiar dilemma for the government of
India. It welcomed the critique of the caliph that these societies generated, because through their cross-border contacts they were able
to take that critique onto a global stage. At the same time, the government was always fearful of such discussions slipping into anti-
European sentiment. The government responded through its effort
to tame the loose public sphere that had produced such discussions. It found that the transimperial brokers, like Fadl, were particularly handy to perform this job. And it closely monitored
middlemen, like Fadl, who straddled the Asiatic networks of secret
societies, pilgrimage routes, and commercial highways. It tapped
them for information, and their ideas on Muslim societies and the
caliph were selectively picked up and given a new spin.
Thus, for instance, the British played on those anticaliph sentiments articulated by Fadl that suited them. They popularized Fadls
scandalous suggestion that the British could do a better management job than the caliph as the overseer of Muslim interests. Indeed,
they aimed to be the European front-runner in this race for the new
caliph, even if it meant being an overseer without the title of the
caliph. They allied themselves closely with the sheriff at Mecca as
the din for an Arab as the preferred choice for the caliph gained
momentum globally. The sheriff was the ideal ally as he was the
fountainhead for this new pro-Arab caliph sentiment. During the
1880s the British saw the Arab alliance as critical to pulling Hijaz
out of Turkish control and bringing it into their own ambit. They
were convinced that the political dividends earned by insinuating
themselves as the overseer of the sacred lands of the Muslims was
the best way to dent Ottoman political sovereignty.160 This would
catapult them instantly to the position of the global protector of
Muslims. They also saw this as a good way to bring the government
closer to its Muslim population in India.
On his part, the sheriff of Mecca, very much like Fadl, hoped to
personally benefit by supporting the global aspirations of imperial
Britain. He had his own axe to grind and was happy to support the
British as the global Muslim overseer as this was the way he could
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get rid of Turkish rule. Indeed, he was even willing to use his religious authority to sanctify the new role of the British as the the
firm friend and able protector of Muslims all over the world.
Indeed, the experience of the British administration in India and
the rights and privileges enjoyed by the Indian Muslims were showcased to market the idea of the British being the best overseers of
the Hijaz and thereby of the Muslim world. The sheriff was reportedly keen to send his emissaries to war-torn Afghanistan in the
1880s so as to explain to the Afghans the ways in which Britains
Muslim subjects all over the world enjoyed equality with all other
religions. He asserted, therefore, that the Musalman religion
requires for its support the aid and protection of Englandthe only
power that places all religions on an equality, and protects all without
distinction. Indeed, he was said to have taken his stand to the
extreme when he willingly announced to those Afghans who opposed
the English that he as the Religious Head of the Faith, declares
him to be an opponent of the faith, in other words a traitor to his
religion.161
Zohrab, the British consul at Cairo and Jeddah, urged the British
to cash in on the sentiments of the sheriff, to help him oust the
Turks and then to establish their own influence and protection over
the Hijaz. He argued that this strategy had immense political dividendsas the sheriff and the Hijaz were the path to the heart of the
Muslims globally.162 He was convinced that this was the only way
England might get supreme influence over the whole Mussalman
world.163 Zohrab attributed the positive image of Britain in the
Hijaz solely to the effective handling of its Muslim subjects who
were located there. This new role of protector picked up in the
1870s when the brief friendship between Russia and Turkey rekindled Russophobia in British official circles. And thus Muslim subjects who had left India became the crucial site from which Britain
envisaged launching its career as a protector of global Islam. Zohrab
often compared the relative benefits enjoyed by Britains Muslim
subjects to their other coreligionists in the area, as for instance,
when he claimed, Ninety percent of the Arab population would
vote for the separation from Turkey. The majority of the inhabitants
of the towns have visited either India or the Straits Settlements and
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are thus able to judge from compassion and form an opinion on

what the government they live under ought to be.164 He underlined
further the favorable sentiments in the area when he reported that
the Arabs, tired of Ottoman corruption and the instabilities it caused
to their lives, were keen on becoming British subjects and obtaining
new passports. According to him they were willing even to live in
India if this was the only way to become subjects of the empire. In
reply to his query of how the holy land could pass to the stranger
and unbeliever, he was told, It would not be to the stranger but to
the real friend of the Mohamedan, and as in India so in the Hijaz the
Mussalman would be more free to exercise his religion, and it would
be more venerated than it is under the Turk.165
Zohrabs agent in Mecca also reported that the sheriff had
obtained the sanction of the ecclesiastical departmentthe ulema
in exchange for his friendly overtures toward and favorable opinions
on the English. Thus, for instance, the ulema approved of the British
conduct in the Afghan war and praised it for being generous and
the Afghans as being treacherous.166 The sheriff was of the view
that Mecca was the ideal forum from which one could determine
what was the best European nation-state. Mecca was the city where
Muslim subjects from all the European colonies gathered and compared their experiences as subject people. Invariably, the British
Muslim subjects seemed happiest. They always expressed gratitude
at the freedom they were allowed in the exercise of their religion,
the manner in which they were treated and the way their interests
were protected. They found the British government neither unjust
nor oppressive.167
The ball did not stop there. British consuls in Jeddah contrasted
the exceptional protection of their Muslim subjects and the relatively better conditions in which they lived in Hindustan to their
misery in the Ottoman-ruled Hijaz. They also highlighted the anticaliph sentiment of the secret societies and the critique of the caliph
by brokers like Fadl. It helped the British game plan if Indian Muslim
subjects appeared as beleaguered subjects in the Hijazpeople who
had invested in its economy and yet received harsh treatment.
Consuls in Jeddah hoped that the care for their subjects in the Hijaz
would not only improve their pro-Muslim image globally, but also
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earn dividends back in India. Time and again Abdur Razzack, the
British vice consul in Jeddah, highlighted the contribution of Indian
merchants in improving the water canals of the Hijaz, an achievement that had gone a long way in improving the sanitation of the
city. In one of his many detailed reports on the 1882 cholera epidemic in Mecca, Razzack praised Hajis Abdullah Arab and Abdul
Wahid Wahdana, merchants from Calcutta, for their personal
efforts and liberality for such a blessing as the water which now runs
through the Zobeidah Aqueduct. He was of the view that but for
this aqueduct the water of the city would have been so unclean that
it would have led to disease. Razzack strongly refuted the charge
that cholera had come to Mecca via a passenger ship, the Shelley,
which had sailed from India. He underlined that the analysis of the
epidemic in Calcutta had shown that it was related to sanitation and
hygiene. And because the Indian merchants had contributed to
cleaning the water system of Mecca the entire Mahomedan world
should be grateful to the Indian merchants in Mecca and elsewhere
for their generous donations that made it possible for the clean water
to flow in the Zubaida Aqueduct.168
Indeed, merchant Seth Abdul Wahid and his colleague Mirza
Amir Beg not only donated lavishly but also located themselves in
Mecca, where they supervised the construction at the aqueduct
site as well as coordinated donations from Muslim notables and com
mercial elites of India. People from as far as Meerut in the North
west Provinces sent large amounts of money to them. In 1880, one
Sheikh Ilahi Baksh of Meerut wanted the consul at Jeddah to ensure
that his donation of Rs. 10,000 was not being misappropriated at
Mecca.169 Subsequent investigations revealed that the merchants
had a well-administered committee and an establishment consisting
of people from Hindustan with whom they worked. A well-trained,
educated person from Roorkee, in the Northwest Provinces, assisted
Abdul Wahid with the accounts. They were also assisted by a supervisory committee of gentlemen from Hindustan now resident in
Mecca.170
The showcasing of Muslim subjects such as the Calcutta merchant Abdul Wahid not only projected the image of Indian Muslims
as beleaguered heroes but also put the spotlight on the benevolent
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

and considerate attitude of the British government toward Muslims

of the world. And this brought the British government into direct
contest with the Porte. Indeed, taking on the Porte was one of the
main reasons for British interest in the Muslim cause. Thus in 1884
a difficult situation arose Abdul Wahid, an Indian Muslim, was recognized by the Porte for his services in cleaning up the canal system
at Mecca and was honored by being awarded the Order of the
Osmanieh, fourth class, by the Ottoman pasha.171 The Indian government refused him permission to accept the award. This was a
clear case of competing imperial claims over a subject. Such competitions over immigrant subjects were significant as they indicated
how imperial rivalries were fought over Muslim subjects who straddled frontiers and cultures using the very imperial networks that
clashed over them. But this mutual dependence of Muslim trans-
Asian networks and modern empires was also the key to the longevity of both parties.
Muslim rulers and notables were also important donors for various philanthropic projects in Mecca. And they too constituted critical sites of imperial contestation. Thus, in 1885 the nawab of the
Muslim princely state of Rampur in northern India contributed Rs.
70,000 for constructing an extension from the Zubaida Aqueduct to
the city of Manna so as to supply it with fresh water. Indeed, the
nawab also promised a contribution toward improving the supply of
water to Jeddah by extending the Zubaida Aqueduct to the city. He
made that contribution contingent, however, on the vali also collecting money locally from the inhabitants of Mecca and Jeddah.172
Abdur Razzack showcased the philanthropy of such elite Muslim
subjects of the British Empire and underlined the deep connec
tion between Britain and Muslims globally. The Porte was quick to
strike back.
The Porte reacted to increasing British influence on its Muslim
constituency by calling on Indian Muslim notables and community
leaders to support its endeavors. Thus in 1896 it sent emissaries to
Rampur to test the feelings of native Muhammadan states. That
year the commissioner of Rohilkhand reported that a Turk calling
himself Hashim Effendi had arrived at Rampur. He claimed to be
the emissary of the Porte and tried to establish contact with the
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

nawab so as to test his feelings toward the Porte. In this particular

instance he was supposedly snubbed by the nawab.173
Indeed, the expanding British influence in the Hijaz consciously
spilled from benevolence and concern for its Indian Muslim subjects to a cautious tilt toward the larger Muslim constituency of the
caliph. This of course was a sensitive game, as the Porte was always
ready to strike back. For instance, Abdur Razzack had proposed to
establish a hospital in Jeddah or Mecca for pilgrims; discussions of
his proposal centered on the suspicions that such an act of philanthropy would trigger in the Porte, since the hospital would find it
impossible to limit its medical services only to Indian Muslims. In a
report, Razzack described his concerns, noting,
while it would not be advisable to reserve the affording of relief
only to Indians as it would lead to race distinctions not proper
in a country where all are of one caste and creed...and it
would be difficult to draw the line between the Indians and
Arabs, Turks and Blacks who form the majority of the inhabitants of these places...it might lead the Turkish government to
show a susceptibility proportioned to the amount of influence
which the British Government is likely to obtain by the supplying of a desideratum which would be gladly welcomed by all
classes of people, rich and poor, Indians, Arabs Turks and all
other nationalities which congregate during the haj.174
Razzack was afraid of incurring the wrath of the Porte, which
might then obstruct the project. He therefore suggested a relatively
quiet and unostentatious alternative: medical help could be offered
to Indian pilgrims at their own quarters and lodging houses. He
demanded that he be provided additional native Muslim doctors to
help him if he had to move around with his chest of medicines. He
toyed with the idea of establishing a dispensary, rather than a hospital, as it would be low profile, and, he hoped, would create fewer
objections from local authorities. But he feared that even this would
be looked upon with an envious eye, as he phrased it, by one or
two Turkish doctors who are here, as they would be to some extent
thrown into the shade when the dispensary became popular.175 In
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the end he advocated the least ostentatious method, which was

working from his house offering semi-private relief and medical
help free of cost to those who came there. He was of the view that
since it was invidious to make distinctions between Indians and
other races in the distribution of such a charity or medicines and
medical advice, this semi-private unit of his, even if attended by
Turks, Africans, and Arabs, would not provoke too much reaction
from the Porte as it would not be loud and bold in its statement.
However, the government of India was more shrewd in its planning. It wanted the hospital to be established to display its benevolence, but it also wanted to piggyback on the efforts of Muslim
notables and the wishes of the richer Indians. Responding to
Razzacks report, the government made it clear that these influential
Indian Muslim notables could help to overcome the objections of
the Porte and at the same time make it possible for the sheriff to be
brought on board. The government was also willing to contribute
liberally to such a hospital, if rich Indians were willing to take the
initiative and first provide financing. Nor did it have objections
to the creation of a dispensary at Razzacks residence.176 The secretary to the government of India made it clear that while the government was all for increasing its influence and showing its benevolent
face in the Hijaz, it did not want to lose prestige if permission for
setting up the hospital or dispensary was denied by the Porte. Thus,
it wanted to bring on board influential Indians in Mecca who had
collected money for such a hospital, rich notables in India, and
the sheriff. Indeed, it wished to use them at the forefront of its
mission.177 And this again showed how the conflation of imperial
international relations with the global aspirations of Muslim migrs was crucial to the development of Muslim trans-Asiatic networks. Indeed, it showed the imperially embedded nature of such
networks.

Fadl and the Imperial Contest over Muslim Subjects

Imperial rivalries offered amazing possibilities to Sayyid Fadl. The
imperial contest over Muslim subjects, the challenges posed by
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Muslim secret societies, the positive sentiment toward European

nation-states generated by poor Ottoman rule, and the debates over
Islams spiritual and temporal head in the international public
domain energized Fadl and brokers like him.
In 1880, Fadl created a stir in British circles when Al Jawaib, an
Arabic newspaper from Istanbul, reported that the sultan of Turkey
had bestowed on Fadl the honorary title of wazeer.178 The Aden
residency suggested that the government of India might deem fit to
take further steps in drawing attention to Port of the antecedents
of Fazl.179 News about Fadl was carefully scrutinized in British
circlesand there was plenty of information on him. He had built
enough clout for himself at critical imperial cross-sections, like the
Hijaz, to be always in the news. A newsletter of 1880 created further
concern when it reported that Istanbul had granted him a pension
and asked him to live in Mecca for good.180
The same year he jumped into the contentious arena of British
and Ottoman efforts to monopolize influence over Muslims globally. He aligned himself with the Ottoman pasha, and wrote in a
lofty tone to the sultan of Muscat, who had driven him out of Dhofar.
As he described his planned return to Dhofar to rectify the un-
Islamic conspiracies and intrigues that had resulted in his overthrow
by the tribes, his tone was that of an Islamic monarch. He not only
legitimated his self-styled Muslim leadership by claiming to have
the support of the Ottoman sultan but said that he was proceeding
to Dhofar with the orders of the Sublime Porte. He mapped his
individuated international relations onto Caliph Abd-al Hamid IIs
foreign policy. Like the caliph, he referred to Istanbul as the Empire
of Islam. He informed the sultan of Muscat of his arrival in Dhofar
and ended his letter in a tone reminiscent of Caliph Abd-al Hamid
II, who had projected a Muslim image of himself globally to deflect
attention from his domestic crises. He concluded, And I ask of God
prosperity for myself and the Mussalmans.181
In 1888, he created a stir in British official circles with the news
that he had brokered a deal between the Porte and some Indian
Muslim merchants of Bombay who lived in Medina. The former
had offered to influence the Indian hajis not to use any other steamships except Turkish ones to travel to Mecca. This was seen as a way
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of denting British commercial interests in the region. A Bombay

merchant, Abdullah Arab Moonuffer, who had originally lived in
Bombay but had recently become a Turkish subject and now resided
in Medina, visited Istanbul. Here, he used Fadls influence to reach
out to the sultan and proposed that if he received the sultans sanction
and help he could, he claimed, induce the head of the Mahommedan
community in India to advise their co-religionists not to come on
the pilgrimage to Mecca, and [not] to take passage in any but Turkish
steamers. These, he argued, could be dispatched by the Porte to
Bombay and Calcutta for transporting pilgrims.182
Abdulla Arab, working in conjunction with Fadl, was not content
with only sabotaging British commercial interests. He also hinted
that he could help in restoring the waning authority of the caliph as
the spiritual head of all Muslims. He proposed that Indian pilgrims
once in Turkish ships should be considered under the protection of
the Turkish Government and treated as its own subjects. Abdulla
Arab played on the sultans wishful thought that his authority as the
caliph drew all Muslims to him, despite his corrupt administration
and apathy toward their problems. He convinced the sultan that
British Indian subjects would happily become subjects of the Porte,
since, as he described it, they would be glad to be under the special
protection of the head of the Muhomedan religion and would have
nothing to do with the British government until their return to
India again.183
Of course, this latter suggestion impressed the sultan as it fed his
political appetite to be called the Caliph of the faithful. His reputation, due to his corrupt officials, had suffered a severe beating in
the Hijaz region. And in the late nineteenth century, the Hijaz,
rather than the Levant, was critical to the Ottomans commercially
as well as politically. Indeed, the political significance of the Hijaz
was great given the Portes desperate efforts to hold on to its world
power status by projecting the caliph as the global overseer of all
Muslims. Hijaz, with its location as the central meeting point for
Muslims, was the Portes window to the world. The might of the
fledgling empire, increasingly based on the caliphs authority rather
than on a burgeoning economy, could be showcased from here to
the larger Asian and European world. The Ottoman sultan thus
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happily agreed to send Turkish steamers and extend protection to

Indian pilgrims if Abdullah Arab could first go to India and obtain
the cooperation of the chiefs of the Muslim community there.
Sayyid Fadl, with his wide network of contacts in India, supplied
him with letters of introduction addressed to the all-important
Muslim heads of regional states, and Abdulla Arab proceeded with
these to Bombay.
A clearly alarmed British Foreign Office appealed to the government of India for help: [We] trust, it stated, that the Indian government will take such measures as they may think proper in dealing
with this man...his object is not only to deprive British shipping
of Indian pilgrim traffic but to undermine the influence of the
British government with its Mahomedan subjects in India.184
But if Fadl encouraged the sultans political ambition and tuned
his international relations to it, he also provided grist for British
propaganda on the pasha as the failed caliph. He wished to benefit
also from the British imperial mood in the region, and fanned their
aspiration to lead the Muslim world. Thus, for instance, the British
were quick to latch on to Fadls critique of the caliph and his suggestion that they could be better managers of Muslim interests. They
saw his critique as symptomatic of general Muslim discontent over
poor Ottoman administration, a trend that was conveyed to them
by their consuls, like Zohrab, who closely monitored secret societies
in the Hijaz area. Fadls suggestion that Muslim interests could be
better protected by the British in the wake of Ottoman collapse was
a welcome one, even if it came from a fanatic Mahomedan.
Indeed, it was such deft diplomacy that made the fanatic Mahome

dan
slip into the role of the respectable transimperial middleman
with ease. It also entrenched the Asiatic networks of such middlemen
in imperial plots and rivalries. The British encouraged Fadl to continue to work within the niche he had carved out for himself as
a trans-Asian middleman. Indeed, the British resident noted in a
letter that he saw Fadl so fully in the role of a middleman and broker
that each time the latter wished to meet he thought it might have
been suggested by the [Ottoman] Sultan.185 He always emphasized
to Fadl that his government wished the Ottoman sultan well only
because of its concern for the well being of Muslims and the cause
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of Islam. On his part, Fadl claimed that the British were concerned
about Ottoman maladministration and the sultans failure to deliver
to the Muslims as their caliph. The resident wanted Fadl to convey
these thoughts to the sultan. He observed, If he [Fadl] gave such
counsel [about Ottoman maladministration] to the Sultan, and they
were followed he would be rendering good service to His Majesty
and his people as well as to Islam. The resident reiterated the significance the British gave to the well-being not just of its Muslim
subjects but of Islam generally and noted that they were concerned
that the Ottoman Empire was failing in its duties of being the
Muslims overseer. He wanted Fadl to communicate this to the
sultan, saying in so many words, Should the opportunity occur
if he would repeat to His Majesty what I had said. Fadl was only
happy to be an interlocutor and replied that his majesty had frequently spoken to him of me as his true friend, and of England as his
best ally.186
Indeed, the outlawed Malabar rebel and fanatic Fadl thrived
on his role as a transimperial interlocutor and middleman between
the British and the Ottoman Empires. He exploited the international relations of imperial powers even as he continued to rely
on his core repertoire of religion, kinship, and rank. He used his
sayyid cardhis direct descent from the Prophetto legitimize his
self-styled authority to comment on the failed caliph and to suggest his replacement. At the same time, he plugged into British
Ottoman tensions over the control of the southwest rim of Arabia
the Dhofar region in the Hadramawt. He almost brought Britain
and Turkey onto a collision course with his claims that he had
Ottoman backing to reassert his hold over Dhofarfrom which
he had been expelled by the British ally, the sultan of Muscat. The
British supported the sultan of Muscats political sovereignty in the
region. And even though they had their doubts about his hold over
Dhofar they were generally unforgiving of any Ottoman intervention into his territory.
Indeed, the India Office always feared that the Porte was inclined
to use Fadl in the Arab area as an agent.187 Thus, for instance,
Fadls claims that the Ottomans would help him with ships and
troops to reestablish his hold over Dhofar in the Hadramawt area
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

were viewed by the India Office as a ploy by which the Porte would
extend Ottoman sovereignty over the region using Fadl as their
agent. Even though the British did not entirely support the claims
of the sultan of Muscat, who had wrested back Dhofar from Fadl,
they were with him on this issue. This was because they were suspicious of Fadl and saw him as the conduit for Ottoman political
expansion.
Fadl combined his traditional repertoire of skills with those of
modern empires to fashion his international career. He used his
religious sayyid card to project an image of himself as someone who
embodied all the virtues of an ideal Muslim leader. This helped him
launch his career as the ideal consultant in Asian politics. He
understood that what enabled his success as an ideal ruler was that
he offered a unique model of Asian Muslim politics. His political
model involved reaching out to the highest reference pointthe
caliphbut extended also to include customary Arab law and jurisprudence. Thus in 1880, while urging the sultan of Muscat to give
Dhofar back to him, he argued his case by using his ideal Muslim
ruler card. He invoked both Arab jurisprudence and Turkish political authority to argue that he was best suited to rule Dhofar. He
lent to Istanbul the signature of a sacred space normally associated
with Arab lands. He called it the Empire of Islam and invoked the
religious authority associated with it to strengthen his claim over
Dhofar. Thus, in contrast to the misgivings he usually expressed
about the caliphs maladministration, he now reported that news
with respect to the Empire of Islam both private and public [was] in
every way satisfactory, and that he had brought his case to be
reviewed in Istanbul, as that was the locus for justice that was
binding on all Muslims.
And yet while he was seeking justice in the sacred house of the
Turkish caliph, he delved also into Arab custom and law for legitimacy. He invoked his regard for Arab custom and law as the defining
agents that would ensure the Islamic way of social harmony. As he
built his political career, he drew on and combined both Ottoman
and Arab reference points of authority. He claimed that he had
always been a vali of the Ottomans in Dhofar, had raised the
Ottoman flag in his kingdom, and had maintained good neighborly
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

relations with Muscat as per Arab customs and laws of good governance. The combination of Ottoman political sovereignty and Arab
jurisprudence ensured his gathering together under one banner...
the disjointed (different sects) of Islam. He represented himself as
the leader of all Muslims and said justice for him and restoration of
his kingdom of Dhofar was his objective as he asked of God prosperity for [him]self and the Musalmans.188
And yet the British saw him as the archetypal transcultural middle

man,
who could negotiate for them with the Ottomans, the Arabs,
and the Indians. But he was to be handled with care as they remembered him, after all, as the dangerous intriguer, the Muhammedan
fanatic, and the Moplah rebel. They always viewed his moves as
important, as they believed that these had significant repercussions
on the policy shifts of the Turkish government in other parts of
Arabia. In a letter sent to the Foreign Office, the government made
its intentions clear: The Government of India appear to attach
importance to Sayyid Fadls proceedings which have indeed some
bearing on those of the Turkish government in other parts of Arabia.
Lord Cranbrook would be glad if Sir H. Layard were instructed to
report to her Majestys Government such further information as he
can obtain in regard to them and to the relations which exist between
the Porte and the Sayyid.189
In 1881, the India Office was alarmed at rumors that the Porte
had nominated Fadl to serve as the new sheriff of Mecca once the
existing occupant died. They were shocked at the temerity of the
Porte to so elevate an Indian outlaw.190 However, this rumor was
soon quashed by the revelation of the sheriffs brother, Rafik Pasha,
who lived in Istanbul. He pointed out that only members of two
chosen familiesthe Auwn and the Zedrepresented in one case
by Auwn Pasha and in the other by Abdul Mutalib, the present
holder of the office, could be elevated to the post of sheriff. This of
course disqualified Fadl, and consequently British fears about him
abated.191 Nevertheless, the fact remained that the Porte had
appointed him to the rank of mushira position higher than that of
grand sheriff. This proved detrimental to Fadl as it infuriated the
sheriff and made him his enemy. Yet it helped in the larger games
that the Ottoman rulers were playing over Fadl, as they used him to
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settle scores and conduct their diplomacy with the British. This
appointment was, in the words of the British resident, actuated by
a feeling against England. Fadl was, after all, a middleman with
out whose trans-Asian contacts imperial rivalries would have lost
their sting.
And sure enough, Fadls friendly and encouraging overtures
toward the British as he brokered between them and the Ottomans
only complicated matters for the Porte and made it anxious. In 1878,
Fadl caused a stir in Istanbul when he sent an appeal to Loch at
Aden. Fadl noted that he appreciated the efforts Loch had made to
extend British administrative control to those parts of the Arabian
southern rim where the Ottomans had failed to provide any effective control. He spoke in particular about the ships flying Turkish
red flags. These ships were unregistered and had owners who
claimed Arab descent; the ships visited free ports and engaged in
loot and plunder. These big ships also ransacked small ships (buggalows) that had themselves wrecked and plundered goods. Fadl
complained that ships with Turkish flags even sell those whose
skin is black. Engaging his diplomat skills at their best, he expressed
his concern over British intervention in this part of Arabia: it would,
he said, lead to the advantage of the High Government in the latters dominion where it does not organize any government, as the
peninsula of Arabia; and we thank the English Government for
offering its good offices and exertions in the advantage of the High
Government Turkish nation.192
Fadl was always happy to broker for the Ottomans even as he kept
his communication and relations with the British intact. He not
only negotiated for the pasha with the British but with other Asian
sovereigns like the sultan of Muscat or the Arab chieftains of the
Hadhramawt as well. Indeed, he helped whet the huge political
appetite of the Ottomans. And this was also his way of furthering
his own political fortunes. In 1879, Fadl proposed to the Ottoman
sultan that four thousand troops and three vessels of war be placed
at his disposal. He said that with this force he would help establish
the authority of the pasha both in the Hadhramawt region as well as
in Muscat, after dislodging the control of the Muscat sultan. Both
the Hadhramawt area as well as Muscat were crucial arenas for Fadl,
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as he had earlier established himself as an independent sultan in

Dhofara Hadramawt principalityknown to be under the sovereignty of Muscat. The sultan of Muscat of course had disputed his
claims and had reasserted himself as the sovereign of the region.
Fadl played on Ottoman political ambitions in order to further his
own ends in the region. He hoped to put Muscat and the Ottomans
onto a collision course and then reap the benefits.
The Ottoman sultan was so smitten by Fadls plot that he was
ready even to name the Ottoman governor of the Hadhramawt
region once it came under his control. But the geopolitics of
nineteenth-century trans-Asia were very interdependent, involving
many rulers and overlapping political sovereignties. It was difficult
for Fadl to have a clear path to achieving his political goals. In
Ottoman-controlled Hijaz, the British had as their ally the Arab
sheriff of Mecca. His brother, Sheikh Oun, lived in Istanbul and
belonged to the inner circles of the sultan. The sheriff intervened
and quashed Fadls plans. He asked his brother, Sheikh Oun Rafik
Pasha, to warn the Ottomans about Fadl. He brought to the notice
of the Ottoman ruler the grave political dangers he was making
himself vulnerable to if he followed Fadls plans. Echoing British
views and conveying their veiled threat to Turkey, without mincing
words he warned the Ottomans that Sheikh Fadhl was a dangerous
adventurer, that he would be quite unable to carry out his promise
of even reducing Hadramawt, and much less Muscat, and bringing
them under the authority of His Majesty, and that any attack by the
Sheikh on the dominions of the Imam of Muscat with Turkish
troops would inevitably lead to serious complications between
England and Turkey.193 This had the desired effect, and no troops
or warships were ever supplied to Fadl.
But Fadl was too important a broker to be dumped for good. In
Istanbul Fadl was no ordinary visitor or clandestine spy. Instead, he
flaunted his high statushis sayyid cardand was the royal guest
of the sultan and stayed in the house of the imperial chamberlain,
Osman Bey.194 His regal reception on his arrival in Istanbul made
headlines in the local press and caused much anxiety to the Bombay
government, who monitored his every move. Francis Loch, the
political resident at Aden, was quick to report to Bombay the details
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of the welcome Fadl had received in Istanbul. He wrote: Captain

Mehemt Bey, one of the sultans Aides-de-camp, went on board to
receive him on behalf of his majesty and he was conducted at once
to the imperial villa at Kloiz Kiosk, where he had an audience of the
Sultan...he is a guest of his majesty during his stay in the residence of the Imperial Chamberlain Osman Bey.195 The resident at
Istanbul was urged to confirm the veracity of these reports. But
he in turn pleaded helplessness as the sayyid tag that Fadl carried
made him a man of status in Istanbul and no one was willing to
report on him.196
Fadls clout in the Ottoman world was not just a matter of British
paranoia. It was recorded and propagated by his own son, Sayyid
Ahmad Fadl, in his biography of Sayyid Fadl, the Al-Anwarul. This
text reveals that prior to Fadls arrival in Ottoman Egypt one
courtier of Pasha Al Khidvi Abbas I told his master that he had
dreamed that the clerics of Egypt (Awliya-i-Misr) had set out with
lanterns in their hands. On being asked the reason of this spectacle
he was told that they were waiting to welcome a visitor who was
related to the ashraf-i-Alawi Husaini clan. Al Khidvi said that this
dream was a premonition of the arrival of a saint. On subsequent
inquiry it was found out that Sayyid Fadl Alawi had arrived in Egypt
that very night and was staying in a beautiful locality. Ahmad bin
Fadl notes in the biography that Al Khidvi visited Sayyid Fadl Alawi
and offered his respect and extended all hospitality. He also wished
to know the purpose of his visit. On hearing that he was looking for
a place to stay, Al Khidvi asked Sayyid Fadl to chose a palace for
himself and his family and also to acquire land for subsistence so
that he might live in comfort. Sayyid Fadl was grateful and thanked
him. But that offer could not stop him from proceeding to the ultimate seat of Ottoman powerIstanbul. His son records with great
aplomb that in Istanbul he was received with great fanfare by Sultan
Abd al Majid.197 This royal reception enhanced his power, and he
returned to Mecca in 1865 with added clout. He later proceeded to
Dhofar, where he was pronounced its ruler.
His biography notes his return to Istanbul in 1878 after the fall of
Dhofar. It details his clout in the city. Here he worked closely with
the people in the upper echelons of power and associated himself
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with projects that were for the welfare of the people. The sultan
invariably accepted his suggestions.198 Fadl remained involved in
pious acts in Istanbul and often went to the valley close to Mecca for
solitude and meditation.199 Often monarchs and rulers of other
countries consulted with him on matters of diplomacy. One of his
suggestions that is mentioned with pride in his biography is that of
introducing railway tracks in the Hijaz area. This helped pilgrims
during haj and contributed to the development of the area. 200 His
son unabashedly stresses Fadls love for the Ottoman caliphate
(Daulat-i-Osmania) and how he worked hard to strengthen it. If
there was any attack on the caliphate or Islam he felt very bad and
prayed to God for help. His son writes that he always claimed that it
was entirely possible to combine piety (taqvia) and politics, and that
he would give the example of the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the
Magnificent to prove his case.201

Fadl and Pan-Islam

The British and the Dutch regimes continued to view the trans-
Asiatic networks of Muslims as pan-Islamic, a term that for them
meant anti-European and caliph oriented. Anthony Reid, discussing the Dutch case, has argued that in the late nineteenth century pan-Islam connoted a religious reaction to growing European
influence in Asia, as well as a quest for a global movement to restore
power to Muslims. According to the colonial regimes, all Muslims
saw the Ottoman caliph as a global referent for this Islamic leadership.202 In the case of India, Ayesha Jalal has convincingly argued
that pan-Islam was a British phobiaa creation of the Anglo-Indian
and Hindu press only. It was based on their usage of the normative
Muslim theory that privileged the caliph. The reality, as borne out
in the actual lived experience of Muslims, was more contingent on
individual action that balanced the symbolic sovereignty of the
caliph with Muslims own territorially framed lives. This balancing
act produced myriad forms of universalisms.203 We saw above that
the discussions in the trans-Asiatic Muslim circles were far more
complex than that indicated by either Anthony Reids analysis or
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official British analysis. The increasing contact with the caliph, and
the caliphs power structures, by hajis and visitors to the Hijaz and
Istanbul dashed any hope of his providing the promised leadership
to the global community of Muslims. Middlemen like Fadl cashed
in on these sentiments and used them selectively to bolster their
careers. They also tuned their international relations to those of
modern empires, using imperial fissures and tension zones to
insert themselves into imperial politics. They laid out a complex
web of transimperial contacts that were imperially embedded, even
as they relied on traditional repertoires of religious aspiration, kinship, and rank.
Fadls transimperial contacts were expansive. No amount of
British monitoring could tame them. In 1880, the resident at Istanbul
reported that Fadl was to be feared not only because he had political
networks, but because he had commercial webs that he used for his
political ends. Indeed, the resident was worried about Fadls contacts
with English commercial agents in Istanbul, with whom he wished
to form a trading company in order to make money. One Mr. Ede,
an Englishman in Istanbul, was always suspect in the residents eye
because of his commercial dealings with Fadl and plans for trading
in the Hadramawt area.204
But Fadl had other trans-Asian contacts as well that were equally
if not more alarming. Indeed, although these contacts might offer
profits from trade, their real benefit to Fadl was in the military labor
and diplomatic avenues that they provided. Fadl exerted influence
over the vast trans-Asian military labor market as a military entrepreneur who could recruit with ease men from as far east as Acheh
in Indonesia, Egypt and Morocco in North Africa, Kabul in
Afghanistan, and Istanbul in Turkey; he could also find laborers
from among the Arab tribes in the Persian Gulf area and from
immigrants from India.
In each of these places, local entrepreneurs via whom he could
influence Muslims were tied to him through marriage relations,
professional deals, shared tribal affiliation, or Islamic bonds. The
well-known rebel Sayyid Abdul Rahman-ul Zahir, the principal
instigator of the Acheh rebellion, which in 1876 caused the Dutch
government heavy losses in life and money, was an Arab by descent.
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THE INDIAN ARA B AND THE TALE OF SAY Y ID FADL

He was a Hadrami Arab, who like Fadl had been born in India. Even
though settled in Indonesia, he was a regular visitor to the Malabar
Coast. Two of his six wives hailed from this region,205 and one of
them was the sister of Sayyid Fadl. Fadl played a critical role in
introducing Zahir to the Ottoman officialdom. He emerged as an
important individual in Acheh politics who, like Fadl, brokered with
the Ottomans to safeguard the interests of the Javanese Muslims.
He encouraged the Javanese to experience the corrupt administration of the caliph in the Hijaz, and he punctured their illusions
about the caliphs pivotal role as their global leader. In the process,
Achehs dependence on Zahir increased and the caliph-centric pan-
Islamic bubble began to give way to more embracive, imperially
embedded Muslim networks. Transimperial brokers, like Zahir,
energized such networks and made them all-powerful.206
Zahir was a religious and legal reformer who had reached Acheh
in 1864 after interesting stints in Europe, Egypt, Arabia, Malaya,
and India. Zahir played the perfect middleman between the sultan
of Acheh and the Ottoman sultan at the time of the 1873 Acheh War
with the Dutch. He pleaded to the latter for help and protection.
Zahirs sayyid Arab pedigree and his claim to have wide-reaching
contacts made him the perfect broker. The Muslims of Acheh
believed that by offering them Ottoman protection Zahir could
bring them relief from Dutch exploits. Their first reality check of
the caliph as a global Muslim leader ended in failure. Muslims were
disappointed when a much-enfeebled Ottoman Empire refused help
because none of the other major imperial powers were willing to
support it.207
Zahir did not give up easily as he needed to keep his own reputation as a middleman intact. He pulled out an 1850 firman from the
archives that declared Acheh as a protectorate of the Ottomans.
This was an effective face-saving move for him. The caliph in a very
gentle and nonpersuasive way stated that he had political sovereignty over Acheh. This claim was dismissed instantly by Holland.
Soon the Porte dismissed Zahir with a minor decoration for himself
and a vizirial letter for his sultan that summed up Turkeys attempts
to help Acheh.208 Zahir thus lost out to the Dutch without substantial forthcoming Ottoman support. Once the Dutch had crushed
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his rebellion, they paid him a monthly stipend of $1,000. He was

allowed to move and settle wherever he liked. The Ottoman bubble
had been burst, but Zahir had successfully shifted the discussions
away from the importance of the caliph as the savior, to middle
men brokers such as himself. In Penang and Singapore, the Muslim
community followed the developments in Acheh with interest. In
both settlements, financial and material help for the Achehnese
and for men like Zahir who could broker for them was always forthcoming.209
As the focus turned to middlemen like Zahir, the British also
shifted into an alarmist gear. After all, Zahir was Fadls brother-inlaw. It was clear that Fadls networks extended via his family ties into
Dutch Indonesia as well. In 1879, Brigadier Francis Loch, the political agent at Aden, reported his visit to the area and his journey to
Mecca, where he proposed to stay for a year. Loch had had news
from his residency interpreter, Saleh Jaffer, that while at Aden Zahir
had been in touch with Fadl and that he also had with him a huge
retinue. Loch feared that as the two shared the same restless and
active spirits and natures and as they were related in marriage they
might pool their men and resources and create a problem in the
Dhofar region. Loch, mindful of the clever character of these
men of spirit and action, feared that they might represent themselves as having the support of Turkish troops. This might help Fadl
to reinstall himself in Dhofar and make relations between Turkey
and England tense.210
The British resident at Istanbul also worried about Fadls wide
network in India and Afghanistan. He was particularly worried when
Fadls predictions about troubles in India and his convictions about
the inability of the Afghan warlord, Ammer Abdurrahman, to maintain himself unaided at Kabul proved correct, as was reported in the
press.211 But more worrisome were of course Fadls contacts in India.
After all, that was where he had grown up after his father migrated
to Malabar from the Hadramawt area. Even though Malabar commissioners Henry Conolly and Thomas L. Strange insisted that they
had gotten rid of the Fadl problem by deporting him and his family
to Arabia, they could not extinguish his extended family networks in
India. Stephen Dale has argued that Fadls influence and contacts
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continued to shape Muslim politics in India until the early twentieth

century.212 One of the reasons for Fadls influence was that in the
Hijaz he was in constant touch with visiting Malayali Muslims. The
British resident then at Aden, Captain Haines, felt that the deportation of Fadl to Arabia had helped him as it made him a living martyr.
He was known to have carried on a correspondence with people in
Malabar as late as 1900.213 Haines also reported that when Fadl was
at Mocha (northwest of Aden), Indian Muslims regularly arrived there
to do him homage. Later when Fadl shifted to Mecca, the British
vice consul reported that he exerted a huge influence on pilgrims
from both India and Hadramawt.214
And despite Conollys claims of having purged Fadls family
from Malabar, his circle of relatives was far too huge to be completely washed out. In 1881, the commissioner of Calicut introduced to the consul at Jeddah the son of one of his nephews who
wished to travel to Mecca. This man, Sayyid Hassan ibn Sayyid
Ahmad Jifri of the Putiamaliga house in Calicut, wanted to travel to
the Hijaz because his father and other family members there had
died of cholera.215 This desire, of course, would not have discounted
the rituals and ceremonies of martyrdom at Mambram that perpetuated and kept alive both Fadls and his fathers memory and
ideology.216
Fadls status in India loomed large also because of news as well as
rumors of the importance he enjoyed in the Hijaz and Istanbul.
Thus, even though Fadl had been deported from India, the security
personnel in India understood the clout he wielded in the Hijaz and
recognized the networks that connected him throughout trans-Asia.
In 1881, Ahmad Gorukul Khan Bahadur, inspector of police in the
Madras presidency, who had played a key role in cracking down on
the turbulent population of Malabaras a letter from the chief
secretary described itand thereby incur[ed] the enmity of Syud
Fazl the deported priest, feared for his life as he prepared to make
a trip to the Hijaz. He submitted his passport to the chief secretary,
asking for adequate provisions for his personal safety and protection from Fadl. Fully realizing the seriousness of the problem, the
secretary promptly forwarded his request to the British consul at
Jeddah. 217
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In the late nineteenth century, news of Fadls potential and clout

as a broker who would protect the interests of the Muslims trickled
along with stories about the inept and powerless caliph. The hopes
of people shifted from the caliph to intermediaries like Fadl. In
1879, it was widely believed in India that Fadl was in touch with
Indians in Istanbul, that he shared their anti-British sentiments,
and that at one time had contemplated going to Afghanistan to
oppose the English.218 In Istanbul, Fadl found an agile intellectual
public sphere. The city had a vibrant community of runaway
Muslim mullahs, rebels, and renegades of all hues. Much to the chagrin of the British government, they had escaped the British clampdown in India and lived under royal patronage in the city. Indeed, as
we will see in the following chapter, Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi
was one such case in point. He enjoyed royal patronage as he pursued his scholarly work as well as political activism. The latter
derived from his vast trans-Asian contacts established via his many
activities: politics, travel, pilgrimage, dissemination of religious
knowledge, establishment of seminaries, exercise of miraculous
powers, and creation of social welfare schemes for the immigrant
populations in the Hijaz in particular.219 Likewise, in 1880 the resident reported the huge influence Fadl had in Turkey, where mosques
were being used as a recruiting ground for him. The resident had
seen that in the mosque of Sultan Mehemed a sheikh was preaching
that in exchange for Fadls assistance in recovering Dhofar, every
Mussulman should arm himself.220 Reports of men and money
pouring in from Morocco also sent shivers down the India Office
spine.221
Fadls close connections with the Ottoman sultans chamberlain,
Osman Bey, was of course always a source of concern for Muscat,
the British, and independent Arab chiefs, especially because Bey was
known to be, as one letter described it, one of the most fanatical
and mischievous men about the Sultans person. The charge of
fanaticism was something that the British could never wash away
as far as Fadl was concerned. And therefore his friendship with Bey
was always suspect in their eyes.
The Hijaz, especially Jeddah, was an arena where it was believed
that Fadl had many contacts with the Indian population. Fadls
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son-
in-law Abdul Rahman, who frequented Mecca and who was
known to be both active and intelligent, was particularly instrumental in keeping these contacts alive. And there was always a concern about the extent of influence Fadl had over the Indian population
back in India.222 A detailed memorandum submitted by the British
resident in Istanbul to the government indicated that Fadl did have
networks and influence in India. The India Office was always asked
by officers posted in Istanbul to keep tabs on Fadl regarding his
influence on the Muslims of India.223 In 1880, Fadls proposed visit
to Mecca to meet with the sheikhs who were gathering there to
strengthen the position of the caliph caused alarm in British circles
because there were intelligence reports that Fadl would also be
meeting with the Indian pilgrims and soliciting their opinions on
the caliphate and global issues.224 The government of India was
equally concerned at the links he had forged with the viceroy of
Egypt as he garnered support for his claims on Dhofar.225 Indeed,
urgent telegrams were sent in 1880 to the British Agent at Aden and
to the vice consul at Jeddah warning them of the seditious character
of Fadl, who threatened to visit Jeddah.226
From 1880 until his death in 1901 Fadl contributed to the intellectual and political energy of Istanbul and helped establish it as the
hub of a vast Muslim network that was both Islamist as well as cosmopolitan. The network was slippery and contingent on the individuals, circumstances, and institutions that used it. Thus Fadl
could use this transcultural network to build his political career as
an independent ruler of Dhofar. In doing so, he could critique the
Ottoman caliph, suggest that the English could do a better job as
the protectors of Muslims, but at the same time extol the sultan and
his imperial capitalIstanbul. He called the sultans territories the
Empire of Islam and referred to Istanbul as the sacred space
of Islam.
Even more striking was his praise of the British, whom he said
were better than the Ottoman caliph at protecting the religious and
civil rights of Muslims, and his simultaneous urgings to the Ottoman
sultan that foreign encroachments on Muslim territory would be
stopped, as he was reported to have stated, only by a union of the
people of Islam. And he announced, By the aid of this great
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cause...we shall promote the patriotism of all Mussulmans and

gain the admiration and approval of our co-religionists.227 This
was indeed the best example of the tilting of the global networks
toward a caliph-centric pan-Islamism. Indeed, in Fadls writings
from Istanbul his identification of the caliph as the undisputed head
of the Muslim networks was unquestioned. In two of his works,
Tarikat al-Hanifa (1899) and Tanbih al-Ukala (1881), he refers to
Sultan Abd-al Hamid II as the caliph of Islam and praises his
rule. In Tanbih al-Ukala he cites two traditions about the need to
obey the caliph. He states, Whoever betrays the sultan is betrayed
by God.228
Dale sees Fadl as being influenced by the model provided by
Jamaluddin Afghanithe Persian rebel who was a pan-Islam vision
ary. And maybe the links between them were there. But Fadl was
certainly weak on politics and strong on personal aggrandizement.
Unlike Afghani, who saw the strengthening of the caliph as an end
to his extraterritorial politics, there is no such agenda evident in
Fadls career. If anything, he and others in his network, like Zahir in
Acheh, overshadowed the caliph through their ability to negotiate
with the range of Asian and European imperial powers that framed
Muslim lives in the period. He was in the end a typical transcultural
and transimperial entrepreneur.
And there were many other Muslim British subjects in the Hijaz
and Istanbul, many of whom were fugitive mullahs who had reached
Ottoman territories as they escaped the British crackdown on them
after the mutiny. Of course, like Fadl, all these were grouped
together as outlawed fanatics by the British. Yet there was no
doubt that in the late nineteenth century such outlawed Muslim
subjects themselves constituted formidable trans-Asian networks
that the British were better off using rather than dismantling if they
wanted their political sovereignty in the region to attain the durability and geographical expanse that they desired. Fadl and his network were crucial for the globalization of the concerns held by
Muslim subjects. He was revered as a martyr in Malabar even
decades after he had been unceremoniously deported from there.
Fadl represented networks that were global rather than simply
pan-Islamist in the procaliph manner. This at one level made it easy
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for the British to tap their potential. But Muslim networks were
slippery. They had the potential to switch gears. Transcultural middlemen like Fadl who energized these networks could become the
rabid mullah and the Muslim fanatic when it suited them. For the
British and other imperial powers, these were not imagined fears
but real dangers of relying on late nineteenth-century Muslim networks. Sayyid Fadl was the best case in point, as was Maulana
Rahmatullah in a different kind of way, as the next chapter will
unfold.

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3
R a h m at u l l a h
K air a nw i a nd the
M usl i m Cosmopol is

Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi (18181892), the 1857 scholar

rebel and close associate of Sayyid Fadl, was born in Kairana in the
Muzaffarnagar district of modern Uttar Pradesh. He traced his
intellectual genealogy to the Delhi Naqshbandiya Sufi Shahwaliulla
and his disciple Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae Bareilly.1 After an
initial stint of home schooling with his scholarly father, Maulvi
Khalil Allah, he moved to Delhi and Lucknow. At Delhi his private
teachers were Maulana Imam Baksh Sahbai of the Delhi College. In
Lucknow he was taught by Mufti Saad Allah. He had contacts and
initiations with numerous Chishti and Naqshbandi khanqahs (hospices) as well.2 After the death of his father, he set himself up in
Kairana, where he established a madrasa. In 1852, at the time of
the Delhi College conversion controversy, he was requested by
the ulema to take up the missionary challenge. This gained him
political visibility and brought him to the notice of the local administration.
He gained further notoriety in British circles during the mutiny
of 1857. He was one of the rebel leaders from Kairana. At the Jama
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Masjid in Kairana, every evening the mujahidsthose people

engaged in jihad, in fighting for a good causeassembled, and
before they were given any orders the following announcement was
made: Mulk khuda kaa. Hukm maulvi Rahmatullah ka. (The
country belongs to God. And the orders of Maulana Kairanwi are
followed.) Kairanwis role in 1857 was therefore quite explicit, and
he was on the official hit list. But with the assistance of local Gujjar
families he managed to flee from Kairana and escape arrest.3
He had an arrest warrant issued for him, and an award of Rs.1,000
was offered to anyone who gave information about him.4 Kairanwi
wished to flee to Mecca. He disguised himself, changed his name,
and left on foot for Delhi and then traveled toward Surat. From
there he took a sailing boat to Jeddah. In Kairana his huge riyasat
where his family and workers lived was confiscated by the British
and put up for auction.
Kairanwi can be placed in the galaxy of early nineteenth-century
Muslim reformists who we discussed in Chapter 1. Like them, he
too used the print and the vernacular Urdu to reach out to the Indian
masses with literature offering advice, and in particular about individual adjustment to the new British political sovereigns.5 He was
also one of the last of the multilingual gentlemen: he wrote simultaneously in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu with an eye to an audience
outside India. Much of Kairanwis writings were framed in the late
nineteenth-century Salafi intellectual tradition of Ottoman and
Arab reformist thought. Indeed, he combined the Indian reformist
emphasis on the salience of the individual with the Ottoman Salafi
tradition that foregrounded science and rationality as the frame for
individual action. In line with the Salafi tradition, he aimed at inclusivity and used the scriptures as an accretive template that could
accommodate diversity. And very much in tune with their fears, he
was also apprehensive of Western ascendancy and wished to achieve
the unity of the Muslim umma across the British and the Ottoman
Empires. He urged his audience to embrace science and rationality,
as these were integral to their Islamic heritage. According to him,
Islamic scriptures had universal appeal across the Muslim world.
They were the ideal means by which to level differences and unite
Muslims.
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Kairanwis writing career in India developed during the debates

he had with the Christian missionaries on the authenticity and reliability of their religious texts. His main debating partner was one
Carl Gottlieb Pfander (18031868), a German evangelical missionary. In several books that he compiled during his public debates
with the missionaries in Agra and Delhi, he refuted Pfanders claim
as to the textual superiority and authenticity of Christian religious
texts. Instead, he privileged the Koran and attributed to it a permanence and protection from tahrif lafzi (the practice of changing
words). The idea of hifz (memorizing) and the production of hafiz
i-Koran (those who had memorized it), made the Koran superior as
its embodied nature protected its original form. No human agent
could tamper with the text. Indeed, it preserved its revealed innocence for posterity. In contrast, the human agency that produced
many textual versions of the Bible, including the Torah, disembodied their revealed knowledge, making it vulnerable to corruption. Most of the books of Kairanwi develop this theme and lay out
the endemic connectivity that the Koran lends to its followers.
These books bring to the forefront the embodied nature of the
Koran, and they showcase it as a global connector, since it lies
engrained in the hearts and minds of all Muslims. Kairanwis books
offer a historicist intellectual underpinning to the nineteenth-
century Muslim networks. According to him, his books are exceptional because they are embedded in the Koran. Such ideas were
penned first in his books the Ijaz-i-Iswi and Izalatul al-Shakuk, both
of which he wrote in India even before he set himself up in the Hijaz
and Istanbul. He developed his ideas further in the Izharul Haq,
which he wrote from Istanbul in 1865.
Even before Kairanwi moved out of India, he publicly debated the
Christian missionaries in Agra and Delhi and wrote a critique of
their texts in his book the Ijaz-i-Iswi. This book, written in Persian
for an Indian audience, was published in Agra in 1854. It was later
translated into Urdu. It deals with tahrif lafzi in the Christian and
Jewish books, and underlines their inferior status as compared to
the permanence of Koranic knowledge, which is unchanging. Kairanwi
argued that Christian and Jewish religious texts had no tradition of
hifz, which made them vulnerable to change. Kairanwi privileged
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the Koran over such inferior texts because its contents were change
less and embodied in an unalloyed form in the hearts and the bodies
of believers. The Koran was transmitted through their movements
and had the unique privilege of being transmitted as a memorized
text. The transmission of the Koran by way of individual mobility
and word of mouth enabled the establishment of the trans-Asiatic
Muslim networks.
Kairanwis second book, Izalatul al-Shakuk (1853), extended further his argument about Muslim global connectivity. This book was
a reply to twenty questions posed by Christians to Muslims. It was
written in Urdu so as to reach out to an Indian audience. Indeed,
Kairanwi wanted not just the ulema but ordinary people to become
aware of the thrust of his public discussions. The book is also known
by its other title, Sawalat Kairanwi. In its preface, Kairanwi notes
that the book was his response to questions published in a Hindi
newspaper, challenging Muslims to reply. Initially, he was reluctant
to respond to things he had already engaged with in his various
discussions (munazra) with the Christian missionaries. But he soon
realized that the Christians had added more queries to this list
and wanted a response from Mirza Ahmad Fakruddin, the son of
the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. The emperor passed the
list on to him, as he was the best respondent in matters of theol
ogy. He had no choice but to pen this book. The issues were of
interest to him, and he was motivated to write because the Christian
missionaries challenged the Muslims to reply.6 However, the book
did not remain confined to the twenty-questions format, because
before its publication not only did the Christians add more questions but Kairanwi participated in the public debates with Pfander
in Akbarabad. He thus also included some of that discussion in
the book.
In 1,116 pages, the two-volume book defends the Koran as the
singular text that offers evidence of the Nabuwat or Prophethood of
Muhammad and his ability to perform miracles. And of course it
also shows in copious detail the changes introduced in other religious books of the past and present. In the book, Kairanwi separates
the questions on the Koran from the questions about miracles and
answers them individually. The discussion is triggered by a Christian
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query about the Koran validating the miracles of the Prophet.

Kairanwi reiterates the salience and exceptional status of the Koran
and the Prophet. This is exemplified in their innate potential to
establish global connections among Muslims.7

Kairanwis Cosmopolitanism at the Cusp of Empires

Kairanwis cosmopolitanism was exemplified in the discursive space
that he carved out between empires, a space that showcased Mus
lims as a civilizational force. He grafted this cosmopolitanism onto
the imperial networks that were a feature of his new location in the
Hijaz and Istanbul. He used imperial fault lines to maneuver the
diplomatic connections between the British and Ottoman Empires
to his advantage.8 His ability to negotiate with both the British and
Ottoman consular offices and play them against each other was the
best such case in point. In his new identity as a fugitive subject of
the British Empire, he became a significant actor in the trans-Asiatic
politics of the nineteenth century, a sphere that involved the British,
Arab polities, the Ottomans, and the Russian Empire. As he worked
his way through the networks of imperial rivalries, he engineered
his career by tapping into the Islamic repertoire of communication
skills and older forms of Islamic connectivitythe scriptures and
the oral tradition through which they were disseminated. In the
process, he laid out critical Muslim intellectual networks between
the British and Ottoman Empires. The entanglement of Muslim
networks with Western empires turned pan-Islamic connectivity
away from its caliph-centric orientation. It also made pan-Islam
attractive to a range of Ottoman liberals and non-Muslims, even as
Muslim networks retained their Islamic intellectual core.
In Mecca, Kairanwi attended the darrs (classroom lectures) of
Sayyid Ahmad Dahlan, who taught the Shafi jurisprudence. Kairanwi
always asked Dahlan intelligent questions, and the latter was so
impressed by him that he met him separately one day to find out his
background and details. This was the first time Kairanwi had an
opportunity to tell Dahlan about his discussions and public debates
with Pfander: the Islam versus Christianity debate, the issue of the
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1857 rebellion against British rule, and the problems of the Indian
Muslims who lived in the shadow of the British raj. This meeting
was followed by an invitation to Dahlans house the following day.
Dahlan asked Kairanwi to set up his own study circle at the Kaaba
in Mecca, and had his name included in the list of the ulema of the
sanctum sanctorum of Mecca. This not only gave Kairanwi a newfound status in the global hub of Mecca, but it also made his financial situation in the city secure.9 Soon Kairanwis lectures became
very popular and his students obtained high positions. He remained
continuously in touch with Indian affairs via pilgrims who came
every haj season.
Kairanwis presence in Mecca predictably drew the attention of
the British consulate. After all, he was in British records a marked
1857 outlawa mutiny convict against whom there was an arrest
warrant. But his darrs and later the madrasa he established also
alarmed Turkish officials, who feared that if the British continued to
be interested in the madrasa, they might make it their point of intervention in the region. Or, the consulate worried, the madrasa might
become a nodal point for foreign influence, and as such might oppose
Turkish rule in the region. They were not sure what the madrasas
political orientation would be in the event of an imperial clash of
interest.
Thus Kairanwis intellectual nest became the flash point in the
region where British and Ottoman political sovereignties were
poised to assess each other.10 There were, however, moments when
both the British and the Ottoman officials agreed on the suspicious
character of Kairanwis madrasa. They both viewed it as unacceptable and categorized it as the beginning of a movement of a
stranger who represented an outside country. Such moments of
collective concern occurred when Turkish military men held positions of influence in the Hijaz. Thus at one point the governor of
Hijaz Nuri Pashaa Turkish military man who always remained
suspicious of Kairanwis madrasasent a damaging report on Kairanwi
to Caliph Abd-al Hamid II (r. 18761909). He had prepared the
report in consultation with the British consulate at Jeddah. Kairanwi
retaliated by sending his own details to the caliph. Both for intellectual as well as political reasons he received a positive response
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from Abd-al Hamid II, who read both the reports and invited
Kairanwi to visit Istanbul. He even asked the governor to arrange
for Kairanwis travel.11 Kairanwi reached Istanbul in 1883 via imperial networksin this case, a network characterized by consular
cooperation.
Ottoman reformists were familiar with Kairanwis writings even
before he visited Istanbul. The news of his debates with Christian
missionaries in Delhi and Agra circulated in Istanbul. Indeed, he
had visited the city in 1864 on the invitation of Caliph Abd-al Aziz
(r. 18611876). This Ottoman sultan, with no claims to be the global
leader of Muslims, had invited him to learn about his views on the
missionary Pfanders claim that he had defeated him in a religious
debate in Agra. And this, as we shall see below, resulted in his writing
Izharul Haq while in Istanbul.
However, the second visit, in 1883, was different. This visit was in
response to an invitation from Caliph Abd-al Hamid II following a
British consular complaint regarding Kairanwis dealings in Mecca.
The caliph realized that Kairanwi epitomized the entanglement of
Muslim networks with Western Empires, and that this lent him
immense political value. That is, Abd-al Hamid II was not attracted
to Kairanwi merely because of his caliphal duty to Muslims. On his
part, Kairanwi too was not interested in Istanbul simply because it
was the seat of caliphal power. Rather, the camaraderie that developed between the two men is a case in point of the Ottoman sultans
attempt to access the imperially embedded pan-Islam networks of
Kairanwi, and the latter making the most of the sultans interest in
reinforcing them.
On this visit, Kairanwi traveled to Istanbul along with the head of
the madrasa, Maulvi Hazrat Noor, and his brother Maulana Badrul
Islam. In his diary, Kairanwi details the royal treatment he received
as he traveled from Mecca to Istanbul, and his royal reception at the
hands of the highest-ranking officials, such as Nasim Bey. He also
received a khilat (robe of honor) from the caliph and lived as a state
guest. He was given Rs. 5,000 (hazar qarash) and the title of payah
harmain sharif. When he met the caliph it was quite clear that he was
a state guest, not only because of the respect that the caliph had for
his scholarship and his status as a ulema of the haram sharif, but also
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because he wanted to learn from him the details of British rule in

India. Kairanwi wrote in his diary: The Turkish Sultan shook
hands with me and said that he was very eager to hear about my
circumstances and that is why he had invited me. And he will talk to
him in details [about India and his madrasa] at leisure.12
Kairanwi returned to Mecca after several months of royal treatment at Istanbul. During his stay in the city he was not only exonerated of all wrongdoing but also established a cordial relationship
with the caliph. When he departed, he left behind his brother,
Badrul Islam Kairanwi, as his permanent contact at Istanbul. The
caliph had requested that Badrul Islam Kairanwi remain, and he was
in turn honored with the charge of the Hamidiyah library. This is
Turkeys largest royal library, and it had been established by the
sultan himself. Kairanwis brother was made its directora great
honor. He remained permanently lodged in Istanbul throughout his
life.13 Kairanwi himself returned to Istanbul several times for discussions. He had a social circle in the city as he had lived there
previously, for long stretches, to write his book Izharul Haq. On
several occasions he visited the city for eye treatment. On all occasions he was always treated as a state guest. But despite his regal
treatment, he always yearned to return to Mecca, where he wanted
to breathe his last.14 Even while in the Ottoman cities, he never let
go of his connection to India, and at one time requested to be sent
back home just one last time.
In 1883, the British consul in Jeddah received two letters from
Kairanwi in which he pleaded that he wished to go back to India.
The consulate made inquiries into his case through its dragomans
and through reliable Indian agents and found his behavior during
his residence in Mecca perfectly unobjectionable. They recommended to the government that Kairanwi be allowed to go back
to India. Their decision was based on the reports of two Indians in
the city, Hassan Johar and Hafizuddin. These men had known the
maulana for twelve years, and the consulate trusted them. The consulate said that notwithstanding his real or supposed share in 1857,
his stint in Mecca had been very uneventful. In a letter, the consulate reported: [He is] much respected, it appears as a man the
morality of whose life is in conformity with his religion...he lives
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very quietly and has no connection with public affairs religious or

political. The consulate was of the view that its act of generosity
would be appreciated not just by Kairanwi but also by influential
people in Mecca.15
The government of India denied the request, basing its decision
on the report of the government of the Northwest Provinces, in
whose jurisdiction Kairanwis village Kairana, in the Muzaffarnagar
district, was located. They agreed with the secretary of the
Northwest Provinces, who reminded them of Kairanwis disloyal
conduct in the mutiny at Meerut. They noted that Kairanwi had
been charged with complicity in the murder of a number of persons
whose relatives recognized him, and that therefore the lieutenant
governor and chief commissioner could not promise him safe conduct to India.16 The secretary quoted from the charge sheet he had
prepared on the 1857 rebels, noting that Kairanwi had been accused
of violence at Thana Bhowan. He was said to have accompanied the
reformist Inayat Ali Khan in the attack on the government offices at
Shamli. At the time, Khan had been worried about the fate of the
large numbers of people locked in the mosque and the camp and had
turned to Kairanwi for advice. Khan reportedly instigated Kairanwi
to commit violence by commenting, Pigs must not be suffered in
masjid. The authorities considered this statement tantamount to a
sentence of death when the slaughter commenced. As the charge
sheet described it, the commissioners had never seen Muhammadans
killing Muhammadans inside their own place of worship. And
according to the charge sheet, Kairanwi was definitely a leader and
instigator.17
The government did not want Kairanwi back in India. But they
worried about his activities in the Hijaz. They were not content with
the Jeddah consuls favorable report on him. Indeed, they saw him
as one of the many spokes in the wheel of sedition that operated in
the holy city of Mecca. The Foreign Office echoed the fears and
anxieties of Zohrab, the Jeddah consul, who saw Muslim secret soci
eties brewing trouble for the British all over the Hijaz and beyond.
They saw Mecca as the hub of the production and circulation of
dangerous anti-British Wahabi literature. They feared, as they
described it in a letter to the consul at Jeddah, that Kairanwis return
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would energize politico-religious movements which starting from

the head quarters of Islam would very soon reach the Mahomedans
of India. Moreover, they wanted to obtain accurate information
on the personality, motives and influence of their leaders. It came
as no surprise that their list of Wahabi suspects included Maulana
Kairanwi. In 1888, H. M. Durand, in the Foreign Department,
wanted information about Kairanwi, who, he said, we have reason
to believe is engaged in preaching sedition to and circulating seditious papers among our subjects at the Haj. He wanted all available information about him and about the motive power which
works him if he is merely a tool in the hands of others.18
Kairanwi played on British suspicions about him to insert himself
into Ottoman society. From 1864 to 1900 he moved continuously
between Mecca and Istanbul (18641900) and built his intellectual
resources. In Mecca, his focus remained his darrs and madrasa.
Kairanwis lectures, writings, and madrasa activities provided the
intellectual underpinning of his imperially derived cosmopolitanisma cosmopolitanism that flourished at the cusp of empires.
The long reach of his thought was evident when it connected to the
larger trans-Asiatic wheel of reforms; these reforms were of both
the Islamic and Western radical kind, and they were sweeping
through the Ottoman provinces. This intellectual energy, often
known as the Arab renaissance, was triggered in Istanbul and its
Arab provinces (Syria, Lebanon, and Cairo). Here, during the late
1860s, reformist ulema and bureaucrat scholars reeled under the
shock both of the financial crisis and of the obstacles to reform
imposed first by Caliph Abd-al Aziz and then by Abd-al Hamid II.
These reformers and scholars attempted to understand the imperial
crisis, the failed administrative (tanzimat) and constitutional reforms
of the empire, and the ascendancy of an autocracy that legitimated
itself using caliphal authority.19 But the reformists were energized
by the more immediate threat of Western ascendancy in and around
the Ottoman territories, especially after the Russo-Turkish war of
1877. Both the moderate ulema as well as reformist bureaucrats who
had lost favor in Abd-al Hamids Istanbul converged in the provinces (Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt)away from the Ottoman core
to fashion moral and political reforms that would connect Islamic
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societies, unite Muslims globally, and highlight the accretive civilizational heritage of Islam. Privileging this more material, lateral
connectivity, rather than the caliph as the normative figurehead,
was eventually meant to desacralize autocracy at Istanbul. The reform
ists in the provinces urged the umma to unite politically and showcase
its civilizational heritage: science, modernity, reason, interpretation,
and emulation. Differences of Islamic belief and practice had to be
subordinated to this new reformist agenda, and the scriptures were
chosen as the ideal template with which to unite the Muslims. This
resulted in the demystification of the Koran and the Hadith and a
generous interpretation of their content so as to accommodate Mus
lim diversity. It also decentered the caliph.
The return to the scriptures, and reliance ontraditional or clas
sical Islamic principles of consultation, reason, and rationality to
interpret them, became the popular route to an inclusive political
reform. The reformists argued that science and modernity always
had a place in classical Islamic society. These were not borrowed
Western concepts. As unity of the umma, with a specific political
intent, became their motto, they added commentaries to the scriptures that made the Islamic engine more inclusive. Thus Shihabuddin
Alusis in Baghdad added Sufi dialectics and Razis natural science to
his commentaries on the Koran. Islamic reformists, deeply immersed
in scripture, established trans-Asiatic networks that stretched from
Syria, Lebanon, and Cairo to Morocco and India. Alusis, for instance,
traveled to Cairo and read the exegesis of the Indian scripturalist
reformer Siddiq Hasan Khan. He also sent his son to India to train
with him. Indeed, these trans-Asiatic reformers all converged in their
untiring devotion to the thinker Ibn Taymiyyaah, who emphasized
to them the religious and political significance of ijtihad (interpretation and independent judgment), emulation, reason, and revelation.
Through their magazines, journals, and societies, these Islamic reform
ists had already created a vibrant public sphere in the Ottoman territories and beyondlong before Abd-al Hamid II clamped down
on them and on the constitutionalist bureaucrats in the empire who
opposed his back to Islam policy.20 Their networks offered a ready
ground for reformist Ottoman bureaucrats and Indian men of religion who cared to connect.
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The Salafis in the Arab fringes of the empire also found willing
allies in the secondary school graduatesproducts of a secular education. These students became the first Arabicists who allied with
Salafis and pioneered movements for educational and political
reforms: Arab cultural revival, an inclusive renaissance, political
rights, and later autonomy if not independence.21 Of course, the
Salafis and the Arabicists (a group that also included many former
Ottoman constitutionalist bureaucrats) both perpetuated as well as
departed from each others ideas, especially in the context of education. The Salafis advocated reason, rationality, and Sufi doctrine.
But they remained more concerned with reforming Muslim belief
and practice. On the other hand, the Arabicists were more political
and moved beyond belief and practice to urge intellectuals to make
their agendas more appealing and to present them in contemporary
terms, even if it meant moving beyond the Islamic heritage formula.22 Nonetheless, they both contributed to create a vibrant
atmosphere of change and reform.
Ottoman provinces in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt were at this
time the melting pot of reformist ideas of all hues. If Islamic liberalism and ideas of unity swept the region, triggered by the administrative and political turmoil in Istanbul, so too did French ideas of
patriotism, which demonstrated how to think of a united Muslim
world comprising different nation-states.23 Also noteworthy was the
influence of Western radical politics, which itself urged people to
rise across Asia, transcending religious and linguistic barriers, and
to unify against the ascendancy of Western capitalism.
Ilham Makdisi has shown the catalytic role that Arab theater in
the Ottoman provinces played in triggering a unique kind of moral
and political reform; like the religious reformists, it aimed at pushing
people to unite across class, ethnicities, and sects. This meant transcending the self and focusing instead on matters of public interest.
This movement from the self to public interest was indicative of
progress, civilization, and the unification of all types of peoplethat
is, the creation of a social body. This was the beginning of a new
radical transnational politics and society, and it was linked to theatrical performances. According to Makdisi, this was yet another ideological route to creating unity and fostering introspection at a time
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when Western ascendancy loomed large in the background. The

movement of people across Ottoman provincesSyria, Egypt, and
Lebanonand the development of a transimperial social bond and a
popular culture that went beyond local issues encouraged Ottoman
theaters to deal with radical themes. Many actors, like Aziz Eid, were
Freemasons and had links with radical intellectuals. They performed
plays such as The Masons in Cairo. Popular theatrical themes like the
French Revolution radicalized thought in no small measure and prepared the ground for the Ottoman Revolution. 24
It is worth noting that the scripturalists, the Arabicists, and the
radical reformistsall imbued with the idea of trans-Asiatic unity,
progress, and civilizationintersected politically and strategically,
even if they had their own very different ideological bases and material contexts. Indeed, the pioneer of Arab theater in the Ottoman
provinces, Marun al-Naqqash (18171855), who introduced the
Western literary genre of drama into Arab lands in the mid-
nineteenth century, maintained close links with Jamaluddin Afghani,
the most radical Muslim reformist of the 1870s and 1880s. Afghani,
who above all stressed the principle of unity as a political ploy
against Western ascendancy, reached out to universal reference
points like the caliph even as he leaned on the non-Muslim support
base in India to serve his political agenda of ousting the Western
powers from the region. Makdisi shows that Afghani viewed the
establishment of an Egyptian theater as the most effective way of
promoting radical ideas and raising the political consciousness of
the populace.25
Kairanwi used this intellectual moment to harness Indian interests to the trans-Asiatic reformist movement. Indeed, he impacted
this movement with some very India-specific reformist intellectual
energyNaqshbandiya Sufi spirituality, whose most characteristic
feature was the compromise it offered between the more Sufi-
inclined wahdat-ul-wajud (unity of being) and the Shariat-inclined
wahdat-ul-shahud (unity of existence). It attempted to unite diverse
Muslim sects and ideologues by bringing together their different
literary productions: the Sufi masnavis, Hadith texts used in India,
and Kairanwis own book Izharul Haq, which talked about the exceptional historicity, poetics, meter, and rhythm of the Koran.
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The combination of the scripture-oriented Naqshbandiya hard

line with the more culturally alloyed Chishtiya Sufi outlook had
been the defining feature of Mughal political culture. Emperor
Akbar, weary of the global networks of the Naqshbandiya across
Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire, shored up his social base
internally by engaging with and encouraging the Chishti Sufis in
Delhi, Agra, and Ajmer. This led to the very Indic practice of multiple initiations into diverse Sufi brotherhoods. Kairanwi, the archetypal Mughal gentleman, was also initiated into both the Naqshbandiya
and the Suhrawadiya Sufi brotherhoods. He exported to Mecca
this Mughal gentlemanly practice of cultural tolerance and accommodation.
In Mecca, Kairanwi found a rich intellectual legacy; through this
intellectual heritage, the groundwork had already been laid for a
reconciliation of mysticism and of the scripture-based jurisprudence represented by the Naqshbandiya Sufis. Since the fifteenth
century, India had been integral to Naqshbandi global networks,
which had connected early modern Asian empires. The popularity
in India of Abd ur Rahman Jami of Herat is one example of how the
eclectic Indic reformists rubbed shoulders with the Naqshbandis
from the Mediterranean Arab-Ottoman world. This interaction
only intensified in subsequent centuries and can be seen in the long
residence in 1802 of Khalid Naqshbandi of Kurdistan at the Delhi
madrasa of Shahwaliulla. At the same time, Indian Naqshbandis
also had an impact on the Arab world. During the seventeenth century, South Asian Sufi scholars like Sibghat Allah (from Ahmadnagar
and Bijapur in India) and Tajuddin al Hindi (from Gujarat) exported
to the Arab world the Shattariyyah and Naqshbandiya Sufi orientations, respectively, which reconciled the Shariat to Sufi tassawuf.26
Indeed, the translation of their Persian works into Arabic and the
introduction in Mecca of the famous Shattariyyah text Jawahir-i-
Khamsah of Ghauth al Hindi went a long way toward producing
the neo-Sufism that brought mysticism and Islamic jurisprudence togetherin both cases by sharpening the focus on the
life of the Prophet and his teachings, that is, the Hadith studies.27 Kairanwi cashed in on this Indic legacy and used the infrastructure of modern Western empires to reinforce the earlier
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Naqshbandi-driven trans-Asian, transimperial networks and make

them more pronounced.
Michael Laffan argues that the idea of Indonesian nationalism
based on a modern Islamic state was conceptualized in Cairo. Both
the press and the anti-British political movement in the city created
a more conducive environment in which the runaway Javanese
Muslims could work out their anti-Dutch activism. Mere caliph-
sponsored pan-Islam failed to create the desired anti-Dutch sentiment. The caliph, located in faraway Istanbul, did not fire the
Javanese political imaginary or offer the pivot around which to
organize their political energy. Things had to happen over and
above him in Cairo.28 In India, exiled outlaws in Mecca and
Istanbul also deflected pan-Islam aspirations away from the caliph.
But unlike the Cairo-based Indonesian runaway nationalists, Indian
outlaws are hard to categorize as nationalist or even as pan-
Islamists. Their aspirations were more global and were oriented
toward laying out more diffuse, widespread networks that sprawled
over and derived from both Western imperial and older forms of
connectivity: imperial rivalries; consulates; print, telegraph, and
madrasa networks; the pilgrimage; teachers and students; and public
debates, oratory, and written texts. These networks stretched
between the British and the Ottoman Empires and constituted the
reformers cosmopolis. It was here that they carved out their civilizational space to unite Muslims and meet the Western political
challenge. Caliphal pan-Islam had little role in the creation of this
Muslim cosmopolis.
Kairanwis career shows that he contributed to the creation of this
cosmopolis and articulated his global aspiration in its discursive
space. He desacralized the caliph and scrutinized instead his global
reputation as the formidable sultan of an ethnically and religiously
diverse empire. British colonial rule helped Kairanwi in this task.
Because it enabled large numbers of subject people to travel physically to the Hijazwhere they then experienced firsthand the
caliphs corruptionBritish rule played a critical role in busting his
imagined universal appeal. Kairanwi highlighted the caliphs corrupt administration even as he leaned on him for help. He then
moved in to fill the gap with his vast networks once the caliph had
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been exposed and reduced in popular perception to just another

indifferent Asiatic ruler. And while Kairanwi played his imperial game, both the British and Dutch governments continued to
magnify caliph-centric pan-Islamic fears and paid less attention
to the challenge posed by the freshly constructed global Muslim
cosmopolis.
Kairanwi also tapped into the tensions within the Ottoman
Empire. He exploited the friction between the Ottoman center and
its provinces and benefited from the modernist reform that simmered in its Arab and African cities: Cairo, Syria, Lebanon, and
Mecca. And yet he continued to claim Caliph Abd-al Hamid II as
his patron. This association offered him clout vis--vis both the
British and the local Meccan administration. He maintained this
balancing act because the foreign relations policy of Abd-al Hamid
II fit favorably with his own global aspirations. Both aimed at
reaching out to the global Muslim society with their message of
unity. Azmi Ozcan and Selim Deringil have shown how Hamids
domestic crisesthe grave financial crisis, the defeat at the hands
of Russia in 1877, and the loss of the Balkansenabled him to
become the protector of Muslim subjects around the world. He
used Indian Muslims, in particular, as pawns to influence British
policy toward the Ottomans. The printing press both in Turkey
and India was mobilized to keep Ottoman issues and the caliph
himself continuously at the center of Muslim public discourse so
as to pressure the British government to attend to the needs of
Indian Muslims. 29 Kairanwi benefited from this Ottoman imperial
vision. The correspondence of Ottoman foreign relations to his
own global agenda helped him to lay out his cosmopolis between
empires. The aim of his cosmopolitanism was to unite Muslims
globally around the scriptures. But he benefited also from the
reformist intellectual energy that simmered in the provinces and
shaped the Ottoman imperial project. His madrasa was a microcosm of his cosmopolitanism: traditional at the core with its reliance

on the Koran and the Hadith, and impacted by the Ottoman-

tanzimat-inspired Salafi intellectuals in its orientation. It showcased
the making of a social body based on the principles of unity, progress, and civilization, all embedded in the divine scriptures but
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reaching out to referents in scientific and technical education, rationality, emulation, and Sufi tassawuf.

Madrasa Saulatiya and the Meccan

Reformists Indic Stamp
In 1879, Abdur Razzack, the British vice consul, reported that
Kairanwi had established a madrasa at Mecca. Kairanwi raised the
funds for the madrasa from donations received by people who came
for the haj. Initially the madrasa was for Indian children only. It
made steady progress, and some distinguished scholars found residence there. Soon, on the intervention of the sheriff, Arab children
were also allowed in the madrasa. The syllabus included the Koran,
theology, and allied sciences.
Razzack noted that the madrasa and Kairanwi were highly
respected not just by people high and low, but also by the Turkish
governor general of the Hijaz, Halat Pasha. On one occasion the
pasha visited the madrasa and kissed the hands of the maulvi, who
kissed him in return, and then shook hands with all who were
standing. The pasha was so impressed by the madrasa and Kairanwis
involvement in it that he stayed in the institution for several hours
and patiently heard the students walk up to him in pairs and recite
the Koran. Razzack said that it was a major spectacle and that many
hajis also came to see the show.30 In 1885, Razzack reported that
Kairanwis private madrasa, which received funds from India, stood
out as a beacon of hope and light in the Hijaz region, where the state
of education was otherwise dismal.31 The pashas respect for Kairanwi
was striking because his government was known for its general
neglect of education in the Hijaz. Razzack said the bad state of education was largely due to the apathy of the Turkish government
toward learning. He lamented that the high traditions of learning
that the region had been known for in the period of the classical
caliphates had dissipated rapidly under Turkish rule. The ulema
struggled to preserve their knowledge and disseminated it from
their homes, from the portals of the haram, or from small private
madrasas that they set up on their own.32
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After arriving in Mecca in the early 1860s as a fugitive from India,

Kairanwi soon got involved in the affairs of the muhajirs (migrants)
in the city. He was particularly incensed at the shoddy treatment
they received at the hands of the Arabs, and noticed that there were
no proper facilities for their accommodation, livelihood, and religious as well as scientific education. Having himself gone through
the rigor of a standardized syllabus in the madrasas in India he was
surprised that religious education for the youth in Arabia was
unstructured, followed no set syllabus, discouraged any dialogue (as
it adopted the vaaz or sermon style of communication), and was
casual and teacher-centric. Students read grammar, jurisprudence,
commentaries, and the Hadith and yet did not show any intellectual
sheen. In Arabia the students completed the text Tafseer Jalaleen
usually taught in Hindustan in just one yearin seven years.
Kairanwi was also bothered by the fact that despite the Hijazs reputation as the fountainhead of Islamic learning and as a scholarly
center that attracted students and learned men from across the
world, there were no facilities at all there either for the intellectual
growth or the physical comforts of the muhajirs. Also missing were
any adequate educational facilitiesboth vocational and religious
for their children.33
Instead of reforming the existing system, Kairanwi decided to set
up his own madrasa in front of the Kaaba. His critique of the intellectual environment of the Hijaz became the blueprint for the
madrasas objectives. He wanted his madrasa to be the pride of the
worlda truly international school that would hire religious teachers
proficient in different languages, admit students from all over the
world, and boast of a syllabus that covered both religious and scientific education.34 He wanted to set up a vocational school for muhajir
children, and to this end he held several meetings with a cross section of people. Initially, he started a madrasa called Madrasa-i-Hindi
in the mosque of the Kaaba. Here he taught the Koran, the Hadith,
and jurisprudence. One of his ardent disciples, Faiz Ahmad Khan, a
notable of Aligarh who attended his lectures at the Kaaba, offered
the first floor of his big house for the madrasa. The foundation of
the madrasa was laid in his house, and an appeal was soon issued for
donations. Since the house could not hold all the students, only
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those who read the Koran and Hadith were transferred there and
the rest continued to study at the original madrasa.35
Kairanwis muhajir-centric madrasa was bound to be popular with
trans-Asian visitors and pilgrims to the Hijaz. Donations came
freely from muhajirs, visiting hajis, and Muslim landed elite in India
who gifted their properties in the area to Kairanwi.36 But the largest
endowment came from the widow of a Bengal zamindar, Begum
Saulat-un Nisa, who in 1882 had inherited the entire property of her
husband, Latafat Husain. She had heard of Kairanwi because of his
widely publicized debates that had been held in Delhi and Agra with
the Protestant missionary Pfander. She agreed to donate lavishly to
his madrasa after having heard, during a pilgrimage to Mecca, that
there was no other place except this madrasa where the children of
muhajirs could have a decent education. Using the funds Begum
Saulat-un Nisa donated, the madrasa constructed a new building,
which was named Madrasa Saulatiya after her.37 However, the funds
were exhausted before the most vital featurewater tanks for stor
ing rainwater for drinking and ablutionswas put in place; this
worried the begum, who donated even the money she had kept for
her return journey to India to address this problem. And once she
returned to India she sent fifty rupees per month for the specific
purpose of ensuring an adequate water supply for the madrasa students and teachers.38
The madrasa for muhajirs fit into the reform initiatives of exiled
Ottoman reformists and moderate ulema in the provinces of Syria,
Lebanon, and Egypt that we noted in the previous section. Like
them, Kairanwi also used the scriptures as the template onto which
he was happy to add instruction in science and rationality, both of
which had the legitimacy of tradition. Indeed, the Delhi Naqshbandiya
Sufi silsila (brotherhood) of Shahwaliulla, which had laid out Islamic
heritage in similar ways, became the foundation of the madrasas
curriculum. Kairanwis madrasa was unique in the Hijazian context
because its syllabus followed the rational-sciences-oriented Darrs-i
Nizamiya education format popular in Hindustani seminaries.39
And not surprisingly, the madrasa soon became the center of the
characteristically inclusive India-specific Arabicist grid that was fast
enveloping late nineteenth-century trans-Asia.
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Most striking of Kairanwis contribution was the eclectic intellectual base of the madrasa. This reflected the carryover to Mecca
of the Naqshbandiya Sufi legacy, known for its spirit of accommodation and compromise. In Delhi it had combined the individual-
centric movement sirat-i-mustaqim (the right path or adherence to
the Koran and the Prophet) with an emphasis on the significance of
the sheikh as the moderator of individual prescriptive practice.
Kairanwi carried into Mecca Shahwaliulla and his disciple Sayyid
Ahmad Shahids intellectual legacy, which tried to compromise with
Sufism as long as it was framed within the scriptural prescription.
At the inauguration of the madrasa, Kairanwi and his companion
Imdadullah Makki read from the Bukhari sharif and the Masnavi
shariftexts that were popular in Hindustani religious circles that
combined monism with Sufi spiritualitybut that were relatively
less known in the Arab world.40 Kairanwi was able to introduce the
Naqshbandiya tradition into the education system because the
region was familiar with this Indic stream of thought.41
He also benefited from the fact that the intellectual energy at the
madrasa was in tune with reformist Islamic currents, notably the
Salafi ideas, which were sweeping through late nineteenth-century
South and West Asia. Like the Salafi intellectuals, Kairanwi also
combined religious and scientific education. He made the syllabus
broad and inviting with a view to forging the unity of the enlightened umma. He integrated the study of scriptures with commentaries on law, lessons on Ilm-i-Hayat (the planetary sciences), and
technical education. He kept pace with the late nineteenth-century
Ottoman and Arab liberal reformist stress on combining religion
and technical education and introduced technical entrepreneurial
skills like craftsmanship (dastakari) in the madrasa. He also introduced modern disciplines and areas of learning like Ilm Al-Riyazi
(knowledge of mathematics), Ilm Al-munazara (knowledge of the art
of debating), Ilm Al-mantaq (knowledge of logic), Ilm Al-falsafa
(knowledge of philosophy) and ulum Falkiya (astronomy). His syllabus showcased the accretive Islamic heritage, which had always
accommodated eclectic learning. He made it clear that his innovations were neither Western derived nor an innovation, but well
within the realm of acceptable Islamic tradition.
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Kairanwi broadened the scope of learning and introduced a sprinkling of learning from all four Islamic schools of legal thought. In
contrast to the tradition in Arabia, where the syllabus focused
mainly on the Muatta of the legist Imam Malik, he introduced the
teaching of a Hadith written by the Shafite legist Imam Bukhari,
called the Bukharisharif in the Madrasa Saulatiya. In Hindustan,
this Hadith is still regarded as the most authentic because it claims
to be a compendium of only those sayings and observations of the
Prophet that were narrated directly by him to his close companions,
and were not passed on via several layers of interlocutors. The introduction of this text into the curriculum of the Madrasa Saulatiya
was even more interesting given the fact that Kairanwi himself
claimed to be a Hanafite. Along with this, other texts, such as the
Masnavi sharif, were also included. Lectures on the latter were given
at the madrasa by Maulvi Imdad-ul-mulk. Thus, the madrasa included
quite an eclectic intellectual spread. It clearly reflected the South
Asian seminary tradition of never pronouncing as wrong any of
the four schools of law prevalent in India, even though one could
claim allegiance to only one of them. In the Hijaz, this eclecticism
proved particularly useful, as the idea was to introduce a curriculum
that would have trans-Asian appeal. Kairanwi strived to attract the
muhajirs of all countries, people who spoke different languages and
whose diverse religious and worldly requirements had to be accommodated.
The madrasa received a steady supply of books from Hindustan.
Taking advantage of imperial networks and the rivalries that energized them, the madrasa arranged to receive books printed in Cairo
and Istanbul. And thus a vibrant print ecumene underpinned the
madrasa and made it the hub of the trans-Asiatic Muslim networks
that Kairanwi had laid out. Books like the Ruh Nisar and those
penned by Muhammad Ali Monghyri arrived at the madrasa from
India. The Azaltah Alaawaham, produced in India, was also taught
there.42 Literature from India stamped the Indic seal on the
nineteenth-century Arab liberal reform that emanated from the
Ottoman provinces in the Middle East. And this Indian seal was
characterized by the Shahwaliulla emphasis on compromise and
accommodation. Indeed, it was a momentous day when Kairanwi
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began his darrs on Shahwaliullas book Hajutullah al Baligha (Detailed

Discussion), which talks about the wisdom of the Islamic Shariat
and its innate potential to accommodate social and cultural diversity. He also lectured at length on astronomy and on Ibn-Khalduns
literature.43
Also noteworthy was the inclusion of his own books (published in
India and Istanbul), which encouraged a dialogue between Muslims
and the Christian world. Much of this dialogical literature grew out
of Kairanwis debates with Christian missionaries in Delhi, Agra,
and Istanbul. Thus his own masterpiece, Izharul Haq, a written version of his debate with Pfander that alludes to the exceptional intellectual heritage of Islam, was on the syllabus.44 In this text, Kairanwi
demystifies the Koran by highlighting its exceptionality in terms of
its poetic meter and rhythm, rather than its mere revealed nature.
This demystification of the Koran was also meant to make it this-
worldly and thus enhance its innate potential to connect Muslims
around the world.
Books like Izharul Haq were clearly the product of Ottoman
patronage of an Indian Muslim. And thus not surprisingly, the British
Foreign Office saw the literary productions and print ecumene of
Kairanwi not just as seditious but as fully supported by the Ottoman
sultan, who, the Foreign Office maintained, was doing so with a view
to challenge British political sovereignty in India. In 1888, Colonel
Henderson said that his spy confirmed that Kairanwi was summoned a second time by the pasha to Istanbul, and was instructed
to again distribute seditious books among the pilgrims. He also
reported that the sultan advanced him money to establish a press for
printing such books.45
Even as Kairanwi depended on imperial networks to sustain the
discursive Muslim civilizational space he had laid out between
empires, he never let go of the older forms of Islamicate connectivity. Thus, for instance, the Islamic form of connection via the
fann tajveed (mode of pronunciation), hifz (memorizing), and qirrat
(recitation) became the focus of his attention at the madrasa. He
appointed an Egyptian qari (reciter of the Koran), a man who had
been chosen in the time of Abdul Hamid Pasha as the best orator
out of five hundred contestants, to teach his Hindustani students
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the art of Koranic qirrat (recitation). The students picked up the

skill fast. One of his Hindustani students, Qari Abdulla, was characterized by the Egyptian teacher as being the best in the Arab
world.46 Hazrat Thanawi, of the Deoband fame, practiced his qirrat
with guidance from Qari Abdullah. Regular practice made him so
perfect that when he recited the Koran crowds collected below his
window and people could not make out whether it was his voice or
that of Qari Abdullah. The madrasa soon became a center that
encouraged students from all over the world to perfect the art of
qirrat and use it as a global connector.47 The madrasa paid special
attention to perfecting pronunciation, the art of memorizing, and
recitation skills. Most qaris in Lucknow, Bhopal, Deoband, Multan,
and other parts of India that are today known for this talent owe
their training to Kairanwis madrasa.48

Madrasa Saulatiya and the Making

of Muslim Cosmopolitanism
Kairanwis cosmopolitanism had the scriptures as its base and a
tanzimat-inspired pragmatic, scientific outlook. It stretched as a
civilizational space between the British and the Ottoman Empires.
The Madrasa Saulatiya played a pivotal role in keeping its discursive
space alive. As we saw above, the madrasa became the nodal point
from which books written in India circulated in the Hijaz and the
Ottoman Arab provinces. They continued their onward journey to
Southeast Asia via itinerant teachers and students who linked the
madrasa to the larger Asian world outside. Students played a critical
role in the formation of Muslim cosmopolitanism. Kairanwis students included his own brothers grandsonSayyidwhom he
groomed to take charge of the madrasa after his death.49 But his
ambit was not confined to family members. It included learned alims
from Egypt, like Qari Ibrahim Saad, a specialist in the Koran, who
attended the lectures on the Bukhari Sharif with rapt attention and
taught the Koran to the students at the madrasa. His notable students who later fanned out into the world included Sheikh Alqara,
Hazrat Qari Abdullah Makki, and Qari Abdul Rahman Allahabadi
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(Hazrat Qari Abdullah Makkis brother).50 The reputed teacher

from Egypt remained associated with the madrasa throughout his
lifetime. Javanese scholars from Southeast Asia attended his lectures, studied at the madrasa, and then went back home to set up
madrasas that were similarly oriented.51 Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat
(the informant and close associate of the Dutch Orientalist Christiaan
Snouck Hurgronje, who had been deputed in the Hijaz area by his
government to study the relationship of the Hijaz to the Javanese)
was a Naqshbandiya Sufi who had been educated in the tradition of
Kairanwi by one of his students, Abd Allah Zawawi.52 Djajadiningrat
had many Javanese students who were similarly trained. A range of
Javanese scholars in Mecca were students of the reformist scholar
Sayyid Ahmad Dahlan, who was also Kairanwis contemporary and
intellectual comrade. Many others from the Indonesian archipelago
were influenced by Kairanwis scholarship because of their contact
with Cairo, where many of Kairanwis former students held influential positions.53 Indeed, many of Kairanwis students, such as Sheikh
Abdulla Siraj, Sheikh Ahmad Ali Hasan, and others, became muftis,
qaris, and teachers in the Kaaba and in other mosques and madrasas
in Mecca and Taif, and in the madrasas in Hindustan and Karachi.54
Branches of the Madrasa Saulatiya were also established in Calcutta.
In fact, Begum Saulat-un Nisa went back to Bengal after her haj and
established a branch of the madrasa in her village in the district of
24 Parganas.55 She allocated a part of her estate as waqf property so
that the financial dealings of the madrasa and the mosque attached
to it would be looked after. She deputed her older brother, Maulvi
munshi Abdul Samad, as the mutawali (caretaker) of these buildings.
After his death, his son, Munshi Muhammad Abdullah, took over
the madrasa.56
Significant financial networks underpinned much of this trans-
Asiatic intellectual energy. There was always a large number of
Indians with property and money in the Hijaz who had influential
contacts with Muslim notables back home. Indeed, notables like the
nizam of Haiderabad and the begum of Bhopal owned houses in the
Mecca-Medina region. They were ever-willing donors. Thus, for
instance, the learned scholar Imdadullah Makki, an important student and companion of Kairanwi who also taught at the Madrasa
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Saulatiya, was offered a house to stay in Mecca by the Haiderabad

state that owned several properties in the area. Help generously
flowed from other sources as well. And thus Imdadullah moved from
the nizams property when he had a better offer. He eventually
decided to take up the offer of one of his Indian disciples, who
bought a house for him in the residential area called Hartah Albab.57
And of course, every year hajis from India flocked to Mecca, made
donations, and exchanged religious and political news with the alims
of the madrasa. Imdadullah not only met and exchanged news with
ordinary hajis, who always visited him in large numbers, but once
hosted a feast for a large contingent of ulema from Hindustan.58
Kairanwi saw India as integral to the cosmopolitan world he had
carved out between empires. He maintained his links with India not
merely because of his interest in the anticolonial struggle. Rather,
Indian financial, intellectual, and emotional resources were critical
for the conceptualization of the embracive transimperial Muslim civ
ilizational space that Kairanwi was helping to establish. Even though
he was located in Mecca, Kairanwi was always worried about the
future of Indian Muslims and searched for the best way they could
cope with their new British rulers. Very much like his contemporary
Arab and Ottoman reformists, who energized the Mediterranean
intellectual atmosphere while in exile, Kairanwi too saw education
as the way to both resurrect and strengthen the accretive civilizational heritage of Muslims. He pledged to make this legacy the core
of his brand of cosmopolitanism, even as he depended on important
imperial networks to sustain its vast edifice. This was no narrow
territorialized anticolonial fight. It was a more ambitious struggle
for civilizational survival. He was convinced that Muslim religious,
educational, cultural, and historical heritage would be best preserved through a big educational program that combined religious
education with scientific knowledge and technical skills.
This sentiment underpinned the expansion of the Madrasa
Saulatiya. But Kairanwi exported his educational model to Hindustan
as well. Indeed, in 1866 his madrasa became the inspiration for
establishing a Sunni Muslim seminary in a mosque in the city of
Deoband. This seminary later moved to a new building and became
the famous Darul ulum Deoband, which hosted students from all
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over the world. Both Kairanwi and his close associate in Mecca,
Imdadullah Makki, maintained close ties and contact with all the
ulema associated with the early years of the Deoband seminary:
Maulana Hazrat Abid Husain, Maulana Muhammad Qasim
Nanatawi, Maulana Zulfiqar Ali, and Maulana Yaqub Nanatawi.
Nanatawi, the first president of the madrasa, was his khalifa (spiritual guide and mentor).59 Imdadullah Makki sent one rupee per
month to the madrasa, for an annual payment of twelve rupees.60
Kairanwi also maintained a continuous correspondence with the
ulema of Deoband, participating in all their intellectual discussions
and urging them to stay in India as their initiatives for the community [ijtimai kaam] were more valuable than their migrating and
living in Mecca. In a letter to Abid Husain in Deoband he reiterated the value of the Deoband initiative: It is in your interest to stay
on in Deoband and serve the madrasa in the way Allah wants you to
do.61 In another letter, written to Maulana Rafiuddin, he cautioned
against corruption creeping into the madrasa in the form of favors
or concessions being given to some people. He strictly forbade such
favors.62 At the same time, he was always eager that the Deoband
and Saulatiya madrasa at Mecca should work in a spirit of intellectual camaraderie and that they should have student exchanges. He
invited the son of Maulana Nanatawi, Maulana Hafiz Muhammad
Ahmad, to enroll at Madrasa Saulatiya for further education.63 He
kept in touch with his murids and suggested appropriate religious
rituals for them to solve their problems. He referred to himself as a
fakeer, allowed his followers to take bait (oath) on him, and via his
writings offered one of the most accommodative frames of Islam,
aiming to have the widest possible reach.
Kairanwis embracive ambit, which, as we have seen, followed the
Shahwaliulla formula of striking a compromise between the scriptures and Sufi practice, became his lasting legacy. It was carried forward and articulated most clearly by his student and close associate
Imdadullah Makki. Makki wrote eight very important books in
Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. Most of them, like his commentaries
on the Masnavi Maulana Rum and Ghiza-i-Rooh, read like the Sufi
texts that aimed at uniting different sects of Muslimsthe texts
whose goal was to forge transimperial bonds by pitching Islam as an
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inclusive philosophy of harmony.64 Writing in Urdu for a larger

audience, Makki talked to people about Satan and his dealings (satan
kei waswasa), the defects of the spirit (nafs kei mughalte), and the results
of ignorance and backwardness ( jihalat kei natayaj). Using different
examples, he emphasized the significance of spirituality, which
enables one to transcend difference and unite people.65
The next chapter details some of the texts that Imdadullah Makki
wrote while in Mecca, such as the Faislah Haft-i-Maslah (Verdict on
Seven Issues). Written in Arabic and translated in Makkis lifetime
into Urdu, this book focused on seven mooted customs and rituals
that caused friction between different sects of Muslims. Makki
wanted a consensus on these issues for the sake of forging Muslim
unity.66 In Makkis view, the moderator or sheikh played a key role
in building consensus. Makki combined the monist emphasis on
tauhid (belief in one God) and the holy scriptures with the Sufi stress
on the spiritual leader as the moderator of individual practice.
Makkis discussion of the balance between scripture and Sufi practices that the scripture sanctified became the foundation of the signature lectures that he delivered at the Madrasa Saulatiya.67 His
lectures and books are a far cry from the mujadid (renewer or renovator) reformist literature of the early nineteenth century that, as we
saw in Chapter 1, privileged only the holy text and individual interpretation, and ignored the moderator and other Sufi frills.
Istanbul in the late nineteenth century welcomed men of all religions. One of its visitors was the German evangelical missionary
Carl Gottlieb Pfander. He was the missionary with whom Kairanwi
had already debated in Agra and Delhi. After his stint in India,
Pfander lived in England for six years, visited Germany and Switzer
land, and was eventually sent to Istanbul by the Bible Society of
London to engage in missionary activity. Here, he earned notoriety
for publicly referring to his victory in the debates with Kairanwi
and other Muslim ulema of Delhi and Agra.68 He claimed that the
Muslims of India were converting to Christianity in large numbers
because he had defeated their ulema in religious debates.
The caliph asked his governor in Jeddah to verify from the Indian
hajis and visiting ulema if the missionarys lofty claims were correct.
The caliph, Abd-al Aziz, wanted a full report from his governor in
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Jeddah. When the governor presented this request to the sheriff of

Mecca, Sheikh ul Muslamin, he was told that the chief Indian
debater, Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi, was a migrant in Mecca
and in a position to verify the missionarys claim. The sheriff introduced Kairanwi to the governor, who discussed the matter with him
and sent his report to Istanbul.
The caliph was also interested in meeting Kairanwi because
British complaints about him reached Istanbul regularly. These
adverse reports, as we saw above, resulted in his several visits to the
city to offer explanations to the caliph. But the most crucial visit
happened in 1864, on his receipt of the governors report.69 Kairanwi
lived in the city royally and attended the caliphs gathering every
night after the last night prayer. Here, he explained the details of his
debates with Pfander. During these close encounters, Kairanwi also
related to the caliph the general state of affairs of the Muslims in
India, especially after the British clampdown on them after the 1857
mutiny-rebellion.70 It was in the course of these discussions that the
caliph suggested that Kairanwi should relate his experiences and
discussions with the missionary in the form of a book. The Turkish
administration offered to translate and publish the book in Turkish
and other languages.
Kairanwi began to write this book in 1864 in Istanbul. He agreed
to live in Turkey until the book was finished. He labored on it night
and day and included in it not just the Agra-Delhi public debates but
also all the other themes that he had discussed with Pfander. In
total, there were five debatable themes. The general thrust of the
book was on the obsolete nature of Christianity and the superficial
nature of the Bible (Injeel).71 He completed the book in 1864 in a
period of only six months. He titled it Izharul Haq (The Truth
Revealed) and presented it to Khairuddin Pasha.
Izharul Haq laid out the blueprint of Muslim cosmopolitanism. Its
production, which had relied on Ottoman patronage, revealed how
dependent this cosmopolitanism was on imperial networks. The
dedications in the book, to varied individuals, revealed that although
Kairanwi was using the caliphs network to further his own global
aspirations, he was by no means ignoring other Muslim networks.
Significantly, the book is dedicated to the Arab Sheikh ul ulema of
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Mecca, much to the chagrin of the Ottoman caliphthe amir ul

mominin. Kairanwi explained it as follows: This book is a purely
religious service. And thus it should remain free from any worldly
interest. Besides, the Sheikh ul ulema himself had asked me to pen
down my debate. And I had started my initial researches there. And
if he had not introduced me to the amir of Mecca I would have never
been able to reach Istanbul. So he is mainly responsible for the
writing of this book.72
His deft diplomacy was evident when he continued to enjoy royal
patronage in Istanbul, despite dedicating the book to the sheriff of
Mecca. He interacted with Turki ulema and religious scholars. He
responded to their concern that the new generation doubted Islamic
learning due to the influence of Western education. In 1865, at their
request, he wrote a book on issues like basharat wa nabuwat (the
divine message and Prophethood) and hasar wa nasr nazur va wahi
(revelations of Gods message). This book, entitled Tanbihat, was
also published in Istanbul, under the orders of Khairuddin Pasha. In
the 1880s, Caliph Abd-al Hamid II showed a keen interest in him,
and Kairanwi was invariably treated as his royal guest. As we saw
above, in 1883 Kairanwi stayed in Istanbul for a year, and in recognition of his writings was honored with numerous exalted titles by
the pasha. He was honored with the title of payah harmain (pillar of
Kaaba and Masjid-i-Nabawi) and presented with a medal called
Majidi darja doam. He also received a khilat and a monthly pension,
and was asked to reside in the royal guest house (shahi mehmankhana).

Cosmopolitanism Sketched
Kairanwi wrote the Izharul Haq in Arabic. It is a compilation of the
debate between him and the Christian missionaries; in it, he pleads
for the superiority of Islam over Christianity and Judaism. He does
so by representing the Koran as a positivist, rational text that could
play the role of a connector in the larger civilizational victory that
Muslims had to win over the West. Kairanwis aim was to present
the book as an exemplar of Muslim faith in rationality, reason, and
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scientificity. He showcased the Koran as a text subject to positivist

scrutiny and not merely a sacrosanct divine revelation. He hoped to
lend scriptural sanctity to Muslim modernity by demystifying the
Koran. Kairanwi was convinced that the Koran was exceptional
because its spirituality lay within an appealing shell of reason and
rationality. This unique combination enabled the text to be the critical factor that would unite Muslims in empires around the world so
that they could then function as a civilizational force against Western
ascendancy.
The aim of Izharul Haq is to prove the exceptional status of the
Koran and the Hadith on the basis of their historicity and to prove
the ahistorical nature of the Bible, the Torah, and other revealed
books. These were lower in the hierarchy of revealed texts as they
lacked the sanctity of evidence and authorial legitimacy.73 The book
lays out Kairanwis use of the scripture as the exceptional connector
and accretive platform on which the global appeal of Islam could be
showcased. Izharul Haq demystified the Koran by attributing to its
revealed wisdom a worldly author: the Prophet. It wrapped it in
this-worldly evidence subject to historical scrutiny and brought it
closer to everyday life. This focus on the individual and the worldly
context (dunyadari) was to become the signature of the India-specific
Arabicist grid, as it allowed for flexibility of thought and action,
even while acknowledging the unique status of Islam and the exceptional powers of Allah and the Prophet.
Izharul Haq revealed Kairanwis use of modern norms of authorship and scientific objectivity to frame religious writing. His literary
format was grounded in the scriptures, framed in an Ottoman-
tanzimat-inspired modern vision, and sustained by imperial networks. Like the tanzimat-impacted Ottoman reformists, Kairanwi
too saw modern norms as Islamicate and not European in origin.
He used the Islamic reformist language of the Salafi intellectuals of
the Ottoman Arab provinces, who stressed reason, logic, and scientificity, to scrutinize the religious literature of Christians, Jews, and
Muslims. He concluded that judged by such an Islamic yardstick of
modernity, the Koran outshone all other literary productions.
The Izharul Haq offered a methodology that framed the religious
texts of the people of the book (ahl-i-kitab) in distinct modern
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norms that were scientific, positivist, and objective. It privileged

texts on the basis of authenticity, verifiability, veracity of facts, and
accountability of the author. Kairanwi, very much like positivist history writers, was intolerant of any inconsistencies between the original manuscript and the text itself, as well as between different
versions of the text. According to Kairanwi, a superior text was one
that is unchanging: untarnished by the introduction of any changes
in words, meanings, or points of emphasis. And thus in this sense,
the revealed text of the Muslims, the Koran, seemed to him to be
most authentic as it had remained unchangedbased on words of
God rather than on different versions of written documents vulnerable to individual intervention.
The first few sections of the book downgrade Christian and
Jewish religious literature on the grounds that they lack scientificity and historicity. Kairanwi uses this point as the basis for
his critique throughout the book. The opening chapter is called
Bible Mein Tahreef kei Dallael (Evidence of Changes in the
Bible). In it, Kairanwi enumerates two types of changes: The first is
a change of words, which means adding new words and substitut
ing one word with another. The second is a change of meaning,
which means offering varied interpretations that diverted attention
from the real meaning of the word.74 Kairanwi states that Prot
estants wrongly deny that new words have been inserted in the
original Bible. But the second kind of change caused by numerous
interpretations of the Bible cannot be denied as it has created in-
house factions within Christianity: Christians, he states, accept
the fact that the Jews changed interpretations and explanations in
those verses from the ancient times that refer to Jesus Christ.
Protestants allege that the followers of the pope made changes as
well. And the Catholics, of course, counter these allegations and
level the same charge against the Protestants. He concludes that
these in-house circles of allegation within Christianity prove that
changes were made and that therefore he does not need to provide
further proof.75 Kairanwi elaborates on the types and impact of the
change of words in subsequent versions of the Bible. According to
him, changes were introduced by substituting words and figures for
those that appeared in the original. For instance, all three original
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manuscripts of the Bible change the number of years that denote

the period between Adam and the storm of Noahs fame, as compared to the Koran.
In contrast, he underlines the privileged status of revealed texts
like the Koran. Kairanwi dismisses the notion that the Torah was in
the same august league as the Koran. He argues that the Torah of
the Jews is definitely not the one that Moses had seen in his dream
and that therefore it was an unreliable text.76 The original text was
destroyed and subsequent editions were compiled by the Prophet
Azra, who produced it from the unreliable manuscripts available to
Christians. Speaking about the finality of the damage done by the
introduction of changes, Kairanwi states that once these changes
were introduced, subsequent prophets could not rectify them and
absolve the text of its adultery.77
Subsequent chapters of the Izharul Haq continue to disprivilege
Jewish and Christian literature on the basis of factual authenticity.
Kairanwi elaborates also on the addition of new words in subsequent
versions of Christian texts, which thus has made them different
from the form in which they originally appeared. According to
Kairanwi, this was usually done in order to make these texts widely
acceptable. He cites the example of eight books in the Christian
world that in ancient times (ahad i-ateeq) had been regarded as unacceptable. But after tactful additions were made to the original texts,
the Roman Catholic Church slowly included these books in the
acceptable corpus of literature. The Latin version of these books
had been tampered with most. These included the Kitab-i-Asteer,
Kitab-i-Barook, Kitab-i-Yahoodiyat, Kitab-i-Taubiya, Kitab-i-Danish,
Kitab-i-Pandkalisa, Makabe-Een kee Pehli Kitaab, and Makab Een kee
Doosri Kitab. Kairanwi showed how this tampering helped enhance
their popular appeal. But this was by no means a smooth ride. At
one meeting of Christian theologians called in Constantinople by
the emperor, it was decided that of these books only Kitab-i-
Yahoodiyat would be considered acceptable and the others declared
objectionable. In a later conference in Lodeshia, one of the objectionable books, Kitab-i-Asteer, was declared to be acceptable, along
with the Kitab-i-Yahoodiyat. In a third conference, in Carthage,
which was attended by 127 ulema including the famous Christian
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theologian Augustine, all of the other books on the list were declared
to be acceptable. In three further conferences, held in Trent and
Florence, this list was further endorsed, and they were regarded as
accepted Christian texts until 1200. The Protestant movement once
again stopped their publication and declared that they were unacceptable. Only one book, Kitab-i-Asteer, was allowed to be published
in one volume in a heavily edited version.78
However, these books were not considered unacceptable by Jews,
and they continued to be appreciated by Catholics. And for Prot
estants and some Jews there could be no greater proof of change
than the fact that the books they had considered for so many years
to be unacceptable for all Christians were suddenly acceptable to
one group of Christians. This showed that the texts of their ancestors were unreliable. And, Kairanwi claims, similar methods might
also have been adopted to make the Bible acceptable as the ultimate
truth.79 Further changes were introduced when the Roman Catholic
Church translated these books into Latin. The Protestants anger
notwithstanding, these books, with all their changes, began to be
regarded as the authentic religious books of Christians.
Indeed, Kairanwi alleges that given the tradition of tahreef lavzi
(the practice of changing words) even the book that is known today
as the Injeel of Jesus (Anjeel Masee)the first Injeel that Christians
regard as their ancient (qadeemi) textis in reality not the one that
Christ authored. Kairanwi claims that the original, written in the
Abrani language, was altered by Christians to the extent of it
becoming useless. And he stated that there is a general understanding among Christians that the Injeel that was in circulation
was a translation of the original. But Kairanwi doubts even this
claim, since, as he points out, Christians do not have the certificate
of its translation. Interestingly, Kairanwi invokes modern norms
of individual authorship and accountability and ridicules the fact
that Christians do not even know the name of the translator of the
text. Reflecting his own entrenchment in the literary production
norms of modern empires, in which authorship is salient to the
text, Kairanwi states that no book could hold any significance if its
author were unknown. Merely guessing its writer was not enough.
He questions Protestants who argue that Jesus himself was the
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translator.80 He invokes the new systematized norms of individuated

authorship and points out that Christian religious books whose
authors or even the translators are not known cannot be treated as
reliable or authentic. Thus Christian claims flaunting such literature as sacrosanct lack merit.81
Kairanwi argues that if Christian and Jewish texts fall below this
line of modern scientificity, objectivity, empirical scrutiny, and
logic, then it follows that their readers cannot be modern and
honest individuals. He launches his attack on the Christian clergy,
again using this yardstick of modernity. According to him, the
Christian clergy has misled people into believing that only Muslims
have alleged that Christian texts were adulterated. He reiterates
his claim that both the opponents and supporters of Christians and
Jews have said that they have introduced changes into their texts
and that they were in the habit of making such interventions even in
their aasmani kitab (revealed books).
Kairanwi uses information from newspaper editors and writers to
show that even Jews introduced changes into their religious texts.
Quoting a newspaper story, Kairanwi writes that one day a sultan,
Shah Talmai, asked for the Torah from the Jews. Their religious
leaders were scared to present it to him. This is because it had many
tenets that the sultan denounced (munkar). So about seventy men of
religion got together and changed the objectionable verses. In his
book, Kairanwi wonders whether one could rely on the authenticity
of such a text if it had been tampered with so readily.82 Indeed, he
blames the Jews for destroying the earlier versions of the Bible in
the seventh and eighth centuries and thus being complicit in making
the text inauthentic. He cites Kini Scott to argue that the Jews
destroyed the old version of the Biblethe version based on the
manuscripts of the seventh and eighth centuriesbecause its tenets
did not conform to their beliefs. The Bible currently available, then,
is not authentic because it is based on the manuscripts of the later
period. According to Kairanwi, the Bible had even been changed in
response to the expansion of Islam in the eighth century. And since
it kept changing with the times, it cannot be relied on as an authentic
text.83 But, Kairanwi insists, the onus of tehreef (changing words) is
by and large on the Jews, who completely distorted books of the
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ancient times and deleted from them the good news of the arrival of
Jesus that those books had announced.84
According to Kairanwi, both the process of writing the text as
well as the technique of copying also produce changes. The possibility of the error of oversight is always there. Often the copyist
mistakenly thinks that some things are worthless and deletes them,
even though they are not. At times in his urge to create consistency
he smoothes out the text by tampering with inconsistent or opposing
sentences and makes them conform to each other. This type of
change is most evident in the Bible where the letters of Polius have
been tampered with. And finally, the anxiety and lack of knowledge
of the writer is always there to reckon with.85
Kairanwi lashes out at the idea that the popularity rather than the
veracity of a text proves its authenticity. And he refutes the Christian
claim that the global popularity of the revered books proves that
their content has remained unchanged. Kairanwi challenges this
claim by contending that time and again Jews themselves have said
that these books have been changed. He wonders what the point is
of raising this issue again and bringing in the issue of the books
popularity.86 He contrasts these texts to the Koran, which, he
argues, was embodied in every Muslims heart in the same way as its
words are inscribed on its pages.87
He invokes the Islamic oral tradition of learning to bring to the
fore the exceptional stature of the Koran. He privileges the memorizing of the Koran over the writing and reading traditions associated with the Christian and Jewish books and views that as the
reason why the Koran has remained untainted and free from the
charge of tehreef, or change. He cited the example of the Al-Azhar
seminary in Cairo, where, he says, one will find at least 1000 people
at any point of time who are hafiz or one who has memorized the
Koran. He states that there is not even a single small village in Misr
(Egypt) where one cannot find a hafiz. In contrast, in the whole of
Europe one will not find even a single person who is hafiz-i-Injeel
(those who have memorized the Bible), or one who can compare
to any hafiz-i-Koran (those who have memorized the Koran) of
Egypt.88 This is even more surprising since European societies are
relatively well off and have far more resources than their Muslim
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counterparts. And yet he has not heard of a single person who said
that he is the hafiz of the Bible, let alone that of the Torah and other
books. Kairanwi challenges the Jews to produce even ten such
people in the world. He states that it is appalling that no one in the
whole of Europe can compare to the people of one little village of
Egypt in memorizing the religious texts. He ridicules the religious
leaders of Christians and states that in this respect, The padres of
the Christians are worse than even the mules and donkey owners of
Egypt.89 He rubs in the superiority of Islam over Christianity and
Judaism by underlining the fact that it is to the credit of the Prophet
Muhammad and his miraculous powers that at any point of time in
the world one can find at least one hundred thousand hafiz-i-Koran,
whereas in the Jewish community it is said that only Prophet Azra
was so gifted.90
Kairanwi gives several anecdotes to prove that the oral tradition
of learning by rote is the reason for the wide popularity of Islamic
literature. He notes that one day an English officer saw children in
a madrasa in Saharanpur, India, reciting the Koran from memory.
On inquiry, their teacher told him that these kids were all hafiz-i-
Koran. The Englishman called on one thirteen-year-old and tested
him. The boy excelled, and the officer was so impressed that he said,
I vouch that no other book is so blessed. 91
Kairanwi applies nineteenth-century standards of historicity to
prove the scientific nature of Islamic religious texts. He refutes the
Christian claim that the early manuscripts of the Bible were written
before the Prophet and that they are very similar to Muslim manuscripts of the Koran. He states this is yet another canard because,
according to Kini Scott and other writers, there is not a single manuscript that predated the tenth century. He notes that the earliest
manuscript, called the Codex, is dated variously as being from the
tenth and eleventh centuries,92 and that the Abrani manuscript was
based on it. He concludes that he is not interested in proving if the
early nuskhas (manuscripts) of the Christian texts are pre-Prophet or
not. He argues that even if one were to accept that many manuscripts, like the Codex, predate the Prophet, the fact remains that
they are open to change, and indeed prove further that Christian

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literature is unauthentic because of the layers of changes to which it

has been subjected.93
Kairanwi condemns Christian and Jewish literature for falling
flat on yet another modern literary principle: consistency and
neatness of narrative style. He considers the existence of exaggeration or hyperbole in the Bible as proof of its dubious veracity.
Kairanwi gives many examples from the Bible to prove that the
hyperbolic claims in the text make it fall short on the nineteenth-
century literary authenticity yardstick.94 In the final section of his
book, he critiques the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity. In this
section, called Khuda Teen Naheen (There Are No Three Gods),
he invokes the Islamic concept of One God and sarcastically highlights versions of the Bible where the word God (khuda) is used for
angels ( ferishtas) at least fourteen times. This is clearly unacceptable
to Kairanwi.95 Indeed, Kairanwi notes, in some versions of the Bible
the word khuda is used for ordinary people and for Satan as well. He
also cites instances where God is described in terms of an animate
figure with a face and limbs.
He then invokes reason, scientificity, logic, and rationality to
challenge some of the basic beliefs of Christianity. One of these is
that according to the Roman Church two pieces of bread can become
the body and blood of Christ and therefore can be converted into
Christ. Kairanwi said that no matter what Roman Catholics say the
fact of the matter is that the bread tastes like bread, and when it is
stale it has all the traits of stale bread, and has no indicators of possessing any human traits at all. So this claim, according to Kairanwi,
is ridiculous.96 Carrying forward his critique of the bread representing the body and blood of Christ, he states that if this were so
then Christians are worse than Jews. The latter just tortured Christ
once, whereas the former eat him every day and drink his blood at
mass.97 He also questions the belief that Christ had the ability to be
physically present at different places at the same time. Again,
invoking science, logic, and rationality, Kairanwi asks that if Christ
was human like all of us, if he ate, drank, slept, and feared Jews, and
if he had all human qualities, then how is it logical to expect that he
could appear simultaneously at different places?98

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Again using the nineteenth-century narrative stylea style that

is straightforward, structured, well reasoned, logical, and easy to
comprehendKairanwi critiques those sermons of Jesus that lack
cohesiveness and are difficult to follow. He cites numerous instances
where ambivalence, incredibility, and abridgement prevail in the
sermons of Jesus, at times so heavily that even his close associates
and students could not understand what he was saying until he himself explained. Some of these sermons were explained by him and
some remained ambiguous and therefore inexplicable. These can be
found in the Bible, making it a difficult and an illogical text. Kairanwi
illustrates this with an anecdote in which the Jews asked Jesus to
perform any miracle. He replied by telling them to pull down their
sacred site and then saying that he would rebuild it in three days.
They could not understand him, and asked how that would be possible as it took them forty-six years to build. Even Christs students
could not understand what he was saying. Only when Christ was
resurrected from the dead did people understand what he meant and
the unique prowess he had.99 Kairanwi asks that if the students
of Jesus could not understand him, then what does that say about
the Jews?
Again, when Jesus told the Jews that they should eat the bread as
it was his body and all of his virtues would be transferred into them,
they did not understand him. Even some of his Christian students
were appalled and separated from him as they thought that he was
exhorting them to eat him.100 Kairanwi states that because of the
abridged nature of Christian texts a lot of things remain unclear.
One of these confusing points has to do with the Day of Judgment
when will it come? Indeed, matters are even hazier because the real
Bible was missing. And the Greek translation, in which all kinds of
changes were made, and whose writer and translator are unknown,
remains the only source of information.101
Carrying forward his scrutiny of Christian literaturestill using
as his yardsticks the modern notions of simple narrative style,
logic, rationality, and veracity of evidenceKairanwi introduces a
special section called Tasleet kaa Aqeeda Aqal kee Kasauti Par
(Christian Doctrines That Do Not Pass the Test of Rationality).
Here he once again talks about the myths related to Christ and his
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miraculous powers. According to Kairanwi, only illiterate Christians

believe in these illogical myths associated with Christ.102
Although Kairanwi is harsh toward Christian texts and their
irrationalitytexts, he claims, that attribute exceptional and often
outrageously ridiculous powers to Christhe never comes down
heavily on the person of Jesus Christ. In fact, he uses his interpretation of the words of Christ to question the logic of Christian doctrine, particularly the idea of the Holy Trinity. He cites the Bible to
argue that Jesus said to God that people should consider Him as
their one and only God (khuda-i-wahid) and regard his own self
(yesu masih) as the messenger. Kairanwi states that this proves that
Jesus himself felt that people should regard God as the only divine
one (wahid haqiqi) and him as his Prophet. He never said that people
should regard him as part of the Trinity (teen aqoom wala) and hence
sacrosanct and a god in his own right. Kairanwi repeats that Jesus
did not even say that he is both man and God, or that he is a god
with a human body.103 He cites numerous other instances from the
Bible to prove that Christ himself said on numerous occasions that
there is only one God.104
Kairanwi once again uses reason and logic to question the
Christian belief that Christs death by crucifixion absolved or washed
off people of all sins. He argues that this was untrue because the
original sin according to the Christian belief was committed by
Adam, and that it is ridiculous to believe that Christ or anyone of
Adams children should be made to repay for his sins and be absolved
of it by crucifixion. Each man has his own quota of sins to deal with.
One crucifixion cannot wash off the sins of the world.105

Secularizing of the Koran

First published in Arabic in Istanbul in 1865 by the imperial printing
press, the Izharul Haq was soon translated into Turkish as well by
Hareddin Pasha, the grand vezier.106 Once published in Istanbul,
the Izharul Haq traveled across the imperial grid to have many different lives in regions that corresponded to the conceptual and discursive civilizational space that Kairanwi had laid out between
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empires. It was subsequently translated into Gujarati and Urdu in

India, and several editions were printed simultaneously in Egypt.
Indeed, Edward Wilmot Blyden, the well-known father of pan-
Africanism who later became interested in Islam, reported seeing it
during his stint in Sierra Leone: We saw a copy of this book [Izharul
Haq] in the hands of a West African Mohammedan at Sierra Leone,
who was reading and commenting upon it to a number of his co-
religionists.107 Its English translation launched it out from the
Muslim world into the whole of Europe.108 It created a stir in
London. In 1894, the Times wrote, As long as people continue to
read Izharul Haq Christianity will never prosper in the world.109
One of the lasting impacts of the text was its take on the Koran as a
book entrenched in the positivist literary tradition that characterized the age of empires.
According to Kairanwi, the Koran meets the highest standards
of poetic license as well as scientificity, even though it is a revealed
text. In the fifth section of Izharul Haq, entitled Koran Kareem
Allah kaa Kalam Hai (Koran Is the Book of God), Kairanwi highlights the wondrous virtues of the text. He discusses twelve
proofs that show that the Koran is the revealed text of the world
(kalam-i-almi).
He defines its exceptional divine status as a revealed text in positivist terms. Thus for him the Koran is unique not merely because it
is revealed. Instead, it is exceptional because of its maturity of words,
narration, and transmission stylebalaghat. Its appealing verse
makes it stand out from all the poetry and poets of the world. It is
unmatched to any other manmade text or narrative. In this way,
Kairanwi judges the Koran using this-worldly poetic norms.
This stamp of scientificity, reason, rationality, poetics, and methodology in matters of religion was one of the characteristic features of the late nineteenth-century Islamic diasporic literature
from Istanbul. Kairanwi fit the Koran into this diasporic literary
genre. He demystified it as he lent to it an author and brought it in
line with nineteenth-century positivist literature. He measured it
on the yardstick of the poetic production norms of his times. He
explained that balaghat meant the use of the correct choice and apt
number of words. And, he stated, the Korans narrative style makes
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a perfect fit to balaghat norms. It reaches that high point of eloquence.110 According to Kairanwi, the Koran excels in eloquence
because its verses are based on truth. Its verse is all encompassing
and unparalleled in its appealing narrative style. Again, as compared
to other poets and littrateurs, whose verses begin to fall in grace
if there is repetition, the Koran stands as eloquent as ever despite
its repetitive narration of the life and times of the Prophet. It can
list several points of good etiquette (akhlaq) in a single verse and
yet remain pristine in its freshness, unlike other texts that look
drab when their authors package a mouthful of such virtues into a
single verse. Finally, whereas every poet has his own specialized
themes and seldom moves beyond that, the Koran covers a wide
range of themes and yet remains steadfast in its eloquence.111 The
Koranic verses that outshine in eloquence include ones on temptation, deterrence, threat, and sermonizing.112 Kairanwi is of the view
that the melodious sweetness in the text has an empowering effect
on its verse.113
Kairanwi describes the elements of the Korans enchanting
poetics that make it kalam-i-alami: exceptional composition (ajib
tarkib), novel and well-formed verses, a narrative style that reflects
heavenly truth (ilm-bayan kei daqaiq aur irfani haqaaiq parr mushtamal hona), beautiful and pristine couplets (husn-i-ibarat aur pakizah
ashaar), and excellent, methodical arrangement of words (behtarene
tartib). According to Kairanwi, this poetical style surprised even the
best of the littrateurs. The purity of style ( fasahat) and the eloquence (balaghat) of the Koran are deliberately raised to a high pitch
so that no one could ever have a chance to say that it has any element
of borrowed or plagiarized elements. It was also important to make
its poetics exceptional so as to distinguish this bookGods book
from anything penned by human beings (insaani kalam).114 Kairanwi
notes that many specialists of the Koran had openly challenged littrateurs to produce anything similar to its eloquent and poetic
verses. But their urging did not yield any positive results. According
to Kairanwi, the widespread appeal of the Koran is due to its poetic
elegance, melody, and the sweetness of its verses. He cites a tradition that says that when Abu Jahal (a tribal leader and enemy of
Islam) heard the Koran he went to his nephew Walid to admonish
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him. Walid replied, I can say in the name of God that none of you
know the beauty and poetic value of couplets more than me. And I
can vouch that what Muhammad says is unmatched with respect to
any couplet.115 Kairanwi refutes claims by proponents of the
mutazalli tradition that the Koranic verses were familiar to people
before Prophet Muhammad was born, and that Muhammads arrival
only made them appear fresh or new. He argues that it is possible
that people were familiar with some of its tenets. But its real impact
is in its entirety. Its case is similar to that of a rope that when reduced
to single strand is of no use. But when woven together with myriad
strands it can serve important functions such as docking a ship or
tying a huge elephant.116
Kairanwi scrutinizes the Koran for its historicity, and it comes
out with flying colors. He claims that the Koran is unique because it
offers information about the past directly from the Prophets mouth.
The agency of the Prophet in decoding the past is remarkable considering the fact that he was illiterate and did not have the privilege
of attending formal lectures and educationdarrs, tadris, or majlis
and had idol and pagan worshippers in his company. Even the books
that were available then were either unreliable, like the Bible and the
Torah, or very ordinary as they were not in the revealed category.
Kairanwi attributes the vast compendium of history and knowledge
of the past events contained in the Koran to the Prophets intellect
and exceptional prowess.117
Again, continuing his emphasis on demystifying the Koran, he
stated that it is an agile text that was written in response to societal
concerns. It refutes the various conspiracies and canards that nonbelievers spread about Islam. Kairanwi thus presents the text as an
organic and live entity that was divinely revealed but that is also in
sync with the issues of its time. It offers solutions and responds to all
kinds of criticism heaped on Islam to produce a canon based on
reason and rationality. This characteristic is best exemplified in the
chapters on jurisprudence, which reflect its stress on logic and

reason.118
Kairanwi enumerates the Korans many medical virtues, in particular its prescriptions for health and well-being. He then gives
anecdotes about discussions between men of Islam and Christian
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padres and physicians; in these, the Christian padres and physicians

assert that the Koran is lacking in medical knowledge. In defense of
the Koran, one Husain bin Ali stands up to the Christian physician
and recites a verse of the Koran that encapsulates the essence of its
medical dictums: khao aur piyo aur israf na karo (eat, drink, and do
not waste). The physician is not satisfied, and asks if the Prophet had
anything to say about Islamic healing. And Ali replies that the
Prophet in just a few words has encapsulated the entire discipline of
medicine. He then recites the words of the Prophet: Meidah amraz
kaa ghar hai aur perhaiz sab sei barri dawa hai. Badan ko who
cheezein dau jiska tumnei isko aadi banaya hai. (The liver is the
home of diseases. And abstinence is the best medicine. Give to the
body only those things that you have made it used to having.) The
Christian physician is so impressed that he says words to the following effect: Your Prophet and your Book have made the famous
physician Galen [Jalenoos] irrelevant. And they have provided us
knowledge which is essential for good health.119
Kairanwi not only underlines the scientific and rational profile of
the Koran, but also points out its rhythm and melody, the features
that make it easy to memorizehifz-i-Koran. Kairanwi shows that
children, students, and all kinds of Muslims can memorize the
Koran very easily. He states that even in their day and age, and even
when Islam faced very difficult challenges, there were at least one
hundred thousand Muslims in certain areas who knew the Koran by
heart (hafiz) and who could write it from memory at any point of
time (qalam-band). He compares this to the situation in Europe,
where, he states, it is difficult to find people in such large numbers
who know the Bible by heart. And this is despite the fact that the
Christian world is far better off and wealthier than the Muslim one
and has a longer learning tradition.120
Kairanwi argues that the Koran has survived over the years
because of its easy-to-memorize style. He states that its recitation is
an ongoing process and it will continue to be a living tradition until
the Day of Judgment. The Koran is the only text that has recorded
the miracles of all the prophets of Islam. No other book can make
such a claim. It has about two thousand small muajzahs (miracles),
and these collectively have stood the test of time and have remained
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unchanged for the last 1,400 years.121 Kairanwi states that the Koran
is exceptional also because of its endearing qualities. The more one
reads it the more it is endeared to the heart. One never gets tired of
reading or hearing it. This is in contrast to other texts that if repeatedly read will tire as well as bore the reader. Kairanwi elaborates on
the aesthetic appeal of the Koran, a quality that is best proven by its
popular reception. He discusses the special way in which it is received
and the impact it has on those who hear it. He notes that people are
awestruck on hearing its verses. He states that the recitations of the
Koran (tilawat) have a special register and meter that not only touch
the aesthetic sensibility of the listener and reader but that impact
the heart. He claims that this meter is so effective that even if people
do not understand its meaning it still impacts their heart and mind
through its sheer rhythm. And he states that many people have
accepted Islam the first time they heard the tilawat. He cites an
anecdote about a Christian man who heard the Koran and was so
dumbfounded by the melody and rhythm of its verse that he started
weeping. When he was asked why he was crying, he replied that he
was in awe of its rhythm and that he had experienced a special kind
of reverence and awe when he heard the Koran, which brought tears
to his eyes.122 According to Kairanwi, the eloquence and rhythm of
the Koran is enough to convert to Islam even the most ardent Jewish
theologians who care to hear and debate it. Kairanwi argues that all
this proves that the Koran is a miracle. It is so because it is a book
of Gods praise (kalam-i-khudawandi). There are three reasons for
its greatness and value: its beautiful, hyperbolic words (alfaz fasih),
the fine arrangement of its words and its appealing composition
(tartib aur talif pasandidah), and the purity of its chapters (mazamin
pakeezah).123
In his discussion, Kairanwi combines the this-worldly charm of
the Koran with its surreal appeal. He describes its ability to prophesize (peshingoi). Kairanwi lists twenty-one prophecies of the Koran
that came true. One of these was that God has said that people will
enter the masjid-i-haram one day with either tonsured heads or short
hair. And that did happen when the learned ones (sahaba) entered
the holy Kaaba in Mecca.124 He cites another instance when God
promised those who were believers and maintained good deeds,
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offered prayers, and did not worship anyone except Allah that he
would provide them caliphates in this world, make their religion
very strong, and convert their fearful existence into a peaceful one.
Kairanwi points out that this promise too was fulfilled to the letter
even in the lifetime of the Prophet. Muslims conquered Mecca in
his lifetime and soon expanded to other Arab lands like Yemen,
Bahrain, and Africa (mulk-i-habsh). Non-Muslims in Syria accepted
Islamic rule and agreed to pay the jaziya or tax on non-Muslims. In
the years to come Muslims spread to other cities of Syria and to
Persia. In the Ahad-i-Faruqi, this process of expansion continued.
The whole of Syria (Sham), Egypt, and Persia became Muslim. In
the time of the Usmani caliphate, Islam spread as far west as
Andalusia in southern Spain. Muslims continued to pray and God
kept his promise. In the caliphate of Ali, even though no fresh lands
were added, the prosperity continued.125 Kairanwi interlaces this
section with his replies to the Christian missionaries, who in their
book Mizan-ul-Haq alleged that many of these examples were not
prophesies of God but just intelligent and thoughtful comments of
the Prophet as he addressed his community. According to Kairanwi,
if that were the case, some of these prophecies would have been
proved wrong. But the fact that all were proved correct shows that
they were promises of God.126
The last section, consisting of about a hundred pages, is called
khatimah (conclusion). In it, Kairanwi proves that the Koran is an
exceptional text and a muajzahsomething that astounds both
through its narrative as well as through its narrative style. They
are what make the Koran a truly this-worldly book with other-
worldly charm. According to Kairanwi, the Koran contains verses
that are a response to the social problems prevalent in Arab society.
The prophets were blessed with the traits of balaghat and muajzah
(the power of miracles) because they lived in times when people
falsely claimed to have exceptional God-like powers. The only
way such individuals could be contained was to give real prophets
unique divine qualities; worldly mortals would then realize that they
were nothing when compared to those who had divine connections
(minjanib allah) and the power to perform miracles. Kairanwi cites
anecdotes about Moses, who shocked and outdid the magicians of
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his time with his exceptional powers; of Jesus Christ, who dumbfounded the medical professionals (fan-i-tibb) by curing lepers and
the blind; and of Prophet Muhammad, who stunned into silence the
professionals of his timemen who prided themselves on their elegance and oratory (Zaban dai aur fasahat aur balaghat)by displaying
exceptional eloquence (Qurani balaghat) in reciting the Koran. All
these categories of professionals soon began to believe that the
Koran and its prophets were exceptional and that the book itself was
a muajzah.127
Kairanwi demystified the tale of the Korans revelation and
explained the process as a natural response to the prevalent social
ills. According to him, the Koran was not revealed in one go (ek dam
kyon nazil nahin hua). Rather, it arrived in installments. He said that
the Prophet was not literate and therefore he might not have been
able to absorb the entire revelation if it came as one whole. He memorized it because it came in installments. Soon it became Sunnat (the
Prophets way) to memorize the Koran. Kairanwi commented that
it was good that the Koran came in installments also because it
offered an alternate way of life, which would have been difficult for
pagans to accept all of a sudden in its entirety. The Prophet initially
introduced only the tauhid. His meetings with the angel Gabriel,
who brought him verses of the Koran, relaxed him, and gave him
the stamina (taqwiyat) to spread the message (tabligh). The Koran
came gradually and dealt with everyday issues. It responded to the
immediate problems of the people. And through this gradual process of revelation, it prepared people for its ultimate message of
bestowing prophethood on Muhammad. Finally, because the revelation was delivered in installments, it enabled the angel Gabriel to
maintain his significance and status as the exalted mediator between
God and the Prophet, or the apostle. This might not have been possible if the Koran was delivered all at once.128
Thus, according to Kairanwi, the Koran, notwithstanding its
exceptional status as a revealed text, conformed to the highest this-
worldly literary standards: poetics, eloquence, meter, rhythm, and
relevance to societal issues. Its repetitions were meant to impress
upon a range of pagan worshippers the value of its tenets. The repetitions were also important in terms of textual aesthetics: brevity
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(ikhtisar), empowerment (tatwil), and eloquence (balaghat). Indeed,

its exceptional eloquence made the Koran different from any other
insani kitab (nonrevealed book).129 Even as he highlighted the this-
worldly objectivity of the Koran, Kairanwi never ceased to point out
that it was as wondrous as a miracle.130
He emphasized the point that the Koran had had a distinct production style that made it different from those sacred Jewish texts
that had combined the oral and the written traditions at tremendous
cost to veracity. These books were revealed to Moses on Mount Tur,
and although he compiled them, the explanations later included in
the books remained a very important part of the oral tradition that
was passed from one notable and companion of Moses to another.
The Jewish books were meant to be read along with their commentaries, which were based on the oral tradition (zabani rawayait).131
According to Kairanwi, Muslims could not believe in those sections
of these texts that were based on zabani rawayait, as these were liable
to change and interpretation. They had been written neither on the
basis of eyewitness accounts nor of revelation.132
Kairanwi privileged the Koran over the Bible and Jewish religious
texts mainly because it was the only text that had been memorized
by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Embodied in
the hearts of people, the Koran remained changeless and a perfect
global connector. It was indeed the most useful text with which to
unite Muslims. Kairanwi gave the example of the Al-Azhar Uni
versity in Cairo, where, he claimed, at any one point of time there
would be more than a thousand people who had memorized the
texthafiz-i-Koran. Indeed, according to Kairanwi, in Egypt even
the donkey and cart drivers were hafiz-i-Koran. This was not the
case with any of the Christian or Jewish books. Kairanwi claimed
that this proved that the words of the Koran impacted people and
made them want to memorize and remember it. And, he stated, this
was not the case with books of other religions.133
Kairanwi also discussed the making of the Hadith tradition in
Islam. He noted that Muslim notables and men of learning were
reluctant to compile Hadith text as they were scared that it might
get confused (mustabah) with the Koran. But some of their students,
such as Imam Zahri, initiated the process of compiling collections.
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Imam Malik, for instance, who was born in Mecca, Abd-al Rahman
in Syria, and others in Basrah began to collect the traditions of the
Prophet and organize them into compilations. Through this process, written texts, called the Hadith, were produced. Imam Bukhari
commented on these and picked for discussion only those traditions
that were correct and in his view worthy of intellectual debate. He
rejected the weaker ones. And most sahabah (notables and companions of the Prophet) built genealogical traditions that linked the
contents of the compiled books to the Prophet.134
Kairanwi emphasized that the Koran was a more significant and
central text than the Hadith for three reasons: First, relatively less
human agency was involved in the production of the Koran. Its
copyists did not change it even by a single word. It exists exactly as
it was revealed to the Prophet. In contrast, the Hadith had been
recorded using Arabic words chosen by its compilers in their wisdom
to connote what they remembered of the sayings of the Prophet.
Second, the Koran is fixed in its final word. To deny any part of it is
sin. Third, the Korans words are diktat or orders (ahkam). They
need to be obeyed. This is not the case with the Hadith.135
Kairanwi defined authenticity using the literary norms of
modern empires that put a premium on rationality, authenticity,
and individual accountability. But, very much like the tanzimat-
inspired Salafi intellectuals, with whom he interacted, he claimed
Islamic origins for these norms. In the hierarchy of authentic knowledge, he accorded the highest status to the Koran. And even as he
subjected Islamic literature to scrutiny based on these norms,
Kairanwi also defined its exceptional cosmopolitan character on the
grounds of its reliance on and deep roots in oral tradition. Thus
Kairanwis cosmopolitan literature is unique because of its dependence on both the Ottoman reformist modern styles and the more
traditional Islamic oral tradition of memorizing and narration.

The Politics of Kairanwi

This chapter has argued that Kairanwi redefined what it meant to
be Muslim and to belong to a global Muslim community in the late
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nineteenth century. His career revealed that modern pan- Islamic

activism was far from being merely caliph-centric. Instead, it was
cosmopolitan, as it lay entangled in pan-Islamic networks that had
the scriptures as their core even as they remained embedded in
imperial spaces and politics. Kairanwi demonstrated pan-Islams
intellectual core through his eclectic syllabus at the Madrasa Saulatiya
and through his writings, in which he debated with Christian theologians and offered a historicist, positivist, and rational rendering of
the Islamic religious texts. His emphasis on the Korans poetic
meter, its rhythm, its narrative style, its rendition (qirrat), and its
exceptional status as a book that was widely memorized (indeed, as
a book that was memorized by more people than any other book)
enabled him to demystify it and make it this-worldly. In the case
of the Koran, the art of memorizing fixed the text in the hearts
of people and preserved it for posterity. This was in contrast to
Jewish and Christian literature, which had no such tradition of
memorizing or an exceptional poetic and narrative style. Indeed,
the human agency involved in writing and transmitting those texts
had introduced change into them. Thus, the unchanging Koran,
embedded in the hearts and memories of people, became the basis
for an intellectual grid that existed across empires and that provided
the perfect global canvas upon which cosmopolitan pan-Islamic
networks could flourish. These webs were energized by the hafiz-i-
Koran who straddled worlds and thereby created a discursive Muslim
civilizational space between empires. But the deep entanglement of
the Korans readers and commentators with trans-Asian Western
empires meant that the Muslim cosmopolis was also attractive to
liberal Ottoman sultans as well to temporal British leaders. And
this imperial interest also meant that Muslim cosmopolitanism
remained connected with politics of the Indian subcontinent, and
to its defining elements of homeland, language, and ethnicity.
Indeed, it sustained itself by playing the imperial politics game to its
advantage.
Kairanwi too never shied away from direct political action as he
moved across Asia in a period of imperial rivalries. Thus he urged
the Ottoman sultan not to give permission to the English to establish themselves in Aden in order to obtain coal for their steamers.
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He argued that this was a crucial area and that if the English established themselves there it would become the launchpad from which
they would spread throughout the whole region. The sultan did not
pay heed to his advice and sure enough suffered the consequences.136
It was also a popular perception in India that the Madrasa Saulatiya,
even though located at the imperial crossroad at Mecca, was tuned
to and responsive to Indian affairs. And Kairanwi encouraged this
image because he saw India as integral to his transimperial political
and intellectual networks. In 1899, the Azamgarh newspaper the
Liberal reported that the manager of the madrasa told them that it
had once refused funding from the sultan of Turkey on the grounds
that it looked only to natives [Indians] for aid. The editor concluded that this gesture showed how closely this literary institution
[was] connected with them.137 According to the editor, the madrasa
received funds from India even after the maulanas death in 1893.
This of course reflected the connections between the Muslim cosmopolitan world and India. But the fact that a range of Muslim and
a few Hindu newspaper editors raised funds for the madrasa indicated also the significant role the Indian Muslim cosmopolitans
played in energizing the print culture back home. Indeed, the
Muslim cosmopolis, via its literary productions, demand, clientele,
and dissemination of books, kept the printing presses in India busy.
It was no surprise that media barons and printing houses generously
financed the Muslim cosmopolis. Thus in 1899 it was reported in
the Liberal that Munshi Asad-ud-din, the proprietor of the Naiyar-iAsfi newspaper in Madras and the proprietor of the Wakil newspapers in Amritsar, collected funds for the upkeep of the intellectual
hub of Muslim cosmopolitanism, Madrasa Saulatiya. Equally interesting was the collection of funds by Munshi Amba Prasad, the
proprietor of the Jami-ul-Ulim newspapers. He was inclined to contribute a large portion of his profits from the sale of his books to the
funds of the madrasa. The Liberal exhorted all Muslims to loosen
strings of their purse and help the institution situated at the center
of the Muhamedan world.138
Kairanwi saw India as integral to his trans-Asian networks, which
were, as we have seen, dependent both on imperial webs of communication and on the repertoire of traditional knowledge and of
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communication skills. He wanted to pull Indian Muslim politics

out of its narrow territorial nation-bound groove and locate it in
the wider public sphere of books, ideas, and littrateurs that existed
between empires. Kairanwi always opposed the idea of Muslims
joining the Indian National Congress. His response to an invitation by Nawab Amar Ali Khan rais Basudah to join the Congress
was reported in the press as follows: He replied that he was not
familiar with the objectives of the Congress. But even if these
objectives are good for a variety of reasons I consider the Congress
harmful for the Muslims.139 But the fact that the Muslim notables
of the Congress still considered him worthy to be included in the
party and to take an integral role in their affairs, even though
he lived in the Hijaz and Istanbul, shows how the cosmopolitan
Muslim networks intersected with the territorially bound idea of
the nation.
It has been argued that in the nineteenth century the politics of
expediency made Muslim men of religion disprivilege the normative Muslim thought that had earlier fixed their cosmopolitan imaginary around the caliph and inclined them toward exclusivity within
India. Until the Khilafat movement, when this normative thought
resurfaced, Muslims developed new and individual ways to balance
their lives with the British as political sovereigns and the caliph as
the spiritual referent in Istanbul. In this way they could balance territorial nationalism with universalism and carve out an exclusive
identity for themselves.140 The trans-Asian intellectual and institutional networks of Kairanwi gave physicality to the extraterritorial
imaginary and deflected it from the single referent of the caliph. It
offered Muslims more substantive networks that depended on global
imperial webs and that were derived from the Islamicate repertoire
of knowledge and of communication skills. Now it was not only a
question of territorial nationalism coexisting with an imaginary
universalism, but of the two physically intersecting and energizing
each other. Thus the intellectual grid of Kairanwi not only injected
life into the trans-Asiatic movements of career brokers and entrepreneurs like Sayyid Fadl, but also intersected with political parties
and people who operated within the confines of the territorial idea
of the nation.
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And thus Kairanwis trans-Asian networks were always a part of

Muslim lives (not just normative thought) whenever Muslims
needed to use them to tap the world outside. In 1890, when a terrible famine engulfed the Arab lands and Indian Muslims wanted
to send help, it was the names of Kairanwi and his associate
Imdadullah Makki that were most often cited as the reliable sinews
that connected India to the trans-Asiatic world outside. The editor
of the Mushir Qaiser of Lucknow wrote in its issue of 12 February
1890: The famine is severe...many rich Muslim of Hind do not
know about this yet...otherwise by now help would have come
from Calcutta, Mumbai, Rampur, Junagarh, Tonk, Bhopal, Patna,
Delhi etc....One can send money and food via the resources of
Rahmatullah Kairanwi and Imadadullah Makki. Indeed, the editor
also mentioned in further reports that since very little was known
about the actual conditions in the Hijaz, readers should tap the networks of Kairanwi and lean on him for news and information.141
Equally noteworthy were the efforts of Kairanwis Deoband colleagues, Maulvis Muhammad Qasim (18331877), Muhammad
Refiud-Din, Muhammad Abid, and Muhammad Yaqub (d. 1886),
who sent money to Turkey via Kairanwis contacts at the time of
the Russo-Turkish War in 1877.142
These instances reveal what it meant to be a Muslim in late
nineteenth-century India and to belong to a global Muslim community that was accessible via imperially embedded pan-Islamic
networks. Even if the caliph was not popularly viewed as the sole
connector of this global Muslim community, British fears of his
imagined influence and the occasional Ottoman invocations to his
spiritual clout kept him relevant. For example, a newspaper in Istanbul,
the Urdu-language Paik-i-Islam, printed by the runaway Indian Mus
lim Nusrat Ali Khan, was financed by the Ottoman government for
its procaliph stance. In retaliation, the British sponsored a Londonbased Syrian Christian, Lauis Sabunki, who published an Arabic
journal, Al-Khalife, that questioned the authority of the caliph. The
protests of the Ottoman government led to the journals closure.
But this compliance by the British did not stop the Ottoman ambassador in London, Masurus Pasha, from supporting an Arabic-Persian
newspaper, al Gayrat, that was published by an Indian Muslim from
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Delhi. This newspaper was not anti-British, but it emphasized the

importance of the caliphate.
The next chapter, an examination of Kairanwis close associate
Imdadullah Makki, reveals how transimperial subjects like these
runaway mullahs continued to maintain intellectual and financial
links with the subcontinent and make borders porous. But even as
these men straddled empires, there were Muslims who were firmly
framed within the territorial idea of India and so reconciled to
Indias British sovereigns that they always opposed men like
Kairanwi. Notable among these was Sir Sayyid Ahmad, as we will
see in Chapter 6.

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4
H aj i Im da du l l a h M a kk i
i n M ecc a

Imdadullah Makki (18171899) was born in Thana Bhuwan, in the

Muzaffarnagar district of modern Uttar Pradesh. He belonged to
the famous Faruqi family, which boasted of having learned alims like
Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi in its ranks.1 He was the third son of
Hazrat Sheikh Abdullah and Bibi Hasini. His mother died when he
was only seven years old. In accordance with her wishes that he
should be well looked after and not coerced into anything, he got off
lightly as far as initial schooling was concerned. He obtained no
formal schooling.
He was self-taught. And with some help from local mentors and
teachers he memorized some parts of the Koran. He used the same
informal training to study the basics of the Persian language. He
read an eclectic selection of books. These included popular texts
penned by Naqshbandi Sufi reformists, such as Taqwiyat-al Iman,
the Masnavi of Maulana Rum, Hasan Husain wafqah Akbar Imam
Azim Ali Hanifa, and Maskutah wa al Masabih. He also studied with
a diverse group of teachers. He read the Taqwiyat with Maulana
Rahmat Ali Thanawi, Hasan Husain with Maulana Abdul Rahim
Nanautawi, and Maskutah with Maulana Sayyid Muhammad
Qalandar Jalalabadi. His teachers for the Masnavi of Maulana Rum
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were Maulana Abdul Razzaq Jhanjhanwi and Maulana Abul Hasan

Kandhli.2
Some of the key founding members of the famous Deoband seminary in north India were his relatives and intellectual peers: Asharaf
Ali Thanawi, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi (18331877), and
Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (18291905). They all hailed from the qasbahs (country towns) of the upper Doab region of modern Uttar
Pradesh. Imdadullahs mother was from Nanautawi, the hometown
of Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi, and his sister had married into
the family of Asharaf Ali Thanawi, who was also from the same
qasbah. Thus his association with Nanautawi and its scholars went
back to his childhood when he visited the area to meet his relatives.3
Scholars from this area had been private students of the famous
Delhi College teacher Mamluk Ali. Some influential ones, like
Rashid and Qasim of the Deoband seminary, were influenced by
Imdadullahs Sufi orientation. He is said to have introduced Qasim
to Sufism and the art of bookbinding.4 But he always acknowledged
their mentorship and went to great efforts to obtain the oath of allegiance (bait) with Qasim.5
Imdadullah moved to Delhi at the age of sixteen and studied with
Mamluk Ali Nanautawi. He had studied Persian and showed interest
in Sufism from a very early age. And this interest developed further
in Delhi. He read sections of the Persian text Gulistan with Maulana
Ahmad Ali Muhadas Saharanpuri. He also read sections of the
Zulekha with the same teacher. His attention was particularly drawn
to the Masnavi of Maulana Rum, which was taught to him by
Maulana Abdul Razzaq Jhanjhanwi and Maulana Sheikh Abul
Hasan Kandhalwi. This text remained his source of inspiration
throughout his life.6
Beyond providing him with the opportunity merely to read texts,
his Delhi stint was significant also because it brought him the guidance of the well-known Naqshbandi reformist Sufi Nasir-ud-Din
Dihlawi, the successor of the famous reformist Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid of Rae Bareilly. He took an oath with him and was initiated
into his mujadid silsila. Once in the fold of the mujadids he developed
a close relationship with his teacher Miyanji Nur Muhammad
Jhanjhanwi. The fact that Jhanjhanwi was also a mujadid khalifa
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of Sayyid Ahmad bonded them. And after Nasir-ud-Din died

Jhanjhanwi became his pir (holy man or spiritual mentor).7 He took
the oath of allegiance with this man, who was originally a Chishtiya
Sufi of Lohari, after a dream in which the Prophet himself urged
him to seek his guidance.8
In 1845, he left for his haj (pilgrimage) after a dream in which the
Prophet invited him to visit Mecca. On his visit to Mecca, he met
the learned alims of the city, including Hazrat Shah Muhammad
Ishaq Muhajir Makki and Sayed Qudrat-ullah Benarsi.9 Both of
these Hindustani scholars were known for their miracles.10 Ishaq
advised him to observe humility and avoid eating food prohibited in
the holy scriptures. He also learned a form of meditation from him.11
Significantly, he was advised by Ishaq to return to Hindustan and to
come back to Mecca only once he had completed his undone work
there. On the same trip, in Medina, he met Shah Ghulam Murtaza
Jhanjhanwi, who was later called by the last name of Madani. He
also met Maulana Shah Gul Muhammad Khana, a resident of
Rampur who had lived in Medina for the last thirty years and was a
keeper of the Prophets tomb.12 He too offered him training in forms
of salutations and meditation that gave him the sensation of the
Prophet himself making an appearance and handing him a cap as
headgear. He recounted that the Prophet gestured to him to return
to Hindustan.13 He complied and returned home in 1846.
Back home, in Bayanah, Imdadullah lived an ascetic life in a
mosque called Pir Muhammad Wali. He emerged as an important
religious leader to whom people flocked in large numbers to take
bait, the oath of allegiance. And his intellectual genealogy, which
stretched back to Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly, invested him with
the zeal to disseminate his worldview using the new opportunities
offered by colonial rule: print, telegraph, and modern transportation.
But after 1857, once the clampdown on the descendants of Sayyid
Ahmad began, he too came under fire from the British administration. As things got tough for him, he escaped to Mecca.14
He left India in 1859 after an arrest warrant was issued against
him.15 He reached Mecca via Karachi.16 In Mecca he stayed initially
at the Rabat Daoudia, in the guesthouse of one Seth Ismael. Later
the Haiderabad state offered him accommodation. He finally settled
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in a house in Harta Albab that was bought for him by one of his
disciples.17 It was in Mecca that he met Rahmatullah Kairanwi, the
fugitive scholar from Kairana we discussed in the last chapter.18
This meeting proved critical as it signaled the beginning of a lasting
intellectual bond that later proved critical in connecting Indian
Muslim cosmopolitanism to similar intellectual currents in the
Hijaz and other parts of the Ottoman world, a task already undertaken by Kairanwi.19
In Mecca, Imdadullah cashed in on the imperial moment of the
late nineteenth century that made the region an important cross
section in imperial politics. Here, paradoxically, competing imperial claims over diverse Muslim subjects and their networks also
offered an ideal ground in which to invoke the Islamic principle of
consensus in order to unite the umma. It was around this concept
that Imdadullah began to establish Muslim virtuous conduct as
a form of inclusive cosmopolitanism. Mecca offered the perfect
political, intellectual, and cultural platform that Imdadullah was
looking for.

Mecca, the Cradle of Muslim Cosmopolitanism

The role of Cairo as a cosmopolitan center that attracted runaway Muslim nationalists and reformists in the nineteenth century
has been well documented by Michael Laffan, Juan Cole, and
Azyumardi Azra.20 Even though no such nuanced study of Mecca
exists, the career of Imdadullah Makki demonstrates that it was certainly more than the cradle of a political economy triggered by haj.
Nor was it merely the seat of the inclusive type of Naqshbandiya
mujadidya scripturalist reform that was connected with the Salafi
purist reformists of the Middle East.21 In documents available in
colonial Dutch and British archives, it is seen as a multiethnic
melting pot of Muslim pilgrims as well as a seat of sedition and
the hub of an anti-Western politics. Both the Dutch ethnologist
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje as well as the British assistant consul
in the city, Abdur Razzack, regarded it as the cradle of a virulent and
divisive Islam.22
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And yet in Mecca a kind of Muslim cosmopolitanism was crafted

by Kairanwi and Imdadullah that bridged the sectarian and Sufi silsila divide, forging unity through the invocation of the Islamic principle of trust and faith (itemad) and consensus (ijma). Kairanwi and
Imdadullah selectively picked from aspects from all Islamic traditions. Imdadullahs Sufi order in Mecca earned its authority by estab
lishing a middle ground for the four different Sufi families of the
Naqshbandiyas, Qadariya, Chishtiyas, and Suhrawardiya. Imadadullah
upheld the organizational principles of the Sufi khanqhas (hospices),
which were based on hierarchies derived from models of family
patriarchies. He adopted their prescriptive norms to suit his interests. But he stamped this local eclectic mix with the universalism of
tauhid (belief in one Allah and the last Prophet) and the texts identified with it: the Koran and the Hadith. These universal templates
exemplified the continued usage of Shahwaliullas intellectual legacy.
Indeed, Imdadullah never failed to trace his intellectual genealogy
to this Delhi Naqshbandi Sufi.
The legacy proved handy at a time when the Prophet was represented by the reformists as an ideal individual and exemplar whose
life offered a model that could be emulated to negotiate better the
European challenge.23 And indeed, this mix of Sufi organizational
format, localized devotion, and emphasis on the Prophet, the Koran,
and the Hadith became ever more useful as contact between the
British and Ottoman worlds increased in the late nineteenth century. The Prophet emerged as a model to be emulated as tales about
him and his miraculous powers filtered in from Ottoman-controlled
Mecca and Medina. And as regional flavors of his appropriation
gathered momentum so did the awareness of his universal appeal as
a connector that could link Muslims to the world outside. His significance was realized in the early nineteenth century itself when
Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae Bareilly used him to launch his universalist Tariqa-i-Muhammadiya (the way of the Prophet) as a transnational therapy to combat European intrusions.24 Imdadullah and
Kairanwi took forward this idea of the global unity of Muslims that
centered around the Prophet.
Imdadullahs location at the heart of the Prophets homeland
Meccagave him a unique advantage. He along with Kairanwi
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physically met Muslims from all over the world from whom they
learned about the anti-European struggles elsewhere and with
whom they shared their own experience of British rule. Mecca
offered a ready audience of Muslim subjects who had the shared
experience of living in the shadow of Western imperialism. More
important, Mecca was a bridgehead into the Ottoman world, where
similar ideas of unity were being toyed with by Salafi reformists in
the cities of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo.
They benefited also from the temporal moment of the late nineteenth century. The period from the 1850s to the 1880s until the fall
of Egypt to Britain in 1882 constituted a unique momenta moment
in which borders between empires hardened but also one that paradoxically allowed for greater connectivity via new print, communication, and transportation technologies, especially the telegraph
and the steamship. In this period of high imperialism, the imposition of official nationalisms (being British Indian or Ottoman)
created new tensions for merchants and other members of business
communities who had traditionally crossed borders with ease to
earn their livelihood. At the same time, European intrusions in
South Asian and African political economies challenged the livelihood of peasants and urban workers alike. 25 The state-sponsored
hardening of national identities could slip very quickly into a religious gear in societies that were strong on primordial caste, sect,
and religious referents. And thus the resentments against European
powers in Ottoman Africa, the Hijaz, and British India often took
on the color of Muslim-Christian clashes.
Paradoxically, print capitalism, the telegraph, and new kinds of
industrial technology that fueled resentment by upsetting the traditional social order also fueled dissent. These technologies became
the grid across which news, political experiences, runaways, and
professionals from British India could move to the Hijaz and to Arab
and African territories of the Ottoman Empire, and vice versa. And
thus it was no coincidence that the events of 1857 in India coincided
with the 18561858 anti-Christian riots in Jeddah, the 1860 riots
between Druze and Christians in Damascus, and the 1870s riots in
Egypt (which culminated in the 1882 Alexandria riots). There was
a connectedness to these riots that rested on and reinforced the
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connected
histories of the British and Ottoman Empires. Juan Cole
calls this imperial moment of unprecedented connectedness the
age of secondary revolts. People who experienced the events of 1857
were active in the riots in Cairo,26 and in Jeddah the wealthy Indian
merchant Faraj Yusr, who was pro-British, was attacked. In the
Hijaz, Indian migrants known or suspected to have had a role in
leading the riots were always under surveillance. In the Arab peninsula, more than ten thousand Indians had returned to Mecca in the
decade that followed 1857, and they instigated protests.27
In the context of this imperial moment it is not surprising that
Imdadullah found a ready niche for himself in Mecca as an 1857
fugitive. Imdadullahs location in the city that was a global Muslim
metropolis encouraged him to forge an alternate Islamic imperium
as a spiritual and civilizational space between empires. This became
strategically critical in combating the British imperium. The movement of people from Ottoman and the British cities to Mecca offered
him the rare opportunity to connect with like-minded religious
scholars and intellectuals from Delhi, Deoband, Baghdad, Damascus,
Istanbul, and Cairo. He taught at the Madrasa Saulatiya of Maulana
Kairanwi, where he met scholars from all these cities. Kairanwi
helped him maintain his links with Istanbul as well.28 His interactions with Muslims across the globe made it possible for him to
burrow through fast-hardening imperial borders and make them
porous.
Imdadullahs writing career flowered in Mecca as he sought to
further his agenda of uniting the umma by invoking the Islamic
concept of achieving consensus regarding contentious issues that
divided the community. This invocation of consensus had roots in
his Indo-Persian upbringing. The Mughal emperor, Akbar, viewed
the Naqshbandi global networks that connected the Central Asian,
Ottoman, and Mughal worlds with suspicion whenever he faced any
political crisis. His orientation toward the Chishtiya Sufis, who
embedded his empire in Indian society, was a way to balance the
perceived Naqshbandi threat. It marked the Mughal tradition of
consensus that was invoked at moments of imperial crisis. 29 Indeed,
even in periods of political stability Akbar aimed at establishing
consensus between different Sufi brotherhoods so as to highlight
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the universal dimension of his religious tradition. This Mughal

legacy of compromise and social harmony enabled Indo-Persian
gentlemen to straddle all four Sufi brotherhoods and to perform
multiple initiations. Imdadullah, himself the last of the Mughal gentlemen legatees, was a case in point.
It is thus not surprising that in Mecca he smoothly slipped into
the Ottoman tradition of writing consensus literature in the context
both of social diversity and of the political need to unite the umma.30
Unfettered from the British imperial frame and away from his dissenting peers in Hindustan, he wrote consensus literature with greater
confidence and robustness. This resulted in the publication of several books that were written in Mecca but in active consultation
with scholars in India. They found wide circulation in the connected
world of the British and Ottoman Empires and were understandably
multilingualpenned in Persian, Urdu, and Arabic. These included
the Zia-ul-Qulub in Persian with an Urdu translation; the Sharah
Faisla Haft Masala in Arabic with a later Urdu translation, the Faislah
Haft-i-Maslah; the Masnavi Maulana Rum in Persian; the Ghiza-iRuh in Urdu; and the Jihad i-Akbar in Urdu.
His books articulated an inclusive cosmopolitanism as an early
form of transnationalism that had global aspirations. They reveal
that, temporally, Muslim cosmopolitanism was launched during the
1857 unrest that saw Indian Muslims cross over to Ottoman Mecca.
Spatially, this cosmopolitanism maintained its intellectual links
with India, even as it grew out of debates conducted in the scholarly
circles of the Ottoman cities of Mecca, Istanbul, Cairo, and Baghdad.
It carved out an alternate civilizational imperium at the cusp of the
British and Ottoman Empires. The text, Zia-ul-Qulub, in Persian
with an Arabic and Urdu translation, which we discuss below, exemplifies best this brand of cosmopolitanism.
Imdadullah wrote the Persian text Zia-ul-Qulub (Light of the
Heart), originally titled Marghob Dil, in Mecca in 1857.31 According
to him, he was persuaded to write such a text by Hafiz Muhammad
Yusuf, who was of the Chishti sect.32 The preface states that the book
was written because its patron, Muhmmad Yusuf, asked Imdadullah
to pen down three forms of devotionashghal, azkar, and maraqabat
identified with the Chishti silsila. This compendium was meant for
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the benefit of the people in Hindustan who were deprived of

Imdadullahs company after his migration to Mecca. Yusuf was convinced that such a compilation would also be useful for posterity.
Imdadullah was reluctant to write this book as he lacked confidence
in his scholarly abilities. As he stated, Yeah martabah sheikh kamil
va mukamal ka hai. (This is the task of the scholarly and the perfect.) However, he also noted that God gave him the strength and
inspiration to undertake the task.33
The original Persian text was published in Hindustan by the private printing press of Muhammad Abdul Rahman Khan.34 The
choice of Persian suggests that it was intended to reach out to his
constituency in Hindustan. It was followed by an Urdu translation,
intended for a wider circulation in Hindustan. But the audience in
the Middle East was also very much on Imdadullahs agenda. In
a letter to Ashraf Ali Thanawai, Imdadullah requested that the
Zia-ul-Qulub be translated into Arabic and sent back to the Hijaz
for wider circulation in the Arabian, Egyptian, and Central Asian
societies, where people did not know the Persian and Hindustani
languages.35
The publication of the text in multiple languages, its production
site, and the timing of its publication showcased Imdadullahs efforts
to carve out a Muslim cosmopolitanism with transimperial aspirations. His quest for global connectivity was a response to the official nationalism stamped on Muslim subjects by the imperial
powers. The official imposition of national identities had heightened as countries sharpened their political contours by setting up
consulates across the globe and introduced their flag-bearing steamships, quarantine procedures, personal identification papers, travel
documents, and hospitals at imperial crossroads, and in particular,
at the Muslim pilgrimage site at Mecca.36
Imdadullah used the text to reach a middle ground by bringing
different Sufi silsilas and sects of Muslims together. The Urdu version of the Zia-ul-Qulub is a sixty-four-page text that goes beyond
the brief that Yusuf gave to Imdadullah. It articulates a form of
Muslim public conduct as an urbane civility based on a virtuous
disposition as sanctioned by the Shariat. The guide, or murshid, had
a pivotal role in fashioning this conduct as a form of inclusive
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cosmopolitanism.
The text breaks new ground in Muslim intellectual history as it dilutes the late nineteenth-century trend toward
the individuation of prescriptive religion: individual interpretation
of the Koran and the Hadith and self-moderation in forms of devotion. And yet it does not discard this tendency toward individuation
entirely. Indeed, the text reaches a middle ground in bringing different Sufi silsilas and sects of Muslims together.37
The Delhi Naqshbandiya silsila of Shahwaliulla, with its Arabicist
worldview, had encouraged individuation of religion, even as it borrowed from the Sufi organizational format of the hospice and
adopted the practice of the oath of allegiance to its leader. Its notable
legatees, like the reformist Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, continued to
combine the scriptures with the Sufi emphasis on initiation into the
silsila with the oath of allegiance to the guide. However, this allegiance was to be a very private, individual affair. They shunned as
heresy (biddat) any public form of devotion centered on pir, murshid,
or khalifa. The individuals reliance on moderators in matters of
devotion was discouraged.38 Instead, they encouraged devotees to
model their lives in accordance with the Koran, the Hadith, and the
life of the Prophet alone (tariqa-i-Muhammadiya).
In contrast, Imdadullah underlined the supremacy and the salience
of the guide over self-interpretation of scriptures. He argued that
when God wished to give someone direction the blessed one shuns
all his sinful acts and turns toward Him. But a guide should mediate
this relationship with God, as the individual himself is incapable of
forging a direct relationship. And thus he should hand himself over
to some murshid kamil, or the perfect guide. Imdadullah, very much
like the medieval Indo-Persianate political theorists who invoked
the analogy of the ideal physician to define the perfect king, compared the perfect guide to the best of the physicians. He described
him as the physician of the soul and followed the format of devotion
(saluk) prescribed by him.39 According to him, the perfect guide
should take care of the internal well-being of the individual, very
much like the physician who cures the physical ailments of his
patients. Imdadullah presented the guide as an exemplar of Islamic
virtuous conduct, which he saw as a form of urbane civility that is
universalist in its reach. According to him, Islamic public conduct as
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modeled on that of the guide should be embracive and inclusive

within the theological frame. Thus the guide/physician should be
an epitome of good conduct. He should uphold the Shariat and
tariqat and should follow the Koran and the Sunnat. According to
Imdadullah, the physician-like guide has to first cure the inner diseases of jealousy, pride, cheating, and envy. It is only once these are
replaced by good conduct that the grace of God will arrive.40
Thus, the murshid and the Islamic notion of consensus (ijma) and
mutual trust (itemad) become the key to forging the unity of the
umma, and this consensus is based on a standard form of virtuous
public conduct. Imdadullah described the varied prescriptive formats offered by different Sufi silsilas to get close to God: akhyar ka
tariqa, ashab mujahidat va riyazat ka tariqa, Shatariya tariqa. In each
of these the guide played a critical role in shaping proper conduct.
But it is important to note that the book aimed to synthesize the
four main Sufi sects around a prescriptive conduct and arrive at a
common meeting ground in their forms of devotion to God (zikr).
Imdadullah built a consensus on Muslim virtuous conduct based on
tolerance and recognition of internal difference. This became the
universalist template that united the umma. This form of urbane
civility constituted Imdadullahs cosmopolitanism. He was successful in forging a compromise public conduct as he like many
others of his peer group had multiple initiations into Sufi silsilas.
This inculcated in him the spirit of tolerance. He had been initiated
into the Naqshbandiya mujadidya silsila by his guide Nasiruddun
Dehlavi, and into the other three by his later pir, Mian Nur
Muhmammad Jhanjhanwi. And thus the book has chapters on all
four Sufi sects.
The first chapter focuses on the Chishti prescriptions and
describes how to take oath of allegiance and perform different forms
of devotion: ashghal, azkar, and maraqabat. The text elaborates on the
different ways in which to perform zikr (celebrating God). This was
to be done by expressing devotion to a range of superior entities
associated with the Chishtiya Sufi silsila: zikr ism zat, zikr nafi va
asbat, shaghal Sultana nasi, and so forth.41 It also includes discussions
on forms of meditation (marqabat aur anwarat) associated with the
members of the silsila. The second section concentrates on similar
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prescriptions for forms of devotion prescribed by the Qadariya

silsila, including prescriptions for forms of devotion to Godzikr
like ism zat, and meditation styles of the Qadariya Sufi order. Dif
ferent forms of revelations like those announced after the call for
prayer are also described.42 The third section describes the prescriptive norms of the Naqshbandi Sufis. It ignores their reformist doctrines and instead focuses on prescriptions that overlap with the
other Sufi silsilas: meditation, augury or reliance on omens, forms of
celebration of God like the zikr jarub, the rituals for concluding
the devotion to revered elders, and the rituals for the visit to the
Prophets tomb.43
The fourth chapter lays out consensual universal norms on the
recitation of the Koran and bodily comportment to be followed
during prayer. These norms constitute a type of Muslim virtuous
public conduct that would unite the culturally diverse umma.44 The
prescriptions for the visit to the Prophets tomb constitute another
set of standardized norms of conduct intended to unite the sects.
Imdadullah represents these prescriptions as exemplars of the communitys ability to arrive at a consensus on such matters.45 The text
also takes many other mooted rituals and forms of conduct that traditionally divided the Muslims and builds a consensus around them.
Imdadullah suggests a standard, common format of devotion (saluk)
for all Muslims, and recommends three sets of public conduct to
sort out differences and unite the umma. The first way of saluk
includes public conduct centered around fasting, prayers, Koranic
recitation, haj, and jihad. The second standardizes conduct by urging
the individual to give up undesirable actions and adopt good conduct. In a discussion of the last form of saluki, Imdadullah reaches
out to his reformist colleagues by emphasizing the individual, self-
driven way to reach God. According to him, here one avoids the
company of good people, renounces austerity and abstinence, and
engages in individuated forms of devotion that are self-drivenlike
chanting the praises of God in a self-guided wayzikr.46
In the conclusion, Imdadullah prescribes some select Koranic
recitations, which he wants people to remember and follow as his
lasting intellectual legacy. The book ends with praises and a discussion of his two Deoband associates and relatives, Maulanas Rashid
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Ahmed Gangoi and Qasim Nanautawi. He praises them and prays

that their good work will go a long way to light up the world.47
The Zia-ul-Qulub is significant because here the focus shifts from
the self and the individual to the guide as a moderator of virtuous
conduct. A more important point is that the moderator mediates not
only between the individual and God but between the local and the
universal by setting standardized universal formats of devotion.
These offer a middle ground between diverse Sufi orders and sects
of Muslims and also provide a global reach. And thus the book
reaches out both to the regional flavors of Sufi orders as well as to
the Koran and the Hadith, which have global appeal. This combination of the local and the global constitutes the formula that produces a standard norm for ideal public conduct, which in turn will
connect Muslims globally and unite them locally. This model of
Muslim virtuous conduct is a form of cosmopolitanism that is a
theologically framed form of urbane civility. Imdadullah wrote this
book to balance the local with the universal templates of Islam. He
made the scriptures the meeting ground for all four Sufi orders, as
did the reformists with their focus on the individual and the self-
interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith.
In its attempts to forge unity by accommodating dissent within
the Muslim community the Zia-ul-Qulub is an archetypal nineteenthcentury text that showcases Muslim concerns and strategies in the
face of new challenges. It shows that the most common response of
Muslims was to balance the local with the global and the particular
with the new stress on standardization and professionalization of
religious norms.
Imdadullahs unique position as an 1857 refugee in Mecca enabled
him to standardize devotion and ritual as a form of universalist
Islamic virtuous conduct. At this site of Ottoman-British rivalry he
used his Indo-Persian gentlemanly upbringing, which gave him a
command of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic, to negotiate to his advantage the imperial borders. Mecca enabled him to write a text like the
Zia-ul-Qulub, through which he could aspire to lay out transimperial connections as a form of cosmopolitanism that embodied
Muslim virtuous conduct based on the Islamic principle of consensus (ijma). His cosmopolitanism leveled the differences between
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the four main Sufi orders, and brought on board the scripturalist
reformists as well, by advocating a consensual public conduct that
everyone accepted. This prescriptive conduct embraced customs
and rituals of diverse sects and Sufi brotherhoods and was based on
the principle of compromise. Its wide ambit included devotion to
God, recitation of Koran, and visits to tombs of saints (zikr, tilawat,
and ziyarat). This form of urbane civility based on tolerance and
recognition of difference constitutes Imdadullahs cosmopolitanism,
one that is accretive and global as well as locally grounded.
In the book, Imdadullah defines zikr as a stage in which the individual forgets everyone except God and obtains peace of heart
(zahuriyat qalb) by submitting himself to Him. According to him,
there are many forms of zikr. Any deed ( fail) or practice (amal) to
address and remember God is zikr. These include both the universal
templates of Islam like prayers (namaz), salutations and blessings
(durud), and recitation of Koran (tilawat) as well as local Sufi forms
of devotion. And thus zikr includes many different types. By his
embracive definition of zikr, Imdadullah connects the local forms of
devotion to standardized universal connectors of Islam that are
derived from the scriptures: the namaz, durud, and tilawat.
He argues that there are several types of zikr depending on varied
forms of rituals prescribed by different Sufi sects to celebrate
God. He describes those followed by the Naqshbandiya, Chishtiya,
Suhrawardiya, and Qadariya Sufi orders. These include zikr jarub,
zikr arah, zikr hadadi, and zikr qalandari. Each of these, he explains,
has different bodily deportments. And yet they are all connected to
the same universal referent, Allah. He describes the comportment
regime specific to each Sufi order and makes a plea for one consensual format of a standardized Muslim public conduct, one that would
link the local rituals of devotion to the global as represented in the
universal reference point of God and the scriptures.
Imdadullah describes in detail the bodily deportment prescribed
by each of the four Sufi orders to express devotion to God. Their
local variations notwithstanding, they all reach out to a common
reference point: belief in One God and his Prophet. According to
him, the Qalandariya Sufi order (Tariqa Ism-i-zat Qalandari) has the
following deportment format: the person should sit and bow his
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head, bringing it to his knees. He should bring his head close to the
naval and utter the name of Allah before raising it up.48 Imdadullah
then explains the bodily deportment called zikr Jarub, also prescribed for the celebration of God. In this format, the individual
conveys his faith in God and the Prophet (kalima) by moving his
head from the side of his left knee and turning it to the right, taking
it right up to his shoulder. And then, bending his head toward his
waist, he utters the kalima with all his strength and continues to do
so.49 The procedures of zikr hadadi follow a different body deportment wherein the person has to hold his breath and utter la ilaha
(One Allah) taking the head up to the right shoulder. Then both
shoulders and both hands have to be raised and the entire kalima
recited out loud. Next, placing both hands alongside his legs, the
person should clasp his thighs and then sit down. This zikr is related
to Imam Hadi and is the most difficult to perform.50 Imdadullah
stresses that the variations in body deportment notwithstanding, all
forms of zikr are directed toward pleasing One Allah. And this
common referent brings these diverse forms of deportment regimes
all of which constitute zikrtogether.
Imdadullah combines the local and the universal, and emphasizes
the role of the guide for all the forms of zikr, their local flavors notwithstanding. At the same time, he is quick to show that these local
variations apart, there are certain universal forms of devotion that
override all regional particularities: prayers, recitation of the names
of God, and the recitation of Koranic verses (namaz, durud, and
tilawat). These do not require a guide and are entirely self-directed.
Imdadullah argues that the guide is the mediator not just between
God and the individual but also between the local and the global.
The text stresses the significance of the guide because he is the
agent who makes localized renditions of devotion connect to standardized norms of universally acceptable conduct. For instance,
zikrthe celebration of Godcan have local ritualistic variations,
but when moderated by the guide zikr can make all the devotees
connect to the singular universal reference pointone God or
Allah. Imdadullah compares the guide to a physician. Both are
agents of well-being. In the context of late nineteenth-century theology as well as medicine, both needed to reach out to universal
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standardized referents even as they zealously guarded and showed

sensitivity to the local in the healing of the body spiritually and
physically. The text makes this analogy to the nineteenth-century
physician at several points. Indeed, Imdadullah was known for comparing the guide to the physician and his hospice to the hospital, the
guide in charge of spiritual well-being and the physician taking care
of physical health.51
Imdadullah wanted his model of Muslim public conduct to become
a universal template that would connect Muslims globally. It was his
ardent desire that his Zia-ul-Qulub, which embodied this template
for prescriptive conduct, be disseminated far and wide. He wanted
people in the British and the Ottoman worlds to read it and comment on it so that he could refine further his universalist model of
public conduct. His temporal and spatial location gave him access to
older repertoires of connectivitymigrant networks and multilingual communities from the Indo-Persian cultureas well as to new
forms of connectivity via the imperial networks of steamship transportation, telegraphic communication, and print capitalism. He
reconfigured these networks to disseminate Muslim virtuous conduct as a universal referent and to unite the umma around it.
He called his book the murshid-i-kamil (the perfect guide). He
wanted people to keep it close to them as a companion text, much in
the way they kept talismans close to their body. For instance, in a
letter to Maulana Abdul Wahid Bengali, Imdadullah refers to the
text as a perfect guidemurshid-i-kamil. He advises Bengali to keep
it close to him all the time in the manner of a talisman, and he asks
Bengali to write to him or to his peers Maulvi Qasim and Maulvi
Rashid Ahmed Gangoi if any clarification is required.52
The exceptional status that he accorded to his book is reminiscent
of the ways reformists talked about the Koran and the Hadith. And
very much like them, he too emphasized that his book was a guide
to be used for both the physical as well as the spiritual well-being of
people. He highlighted the sections in the text that offer prescriptions for physical ailments like constipation. The remedies that the
book offers rest on the assumption that such ailments are caused by
unregulated forms of devotion that make the individual neglect his
physical health.53 At the same time, he encouraged Hakim Ziauddin
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in Deoband to ask his students to freely consult Zia-ul-Qulub for

any clarifications they might need on matters of devotion. In letters
he wrote to Hakim Ziauddin, Imdadullah specifically asks him to let
the students train themselves in the art of taking bait and in the
conduct of zikr, using the prescriptions noted in the text.54
Even though written in Mecca, the language of the original text
is Persian, which indicates that his target audience continued to be
the Indo-Persian literate audience back in India. The choice of
Persian revealed that Imdadullah exercised restraint in circulat
ing his eclectic text from the Arab heartland of Mecca. This was a
city where even after the fall of the Wahabi control (1819) and the
establishment of Ottoman rule the climate of religious scholar
ship was heavily influenced by reformist Sufi doctrines of both the
Mediterranean Salafi and the South Asian Naqshbandiya kind
both of which relied heavily on individual interpretation of doctrinaire texts to reach out to the world outside, and which minimized
reliance on mediator guides and public devotions to them. The individual, they argued, could use universal templates like the sacred
texts and the Prophet to connect to the world outside, overriding
the local magnetic pull of diverse forms of Sufi devotions and practice. In contrast, for Imdadullah, Muslim transimperial outreach
was a kind of cosmopolitanism that was exemplified in a universalist
public conduct that depended on the direction and guidance of a
leader. It delved into the local even as it connected to the universal
referents of the Koran and the Hadith. It based itself on consensus
within a theological frame.
Imdadullah targeted readers in the Hijaz and the Ottoman territories as well. He was keen that an Arabic version of the text also be
prepared and circulated in the Mediterranean world. But this had to
be done with care. His caution is reflected in the fact that he had the
Arabic translation published in Hindustan. His letters to Maulana
Ashraf Ali Thanawi reveal the range of private publishers he engaged
and his excessive monitoring of the publication even as he gave a free
hand to his Deobandi peers to make corrections to the translation.
He urged Thanawi to have the book translated and published at
the earliest time possible by the private press of his acquaintance
Abdul Rahman Khan. Imdadullah informed Thanawi that the
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manuscript
had been dispatched via Maulvi Muhammad Husain
Allahabadi, who also had promised to have it published. He gave
Thanawi the following instructions:
Aapp kei pir bhai ahl-i-Arab jo ji yahan makkah mukarramah
aur madineh munawwarah aur Misr va Ddaghistan vaghaira Arab
kei mulk mein hain bawa jah nawafiq honei zaban farsi aur hindi
kei go naa seekhnei aur tarikh saluk vaghaira sei mutaasrin
bina bar aasani va tashil kei qabl azeen tarjumah arabi risalah
Zia-ul-Qulub-musannifah faquir, azizum maulvi Muhammad
Husain sahib Allahabadi taba karnie ko lei gaye hain.
The people of Arabia, living in Mecca, Medina, Egypt,
Daghistan, etc. do not know the Persian and Hindavi languages
and are unfamiliar with its history and conduct. It is for their
convenience that the Zia-ul-Qulub [manuscript] has been taken
by the scribe Muhammad Husain Allahabadi [to Hindustan]
for publication in its Arabic translation.55
Imdadullah asked Thanawi to have at least one to two hundred
copies published, and he promised payment at the earliest opportunity. He requested that Thanawi take particular care of the paper
and the binding of the copies. He insisted that Thanawi and the
publishers should not hesitate to consult him in case any clarification was required.56 In subsequent letters he continued to inquire
about the status of the publication and emphasized the urgency of
sending the Arabic version quickly to the Hijaz. He stressed the
urgency of obtaining the copies because, as he stated, [The] religious Shaikhs or notables of Arabia, Syria, and Istanbul [were] anxiously awaiting its arrival (aksar mashaikh-i-Arab va sham va
istanbol iskei muntazir hain).57
The Zia was translated into Arabic in Deoband. In a letter to
Thanawi, Imdadullah urged him to have the translation published
soon and to dispatch it to him at the earliest. He promised to send
one hundred rupees via any acquaintance going to Deoband.58 Even
on his deathbed in 1898, Imdadullah wrote to Thanawi in anguish
that despite hearing news for the last two years that the translation
of the Zia was ready he had not received a single copy.59
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The Zia-ul-Qulub encapsulated Imdadullahs brand of Muslim

cosmopolitanism. Indeed, he designed it as the bridgehead that
would connect the local forms of devotion with the universal templates: belief in one God, or Allah; the Prophet; and the Koran and
the Hadith. The guide (murshid) is the chief interlocutor who enables
the individual to remain entrenched in the local and to reach out to
universal referents. The text shifted the focus from individual
agency to the mediator guide, and from doctrinaire texts to advisory guidance literature like itself. It synthesized the local Sufi
orders and regional customs with the Koran and the Hadith to prescribe Muslim public conduct that had global appeal. Imdadullahs
cosmopolitanism was the bedrock from which transimperial Muslim
networks emanated. The laying out of such networks was his
response to the official nationalism engineered by Western imperial powers in South and West Asia. Imdadullah made imperial borders porous through his cosmopolitanism, which nurtured Muslim
transimperial aspirations.
Imdadullah wanted the book to be widely circulated in Hindustan
as a popular guidebook. In a letter to his peer, Maulvi Wahid Khan
of Deoband, he revealed that he wrote the book in accordance with
the wishes of his relatives in Hindustan. He called the book a collection of verses on the celebration of God (azkar), devotion (ashghal),
and forms of meditation (maraqabat). He sent it to Hindustan so that
people could consult it with ease and solve their daily problems. He
wanted Wahid Khan to collect the text from Maulvi Ismael
Saharanpuri and have it copied and keep it with him as his guide and
overseer (uskee naqal karr walein aur apnei pass mahfuz rakhein aur
apnaa peshwa banaein). He drew Wahid Khans attention, in particular, to the forms of conduct (tariqa saluk) that he had listed. He
recommended them to the learned as the most beneficial, and wanted
them to be widely disseminated to all men of religion (maulvi-aur
mausufon ko tahsil karein).60 Indeed, he reiterated that the book was
comprehensive and that it offered guidance for appropriate conduct
and comportment: prescriptive rituals for the visit to the Prophets
tomb and all other kinds of devotion. In a series of anxious letters to
Wahid Khan, he asked if the published book had reached him. He
informed Wahid Khan that copies of it were with Maulanas Rashid
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and Qasim and could be collected if required. He wanted Wahid

Khan to regard Zia-ul-Qulub as murshid-i-kamil (perfect guide) and
to designate it as the talisman of his hospice (khanqah kee taaweez
banayein).61
He wanted his book to be designated murshid and hadi raah (guide
and companion). He wanted to keep it away from undesirable people
(na-ahal).62 In response to another letter from Wahid Khan ask
ing for advice about an ailment (marz malum), Imdadullah recommended that Walid Khan consult the Zia-ul-Qulub, which listed
different types of zikrs that offer cures.63 He advised Wahid Khan
to feel free to write to him and ask for any clarification that he might
require.64
The transimperial networks that ensured the books publication
and wide circulation also enabled its production. It was written in
Mecca but with input from and in consultation with scholars in
India. Its manuscript straddled the British and Ottoman worlds,
using networks of scribes, financiers, private printing press owners,
and scholars who connected the two empires. It was finally published
in Meerut, in North India, in 1867 and translated in the lifetime of
Imdadullah into Urdu as Tasfitah Alqalub by Maulana Nizamuddin
Ashaq Kairanwi and Maulvi Muhammad Beg. The Urdu version
was published from Delhi after his death in 1910. Since then it has
appeared in several editions.65
Imdadullah sent the manuscript of Zia-ul-Qulub to Maulvi Rashid
of Deoband for a thorough review before he finalized it. In several
letters to Rashid he expressed concern about its safe receipt in
Deoband. He sent the manuscript via Haji Ismael Saharanpuri, who
had visited him. He explained to Rashid that the manuscript was a
compilation of forms of devotion (azkar va ashghal) of the Chishtiya
and other Sufi orders that came to his notice via the elderly wise
men of the Qadariya and Chishtiya orders. He wanted him to read
it from beginning to end without any reservations and add or delete
whatever he thought was necessary. He gave him free license to
change words and inappropriate phrases and quickly begin to use
the final corrected version. (Isko awwal sei akhir tak baghor mutala
kar kei jo kutch kam va zyada karna manzur ho yaa alfaz va abarat
ghair muhawara ho durust kar kei kaam mein layein.)66 In another
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letter to Rashid he expressed relief on having heard the news that

the Risala Zia-ul-Qulub had reached Hindustan safely. He wanted
Rashid and others to read it carefully and prayed that God would
make it acceptable and beneficial.67
The book was published in Meerut by the city notable Maulvi
Abdul al Hakim, who was the brother of Abdul Karim Rais and
Sheikh Ilahi Baksh, the thekedar (contractor) of Meerut. In a letter
to the Deoband maulana Qasim Naunatawi, Imdadullah stated that
these men should be supplied with the manuscript of Zia-ul-Qulub
as they had shown interest in its publication. They had also written
to him promising that they would get it published according to his
wishes and that they would then send the published book to the
Deoband maulvis Qasim and Rashid. Imdadullah accepted the offer
and asked Maulvi Qasim to personally take the manuscript to
Meerut and hand it over to Munshi Mumtaz Ali, who would oversee
its publication in Maulvi Abdul al Hakims press. Imdadullah was
particularly concerned that Maulvi Qasim take care that the form
and content of the manuscript remain unchanged in the course of its
publication. He remarked, Apnei samnei puri sahat aur hashiyah
waghiara kei ihtemam sei munshi Mumtaz Ali sahib kei chapahkhanei mein chapwah lein. (Under your direct supervision get it
published in the printing press of Munshi Mumtaz Ali Sahib.) 68 At
the same time he also authorized him to change whatever words he
thought inappropriate, and to remove whatever he thought was
unnecessary.69 He wrote several letters that inquire about the delay
in the manuscript reaching Meerut, and that reiterate the eagerness
of Maulvi Abdul Hakim to publish it with his own money. In a letter
to Qasim, Imdadullah expressed total faith in him and requested
that he look into the contents of the manuscript and have it published under his aegis and scrutiny.70 The book was finally published
in Meerut in 1867.71
The history of the books publication reveals the vibrant network
of ideas that moved via migrant scholars, printing networks, and
financiers across the British and Ottoman worlds. Migrant populations of religious scholars, traders, and professionals who connected
the British and Ottoman worlds became the conduit for Imdadullahs
constant intellectual transactions with Hindustan. They ensured
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that the intellectual capital generated by him in Mecca reached both

the specialists and laymen in Hindustan who enriched it through
their input. These individuals also ensured that his book would have
the widest possible dissemination via the many private printing
presses maintained by the elite merchant community and the gentry
in Hindustan. Most important, they established a permanent link
between, on the one hand, the narrowly scripture-centric reformist
scholars of Deoband and, on the other, Imdadullah, whose views
were relatively eclectic even if his intellectual journey had begun in
Deoband.
Imdadullahs unique circumstance and location enabled him to
engineer a Muslim cosmopolitanism that was a far cry from the
exclusive scripturalist agenda of the scholars from the Deoband
seminary (Deobandis). His literature offered a universalist model of
Muslim conduct as an adhesive for the unity of the umma across the
Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world. It connected the regions
as a civilizational and spiritual continuum, making the impervious
imperial borders irrelevant.

The Masnavi Rum

Imdadullahs other texts and publications had a similar spatial and
temporal history. Most of them were written in Persian in Mecca in
interaction with the people of Hindustan. They were sent back to
Hindustan for final comments, translation into Arabic, and publication. And like the Zia-ul-Qulub they straddled the British and
Ottoman worlds via the networks of scholars, scribes, financiers,
and publishers that brought the two empires together. The Masnavi
Rumone of Imdadullahs most favorite textsis a case in point.
In Mecca, Imdadullah was known for his lectures on the Masnavi.72
Indeed, his lectures (darrs) made him famous not just in Mecca but
in the entire Ottoman world. Scholars from Ottoman-controlled
Arabia, Turkey, and North Africa attended his darrs. People from
British India attended as well.73 He was involved from a very early
stage in his career in understanding the most complex sections of
the text. He would note down his thoughts on and reactions to the
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text. The Masnavi was popular in the Chishti Sufi order, into which
Imdadullah was initiated very early in his career. Most elders of this
order had made the text their routine reading. He had attended lectures on the Masnavi given by Shah Abdul Razzack, who himself
was privileged to have studied the text from Maulvi Abul Hasan
Kandhalwi. He was a special teacher because his father, Majid mufti
Ilahi Baksh, claimed that he had read the Masnavi under the direction of Maulana Rum himself.74
Very much as with Zia-ul-Qulub, after Imdadullah migrated to
Mecca his followers in India asked him to publish the Masnavi afresh
with his comments. And again, very similar to his experience in
publishing the Zia-ul-Qulub, the Masnavi with his commentary was
sent back to India by one of his Hindustani visitors. But it was
reportedly misplaced. On Imdadullahs request, it was located by
Rashid Gangoi, who sent it back to Imdadullah. It was returned to
Hindustan for publication by Maulvi Ahmad Hasan Kanpuri.75
Imdadullah was willing to dispatch one hundred rupees to Hindustan
via any reliable visitor for the speedy publication of the Masnavi.
Keeping a hand in the production process in Hindustan, he made
it evident in his letters to Thanawi that Qari Ahmad Makki and
others from Hindustan had kept him aware of the latest news
about its production.76 In another letter, Imdadullah sought the
help of Asharaf Ali Thanawi in getting the book published at the
earliest opportunity, and pointed out that he had identified errors
in the earlier editions of the book. He was thus anxious that his
edited version should have no errors and should be sent to him
for final approval. He wanted his original manuscript to be preserved by Thanawi and Ahmad Hasan as it would bring them
prosperity.77
Imdadullah explained the difficult parts of the text in its margins.
He clarified to Thanawi that these notes were his own interpretations of the text. He was aware that others might not necessarily
appreciate his notes in the margins. And in certain places they were
repetitive as well. He said that he was happy to send his original
manuscript to Hindustan in case it was required.78 In another letter
to Thanawi he requested that he look at the content of the manuscript and supervise its publication. He wanted him to take due
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care of the quality of the paper and of the books production.79 The
book in its translated Urdu form with Imdadullahs comments was
finally published by a private publishing house called Matbai Nami
in Kanpur.
Imdadullah was very satisfied when he received the published
Masnavi. In a letter to Asharaf Ali Thanawi, he conveyed his hope
that the text would reach the pinnacle of success.80 Only two volumes of the text were published in his lifetime. The rest were completed later. He was delighted to receive four copies of the second
volume, but he expressed his anxiety about not receiving the third
volume. He was also concerned that he had incurred a loan of Rs.
1,500 on the publication of the earlier two volumes.81
Imdadullah, in his letters to associates like Hakim Muhammad
Zia, invariably mentioned the Masnavi as a text that was a vital read
for ones peace of mind. He commented, Sufiyah kee kutab akhlaq
ka mutalah masl tarjuman haya al uloom va kimiya-i-sadat va masnavi sharif kabhi kabhi karte raho agar talb khuda aaye. Jo kutch
apnei buzurgon sei paya hai talim karo. (Whenever you want to
remember God, read the Masnavi. And educate yourself from the
knowledge you have inherited from your elders.)82 He also recommended the published book highly to Thanawi and said that once it
was finalized and printed it would benefit the general public as well
as its publisher and those who assisted in its preparation.83

Faislah Haft-i-Maslah
The text Faislah Haft-i-Maslah (Verdict on Seven Issues) exemplified
best the Islamic cosmopolitanism that Imdadullah wished to achieve.
Written in Arabic in Mecca, this was Imdadullahs last effort to reconcile warring Muslim sects and make them arrive at a common
meeting ground. He developed a consensual standardized Muslim
public conduct that aimed to weld together Muslims across British
and the Ottoman societies and create for them a shared civilizational and spiritual space.
The Faislah Haft-i-Maslah focuses on issues of custom and ritual
that were controversial and caused friction between different sects
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of Muslims. Imdadullah makes it very clear that he is suggesting a

compromise on these mooted issues to arrive at a middle road and
end once and for all the sectarian disagreements. (Aur koi sahib iss
tehrir kei jawab kee fikr na karein maqsud mera munazara karna
naheen.)84 He identifies seven such issues that divide Muslims
five that are amli (practical) and two that are ilmi (intellectual). The
amli issues include mouloud (celebration of the birth of the Prophet),
fatihaa (prayer for the dead), murrawaja (customs), urrs (celebration
of the cult of the saint), and samai or qawwali (collective singing in
praise of God and the Prophet). The ilmi ones are Imkaane Nazeer
and Imkaane Kazab. The former, Imkaane Nazeer, concerns the revealed
truth about the exceptional status of the last Prophet; the latter,
Imkaane Kazab, looks at the falsehood about the existence of any
one apart from Allah, who is imperishable (fanna mumkin naheen).
Imdadullah makes it very clear that he does not want people to waste
too much time quarreling over these issues. He wants no further
discussion or debate on these matters; his stated goal is for people to
arrive at a consensus, because of the urgent need for Muslims to
achieve unity.85 Imdadullah was of the view that history and historicity could aid Muslims in arriving at a consensus on matters of
faith. He was of the view that all the contentious practices could be
easily accommodated within Islam as each of them had a long history in Islamic societies. Thus in his book, with a view to minimizing disagreements, he offers history and a historicist claim as
the way to distinguish between truth and falsity. He asserts that his
opponents are not false but need to provide more evidence for their
claims to be taken seriously.86
He declares that the mouloud ritual (the celebration of the Prophets
birth) that divided the community amounts to zikr-i-khuda (the celebration of God). He cites ayayte karima (a verse from the Koran) to
observe that yaad i-Ilahi (remembrance of God) is not limited or
confined to any specific sect, time, or place. Rather, it is universal
and can be performed anytime and anywhere:
Likhte parh te, bolte, chalte, sote, jaagte, khare, baithe raza-i-
ilahi kei husul ke liyei yaad i-ilahi mein masruf va mashgul
rahna aur zindagi ke har mamle kisi na kisi tarah khuda ka
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naam zaban per aatei rahna yeah sab zikr-i-ilahi hee kee suratein
hain aur Islami zindagi ki jaan hain.
Zikr of God and the core of an Islamic way of life include several conditions. They entail that one indulges in the remembrance of God at all times: when one is studying, walking,
sleeping, awake, standing, sitting. In all matters of life the name
of God should always be uttered.
Since the celebration of the Prophet and that of God complement
each other, the remembrance of the Prophet is also equally universal.87 However, it is conditional on absolute faith in one God (iman).
No amount of praise of the Prophet in the absence of iman will bear
fruit. Indeed, it will be invalid. Imdadullah cites the Koran to say
that praise of others besides Allah is not bad. In fact, those things
that are approved in the eyes of God are the law of the religion.88
According to Imdadullah, people of religion (including spiritual
leaders and those who claim to be their associates) may be praised
and celebrated, as this is within the limits of Shariat. Indeed, such
praise has an exalted position within it.89
However, Imdadullah clarifies that mouloud cannot be equated
with prayers and Ramadan fasting in the hierarchy of Islamic essentials. Indeed, its placement in that category amounts to biddat
(heresy).90 Similarly, the celebration of the Prophets life needs to be
delinked from the rituals of distributing sweets and dates that have
assumed centrality in the mouloud.91 He laid out a regime of proper
conduct (adab) to be followed at the mouloud. The ceremony should
focus on the narration of Prophets birth (zikr-i-wiladat). And while
this is being done adequate arrangements that ensure regimentalized comportment are to be observed. These include arrangements
for sitting on the floor (qayam farsh farush ka ehtemam), use of fragrances (khusbu va attar), the cleaning and beautification of the
house and locality in which it is being performed (makan va maqam
kee arastagi), distribution of sweet meals (taqsim shirini), feasting for
those present (hazrin kee dawat), arrangements for a podium and
stage (menber va takht va chauki), recitation of the Koran (tilawat),
recitation of the names of God (qirrat-i-durud sharif), and the
announcement for the gathering (ijtima). According to Imdadullah,
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if these observances are maintained and if mouloud is performed on

the twelfth day of the month in which the Prophet was born (rabiawwal), it is even better.92
In the Faislah Haft-i-Maslah, Imdadullah restores mouloud to the
legitimate pantheon of Islamic rituals and beliefs but lays out a specific code of conduct for it (an adab) so as to shear off its ritual frills.
However, he hastens to add that his codified mouloud regime does
not constitute the essential practices of Islam. This means that it
does not hold the same status as prayers and fasting.93 And yet
Imdadullah goes on to say that if his adab on mouloud is followed
it will lead to a divine glow in the eyes, pacify the heart, cleanse
the thoughts, refresh ones meditation and prayers, and bring prosperity.94 Again, he clarifies that he does not privilege any one adab
over the others in the performance of the mouloud. Indeed, if the
entire regimen is followed then prayers will be best fulfilled.95 In
the past, the adherence to these rituals by certain sects of Muslims
had incensed the reformists. Imdadullah tries to arrive at a compromise by emphasizing that mouloud in its unrestrained format is
unacceptable.
Imdadullah redefines heresy (biddat) to make it more embracive.
He does not view it merely as deviation from the singular path of
tauhid. Instead, his definition introduces into the domain of religion
things that had hitherto been left out if it. According to Imdadullah,
celebration of Allah and the Prophet, in any form, was always very
much part of religion. And thus belief in the diversity of rituals and
custom in reaching out to Allah does not amount to biddat. In the
book, Imdadullahs new interpretation of biddat opens up space for
accommodating local custom. However, he does not spell out what
he regards as nonreligious. But given his disinterest in politics, it
would seem that he preferred to put that in the nonreligious sphere.
Thus, for instance, politicsfrom which Imdadullah wanted to
consciously steer clearcould involve biddat if it were mixed with
religion.96 The book was a far cry from both the textual monist literature of the early nineteenth century, which, as we saw in Chap
ter 1, deemed any form of ritual heretical. It was also removed from
the rigidity of the Meccan doctrine as articulated by both the South
Asian Naqshbandiya mujadadi reformists located there as well as the
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Salafis of the Mediterranean. Rather, it reflected a unique strand of

the India-centric Arabicist grid as it was reformulated in the Meccan
political, social, and intellectual context.
The second issue that Imdadullah takes up is that of prayers for
the dead (fatiha). Very much as he did with the mouloud, he cites
various Hadith texts to prove that fatiha amounts to the performance
of a good deed, like reading the Koran, reciting the kalma or durud
(salutations to God), or doing a good act, with the object of passing
on the spiritual reward to the dead. To bring the opponents of fatiha
onto common ground with those who upheld it, he removed some of
the accepted but extraneous customs and rituals attached to it. For
instance, according to Imdadullah, it is not necessary that the fatiha
to the dead be recited with food laid out, with the intention that
the food will later be distributed to the poor. At the same time,
Imdadullah acknowledges the concerns of the opposing camp by
adding that there is no harm if food is involved in the ritual.97 He
challenges those who oppose fatiha and who have attempted to prove
by citing history and the Shariat that it is improper. In fact, he states
that it is inappropriate to deny something that has been sanctioned
by God and his Prophet.98
Again, as with the case of the mouloud, he invokes the Hadith to
elaborate upon the long history of the ritual. He lays out a regimen
of proper comportment for it, based on a typology he has built for
the ritual. He sanctions as appropriate three kinds of fatiha: The
first is when fatiha is recited over food that is distributed with the
intention that the merits collected through this gesture will go to
the dead. The second kind of fatiha is when the food is distributed
with the intention of benefiting the dead and the recipients told to
first recite the fatiha and then consume the food. In the third kind
of fatiha, the recipients of the food are told that they should bless the
dead after they have eaten the food (baksh dein).99
Imdadullah standardizes the fatiha ritual as universal Muslim virtuous conduct. He uses his unique position to delve into both the
history of Islam in the Mediterranean belt as well as its expansion in
the Indian Ocean world. He cites various Hadith that are critical of
the rigid anti-fatiha stand of the Wahabiya to reinforce the Islamic
ideal of tolerance. The Hadith he chooses to challenge the rigid
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stand on ritual taken by the scriptural reformists are those that

invoke reason, rationality, and logic.100
In an interesting section, Imdadullah engages with critics in the
Hijaz who have opposed his effort to create an inclusive Muslim
public conduct as a kind of urbane civility based on standardized
comportment. Predictably, the strongest critique had come from
the Arab Wahabiya, who were no longer a political factor in the
area, but who were still very much a presence intellectually. In this
section, Imdadullah challenges the Wahabiya on their rigid stand
against the rituals of faith. And his critique invokes not just the relevant Hadith traditions that were framed in the Middle Eastern
world, but also the history of Indian Islam as it developed across the
Indian Ocean. He dismisses the Wahabiya claim that rituals like
fatiha are emulations of Hindu customs and thus invalid. He elaborates upon the history of Indian Islam and highlights the influential
impact it has had on Hinduism rather than the other way around.101
He picks specific allegations, such as the Wahabiya canard that
Muslims emulate the Hindu custom of Vedic recitations in the practice of the fatiha. He counters this by arguing that the Vedic recitations have never been an identity marker or symbol of Hindus. And
thus it is wrong to say that this art of recitation has impacted the
Muslim ritual of fatiha. Moreover, Muslims recite the Koran during
fatiha, and this is different from the reading of the Vedas. He concludes that if one went by the Wahabiya logic then even Islamic
fasting is forbidden and so is haj, as they too are allegedly influenced
by the Hindu rituals of fasting (vrat) and pilgrimage (tirath).102
Imdadullah refers to an incident in which Rashid Ahmed Gangoi
was asked if reciting the fatiha with hands held toward God was
rewarding and legitimate. He replied that reading the fatiha with
this body deportment was akin to the Hindu custom of reading the
Vedas on the death anniversary of their dear ones with hands
extended toward God.103 The answer revealed that Gangoi considered the ritual un-Islamic. Imdadullah expresses shock that such a
comparison could be made between the recitation of the Koran and
the reading of the Hindu Vedas. He thus replies that if this is
Gangois frame of mind then by the same logic the Muslim month
of fasting should be seen as a reaction to the Hindu fasting and the
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haj as an influence of the Hindu pilgrimage.104 Also by the same

logic, the Deoband madrasa should be closed because that too is
similar to the Hindu seminaries (pathshala). The only difference is
that the Koran is read at Deoband whereas the Vedas are the preferred text at the pathshala.105 He exhorts people against adopting
Wahabi rigidity and cautions them against their divisive ways.
Soon after offering this note of caution against Wahabiya extrem
ism, Imdadullah reverts to his characteristic reconciliatory tone and
concludes that he advocates taking the middle road and does not
encourage confrontation. He explains this to mean that while the
act of offering food to the poor and reciting the Koran over the food
is not sinful, it is also not a necessary prerequisite for performing
the fatiha. The latter is complete even without the offering of food
for the benefit of the dead.106
Imdadullah offers a similar kind of compromise in his discussion
of urrs (an annual congregation at the tombs, or mazar, of religious
notables to celebrate their birth). He justifies urrs by highlighting its
practical and political side. According to him, urrs is valuable because
it provides Muslims with the opportunity to congregate and meet
likeminded people. The congregation thus becomes a source of
blessings and prosperity. Imdadullah justifies urrs mainly because it
enables Muslim congregation, and within this congregation unity
can be achieved through standardized patterns of devotion that are
globally recognizable.
Imdadullahs endorsement of urrs was due primarily to its salience
as a site that enabled unity and connectivity across the umma via
virtuous conduct. He understood the political advantage of con
gregations because he was located in Meccathe biggest melt
ing pot of the Muslim umma. From within this ideal location
Imdadullah attempted to construct a Muslim self that was accretive
and embracive and that upheld urbane civility as a universal Mus
lim public conduct. He hoped to unite the umma across empires
around this conduct and meet the European civilizational challenge. Imdadullahs standardized public conduct, produced at it was
in Ottoman-controlled Mecca, framed his cosmopolitanism. This
focused on non-British imperial centers and aimed to rewrite global
history around Ottoman cities. His compromises on urrs, as on
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mouloud and qawwali, are geared toward the making of this multi
faceted globalism.
In the Faislah -i-Maslah, Imdadullah took on board the opponents
of urrs by introducing a range of qualifications for the performance
of the ritual. He takes specific ritual acts associated with urrs to
strike a balance between warring factions. According to him, there is
nothing wrong in the performance of the ritual provided it is celebrated within certain Shariat rules. Thus, for instance, he opposes
any observance that mars the sanctity and soberness of the occasion.
According to him, qawwali on its own is fine. But it is objectionable
if marked by opulence, fairs, and merrymaking on the graves of the
holy men. He reiterates that mere congregation at the grave of any
holy man in a sober manner is not invalid. He cites the example of
the movement of caravans to Medina for the ziyarat (paying of respect)
of the Prophet as proof that Islam does not ban congregations that
gather to pay homage at the graves of holy men.107 And thus he concludes that urrs is permissible as long as it is framed within Shariat
prescriptions.108
Imdadullah writes at length in the book about his own personal
regime of devotion to his guide (pir) so as to lay out the format for
proper public conduct that will appeal to all warring factions. This
is his way to strike a compromise on the issue of urrs. He notes that
every year he prays for heavenly rewards for his guide and leader. He
calls this a form of homage, which he strongly recommends to
Muslims. He enumerates the format for this homage as follows: first
there is recitation of the Koran (Koran khani), and then mouloud is
recited. He says he is not in favor of unnecessary opulence and
showing off (zawaid amur). Nor has he ever had the occasion of
being in a qawwali. At the same time, he never objects to these forms
of devotion.109 He argues that they can be included as forms of devotion and homage to guide and leaders.
Imdadullah makes a strong plea to his readers to be tolerant and
to accept and accommodate difference. Throughout his writings he
gives anecdotes that plead for the spirit of tolerance and compromise. For instance, he argues that if someone is a fraud then he is
bad. But it should be first proved that he is so. Such is the spirit of
patience and tolerance every individual should exercise. He argues
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that those who are strictly against rituals should be regarded as

upholders of the traditions of the Prophet (kamal-i-itibai sunnat) and
those who do observe the rituals should be seen as followers of the
traditions of their spiritual elders (ahl-i-mujadid). He pleads to
people that they should not contradict each other or oppose each
other.110 Rather, they should accept with dignity the ritual observances of others.
The fourth issue that he discusses in detail is that of inviting those
not oriented to Allah to join the ranks of believers (maslah nida-i-
ghair Allah). He argues that that this is not improper and sinful provided people are being called only for the purpose of religious
discussions, or for the inculcation of a deep emotional connect with
God that leaves them saddened on separation.111 But if the purpose
is not to disseminate the message of love and peace, and there is no
messenger (murshid), nor is there a way to get across the message,
then the invitation to become a believer is invalid.112 He argues that
mere exhortations toward faith without any thought and method
could amount to heresy (shirk). But one has to be careful in so designating it because it is possible that God can help take the message
across to the person. He concludes that the invitation to Islam is
more a matter of belief and secret knowledge than a rigid Shariat
diktat.113
The book ends with a discussion of the sanctity of congregations
for prayers ( jamat i-saniyah). He pleads to Muslims to shed animosity on this divisive debate around collective ( jamat) versus individual prayer. He argues that even though the collective prayers are
more disciplined and regimentalized, one should not create differences on account of this. Every individual should respect the others
choice of prayer. Imdadullah was a strong advocate of flexibility in
human action. He thus urged his followers to shun their rigid stand
and offer prayers as it suited them.114

Imdadullah, the Deobandi Sufi with a Difference

Imdadullahs literature transferred to Mecca the Indian brand of
Sufi spirituality. In the tradition of Shahwaliulla, this combined the
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monist emphasis on belief in one God (tauhid) and the holy scriptures with the Sufi stress on the spiritual leader as the moderator of
individual practice. And this Indic tradition flowered in Mecca
because, as mentioned above, the city had been home to the Delhi
Naqshbandiya mujadids since the late eighteenth century. But Faislahs
extraordinary spirit of accommodation and its advocacy of compromise within the tradition on the issue of both the desirability and
forms of public devotion went far beyond the Delhi Sufi Shahwaliullas
gentle blend of tauhid with the Sufi organizational format. It was
also, as we will see, a step ahead of the Deobandi tradition that carried forward Shahwaliullas combination of tauhid with its stress
on the scriptures, and the Sufi emphasis on the allegiance to the
sheikh or leader as the mediator between God and the individual.
Imdadullahs stress on consensus as the bedrock for his standardized
virtuous Muslim conduct reflects not just the adaptability of both
his Delhi and his Deoband intellectual legacies, but their capacity to
evolve.
Perhaps his location in Mecca as a 1857 refugee, his interaction
with the Ottoman officers in the Hijaz, and his religious and political exchanges with Muslims from all over the world offered him a
wider intellectual and cultural arena for constructing a far more embra
cive Muslim cosmopolitanism than Shahwaliulla or the Deobandis
could ever achieve in Hindustan. Indeed, Ottoman Mecca emerged
as a critical hub from which Imdadullah could nurture his global
aspiration in a way that was not possible from British-controlled territories. Imdadullah used Meccas critical location at the interstice
of the British and Ottoman imperial space to maintain a steady intel
lectual contact with his intellectual peers in British India. He relied
on books from India to impact the Mecca region with the Indian
Naqshbandi mujadidi form of Islam. He delivered lectures in the
Madrasa Saulatiya established by his intellectual peer, the Naqshbandi
Sufi Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi.
But he moved ahead of his Indian colleagues in his effort to end
intratradition conflict. His aim was to forge the unity of the umma
across the imperial assemblage. His quest to establish an ideal form
of consensual public conduct triggered an obsessive drive to be
both in the knowhow of the Hindustani intellectual and literary
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productions as well as to send his own writings to India for peer

review. At the same time, he was keen to hold discussions with the
Meccan religious littrateurs. He desired to create a form of standardized conduct that could weld the South Asian and Middle
Eastern Muslim worlds together. He tapped into the thriving networks of traders, pilgrims, visitors, littrateurs, and scholars who
bridged the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds. Such networks predated the imperial connections of the nineteenth century.
The age of steamship, print, and consular webs hardened borders
officially, but that did not mean the end of these porous zones of
the past. Indeed, imperial networks made this Asian underbelly of
empires even more vibrant. Imdadullah cashed in on the movement
of men and books between the British and Ottoman worlds to further his own agenda of constructing his much-desired united umma
around a universally agreeable public conduct.
His book supply from India included the Koran with commentaries in its margins by Abdullah bin Abbas. These commentaries,
which explained and gave the context of Koranic verses, were in popular demand in the Hijaz. In several letters that Imdadullah wrote to
Maulvis Qasim and Yaqub of Deoband, he indicated the demand for
this particular edition of the Koran in the Hijaz. He noted that
people were willing to pay him in advance for these copies with commentaries. However, he agreed to accept payment only after the
receipt of the copies.115 In addition, books like the Tafsir or commentaries on the scriptures of Hafiz Ilahi Baksh Saharanpuri also reached
him. His letters indicate that visitors to the Hijaz carried these books
back and forth from Hindustan and that some of these books, like
the Tafsir (which was carried by one Hafiz Abdullah), were written in
Hindustan in consultation with Imdadullah himself. In a letter to
Maulvi Rashid Ahmad of Deoband, Imdadullah confirmed that the
Tafsir included his suggestions to its author, Ilahi Baksh.116 He also
repeatedly asked for the translated copy of another book, Tanveer, to
be sent to him.117 His keen involvement in the publication of Tanveer
is evident when at his request a few sample pages of it were sent to
him for approval before its final publication. He approved of its good
print, size, and quality of paper.118 He insisted that the book should
be sold and not distributed free.
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Imdadullah revealed his keen sense of publishing entrepreneurship with his suggestion that a free book would be less likely to be
read and taken seriously than one that readers needed to purchase.119
Imdadullah also sent his other books, like the Hakm, to Deoband
for translation. His letters include several reminders to Thanawi to
arrange for the publication of the Hakm. For this he was again
willing to send one hundred rupees via visitors who could connect
him to Hindustan.120 His book Faislah Haft-i-Maslah, which we discussed in the last section, was also published and translated in
Hindustan with a supplement, and he anxiously awaited its arrival in
Mecca. He also repeatedly inquired why only one copy of the Kulliyat
Imdadiya had reached him.121 Imdadullah was in regular correspondence with the ulema of Bhopal with regard to book exchanges.122
Even on his deathbed, in Mecca, he worried about his book collection. He invited Thanawi to visit him one last time and carry back
his huge collection of books to Hindustan.123
The intellectual exchange in which Imdadullah participated was
most evident when he sent his own compilation, Zia-ul- Qulub, to
Maulvi Rashid via Maulvi haji Ismael Saharanpuri, who visited him
in Mecca. What is more important is that he urged Maulvi Rashid
to read it from beginning to end and to add material to overcome
any shortcoming. He also gave him the license to correct any inappropriate word or phrase.124 He deputed Thanawi as his representative in Hindustan and asked him to make it clear to the Deobandi
maulvi, Ishaq Ali, that if the maulvi needed any clarifications on the
Zia-ul-Qulub he should feel free to contact him in Mecca. Thanawi
remained his conduit for all intellectual discussion with the scholars
of Hindustan.125 His letters to his members of his peer group back
home, like Hakim Ziauddin, reveal his interest in several magazines
and booklets published from Hindustan.126 He also received the
book Qaul Faisal an Aziz and read it from beginning to end and
commented on it.127
This intellectual exchange ensured that his brand of cosmopolitanism with its global aspirations was exported to Hindustan.
The balance between scripture and Sufi practices and the middle
ground that he struck on forms of public devotion became his unique
signature in Mecca. Indeed, it is from there that he continued to
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influence his peers in Hindustan and convince them about the benefits of Muslim cosmopolitanism. This made him distinct from his
peers and contemporaries in Deoband. He was always pained to
hear of factional conflicts at the Deoband seminary, and his correspondence with Thanawi reveals his readiness to intervene for the
sake of consensus and peace.128 Barbara Metcalf has shown how
scholars at the Deoband seminary stressed the basic commitment to
the idea of tauhid and focused on the study of scriptures (the manqulat). At the same time, the seminary adopted the Sufi format as
part of an effort to forge social relationships between fellow Deobandis.
Membership in more than one Sufi order was permissible so as to
encourage unity and minimize conflict. Thus teachers claimed multiple initiation into the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadari, and other Sufi
orders and followed select rituals from each of them. The famous
Deoband scholar, Rashid Ahmed, claimed descent from Chishti
saint Abdul Quddis Gangohi, but kept alive memory of other saints
as well. Most Deobandis traced their intellectual genealogy to the
Naqshbandi Sufi order of Shahwaliulla. They selectively appropriated the Sufi ritual of bait and forms of zikr. And they rejected
other aspects of Sufi practice such as public devotion to leaders,
objectionable literary productions, and ritual observances at graves
and khanqhas. According to these scholars, such forms of devotion
were reserved only for God, who had exceptional powers. Metcalf
argues that through a selective appropriation of the Sufi way the
Deobandis ended up with their own exclusive cluba Sufi order
characterized by the nineteenth-century stress on a single spiritual
guide, or leader.
Metcalf shows that the tradition of the nineteenth-century Sufi
order with a single guide, the sheikh, gave way to the emergence of
a new form of Sufism with fresh spiritual guides from within the
ranks of the Deobandi scholars. This Sufi tradition had the scriptures as its core, was leader oriented, and had social hierarchies that
mirrored the traditional Sufi orders that bonded via the oath of allegiance to a single leader. It was unique because it was created by
shearing off the gamut of Sufi rituals and the wide range of their
devotional forms. The Deobandi brand of Sufism was exclusive as it
eliminated difference within the Muslim community by establishing
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a standardized conduct that balanced local Sufi-impacted custom

and ritual with scriptural legitimation.129 In this sense, Imdadullah
emerged as a very important Sufi guide to the Deobandis, most of
whom took the oath of allegiance to him.130
Imdadullahs wide-arm inclusivity stood in contrast to the Deobandi
exclusivity. This difference was due to his being located in Mecca
and to the global aspiration that framed his objectives and strategy.
But that did not deter his devotees in Deoband from regarding him
as their sheikh. Metcalf explains this phenomenon narrowly in terms
of the concept of the Sufi sheikh, which she suggests was different in
the nineteenth century than it had been in earlier times. According
to Metcalf, this devotion derived more from an attachment to the
individual per se, rather than to the values of his entire order. She
argues that it was the affinity of the heart that was the link (qalbi
munasabat). And thus Rashid Ahmad trusted Imdadullah immensely
and pledged allegiance to him despite the latter upholding customs
and practices abhorred by the Deobandis.131
Perhaps there is a wider history of imperialism and its negotiation
by individuals located at the cusp of empires that needs to be foregrounded to explain this extraordinary compatibility between the
Deobandis and Imdadullah. The connected worlds of the British
and Ottoman Empires in the nineteenth century had given new
twists to the earlier histories of networks of traders, scribes, and
pilgrims who had connected the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean
worlds; these new networks offered an arena of new possibilities that
could be used by individuals located at the interstices of empires.
Thus Naqshbandi mujadids from the Delhi and Deoband intellectual lineage, like Imdadullah, could evolve, connect, and influence
in new and complex ways their intellectual peers in Hindustan. As
we have seen, Imdadullahs Faislah struck a conciliatory chord, a
middle path of accommodation in matters of Sufi devotion and
public rituals like urrs, mouloud, fatiha, and zikr. In contrast, the
fatwas or diktats of the Deobandis on these rituals put them to
the test of scriptural scrutiny. They were allowed only if they fit into
the Deobandis rigid, scripturally sanctioned code of public conduct.132 Yet even though Imdadullah on many occasions contravened Deobandi public conduct by his participation, for instance,
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in the mouloud at Mecca, he never lost his stature in the Deobandi

circles. This was an indication of his success in disseminating his
cosmopolitanism, with its global aspirations to decenter the Brit
ish imperial hold over Indian Muslim subjects. His peers in Hindu
stan ignored many of his contraventions in view of this larger
objective.
In one of his many letters to his confidant, Maulvi Yaqub of
Deoband, Imdadullah urged the scholar to incite his students to
engage in continuous intellectual struggle to achieve their aims.
This, he said, was the true definition of the highest form of jihad:
the jihad-i-Akbari.133 According to Imdadullah, such a lofty objective could be achieved if unity became the mantra for Muslims. This
mantra could be followed only through an eclectic mixture of the
scriptures and Sufi devotion. Imdadullahs book Zia-ul-Qulub advocated such a mixture and laid out the format for consensual Muslim
public conduct. He promoted his Zia-ul-Qulub in Hindustan as an
advisory guide that offered a solution to all controversial issues that
divided Muslims. Indeed, he recommended that its contents, rather
than verses from the Koran (as was normally the case), be used as
talismans to be distributed by Sufi sheikhs.
He shifted the focus from more popular texts like the Koran and
the Tibb-i-Nabawitexts that, in the nineteenth-century climate of
individuated religion, focused on the Prophet as the guide and
model to be followed. Instead, he put the spotlight on his own
book, Zia-ul-Qulub, as the perfect guide (mushir-i-kamil) that could
take care of both the spiritual and the physical well-being of its
readers. He claimed to have sent the Zia-ul-Qulub to his devotees in
Hindustan. His correspondence reveals that he sent the master copy
to Maulvi Yaqub and urged him to copy it and keep it in his safe
custody. He advised him to use it as his guide and adviser. He wanted
him to acknowledge the books exalted status and to keep it away
from his opponents. He reiterated that in the book he had laid out
the norms of proper conduct and behavior (tariqa saluk). He urged
Yaqub to spread its message and assured him of good results. The
usefulness of the book in resolving everyday life issues was evident
when Imdadullah made a suggestion to a young man who complained of distraction on seeing a beautiful woman. The answer
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HA J I I M DADULLAH M A K K I IN M E C C A

given in the book was to concentrate on the love of God.134 In letters

to Abdul Wahid Khan, Imdadullah indicated that the saluk, or conduct, as prescribed in the Zia-ul-Qulub also included proper rituals and decorum to be followed when one paid homage at the
Prophets mausoleum (tarkib ziyarat). Imdadullah claimed that it had
advice and solutions for all kinds of issues, and that it was the perfect
guide (kamil murshid). And in another letter to Khan, Imdadullah
reiterated his wish that the book be regarded as the guide to the
singular right path (murshid wahadi raah). He wanted it to be kept
away from non-Muslims. According to him, this was a book of
knowledge that needed to be discussed by the scholarly elite of
Mecca and Hindustan. Eminent fellow scholars like Fazl-i-Haq,
who was lodged at the Andaman penal colony, were familiar with
the knowledge contained in the book, and Imdadullah was happy to
have an ongoing discussion with such men of learning.135 And in
response to Wahid Khans query about a particular kind of ailment,
Imdadullah once again referred him to the Zia. He instructed,
Keep following the Sultan-I- Nasir devotion that is listed along
with its procedures in the Zia al qalb.136 Imdadullahs correspondence made it clear that he wanted an ongoing discussion of the
book with Khan and other intellectuals in Hindustan.137
Imdadullah was always anxious about the safe delivery of his
eclectic texts, like the Zia-ul-Qulub, the Masnavi, and others, to
Hindustan. Indeed, he had these books published in Hindustan and
monitored their wide circulation in the intellectual circuits. In a
letter to Maulvi Qasim and Yaqub, he expressed concern about the
safe delivery of his manuscripts to Hindustan. He wrote, Inkee
[manuscripts] raseedon sei itlass bakshein. (Please inform me about
the receipt of these texts.)138 He also urged them to send a copy of
the manuscript to Maulvi Sheikh Ilahi Baksh thekedar Meerut
for the purpose of its publication and wider distribution.139 And in
another letter he expressed concern about a report he received from
Maulvi Abdul Hakim, resident of Meerut, that the Zia-ul-Qulub had
not reached him. He wanted Qasim and Yaqub to deliver the book
to Hakim personally. He offered the names of alternate publishers
in case of any delays in the publication of his books. He noted that
if Abdul Hakim was unable to publish it then Maulvi Muhammad
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Ahsan should do so as he too ha[d] shown willingness to publish

it. But he insisted that no fewer than one hundred copies of the
book should be published and that it would cost one hundred rupees
to do so.140
The Zia was not the only text whose journey in Hindustan
Imdadullah followed. This was true of most of the books that he
wrote while in Mecca. He was always keen that his books be circulated far and wide, and he entrusted the job of copying and circulating them to his confidant in India, Hakim Ziauddin. Even while
located in Mecca, Imdadullah continuously suggested names of
copyists he trusted. For instance, he wanted women like Hamshirah
Bi Sahibah and Bi Khairana, as well as a relative, Umat al Jaib, to be
asked to copy his text. He urged Ziauddin to ask other people as well
to copy it and to make the Zia their regular companion.141

Imdadullah, the Muslim Bridgehead

It is significant that Imdadullah not only maintained regular correspondence with his peers in Hindustan but also inspired them to
establish the famous Sunni Muslim seminary at Deoband. Imdadullah
financed it, and he also impacted it with his Meccan brand of cosmopolitanism. Imdadullah always referred to himself as fakir or
Muslim ascetic in his correspondence with the Deoband scholars.
Despite his differences with Deoband intellectuals vis--vis the
limits of orientation to Sufi rituals, he continued to work with them
and never gave up his efforts to influence them. As we saw in the
previous section, he constantly engaged in intellectual discussions
with them. Indeed, he was also in touch with his own family madrasa
in Thana Bhuwan near Deoband. Even when on his deathbed he
wrote to Thanawi to ask him to visit his madrasa and mosque and
revitalize them.142
Imdadullah drew the attention of the Deoband stalwarts like
Maulvi Rashid, Ahmad Hasan, Maulvi Qasim Naunatawi, and
others to the merits of his prescriptive book on Sufi devotions, the
Zia-ul-Qulub. Deobandis were also initiated into multiple Sufi silsilas but limited their participation: they adopted the organizational
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format of hospices and Sufi orders but kept away from ritual practices centered around the leader. Indeed, they sheared Sufism of its
many ritualistic frills and tailored it narrowly to the Koran and
Hadith. In contrast, Imdadullah drew his Deobandi peers toward
certain forms of devotion that were murshid or leader-centric. For
instance, he insisted that Maulvi Rashid carry on with the zikr and
shaghal (bodily practice) regime that he recommended, as that was
beneficial. Indeed, he also recommended specific forms of meditation to him. He advised him that for peace of mind after the morning
or the dusk prayers he should meditate and imagine that he was sitting in front of his murshid. He should visualize that something
from the murshids heart was going into his heart. Imdadullah promised that he too would think the same from his end at Mecca.143
He highly recommended his Zia-ul-Qulub to his peers for regular
consultation, as much of his Sufi devotional prescriptions were listed
in it. In various letters to Maulvi Abid Hasan, he reiterated the significance of the Zia-ul-Qulub as a prescriptive guide for devotions
that should be consulted at Deoband. He urged people there to consult it, to seek clarification on it from Maulana Rashid, and if in
doubt to write to him directly for clarification.144 At the same time,
in letters to Wahid Khan in Deoband he reiterated the significance
of the right path (mustaqim) and the significance of the murshid and
pir as the guides to lead one to that path.145 Once again, he urged the
Deoband maulvis, Rashid and Qasim, to relent on the issue of mouloud and to create a consensus or agreement (itifaq) between different sects on it. He preferred this to their rigid stand that fanned
dissent (ikhtilaf) and highlighted difference (nafsaniyat). He urged
Maulvi Rashid to deliberate on this issue according to his advice and
to adopt a middle path.146
And along with his commitment to Sufi devotions and public rituals like the mouloud, he encouraged equally the dissemination of
the scholarly disciplines of the Hadith, of the Koran, and of the
jurisprudence that was the hallmark of the Deoband seminary. He
wrote to Maulvi Sayyid Ahmed of Deoband that he was very pleased
to learn of the syllabus and to receive an update on the academic
work of the seminary students, who were learning the Hadith, commentaries on the Koran, and jurisprudence. But once again he urged
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that the students combine theological studies with internal meditation. Indeed, he considered this as essential.147 But this did not stop
him from expressing his satisfaction to Maulvi Rashid about the
lectures that he had given on the Koran and Islamic theology at the
seminary.148 Indeed, in a letter to Sayyid Muhammad Abid Hasan
(later principal of Deoband) he suggested that it was better that
Hasan remain in Deoband to teach the students rather than go to
Mecca. He clearly considered the teaching of theology of extreme
significance.149
Apart from his correspondence with Deoband and his meetings
with hajis from Hindustan, Imdadullah also interacted with the
Hindustani Naqshbandi mujadids who were already located in
Mecca: Sheikh Yahya Pasha Waghistani Hanafai Naqshbandi mujadidi, Hazrat Sheikh Faisi Shazili, Hazrat Sheikh Ibrahim Rashidi
Shazli, Sheikh Ahmed Dahan Makki, and others.150 They informed
him that no individual should ignore any Sunnat or tradition of the
Prophet. And thus they asked him to marry, as that was also one of
the Sunnats.151
In Mecca, Imdadullah gained another important and unique
platform from which to disseminate his cosmopolitanism, one that
he was also able to connect to Deoband. This was the Madrasa
Saulatiya at Mecca that, as we noted in Chapter 3, had been established by the Naqshbandiya mujadid Rahmatullah Kairanwi. This
madrasa had made an impact in the region by exporting not just the
Shahwaliulla kind of eclectic Islam, but that had carried its accretive spirit forward by introducing into its curriculum nineteenth-
century texts like the Izharul Haq that interpreted the Koran and
showcased its knowledge according to modern notions of reason,
science, and rationality. Rahmatullah was personally not as much of
an ascetic Sufi nor as oriented personally toward the Chishtiya and
Suhrawardiya silsilas as Imdadullah. Indeed, he had his differences
with Imdadullah on the ways in which to connect with peers in
Hindustan. For instance, unlike Rahmatullah, Imdadullah considered the collection of money for him in Hindustan unacceptable
and even offensive (khilaf marzi), and preferred to call himself a
fakir or ascetic who united the umma through a spiritual consensus
on mooted issues.152 Yet Madrasa Saulatiya shared Imdadullahs
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broad vision of a Muslim cosmopolitanism that struck a middle

ground on matters of rituals and customs that divided Muslims. The
madrasa and its founder Rahmatullah, very much like Imdadullah,
advocated a universalist Muslim conduct based on consensus.
Imdadullah was happy to deliver lectures at Madrasa Saulatiya to
the students of Rahmatullah. Indeed, Imdadullah encouraged a
healthy flow of students from Deoband to Mecca. He hoped that
they would become the conduit by which the Meccan reformist
spirit of the Rahmatullah brand and his cosmopolitanism based on
standardized forms of public conduct would reach Hindustan and
transform its reformist seminaries. In a letter to Hakim Muhammad
Ziauddin, Imdadullah stated that he had received some students
from Hindustan who had come to stay with him and study in Mecca.
These included Maulvi Muhammad Muhiuddin Moradabadi,
Maulvi Allahdad Punjabi, Maulvi Rahim Baksh, and Mullah Murad
Sahib. He explained that they had come only for the search for truth
and would stay with him for a year.153 And in another letter that
described the regular flow of people from Hindustan, Imdadullah
noted that Hafiz Ahmad Hasan had expressed a desire to visit Mecca
that year. Imdadullah wanted most of these Hindustani students
and visitors to study at the Madrasa Saulatiya. He wrote to Ziauddin
that if possible he should send also the son of the scholar Maqsud
Ahmad to Mecca. He wanted the boy to study at the Madrasa
Saulatiya and recommended that fifty rupees from the account of
Maulana Rashid Ahmad or Ahmad Hasan be given to him for travel
expenses.154 And in many other letters, Imdadullah advised Ziauddin
how to pass on to his students what he had learned from his elders.
In other words, Imdadullah not only stressed the significance for
students of manqulat and scriptural knowledge, but he also put a
premium on devotional aspects that were passed on orally from the
older generation to the younger.155
Imdadullah, who had arrived in Mecca before Kairanwi, warmly
welcomed the latter on their first meeting. They performed the
tawwaf and sai together and later met at Imdadullahs house to discuss their circumstances and course of action while in Mecca.156
Kairanwi was always part of Imdadullahs gatherings, which brought
the umma together spiritually and made its members aware of political
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matters in Hindustan. Indeed, Imdadullah became so close to

Kairanwi that when Kairanwi would leave Mecca to take extended
trips to Istanbul, Imdadullah would miss him. In a letter to Rashid
Ahmad Gangoi of Deoband, he expressed his wish that Kairanwi
would return to Mecca quickly: Aur maulvi Rahmatullah sahib
bhee Istanbul mein tashrif rakhtei hain. Khuda tala maulvi sahib ko
jald layei. (Maulvi Rahmatullah is in Istanbul. I pray to God that he
returns at the earliest.)157
The gentle blending of Sufi devotion, which borrowed from all
four orders, and the Shahwaliulla brand of Naqshbandi reformism
became the signature of Imdadullahs lectures and discussions at the
Madrasa Saulatiya. According to Imdadullah, this blended approach
was the best way to cope with the new circumstances of the time.
The presence of the sheikh as the moderator was significant, as he
was the interpreter of religion who would enable Muslims to cope
with the changing times without abandoning their religious beliefs
and practices. Imdadullah invoked the Islamic traditions fundamental capacity for change and resilience, which could be deployed
via human agency, as the political formula for all Indian Mus
lims. This was a far cry from the reformist doctrines of the early
nineteenth-century Urdu texts written by followers of Shahwaliulla,
such as Inayat Ali and Khurram Ali. They, as we saw in Chapter 1,
privileged the holy text only, and the individual reading of it, and
ignored the Sufi frills.
Indeed, Imdadullah Makkis formula, which combined devotion
and azkar (the repeated praise of God) with a commitment to the
right path (hidayat) or showing the right way (irshad) eventually
became the transimperial political formula for Muslims living under
European influence. This produced a system that offered a way out
of living under foreign occupation and interpreting religion accordingly for guidance. Imdadullah co-opted the Sufi way of seeking
guidance from a sheikh when endeavoring to interpret normative
religion, rather than simply relying on independent judgment. He
emphasized that without the murshid one should not follow the
tariqas of azkar or that of any form of devotion. He equated the role
of the murshid with that of the physician. He argued that just as
medicine should not be taken without the guidance of a physician so
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also the guidance of a leader is needed in spiritual matters.158 He

further underlined this point by noting, The sufi way is useful only
when it is applied in a certain way in a certain amount.159 Thus the
company of the spiritual guide (sohbat sheikh) became the signature
of what came to be regarded as the Imdaduddin brotherhood: Silsila
Imdadiyah.160
Imdadullah was eager to learn from the Mecca ulema. Significant
Islamic traditions like the ilm-i-tajvid or the art of recitation of the
Holy Koran was something that hugely attracted his attention. This
tradition was very much part of the Muslim public conduct that
would weld the Muslim sects together. Qari Ahmad Makki, whose
madrasa was in Mecca, was a specialist in the art of recitation. His
madrasa, which was a branch of the Madrasa Saulatiya, was located
in Mohulla Jiad in Mecca. It specialized in the art of recitation or
the ilm-i-tajvid and hifz. At any point in time it had sixty-five students, including Arabs, Turks, Hindustanis, and others who specialized in the ilm-i-tajvid. The Hindustani seminaries were particularly
weak in this training. The Arabs looked down on Hindustani ulema
and often refused to offer prayers behind them. But the training of
Hindustanis in the Meccan madrasas, like that of Ahmad Makki,
began to change things. Differences were soon bridged. Imdadullah
hoped that Muslims would unite around such a common professional form of recitation of the Holy Koran. And students from
Hindustan benefited from this madrasa and other, similar branches
of Saulatiya.161 Again relying on the newly emergent Urdu press in
Hindustan, Imdadullah urged Thanawi to publicize these madrasas
in the press. He wanted Thanawi to have a letter he had written
detailing the work of the madrasa published in the Urdu newspaper
Nurul Anwar or in any other widely circulated newspaper so that
his formula for establishing a system of universal public conduct
one that would connect Muslimsbe propagated widely. He also
requested that Thanawi write an article on the madrasa and publish
it in Hindustan.162

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5
Nawa b Si ddiq H a sa n K h a n a n d
t h e M usl i m Cosmopol is

If Rahmatullah Kairanwi and Imdadullah Makki contributed to

the Muslim cosmopolis from Mecca, there were others who energized it from their Indian locations. Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan
(18321890) was an important case in point. He was a reformist
scholar of the scriptures popularly known as the Ahl-i-Hadith. He
came from a poor background and arrived penniless in Bhopal. He
established himself in the city not through his modest job but
through his marriages, initially to the daughter of the prime minister and then to the widowed ruler herself. Like most scripture-
oriented scholars, Siddiq Hasan was also categorized as a Wahabi
by the British. In fact, given the cordial and reliable relationship the
British had with his wife Shahjahan Begum of Bhopal, his seditious activities were a cause of deep concern and anxiety for the
British residents at Indore in Bhopal. Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan
was never convicted by any law court and had the advantage of being
the nawab consort of the begum of the princely state of Bhopal. His
fate in British India was thus different from the other protagonists
examined in this book who had to flee to escape the British clampdown. His biography, journeys, and intellectual forays reveal how
he used the challenges and opportunities of nineteenth-century
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imperialisms and reconfigured them to suit his own particular interests. At the same time, he used his Indo-Persianate intellectual
legacy and his regal family connections to construct an embracive
cosmopolitanism as a civilizational space that stretched between the
British and Ottoman Empires.
He traced his intellectual genealogy to the Delhi Naqshbandi Sufi
Shahwaliulla, whose legacythe spirit of compromisehe lived
with for his entire life. He encouraged ijtihad (interpretation and
independent judgment) in legal or theological issues, knowledge of
the Koran and the Hadith, and an abhorrence of pirs and saint worship. He made the Koran accessible to people by making it available
in Persian and Urdu. His birthplace was Rae Bareilly, in Awadh,
where Shahwaliullas well-known disciple Sayyid Ahmad Shahid had
been born. Indeed, Siddiq Hasans father, Sayyid Awlad Hasan, was
a strong supporter of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid and accompanied him to
Afghanistan and the northwest frontier to fight his famous jihad.1
On arrival in Bhopal he initially worked with Sayyid Jamail-al
Din Khan, the prime minister of Bhopal, as his personal bodyguard.
But he was soon sacked because of his alleged involvement in religious debates of an inflammatory nature. Soon after, he found
employment with the nawab of Tonk and lived with the relatives of
Sayyid Ahmad Shahid in Tonk. After an eight-month stay in Tonk
he was invited back to Bhopal by the prime minister; given his intellectual orientation, he was commissioned to write the history of
Bhopal.2 He soon won the favor of the begum of Bhopal and rose to
become first the chief scribe and later the nawab consort with the
titles of Mir Dabir and Khan conferred upon him.
Barbara Metcalf argues that like most reformists Siddiq Hasan
desired a unified umma welded together by a singular interpretation
of the scriptures. She views this forced exclusivity as having created
dissension and sparked protest from within the umma.3 However,
his activities outside of British India convey a more nuanced picture
of the nawab. It is in Bhopal that Siddiq Hasan Khan met with the
ulema from across Asia, and it was here that his exclusivist scripturalist stance acquired a trans-Asiatic inclusivity. At the court of
Bhopal, he first met the ulema from Yemen and read under their
supervision the works of Ibn Taimiyyah and Shawkani. These two
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

famous scripturalist reformists of the Arab world advocated the

application of individual interpretation and reason to the scriptures.
Very much like Shahwaliulla, they too encouraged Muslim unity
based not on a singular meaning of the scriptures. Rather, they
advocated an inclusivity based on individual judgment on matters of
law and theology. In 1869, en route to Mecca on his first pilgrimage,
Siddiq Hasan read more of their literature in Hudaydah, the port
city of Yemen, and in Mecca. He made friends and intellectual contacts in Yemen who linked the region to Bhopal in important ways.
Thus, for instance, one of the regions most prolific scholars, Sheikh
Zayn al Abidin, visited him later in Bhopal and became the qadi of
Bhopal. His friendship with other Yemeni scholars, such as Husain
ibn Muhsin, also proved long-lasting.4 On his return to Bhopal he
was a changed man. No more an emulator or muqallid, he started
writing books against taqlid (emulation) and the followers of Abu
Hanifah. He followed with certain reservations the intellectual
legacy of Arabicists like Ibn Taimiyyah, Shakani, and Abd-al Wahab
and Indic monists like Shahwaliulla and Sayyid Ahmad Shahid. Like
them he highlighted the salience of ijtihad and its application to the
Koran and Sunnah for guidance. He critiqued taqlid and biddat.5
The emphasis on scriptures and ijtihad constituted an intellectual
reformist current that connected modernist ulema and reformist
bureaucrats of the middle-eastern and North African provinces of
the Ottoman Empire to similarly oriented scholars in India. Indeed,
Indian reformists were being hounded by the British administration
in India at a time when their Istanbul peers, out of favor with Sultan
Abd-al Hamid II, were finding it tough to survive intellectually in
the Arab provinces of Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. They were being
hounded by the administration for their alleged role in the 1857
mutiny-rebellion. Many of them, as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4,
were located in the Hijaz and Istanbul, from where they contributed
to the intellectual energy of the Arab and African Ottoman provinces and reached out as far east as Acheh in northern Sumatra.
Through their books and students they created viable trans-Asiatic
networks.
Siddiq Hasan Khan became a particularly influential spoke in this
trans-Asiatic web when in 1871 he married Shah Jahan Begum, the
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

ruler of Bhopal, and became the nawab consort. He had by now a

handsome jagir worth Rs. 75,000 a year, the title of Mutamad al
Mahaman, a free press, and an efficient team of ulema of the royal
court of Bhopal. More important, he had the title of nawab with all
the privileges that it entailed duly conferred on him at a specially
held durbar in 1872. He used all these to his advantage and wrote
some eighty books on his reformist ideas simultaneously in Arabic,
Persian, and Urdu. The books were published in India, Istanbul,
and Egypt.6 Their publication in multiple languages indicated that
he had in mind his trans-Asiatic audience.
The thrust of most of his literature was on consultation, self-
judgment, reason, and rationality. These were to replace ijma (consensus) and qiyas (analogy), which were very critical to the legal
schools of jurisprudence, especially to that of the Hanafites. The
Hanafites accused him of causing dissension within the community
because of his different stance. Maulana Abd-al Hayey Lakhnawi, a
prolific scholar of the Hanafi school, was his worst critic. A lively
dialogue went on between them, with Maulana Hayey criticizing
the nawab in various magazines and journals and in a book called
Ibraz al Ghayy. The nawab responded in a book called Shifa al-Ayy
an-ma Awradahu al Shaykh Abd al Hayy.7 In fact, he challenged the
intellectual prowess of Abu Hanifa and questioned his knowledge of
Arabic. He also questioned the Hanafite belief that Abu Hanifa had
ever met or narrated any Hadith on the authority of the Prophets
four companions.
If the nawab provoked the Hanafites and other schools of jurisprudence, he also incurred the wrath of the British, who saw his
literature as seditious, anti-British, and having the potential to stir
pan-Islamic sentiments against their rule. In fact, this became one
of the reasons why he was deposed by the British in 1885.8 The
nawabs critics concentrated their attacks on five specific books:
Mawizah Hasanah, Hidayat al Sail, Girbal, Iqtirab al Saah, and
Tarjuman-i-Wahabiyah. They argued that the nawab incited people
to jihad against British rule. In contrast, his defenders argued that
the charges were untrue because quite apart from the fact that the
nawab never had such anticolonial sentiments, these books were
really the translations and abridgements of the works of other
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scholars, and therefore even if they contained objectionable parts

they were not necessarily the views of the nawab.9

Siddiq Hasan Khans Literature and the Imperial Moment

What was the nawabs literature all about? He negotiated the
scriptures with human judgment (ijtihad), reason, and rationality to
forge a progressive social bodya civilizational frame that would
function as a formidable force alongside the Western global imperium. He shared this idea with the Salafi scripturalist reformers
and Ottoman reformist bureaucrats in Syria, Lebanon, and North
Africa. The territorial confines of India and its many exclusive intellectual and administrative markers, were they of schools of jurisprudence or colonial rule, stifled him. He wished to work beyond their
confines.
He was successful in breaking out of British India and connecting
to the Ottoman world via his scholarly books because he used to his
advantage the imperial moment of the postmutiny decades (1860
1880), which has been called the period of secondary revolts.10 In
this period, both the British and the Ottoman Empires showed
exceptional concern for the Muslim subject, even if for different rea
sons.11 The late nineteenth-century imperial moment was marked
by Britains aggressive imperialism: during this time, Britain conquered new lands and laid out new consular, transport, print, and
communication networks, which linked it to the Ottoman world.
But these connections, especially after the Russo-Turkish war (1876),
aimed at pushing the Ottomans out of the European global cluba
place they had occupied since the time of the Crimean War (1856).
It produced the Gladstonian-style racial and religious profiling of
Muslims and a clampdown on men of religion, especially after the
1857 mutiny-rebellion in India.
British imperialism was matched by a similarly zealous modernization of roads and railways and by the print and communication
revolution in the Ottoman Empire. There were other parallels as
well. The 1860s revolt in the Balkans threatened Istanbul as much
as 1857 had challenged the British in India. But the two empires had
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mismatched political and economic trajectories. Istanbul in the late

1870s was going through its worst political and financial crisis. This
was reflected in the loss of territory to Britain, Russia, and France,
as well as in opposition to the tanzimat reforms. Also noteworthy
was the constitutionalist and Islamic modernist reform in its Arab
provinces. In response, the beleaguered empire piloted the idea of
Islamic solidarity based not only on traditional religious and ethnic
principles but on tanzimat-inspired notions of equity, justice, the
rule of law, and constitutional ideas of protecting minority rights.
This kind of Islamic solidarity or pan-Islam marked the modernization and centralization efforts of Sultan Abd-al Hamid II, who also
nurtured aspirations for global leadership of the Muslim world.12
Thus the late nineteenth-century imperial moment made Mus
lim subjects critical to both empiresalbeit for different reasons.
In the Hamidian era, the Ottoman Empire offered a welcome
umbrella to Muslims globally. It offered a readymade ground across
which men like Siddiq Hasan could move and connect to the modernist reformist ferment in the Ottoman world. These men used
both imperial print and telegraph networks, as well as older communication networks, and invoked the Islamic tradition of consensus to unite Muslims against an ascendant Europe. As they
straddled empires they crafted a literary sphere that was conceptualized in civilizational terms. This manifested itself as standardized Muslim virtuous conduct. This was a form of cosmopolitanism
that they hoped would override territory and unite Muslims across
empires.
Nawab Siddiq Hasan fashioned his own international relations
using his distinct Arabic learning and the gentlemanly status that
emanated from it. He looked for trans-Asian connectors flaunting
this special status. His persona appealed to and his politics corresponded with the foreign relations agendas of the Ottoman Sultan,
Abd-al Hamid II, who was eager to represent himself globally as a
Muslim protector: the caliph. And thus even if his Arabic-oriented
education brought him onto the British official radar, he managed
to cash this demerit card at imperial crossroads, where he was able
to exploit transimperial rivalries. Siddiq Hasan moved one step
ahead of the English-educated Muslim intellectuals, like Sir Sayyid
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

Ahmad Khan, and those of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions who
depended on British imperial networks alone to connect to the world
outside. Instead, he used these as well as the webs of influence spread
out by Ottoman Turkey. He had access to the Ottoman imperial
networks because he flaunted his traditional learning and the difficulties that his intellectual pedigree created for him in British India.
He thus exploited imperial fault lines and laid out a vast network of
men and literature that upheld the scripturally sanctioned idea of
Muslim unity as a distinct civilizational force.
Siddiq Hasan played on internal fissures within these empires and
their important fault lines outside to exploit their competing print
cultures. He reworked his repertoire of older knowledge and defended
it using the referents of modern empires: print technology and
individual accountability. Indeed, Siddiq Hasan Khans cosmopolitanism was deeply dependent on the networks of imperial assemblages that stretched across the Hijaz, Turkey, North Africa, and
India. Indeed, this wider imperial constellation constituted the bedrock of the vast literary ecumene he had laid out between empires.
His public sphere of books and journals could never be successfully
extinguished by the British government because it had roots in the
connected worlds of imperial rivals in the age of globalization.
Very much like the Indo-Muslim gentlemen, he wrote simultaneously in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and aimed at a trans-Asiatic audience to forge a new kind of unity in the umma.13 It is ironical that
one of his texts, the Tarjuman-i-Wahabiyah, which was labeled as
seditious by the British administration, offered the best explanation of his trans-Asiatic forays and his disinterest in narrow anticolonialism.
The Tarjuman-i-Wahabiyah is often cited as a text in which Siddiq
Hasan Khan defended himself against the charge of being a Wahabi.
It is used by Barbara Metcalf and others to show the India-centric
credentials of Khan and his denial of any genealogical link to the
Wahabis of Nejd. But Siddiq Hasan Khan objected to the term
Wahabi being used against him not only because of its anti-British
connotations and political implications, but because he found it too
rooted in geography and space. This was the kind of territorialization and confinement that he did not wish to be stifled by.
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The book opens with his discussion on the Nejd Wahabis. Siddiq
Hasan critiques the idea that the Wahabis had stamped Islamic universalism with territorial localism and pulled it back to the constraints of geographical space and rigid norms. He was not against
these norms per se. But he resented the territorial marker on them.
Indeed, in the book he refers to the discomfort of the Prophet himself with any kind of hard territorialization of Islam. He cites the
Hadith of Ibn Umar and describes an occasion when Prophet
Muhammad was giving his blessings to Yemen and Shaam (Syria)
and someone said that he should pray for Nejd also. The Prophet
initially kept quiet. But when the request was repeated thrice he
expressed his disapproval of the Nejdi way of localizing Islam. He
refused to bless Nejd because, according to him, This [would] only
create strife and raise unnecessary issue[s] and [would] offer an ideal
playing field for the Satan [to create strife in the Muslim world].14
Siddiq Hasans text is critical of those who believe in pir and fakir
worship and who mislead people by labeling those who believed in
One God or tauhid as Wahabi or as the follower of Abd-al Wahab of
Nejd. His critique largely drew from the fact that being called
Wahabi connoted a kind of territorial closure. This was in stark
contrast to his effort to create an embracive transimperial ecumene
for Muslims that would unite them globally. In the late nineteenth
century, Asiatic empires were so politically entangled in rivalries
and so mutually fearful and anxious of each other that they offered
interesting geographical and cultural spaces over which trans-Asian
connections could be grafted and a vast public sphere created. As
Siddiq Hasan observes,
Those who worship one God object to being called wahabis in
the Abd al Wahab kind of way not only because of his belonging
to a different nation and all its politic, but because they consider God as the ruler and protector of the whole world and this
[universalist] stance is blunted if they are said to be followers of
a territorially rooted Abd al Wahab.
Main kahta hoon kee iss baat ko jaanei do kee yeah doosre
mulk kee baat hai Hindustan kee naheen. Kalam ismei hai kee
yeah firqah jo ek khuda ko manta hai aur sarare jahan ka hakim
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

aur malik hai usko wahabi kehna aur Muhammad bin Abdul
Wahab kee tarraf iss firqah ko mansub karna mahaz ghalat hai
aur jhooth hai.15
In the book, he critiques the term Wahabi on account of its
narrow, localized connotation and its fixity in the confines of geographical space. He notes its inability to offer any useful universalist
grid with which to unite Muslims. Indeed, in different parts of India
the word had localized connotations. He points out that in the
Deccan anyone against intoxication is a Wahabi; in Bombay anyone
who takes the name of Sheikh Qadir is a Wahabi; in Awadh a Wahabi
is one who does not adhere to or follow any of the new forms of
religion; in Delhi those who raise objections to grave worship are
Wahabi; in Badayun those who do not follow the dictats of grave
keepers are Wahabi. But in Mecca a Wahabi is one who follows the
people of Nejd (ahl-i-Nejd).16 He concludes that the term does not
only connote an anti-British sentiment. Instead, it has varied localized connotations and origins. He strongly himself objected to be
called a Wahabi since he found unappealing the various geographical constraints imposed by that label.
Siddiq Hasan looked for connectors with which to unite Muslims
across the imperial assemblages of his time and arrived at an interesting interpretation of the Adam-centric creation of a multiracial
world. In his book, he argues that Adam was created from mud of
different colors and varieties that was picked up from different places.
This phenomenon explains the multiracial nature of mankind that
owed its origins to him ( jaisee mitee thee vaisee rangat aayee).17 Siddiq
Hasan viewed Adam as the universal reference pointa connector
via which one could reach out to people located in varied geographical spaces. This became a continuous refrain in his work, one that
he invoked to connect to Muslims outside British India. Indeed,
Adam becomes the meansthe conduitby which to move across
imperial assemblages spread out in uniquely situated geographical
and political spaces: the British territories, the Ottoman world, the
Arab provinces, and the Russian imperial spaces.
Adam thus occupies a key position in Siddiq Hasans metanarrative on the Muslims in India. Siddiq Hasan located Muslims in the
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

wider fold of world history rather than trace their histories simplistically to the Prophet. This made him stand out from other reformists who began their story of Indian Muslims with the Prophet.
Siddiq Hasans narrative begins with Adam and moves through different imperial assemblages: the classical caliphates, the Mongol
Empire, the Turkish sultanates, the Mughal Empire, and the British
Empire. Siddiq Hasan claims that of this assemblage British rule
was the best because it offered peace, comfort and freedom...to
people of all religions. Hindus and Muslims to practice and live
their religion as they wanted (aman aur asaaish aur azaadi hukumati-angrezi mein tamam khalaq ko naseeb hui, kisee hukumat mein
naa thee).18
The Tarjuman also quotes extracts from one of Siddiq Hasans
other books called seditious by the British: the Hidayat al Saail Ila
Adillatil Masaail. This book is in the genre of fatwa or Islamic diktat
collections. In it, Siddiq Hasan explains that it is in the question-
and-answer format, providing responses to queries on Islamic prescriptive norms on prayers, fasting, and so forth. These questions
had been addressed to him, and he had been asked to provide appropriate answers. Most of the questions are on the issue of heresy
(biddat), emulation (taqlid), and interpretation (ijtihad) in the tradition.19 In reply to a question inquiring about Muhammad Abdul
Wahab Nejdi and his beliefs and seeking clarification on his Sunni
credentials, Siddiq Hasan explains that the Sunnis of Hindustan are
different from Nejdis as they adhere to very different legal schools.
He notes that the latter are followers of Imam Hambal and therefore Hambalis, whereas in Hindustan it is the Hanafi school that
prevails. Significantly, he also excludes Nejdis from the Hindustani
Sunnis because they do not fit into the imperial assemblage that
sustains his embracive cosmopolitanism. This scripture-centric world

view
was the trans-Asian glue with which Siddiq Hasan aimed to
unite the umma. He summarizes this outlook in the Tarjuman: In
India ever since Islam has come its subjects followed the religion
of their Kingand thus followed the Hanafi schools. According
to him, alim, fazil and qazis all came from the Hanafi school.
Together, they compiled the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri. Shahwaliulla and
his grandson Ismael Dehlawi fine-tuned the Hanafi sect and purged
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

it of unnecessary rituals. They tailored it tightly around the Koran

and the Hadith.20 The Fatawa-i-Alamgiri was compiled by the
Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and later codified by the British. By
invoking the Mughal emperor and the compilation of the Fatawa via
British patronage, Siddiq Hasan located the making of the Indian
brand of Hanafi jurisprudence in very different sets of imperial
frames. (Indeed, it is within these imperial frames that his cosmopolitanism, as a scripture-driven Muslim form of conduct, would
move in the years ahead.) He further explains that important clerics
of the Hanafite orientation have a wide vision that cannot be stifled
and contained by adherence to a leader like Muhammad Abd-al
Wahab, who was territorially rooted and outside the more organic
imperial grid.21
And yet his response to another set of questions in the Hidayat on
the religious sanctity of Muslims living under British rule of law
and justice are revealing, as he did not see the Shariat as integral to
the political and legal culture of British India. He draws a clear distinction between the two. These passages, earmarked by Sayyad
Muhammad Rashid, the assistant district superintendent of police
in Delhi, clearly reveal the separation in his mind between the two
separate legal imperia: the Islamic and British. In reply to a question
on Muslim subjects being satisfied with their infidel rulers, he
responds, Such Muslims are faithless. And in case they call the
infidel rulers just and lovers of justice they are heretic and guilty of
great sin.22
He cites extracts from another book he authored, entitled
Mawaidul Awaid min Deunal Akhbar wal Fawaid. This was a collection of the sayings of the Prophet. Here, he declares jihad, in the
way it was used against the British government in 1857, as un-Islamic
and refers to it as merely fitna (strife). Very much like the Indo-
Persianate gentry of his time and reminiscent of the Delhi poets
Ghalib and Azurdahs condemnation of what went on in the name of
jihad, he too calls the 1857 jihadis rioters and plunderers, and their
jihad a riot of the fools (bewaquf aur jahil kaa jihad). In this book,
he offers tenets from the Hadith that discount jihad as a requirement for the good Muslim. And he lays out the qualifications of
people who are certified in accordance with the precepts of Islam to
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declare jihad. Siddiq Hasan maintains that none of these conditions

were followed in 1857, and therefore it was a mere riotwhich he
clearly disapproved of. Siddiq Hasan wrote the Tarjuman to defend
his position vis--vis the charges of sedition leveled against him by
the British administration. His defense was interesting as it disapproves of nonimperial constellations, localizations, and territorial
frames. Instead, it approves of assemblages that could be used to
connect to the world between and across empires. And of course the
British Empire, with its vast infrastructural sinews, was one that
was viewed by Siddiq Hasan as a particularly useful conduit to this
world. It is noteworthy that he devotes a whole chapter in his
Tarjuman to caution Indian princes and nawabs not to break their
agreements and treaties with the British. He invokes the Hadith to
argue that God and the Prophet desire that treaties and agreements
should not be violated on flimsy grounds for the sake of preserving
peace.23 He was even prepared to intervene in the colony of Muslim
jihadis on the northwest frontier, and conveyed to them that their
taking of arms against the British was un-Islamic. He was disappointed when his request to the lieutenant governor of Punjab to
send his messages across to Hazara was ignored.24 He argued that
the British Empire, for all its faults, should be allowed to function.
And he was not the only one of his peer group who was aware of the
huge potential that lay in the British infrastructural sinews. Jafer
Thanesri, his colleague confined in the Andaman penal colony, also
used this British imperial grid to reach out to the world in his own
specific ways.
Late nineteenth-century India was going through a phase of individuation of religion. Francis Robinson and others have argued that
it was left to the individual to make judgments about legal and scriptural matters.25 But for people like Siddiq Hasan Khan and his contemporaries Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi and Imdadullah Makki,
who had global aspirations, the scriptures were not just for individual
reform and purification but for knitting together a more embracive
umma. They used the scriptures to legitimate the idea of unifying
the umma across the late nineteenth-century assemblages. The most
prominent dissensions in global Muslim society were around the
issue of legal schools of jurisprudence. It was not surprising that the
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thrust of much of Siddiq Hasans commentaries on jurisprudence

was to highlight their points of consensus and agreement and to
legitimate these points via the scriptures.
In 1868, Siddiq Hasan wrote an important book called Alikhtawa
ala Maslaul Istawa (Existence of God on Heaven) that was published
in Lucknow. In this book, he highlights the basic points of agreements between the four legal schools of Muslim thought: Hanafi,
Maliki, Shafi, and Hambali.26 He argues that these schools differ
from each other on more than three hundred issues. But there are
also some issues based on Tradition (Hadith or the sayings of the
Prophet) on which they come together so much so as to form a
unique consensual religion called Muhadiseen. And thus he decided
to write the Alikhtawa as a book of the Muhadiseen. It relies on the
Hadith to highlight the consensual points between the four legal
schools of thought.27
Siddiq Hasan meant to work out the Alikhtawa as a text that would
forge global unity across the varied empires through its advocacy of
a consensual form of Muslim conduct based on the scriptures. He
wrote the book in 1867 in Arabic with a global audience in mind. It
was titled Intiqad Fi Sherhal Etiqad. The following year it was translated into Urdu as the Alikhtawa. Its opening chapter describes in
detail the Koranic verses that establish the singularity of God in
heaven (wahdaniyat). The second chapter moves to the Hadith texts
and analyzes sections from it that again talk about the same idea of
one God and his abode in heaven. Subsequent chapters confirm the
same idea via the teachings of learned people, many of whom formed
the legal schools of jurisprudence: Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik,
Imam Shafai, Imam Ahmad, Abul Hasan Ashari, Imam Ali Bin
Mehdi, and Hafiz Abu Baker. After establishing a consensus among
all these teachings on this first idea of wahdaniyat, he shifts the discussion to the supremacy of the one singular God over all his creation. Once again, he legitimates it based on the scriptures and the
sayings of the Islamic legists. Siddiq Hasan uses these points of unanimity legitimated by the Koran, the Hadith, the Prophets companions, and qayas (supposition)despite their many differencesto
bring the umma together. The book details these points of agreement and uses them as referents of Muslim unity. He concludes by
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commenting that he wants young boys and girls to read the book so
that they can become active in the forging of this unified umma.28
If scriptures formed the template for building unanimity among
warring schools of jurisprudence, they performed no less a role in forg
ing the universal norms of bodily deportment and discipline and
notions of morality. And these prescriptions for bodily deportment
and morality constituted the cosmopolitanism of Siddiq Hasan. This
cosmopolitanism was scripture based and transcultural as it united
Muslims across the empires. He published from his own printing
press in Bhopal a series of texts on akhlaq (morality and body discipline and deportment). The subjects of these texts ranged from universal prescriptions on hygiene, well-being, rituals about performing
prayers (namaz), pilgrimage, marriage, and relations between men
and women.

Fathul Mughees ba Fiqhul Hadith

Siddiq Hasan wrote another book in 1881 called the Fathul Mughees
ba Fiqhul Hadith (Seeking Blessings in the Light of Hadith) on bodily
comportment. He published this book using his own private press in
Bhopal. As with many of his other books that were written both for
a global audience as well as for readers in Hindustan, this too was
originally written in Arabic and simultaneously translated into
Urdu. He uses the Hadith (Tradition) to lay out his prescriptive
norms on proper religious conduct, matters of purity and pollution,
dietary regimes, hygiene, and well-being. He argues that these
norms not only connected Muslims across cultures and geographical spaces but also earned them the blessings of God. He quotes
different Hadith to lay out norms on purity and pollution called
najasat, the purgatory called qaza-i-hajat, the social regime for the
menstrual cycle, and the ablution regime for prayers, and the correct way to drink water and to bathe. 29 These bodily deportment
prescriptions are followed by details about prayer rituals, both private and publicsuch as the Friday prayer, the Eid prayers, and the
prayer for the dead (the namaz-i-janaza).30 Finally, the book establishes a strict prescriptive regime for customs like the payment of
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zakat (charity), healing directives, divorce norms, interest on loans,

and much more.31 Significantly, the section on bodily deportment
and discipline also includes loyalty to the king (Itait-i-Badshah) as
part of its recommended universalist social regime.32 This underlined once more that men like Siddiq Hasan were embedded in the
imperial ethos and moved across imperial assemblages. They used
various imperial assets like the printing press and communication
networks to forge transimperial Muslim connections.
A few years later, in 1883, Siddiq Hasan published another text,
called Terazul Khumrat min Fazail ul Hajwal Umra (Benefits of Haj
and Umra).This seventy-two-page book was originally written in
Persian and simultaneously translated into Urdu. He again used the
Hadith to highlight the salience of the haj and umra (pilgrimage to
Mecca and Medina during the time when the annual haj is not being
performed) in the life of Muslims. He quoted from the Hadith
extensively to detail bodily deportment (attire, method of circumambulations, and social hygiene) that was to be observed in the
sacred space of the pilgrimage.33 Establishing universally acceptable
standards for dress (unstitched cloth), bodily deportment, and discipline, along with the norms for circumambulations and prayers,
helped him to lay out unifiers, despite all the dissensions within
Muslim society. Siddiq Hasan was happy to circulate this type of
prescriptive literature both within as well as beyond Hindustan so
as to reach out and establish the unity of umma.
One of Siddiq Hasans most interesting books, in terms of prescriptive deportment literature with transimperial appeal, deals
with the relationship between men and women. This 164-page text,
entitled Salaho Zatealben ba bayan Malezaujen (Discussion regarding
Relationship between Spouses) delineates a universal code for spousal
relationships that is derived from the scripturesthe Koran and the
Hadith. Siddiq Hasan cites a range of Koranic tenets and Prophetic
traditions to legitimate his strictures on how men should relate to
women and vice versa. He quotes the prophet Ibn Saud, who said
that it was lethal to gaze at women.34 Like Ibn Saud, Siddiq Hasan
also denounces the practice of social intermingling between sexes
and meeting women in seclusion.35 He upholds the prophets definition of good and virtuous and bad and evil women and Ibn
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Sauds importance to the man who was lucky enough to attain a

good woman. Siddiq Hasan cites him as having said, Blessed is a
man who should get a woman, house and conveyance and doomed is
one who gets an evil woman and a bad dwelling or a combination of
these. He quotes Ibn Saud again to describe a good woman, whom
he saw as one who was peace loving, brought good blessings of God,
and had pleasant mannerisms and looks. He describes a woman of
bad character to be just the opposite: unpleasant, arrogant, and
untrustworthy.36 Siddiq Hasan wants these definitions to be used as
universal referents across cultural and geographical space.
Siddiq Haasan arrives at universal referents for the definition of
the best woman by invoking a certain tradition of the Prophet. He
cites the Prophets companion Abu Harira, whose views impacted
him in no small measure: [The] Prophet has said women on camel
back and those of Qureish clan are the better ones. Hasan clearly
lays out his preference for women of the Prophets very own Qureish
clan. He represents Qureish women as the ideal type of spouse, along
with those who, according to the scriptures, are on camel back, kind
to children and take care of their husbands and property.37
In the book, Siddiq Hasan cites numerous Hadith texts to legitimate his universalist civil code of conduct code, in this case as it framed
issues of marriage, divorce, alimony, and inheritance. He invokes the
Shariat to break the localized customs and rituals Muslims observed
in these matters. He wished to formulate a code of conduct that
would be implemented across the imperial assemblage. Thus, for
instance, in a chapter devoted to questions of alimony, he relies on
the scriptures to state that if men decide in their heart not to pay
alimony despite having agreed to it on paper they will be sinners
and categorized as rapists (zani).38 In another chapter, he safeguards
men from getting roped into the payment of alimony higher than
they can afford.39 Subsequent chapters cite the scriptures generously
and detail prescriptions for marriage and related rituals like feasting
and celebration. They also explain the significance and importance
of marriage. Thus, for instance, in a chapter entitled Bayan mein
Walima ke (Description of Wedding Feast), he cites the scriptures
to argue that it should be modest and not compulsory for all to
attend.40
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

In another chapter, entitled Haq-i-Zauja (Rights of a Wife), he

cites numerous Prophetic traditions that declare that men have
rights over their wives; these rights are primarily related to matters
of maintenance and good conduct.41 In a separate chapter that details
such rights, he declares that a wife may not deny sexual relations
with her husband at any point in time.42 Other chapters detail his
diktat to men on the importance of providing financial maintenance
for their wife and children.43 He offers support for each such prescription by referring to the scriptures, and expresses hope that
local customs regarding maintenance will be discontinued. Similarly,
he devotes several chapters to etiquette and education of children
(tahzeeb aur talim aulad kee). Once again giving scriptural sanctity to
his transcultural dictums, he notes that the Prophet said that the
man who brings up his children in good etiquette or adab and education will go to heaven.44

Siddiq Hasan and the Imperial Assemblage

Ulrike Stark has argued that the imperial assemblages of the nineteenth century were also empires of print.45 Middlemen like Siddiq
Hasan exploited not just the international relations of empires, but
tapped also into the print cultures of rival powers to fashion their
own self-driven cosmopolitanism. Muslim cosmopolitanism benefited as the books and periodicals Muslims produced from printing
presses across diverse imperial cities circulated across the assemblages. This literature fed into the empires existing fears, phobias,
and foreign policy concerns. Muslim cosmopolitans could bloom if
their agendas corresponded with the imperial mood of the host city.
Many reformers used internal fault lines of empires for personal
aggrandizement. They tapped into the tensions between the core and
the periphery that riveted both the British and the Ottoman Empires.
And thus a print ecumene emerged that was driven by individuals,
embedded in both inter-and intraimperial fault lines, and sustained
via the deft handling of the international relations of empires.
Siddiq Hasan played on imperial fissures between empires and
exploited the print cultures of rivals to create a vast literary ecumene.
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At the same time, he tapped into the northwest frontier politics

within the British Empire as well. Within India he hooked onto the
movement of Muslim men of religion from the settled plains of
Bengal to the northwest frontier.46 The frontier with Afghanistan
always remained a trouble zone for the British government. At one
level, the government encouraged tribal polities, even at the risk of
fanning Islamic revivalism, to create a buffer zone against Russia.
But at the same time there was always a fear of the frontiers potential to destabilize British power.47 Siddiq Hasan used this imperial
tension to his advantage.
The deputy commissioner of police in Calcutta, one Mr. Lambert,
prepared a memorandum on the circulation of Siddiq Hasans literature. He saw a clear link between the author of this literature and
Muslim reformists whom he called Wahabi. He followed the official view of seeing reformist migrs as fanatic Wahabis who were
charged with the spirit of jihador with conducting an anti-British
war from the frontier. He had followed the fanatics ever since the
jihad of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid at the frontier that involved religious men from Awadh, Bihar, and Bengal. He was convinced that
the Wahabis were the conduit for the wide circulation of the
nawabs literature and that their contributions kept the nawabs
public ecumene energized. According to Lambert, the headquarters
of the Wahabis in Calcutta was the house of Maulvi Abdul Rahim
in Dhobiparra. Abdul Rahim was formerly a regimental munshi in
the First Bengal Cavalry. Along with his colleagues Abdulla of
Sealdah, Hyder Ali and Ataulla of Misregunje, and Muhammad
Ahsan of His Excellencys bodyguard, he had distributed the nawabs
book in the region. The agent of the nawab was a man called Sheikh
Ahmada native of Suratwho had returned to Calcutta after a
long stint in Mecca. He distributed the books in India via a string of
contacts: in Benares, through a maulvi of Delhi; in Dinapur, through
Maulvi Ibrahim; in Arrah and Patna, through Maulvi Badi-ul-
Juman; in Nuddea, through Haji Abdul Rashid; in Rangoon, through
Ismael, a Wahabi of Surat; and in Dacca, through Abdul Rashid, a
hide merchant.48
Lambert collected his information on Siddiq Hasan and his network with the assistance of the police inspector of Calcutta, Azizuddin.
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He argued that the nawabs literature percolated not only in different geographical spaces within and outside India but also in government institutions like the army. And this was because the army
was not impervious to Wahabi intrusion. Indeed, Siddiq Hasans
literature had resulted in a lot of Muslim conversions to Wahabism
in the military. Azizuddin discovered that Maulvi Abdul Rahim
the head of the Calcutta Wahabiswas formerly a regimental
munshi in the First Bengal Cavalry. He served the army for some
time in the Punjab and was removed on account of his seditious
character. After his military appointment ended, he became a
Wahabi preacher and traveled to Swat and Sittana on the frontier.
He finally married a woman in Dhobiparra and settled there. It is
interesting that in Dhobiparra he preached from the nawabs texts
and indoctrinated a range of people, including not just maulvis but
ordinary folks like tailors and washermen, into this new form of
reformist ideology. Of course, the literature talked more about the
idea of unity using the scriptures as its template. But Lambert was
most bothered by the many references to jihad.49
The nawab was proud of his traditional learning and the gentlemanly status that it gave him. He used his gentleman card to straddle
British networks at home and imperial crossroads abroad. The regal
persona helped him justify his writings and movements. The British
always described Siddiq Hasan as a fanatic but also something of a
scholar who could read Arabic.50 He was also known to fund religious education of a certain kind. He sent monthly contributions to
Wahabi schools in Ghazipur in eastern Awadh.51 Indeed, his propensity to fund religious education and to publish and disseminate
his books widely alarmed the British. They were worried about his
Arabic compilations that appeared in the bazaars of Calcutta. Even
if it was widely believed in official circles that most people did not
read Arabic in India, the fact that the nawab penned such literature
and circulated it was a cause of grave concern. As Sir H. Dayly, the
agent to the governor general in central India, put it, There is
always a mulla here and there to turn such publications into the
vernacular for the benefit of the people at prayer time.52
Siddiq Hasans literature moved with ease along the networks of
migr men of religion also because this power engine was oiled
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with merchant money. His agents were clearly supported and sustained by Muslim merchants from India. They did not rely on
money received from the nawab for their services. In 1886, one
Maulvi Abdulla, alias Abdul Rhyman (Rahman), traveled across
Dacca, Calcutta, and Madras, carrying with him the nawabs literature. He was supported by both his family and merchants, and he
used the merchant contacts of his father, Maulvi Sheikh Ibrahim, to
disseminate the nawabs books. Sheikh Ibrahim had settled in
Madras after his deportation from Mecca. He lived and preached at
the big mosque in Triplicance in a house that belonged to the merchant Muhammad Pasha. He worked as his translator. The commissioner of police in Madras reported that Maulvi Sheikh Ibrahim had
received a parcel of books wrapped in cloth prior to Abdullas
travels.53 Ibrahim had friends in respectable circles of the Dacca
nawabi and uncles who worked with the Deldwar zamindars. A hide
merchant of Dacca, Haji Rashid, had dispatched a parcel to Ibrahims
address in Madras.54 This was the same merchant who had hosted
Abdulla in Dacca.55 The nawabs book agent, Maulvi Abdulla, was
clearly using his fathers useful contacts because at Madras he
had stayed with Muhammad Pasha, the merchant employer of his
father.56
Reports from the Punjab Police Department also confirmed the
nexus between the nawabs book dissemination and the merchant
networks. In 1885, D. McCracken of the Punjab police was shocked
to discover eight hundred copies of the nawabs Persian book Hidayat
al Saail in the possession of Fakirulla, a bookseller of Lahore.57
Published ten years earlier in Bhopal, this book was viewed by the
British as the most seditious of Siddiq Hasans writings because of
its supposed exhortations to jihad. Siddiq Hasan put up a spirited
self-defense even as the British officers debated how to penalize him
and withdraw the book from circulation. He said he had had only
three hundred copies printed and that none were sent or sold out of
Bhopal. Irrespective of the truth of this statement, the fact remained
that books had traveled outside Bhopal via existing commercial networks. And thus commercial profit and not just ideological commitments had powered their distribution and sale. However, the material
and the intellectual concerns were not always separate. They often
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operated in mutually beneficial ways. Thus the bookseller Fakirulla

smuggled out a huge consignment of the book the Hidayat al Saail
to Batala when the British cracked down on Siddiq Hasans publishing efforts. Fakirullas brother, Abdul Rashid, transported the
package, which weighed one maund.58 The books were sent to one
Maulvi Muhammad Kamaruddin of Batala via the nawabs Wahabi
agent at Lahore, Maulvi Muhammad Husain.59
Merchants and bankers assisted Siddiq Hasan in other ways as
well. Lepel Griffin pointed out to the vast amounts of Bhopal state
money that Hasan used to finance his printing and other operations
and to pay for his legal defense. His agents were known to have
brought hundis for as much as Rs. 1 million from his private
bankersthe Goculdas firm in Jabalpur. These were to be cashed at
the kothis (headquarters) of bankers Sewa Ram, Khushalchand, and
Gopaldass Motiram in Burra Bazar, Calcutta. Griffin was incensed
that Bhopal state money was being used for secret intrigue and corruption. Griffin, in view of earlier reports of Siddiq Hasans attempts
to bribe lower functionaries in the Foreign Office, wanted the government to issue a stern reprimand to the begum whose foolish
infatuation with the nawab made all this possible.60 These commercial networks that sustained Hasans literary and other agendas
alarmed the British, even after Hasan had been deprived of all
share in the government of the state in consequence of his having
published a seditious book.61
Ironically, it was British networks that sustained Siddiq Hasans
book distribution. The imperial postal and telegraph departments
became useful conduits that energized and expanded his burgeoning
world of print. The easy availability of the postal network helped his
network of agents. The Punjab police intelligence reports revealed
that several mosques advertised his books after the Friday prayers
and promised to organize quick postal delivery for them. In the
Chinian mosque, Maulvi Muhammad Hussein of Lahore announced
that Siddiq Hasan was making a charitable distribution of his religious works. He made it clear that the books would be forwarded to
any address on receipt of remittance to cover postage.62
The introduction and expansion of print technology in India and
the private presses that became available to local elites became the
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main engine that powered Siddiq Hasans literary ecumene. Print

capitalism did not revolutionize society to create imagined com
munities.63 But it did give opportunities to individuals to publicize
their interpretations of Islamic tradition and disseminate it far and
wide. Hasans books were printed in imperial and private printing
presses in Bhopal. Books like the Fathul Mughees ba Fiqhul Hadith,
discussed earlier in this chapter, were published by the imperial
press, the Matba-i-Shahjahani, in Bhopal. All the copies of Hasans
Girbal (History of Bhopal) were printed by the Bhopal imperial
press under the management of Maulvi Badiuzzaman. Likewise,
private presses that were owned by Hasans entrepreneur friends
and agents were also involved in the production of his literature.
Periodicals like Mauj-i-Nashadda that carried his religious and
political views were printed in the press managed by his friend
Maulvi Abdul Karim.64 Some of his agents had printing presses that
were used to publish his writing in other cities of Hindustan as well.
Lucknow was one such city that produced quite a lot of his books.
The Matba Gulshane Awadh, a private printing press in Lucknow,
published several of his books including Alikhtawa ala Maslaul
Istawa. Ranzat-ul-Nadiya (The Fresh and Magnificent Garden) is a
work on Wahabi jurisprudence written by Muhammad bin Ali bin
Muhammad of Yemen that has a commentary by Siddiq Hasan. In
1873, soon after the nawab wrote the commentary, Muhammad Ali
Baksh Khan of Lucknow published it at the Motbah-i-Alavi press in
Lucknow.65 Two other books by Siddiq Hasan, the Tarjuman and
the Terazul Khumrat Min Fazail ul Hah Wa Umaram, were produced
at the Mufid-i-Aam press in Agra.
Siddiq Hasan also wielded considerable influence in the newspaper and periodical world of north India. It was widely believed in
British circles of Bhopal that he funded and supported a vibrant
chain of wahabi journals and newspapers and that he attempted to
bribe a great majority of Indian newspapers. Lepel Griffin reported
that the proprietor of the Punjabi press at Lahore, Maulvi Muhammad
Shamshuddin, had passed on to him two letters that he received for
publication from Hasan. In both these letters he had critiqued the
British government.66 The editor of the Fatiya-i-Hind of Meerut as
well as the Pioneer also claimed that Hasan had offered a bribe to
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them in return for publishing select news reports on people under a

cloud in Bhopal.67
A minister who had defected from the Bhopal state, Nawab Abdul
Latif Khan, revealed that Hasan subsidized a large number of Urdu
journals using funds from the Bhopal treasury. He paid vast amounts
of money to people for writing articles in the press that praised him
and his ideology and trashed his opponents: the Hanafites, Chris
tians, and political rivals.68 Editors of some English-language newspapers, like the Statesman, the Indian Mirror, the Mahomedan Observer,
and Amrit Bazar Patrika, who were also paid money by the begum
to write in favor of Siddiq Hasan, reported that of all of them,
the largest amount of money was paid to Amir Ali, the editor of the
Mahomedan Observer. He was given Rs. 20,000. The editor of the
Urdu Guide of Calcutta also received Rs. 2,000. One of Hasans
agents, Abdul Ali, was deputed to supply them with information.69
Khan concluded that despite Hasans favors to the newspaper editors, he did not necessarily receive preferential treatment. The
Muslim society of Bhopal resented his imposition of the Wahabi
ideology on their madrasas and mosques and his abandonment of
the Muhammadan law and its Hanafite strand in favor of his singleminded monism. They loathed his brand of cosmopolitanism, which
he justified in the name of unity of the umma. They also resented
his desire to become amir-al mominincommander of the faithful
and leader of the Muslims of the world.70 And there were elements
of the Urdu press that commented on his misdeeds and echoed
the popular resentment against him. Many Urdu periodicals exhorted
the government to take action against him.71
Colonel H. Wylie, the political agent at Bhopal, elaborated on
Hasans unpopularity with the Hanafite segment of Bhopal society.
Commenting on the mood of the city soon after Hasans death in
1890, Wylie noted, There is no excitement in Bhopal about the
death, and it will be viewed with satisfaction in the state generally.72
Indeed, even when Hasan was critically ill, many Indian newspapers
did not absolve him of all suspicions and misdeeds. They suspected
him of being complicit in the murder of Mirza Fazl Beg, the diwan
of the heir apparent, and one of her loyal supporters, by a wahabi
ruffian called Alimuddin. One self-styled anti-Wahabi newspaper
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accused Hasan of the murder of Alimuddin when he died, and lambasted the Urdu press that had supported Hasans mischief through
out India as well as in Bhopal. It praised Lepel Griffin and attacked
Urdu press editors who had critiqued him in the past.73 To underline how much Hasan was disliked in the city, one article mentioned
that even on his deathbed the only friend he could summon was an
outsider from the city of Lucknow: Sheikh Asghar Ali, the well-
known perfume dealer of Lucknow, was specially called to be at
Hasans bedside as he had no one in the city who was close to him.74
And after Hasans death, T.L. Petre, the first assistant agent to the
governor general for central India, proposed to overhaul his administration by purging it of all Wahabi-oriented kazis and muftis and
substituting them with Hanafite-inclined ones. Petre argued that
this was only appropriate given the fact that the citys population
was Sunni of the Hanafi juridical persuasion.75
As his books triggered official wrath and created discontentment
in society, they became the subject of a wider political discussion,
one that established the definition of a transimperial cosmopolitan
author. Indeed, print technology and the print culture ensured that
debates on Hasans writings moved beyond the confines of sectarian
concerns on Islamic rituals and prescriptions to a broader political
domain. Issues of subject loyalty, leadership, the individual, and the
contours of the community itself began to be publicly discussed. In
1887, the Education Societys press, in Byculla, Bombay, reprinted a
fifty-one-page pamphlet in defense of Siddiq Hasan that had been
originally published by the Ishat-us-Sunnah, described by the British
administration as the Mahomedan Journal of Lahore.76 This pamphlet offered an appeal from the supporters of the nawab to Lord
Dufferin (the viceroy) and Lepel Griffin that urged them to drop
the charges of corruption, exhortations to jihad, and publication of
seditious literature that had been slapped on the nawab. The pamphleteers attributed these charges to undue and out-of-context complaints about him leveled by the Hanafite Muslims. They wanted
the government to understand, in particular, his publications in the
proper context.
The pamphlet moved away both from sectarian blame-game politics as well as narrow anticolonial grievances to publicly debate and
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redefine the connect between the individual and community and

the latters link with the world beyond the confines of British India.
It redefined both subject loyalty and the community in embracive
ways that combined older Islamicate forms of and approaches to
writing with new imperially framed norms. The Islamicate core
enabled the individual to reach out to the world outside while adherence to the new norms of individual accountability underpinned his
loyal status. The pamphlet offered a definition of a cosmopolitan
author by combining the norms of Islamicate literary styles with the
repertoire of the modern empires. It represented Siddiq Hasan as
the archetypal cosmopolitan who was both imperially embedded as
well as marked by traditiona new kind of loyal subject.
The pamphlet began by offering the clarification that it did not
blame the government for its harsh treatment of Siddiq Hasan.
Instead, it targeted his opponents within the communitythe
Hanafites. It regretted the conduct of our own co-religionists who
justified this harshness and advised the authorities to go a step further...and ban the Nawab or transport him to Rangoon or some
other island.77 But as it began to refute the charges of his seditious
publications and support of the mahdi, or spiritual leader, it left the
Hanafite coreligionists and their hostility to him far behind. Instead,
it drew attention to notions of the community, leadership, individual
propriety, loyalty, trustworthiness, leadership, and veracity. It redefined all these concepts in reference to the norms of modern
empires. And it located Hasans vast print ecumenewhich included
his books and agentsfirmly within this imperial frame of sociality. It saw no contradiction between the two. And it concluded that
Hasan adhered to all imperial norms of public order and of the
print culture despite employing the approach of Islamic encyclopedic texts that paid little attention to referencing and borrowed
freely without always acknowledging. The pamphlet underlined
that Hasan had a dissemination network that spilled across and
beyond British India. He was thus undoubtedly beyond suspicion.
The pamphlet refuted the charge that Hasan supported the mahdi
by raising doubts about the evidence that had been gathered from
his agent Din Muhammad. It also raised doubts about the reliability
of Din Muhammad and cast aspersions on his integrity by noting
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the number of cases against him in the Bhopal courts. It argued that
his hostility toward Hasan stemmed from the latters refusal to support his dubious dealings.78 By so discrediting Din Muhammad, the
pamphlet represented Hasan as participating in the British idea of
public order.
On the issue of seditious literature, the pamphlet absolved Hasan
of any wrongdoing. It contrasted his approach to writing, borrowed
from the Islamic style of writing encyclopedic texts, to the British
notion of authorship, which was based on individual responsibility
and accountability. The pamphleteers argued that in his books
Hasan followed the premodern style of writing big-canvas texts that
freely borrowed from other authors, and that he had done so in
order to carve out a gentlemanly status. They pointed out that this
was different from the British style of authorship, in which the
notion of individual accountability remained salient. According to
them, it was unfair to judge the nawab by nineteenth-century imperial norms. He had a strong case in his favor as he could not be held
responsible for the opinions of those that he merely cited. The pamphlet urged that he be absolved of all wrongdoing.
The pamphleteers maintained that the individual was less accountable in premodern times, when literature produced under one name
unabashedly relied on the works of many others. Authors of premodern Islamic literature wrote encyclopedic texts that borrowed
extensively from a range of sources without necessarily acknowledging them. The pamphlet argued that Hasan followed the premodern encyclopedic style of writing; the citations in his books
were not his views. Rather, his books were a compendium of knowledge that he culled from other authors. He wrote these books, they
claimed, to show his universal knowledge of every doctrine without
reference to its correctness or otherwise.79 And thus as per the new
modern norms of individual responsibility, he could not be blamed
for views that were not his but merely citations of others.
The pamphlet placed his books within the individual-centric
norms of the new print culture and absolved him of blame by making
him unaccountable for the views he had merely catalogued. His
Arabic book of sermons (khutbas), Dewan Khutab or Mizat-i-Hasna,
printed in Egypt and later in India, was one of the books chosen by
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the pamphleteer to discuss his traditional style of writing and its

location in the new individual authorship culture of British India.
The pamphleteers argued that the khutba on jihad was not his view
but a mere citation from Maulvi Muhammad Ismail, who had compiled most of the writings of the martyred mujahid Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid of the Battle of Balakot fame. They defended Hasan by
pointing out that the Nawab according to an ancient custom collected the khutbas of the ulema, including that of Maulvi Ismail on
jihad, and caused the collection to be printed in India under his
own name.80 They highlighted his loyal subject status by underlining the fact that when objections were raised about the contents
of the book he quickly followed the rules of the new print culture
and withdrew the book. Indeed, he destroyed all the copies of the
book in India. And when the book was republished in Egypt, the
khutba of Maulvi Ismael on jihad was withdrawn.81
Using similar logic, they refuted the charge that in his book
Hidayat al Saail he declared India dar-al harb (land of infidels) and
that it thus warranted jihad. The pamphleteers stated, It is not true
that the Nawab is their author...but the passages in question are
written by others, the Nawab having simply quoted them.82 They
showed that he had lifted passages from the Yemeni treatise the
Banuian by Hussan-bin-Jalal. They contrasted Hasans traditional
writing style with the imperially framed print world in which he
operated. The Nawabs work, they stated, is not distinguished for
research...he is in the habit of inserting everything in his works
without any reference as to its truth, expediency or otherwise...
this is also apparent in the discussions of some religious and scientific issues. They went on to argue how his use of this premodern
writing style in the new print world had gotten him into trouble
with not just the government but with other religious scholars or
ulema as well. The Lucknow ulema, notably Maulvi Abdul Hai,
severely took him to task for some doctrines of his, and compelled
the Nawab to acknowledge the soundness of their criticism...he
was obliged to admit that he had simply copied certain authors and
could not vouch for the correctness of their statement or compro
mise.83 Indeed, according to the pamphleteers the congruence of
the older style of writing and the techniques of dissemination with
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the new imperially framed print culture made Hasans transimperial literary forays into Egypt and Istanbul understandable. He published from these locations and made full use of the imperial and
private printing presses that knitted together the imperial assemblages. Yet he continued to hold on to his own writing style, which
paid no attention to referencing cited texts. And Hasans ability to
straddle the old and the new norms of print culture were at the
core of his inclusive agenda. The pamphleteers argued that his loyalty should not be questioned just because he had an embracive
agenda that reached out to Muslims outside British India. Indeed,
his loyalty was embedded in his trans-Asian grid, which was energized by the new imperial networks of print, diplomacy, and political strategies.
In this wider context, Hasans controversial book Tarjuman, far
from inciting trouble, stood out as an exemplar of the way in which
Hasan defined the term Indian Wahabis. This was for him a political and pejorative phrase that borrowed not just the name but also
its damaging connotation from the culturally exclusivist and politically anti-British movement of Abd-al Wahab of Nejd. In contrast,
he distanced himself (and others like him labeled as Indian Wahabis)
from any form of restriction and upheld a more inclusive trans-
Asian approachone in which his own loyalty to British India was
a significant constituent.84 Similarly, in another work, Mawaidul
Awaid, written two years before the Tarjuman, he makes a similar
distinction: To call those Indian Muhammadans who do not worship tombs and pirs and prohibit people from unlawful acts by the
name wahabi is entirely false for several reasons: In the first place
they do not represent themselves as such, on the contrary they call
themselves Sunnis in opposition to Shias...If there was anything
of wahabeeism in their creed they would call themselves by that
name and should not resent the epithet.85
The pamphleteers also quoted from the Iqtrab us Sait. This was a
text that was written under the name of Hasans son Nurul Hasan,
even though his rivals suspected that Hasan himself was its author.
They pointed out that Hasan states clearly that Muslims do not
regard even the rulers of the two Muslim kingdoms Turkey and
Morocco as their imams or caliphs, as that status is reserved for
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someone from the Arab tribe of Qureish. And the fact that Hasan
maintained this Arab orientation made the pamphleteers wonder
how one could agree to the allegation that he was orienting the
people politically toward the arrival of the mahdi.86
In their defense of Hasan, the pamphleteers refashioned the concept of community and delinked it from the leader, giving the community autonomy. They argued that the community viewed the
nawab as one of its distinguished member[s] and wanted his titles,
honors, and salutes restored. But that did not mean that they
regarded him as a prophet or imam and blindly followed him. His
significance was both on account of his social position and theological learning, they argued, and they claimed that he [did] not
occupy the same position in the eyes of the Ahl-i- Hadis as the
Prophet. And since he did not have a spiritual position the community would never follow him blindly.
This was a clever strategy intended to protect the community
from blame in the event the government continued to press its
charges against the nawab. Significantly, the definition of community as autonomous also helped the pamphleteers to distance it not
just from the nawab but also from other provocative figures that he
had cited in his works. These included Maulvi Nazir Hussain, the
late Maulvi Ismael, and Maulvi Abdula of Ghazni. They zeroed in on
Maulvi Ismael, the most provocative of these figures, and argued
that common people [might] find fault with what maulvi Ismael said
and did.87 They quoted an Amritsar maulvi who said that Ismaels
jihad with the Sikhs was a disturbance and not a jihad, and that his
work the Sirat-i-Mustaqim and the Mansab-i-Imamat [were] now
generally condemned while the accounts of holy men given by him
[were] openly denied.88 Indeed, the writer of the pamphlet, who
represented not just his view but that of a range of people who urged
him to write, gave his own example to show how he, being part of the
community, had continued to have a difference of opinion with
Maulvi Nazir Hussain, whose student he was. These differences
were on matters of religious prescription. Underlining further the
autonomous functioning of the Muslim community and its delink
from leaders, he mentioned also how he was not at one with the late
Sheikh Abdulla Ghaznawi as regards the attributes of God.89
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Through all these examples the writer of the pamphlet underlined the liberal strands and tradition of tolerance within the Muslim
community, concluding that it was wrong to say that the Nawab
[was] the mouth piece of a community distinguished for its liberal
views.90 Finally, the delink between the community and Hasan
notwithstanding, the pamphleteer reiterated his respect for Hasan
because he encouraged learning by causing a large number of
ancient works on various subjects to be printed at great cost and by
compiling works based on ancient works.91 He concluded with the
plea that Hasan be understood in his proper contextthe quintessential cosmopolitanand be absolved of all charges against him.
At the same time he reiterated that Hasan and the community were
two separate entities. And this defense of Hasan was also meant to
make that distinction clear so as to prevent discredit being thrown
on the whole community on his account.92

Siddiq Hasan and the Imperially Embedded Cosmopolis

Siddiq Hasan used the print culture to carve out international relations that benefited from the imperial moods of rival European
powers. Exploiting the British-Ottoman tensions in particular, he
managed to write and publish his literature simultaneously from
India, Mecca, Medina, Istanbul, and Cairo. At the same time, his
agents also bought books by other authors located in these Ottoman
cities; these books were republished at the Shahjahani imperial
printing press in Bhopal.93 Imperial assemblages were also empires
of print. And thus imperial rivalries translated easily into printing
wars. Indian cosmopolitans like Siddiq Hasan took advantage of
these imperial hostilities. This careering trend was not confined to
elites like Hasan. Many other lesser-known individuals, also with
global aspirations, ventured into these transimperial printing rivalries. Many failed. But those whose moves coincided with the international moods of host cities became successful.
The publication of the Urdu newspaper the Paik-i-Islam in
Istanbul by an Indian Muslim was an important case in point. This
was published simultaneously in Urdu and Turkish in Istanbul with
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the knowledge of the Ottoman government. Sait Pasha, the prime

minister, had sanctioned its publication.94 It was printed at the imperial printing office at public expense and the editor received a subsidy. The first issue, dated May 1880, provocatively referred to the
sultan as the Caliph of India.95 Its object as described by its Indian
editor, Nusrat Ali Khan, was to forge a close relation between Indian
Muslims and the Ottoman government. The British embassy in
Istanbul noted that a large number of copies of the first issue of the
paper had been sent to India. Muslim princes and notables had been
particularly chosen as recipients in order to promote an Islamic
Union that was hostile to British rule. Ambassador Henri Layard
wanted the newspaper immediately banned. He was of the view that
the newspaper was a threat to British interests in India as well as in
Central Asia as it had messages such as Those who do not obey the
Caliph do not obey God. He saw this paper as a prelude to agents
being sent by the Ottoman government to incite Indian Muslims.
Layards report was so alarmist that it was discussed in the British
cabinet and parliament.96 London pressured the Indian government
to protest to the Ottoman government and put an end to this newspaper.97
The Foreign Offices fears regarding this newspaper were later
found to be exaggerated, as Paik-i-Islam had an insignificant readership that was confined only to Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, and
its editor was an unknown entity.98 But it was significant that imperial phobias and networks had been exploited by an ordinary Delhi
individual to tap into the print culture in Istanbul and thereby make
a career. Nusrat Ali Khan, the adventurous editor, was a resident of
Bombay, where he earned a small salary as the correspondent to a
Delhi newspaper, the Nasrat-ul-Akhbar. This paper was edited by
one Maulvi Nasrat Ali. In Istanbul, Nusrat Ali Khan passed it off as
his own newspaper. His fraud worked for some time. But soon he
was exposed, as some Indian Muslims in the city revealed the truth.
In subsequent years he tried to work his way back into Istanbul
society by pretending to be a man of some influence in India.99
Nusrat Ali Khan may have dreamed of forging a trans-Asian jour
nalistic career by tapping into imperial networks. But men like him
were equally critical pawns in the hands of empires. The empires
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used these men to get even in their propaganda wars against each
other. Thus at about the same time as the Paik-i-Islam controversy
was occurring, one Louis Sabunji, a minister in the Syrian Church,
started the publication of an Arabic newspaper, Al Khalifa, in
London. The first issue concluded that the Ottoman claim to
caliphal supremacy was fiction. It also accused the Ottomans of ill
treating Arabs and urged the latter to rise in revolt. The paper was
reported to have had a wide circulation in India.100 The Ottoman
government requested that Britain ban the Al Khalifa in its territories, and Britain complied with this request.101 But not content with
this and aware that the British Press Act had rendered the ban less
than foolproof, the Ottoman ambassador, Musurus Pasa, countered
Al Khalifas claims by establishing a procaliphate newspaper. It was
here that the independent Indian careerists in Istanbul proved
handy. Musurus Pasa also urged Abdul Rasul, an Indian Muslim
from Delhi who lived in London, to publish his own newspaper in
the city. It was published simultaneously in Arabic and Persian and
called the Al-Gayrat. It received a subsidy from the Ottoman government. It did not publish anti-British material but stressed the
importance of the caliphate for the Muslim world.102 The newspaper
soon extended its circulation to India. The Indian authorities found
its tone objectionable, but it was never banned.103
Imperial rivalries helped Siddiq Hasan disseminate his books
across Asia even as he held on to older forms of connectivity to
spread his ideas: loyal agents, family and courtly contacts, and public
discussion, lectures, and debates. The Foreign Office was always
concerned about any information about the circulation of Hasans
books in the Ottoman territories and beyond. In 1881, Major
Prideaux, located in Aden, caused a stir in official circuits when he
reported that Siddiq Hasans works were mentioned in the bibliographical list of the Turkish, Arabic, and Persian works printed in
Constantinople during 18771879. The list was published in the last
number of the Journal Asiatique.104 The tension in British circles was
palpable, even if they downplayed the potential of this literature to
stir trouble in India.
Siddiq Hasans main conduits of distribution were his agents.
These men went back and forth from India, the Hijaz, and the
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Ottoman Arab provinces. They tapped into imperial assemblages

and used its political networks, printing techniques, and diplomatic
strategies. Maulvi Badi-ul Zuman, a native of Lucknow and a friend
of the nawab, who had returned from a long stint in Mecca to settle
in Bhopal, was one such crucial agent. He used his experience and
contacts to circulate Hasans books in Calcutta, Benares, and Tajpur
in Bihar. His contacts in the Hijaz also helped in the movement of
books there. Similarly, Sheikh Ahmad, a native of Surat who had
lived in Mecca for several years and who had returned at Hasans
request, became a key man in carrying the literature to Rangoon,
Dacca, and the entire Bengal region.105 In 1885, Abdur Razzack, a
British vice consul at Jeddah, followed four men from Bhopal who
had arrived from Bombay in the ship Rachompton and disappeared in
Mecca: Maulvi Abdul Bari, Munshi Asad Ali, Muhammad Husain
Khan, and Munshi Salamatullah. These men were allegedly close to
Hasan and were ostensibly carrying his books and periodicals for
distribution to the Indian hajis in Mecca. Razzack managed to track
the first three of these men, but the last one was untraceable. These
men were said to be in correspondence with a famous Wahabi maulvi
from Nejd who was also on his haj. And this Nejdi connection
brought them onto the radar of the Turkish authorities as well. The
Turkish officials arrested them. However, no papers of any importance were found on them. Razzack was of the view that probably
the more important of their documents had already changed hands.106
However, a large number of books were found with these men.
And when read by the ulema at Mecca, on the orders of the Turkish
officials, it was discovered that Hasan authored most. Indeed, one
of these volumes, authored by him, was seen to be distinctly
wahabical.
Razzack reported that this particular volume as well as related
pamphlets had been in circulation in Mecca even before the arrival
of these men.107 He also reported that three other men from Bhopal
had started for Mecca in the company of Hasans agent Ismael Surati.
But soon they went over to the other side (North Africa) and
opened up communication with the mahdi of Sudans son-in-law
Osman Digha. Razzack reported the movement of many disaffected people from India, relics of 1857 and of the later wahabi
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movement in and around Mecca. He was of the view that it was via
these men that literature and letters circulated between India and
the Hijaz. Hasans intervention used as well as energized this vast
literary ecumene. Razzack suggested political surveillance as the
only solution to this problem.108
Indeed, his political espionage revealed that Siddiq Hasan had
hired a reliable person in Mecca to keep himself informed about this
ecumene. His people moved with books and letters back and forth
from Hindustan to the Hijaz, and most were headed toward Bhopal.
One Maulvi Ibrahim, a resident of Mecca, always corresponded with
him and his colleagues Maulvi Badri-uz zaman, Maulvi Moinuddin
the cheese maker, and Abdur Rashid of Dacca. He sent his son Hafiz
Abdur Rahman as a special messenger to these people. Kurban Ali,
Maulvi Akhan, and Tamizuddin accompanied him. They had letters
and documents addressed to the nawab and others in Bhopal.109
Siddiq Hasan left no aspect of imperial politics and space
untouched when it came to building his public sphere between
empires. With the exile of the last Mughal emperor to Rangoon,
after the mutiny of 1857, the city had become a site of many Indian
dissenters. Siddiq Hasan took advantages of this crevice in the
British Empire and dispatched his agents there with his books. In
1885, Ziakhut Ali and his agent Ishmail, who were known as his men
in the area, prepared the ground for the reception of his books and
ideas.110 He found Ishmail a home in the Ottoman Hijaz after the
British police harassed him on his visit to Bhopal. Later, he smuggled him out of Bhopal for refuge in Mecca.111 He was successful
because of his clout with the Ottoman administration in the Hijaz.
And back in Mecca, where the British and Ottoman imperial networks crisscrossed, his Indian agents often eluded British surveillance
and posed as Turkish subjects. They enjoyed Ottoman protection
until the British detected and exposed them, and their fraud was
brought to light. In 1886, T.S. Jago, a vice consul at Jeddah, reported
the case of two Indians, Maulvi Ibrahim of Bengal and Maulvi Ahsan
of Meerut, who had Turkish passports and who had been arrested in
Mecca on suspicion of being involved in treasonable correspondence with the mahdi party in Sudan. These two men had lived in
Mecca for years as Turkish subjects. They had licenses from the
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Ottoman administration to act as religious conductors to Indian pilgrims. On their arrest they were found in possession of the mahdis
proclamations and many works on Wahabism. On their arrest, placards appeared that exhorted people to kill the governor general. In
response, the British authorities requested that their Ottoman counterparts dispatch the two men back to India. Their work passes and
passports were withdrawn,112 and they were exiled from Mecca and
deported back to India.
Merchants played a critical role in the sustenance of Hasans
agents in the Hijaz. Indian merchants did not merely sell merchandise in the Hijaz. They were important conduits through which
money, books, letters, and periodicals circulated in the public sphere.
Abdur Razzack was convinced that two Mecca-based Indian merchants, Abdul Hamid and his brother Abdul Rashid, not only sold
their wares but that their business was a cover for some secret purposes. Other merchants had accompanied Abdul Hamid on his
journey from India, and they had all dispersed on arrival and lived
in separate lodgings. Hamid took great care of the letters he
received from India and of those he sent in reply. Razzack discovered that Hamid was in touch with a Gujarati firm of Indian merchants who were natives of Pattan in Gujarat. And this mercantile
firm had secret dealings of a political nature with the son-in-law of
the Sudan mahdi Osman Digha. Indeed, this firm served as the
financial sinews for the Sudan leaders activities, as money from
India and the Hijaz was remitted through it.
Significantly, this trans-Asian rhythm was sustained using both
imperial networks as well as the territorial identity markers that
empires lent to their subjects. Both of the merchant brothers on
arrival at Jeddah in 1886 registered themselves at the British consulate as British subjects. They soon proceeded to Mecca and set up
a shop in the city. The older brother went back to India for a few
years and the younger one continued to manage his business in
Mecca. Significantly, when the younger brother later left for Bombay,
he wanted Razzack to renew the certificate of registration that had
been issued to him in 1886. He also asked for a letter to show that
he was a trader and a harmless person. He argued that he needed
this to avoid a baggage search at Bombay by the police. Razzack did
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give him the letter but noted his nervousness and thus informed the
Bombay authorities to search him, as, he reported, Abdul Rashid
[might] be the bearer of important letters.113 Indeed, intelligence
about men officially on haj pilgrimage who went missing and their
occasional reappearance in Egypt kept the British consulates on
their toes. Investigations often revealed that their disappearance
was linked to their collection of money in India for the mahdi. Sayyid
Abdul Rahman and Abdul Hamid were two such cases in point of
men who collected money from the wahabi community in India for
the mahdi in Sudan.114
Not surprisingly, Mecca became the ideal location for Siddiq
Hasanthe hotspot from which he could power his trans-Asian
ecumene with ease. His wife owned property in the city: a house
(which was often in the middle of legal disputes) and several charity
houses. These offered both physical support and also the notional
excuse for Siddiq Hasans many forays into the city.115 The cosmopolitan character of the city enabled him to slip in his books and
publications via agents who masqueraded as merchants, pilgrims,
and pilgrim controllers. They slipped in and out and dodged authorities as they maneuvered the entangled networks of Ottoman and
British surveillance. He had his main and subsidiary agents spread
out all over the city. Plus he had at his disposal the networks of other
Indian Muslim men of religion who, as we saw in the previous two
chapters, had exploited imperial fault lines and print techniques to
carve out niches for themselves in the city.
Thus, for instance, he received help from Maulana Rahmatullah
Kairanwi, as well as from Kairanwis madrasa and networks, even if
they were always under official surveillance. Indeed, Muslim networks forged by such scholar migrs kept the British officials busy.
The Foreign Departments H. M. Durand was willing to spend
money on vice consuls for political espionage on Maulana Kairanwi
as well as on the agents of Siddiq Hasan, such as a man named Ahmad
Muhammad. The latter coordinated with his Cairo agent Sheikh
Ahmad Halbi, of Aleppo, and circulated Hasans books in the Hijaz.116
In 1888, Duran urged Jago, a vice consul in Jeddah, to get information about Rahmatullah Kairanwi, who, he said, [was] engaged in
preaching sedition to, and circulating seditious papers among our
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subjects at the haj.117 And Abdur Razzack, another vice consul, submitted a proposal that asked for permission and funds with which to
set up an establishment in Mecca where he could camp and make
contacts and friends in the region so as to gain their confidence and
thereby get information on Kairanwi and others like him.118 Of
course, the subtext of such requests was the British fear that scholar
migrs might not only influence Indian Muslims back home with
their reformist ideology, but more dangerously, encourage them to
become the conduit for Ottoman intervention.
These fears were not entirely misplaced, as much of this trans-
Asian activity derived from and was sustained by imperial networks
and their fault lines. The new age of print offered an advantage to
these fugitive reformists. It lent additional zest to their energy at the
crossroads of empires. Print helped forge trans-Asian communities
on a much wider scale than before. But these were not entirely imagined communities. The self-driven global links forged by traveling
middlemen, agents, brokers, and merchants mediated the production
and distribution of books and created a community of readers. When
the global agendas of individuals corresponded to those of the
Ottoman government, not only was access to imperial printing
presses and subsidies forthcoming, but it also became easy to transport printing presses and techniques to distant lands.119 Imperial
tensions ensured a steady flow of men and techniques across the
British-Ottoman territories. Such networks constituted the material
base on which wider conceptual communities of readers emerged.
In 1885, Griffin reported the story of one of Hasans emissaries,
Din Muhammad, who was dispatched to Sudan to test the political
waters. Sudan was an interesting crossroad where a spiritually powered Muslim network linked the rulers to the world outside. This
network offered a spiritual and temporal conduit to the powerful
Senoussi sect. Hasan plugged into this ecumene, hoping to use it
to distribute his literature. Hasan had it easy in the region because
the Senoussi sect adhered to a form of reformist, puritan Islam
that preached monism, austerity, and simplicity. It used that simple
plank to assimilate a range of other Muslim orders in the region.
The founder of the sect, Sidi Mahommed-bin-Ali-es-Senoussi,
was a religious sheikh of renown in North Africa and the Hijaz
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who preached against the abuses of Mohammedan religion. Sidi

Muhammad warned all men of the advent of the mahdi or Messiah
who would cure their ills. He first implied and then openly taught
that this promised mahdi would be found in the person of his son.
From 1837 to 1883, the sect had grown from one mission, to 120.
These were spread out across Africa and Asia and constituted a vast
ecumene that straddled the British and Ottoman Empires. These
missions were located in Cairo, Timbuctoo, Algeria, Senegambia,
Morocco, Tunis, Tripoli, Cyrenaea, Wadai Kingdom, Dongola, and
Darfour, as well as in the Hijaz, Mesopotamia, the Somali coast,
and India.120 The missions were not just preaching hubs but also
local centers of religious and civil government. The chief of the sect
appointed their heads, but they administered justice locally, levied
taxes, and sustained themselves through profits they made from the
slave trade and agriculture. They opened up new caravan routes
across central Africa and controlled the slave traffic of North Africa.
They presided over a vibrant political economy that kept them
going. Indeed, the economy sustained their global networks and
fired their temporal ambitions. Their chief, much to the chagrin of
the Ottoman caliph, often called himself the caliph. In 1861, they
asserted their importance by daring to excommunicate the Sultan
Abd-al Mejid of Istanbul, who had opposed them. By 1882, of course
Sultan Abd-al Hamid II, eager to improve his image in the Mus
lim world, pandered to their spiritual powers and clientele by conferring honors on the chief, giving him arms, and granting him
trading privileges.121 The headquarters of the brotherhood was in
the vilayet of Bengazi, in which province the imperial authority was
divided between the sultan and the grand master of the order, Sidi
Muhammad al Mahdi.
Siddiq Hasan was very keen to interlace his print-derived public
sphere with the spiritual and temporal ecumene of the Sudan chief.
He shared most of their reformist ideology even if the sheikhs fixation on his son as the promised mahdi created some problems for
him. But it was not the mahdi but the ecumene that attracted him to
the Sudan polity.122And his agent Din Muhammad became his critical link. Din Muhammad was a Hindu convert to Islam who was
employed in Bhopal as the favorite servant of Queen Kudsia Begum.
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He continued in palace service on a pension of thirty rupees a month

even after her death.123 In 1885 Hasan trusted him enough to use
him as his agent whom he dispatched to Sudan to test the political
waters for an anti-British alliance with the mahdi. Griffin was of the
view that he wished to contribute to the anti-British sentiment there
and aid the mahdi in the event of a show of strength. Din Muhammad
was given Rs. 1,000, promised a similar amount on return, and
arrears of salary.
Hasan alleged that Din Muhammad had returned from the Hijaz
and never reached Sudan. Din Muhammad, however, claimed to
have arrived in Sudan from Cairo by road. He stayed there for a
month and made contact with Osman Digha, the son-in-law of the
mahdi. But he could never meet the mahdi and returned with a concocted story gathered from bazaar gossip, much to the wrath of his
master, Hasan. In order to delay his arrival at Bhopal and impress
upon his master that he had had a long stint in Sudan, he detoured
from Cairo toward Haiderabad and Rangoon, obviously confident
of obtaining help from existing Muslim networks.124 On his return,
the very angry Hasan paid him only one hundred rupees.
The case became public when Din Muhammad petitioned to the
begum for redress; she asked him to give a deposition at the magistrates office. Hasan, who feared that his transimperial intrigues
would be exposed, offered Din Muhammad a compromise. Hasan
promised to pay him his money and asked him to leave India for
Mecca. Hasan also asked him to send a forged letter from Mecca
that declared him dead. However, Din Muhammad revealed all to
Griffin, as he did not like the terms of the agreement that Hasan
had suggested. But scared of Hasans wrath, he tried to escape from
India to Jeddah. Din Muhammad had a vast array of contacts in
Bombay as well as in the Hijaz, largely on account of Hasans network. In Bombay he reportedly stayed with one Nur Muhammad, a
noted Wahabi and perfume seller.125 And, of course, in Jeddah and
Mecca he hoped to find a safe refuge by using the Muslim networks
that thrived on Ottoman-British rivalries and that had sustained his
career all these years.
Din Muhmmad tapped into Hasans vast networks, which extended
from the Hijaz to Rangoon and from Bombay to the Northwest
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Provinces. This web of contacts included agents, brokers, merchants,

booksellers, and maulvis. Griffin reported that Din Muhammad
hooked onto Muslim networks in the Northwest Provinces, as he
was unable to escape to Jeddah because of the heavy surveillance of
the Bombay government. The frontier offered the most popular
escape route for those who could not leave by ship from Bombay.
Din Muhammad revealed that he had been instructed by the Hasan
to tap his Northwest frontier contacts. His revelations exposed the
critical ties that existed between his mentor, Hasan, and the colony
of Hindustani fanatics and Wahabis at Hazara and Palosi, both
of which bordered the Afghanistan border.126 These people offered
him refuge. He reported to Griffin that he was supported free of
charge at the Hazara shrine of Kunar near Amb and welcomed at
the Wahabi colony at Palosi. He stayed with Sayyad Ahmad Pirzada
of Kunar for three months. Nawab Akram Khan of Amb was not
that welcoming. And he went several times to Maidan near Palosi, as
he later reported, to interview the Hindustani Mullahs and to tell
them about his mentor Nawab Sadik Hasan.127
On his arrest he had on him letters from one Karim Khan, a
Kanauj resident who resided at the frontier colonies, as well as
one from a student who had been staying on the frontier and had
shared a house with him. The contents of the letters revealed that
Din Muhammad played the middleman between the frontier mullahs and their supporters in Bhopal and Hindustan. He enabled a
steady flow of men, money, and wherewithal that moved between
Hindustan and the northwest periphery. The letters, which were
addressed to Din Muhammad, showed concern about his whereabouts and made inquiries about his return from Kunar. One of the
letters urged him to bring certain books, and a printing press and
any other books that may be of use to this community. There was
also a request for a lantern.128 Griffin tracked Din Muhammads
movements to Lahore, where his contacts with local people were
more than evident. He had stayed in that city with Muhammad Ali,
a tinker in the Laukar Bazar area. The Lahore police soon arrested
him.129 An experienced officer recorded his deposition and he
was directed to proceed to Indore for further interrogation by
Griffin.
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Even though Griffin was aware of the lies that Din Muhammad
was prone to tell, he did believe his word on the existence of influential networks across the British and Ottoman territories. British
officials had tracked him on the very routes that he listed. Moreover,
even though Din Muhammad denied the motives that Griffin
attributed to his movements, he never disclaimed having actually
visited, as Hasans emissary, the cities that dotted the networks.
Also, after he lodged his complaint against Hasan, he gave a deposition to the kotwal and requested the settlement of the expenses he
had incurred during his travels.130 Griffin was convinced that Din
Muhammad was just one of the many such agents that constituted
the trans-Asian and African world of Siddiq Hasana world that
Hasan admitted was financed by the Bhopal treasury. Not only did
Din Muhammad have his own agent, Abdul Kaiyum, who connected with him at different places, but other full-time agents were
also involved. Din Muhammad named Maulvi Nazir Hussain as
another such Wahabi agent of Hasan; he received one hundred
rupees a month from the state treasury. Griffin was always baffled
by the complex world of Hasans agents as they crisscrossed empires.
His simplistic understanding of their networks perhaps enabled the
agents to prosper. According to him, the agent Nazir Hussain was
expelled from Arabia by the Turkish authorities, who found him
troublesome.131 That once again did not explain how Nazir Hussain
would later be able to reenter the area.
Ottoman Hijaz, as the critical crossroads of imperial networks,
was a safe haven for many outlawed men and their emissaries.
Siddiq Hasans turncoat emissary Din Muhammad did not take
refuge there because he was outmaneuvered by the British, who had
maintained surveillance of him. But he did maintain a presence in
the region, and, taking advantage of imperial tensions, traveled to
North Africa and Burma. The easy availability of print technology
and the profits derived from it made it relatively easy for Britains
Muslim subjects to straddle empires. Din Muhammad, as the emissary of Hasan, took advantage of imperial networks and established
other agents across the Ottoman territories in Arabia and Africa. As
early as 1870, an important adherent of Hasan, Abdulla Khan Ghazi,
left India for Mecca and settled there. He acted as the nodal point
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for scores of other servants and emissaries that came from Bhopal
to correspond with the mahdi of Sudan. One Ismael of Surat, whose
father was also involved in disseminating Hasans books in distant
lands, was located in Sudan to act as coordinator. The governor of
Hijaz, Osman Pasha, often intercepted these letters. These interceptions, which involved the fate of little men caught in big wars,
resulted in a good deal of political tension. The British felt that the
letters to Sudan were meant to convey to the mahdi that he had supporters in India and that they were willing to join his endeavors.132
Sheikh Ahmad Halbi of Aleppo was Siddiq Hasans trusted agent
at Cairo. He stored Hasans books that were printed at Cairo; these
were worth Rs. 80,000. The fear of the British surveillance made
their distribution and import to India difficult. But with the support
of the Ottoman administration a small number of them were smuggled to Mecca. A Bhopal agent, Ahmad Muhammad, who lived in a
rabat (charity house) of the begum in the city, distributed them to
visiting Indian and other hajis.133
The case of the four Bhopal hajis who left for Mecca unexpectedly in the 1880s revealed the dependence of Hasans networks on
both the imperial and the local webs that liked Indian royal courts.
All these men were of modest means and employees of the Bhopal
state. The state exchequer paid for their haj, and of course in return
they promised to be the critical link in the transimperial chain that
connected Siddiq Hasan to the Hijaz and North Africa, that linked
him to Afghanistan and czarist Russia via the Northwest Provinces
of India, and that even extended his long arm eastward into Burma
and Indonesia.
Maulvi Abdul Baris unexpected journey to Mecca on state money
raised eyebrows, as he was a man of modest means, received a salary
of only Rs. 30 per month, and had a family of ten to support. But he
was Hasans link with the northwestern frontier nest of Hindustani
fanaticsMuslim men of religion accused of sedition after the 1857
mutiny-rebellion. In return for the financial help he received, he was
expected to take this frontier connection forward into the Hijaz. If
royal favor enabled his haj, the imperial networks facilitated his
journey. He traveled on a British passport on an English steamer and
used consular assistance. And once in the Hijaz, he hoped to exploit
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Ottoman interest in British subjects so as to lay his net far and wide.
The same story applied to Munshi Asad Ali, an assistant faujdari (a
local official who helped to maintain law and order) of modest means.
He received Rs. 150 from the state and Rs. 50 from the British as a
pension and had a family of forty to support. He used his daughter-
in-law, who was the daughter of Hafiz Surati, a close friend of Siddiq
Hasan, to get the necessary wherewithal to proceed on haj. The
return favors were the same as those expected from Maulana Bari.134
Maulvi Salatmullah, who was known for his Wahabi views at the
Jama Masjid and received Rs. 30 per month from Siddiq Hasan, was
unexpectedly dispatched to Mecca. He too was expected to be one of
the critical links in Hasans transimperial chain.
Finally, the abrupt departure for haj of Muhammad Hussain
Khana record keeper for the Bhopal state and a former army
officer of the Awadh nawab Wajid Ali Shahalso fit into Hasans
style of using both local royal and imperial networks to establish his
transimperial contacts. Khan, a known mutineer, openly condemned
the British as his estates had been sold when the decrees of his creditors were executed. He openly espoused the cause of the mahdi of
Sudan and was happy to enlist support in his favor. His departure
for Mecca, with Rs. 5,000 from Hasan, made it evident that he had
larger plans in this Ottoman-controlled city, where he intended to
establish himself as the Bhopal agent.135
The memorandum on these men from one of the Bhopal men,
S. Ahmad Raja, stated that traveling on the pretext of haj these men
were to serve as interlocutors between imperial rivals, straddle their
networks, and graft their webs over imperial ones. Significantly,
Raja also brought to notice the critical ways in which these men
would maneuver not just the Ottoman but the Russian Empire as
well. He observed: Some of them have gone out to give instructions to the Mahdi and Osman Digha through their agents at Mecca
to open communications with the Russians. Some others have been
commissioned to keep the Wahabis of Hodeida and Yemen prepared
for jihad and acknowledges the Nawab consort of Bhopal as their
spiritual leader [imam]. Some others have been sent out to gather
important news at the British Consulate and communicate them
where necessary.136
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Indeed, letters, books and other papers were an important part

of the wherewithal these men carried to ideologically firm up the
ecumene that lay embedded in imperial connections. And much of
this literature was generated via their access to the printing presses
in Istanbul and Cairo. These were available to them because they
were seen as critical pawns in imperial wars. They benefited from
the close fit between their own agendas and imperial international
moods. Indeed, close on the feet of these departures Hasan also
requested a sum of Rs. 800,000 from the begum so that he himself
could proceed to Mecca on his pilgrimage. Raja was of the view that
Hasan wished his four haji emissaries to lay the ground for him in
the region and that he wanted to settle permanently in Hodeida or
somewhere close. He concluded that Hasan wished that his imamat
be recognized by the Wahabis in the region. Regardless of the
motives behind the spurt of these unexpected travels, the fact
remained that a specific kind of Muslim cosmopolitanism was being
scripted: this was ideologically rooted in the scriptures, it upheld the
universalist code of public conduct, and it remained physically
embedded in imperial networks and their print technologies. It was
not surprising that the very imperial networks that sustained this
cosmopolitanism were used to clamp down on it whenever necessary. Thus Raja urged Griffin to close in on these men, and offered
the following instructions: You may enquire of the passport office
or office of Pilgrim Protector at Bombay on what steamer have the
Bhopal pilgrims left for Mecca in order to communicate to the
Consul at Jeddah what steamer he is to search for.137
Indeed, it was these imperial tensions and print wars that enabled
Hasans books to be printed simultaneously from both private presses
as well as the state-owned ones in Delhi, Bhopal, Lucknow, Cairo,
and Istanbul. We noted in the previous section the range of imperial
and private presses in Bhopal and other cities across Hindustan that
published his books. He had similar access to private presses in
Cairo and Istanbul as well. For instance, when Inspector Azizuddin
was in Calcutta, he had purchased nine of the nawabs books for
nineteen rupees; of these books, two had been printed in Istanbul
(Has-ul-Manul and Lakat-ul-Izlan), one in Egypt (Al-Rajat-ul-Nadea),
and the rest in Bhopal. They were all in Arabic.138 Hasan, even while
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tapping imperial networks, never let go of his courtly contacts that

he had amassed by marrying the begum of Bhopal. Thus in 1882 the
nawab of Basoda revealed to the British that he had been asked by
Siddiq Hasan to carry a load of books for him to Istanbul. On his
part, he handed over these books to the British officer Colonel
W. Kincaid.139
Thus both his royal pedigree and the contacts that it brought to
him, as well as the imperial networks, enabled Siddiq Hasan to glide
across an array of geographical and cultural assemblages. Indeed,
this larger cosmopolitanism rather than a narrow anticolonial arena
was his canvas. As was evident from his writings surveyed in the
section above, he was interested in a nonconfrontational life that
enabled him to connect to other imperial assemblages spread across
Asia: Ottoman, Russian and Dutch. And there were still many in
official circles who did not consider the movement of his men and
books moving across empires worrisome.

The British View of Muslim Cosmopolitanism

One of the reasons that the imperially stoked and individually driven
Muslim cosmopolitanism survived was that the Indian government
refused to recognize its complexity. They always regarded it as a
law and order problem or as an international Muslim conspiracy
that had to be surgically handled. Thus British officers in Bhopal
considered Hasan less of a menace if he wrote for an audience abroad
in Arabic. And his transimperial gaze came as a relief to officers in
Bhopal who saw it as proof of his disinterest and lack of potential to
stir religious fanaticism in India.
General H.D. Dayly, agent to the governor general of central
India, always went by the views of his contact in Bhopal, Shahamut
Ali, who quelled any alarm regarding Siddiq Hasans literature.
Dayly stated emphatically, If in Arabic it [the literature] must have
been intended for circulation in Arabia or Constantinople, scarcely
a man in Central India would be able to read it. And Dayly was
convinced that because Hasans most scandalous text exhorting
people to jihad was written in Arabic, it had limited or no appeal or
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audience in India. People in Indore and Malwa were not even aware
of this book. And thus Britains friendship and loyalty toward Bhopal
could be maintained and Hasan merely warned. Dayly was of the
view that no drastic action was necessary, as it was not worth it.140
Indeed, many officials thought that Hasans vast transimperial clout
could be of help in the event of a Russian invasion. Siddiq Hasan
played on these imperial anxieties, assuring the British officer that
there would be no trouble in India from Muslim elites if the Russians
arrived: Inshaallah yehan balwa nahin hoga. (God willing there
will be no trouble here.)141
Even Griffin, an arch critic of Siddiq Hasan, was relatively less
alarmed about his transimperial forays. He saw a disconnect between
British India and the Muslim world abroad. He prepared a note for
the begum on some of the most objectionable books of the nawab.
Here, he mentioned that Hasans compilation of khutbas in Arabic,
Diwan-ul-Khutab-lil-Sanat-il-Kamila, could be ignored, as it was
published in Arabic, which is an unknown tongue to the great
majority of the people of Hindustan, and the book was primarily
intended for circulation in Egypt and Arabia.142 The book was
recalled, and Hasan was let off with a warning. When the government of India panicked on account of the discovery of a provocative
compilation of khutbas allegedly authored by Hasan, Griffin responded
with a rare calm, indicating that the problem lay elsewhere. He
stated, Nawab Sadik Hassan was rather in his publication looking
to Mecca and Constantinople than to India, hoping to be accepted
at the head-quarters of Islam as a bold and capable defender of the
faith.143 He reinforced his argument by pointing out that of the five
hundred copies of the khutbas printed, three hundred had been sent
to Mecca, one hundred to different places in India for sale, and that
only the remaining hundred were in Bhopal either in the nawabs
library or in the press.
Griffin, even when he recommended action against Hasan, was
less fearful of his global ambitions. Indeed, he was convinced that
Hasans influence was not so great in Hindustan. He felt his literature was geared toward his effort to be, as he put it, a champion of
Islam, and [to] be accepted at Mecca and Constantinople as the prin
cipal defender of the faith in Hindustan.144 Griffin was invariably
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more worried when he considered the possibility that Siddiq Hasans

target audience was in British India. Thus the Persian Hidayat al Saail
incensed Griffin to the extent of his urgently recommending that
the government take stern action because not a single copy was
found in Bhopal, but was meant for circulation in the North-
Western Provinces and the Punjabthe hotbed of Indian fanat
ics.145 For similar reasons his Urdu books the Ghubal-i-Tarikh-I
Bhopal (History of Bhopal) and the Tarjuman-i-Wahabiya (An Inter
preter of Wahabism) alarmed Griffin because they were written in
the local vernacular; the latter had an English translation as well.
Sayyid Akbar Alim, third assistant to the second minister in Bhopal,
had translated the text into English. Griffin listed it as seditious
even though, as we saw in the discussion of the book above, the
Tarjuman was Hasans self-defense in response to being labeled a
Wahabi. He represented himself as a loyal Indian. The more he
framed himself within the confines of British India to underline his
loyalty, the greater he irked Griffin, who then saw his literary
ecumene as a direct threat to British political sovereignty.
Griffin, unable to trash the Tarjuman for seditious phrases, condemned it on grounds of its mistimed publication. He wrote, I
would only say that this praise of Wahabiism and the discussion of
the pros and cons regarding it were an unfriendly act towards the
British Government...such a discussion was eminently out of place
when the British government were in Egypt engaged in warlike
operations of extreme difficulty with the mahdi.146 He argued that
when seen in the context of his 1884 book Iktirabussa, written under
the name of his son Nurul Hasan, the objections to Tarjuman stood
out even more. According to Griffin, Hasan sidestepped the tenets
of the Hadith and instead listed the distinguishing features of the
promised mahdi, or savior. Griffin was incensed at Hasans suggestion that the Sudan mahdi was the promised one who people believed
would arrive to save Muslims globally from Western domination.
According to Griffin, this proved Hasans anti-British sentiment
and demonstrated that he was attempting to incite people against
the British.147
Indeed, both the domestically produced and consumed literature
of Siddiq Hasan and the literature produced for the audience in the
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Ottoman territories were, as we argued at the beginning of this

chapter, part of the same transimperial ecumene. Hasan had nurtured this public sphere so as to move out of the confines of space
and territory and wage his larger civilizational battle against Western
ascendancy. Yet Griffin insisted on viewing the print ecumene of
the nawab as split into two segments: the Indian and the foreign. He
did understand the nawabs Wahabism as a scripturally derived ideol
ogy that was aimed at uniting the umma across empires. But he viewed
that ideology as distinct and separate from his writings and actions
in India. These were viewed in a very narrow colonial frame and
often stamped as anti-British. In 1885, Griffin wrote, He [the nawab]
is a fanatical Muhammadan, and is by popular report a wahabi;
although writes various books, both to show that he is not so, as also
to show that wahabeeism as properly understood is a distillation of
all the virtues.148 Griffin always warned that the nawab, as he
described it, helps those Muhammedans who try their strength
with the British government like Arabi Pasha and the Mahdi. He
was convinced that flows of men and money were maintained between
Bhopal and these men.149
Other British officers also failed to understand Hasans complex
networks. Lieutenant Colonel W.F. Prideaux recognized the nawabs
cosmopolitanism. But he reduced it to the question of his ego,
noting, He is a bigoted Muhammadan and a man of great vanity. It
would appear from his writings that he is desirous of enhancing his
reputation for sanctity amongst his co-religionists, and at the same
time posing before the eyes of foreigners as a great temporal prince.
He reacted to the objectionable passages on jihad in publications
from Bhopal like the Mawaz-ul-Hasnota or the Ranzat-ul-Nadiya.
But he doubted if they were meant for inciting trouble in India. He
hinted at the global audience Hasan was trying to reach via this literature using his rank and status as a loyal subject of royal background. He said that this was particularly clear from the string of
pompous titles which he gives himself in the books printed at
Constantinople, ending with the unusual designation of Malik
Mamlakah BhopalKing of the Kingdom of Bhopal.150
In contrast, Siddiq Hasan refused to have his transimperial
cosmopolitanism split into two. He saw himself as a cosmopolitan
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intellectual
who was embedded in an imperially framed world. He
followed its norms but at the same time was very conscious of his
royal pedigree. He always defended himself when accused of his
untoward intellectual forays into Istanbul and Afghanistan. He
argued that he was a scholar and could read Arabic and that that
itself should explain why he was connected to the intellectual ferment in the Ottoman lands and beyond.151 He flaunted his Indo-
Persian gentry background and marriage into the princely family of
Bhopal, which had made it easy for him to connect to the varied
cultural spaces offered by empires outside British India. Thus, for
instance, when quizzed about his compilation of an objectionable
textDivan-ul-Khutab-lil-sanat-il Kamila, published by Maulvi Abdul
Majid Khan in Bhopal in 1879that exhorted people to jihad he
was noncommittal. But he did justify his links with the world outside on the grounds of being a scholar who knew Arabic and thus a
natural member of the literary ecumene that connected imperial
assemblages across Asiathe Dutch, the British, the Ottoman, the
Arab, and the Russian imperial grid.
Indeed, Hasans self-defense was a plea to be viewed as a cosmopolitan actor, which he argued was perfectly compatible with his
loyal subject status in India. He acknowledged his contribution to
the wider literary public sphere, having taken it upon himself to
supply reprints of books authored by Indian scholars. He denied any
narrow anti-British agendas and professed his loyalty to the British
government. Indeed, he used its individual-centric norms to argue
that the objectionable sections in his books were not his but those of
authors he had merely cited. He claimed that on the basis of individuated authorship norms he could not be blamed for the views
of others.
He vehemently denied that he was the author of the controversial
sections on jihad in his books. He pointed out that they were extracts
from other Indian authors like Ismael Shahid and reprints from
books given to him by Arab friends like Qazi Zainul Abidin. They
had brought these books with them during their visits to Hodeida in
Arabia. He reiterated that he merely reprinted such literature and
reproduced its extracts in his compilations. Indeed, he not only disclaimed any alleged sympathy with the objectionable passages in his
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books, but also contrasted them to those authored by him. Regarding

those of his books that did not cite others, he said that he was
breathing a spirit of loyalty and expressly denouncing jihad.152
Significantly, he agreed to withdraw these books from circulation
within India when the British administration persisted in their
objections. But neither did he offer to remove them from the wider
ecumene between empires, nor did the British government make
any such demand. The political agent in Bhopal reported that the
nawab was cooperating in the withdrawing of these books from
India. He stated that Hasan had handed him fifteen copies that he
had been able to procure in Bhopal. He also ensured that no mosques
in Bhopal had any copies with them.153
Significantly, Siddiq Hasans self-defense to Lepel Griffin on five
of his particularly objectionable books underlined his contention
that India was part of the Muslim cosmopolis between empires. He
also added that it came as a rude shock for him to know that there
was an official distinction between the norms that operated in the
imperially embedded Muslim public sphere and those that defined
the territorial confines of British India. He proved his innocence by
representing himself as the cosmopolitan who was oblivious to the
legal framing of British India as separate from the Muslim cosmopolis. According to him, India was integral to the larger Muslim literary public sphere. He said, Since I have come to Bhopal I have
devoted most of my time to literary pursuits, translating and compiling books. Had I known that such works are prohibited by English
law, I would have abstained from this occupation.154 Indeed, in his
defense of the book Hidayat al Saail he denied being its author. He
said he was the compiler and had contributed only two questions to
the text. These refuted Wahabism and the idea that India was a
dar-al harb or the land of the infidels that justified the waging of
jihad. And on both these scores he argued against protagonists who
demarcated the world by reducing it to territorial closures.
He reiterated that Indian Muslims could not be Wahabis as the
latter were ideologically and territorially rooted in the Nejd. In contrast Indian Muslims were part of the broader intellectual and cultural constellations. Similarly, India was very much part of the
Muslim public sphere and thus could not be a land of the infidels.155
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Siddiq Hasan sarcastically asserted the intellectual superiority of

the Muslim cosmopolitanism in relation to the relative dullness of
British India that reduced intellectual synergy to matters of public
order. He reminded the British of the longstanding critical link
of India to the world outside. He said, The practice of refuting
one anothers religion is carried on among Muhammadans and Chris
tian men of learning; and religious books are compiled, and discussions on religious matters are made by others in other places in
India; but no disturbance of the peace appears to have been created
thereby.156
In a similar vein he defended his other two controversial books,
the Tarjuman-i-Wahabiya and the Aktar-ab-us-saat. The former, he
argued, delinked Indian Muslims from their Nejdi coreligionists,
who took pride in the constraints of their ideological and territorial space. In contrast, the Tarjuman located them as loyal subjects
with transimperial contacts. Hasan did not see these two issues as
mutually contradictory. Similarly, in Aktar-ab-us-saat he refuted
the claims of the mahdi of Sudan to be the real mahdi because
such a much-awaited cosmopolitan figure could never be territorially
stamped. He called him the imposter.157 Thus Siddiq Hasans
defense amounted not just to his public declaration of being a cosmopolitan intellectual. He also went ahead and demarcated as his
Muslim cosmopolis the imperially embedded Muslim public sphere
that he traversed.
He did not in any way see his loyalty compromised as a result of
his participation in this cosmopolis. Indeed, he saw all Indian
Muslims as loyal subjects even as they straddled the imperial assemblages and carved out a niche for themselves using imperial networks: printing presses, consulate protection, and imperial rivalries.
He regretted that British law regarding publishing in India got in
the way of forging such networks. In his defense, he remarked, I
have always been engaged in translating and compiling books, but
never had any occasion to study the British laws in force in India. If
I had, I would never have attempted to translate such books as were
supposed to be written against the government of India, and to carry
out orders emanating from the Residency and the Agency.158 He
used the rules of modern empires: historicity, objectivity, and
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reason to justify some of his other publications. He defended his

Girbal using these referents. He argued that the book was written at
the request of the begum. It was a text on family etiquette and the
begums visit to Calcutta. It would withstand any historical scrutiny.
He compared Girbal to the chronicle on the Mughal emperor Akbar
penned by the imperial historian Badayuni. Both were based on
official documents that would stand up under scrutiny.159
Siddiq Hasan always defended himself by making a distinction
between his conduct in British India and his connection to the
public sphere outside. It is significant that despite his not so hidden
transimperial agenda, the British administration was reluctant to
engage with him as a Muslim cosmopolitan. Indeed, his activities
within India were under more scrutiny than his doings outside.
Ironically, this reluctance to engage with Muslim transimperial cosmopolitanism and instead to treat it as a simplistic Muslim conspiracy lent it a fresh lease on life. People and texts across the
imperial assemblages of British India and the Arab territories of the
Ottoman Empire moved with ease, with Siddiq Hasan as the interlocutor between the two empires.
In 1881, the government of Bombay sought permission from the
government of India to allow an Arab, Muhammad bin Ibrahim
Alkusaiyar, who had arrived from Linga, in Arabia, to proceed to
Bhopal. He wanted to meet Siddiq Hasan, to whom he was bringing
a load of Arabic books on the doctrine and tenets of the Wahabi
faith.160 A comment he reportedly made confirmed the centrality of
the nawab in the transimperial public sphere: according to the commissioner of police, he said that he pursued in his native country
some works of Muhammad Sadik Hassan which induced him to
come to India for the purpose of further prosecuting the studies of
his creed at Bhopal under the care and protection of Muhammad
Sadik Hassan.161 The list of books he carried included treatises on
the Nejd Wahabis and their doctrine, as well as commentaries on the
Hambali branch of the Sunni sect that they followed. More significantly, he carried the Fathul Majid, a book on tauhid (belief in one
God), by Abdur Rahman bin Hassan, the great grandson of Abd-al
Wahab, the founder of the Wahabi faith. He also had in his possession Kitabut-tufi by Suleiman bin Abdul Kawi Tufi, a book on the
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Hambali legal school of the Sunnis, and Tathirul Atekad, a book on

Wahabi tenets by Muhammad Ibn Ismael-Amir.162
The government of India allowed the Arab to travel to Bhopal
and merely warned the nawab to be careful in dealing with him.163
This made it evident once again that it did not view the nawabs
transimperial ecumene as a grave threat. However, they were
alarmed when after interacting with a range of the nawabs scholarly
friends in Bombay, like Maulvi Inayatullah and Hidayatullah of
Byculla mosque, Muhammad bin Ibrahim Alkusaiyar left for Hodeida
without going to Bhopal.164 Indeed, Siddiq Hasan was able to carve
out his literary ecumene between empires precisely because of the
British denial that its linguistic and theological referents and its literature struck any chord with Indian Muslims. The administration
was convinced that Arabic and Middle Eastern influences would
have limited or no impact on Indian Muslim society. Lepel Griffin
and others in Bhopal had a blinding India-centric gaze when it came
to Muslim societya limited perspective which only benefited men
like Siddiq Hasan. Griffin wanted tough action against Siddiq Hasan,
measures that would bring both the charges of maladministration
and seditious literature to the forefront. This, he felt, was the best
way to balance the politics of setting an example of him without
alienating completely their ally the begum. And yet, as he stated, he
was convinced that the writings of the Nawab ha[d] less influence
than might be supposed. And this was because he felt that dogmatic and polemical books are not much read in India...where
dogmatic theology attracts much less attention and interest than in
Arabia, Central Asia and Turkey. He also had a dim view of the
popularity of the Arabic language in India. According to him,
Outside the narrow circle of mullahs, Arabic is hardly known. He
noted that the boys of the higher classes learned it when young but
never used it and soon forgot it.165
While this may have been true to some extent, Griffin underestimated the Indian impact on the transimperial Muslim public sphere.
This interstitial space was constantly energized by men and by literature that originated in India, moved across imperial networks,
and reached Istanbul, Mecca, and Cairo. Ironically, British officers
viewed Muslim cosmopolitanism as a distant other that was less of a
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threat to public order and British rule in Hindustan. And thus, for
instance, Griffin saw Siddiq Hasans books, for which he had been
reprimanded in 1881 on the charge of sedition, as a comparatively
venial offence, as the books were primarily intended for circulation in Arabia and Turkey.166 Griffin was less worried about their
impact as long as the targeted audience was not in India.
And yet despite British reluctance to engage with Muslim cosmopolitanism, many of its actors dipped their fingers in local Bhopal
affairs as brokers who snooped around for trouble spots so as to
intervene. In 1895, the case of a man called Sheikh Zia-ul-Haq came
to light. Zia-ul-Haq had published a pamphlet in English called The
Reign of Terror in the Bhopal State, a diatribe against one of the
begums ministers that highlighted his corruption. Both the begum
and the Foreign Office ordered an inquiry into his affairs, as well as
measures against him. It was found that he was a native of Hapur,
west of Delhi, and had made a career straddling imperial and Muslim
interests in Persia where he offered to act as liaison for the British
government. In Persia he was regarded as an adventurer and a
suspicious character. In Bhopal, he posed as the official emissary of the British government and was thrown out when it was
revealed that he was an imposter. Then he popped up in Mylapur,
Madras, from where he helpfully sent messages to the English
reporting about one Rajab Ali, who he said was writing a seditious
book called the Eastern Question. He was always untraceable in
Madras. The Foreign Office was convinced that he had joined forces
with Sajjad Hussain to fight out battles in Bhopal by writing this
damaging text.167

Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Twentieth Century

The British administration recognized the embracive world of
Muslim cosmopolitanism, carved out by men like Siddiq Hasan,
even if they downplayed its India connection. They viewed the
Muslim cosmopolis simplistically as a public sphere that represented
caliph-centric pan-Islam. They believed that Indian Muslims were
attracted to the cosmopolis only because of the caliph. This was a
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connection that always aroused their suspicion. They viewed with

concern any Muslim reformist who returned to Bhopal from the
Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They felt vindicated when
in the high period of the Indian Khilafat movement the political
conspiracies in the Hijaz were traced to Bhopal. In 1916, the arrest
at Nainital of Maulvi Khalil Ahmad of Saharanpur, who had recently
returned from Jeddah, caused a stir in both Muslim as well as official circles. It was alleged that the maulvi had contacts in Arabia and
India with those who were involved in a serious Muhammedan
conspiracy against the British government. Though not a conspirator himself, he was said to have had knowledge of the plots of his
associates.168 On his return from Jeddah he had dined with Mirza
Abdul Samad, military secretary to the begum. The Muslims in the
upper echelons of Bhopal society expressed grief and consternation at his arrest. Khalil Ahmad was released after investigations,
but his links with the alleged conspirator, Maulana Mahmud Hasan
of Deoband, always kept him under official surveillance. C.E.W.
Sands, of the Crime Intelligence Office, was of the view, as he later
put it, that it was quite natural that some Muhammedan gentlemen
in Bhopal should be connected with such eminent maulvis as Khalil
Ahmad of Saharanpur and Mahmud Hasan of Deoband both of
whom have a sizable and wide circle of murids, ex-pupils and friends
in Upper India.169
British officials always put under the scanner people with links to
the Delhi-based Nazarat-ut-Muarif ul Korania, the educational
center of the begums son Obaidullah. They were alarmed that the
Bhopal government funded it.170 Obaidullah was the main conduit
between the world of traveling maulvis and Bhopal. Indeed, he was
unrelenting in his efforts to pull seminaries like Deoband into the
center of the Muslim cosmopolis. We saw in Chapter 4 that Deoband
always had a tremendous scholarly presence and link with the
Muslim world outside. But Obaidullah wanted to make this con
nection politically active and dependent on an array of imperial
assemblages.
His forays into the madrasa at Deoband were both welcomed and
resented by the scholars there. In 1916, one Maulvi Sayyid Muham
mad Murtaza Hasan, the son of Hakim Bunyad Ali of Chandpur,
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Bijnor, reported that he had seen Obaidullah in Deoband. More

important, he witnessed Maulana Mahmud Hasan tie a pagri (headgear) on Obaidullahs head. Sayyid Muhammad Murtaza Hasan
remarked on the respect and honors that Obaidullah received at the
seminary and his involvement in event management. Obaidullah
was also appointed naib nazim of Jamayatul Ansar. He gave financial assistance to students at Deoband and obtained the madrasas
assistance for setting up his own school, the Nazratul-Muarif ul
Korania in Delhi. His followers at Deoband included a range of
maulvis from all over India who had links to the Hijaz. These
included Sheikh Ahmad of Bhagalpur and Ahmad Hasan of Kairana.171
With the influential Maulvi Ahmad Hasan on his side, Obaidullah
decided to pull Deoband into transimperial Muslim politics. He
suggested that the institute close down in support of Turkeys war
in the Balkans and indeed collect funds for the Balkan War. This
was opposed by many maulanas of Deoband including Habibur
Rahman, who argued that Deoband was a religious school and the
view of the government was unknown. This implied that it was
not common for the seminary to take independent political stands.
In his drive to pull Deoband out of its narrow territorial groove,
Obaidullah flaunted his own vast transimperial contacts. He cited
his support networks not just in the Hijaz but also among the
maulanas of the northwestern frontier and Kabul.172 Significantly,
Obaidullahs transimperial world corresponded with that of his
step-father Siddiq Hasan.
At about the same time, the youngest son of the begum,
Hamidullah, had become involved in Muslim nationalist politics
that had a procaliph orientation. He caused concern as he had
reportedly become intimate with the brothers Muhammad Ali and
Shaukat Ali who were rallying Indian help for Turkey. In 1915,
M.R. Burn, chief secretary to the government of Uttar Pradesh,
reported to the government of India that the Ali brothers and
Hamidullah had met at Aligarh and that the latter had collected
funds for them and had given them Rs. 2,000.173 Their overt expressions of pro-Turkish sentiment were in tune with the responses of
many Muslim organizations, like the All India Muslim League and
the Khuddam-i-Kaba, that were led by educated elite Muslims.
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These organizations were incensed at British support of the Arab

revolt (19141916), which had ended Turkish control of Arabia and
resulted in the sheriff of Mecca being made custodian of the Holy
Places. Predictably, the All India Muslim League, the Khuddam-i-
Kaba, and various other societies and Muslim organizations adopted
an uncompromising attitude toward the grand sheriffs actions. In
response, the British tapped influential Muslims and urged them
to mold opinion in their favor. The foreign secretary wrote to
all officers across India that they should convey the following
argument in the best possible way to Indian Muslims before an
opinion crystallized among them: That to be pro-Turk is to be
anti-British, since the allies of our enemies must be our enemies,
and the enemies of our enemies must be our friends. The Turks by
their own action brought themselves into the former category...
the Arabs on the other hand have long been attempting to throw off
the oppressive Turkish yoke which the Indian pilgrims have themselves experienced.174
They were asked to explain that the Arabs had become friends of
the British by becoming enemies of our enemy. And thus the
British government would offer them assistance if they so desired.
But at the same time, the British government pledged that the Holy
Places will be more than ever immune from molestation by Christian
naval and military forces.175
Even as the British worked through the supposed contradiction of
Indian Muslims taking on the roles of both loyal nationalists and
Ottoman sympathizers, the begum of Bhopals stand on the issue
revealed that it was entirely possible to lean both ways. She and her
subjects refused to condemn Turkey or to applaud the Arabs and
their British mentors. Yet her alliances and loyalty to the British
remained intact. She was constrained by her political alliances with
the British within India even as she was integral to the vast Ottomansupported Muslim cosmopolis carved out by her husband. Torn
between the pressures of local territorial politics and the pull of
trans-Asian cosmopolitanism, she best exemplified the case of people
at the crossroads of the national and the transnational. The
latter for her was far more diffused and flexible than the notion of
caliph-centric pan-Islam suggests. But her dilemma and ambivalence
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revealed as well that the caliph was also integral to the imperially
embedded Muslim cosmopolis.
The begums supposedly ambivalent stand gave the debate on
Muslim opinion about Ottoman Turkey and the caliph a new
turn, one that drew more from the dynamics of the Muslim cosmopolitanism of her husband and less from the mere simplistic caliph-
centric Pan-Islam as understood by the British administration. At
the start of the Arab revolt in 1914, the begum framed herself within
the parameters of her commitment to British rule and expressed her
regret over the Ottoman governments alliance with Germany,
which had made it the enemy of the British. She did not think the
Arab revolt was anything new or surprising since the Arabs had
been dissatisfied with Ottoman rule for some time. And she was
therefore not surprised that they freed themselves from the yoke
and ranged themselves on the sides of their co-religionists in India,
Egypt and many parts of the world who [were] fighting on the side
of the allies. She described the Arabs as her friends and the results
of their fight as favourable to Islam.176
However, she tactfully realigned the Arabs and their British and
other allies toward the Muslim transimperial cosmopolis. She did so
by arguing that it was via British imperial networks that her Muslim
subjects could access the transimperial cosmopolis. She argued that
the embedding of Muslim networks in Western imperial webs made
Britain and her allies integral to the Muslim cosmopolitan world.
And thus the Arabs had only ranged themselves on the side of their
co-religionists in India, Egypt and many other parts of the world
who [were] fighting on the cause of the allies.177 Very much in line
with the rhetoric of Muslim cosmopolitans like Sayyid Fadl or
Maulana Kairanwi, who as we have seen had carved their trans-
Asian networks by exploiting imperial politics, she too considered it
appropriate to support the Arab revolt against Turkey by invoking
the critique of the hajis from the British and Dutch colonies who
had experienced the corrupt Turkish administration. She exploited
imperial politics regarding the shoddy Ottoman management of the
haj, remarking, With the expulsion of the Turks the Hijaz will
again be open to pilgrimage, and there will be no risk of interference with pilgrims; and the pledge given by the British Government
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at the outbreak of the war absolutely guarantees the immunity of

the Holy Places and Jeddah from attack or molestation by the British
naval and military forces.
Indeed, in her conversations with O.V. Bosamquet, agent to the
governor general in central India, she seemed firmly centered in the
Muslim cosmopolitan world as laid out by her late husband, Siddiq
Hasan. She mapped this cosmopolis onto the political alignments
laid out by Britain and its allies against Turkey. As we saw above, she
viewed this political network as integral to the Muslim cosmopolis
and identified Britain and its allies as political sovereigns of Muslim
subjects. According to her, this status gave them a place in the
Muslim cosmopolis. She thus called the alliance between the British
and the Arabs one between co-religionists. And even while she
emphasized the new political networks as being in line with Muslim
cosmopolitanism, she insisted that the war [was] not a religious
war. She referred to the caliph as an ordinary Asian rulerthe
sultanwho had lost prestige because of his diminished political
clout and territory. And thus, very much like other Muslim cosmopolitans discussed in this book, she too had a very desacralized view
of the Ottoman caliph.
The begum attributed the caliphs significance more to the temporal power that he wieldedas a sultanover a large part of the
Muslim world rather than to his self-proclaimed spiritual status.
She emphasized the significance of temporal power in leading the
Muslim community and concluded that the sheriff of Mecca, despite
his being the custodian of the Holy Places, would be popularly
viewed as the caliph only if he expanded his temporal clout.178 And
until the sheriff reached that position of strength, the Ottoman
sultan, despite having been ousted from the custodianship of the
Holy Places, would continue to be seen as the caliph because he
wielded immense power. Indeed, she observed, The Turk if driven
[out] from Europe will still be the khalifa if he has the power even
though it be an empire purely Eastern and out of Europe.179 And by
the same logic she argued that if help [was] given to the sheriff at
close of the war, and he were made the sultan of Turkey he would
then be the khalifa. No one would have a word to say against such
an arrangement. But she emphasized that as long as there was an
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

Ottoman Empire with a powerful temporal head, anyone else who

was appointed head of the Holy Places would be looked upon only as
the vali of Mecca and Medina. Her late husband and other cosmopolitans had seen the Ottoman sultan as a powerful imperial reference point that marked one significant border of the Muslim
cosmopolis as it stretched over the imperial assemblages. Echoing
their sentiments, she remarked, Islam looks on the sultan of Turkey
as a sort of vakil to the court of Europe, and would be gravely hurt
if that vakil were removed from Europe. But Islam would not care
a button if the sultan were removed to be replaced in Istanbul by
the Arab.180
The begums use of the language and sentiment of Muslim cosmopolitanism was quite remarkable as she balanced her political constraints, as expressed in her alliance with the British, to her larger
connection with the world outside. Her responses echoed those of
the scholarly elite protagonists and founders of Muslim cosmopolitanism. Like them, she too wished to distance the Indo-Persian elites
like herself (the raees) from the views of the Indian Muslim League,
which she said was composed of barristers, doctors and people of
that class. And she described these people as few in number and
without influence. She said her views were also distinct from people
of very ordinary (if not low) birth who had made remarks about the
Arab revolt.181 However, the British were so fixated on caliph-centric
pan-Islamism that they viewed the begums complex cosmopolitanism as a change of stand made under the influence of her son
Hamidullah, who was known to be friendly with the procaliph Ali
brothers.182 The begums reluctance to address her public on the
issue of support to the caliph until she had studied and gauged the
situation in detail only added to British fears.
And yet despite their caliphal gaze, D. Gray, the viceroy, did rely
on the Muslim cosmopolis to influence opinion in favor of the
British on the issue of the transition in the Hijaz. Gray hoped that
the returning pilgrims, satisfied from a pilgrimage free from the
usual scourges of epidemic, disease, robbery and extortion [would]
tend to soften Indian Moslem opinion towards the new regime.183
He thus inadvertently shared the idea of the Muslim cosmopolitans
who desacralized the caliphate and spoke about Muslim connectedness
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across the imperial assemblagebut an assemblage that they envisioned as being informed by ideas of good governance and directed
by a sultan with the political clout to lead the umma.
And the reactions of most Muslim notables and rulers only underlined further how quickly the caliph was de-centered as the desire
for an effective Muslim leader with temporal power gained momen
tum. Thus, for instance, the nawab of Tonk approved of the sheriff
of Meccas revolt, but doubted his strength to pull through. The
nizam of Haiderabad also did not outright condemn him. He waited
to see if he would fully succeed. Political organizations that were
invested in anticolonial politics were the most vociferous critics of
the sheriff. These included not just the Indian Muslim League but
also the Punjab Muslim League and organizations in the Northwest
Provinces.184
The begum had a nuanced view of the Arab revolt that reflected
her understanding of Muslim cosmopolitanism. But the Arab Bulletin,
a British collation of views from the Arab Bureau, insisted on view
ing the Indian Muslim reaction to the revolt as hostile. It argued
that Muslims in India were angry because, as they described it, the
revolt weakens the strongest of the independent Moslem states
on which Indian Moslems consider that their existence as an independent political entity in India depends.185 The report saw Mus
lim orientation toward Turkey as a reaction to their fear of Hindu
domination in the event of Britain not responding to their demands
for separate electorates and resorting to other ways of safeguard
ing the interests of minorities. And thus it concluded that look
ing around for some counterpoise to Hindu majority the Muslims
remembered that they were members of an Islamic brotherhood
extending beyond the limits of India and decided that their one
hope lay in the sovereign Moslem statesTurkey, Persia and
Afghanistan.186
Significantly, while the report itself indicated that these other
countries together constituted the arena of Muslim politics and
movement, it continued to focus on the singular appeal and significance of Turkey in the Muslim cosmopolis. And this singularity of
Turkeys position in Muslim lives was problematic. Although the
report was accurate to the extent that Muslim cosmopolitanism was
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

rooted in the imperial assemblages of which Turkey was an important part, it exaggerated Turkeys significance in defining Muslim
politics. Muslim cosmopolitanism was more diffused than the report
suggested; it embraced many imperial networks and referents, and it
did not hinge only on Ottoman Turkey. Indeed, not only imperial
Persia, as mentioned in the report, but imperial Russia and Britain
sustained Muslim cosmopolitanism. And the report in fact inadvertently alluded to this when it defined pan-Islamism as caliph-centric:
it stated that international relations of both imperial Britain and
Ottoman Turkey under the Islamicist sultan Abd-al Hamid II
encouraged caliph-centric pan-Islamism. The report further suggested that the imperial duo of Britain and Russia had so oriented
Muslim cosmopolitanism: When we were pro-Turk and anti-
Russian, we, too rallied Indian Moslems to the Prophets standard,
filling their minds with novel ideas regarding the ottoman caliphate.
The Sunnis having no universal leader in India easily came to recognise the Turkish Caliph as their Caliph and to pray for him as
such. In this, Abd-al Hamid II, anxious as he was to resuscitate the
caliphate in order to check the liberal reformers in Turkey, encouraged them. Thus Turkey came to be regarded as their refuge.187
The report also suggested that Muslims were upset that the new
custodian of the Holy Places was not an independent power but a
stooge of the British.
Other articles in the Bulletin set up Arabia as the alternate site of
Muslim cosmopolitanism but did not shed the Turkey-centric
approach altogether. They justified the Arab takeover of the Holy
Lands on the grounds of correcting an imbalance that had robbed
the traditionally superior Arabs of their historical role in guid
ing the Muslim world.188 And thus one universal site of reference
for Muslim cosmopolitanism (Istanbul) was set to be replaced by
another one in Mecca. Contributors saw the Arab loss of control of
the spiritual sites as the main reason why they had not been able to
flower into a formidable political force. And thus their fall from
their traditional role as the conqueror and civilizing force to a
subjugated race needed to be corrected. And yet they felt that all
was not lost for Turkey. As an article in the Bulletin stated, The
ruling house of Mecca owes its elevation and present wealth to an
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NAWA B SIDDIQ HASAN K HAN AND THE M USLI M C OS MOPOLIS

Albanian Pasha of Egypt and its present head to appointment by the

Porte.189
Provocatively titled essays appeared in the Bulletin entitled
Arabia: The Next Caliphate, which cautioned the British to handle
carefully their political sovereign status. They warned that Muslim
cosmopolitanism, Arab-centric as it now was, was not merely about
spiritual authority. They urged the British to shed the official pretense that the caliphate was only about spiritual power. The truth,
the Bulletin argued, was that the caliphate combine[d] temporal
and spiritual dominion over Moslems in general. And thus even if
Muslims did not see the caliph merely as a pope or spiritual head but
as a political sovereign, they should be sure to regard him so. And
the article concluded: Thus our sovereignty and that of the caliph
vis--vis our Muslim subjects in India will not be compromised.190
Another article highlighted the sovereign powers of the caliph along
side his spiritual ones by reminding the government of the recitation of the name of the caliph as the sovereign of all Mohammedans
in the khutbas. His name was followed by the name of the ruling
political sovereign of the territory.191
Contributors recognized the complex dynamics and functioning
of Muslim cosmopolitanism. For instance, they cautioned the government not to confuse the actual nature of the Islamic caliphate
with the European conception of it as being merely the spiritual
chief of all Muslims.192 They argued that in his political avatar the
caliph played a key role in shaping Muslim cosmopolitanism between
empires. They thus considered it important that the caliph be an
Arab and allied to the British. This would ensure that the British
would oversee transimperial Muslim cosmopolitanism.
The Bulletin goes into the history of the caliphate tradition only
to prove that the original caliphate was Arab. And in the sixteenth
century, the Ottoman emperor, Selim I, defeated the Abbasid caliph,
who was anyway debased because he was non-Arab, and set himself
up as the first Turkish caliph: he was thus the pseudo Caliph.193
Later, Abd-al Hamid II improvised upon this title, combining temporal and spiritual powers during his negotiations of various treaties
with czarist Russia. This was part of a tradeoff for a similar protectionist role Russia was to play with Christian minorities in Ottoman
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territories. And of course, Abd-al Hamid II played on this further

and institutionalized it by compiling in his name Arabic khutbas in
which he appeared as the monarch of the Muslims of the world. The
author of the article argues that the European concept of the
caliphate as a mere spiritual point had been exploited by Turkey to
make inroads into the subject populations of European powers and
to acquire excessive influence over Moslem subjects of other states
and specially in British possession.194
These contributions to the Bulletin revealed that the British government was in denial of the complexity of Muslim cosmopolitanism
as it stretched between empires and covered multiple imperial centers. In contrast, the begum of Bhopal was very much in sync with
its dynamics and spoke its language, making her an enigma for her
allies in Indiathe British.

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6
M au l a na Ja f er T h a n e sr i a n d
t h e M usl i m Ec u m e n e

Travel across the Indian Ocean to the Ottoman world was not the
only way Indian Muslims carved out their cosmopolitanism to posture against British imperial drives. Moments of crisis fired the
Muslim imaginary and enabled notions of self and identity to cross
the borders of British India and connect with the Muslim cosmopolis laid out by migrs. This chapter focuses on Maulana Jafer
Thanesri (18381905) as one such important case in point.
Jafer Thanesri was born in 1838 in Thanesar, in the Punjab. His
father was a farmer. He was a disciple of the famous mujahid Sayyid
Ahmad Shahid. Even though he remained committed to the Wahabi
movement of Sayyid Ahmad, he rose to status via service as a clerk
and petition writer for the zamindars and other needy people in his
locality. He was known as a legal consultant in his area, and amassed
considerable property by rendering legal advice to clients.1
Thanesri participated actively in 1857. In Delhi he headed the
mujahideen who moved to the city and actively assisted their leader,
Inayet Ali, in exhorting to rebellion the Nausherah and the Mardan
regiments of sepoys posted on the Afghanistan border. He returned
to the Punjab only after the defeat of the rebel forces in Delhi. But
even on his return he actively supported the Wahabi movement
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M AULANA JAFER THANESRI AND THE M USLI M E C U M ENE

against the British in the border areas. His home in Thanesar was
the headquarters of the anti-British mujahids and a critical conduit
for sending money and men to support their war in Afghanistan.2
He was arrested in 1863 for conspiring to smuggle funds to the antiBritish mujahideen in Afghanistan. He was initially sentenced to
death. But in 1866 his punishment was commuted to life in penal
transportation, which meant deportation to the Andaman Islands.
He spent nearly eighteen years in the penal colony, where on account
of his knowledge of Urdu and Persian he was appointed as Naib Mir
Munshi, or clerk in the office of the local court superintendent and
chief commissioner. In 1884, he returned to the Punjab with a new
wife, children, and considerable wealth and social status.
Thanesri was always keen to record his experiences and has several publications to his credit. By his own account he began to pen
his experiences in 1862 on being harassed by the British in the postmutiny decade. However, his manuscript is said to have fallen into
the hands of the government during his court trial in Ambala.
William Hunter incorporated parts of it in his book The Indian
Musalmans. He resumed writing afresh in the 1880s on his return to
the Punjab after eighteen years in the Andaman Islands. His writings focused on his life and time in the Andamans. His memoir was
first published in the late 1880s as the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib.3 In 1895,
incensed by Hunters damaging portrayal of his role and that of the
other Wahabis in the mutiny, he wrote the first comprehensive
biography of the founder of the Wahabi movement, Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid of Rae Bareilly. This was published as the Sawaneh Ahmadi.4
And while in the Andaman penal colony he began to write, along
with Major M. Prothero, the deputy commissioner of the island, a
gazetteer-style history of the islands. This book is titled the Tarikhi-Port Blair (History of Port Blair). It has information on the customs, religions, languages, and flora and fauna of the islands.
Thanesri helped both in the collection of material as well as in the
compilation of the volume. Later, at the request of Sardar Ghail
Singh, the circuit superintendent of Port Blair, he translated it into
Urdu.5 He called the Urdu version the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb.
There has been relatively less interest in exploring how the experience of convicts in their new identity as transportable and
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criminally
marked subjects transformed their own sense of belong
ing. Even lesser attention has been paid to charting out their imaginary, which transported them beyond their immediate location and
triggered a kind of felt patriotism.6 A notable exception is Jamal
Maliks analysis of the prison literature of Maulana Fazl-i-Haq, a
mutiny convict imprisoned in the cellular jail at the islands. But this
too is more a study of imprisonment than of long-distance travel as
a convict. Nevertheless, Malik sees in Haqs predominantly Arabic
literary productions the attempt to create an imagined community that spilled beyond the territorial and connected to the Islamic
imperium with Mecca as its pivot. Malik interprets the preferred
use of Arabic by Haq, and the dispatch of his text by his son to
Mecca, the hub of the Muslim world, as proof of his desire to establish a transimperial identity. He concludes that Fazl-i-Haqs writings in the universal language of Arabic and their export to Mecca
created a historical memory that connected the territorial to the
extraterritorial.7
Unlike Haq, who was locked in a cell from which he imagined a
world beyond, Thanesris observations are more ethnographical, as
he was not caged in a cell but belonged to the category of convicts
who were integrated into the colonial administration as low-level
functionaries. He worked as a scribe in the jail administration. He
describes both his travel to the Andamans and his observations of
the island in great detail. Unlike Kairanwi and Imdadullah Makki,
he did not manage to escape to the Ottoman territories. But this did
not stop him from envisaging a Muslim cosmopolis stretched across
empires. His imaginary straddled empires, and via his writings he
envisaged an embracive civilizational space that spilled out of British
India and challenged the colonial regime through its call for Muslim
unity across the imperial assemblage.

Thanesri and the Making of His Mulk, or Nation

British rule of law rubbed on the everyday lives of people even if
it did not always improve it. It offered employment opportunities in
the army and low-level clerical jobs in colonial offices and the courts
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M AULANA JAFER THANESRI AND THE M USLI M E C U M ENE

of law. It opened fresh opportunities for travel and mechanisms to

address law-and-order issues and to redress inheritance and other
societal grievances. The network of government jobs created a positive impression of opportunities that existed across the length and
breadth of British India and marked its administrative boundaries.
This created a sense of belonging that went beyond the immediate
locality and the patrimonial agrarian patriotism or felt community of the early nineteenth century. It was culled from the British
administrative and legal frameworksarkari amaldariand its claim
to uphold a just society where the rule of law prevailed. Both the
praise of this colonially marked edifice as well as the critique of its
rough edges reinforced the idea of the proto-nation as carved out by
the administrative frame of the British government.
Thanesris memoir, the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib, which he wrote in the
1880s after his release, provides a critique of his own arrest in
Aligarh, an account of his travel to Delhi and Ambala as a convict,
the description of the atrocities committed against his brothers,
children and wife that preceded it, and the subsequent hounding of
Wahabis. It reflects how he internalized the states vocabulary of the
rule of law and often lamented its violation. The critique of the
British legal and administrative framework served to define his own
sense of belonging within a system that had a distinct legal frame
and wider territorial reach. Thanesri believed that it was relatively
easy for individuals to move across British India as it was tightly knit
through roads, rail, and a network of administrative and legal offices.
He was confident that as the literate and experienced scribe of the
Persian office he could obtain employment in any other such office
within British-controlled territory.8 The larger canvas of British
India and its opportunities widened his sense of belonging. And this
administrative frame with its standardized norms of service and
conduct framed his notion of homeland.
However, the freshly construed homelandhis proto-nation
had its limitations. This was evident when Thanesri arrived in
Bombay, Karachi, and Sindh. It was difficult for him to culturally
identify with these cities. He was surprised to see the dress, languages, and the people of Karachi: In this mulk munshis and clerks
wear very high caps...we had always thought that in angrez amaldari
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M AULANA JAFER THANESRI AND THE M USLI M E C U M ENE

there would always be an Urdu and Pharsi daftar. And because of

our expertise in munshigiri we would get the job of writer anywhere
and spend our jail years peacefully. But we were mistaken. In Multan
the Urdu and Pharsi daftar had finished. In mulk Sindh we saw only
daftar of Sindhi zabaan. Even though the Sindhi alphabets are similar to Pharsi, but we could not understand the language.9
The cities made him feel inadequately trained as a scribe. Indeed,
his pride in being a clerk and scribe soon disappeared. Nonetheless,
the administrative and legal structure of the state became the reference against which he defined his own sense of belonging. This was
most evident at the time of his trial, when his battery of lawyers
asked for the trial to be abandoned on the grounds that it was illegal,
as their client had operated from outside his home territory. They
identified his home clearly within the sarkari amaldari, by which
they meant the governments administrative and legal ambit. They
emphasized that both Thanesri and other Wahabis had carried on
their allegedly criminal activities from the Punjab, which was outside the frame of the British administration. This being the case,
Section 121 of the penal code did not apply to them, as it was not
applicable for battles fought from outside the sarkari amaldari.10
Thanesri experienced the hollowness of the British rule of law when
his lawyers plea was rejected. His sense of outrage at the fragility of
the rule of law, with which he identified, was again illustrated
when at the time of his trial at the Sessions Court in Ambala, the
judge urged him to ask for forgiveness. Thanesri retorted that he
wanted justice, and, he told the judge, that does not appear to be
flowing from you.11
The continued violation of the rule of law continued to agitate
Thanesri both before and after his trial. He was convinced that
within the ambit of the colonial administrative territory, with which
he completely identified, the rule of law was hollow and the system
corrupt. His descriptions of corruption as well as his passionate plea
to rectify the systems flaws reflected his sorrow at the violation of
his newborn sense of self that was framed within British legal and
administrative paradigms. He lamented that both his mother and
brother Mohammad Sayyid were arrested and tortured. His younger
brother, on being tortured and threatened with death by hanging,
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revealed his hideouts. This triggered a wide-scale harassment of his

friends and relatives in Ambala, which included a search of the house
of Muhammad Shafiq, his close associate. Thanesri revealed how
the criminal justice system was abused by arm-twisting innocent
people with dire threats until they complied with official dictates
and agreed to give false evidence. His relatives Maulvi Muhammad
Taqi and Muhammad Rafi were arrested. They were asked to reveal
the details or else face the gallows. Later they were freed when they
agreed to become informers. They became the governments witness for the trial of Muhammad Shafi, who was falsely implicated
and arrested in Lahore.12 Their help also proved useful in arresting
Maulvi Yahya Ali, Maulvi Abdul Rahim, Ilahi Baksh, Miyan Abdul
Ghaffar, and other Wahabis.13 In Ambala, Thanesri himself was
given the choice to be freed and was offered positions and status if
he became a government witness. His noncompliance resulted in his
physical torture and threats of death by hanging.14 His younger
brother Muhammad Sayyid was coerced to become the governments witness for his trial. He was given money and threatened
with death by hanging if he did not comply. But at the time of the
trial he broke down and resigned from his position as witness.15
In the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib, Thanesri describes the arrest of thousands of Muslims in Bengal for their involvement with the Wahabis.
He notes also the bribes that many of them paid to buy their release.
Many also agreed to become the governments informers and witnesses.16 The best case in point was that of Ishwari Prasad, the police
inspector of Patna, who throughout the trials of the Wahabis (1863
1873) remained loyal to the British. In return for this he was made a
deputy collector. Many like him amassed favorsjagirs, zamin
daris, and fortunesby their participation in the abuse of the rule
of law.17 The states corruption was commercialized. It was up for
sale in the market. Thus, for instance, one arbitrator along with a
witness was always ready for service. He would sell his services to
the best bidder who would pay him the largest bribe. And he would
secure the evidence of his witnesses tailored to the best interest of
his clients.18
Thanesri made sense of the violations of the rule of law and the
indignities perpetrated on his companions across British India,
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whose legal confines he identified as his homeland, or mulk, through

the moral and spiritual succor of Islam. Thus his territorially defined
homelandmulkbecame morally and spiritually framed in the
Islamic way from the very start. In his memoir he comments on his
own arrest, noting, The four months in jail helped me spiritually.
He adds that he was grateful to Allah for putting [him] through
this test of patience. The unfairness of the corrupt system was
comprehensible to him only as a fight for Allah kee raah (right path).
He could withstand its trauma only through his belief that it was a
trial of his patience and perseverance. God had subjected him to
this torture so as to test his commitment to Islam.19 On May 1864,
when the court announced his punishment as death by hanging, he
was happy at the thought that he would be a martyr and thus acquire
the highest possible status in the eyes of God. He offered the following explanation to the Europeans, who often wondered why he
and his colleagues were looking happy even after hearing their death
sentence: In our religion being tortured in the service of Allah and
killed gets us the status of martyr. And that makes us elated.20
Similarly, when the judge announced his death sentence, Thanesri
responded by defining his sense of self not just as a member of the
sarkari amaldari, which for him was his mulk, but also of another
administration, that of Allah. The two for him were inextricably
connected. He retorted, The work of giving and taking life is
Gods, and not in your hands. He is the Almighty who has the power
to kill you before my death.21 His entire text is dotted with descriptions of the miracles and the barakat (blessings) that occurred in
prison as a result of the confinement of so many learned scholars of
Islam with spiritual powers.22 According to him, their divine administration ran parallel to that of the British legal and administrative
frame; it became only more pronounced each time the latter was
perceived to be unfairly violated.

Travel and the Political Profile of the Mulk

Travel of men of religion in the early nineteenth century across
Hindustan and to and fro from Yemen and South East Asia predates
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the era of European colonialism.23 The Islamic political imperium

that controlled the Indian Ocean until 1800 ensured that such traffic
continued with few obstacles. Indeed, men of religion and their texts
were very much part of the literary ecumene that knitted precolonial India to Iran and Central Asia.24 Historians have argued that
the movement of men, texts, and ideas did not abruptly end in
1800the beginning of the landmark decade of Western global
expansion over what was an Islamicate world order.25 However, the
period did see travel increase in scale; it also inaugurated changes in
the administration of moving people and in the modes of transport.
The consolidation of colonial rule in India in the mid-nineteenth
century also meant that the conditions of travel and its magnitude
underwent significant transformations. If at one level the move
ment of people increased in volume and expanse, it also became a
routine, codified, and narrowly monitored. Most significantly, travelers began to be marked with the new legally recognized identities
of convicts, offenders, pilgrims with official passes, and so forth.
New identities inaugurated an era of novel experiences. Thus long
before the commencement of the passport regime, which inscribed
the nation-state identity upon individuals, colonial subjects had
already reworked their self-identities as a result of their changed
political context.26
The travel and deportation of mutiny convicts, especially Muslims,
revealed fresh dynamics of travel. Since the official explanation of
the mutiny-rebellion put the spotlight on the Muslim rebels, the
crackdown on them was the heaviest. Indeed, from the 1830s, following the jihad call of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae Bareilly, the
state was always suspicious of Wahabi movements. It arrested and
imprisoned these so-called Wahabis in large numbers. This only
intensified the movement of Muslim men of religion across India,
especially from Bengal to the new resistance areas in the northwest
region bordering Afghanistan. But the mutiny-rebellion of 1857
introduced a new element into this movement. It created the category of a mujahid wahabi convict, a marked colonial subject who
moved across the length and breadth of India and abroad as a consequence of his legally sanctioned deportation and transportation to
the penal colony of the Andaman Islands and as indentured labor to
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the Park Straits, Burma, and the islands of the Indian Ocean. Or he
left British India as a fugitive runaway to the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire.27
Thanesri too traveled long distances that he had never traversed
before. His memoir, the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib, is a travelogue that details
his experiences as he moved from Aligarh via much of northern and
eastern India to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. He had
never traveled the length and breadth of India. He himself was
impressed at the extraordinary amount of travel he did as a British
convict. He was excited at the new experiences he collected while
covering a vast geographical space. In 1886, on his return to Ambala,
after eighteen years of imprisonment in the Andamans, he remarked:
I realized that from here via Bombay to Kaala Paani, and then back
via Calcutta to Ambala I had covered two thousand miles.28 This
for him constituted his first-time round tour of what he had begun
to define as his countrywhat he refers to as Hind: Kul Hind ka
tawaaf ho gaya thaa. (I had circumambulated the entire Hind.)29
Indeed, his new job in the Ambala magistrates office after his release
and return to the city enabled him to continue with his travels as far
east as Calcutta and as far west as Lahore. In 1886, he also contemplated traveling to London to pursue a legal case.30
As we saw above, Thanesris travel and transportation along the
networks of rivers, roads, and railways spread out by the British government, and his transfer from one jail and court and its associated
offices to another, ensured that he experienced different geographical and linguistic regions. It cultivated in him the sense of belonging
to a wide and culturally diverse territorial confine that was administratively and legally framed by British institutions. He referred to
this bounded entity as Hind or Hindustan. He identified with its
flora and fauna; its fragrances and natural surroundings symbolized
the essence of home. Travel across British India lent him a sense of
felt community or attachment to the soil, and a political orientation. Ironically, this political profile was defined in opposition to the
very colonial state that had precipitated it in the first instance.
Thanesris Tawarikh details his journey from the Ambala prison,
where he was locked up on being convicted in 1862, to the Andaman
Islands where he spent eighteen years as a convict. The text details
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his long travel to the islands via Lahore, Sindh, Bombay, and
Karachi. At one level, this journeyundertaken with the help of
imperial transport and communicationsoffered him his first-ever
geographical tour of the country and its diverse people. It helped
him reconfigure what he understood to be the territorial and cultural contours of his identity. But at another level, the indignities
that he faced as a convict, the injustice and unfairness that he
observed on account of race and color, and the compromises that he
had to make on his elite class status all combined to give his felt
patriotism a distinct anticolonial political profile.
Travel as a convict across the country introduced him to a range
of people with whom he felt connected because of the shared experience of living under British administration. The crowds of British
subjects who surrounded him slowly lent his sense of belonging an
anticolonial patriotism. Each time Thanesri and his colleagues were
shifted from one jail to another there were crowds of sympathetic
people of all religions who cheered in solidarity and support. They
were a noticeable presence at his first entry into the Ambala jail on
being convicted by the Sessions Court of the city. He describes
them in the following words: Thousands of people men and women
had collected in the kutcheri [legal court] to hear the verdict. They
were shocked and crying, and many accompanied us to jail.31 In
1865, on his death punishment being commuted to life imprisonment, he made a memorable journey by road from Ambala to Lahore.
During this journey, he breathed the fresh air and observed in detail
the diverse flora and fauna of the country. He purchased his favorite
snacks from the street, where people gathered to greet and watch
the marching convicts. He describes his sense of enjoyment: Harr
din Eid aur harr raat shabe barat ho gayee. (Every day was as joyful
as the festival of Eid, and every night as colorful and bright as the
festival of the night of the dead.)32 Thanesri and his companions
popularity due to their status as British convicts was most apparent
in the bazaars in the city of Thane, near Bombay. Some of his companions attempted to loot some sweet (mithai) shops as they marched
through the bazaar to the jail. The shopkeepers were not incensed.
Indeed, some of them handed them sweets. It was even more significant that many of them were not even Muslims.33 Thanesris
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more personal individual encounters with staff in the jails and the
courts gave him an occasion to bond with people of regions and
religions whom he had rarely encountered prior to his arrest and
movement across the country.
Thus in the Lahore central jail he was touched by the sympathetic
welcome and care he received from a Hindu Kashmiri daroga.34 In
Karachi he was bewildered by the new styles of headgear worn by
Hindu and Muslim scribes. He describes it as follows: Iss mulk
mein barri barri unchee topiyaan munshi aur clerk, aur barri barri
unchee pagriyaan Hindu mahajan pahantei hain. (In this mulk,
munshis and clerks wear tall caps, and Hindu mahajans [money
lenders] wear high headgear.)35 He engaged with people who spoke
different languages and came from cultural milieux different from
his own. On the ship that brought him to Bombay he reserved special praise for a Muslim orderly who served him well because he was
a maulvi.36 He reserved special accolades for a Muslim police officer
of the rank of naib daroga at the Thane jail who looked after him
well, and also for the marine Sepoys who very respectfully escorted
him in the ship that took him to the Andamans.37
Individuals of different religions and regions whom he met during
his travels familiarized him with the multifaceted nature of his mulk.
And the multireligious crowds on the streets reminded him of the
common thread that, at least politically, knitted him to this diversity. His observations on the variety of flora, fauna, languages, and
cultures, garnered as he traveled on the newly laid out networks of
roads, railways, and ships, reinforced his felt community identity.
These observations also brought home the fact that there was a palpable anticolonial sentiment across the board that held this diversity
together. This political connectivity surpassed the physical connections established by the new networks of roads, legal offices, telegraph, and railways. In the Tawarikh he reports this diversity with
enthusiasm, often peppering it with a critique of the British infrastructure. For instance, he describes the pleasures of being in the
fresh air as he took a boat ride to Karachi on the Darya-i-Sindh
(River of Sind) and observed with excitement the hitherto unknown
plants and vegetables that he saw on the banks. But he is equally
critical of the colonial infrastructure along which he moved and
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with which he identified. The Tawarikh records his complaints about

the sheer number of people in the trains, who were stuffed into one
compartment like animals.38 The ship journey from Karachi to the
Andamans was also unpleasant for him, and he notes the overcrowding and the seasickness of fellow passengers.39 However, his
felt community got a fillip each time he encountered novel landscapes and cultures within the administrative and legally framed
contours of his mulk. Of course, Bombay, with its novel fruits and
vegetables, building styles, dresses, languages, and people, never
ceased to surprise and excite Thanesri. He appreciated the beauty
and the wealth of the Parsi men and women he met for the first time
in the city. He observes: The people of this community are beautiful with light skin and are also wealthy. They belong to the community of fire worshipers.40 He remarks also on the high-rise
buildings, the mounds of salt around, and the coconut trees with
their fresh fruit. He was seeing each of these items for the first time
in his life. He describes with excitement the saree styles he noticed
in the city and the Hindus headgear, which he had never encountered before.41
Once Thanesri arrived in the Andamans, the flora and fauna, climate, seasons, people, religions, and lifestyles all served as reference
points against which he was able to articulate his felt community
identity, his mulkthe territorial, ecological, and cultural contours
of the administratively defined mainland that he had left behind
more sharply than ever before. Not only did he begin to refer to this
mulk as Hind, but he also gave it a specific location in the territorially vast, administratively welded, and culturally diverse mainland
that he had left behind. And he profiled his proto-nation against the
ecological and cultural contours of the Andaman Islands. Thus the
home on the mainland that he has left behind, his Hind, is contrasted to the penal colony in terms of its topography and seasons,
which are different from those on the island. He describes the hardships unknown on the mainland and remarks, People of Hind often
do not realize the hardships that island people face.42 He gives his
own example to show how difficult it was for him to commute between
islands. It was only the power of prayers that saved him from the bad
weather conditions. Again, he defines Hind by describing its stark
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contrast to the flora, agricultural products, and vegetation of the

islands: In the jungles here you get a variety of wood that is different from the wood of our mulk.43 He also views the island as
different from his mulk because it had a different aab-o-hawa (environment). And that made it healthy (sahat baksh), a place less conducive to the fevers and diseases that ravaged his mulk.44
Thanesri comments on the range of seasons in his mulk, which he
contrasts to the islands relatively consistent weather. This was similar to the chait and baisakh season of Hind.45 He contrasts the tribals
of the island, whom he describes derogatorily as forest dwellers
( jangli) and as belonging to a naked and wild community (dahshi
nangi madar zaat qaum), to the relatively civil and cultured people of
Hind.46 Indeed, so conscious was Thanesri of the differences between
the people, flora, and fauna of the island and that of the mainland
that as early as 1879 he translated into Urdu the English hand
book The History of Port Blair, which he had compiled with Major
M. Protheroe. This book was written with the desire that the
people of Hind could get to know about the life on the island.47 In
the Urdu version of this text, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, as we will see below, he
consistently refers to his mulk as Hind. And he always represented
Hind as a distinct administrative, territorial, and ecological entity
that culturally was not just different but superior to the island against
which its profile was constructed.

Civility, Race, Class, and the Making of the Mulk

The official involvement of the convicts in the settlement and the
ethnographic exercises conducted on the islands made them complicit in the British civilizing mission. They used and internalized
the official vocabulary and definitions of the ecology, culture, and
civilization of the island people. However, they cannibalized these
concepts in fresh ways and lent them new meanings. Thus, unlike
the British ethnographers who articulated their culturally loaded
ethnic categories via comparison with Western societies, Thanesris
referent was the mainland Hind. The island society was defined
in contrast to Hind. In the process, Hind too was colored with a
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specific
civilizational and racial profile. And this was very different
from that carved out by his British masters. Thanesris The History
of Port Blair or the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb (History of the Wondrous) shows
how he engaged with the British-derived notions of civility, race,
and class. He negotiated these using both the Islamic as well as the
tribal societys referents. In the process, British notions of civility
and culture were ascribed with fresh meanings.
The Tarikh-i-Ajeeb is very significant because it is more than just
an Urdu translation of an English handbook. Thanesri coauthored
the English original, which was written in the format of a gazetteer.
He reproduced in its preface a letter from Major M. Protheroe to
the chief commissioner that recommended his release and threw
light on the authorship of the book. In the letter, Protheroe states:
I have received great assistance from Saikh Sayyid Mohamed Jaffer
No. 11450, head munshi in the southern district, in the preparation
of this work he has labored most willingly at it during his leisure
hours, and his intimate acquaintance with the numerous Settlement
orders of the past twelve or thirteen years has proved very useful in
its compilation. He has also unaided translated the whole of the
work from English into Urdu.48
The Urdu text, published in 1879, is 228 pages long and consists of
two parts. The first part is confined to describing incidents in the
Andaman Islands and the customs, habits, religions, and languages
of the people. It has maps, charts, and sketches by Thanesri. The
second part includes the Urdu equivalents of the words and phrases
popularly used in the island. This part was written with the intention
of helping British officers and others in the Andamans to learn and
become familiar with Urdu; it also aimed to help the book make
sense to the people of Hind. The text reveals that Thanesris conception of his mulk evolved as a consequence of his active involvement
and participation in the British settlement of the islands. Britains
imperial project of expanding agricultural land by cutting down forests, as well as its civilizing agenda, colored Thanesris sense of self
and belonging in no small measure. As we saw above, his transportation across the vast British-controlled territory before he entered the
islands made him see his mulk as the administratively marked mainland that he had left behind. And like the British officers, he begins
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to call it Hind. And like them, he too defined it in geographical and

ecological terms as different from that of the islands.
In the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, the ecological framing of the mulk reaches
it culmination. Thanesri articulates his felt community identity
as he demarcates his mulk as ecologically unique and distinct from
the flora and fauna of the islands. Very much like a British settlement officer, as he assesses the benefits of retaining certain types of
forests he details also the varieties of wood and forest products available in the islands. In the process, he defines more firmly the ecological contours of his mulk against that of the islands. For example,
he observes, Here the Samagango wood is as weighty and strong as
the Saal and Sakhoo wood of our country [hamare mulk]. Similarly,
in describing the seasons, he remarks, The cold and the hot seasons
are like our mulks chait and baisakh conditions. (Sardi aur garmi
hamare mulk kei chaitbaisakh kee kaifyat rahtee hai.)49 He even
contrasts the mosquitoes of the islands to those in his mulk. Again,
he notes that the luab i-ababeel [saliva of the swallow] is the specialty of this place and is used by people of other countries [mulk]
like China and Burma for enhancing sexual prowess [quwat-i-baah].50
He attributes the recent diminution in the occurrence of fevers and
skin diseases to the clearance of jungles and expansion of cultivation. He also defines his mulk in terms of commonly found diseases.
He glorifies the benefits of British imperial expansion as he describes
its impact on the health of the islanders, and he contrasts the health
ful conditions on the island to the ravages of disease in the mainland. He notes, Infectious diseases like smallpox, cholera, enteric
fevers that destroy our mulk are not even heard of here. And he
remarks that different types of diseases were experienced on the
island as compared to his mulk: mainly diseases of the lungs and
some cases of fevers.51
Thanesris mulk is not just ecologically and geographically distinct but culturally unique as well. And this cultural profile also
derived from his close association with the British. He was never
reluctant to participate in the British mission to civilize the
islanders. Like the British, he found the appearance and lifestyle of
the islanders not just different but loathsome. In the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb,
he describes the people of the islands not just in terms of their
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appearance but also as being culturally less civilized than the people
of his mulk. Thus in his narrative the mulk emerges as an epitome of
civility: civilized and thus culturally superior to the island. He uses
the word wahashi (wild) to describe the islanders. According to him,
both in their looks as well as in their lifestyle they exhibit traits that
are unfamiliar to him and never found in the people of his mulk. He
describes their features and notes that people cover their face with
hair and are ferocious looking (darawni shakl). He is curious to know
where these junglees came from and how they ended up on the
island. He calls their lifestyle wahshiyaana (wild) and their personality bahayam sirat (wild-beast-like nature and character). He wonders if they were born like that and if this has always been their
condition or if at some time, as he put it, like our people they too
were cultured and civilized [shayasta].52
Unlike the British officers, Thanesri did not view the taming
and the civilizing of island people as merely an exercise to make
them loyal colonial subjects. But he too wished to acculturate them
to the norms of civility that he identified with his mulk. He sympathetically noted that they hated imperial expansion into their ancestral mulk (abai mulk and mauroosi mulk). But they felt helpless in the
face of the heavy-handed state. Eventually these wild beasts
(bahayam sirat) succumbed politically and became loyal subjects (farmaanbardar).
Thanesri viewed the settlement of the islands by the British as a
civilizing mission that was meant to bring the islanders up to par
with the norms followed in mainland Hind. This meant joining the
mainstream as represented by the people of his mulk. He notes in his
book that [the islanders] began to learn English and Hindustani;
they cultivated their lands and some went to school, church and
some others offered namaz.53 Indeed, Thanesri included the Urdu
equivalents of local words in the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb so that it could function as a bridge text that would culturally integrate the islanders
within Hind. It offered the officers and locals of the islands an easy
Hindustani self-instruction manual. Thus, Thanesris understanding
of the civilizing and settling of the locals involved much more
than that of the British, who linked civility only to the making of
the loyal subject.
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Thanesris contribution to the hierarchy of colonial knowledge on

India was distinct from that of his British masters even though he
worked for the jail administration on the island. For instance, he
held a particularistic and historicist view on race. This was in contrast to the British view, which initially grew out of their successful
political conquest, and later leaned on scientific explanations to justify the dominance of the West. Instead, his was a historicized understanding that explained the particularities of Asian societies in terms
of their specific historical experiences as revealed in their genealogies. Thus he described the people of the mainland in terms of their
long histories and genealogies, and he contrasted those histories and
genealogies to those of the islanders. He produced an ecological and
racial profile of Hind as the antithesis or the other of the island
society. He categorized Andaman society as one of African slaves
(habshi ghulam). This nomenclature was embedded in and reflected
his knowledge of African slaves and their history of contact with
India. More to the point, it showed his awareness of a widely prevalent view of the islanders lowly antecedents, one that was based on
their physical appearance: body, facial features, skin color, and
height. Thus, the racial contours of his mulk were embedded in the
separate histories of the mainland and island societies.
Indeed, central to his views on race was his own Indo-Persianate
obsession with class. This preoccupation intersected with the mid-
nineteenth-century British idea of race as a political or biological
given. Thanesri was always critical of the fact that in official circles
class-based discrimination, with which he had little issue, had been
replaced by the new referent of racewhich meant skin color. He
resented the favors given to low-class mixed-race Eurasians simply
because of their lighter skin color. He and his colleagues loathed the
white officers most when they mixed the low- and high-class
islanders irrespective of skin color. He was not that resentful when
they discriminated on the grounds of skin color alone.
The Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, like the Tarikh-i-Port Blair, gives the minutest
details of the islanders physical attributes: four feet six inches tall, pro
truding eyes (aankhein ubhree), dark skin (siyaahposh), round head, and
curly hair (ghungrale baal). Thanesri, as the ethnographer, refers to his
subjects as habshis (black African slaves). And like a typical ethnographer
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who made comparisons with other well-known societies, Thanesri

saw similarities between the islanders physical appearance and that
of the real habshis. Such comparisons reveal that Thanesris view of
race was not confined to the white-versus-black obsession of his British
colleagues. Instead, it was a deeply historicist view that explained
racial profile and difference by drawing on the knowledge of the long
histories and genealogies associated with subject populations. In the
Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, he even offers a genealogical link between the islanders
and the original African slaves (habshi ghulam), claiming that accord
ing to legend the latter were stranded on the islands when their ship
broke down, and that the islanders were the descendents of this stranded
population. However, he cautions against arriving at a speedy conclusion, as there were no words from the habshi lexicon in the islanders
language. In addition, he asserts, their lips too are not as thick as
those of African slaves. Moreover, he observes, the islanders have their
own specific qualities and identity, despite their similarities with the
habshis. And he notes that they are certainly different from those of
any other mulk: Habsh, Hind, Madras, Burma or Lanka.54 In the
course of making these comparisons, he ascribed a racial profile to
his mulk that was different from that of the islands. And this difference was striking because unlike the islanders, the people of Hind
did not have a genealogy that connected them to the disdainful
African slave identity.
The Andaman islanders were also different because they were not
of the Indo-Persianate elite class with which Thanesri identified the
people of the Hind. The concern for social class always intersected
with Thanesris views on race. In this he differed from his British
associates. But very much like his urbane Indo-Persianate contemporaries, Maulana Fazl-i-Haq and the Delhi poets Mirza Ghalib
and Azurdah, he too was critical of discrimination purely on the
grounds of skin color. However, racial discrimination was acceptable to him if the issue of class was considered along with skin color.
His own views on people of color (siyapoost), whom he defined as
distinctly low class and thus different from him, were no better than
those of his colonial masters. And he would not have hesitated to
endorse any inequitable regulations on people of color were it not
for the risk that he himself might mistakenly suffer.
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Thanesri was critical of British race discrimination mainly

because it ignored class. He lamented that colonial jails, for instance,
grouped together people of color, irrespective of class. He did not
like the idea of being locked up with Hindustanis of lower class and
caste. In the Tawarikh, for example, he remarks: Hind kei jail
khaano mein sharifon kee barri pareshaniyan hain...hamarei
desiyon kei madarij [classification] kaa koi lihaaz naheen hai. Kaalei
kaalei sab ek samajh kar Raja, nawab, mahtar, chamar sabb ko ek hee
laathi sei haanktei hain. (The jails of Hind are inconvenient as they
do not show any sensitivity to class and group together the respectable with the lowly.)55
He envied the Europeans and Eurasians who even in jail were
treated like sahibs and not made to comingle with the lowly: Magar
kot patloon walon kee kahin bhe izzat hai. European aur doghlei
donou mashal sahib logon kei wahan bhee chain karr tei hain. (But
people who wear coat and pants [the English] are respected everywhere. Europeans and Eurasians are also treated with respect like
[English] sahibs.)56 Even in the Andaman Island penal colony he
regretted that muazas [respectable] Hindustanis who had hundreds
and thousands of servants in their good days, for no reason were
grouped together with lowly black people [siyaah posh]. And like the
choore chamar [low castes] of Hind they too were made to eat leftover
bad food, and labor with ordinary people.57
Thanesri contrasts the dismal treatment of high-class Hindustanis
to that meted out to the Europeans and Eurasians (doghle kale
kalootei). He regretted that despite the ethnically mixed and therefore low origins of the latter and the often low class of the former
they were fairly treated. Indeed, they were seen as being on par with
those in coat and trousers (patloon) or the pure white men (gorre)
who headed the regiments of the black (kaaliya) Christians. He was
envious that such fair-skinned convicts were allotted bungalows and
servants; they even received a salary of fifty rupees a month once
they had their identity cards (which he called licenses). He was very
disturbed when he noticed that men like Mr. Later, who had dark
skin but who also had a European name and dressed in coat and
pants, began to be treated lavishly on the island, receiving a bungalow, a clerical job in the deputy commissioners kutcheri, and more.
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In contrast, the raja of Jagannathpuri, because of his black face

(kaala chehra), had to labor and live with the ordinary low people
(choore chamar).58 The racial undercurrents in Thanesris felt community identity led him to identify his mulk as one of an exclusively
high-class Indo-Persianate society.
Thanesris mulk was carved out of the colonial frame. Its racial
and cultural profile was no doubt influenced by the views of British
officers. However, his notion of race was distinct. Unlike his British
officers, his concept of race reflected a heightened sense of class and
historicity. Thus important differences remained between him and
the officers, even though he acquired the professionalism of the
average British ethnographer. The most important difference was
his religious conviction. He shunned all the late nineteenth-century
theories that offered feeble scientific explanations of racial difference. He was convinced that racial difference could be explained, as
he put it, only as the power and will of God (qudrat-i-khuda), who
produced a range of differently colored creations (makhlooq) all over
the world (rang rang aur tarah tarah kei makhlooq jangah jangah paida
kiye).59 He distanced himself from the colonially informed political
and scientific explanations, stating, To understand and explain
Gods creation through the power of reason and seek proofs for it is
useless. (Iss maqam parr aql ko daurana aur sabuton kaa talaash karnaa
mahaz fuzool hai.)60 Indeed, not just a belief in God in the abstract
but a highly historicized Islamic view of belief, faith, and identity
shaped the cultural and racial profile of his mulk.
The Islamic frame, rather than the Western intellectual and
political imperium, intersects with Thanesris ethnological observation and sociological understanding. Indeed, he places the islanders
version of their history and genealogy in a Koranic frame. Thus, he
writes in the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb that the habshis of the Andaman Islands
believe in the Koranic revelations, which offer an explanation of the
continuation of life despite the mass destruction caused by floods.
In the islanders stories of migration to the island he sees fragments
of the Koranic view on the ongoing cycle of life.61 He mentions a
story that the islanders told him about their arrival on the islands,
which reminds him of the cyclical view of life underlined in the
Koranic narrative of Noahs ark. He notes that the islanders told
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him stories about the boats of their ancestors, which landed on the
Andaman Islands after they had been displaced from their homeland following torrential storms and flooding. Their ancestors, in
ways that are reminiscent of the prophet Noah, made a boat and
remained on it for many days. When the water receded their boat
floated and docked near the Andamans. Once on the islands, they
had no source of fire. A yellow bird, Lorotoot, which flew into the
air and reached the palace of the god Pagoga, saw their inconvenience. Pagoga was cooking over a fire. The bird picked up an ember
(chingari) in his beak and began to fly back. But it accidentally fell on
Pagoga, who was burned. In anger, he pulled a burning log from the
fire and flung it in the direction of the bird. By chance it landed on
the mountain where the ancestors of the islanders were sitting
waiting for some source of fire. They were thrilled to get fire. And
since then they have been very reverential to the bird Lorotoot, who
helped them.62

From Felt Community to Anticolonial Patriotism

Thanesri was a literate munshi before his arrest and deportation to
the Andaman islands. He worked as a lower functionary in the
administration of several zamindars and local courts and helped
people write their petitions. In the Andamans, as a colonial convict,
he learned how to speak, read, and write English as well. In 1872, his
teacher was one Ram Swarup, an English speaker. Thanesris linguistic skills were perfected in the company of the English officers
to whom he taught Persian, Urdu, and the Nagari languages.
Knowledge of English not only improved his status in the colonial
administration but also his financial position. He was the only
Muslim who knew English, and thus he began to write petitions and
appeals in English for the Muslims on the islands. He earned thousands of rupees through this service. According to Thanesri, he had
an income of at least one hundred rupees a month from performing
this task.63 Apart from monetary benefits, this linguistic skill
enabled him to help Muslims represent their cases adequately and in
the proper format for court and trial proceedings. As a result of his
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valuable assistance, many Muslims were acquitted and many had

their death punishments annulled.64 This made him very popular
and much sought after on the islands. It also imbued him with the
spirit of activism, inspiring him to fight for the rights and privileges
of his people and to use the assets he had acquired from the colonial
apparatus. He was so successful in this task that the British worried
that he might use it to incite people against them. On the day of his
release, the administration issued an order that forbade any government functionary from offering help to the natives in the drafting
of petitions.65
Learning the English language created an interesting paradox for
Thanesri. In the Tawarikh he writes that English was attractive to
him, that it allowed him to rise in the administration, and that
helped him to accumulate global knowledge. It introduced him to a
range of literature that was hitherto unknown to him. Indeed, it
made him fully aware of the realities of world power and dominance.
He underlines the benefit of the English language, which he saw as
the window into world civilization and history and as an instrument
of power and control. He states, Angrezi zaban ilm aur fanon kaa
ghar hai. Jo angrezi naheen jaanta woh bilaa shubha duniya kei
halaat sei bakhubi mahir naheen hai. Aur bina angrezi seekhie pakka
duniya dar naheen ho sakta. (English is the abode of knowledge
and scientific and other skills. One who does not know English can
never be an expert on world affairs. And without learning English
no one can be worldly wise.)66
Thanesri feared the detrimental effect of the English language
and the power that it embodied could have on the Islamic world
order, its cultural etiquette, and its moral underpinnings. He saw
that literature in English questioned a way of life framed by Islam
the way of life he defendedeven as he zealously protected his
status and position in the colonial administration. He was of the
view that the English language was harmful and lethal for religion.
According to him, any individual who learned English would definitelyas in his caseread all the available literature in it. This
would make that individual go astray if he had not read his own
Koran, the Hadith, and texts on the Prophet. Thanesri argued that
the English language made people independent, irreligious, and
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uncultured.67 He cited his own distraction from prescriptive Islam

and spirituality as a result of becoming influenced by English literature. He said that he began to miss his early morningtahujat
prayers, which he had always offered with dedication, and even
missed his Friday prayers. He had lost interest in the reading of the
Koran and Hadith, and had forgotten the verses and chapters that
he had memorized earlier. According to him, the only thing he passionately wanted to do was to read English books. He said that Satan
had overpowered him and he was just a small distance away from
infidelity or kufr.
He tried to resolve his internal conflict by withdrawing once again
into his spiritual self to pray to God to make him see the light: dua
maangta kee aye aankh waalei mujh andhei kaa haath pakar.68 This
worked, and finally the spiritual and moral frame of Islam rescued
him and brought him to the right path. When he fell sick with a
painful boil on his leg, he attributed his bad luck to his going astray
from prescriptive Islam. He prayed for his recovery and promised to
return to the right path on being cured. And as he became healthy he
resumed his prayers and readings as per the Islamic dictates for all
believers. From then on, he strived to maintain the delicate balance
between the colonial knowledge paradigm represented by English
and that of his tradition and moral reckoning.

The Islamic and the Western Entanglement

There was no doubt that colonial rule with its print and communication innovations made access to Islamic societies and literature
easy for Muslims. But it also brought to the forefront the new challenges of the times. At one level, colonialism with its print capitalism, greater opportunities for travel across sea and land, and
wider networks of communication facilitated travel and access to
Muslim cultures and made the Islamic imaginary physically real, at
least for the privileged. But this physicality also brought the realization that the global stage was dominated by the ascendant Western
powers. And this realization evoked envy as well as the urge in some
to access the British Empire for the fulfillment of their global
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aspirations.
This was viewed as one way to take on the empires cultural challenge.
The fact that this empire was colonial of course created its own
dynamics for Muslims. But their take on it derived also from the
ambivalence in their minds between an Islamic global imaginary
and the reality of life within its successorthe mid-nineteenth-
century Western empires with their control of capital and culture.
Indian Muslims, as we saw above, used the colonial infrastructural
and intellectual grid, along with its legal vocabulary, print capitalism, and political rhetoricas well as the English languageto
access this new empire as well as to reach out to the Islamic imperium. They hoped to contest the colonial grid once they were sufficiently fortified intellectually and politically via this particular
style of outreach.
Thus, for instance, Thanesri used the newly introduced print
media to represent the hitherto demonized Muslim leaders as ideal
figures whose conduct would unite the community globally. He
recast the much-maligned mujahid Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae
Bareilly as the nonaggressive individual, modeling him on the figure
of the Prophet. This was in contrast to the British myth about Sayyid
Ahmad Shahid as the aggressive anti-British rebel of Balakot; indeed,
the British viewed Ahmad Shahids movement against the Sikhs as
his jihad against the colonial state.69 In contrast, Thanesris biography of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid encased his career in India in a compellingly benign mold. Thanesri framed him in the global movements
of self-purification like the Tarika-i-Muhammadiya (the Muhammedan
Path), and modeled his charisma and lifestyle on the Prophet. Thanesri
challenged colonial propaganda against him and his followers by coloring these local figures with the universalist spiritual hue associated
with the upholder of universal peace, the Prophet. He highlighted
the transimperial nature of Sayyid Ahmads spiritual appeal and
alluded to the immense potential he and other such individuals had
in mustering global support for Muslims in their fight against the
Western powers. Indeed, he argued that men like him combined
exceptional Prophet-like spiritual appeal with temporal ambitions
that straddled empires. Thus they needed to be handled with care.
Thanesris recasting of regional figures in universalist frames began
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to add a fresh, outward-looking veneer to his felt community identity that had so far been articulated in the specificities of ecology and
nature. The Sawaneh, or biography of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, articulated a patriotism that was subtly anticolonial, territorially rooted,
and yet outward looking, racially profiled, and burdened with a concern for class.70 It produced an Islamic identity that was culled from
within the networks of colonial rule even as it remained firmly rooted
in the spiritual and moral frame of Islam. This was Thanesris contribution to the imperially embedded cosmopolis that his peers, discussed in earlier chapters, had forged between empires.

Sir Sayyids Territorial-Bound Vision versus

the Cosmopolitan Gaze of Thanesri
Thanesri, very much like Kairanwi, took on both the political and
intellectual challenges of his time. He responded to the demonization of Muslims by rewriting the history of the famous mujahid
Sayyid Ahmad Shahid. He represented the sayyid as a global figure
who commanded spiritual and temporal influence across the globe
and did not nurture narrow anticolonial sentiment. The biography
of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid earned him his share of critics and opponents. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the Muslim intellectual who saw
the future of Indian Muslims in the administrative confines of
British India and had very definitive territorialized idea about loyal
subjecthood, was the best case in point.
Sir Sayyids definition of loyalty improvised on the ashraf (gentlemanly) culture of Mughal society, which urged people to become
gentlemen in the service of empire. Sir Sayyid reinvented the concept with the promise of jobs in the new British-sponsored service
sectors: the kutcheri or court culture.71 According to him, Islam
needed to be diversified and its scientific spirit highlighted to
encourage Muslims to learn English and the rational sciences so
that they could fit into the territorialized space of the colonial
kutcheri culture.72 Muslims could best display their loyalty as critical
constituents of empire who fit into the territorialized space of the
British administration.
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Sir Sayyid refuted William W. Hunters damaging treatise The

Indian Musulman, in which he labeled Muslim men of religion as
Wahabis and held them solely responsible for the mutiny-rebellion
of 1857. He refuted Hunters charge regarding Indian Muslims
innate ideological indisposition and disloyalty to the British. In contrast, he showed that Muslims believed that the two cultures could
coexist. He asserted, The purification of our faith and our loyalty
to the government under whom we live and serve are perfectly
compatible.73 His arguments firmly located Indian Muslims within
the confines of British Indiathey were a perfect fit both materially
as well as ideologically. And such political and administrative confines framed his definition of the loyal subject. The same outlook
colored Sir Sayyids approach to the practice of religion: Mahomedans
are bound to obey an infidel ruler, he noted, as long as he does not
interfere with their religion. And thus it followed that the freedom
of religion that Muslims enjoyed in British India ensured that they
would always remain loyal subjects.74
Sir Sayyid territorialized Indian Muslims not just within British
India but also narrowly within Indian distinct schools of legal jurisprudence that were protected by colonial rulers. This allowed him
to delink the anti-British tribal warfare on the northwestern frontier from what Hunter saw as the financial and religious Muslim
networks of Hindustan. According to Sir Sayyid Ahmad, the two
were distinct because the latter were Shaifites and the former
Hanafites. Indeed, he tried to dispel British suspicions about the
hostility of the Muslim frontier tribes as well. He highlighted the
fact that they were anti-Sikh and not anti-British. In fact, Sir Sayyid
went a step further to argue that Sayyid Ahmad Shahid of Rae
Bareilly and his network of men facilitated the supply of men and
money to the frontier from Hindustan only to defeat the Sikhs
and thereby facilitate the annexation of Punjab.75 Indeed, he maintained that Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly was a mediator who
worked with both the Sikhs and the tribals and lost his life in the
process. Sir Sayyid argued that the frontier tribes in fact assassinated Sayyid Ahmad. He emphasized that the Hindustani Muslims
at the frontier were forbidden by their religion to fight the British
as they enjoyed religious freedom and had no complaints. Indeed,
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they had left their families in British India, and this was indicative
of the mutual trust between the Hindustani Muslims and the
British.
Sir Sayyid territorialized Muslim loyalty within the confines of
British India. He vehemently denied any allegation that Muslims
violated its rule of law. He framed Muslim lives and notions of loyalty within the confines of the British legal and administrative service culture and its new educational ethos. According to him,
enlightened Muslims occupied this exclusive domain.76 He argued
that Hunters charge that Muslims were incensed at the introduction of the new education policy that left Muslims unprovided for
was true only for those Muslims who were uneducated and not
enlightened. The same was true as far as the introduction of the
new legal apparatus was concerned. Sir Sayyid expressed faith in the
legal system, which he claimed Muslims could access in order to
seek redress for their grievances regarding education or any other
matter. Sir Sayyid was convinced that the lack of sympathy and
confidence that was building between Muslims and the British
rulers, rather than any innate religious ideological block, was preventing the mass production of loyal Muslim subjects. And thus
the onus was on the British to create mutual goodwill that would
energize their education and service cultureassemblages within
which loyal Muslim subjects could be groomed so as to have an
easy fit in the larger territorialized frame of British India.77
Indeed, in his two books, Asbab-i-Baghawat-i-Hind (Causes for
the Revolt in India) and Tarikh Sarkashi-i-Zilla Bijnor (History of
the Revolt in the District of Bijnor), Sir Sayyid had attributed
Muslim resentment to their not being fully integrated into the
kutcheri culture, which they very much wanted to enter. Thus, he
saw the nonparticipation of Indians in the legislative council of the
viceroy as one of the main reasons for the accumulation of misunderstandings that culminated in the rebellion. These resentments
and misunderstandings revolved around administrative glitches
rather than any direct opposition to British policy per se; they
included Muslim anger at the introduction of the village schools,
British educational interventions, and the zamindari auctions. Sir
Sayyid maintained that if these administrative, educational, and
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legal bodies were crafted with sensitivity they could accommodate

Muslims and make them loyal subjects.78
Sir Sayyid saw Muslims as loyal subjects because their faith was
compatible with British ruleor, as he put it, the government
under whom we live and serve. But interestingly, this compatibility
was not so much between a religious tradition and a secularizing
modern nation-state. In contrast, he saw British rule as inherently
Christian. And thus in Sir Sayyids refutation of Hunter he did not
champion Muslim loyalty by showcasing any innate progressive
willingness on the part of Islam to adapt to the modernizing
agendas of British rule. Instead, he highlighted the similarities
between Islam and Christianity and built the notion of loyalty
around the natural affinity between Christians and Muslims. He
argued that this shared bond and affinity made the Muslim colonial
experience very different from that of the Hindus.
Sir Sayyid occasionally spoke about the poor and those who were
outside the confines of British India, even if he was mostly concerned with the issues of urban, middle-class, and educated Indian
Muslims. His concerns were in tune with the British interest in
pauper pilgrims abroad. These impoverished pilgrims, who reached
Mecca and then languished after the haj for want of finances, drew
the concern of Sir Sayyid. And this concern tied in with the self-
serving British concern about such pilgrims, who, as Radhika Singha
has shown, were the product of an institutional and discursive process. As part of this process, resources were stripped away from
undoubtedly poor pilgrims and stigma and incapacity tagged to
them.79 Hoping to bring the concept of Muslim charity into the
service of the British administration, Sir Sayyid proposed a scheme
to collect money from Muslims at the district level and recommended setting up a coordinating center in Aligarh to have a fund
ready to finance the return of pauper pilgrims.80 He offered to solicit
the help of the Aligarh-based haji Muhammad Ismael Khan, who
had networks in Mecca, to obtain information about the needy
pauper pilgrims. Sir Sayyid argued that knowledge of pauper pilgrims could save the government from the deceit and corruption
that might result if the news spread that it was willing to buy return
tickets to India for abandoned pilgrims. Of course, he wanted the
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central committee at Aligarh to coordinate with the Muslim native

states via their political agents to contribute to this initiative. He
hoped to get government sanction for his proposal.81
Sir Sayyids agenda for Indian Muslims contrasted with that of
Kairanwi in the sense that the former considered both Islam and
Christianity narrowly within the framework of colonial India and
interpreted them so as to forge ruler-subject loyalty. And the latter,
as we saw in Chapter 3, highlighted the differences between Islam
and Christianity unmindful of the territorializing confines of British
rule. Ironically, Kairanwis interpretation of the Koran and Islamic
literature stood out as more embracive of scientificity and inclusivity
than that of the modernist Sir Sayyid, who leaned on the British
administration to teach and train Muslims in Western forms of
knowledge. Kairanwis notion of subject loyalty was also more complex than that of Sir Sayyid Ahmad. Even though Kairanwi, unlike
other Muslim cosmopolitans such as Siddiq Hasan Khan, never
wrote about subject loyalty, he did not also disclaim his British subject status. Nor did he see his trans-Asian forays as incompatible
with his subjecthood. But clearly subject loyalty for him did not only
mean co-optation into the new colonial kutcheri culture.
A twentieth-century biography of Sir Sayyid Ahmad, Hayat-i-
Javed (authored by the famous contemporary poet Altaf Husain
Hali), reveals that Sir Sayyid did not agree with ulema such as
Kairanwi, who saw Islam and Christianity as incompatible because
the texts of the latter had been altered and tampered with. Sir Sayyid
made a detailed study of Christian literature himself and wrote a
commentary on the Bible showing that it was in agreement with the
Koran and the Hadith.82 In contrast to Kairanwi, he argued that
changes introduced into translations or in subsequent editions of
the text did not impair the original or make it redundant. And he
invoked Islamic scholars like Shahwaliulla of Delhi and Imam Fakhr
ud Din Razi to prove that the only kind of textual falsification to be
found in the Bible is that to which Christian commentators had
already admitted. And it is only in these places that the text differs
from the Koran and the Hadith.83 These falsifications were the
Christian belief in the Holy Trinity, the rejection of the Holy
Prophet, and expiation of sins.84 And thus Sir Sayyid denied any
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inherent falsification in Christian literature, apart from that which

had been accepted by commentators, and showed that in the original
version the Koran and Bible were similar. He underlined his position and warded off opposition to his stance by insisting that he was
interested in upholding the truth only. Hali quotes Sir Sayyid as
saying, I do not believe in the Trinity of God since I observe it
nowhere supported or even established in the Scriptures. I am certain that the Muhammedan faith is true and that its veracity and
existence are founded in the Holy Bible itself.85 He disseminated
these ideas via his journal, Tahzib ul Akhlaq, which aimed to reform
Muslim religious thinking with the definitive objective of making
Muslims loyal subjects attuned to the new administrative culture
introduced by British rule.86
Sir Sayyid did not like Kairanwis critique of Jewish and Christian
literature. According to Altaf Husain Hali, he did not agree with the
charges of tehrif lafzi (changing words) that Kairanwi leveled against
Christians and Jews in his book Ijaz-i-Iswi. He even thought that
the different views that Muslims and Christians had regarding the
issue of script boiled down merely to a difference in words.87 He did
not directly question Kairanwis privileging of the Koran over the
books of other religions, but he was not entirely impressed by this
viewpoint. In contrast to Kairanwi, who highlighted the religious
differences between Islam and Christianity, Sir Sayyid wrote his
commentary of the Bible so as to highlight the similarities between
the Koran and Bible and to soften the Muslim attitudes toward
Christians. He tried to show that the Bible did not contradict the
Koran and the Hadith.88
Sir Sayyids interventions infuriated the Muslims. But they won
him accolades in the Christian world. Garcin de Tassy called his
commentary (tafsir) of the Bible neem masihi kitab. This meant that
even though its writer was not a Christian yet, his psyche (that
is, his nafs) was innately inclined to embrace the spirit of Chris
tianity. The English writer Matthew Arnold was delighted with Sir
Sayyids commentary. He felt that if a Muslim could write and validate the truth about the Bible then Christians would not have too
much difficulty in proving the Koran wrong. Hali made fun of this
claim.89 But Arnolds contention became popular, and Muslims
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were so angry with Sir Sayyid that he had to abandon his tafsir
midway.90
It is in this context that Thanesris biography of the famous
scholar-warrior Sayyid Ahmad Shahid becomes significant. This
biography represented him as a trans-Asian figure with immense
charismatic powers. Thanesri created this near-Prophet-like profile
of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid in response to Hunters Indian Musalman.
The biography was also meant to counter Sir Sayyid Ahmads contention that all Muslims were loyal subjects committed to the idea
of India as enshrined in British legal and administrative parlance.
The production of such literature fit well with Kairanwis efforts to
carve out a trans-Asian cosmopolitan profile for Muslims that was
not narrowly anticolonial but that had global ambitions of establishing a civilizational alternative to the Western imperium. Thanesri
kept the debate on Muslim trans-Asian cosmopolitanism alive despite
tough opposition within the community by the likes of Sir Sayyid.

Challenging Colonial Knowledge and

the Production of Sawaneh Ahmadi
Thanesris politics were entrenched in the interstice of the colonial
discursive frame and global Islam. His felt community identity
evolved into a patriotism that looked for a civilizational discursive
space for Islam even as it remained rooted in Hindustan. It derived
both from the colonial and the Islamic frames. Through this brand
of politics Thanesri hoped to offer his best service to the cause of
Muslims. He was convinced that they had been harshly treated by
the state, especially after the publication of William Hunters damaging treatise The Indian Musalman in 1871.91 Thanesri was always
perturbed by Hunters negative portrayal of the Muslims during the
mutiny, and in particular with his remarks on the men of religion
whom he derogatorily labeled as Wahabis. He lamented that even
though Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan had also refuted the Indian
Musalman it continued to be influential and defined the English
mindset on Indian Muslims.92 It is no surprise that one of the first
books in English that he began to read, once he had mastered the
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English language, was Hunters Indian Musalman. He claimed to

have obtained with great difficulty the second edition of this volume
from Calcutta for seven rupees. The reading of the text convinced
him that the British would never release people like him from the
penal colony. This was because Hunter had underlined the fact that
on release the Wahabis would return to Hind and destroy the
English government or the sultanate angrezi. He was even more disturbed when he learned that Hunter had been made the close associate of the governor general, which would allow him to influence
policy decisions.93 Thanesri refuted Hunters allegation that the
Wahabis had killed the British during the mutiny. He cited cases of
people who had actually helped the British, such as Nazir Hasan,
who in 1857 had saved the life of an English lady named Mrs.
Leeson.94
The most important measure he took in response to Hunter was
the publication in 1895 of the first elaborate Urdu biography of the
mujahid Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, whom the British regarded as the
founder of the anticolonial Wahabi movement.95 The biography,
the Sawaneh Ahmadi, aimed to correct British apprehensions about
mujahids. This comprehensive masterpiece was divided into five
parts, and detailed the life, travel to the haj, and politics of the foremost mujahid of the early nineteenth century: Sayyid Ahmad Shahid.
Thanesri represented Sayyid Ahmad as a spiritual man with Prophetlike universal appeal. According to Thanesri, Sayyid Ahmad used
his spiritual clout to further his temporal power, as in the case of his
war with the Sikhs. Thanesri saw no direct connection between
Sayyid Ahmads travel to Arabia for the haj and the influence on him
of the anti-British Arab leader Abd-al Wahab. This was significant
because Hunter had claimed that Sayyid Ahmads militancy against
the Sikhs triggered the jihad against the British.
The Sawaneh Ahmadi was written in direct response to Hunter,
and with the express purpose of trying to convince the government
and the public that far from declaring a war against the British,
Sayyid Ahmad Shahid had on at least twenty occasions exhorted
his disciples and people not to oppose the English.96 Thanesri
reconstructed the life and the politics of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid to
convey to the British both the innocence of the men of religion that
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Hunter had derided, as well as to indicate to them the immense

potential these men wielded in society on account of their spiritual powers. Indeed, the biography of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid sought
to rehabilitate him in the model of the Prophet, firmly linked
to the global movement: the Muhammedan Path or the Tarika-i-
Muhammadiya.
This global encasement of Sayyid Ahmad had been carried out in
his lifetime as well. The Sirat-i-Mustaqim, a compilation of his religious discourses, put together by his followers Shah Ismael and
Maulana Abdul Hayee prior to his haj pilgrimage in the 1820s, represented him as an imam in the likeness of the Prophet. In the late
nineteenth century, when Muslim nationalists created the myth of
his aggressiveness and highlighted his anti-British posture, the
stress on his Prophetic piety was significant. This specific portrayal
challenged both the traditional setup represented by the nationalist
ulema, and the colonial state. Indeed, the text cast him as a global
actor. It added fresh points of emphasis to his global appeal by its
focus on his movement of self-purification, Tarika, and on his individual spiritual and supernatural powers. According to Thanesri,
these individual acts of miraculous powers underlined his extraterritorial appeal in ways that went beyond the ambit of the Tarika,
which itself was a global phenomenon. Thus Thanesri rewrote the
history of the foremost mujahid in India in a way that both allayed
British fears about the Muslims and simultaneously challenged the
colonial power by countering their construction of what was widely
believed as damaging knowledge of the Muslims. It also displayed
the global contours of Muslim influence that could be given a political twist if required.
In terms of the Urdu literary genre, the Sawaneh Ahmadi marked
the beginning of the writings of historical biographies that very
much in the tazkira tradition glorified their subject; but unlike the
tazkira they focused narrowly on the individual rather than his
genealogy. The text was written in the style of medieval Islamic
literature, which did not always show reverence to the sources and
authorities from which it borrowed information. It was written in
simple Urdu and used as its source unreferenced accounts of Sayyid
Ahmads contemporaries. It was also written in consultation with
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English books, which again were not acknowledged. It is noteworthy

that Thanesri threw out of the window issues regarding the authenticity of his sources, the references he used, and the acknowledgement of authors he cited. Indeed, in his introduction he honestly
addresses his use of sources:
I have written this book with great effort and consultation with
the different writings which were written by those who have
actually witnessed the events...whatever books I have consulted unfortunately I have not put the dates and so I felt difficulty in arranging the events. But I have travelled a lot and
consulted some English books also. Though I do not claim
recording of events strictly date wise. Still I have made every
effort to be correct in my recording of events. But still there is
no doubt that the book is more authentic on the subject and
better than previous biographies.97
The text effectively shifts the focus of Sayyid Ahmad Shahids life
and career away from the British and toward the Sikhs in Punjab.
This was significant, as most late nineteenth-century Muslim
writers were complicit in the creation of the nationalist myth that
underlined the anticolonial stance of this martyr of Balakot. In contrast, Thanesris text begins with the atrocities of the Sikhs against
the Muslims. He argues that the Sikhs had been so cruel that society
had been eagerly waiting a savior. The arrival of Sayyid Ahmad was
widely welcomed, and he was perceived as the awaited one. It was
therefore not surprising that the rescue of the Muslims from Sikh
cruelty remained the foremost agenda of Sayyid Ahmad. Thanesri
quotes him as saying, The jihad of Sayyid sahib was only against
the cruel Sikhs, who had wrecked havoc on the Muslims of Punjab. 98
And this fight too was not to obtain the badshahat (political control)
over the Punjab. It was only to stop them from torturing Muslims.
The text cleverly avoids any discussion of the sayyids anti-British
activities. Instead, it represents him as a universally popular leader
whose powers lay not so much in political wisdom as in his extraordinary role as the reformer and the fountainhead of barakat (blessings). He was the archetypal performer of karamat (miracles). This
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made him popular across the length and breadth of the country
and helped him consolidate his temporal alliances. The biography
deftly alludes to the political orientation that the sayyid could give
to his immense spiritual power when required. But Thanesri confines his political role to his interventions in the Shia-Sunni disputes
in Rae Bareilly, Hindu-Muslim conflicts in the area, and of course
the Sikh atrocities on the Muslims. He explains through several
undated anecdotes involving anonymous men in dialogue with the
Sayyid that the latter always explained to his clientele that he could
not declare jihad on the British because, as Thanesri describes it,
his main task was the spread of belief in One God, tauhid-i-ilahi,
and the sarkar angrezi allowed them to do that without any hindrance. There was thus no justification for declaring jihad on the
British. 99
Thanesri skips the anti-British role of the sayyid in his narrative
and casts him more as a Prophet-like miraculous healer and man of
barakat or supernatural powers. At the same time, he also showcases
himand by implication all the mujahidsas an individual who
posed a formidable challenge to the political powers of his day.
Indeed, he shows how the powers of the sayyid were all the more
exceptional and fearsome because his spirituality linked him to the
world outside India. His conduit to the world beyond British India
was the puritanical Tarika-i-Muhammadiya. This was a global phenomenon because of its exhortations to follow the path of the
Prophet, a universally acceptable figure. Thanesri, however, places
particular emphasis on Sayyid Ahmads individual spiritual powers,
which knitted him to an even wider clientele than his puritanical
Tarika could ever do.
Thanesri explains that Sayyid Ahmad combined spiritual with
worldly stamina. This made his exceptional transimperial spiritual
appeal and potential understandable. His power to perform miracles
and to bring about barakat welded together a constituency of Shias,
Sunnis, and even Hindus, as well as zamindars, native officials, and
Indian and English traders.100 Officials of the Awadh state often
used his services in solving Shia-Sunni conflicts in the region.
Hindu milk traders of Tonk came to pay their respects to him, and
the pious of Benares were also his murids (followers). The latter
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often asked him respectfully to leave the city when they feared that
his prayers and zikr (his devotion to Godwith which they personally had little issue) in the city would anger their gods.101 His powers
extended beyond India as well. Thanesri describes how Sayyid
Ahmad always obtained help miraculously from unknown sources
when in trouble abroad. Thus help came to him from God in Aden
when he needed assistance in his travels in the region; and he
was also helped on the ship when en route to Jeddah to perform
the haj.102
Thanesri argues that Sayyid Ahmad often used his spiritual power
for furthering his political ambition and acquiring influence. Thus
it is no surprise that in Thanesris account he made a trip for the
holy pilgrimage or haj before he declared his political warjihad
against the Sikhs. Thanesri shows how the sayyid consolidated his
social base during his long, winding travel across Hindustana jour
ney punctuated with many stopovers and meetings with people
and during his equally eventful journey by road from Jeddah to
Mecca. Throughout the journey, he displayed his exceptional spiritual powers by performing miracles and healing, which drew a range
of people to him. According to Thanesri, it was Sayyid Ahmads use
of the spiritual to further his temporal ambitions, rather than the
influence of the anti-British Arab Wahabi leaders, that explains his
strategic decision to go on haj with his followers before the Sikh
campaign. Thanesri describes the long boat ride that Sayyid Ahmad
took from Rae Bareilly to Calcutta: he added murids and consolidated his cross-country support, and he used his spirituality to
mobilize support for his anti-Sikh politics. According to Thanesri,
the sayyid had made it clear that this haj was a necessary preparation
for his jihad against the Sikhs. Rather than being merely a religious
obligation, the haj was crucial for building social and political contacts. Sayyid Ahmads combination of spiritual and worldly powers
could not have been better displayed.
The Sawaneh Ahmadi challenged the wider politics of the colonial
state. It was of course written to protect Muslim interests. But it
went beyond that as it countered the very production of colonial
knowledge on which British power was dependent. The Sawaneh
showed how print culture and access to the English language and
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institutional resources made available by colonial rule could be

effectively used to generate fresh and useful knowledge about Islam
and its leaders. And this knowledge could be used to effectively
counter the colonial constructions of people, histories, and events.
Thus print capitalism and access to the wider domain of knowledge
that could be accessed through imperial networks enabled Thanesri
to rewrite the history of Islam in nineteenth-century India. His history offered an effective challenge to the colonial constructions of
Indian Islam and Muslims as illustrated, for instance, in W. W.
Hunters Indian Musulman. The portrayal of Sayyid Ahmad in the
Sawaneh as a leader not unfavorably inclined to the British stood in
sharp contrast to the more popular anti-British image of him that
had been disseminated both in colonial writings and in later nationalist Muslim literature of the early twentieth century. Yet the pro-
British image of Sayyid Ahmad notwithstanding, the text is extremely
significant as it challenged the knowledge base of colonial rule by
countering the texts generated by its officials. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan
had countered Hunters text by writing and publishing Asbaab-i
Baghawat-i-Hind and Tarikh Sarkashi-i-Zilla Bijnor. But Thanesris
attack was unique because unlike Sir Sayyid Ahmad he did not represent Muslims as inherently loyal subjects, with narrowly vested
interests, who could be taken for granted once they were incorporated into the colonial administrative system. Thanesris response
to Hunter was closer to that of Maulana Kairanwi, who as we saw in
the previous chapter wanted to carve out for the Muslims a discursive civilizational space between empires. Like Kairanwi, Thanesri
used imperial networks to effectively counter the rise of Western
influence in Asia. Thanesri also highlighted Sayyid Ahmad Shahid
as a global persona and demystified his overt anticolonial aggression.
He hinted at Muslim readiness to engage with British rule even as
his vision exemplified a wider global orientation that straddled
empires. Both the colonial and the Islamic global frame were critical
to Thanesris subtle response to the Western challenge.

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Conc lusion

In an 1887 letter to the Russian czar asking for asylum in Russia,

Dalip Singh, the last maharaja of Punjab, referred to himself as an
unfortunate Indian prince and as a monument of British injustice. He did not seek any financial support, as he claimed that the
funds he received from India made him self-sufficient.1 As a boy,
Singh had been brought to England after the annexation of the
Punjab in 1848 and raised by Queen Victoria. In the 1880s, as an
adult, he schemed to return to India to overthrow British rule. In a
letter he wrote to Katkoff, the Russian military party chief, he
repeated the circumstances of his case and requested letters of introduction that would ensure that his baggage would be passed across
Russian-controlled Central Asia into Tehran in Persia.2 And in his
correspondence with his cousins in Pondicherry, he expressed his
hope of reaching Russia and indicated that he was confident of
obtaining the support of the czar.3
In a personal letter sent from Russia to his children, he wrote
about his stay in the most flattering ways, calling it a sportsmans
paradise. He remarked, I cannot tell you how happy I am to find
myself in Russia. There is plenty of grouse shooting, and fine salmon
fishing in the north of Russia, and if not better employed I mean to
indulge myself in some first rate sport. The woodcock shooting on
the coast of the Black Sea is very good and so is simple wild fowl
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shooting in the Crimea.4 The shift to Russia was also a critical

strategic move in his political struggle. He observed, Money from
India, in spite of the stupid British governments forbidding will
flow to me like water now that I am in Russia.5 He was confident
that his move to Russia would be seen by his countrymen, as he
framed it, as a proof of my sincerity. This would result in their
sending large sums of money to support his political plans.6 In subsequent letters to his children he asked them to look after their
financial affairs: he instructed them to sell their paintings or jewels
and not to bother him, as he had dedicated his life to the overthrow
of the British rule in India. He wrote, Look upon me as dead. But
I will never swerve from my purpose or I would not be the son of the
Lion of the Punjab whose name I dare not disgrace.7
The news that Dalip Singh had asked the czar to enlist his son
Victor in the Russian army alarmed the British Foreign Office.8 It
was equally concerned that the Russian interior minister had allowed
Dalip Singh to enter Russia without a passport. Russia had granted
this favor so that Singh, like other Indian princes caught between
imperial rivals, could return it when required. F.H. Villier of the
Foreign Office thought that the Russians were taking advantage of
Singh. He remarked, There is an inclination to get Duleep Singh
under Russian influence so as to make use of him. 9 But Dalip Singh
was no unsuspecting victim. He hoped to further his political ambitions by exploiting transimperial networks. In Moscow, Dalip Singh
was in close touch with Katkoff, the military party chief. Indeed,
Katkoff was so confident of his long-term association with Dalip
Singh that he advised him to give up the fake name listed on his
passport: Patrick Casey.10 And when Katkoff died in 1887, Dalip
Singh was distraught, calling it a great blow to our plans.11
In an age of imperial rivalries, the going was not smooth for Dalip
Singh in Russia. Rumors occasionally floated that he was in touch
with the British viceroy and that his intentions were dubious. But he
always denied these and emphasized that he had been the loyal subject of the British Empire up until the time that he had been deported
from Aden while en route to India, on the charge of having engaged
in suspicious activity. He was now convinced that Russian rule was
the most desirable for India. He reiterated that he had no desire to
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be a sovereign again as he was now too old. He asserted, I have no

ambition whatever and were I not persuaded fully in my mind that
Russian rule would benefit my countrymen I would not for a moment
seek to be avenged on the English but would bury myself in utter
oblivion to brood over my wrongs.12
Dalip Singhs career moves rested on more than imperial patron
age. His passage from Paris to Moscow was enabled by a string of
agents that included Russians, Europeans, and Indians. They intersected with Muslim cosmopolitans who had forged transimperial
careers. Dalip Singh traveled via Cologne and Berlin as he moved
from Paris to St. Petersburg. In Egatkahum he was met by one Greene

berg,
a Russian agent. In the event of any difficulty, Greeneberg had
instructions to send a telegraph to General Bogdanovitch, the minister of the interior. Dalip Singh had to preserve his incognito status
until he became a naturalized Russian.13 The well-known journalist-spy Nicholas N. Notovich, who served several masters, was also
a close associate of Dalip Singh. It was with his assistance that Dalip
Singh worked out a plan of entry via the Gilgit Passes into Kashmir.
And Kashmiri Muslim Abdul Rasul was his most trusted agent; he
co-coordinated for him in the British and Ottoman territories.
Indeed, Abdul Rasul straddled with ease the Muslim transimperial
webs that permeated the rigidly demarcated official borders.

Dalip Singh in the Muslim Cosmopolis

As discussed in Chapter 1, the northwest frontier of British India
that bordered Afghanistan and the Central Asian territories of the
Russian Empire constituted the western end of the Muslim cosmopolis. Maulvis, merchants, scribes, agents, and political mentors
dotted the landscape and moved over land from the Punjab via the
northwest frontier to Afghanistan, Persia, and the Russian territories in Central Asia. This area constituted the critical intersection
of the British, Persian, and the Russian Empires and was a hotbed of
commercial and political rivalries in the late nineteenth century.
Muslims exploited this geopolitical space to their advantage. They
laid out an attractive military labor and espionage resource base in
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the region. We have seen how this pool of Muslim migrs could be
tapped by anyone with transimperial ambitions. Jamaluddin Afghani,
the most well-known Muslim transnational, used such networks
with aplomb.
But Muslim networks across empires were a valuable resource for
other non-Muslim actors as well. Dalip Singh was a prime case in
point. Indeed, in 1887, one Captain Andrew Hearsey compared
Dalip Singh with Jamaluddin Afghanibased on the Russian czars
earlier friendly overtures to Dalip Singh, which had resulted in
Singhs stay in Moscow and movement to Crimea and other parts of
the Russian Empire. Hearsey wrote: The permission [of the czar]
to reside in the Crimea is, to my mind significant. Dalip will be less
exposed to inquisitive journalists there than in Moscow and can
receive more easily any emissaries from India...the game played
with the maharaja is not unlike that played with Djamal-ed-Dine
[Jamaluddin] with whom I have not yet ascertained if he has yet
been in communication.14
The Foreign Office was concerned also about the relations
between Dalip Singh and Ayub Khan, the Afghan chieftain. Indeed,
it saw him tapping the same imperially embedded Muslim networks
as those used by the Afghan chiefs and Jamaluddin. Its 1887 note on
Dalip Singh observed, Should Ayoub get into Russia, the trio to be
watched will be Ayoub, the Shaik Djamal-ed-Dine and Duleep. It
pointed out that Djemal is a man of great ability and energy.15 And
later in the year the Foreign Office expressed concern at the fact
that Dalip Singh was, as they described, in relations with Ayub
Khan and Sheikh Djemal-ed-ddin [the Afghan journalist] an able
and energetic man.16
British fears were not entirely off track. Dalip Singh indeed did
tap into the imperially embedded Muslim cosmopolis that touched
the eastern fringes of the Russian Empire. The eastern frontier of
the Russian Empirewhich bordered Central Asia, with its Muslim
nomadic and pastoral populationswas an ideal area in which to
look for Muslim support. From the 1860s to the 1880s, czarist
Russia, like most other imperial powers, had to face the impact of
the Ottoman caliph-centric pan-Islam. The Russian state dealt with
Muslim fanaticism on the frontier by a combination of military
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coercion and tolerance. On the eastern frontiers of the Russian

Empire, bordering Turkistan, tolerance implied the permission to
Muslims to carry on with their Islamic practice and rituals of faith.
At the same time, restrictions were put on the implementation of
the Sharia in public institutions and spaces. The governor general,
Konstantin von Kaufman (posted in the region from 1867 to 1881),
generated an ethnic chart of the frontier society and differentiated
Muslims on the basis of their habits and customs. This colonial
knowledge, which created a specific form of ethnicity for Muslims,
served to co-opt them into the administration and dilute the harshness of the colonial onslaught.17
This Catherinian compromise that implied the policy of toleration spearheaded Islamic liberal reforms on the fringes of empire.
The imperial policy of accommodation was accompanied by the
emergence in Central Asia of modernist reform that was in sync
with the reformist ferment all over the Muslim world. The jadids, as
the reformists were called, operated within the imperially framed
political challenges of their time. They responded to them by introducing Koran-sanctioned reforms in the education, science, hygiene,
and health sectors. Very much like modernist reformers globally,
they saw the lack of knowledge as the crux of the problem facing the
colonized Muslim society of Central Asia.
The jadids not only echoed the reformist sentiments of the Muslim
world but also had contacts with them. It is of no little significance
that the Persian text of the Bukharan jadid Abdurrauf Fitrat, Tales
of an Indian Traveller, had an Indian Muslim protagonist. Fitrat
wrote this text as a student in Istanbul. It is a fictional travelogue
of an Indian Muslim who visited Bukhara during his haj and
severely indicted the Muslim society for its lack of knowledge and
for its backwardness.18 At the same time, the southern frontier of
Russia, the Crimean area, saw the emergence of the jadidi modernist
reformer Ismael Bey Gasprinskii (18511914). He was educated in
the Russian military academy and in France and the Ottoman
Empire and was committed to modernizing his Turkic Muslim
society so as to keep pace with the changing world. He urged the
Russians to invest in the Muslims without assimilating their culture
as per the imperial policy of Russofication. He urged the state to
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maintain Muslims as a distinct ethnic entity. His influence was

widely felt throughout Turkic Russia, as well as in Turkey, Egypt,
and the Muslim society of India.19 The Muslim frontier of the
Russian Empire, with its reformist energy and contacts with the
Muslim world outside, offered a fertile playing ground for similarly
oriented transimperial brokers from the British and the Ottoman
territories.
In Moscow, Dalip Singh prepared a draft proclamation that laid
out his political aspirations and plan of action in India. Issued from
Moscow, this document showed that he was clearly in tune with the
rhythms of the Muslim transimperial ecumene. He reached out to
its actors by invoking the memories both of the long-dead Mughal
Empire that nurtured them and of the British government that had
hounded them out of India. Additionally, he pointed at the great
benefits that could come their way if they exploited the British-
Russian imperial rivalry and sided with Russia. Dalip Singhs usage
of the existing imperially framed networks and his efforts to lay out
new ones in the shadow of sparring imperial rivals were reminiscent
of the strategies adopted by the Muslim cosmopolitan protagonists
of this book. Like them he hoped to straddle empiresto use the
old links and to carve out new connections. He allayed Muslim fears
that Russia had ever been their enemy, and urged them to look at the
facts of the case. He asked, Was it Russia or was it England that
supplanted the glorious Mogal [Mughal] Empire of India founded
by the great Muslim Emperor Baber and ruled over by his descendants for some three centuries, and which of the aforesaid great
powers was it that banished the last of that illustrious race to die a
miserable death on one of this lands in the Bay of Bengal after the
fall of Delhi now just about thirty years ago?20 He reminded the
Indian Muslims of the good track record of the Russian Empire in
treating its Muslim subjects in Central Asia: Russia had frequently
appointed some of their officers of high rank, he noted in his proclamation, such for instance as generals in her army and governors
of provinces conquered by her. And he asked them, Can a single
instance of the kind be pointed to in British India?21 He exhorted
Indian Muslims to shed their biases against the Russians and cash in
on the imperial rivalries. He stated, Fear nothing from the Russians
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who we assure you from our experience are most kind hearted and
sympathetic people and entirely different to accursed haughty English
22

men.
And of course the Foreign Office was more than aware that
a transimperial actor such as Dalip Singh could become a tool in
the hands of the Russian Empire.23
Dalip Singh felt dejected and lonesome in Russia after the death
of his military man Katkoff. He appealed to the czar for a passport and permission to stay in the country for good as a private
individual. The appeal was couched in a language reminiscent of
Muslim trans-imperial brokers, who also could never decouple
themselves from imperial networks and their politics. In a letter to
the czar he said that based on the desire of the princes and people of
India he had hoped to broker an alliance between Russia and India:
I ventured to reach you in order to lay the crown of Hindoodstan
at your feet...but Y.I.M [Your Imperial Majesty] did not condescend to place it on your brow and become the liberator of some
250,000,000 helpless beings although I cannot (as a patriot) but
lament their fate.24
The Russian end of the Muslim cosmopolis added new phobias
to the existing British obsession with the Ottoman Empire. In
the early nineteenth century, both Russia and France, Britains two
enemies, had a huge influence in the court of Tehran. As had long
been feared, the imperial city became the conduit through which
Russia and France would make inroads into India. In 1817, Claudius
James Rich, the British resident in Baghdad, expressed concern that
Russian officers had reached Kurdistan on the frontier of Persia and
Turkey via their influence in Tehran. He felt that this could be the
route by which the Russians might enter India and then engage in
espionage. But of greater concern was the employment of Bonapartes
officers in Tehran, who were out of favor in France and heavily prejudiced against the British. Rich feared that from Iran they would
move to Afghanistan and then penetrate into India. He wanted
cooperation with the Russian embassy to expel these men from
Tehran.25 But relations with Russia were hardly smooth enough to
make such a request. By the late nineteenth century, the Muslim
question was quite central to British-Russian relations. British India
was nervous about the Muslim reaction to its overtures to Russia,
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especially after the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turko war of

18771878. Indeed, in 1885, the Hungarian professor of languages
at Budapest, Armenius Vambery, commented on the British caution
regarding Russia and highlighted the dangers Russia posed to its
Indian possessions and British commerce. He also indicated that
Muslim states such as Haiderabad, Bhopal, and Bhawalpur were
favorably inclined toward the Russians and might support an Indian
invasion. This was a possibility because of the anti-Ottoman policy
of the British, which shifted Muslim support toward the Russians.26
This Muslim equation vis--vis Russia may or may not have been
entirely true, but it did indicate the crucial role Indian Muslims
played in larger imperial politics.27
Indeed, the intersection of the Russian, the Ottoman, and the
British imperial and intellectual grid increased the options available
to Indian Muslims to negotiate their British masters. They tapped
into the politics of the Persian courts and played on Russophobia to
further their ends in British India. In 1892, an Indian Muslim at the
Persian imperial capital at Isphahan published a letter in the Meerut
Urdu newspaper Tuti-i-Hind. He referred to a speech delivered by
another Indian Muslim in Iran, Zia ul Haq, at the Royal Mosque in
Tehran. Haq, born and brought up in Hapur in the Meerut district,
severely criticized the Russian influence in Persia and warned the
people that they would suffer ill treatment of their religion and
women at Russian hands. Twenty thousand Persians heard the
speech and got excited. The government reacted by arresting Haq.
He was removed from the mosque and taken to Bushire. He was told
never to return to Persian territory. Later, reports in the Urdu press
revealed that Haq had been employed in the service of the municipal
board at Gujarat. However, he had embezzled Rs. 300 and absconded
in order to avoid punishment. The paper reported that he had criticized Russian rule in order to win the goodwill of the government
of India. He hoped to be pardoned for his criminal offence. 28
But it was by no means an exclusively elite world. Nor was it, as
the case of Dalip Singh showed, a Muslim world alone. Given the
relative easy flow of Muslims on the transimperial networks, non-
Muslims tried to tap the networks as welleither via Muslim agents
or often via those who masqueraded as Muslims. But this could cut
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both ways. Muslim transimperial runaways could lean on non-

Muslim clients to further their agendas. Given the presence of nonMuslim actors in the geographical spaces these runaways traversed,
they often disguised themselves as Sikhs or Hindus to escape the
British arm of law, which was particularly harsh on them.
In 1888, MacLean, the British agent at Meshed in Iran, reported
that the body of a supposed Sikh had been brought to his city
from Khaf. The Sikh feared his capture and had killed himself
with opium. Investigations revealed that he was a Muslim and had
been a water carrier (bhishti) by trade. He had come to Persia with
an Afghan, who robbed him. He came overland via Quetta, Nushki,
and Kerman and claimed to have accidentally wandered into the
Persian Empire. He was en route to join Dalip Singh at Bokhara in
Russia. That the ostensible Sikh might have been a Muslim transimperial actor from the Gangetic valley became evident when MacLean
reported that he had the appearance of a Patna Muhammadan.
This was the category of Muslim rebels who, as we saw in Chap
ter 1, had collected on the northwest frontier to rethink their relations with the new British political sovereigns and link up with the
world outside British India.29 MacLean suspected the man to be a
native of Dinapur or Patna, from where such fanatics came, and
certainly not from the Punjab as he claimed. MacLean was of the
view that either he was an emissary from the northwest frontier
colony of Muslim rebels or else the bearer of a letter from India to
the Russian agent in Meshed. A Hindu fakir from whom MacLean
hoped to get more information accompanied him.30
The identity of the supposed Sikh notwithstanding, it was clear
that he was from Hindustan and was using Dalip Singh to straddle
empires. The fact that he disguised himself as a Sikh also revealed
the entanglement of Muslim networks with those of Dalip Singhs
Sikh supporters. It also revealed how Dalip Singhs men leaned on
Muslim agents as they traversed the critical intersections of the
British, Persian, and Russian Empiresoverland routes that linked
the Punjab via the northwest frontier to Afghanistan, Persia, and
the Russian territories in Central Asia. In 1888, W.J. Cuningham
reported the arrival in Meshd, Iran, of three Hindustanis en route
to Moscow. They carried letters and presents for Maharaja Dalip
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Singh. Their names were Mah Singh, Sawal Singh, and Wadu Singh.
They moved across the interstices of empires with the help of their
Muslim merchant contacts from Amritsar-Muhammad Shah and
Saifuddin. At Bunder Abbas and Karman in the Persian Empire,
they had Hindustani Muslim agents: Gulab and Marwand. They
moved overland from Gilgit to Wazirabad, Ferozpur, Dehra Ismael
Khan, and Kharam to Lus Beyla. They were expected to make the
return journey via Bokhara.31
Muslim agents and merchants at the imperial crossroads not only
intersected with Hindu and Sikh actors but also with imperial
staffers, such as the Russian Cossacks, for assistance. Russian warrior middlemen were a visible presence in the Muslim cosmopolis
between empires. Nawab Hasan Ali Khan, the British agent at
Meshd, reported that he had seen two Sikhs in disguise accompanied by two Cossacks riding with them.32 Indian Muslims worked
closely with Cossacks and took on roles as Russian spies. For
instance, Haji Abdulla Peshawari, the forty-three-year-old emissary
of Nawab Hasan Ali Khan, was a resident of Bokhara and a Russian
spy. He doubled as a tea merchant, moving between his place of
birth, Peshawar, and his residence in Bokhara with tea for sale.
He also acted as an agent who helped navigate Sikhs, Hindus, and
other non-Muslim actors across imperial crossroads. Thus the two
Sikhs, disguised in Turkoman clothes, were reported to have been
in close touch both with the Cossacks as well as with him. Hasan Ali
Khan reported that they had met him at least twice. Abdulla
Peshawari, who knew Russian well, acted as their interpreter as they
moved across these areas with the hope of connecting with Dalip
Singh.33 Nawab Hasan Ali Khan was able to collect this information
via his own Punjabi-speaking emissary, who was Multan born and
bred. This man masqueraded as a merchant and followed them up
to the Russian frontier. He reported that a Russian agent accompanied the Sikhs and their Muslim agents all the time.34 Muslim
agents, disguised as merchants, traveled freely between British
India and the Russian Empire. In 1889, the khan of Kalat dispatched an agent called Shalkalla, disguised as a merchant, to connect with the Russians in Central Asia and help them advance into
India.35
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The Russian adventurer Notovich was an important agent of

Dalip Singh. He was seen as an important and useful adventurer
in British circles. He was said to speak French and English and was
on friendly terms with a diverse range of people. He claimed to have
with him valuable letters from British officers, including Colonel
Herbert at St. Petersburg, Colonel Ridgway at Herat, and Colonel
Trotter at Constantinople. One report noted, [He has several]
voluminous MS [manuscript] books containing he says the secret
reports of English officials in India on the railways...the march to
the frontier, the military strength etc.36 He also maintained correspondence with Indian rajas. As proof of his links with these rajas,
he flaunted photographs of them with dedications to him.37 Notovich
visited India in 1887 and claimed to have bribed a lower functionary
in the Foreign Office to obtain maps of the Kashmir region. He
boasted of contacts in the British administration. And as proof he
said he had notes on the situation in India, which he had gotten
from one Mr. OConnor, who occupied an official position at Simla.
Notovitch also brought back to Moscow letters for Dalip Singh from
a pandit of Lahore called Gopi Nath. These contained promises of
financial assistance.38

Abdul Rasul, Dalip Singhs Kashmiri Muslim Agent

Non-Muslim actors found it easy to operate in the Muslim cosmopolis via their networks of Muslim agents. In particular, the trust that
Dalip Singh and his cousins had in Punjabi Muslims was extraordinary. Gurbachan Singh and his brothers considered them the most
loyal people, whom he could ask to do anything. He claimed, They
have faith in me.39 And it was this trust, coupled with the advantages of relying on Muslims, that led to Abdul Rasul being selected
to serve as Dalip Singhs trusted agent.
Indeed, Dalip Singh relied on his Muslim Kashmiri agent Abdul
Rasul to tap into the Muslim transimperial ecumene. Abdul Rasul
was a native of Srinagar in Kashmir and the son of Haig Abdul
Karim. His career profile was very much like the cosmopolitan protagonists of this book: he was a former agent of the Ottoman Empire,
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a multilingual who had learned Russian while working in Moscow

for Dalip Singh. He was only twenty-six years old when he decided
to work for Dalip Singh.40 He straddled the overlapping British
Ottoman worlds to garner support for his master across the Muslim
cosmopolis. He was well qualified for this job, as he was a typical
Muslim middleman who had made a transimperial career. He had
lived in Egypt for six years and was in Turkish government service
in Istanbul until the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877
1878. After the war he moved to England where for many years he
was the companion and secretary to a Muslim lawyer, Mirza Pir
Baksh, who lived in Russell Square in London. Abdul Rasuls rich
experience in the Ottoman world attracted British officers to him,
and in 1882 he accompanied Lord Wellesley as an interpreter to the
Egyptian Expeditionary Force. He was, however, sent back to
England, as it was discovered that he had maintained secret links
with the enemy.41 After his fall from the British circles, he was
referred to as the bigoted Mohammedan, sharp and suspicious.
He was described in British official discourse as a man of medium
height, Arab features marked by small pox, scar like burn on left
cheek dividing closely cut grisly beard.42
The British detective Azizuddin described him aptly: His only
occupation is to serve as the go-between to further intrigues of one
government against the other.43 Clearly, Abdul Rasul was a middleman cultural broker like Sayyid Fadl, Kairanwi, and Imdadullah
Makki, and he soon became Dalip Singhs principal agent, serving
as his interlocutor with the Ottoman, Russian, and French Empires.
He had contacts across empires. In Russia he was the close friend
and associate of the Muslim military commander General Alikhanov.
Together they lobbied for Dalip Singh with the czar and strategized
on invading India via the Gilgit passes in the Hindu Kush ranges
bordering Kashmir. Abdul Rasul had used his Muslim card to lay
out a network and support base in Russia. The Muslims of Moscow
had welcomed him into their circle and had sent a carriage to take
him to the citys mosque. He had made alliances with influential
Muslims while in Moscow: Sikandar Khan of Herat; General
Alikhanov, the governor of Pendjeh; and Musa Khan, the prince of
Kazan and aide-de-camp to the czar.44
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In Paris, he was close to Asad Pasha, the Turkish ambassador to

Paris, who introduced him to the upper echelons of the French government. The French used him to bribe the Ottomans in forming
a close alliance with them. A British report noted that he was sent
by express train to Constantinople from Paris with money and letters to Muhammad Pasha, the Circassian chief aide-de-camp to the
sultan. The Ottoman alliance was crucial in Frances Nile Wars
with the British. With the Ottomans on their side, the French used
Abdul Rasul to further their ends in Sudan. Rasul was close to
Zubair Pasha of Egypt, who was related by marriage to Sheikh
Senousi of Alexandria. This made it easy for the French to transmit
money to Sudan, as it was sent via Sheikh Senousis firm. The French
consul at Alexandria encouraged Sheikh Senousi in his political
game plans. Abdul Rasul was said to be at the bottom of all these
networks, as he was always in touch with a Frenchman in Paris
through his friend Asad Pashawho controlled the French operations in Sudan.45 He also approved of the idea of Volpertthe
French convert to Islam stationed at Djalfawho wanted to send
Muslim missionaries to India via Mecca to stir up trouble in British
India. Rasul thought the plan was feasible if the chief of Mecca
accredited the missionaries.46
In Egypt, Abdul Rasul networked with Indian migr rebels and
helped distribute their literature. He was friendly to one of the protagonist of this book, Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan of Bhopal, and
distributed his books in the region.47 He never failed to hook on to
itinerant Indians who moved across imperial crossroads, entering
the fuzzy subimperial culture of agents and middlemen. In 1888
Abdul Rasul befriended one Lal-din, a Kashmiri from Jammu, who
was en route from Medina to Istanbul. Lal-din ran away from
India and was on his way to Istanbul, where he hoped to present the
sultan with shawls, rice, and a Koran and to ask him to intercede on
his behalf in obtaining a position in the maharaja of Kashmirs service.48 Rasul was in regular correspondence with him and planned
to meet him in Egypt so that he could assist in arranging Dalip
Singhs plans to return to India via Kashmir.49 Abdul Rasul was seen
as a significant player in the French, Egyptian, and Sudanese support

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base for Dalip Singh, and his links with Istanbul were strong due to
his friendship with Asad Pasha.
In Paris, Abdul Rasul established critical connections between
the Muslim cosmopolis and other transimperial networks. Thus he
connected with the Irish Fenians, who were happy to connect with
any anti-British activity. His links with them brought him into the
purview of the Russian military party. Abdul Rasuls main contact
with the Russian military party was a man called Ivanoffthe
Russian consul in Cairo.50 Ivanoff warmed up to Abdul Rasul when
he heard of his contacts both with the Irish and the Muslim trans
imperial actors. The Russian party was particularly keen to use
Abdul Rasuls relations with Zubair Pasha in Egypt and with the
Sudanese to stir up trouble in Sudan. They employed him to incite
the Sudanese to block the Suez Canal. In Cairo, Abdul Rasul lived
in style in Hotel dAlexandria, where he held meetings with both
Zubair Pasha and the Russians. Osman Digha, the son-in-law of the
Sudanese chief, was in constant touch with him, and he was supplied
with Russian gold and money from Cairo.51 The coming together of
the imperially embedded Muslim cosmopolis with Russian and
French imperial politics only strengthened the former. And middlemen brokers like Abdul Rasul emerged as the beneficiaries.
In a letter in Turkish that the Foreign Department found in his
private papers, Abdul Rasul referred to Dalip Singhs plans to solicit
the help of the Russians and the Ottomans so as to return to the
Punjab. Rasul considered himself suitable to be the interlocutor
between empires. He claimed to have contacts with Asad Pasha, the
Ottoman envoy in Paris. He was also a friend of Zubair Pasha in
Egypt, who connected him to the French, and he had links with
Ivanoff, the Russian consul in Cairo, as well as with General
Alikhanoff, his chief ally in Moscow.52 Indeed, Abdul Rasul was said
to receive an allowance from Russia through a musahib of the
czar.53 As he noted in the letter, he considered the imperially framed
assemblage critical for the sustenance of the Muslim cosmopolis:
If then Turkey considered seriously this important consideration
allying herself ostensibly with Russia and secretly with the maharajah, not only perhaps would great benefit result with regard to the

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Egyptian and Bulgarian questions, but increased bonds of union

would result between Muslamans of India and Central Asia. My
feeling of devotion to Islam did not allow me to remain silent while
such reflections passed through my mind.54
Abdul Rasul made it clear to Dalip Singh that he regarded it as a
duty of conscience and of the utmost necessity to submit this
proposal to the sultan of Turkey. The English had reason to fear
the coming together of the self-driven Muslim subimperial networks and the Ottoman, Russian, and French Empires. The English
feared that Zubair Pasha, emboldened with this support, might
become another Urabi, the military general who had led the social
and political revolution against Ottoman control in the late nineteenth centuryexcept that this time the guns would be turned
against their English rulers. And the letters that Abdul Rasul was
known to carry between Mukhtar Pasha, the Turkish commissioner
in Egypt, and Dalip Singh did not make things easy for the English.55
The British detective Azizuddin always created a stir in official circles when he intercepted letters from Dalip Singh to the Ottoman
sultan that were invariably transmitted via Abdul Rasul. The Cairo
police chief, Captain Martyn Fenwick, discovered a document in
Turkish in Abdul Rasuls hotel room. The translator revealed that it
was some kind of proposal to the Sultan, a memorandum of the
Maharajas history, written around six months previously.56
In 1889, Abdul Rasul left for Egypt en route to India with $100that
he had received from Dalip Singh. His mission was to deliver letters
seeking the support of Zubair Pasha of Egypt and the maharajah of
Kashmir. He also carried letters for two other Indians, one of whom
was married to the daughter of Ranjit Singhs son Shere Singh.
Abdul Rasul sailed in a French steamer as a second-class passenger,
hoping to get financial and moral support in India and Egypt.57 And
in Cairo a police raid of his room revealed more letters in his possession from Zubair Pasha. Two of these were sent to him at his
Paris address and indicated that Zubair Pasha was the main conduit
for his correspondence with India. Zubair Pasha was the forwarding
agent for letters that Abdul Rasul dispatched to India.58 Zubair
Pasha lived in Cairo under Abdul Rasuls patronage and interacted
with rebellious and dis-affected Egyptians who were clearly in
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touch with similar rebels in India. The British correspondent

reported that from Cairo, Abdul Rasul was to proceed to India
with credentials and recommendations to the disaffected elements
there.59 Abdul Rasul did make that trip, and from his Fitzroy Square
address in London, and later from Paris, he remained in touch with
Dalip Singh and kept him abreast of the chain of communications
that he coordinated across the span of disaffected people from
India to North Africa.60 Indeed in an Arabic letter sent via Abdul
Rasul to him, Zubair Pasha offered to work closely with Dalip Singh.
The main selling point of this offer was the connected nature of
Muslim politics across Asia and Africa that Zubair Pasha claimed to
control. He urged Dalip Singh to throw himself entirely upon the
Mussulman element promising an insurrection in Egypt simultaneously with one in India. He also mentioned the sympathy he had
with the anti-English movement of Mukhtar Pasha, the Turkish
commissioner in Egypt. Alluding to the connected worlds of the
Ottoman and British Empires that were straddled by Muslim trans
imperial agents and brokers, he begged Dalip Singh not to waste
his time in Russia but to go to Mecca and thence to Busoorah whence
he could enter India in disguise.61

Indian Rulers, Imperial Russia, and Irish

Nationalists in the Muslim Cosmopolis
Dalip Singh had Muslim agents located in the Ottoman territories
as well. Yet another Muslim agent of Dalip Singh, Mustafa Effendi,
helped him connect with the Muslim networks as they lay embedded
throughout the Russian and Ottoman imperial worlds. Effendi was
located in Istanbul, where he constituted an important link with the
Muslim networks spread out across the Ottoman world. He was an
influential man who was in charge of the sultans burial ground and
who also received payment from the Russians. Effendi was a friend
of the famous Muslim transimperial broker Jamaluddin Afghani,
who was located in Moscow, and he worked as the middleman
between Dalip Singh and the rebellious Afghani who straddled the
British and Ottoman territories with ease.62 Another Muslim agent,
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Latifur Rahman, based in London, was said to be in constant touch

with Abdul Rasul and with a Bengali Muslim law student in London
who supported Dalip Singh. Latifur Rahman oriented Dalip Singh
to the Irish camp. It was widely believed in British circles that due
to his continuous association with the Irish Fenians, Dalip Singh
had become a Fenian in heart.63
Other Muslim agents included a range of merchants. Merchants
from Kabul and Qandahar who traveled across the northwest frontier to the Punjab carried Dalip Singhs messages across to the Sikhs.
One of the greatest and [most] respectable Kabul merchants, a
man who lived for the last seventeen years in the Punjab, told Major
General M. Dillon, posted in the region, that such merchant emissaries ensured that the Sikhs of Rawalpindi as well as Ambala would
welcome Dalip Singh. Indeed, they met in private assemblies to discuss their support for him. They sent him messengers via Quetta
and Kandahar. Dalip Singh reciprocated their friendly overtures.
The Kabul merchant asserted that he too was part of their private
assemblies in Rawalpindi and Ambala, and that they spread love and
support for him.64
The French agents of Dalip Singh also worked with Muslim contacts. One of them, called Volpert, was a young man of twenty-three
or twenty-four years of age. He toured extensively across India,
traveling to Pondicherry, Bombay, Baroda, and Ahmadabad. He
attended a parade of the native infantry regiment in camp and saw
the gaekwars troops. He visited the court of Udaipur and met the
diwan. While in the area he also stopped at Chittor, Jaipur, and the
Amber Palace. He also visited Agra, Gwalior, Calcutta, and Lucknow.
While in Lucknow, he entered into a discussion with a native government official about the benefits of an alliance with Russia. This
officer began to make inquiries that alarmed Volpert so much that
he instantly departed for Pondicherry and from there back to
France.65 While in India, Volpert worked through a Muslim translator, Sheikh Sultan, and a Muslim agent from Azamgarh called
Abdul Ghafur, who was the son of a butcher of the city. Abdul
Ghafar passed as mukhtar (leader) and practiced in Azamgarh. He
was a man with many roles: he wrote for many vernacular newspapers and wrote anonymous petitions; he was employed by various
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badmashes (bad characters) in the city; he traded in hides; he worked

as an immigration agent; and he managed the estates of a large
zamindar, Tej Pratab Singh, in the Atraulia district of the northwest
Azamgarh district. Abdul Ghafar had spent some years in jail on a
forgery charge. For a long time he was thought to be a Russian
agent. But it was disclosed that he was in effect acting on behalf of
Dalip Singh, whom he had met in Paris.66
Dalip Singh used Muslim agents to connect with Muslim princes
of Haiderabad and Awadh, and also with Muslims of the Punjab,
many of whom had worked in the court of his father, Ranjit Singh.
Hussain Khan, a faithful and favorite servant of Ranjit Singh, was
one such case in point. In 1885, Dalip Singh wrote to him, eliciting
his support and establishing a special bond with him on account of
his long association with his family and their shared Indo-Persianate
culture. He greeted him in the Muslim way and said, I send you
salam alaikum for I now follow the precepts of Baba Nanak who
considered all religions to be alike before the almighty, for we are all
His servants.67 He also recited for him the kalima (God is one and
Muhammad is his Prophet) in Arabic and claimed that he knew
some Arabic and had read the English translation of the Koran.
In 1887, Dalip Singhs agent, Arur Singh, who had arrived in
Calcutta from Moscow via Odessa, Istanbul, and Colombo, revealed
that he was in India to collect money and allies for his master. Abdul
Rasuls Muslim contacts in India helped him move along the networks of Muslim princely states. He had already visited the Indian
state of Haiderabad and had letters for the king of Awadh and circulars for the native princes that promised deliverance from British
yoke.68 Abdul Rasul was the mutual friend of the Awadh nawabs
school friend. This was his contact in Awadh. He regretted not
having used this connection when Arur Singh was denied an appoint
ment with the nawab.69 The Haiderabad state was also tapped for
support. In a letter that Dalip Singh wrote to Sirdar Diler Jang in
Haiderabad state, he assured him of coming back to India, as he
stated, to release my brother princes from the yoke of the accursed
English rule. He tried his best to establish alliances with the
Muslim regional rulers and cautioned Diler Jang against giving the
British government any aid. He offered friendly advice and reminded
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him that the British had been known to switch alliances in India. He
noted, [The British] praised and petted the Sikhs who saved the
Indian Empire in 1857, and now I understand are making friends
with you Mussalmans in order to play the same game. He urged the
Haiderabad state to be wary of the English as their object was to
make the Hindoo and Muhummedans enemies and so gain power
for themselves.70 Once he had established the right connections, he
asked the Haiderabad state for financial help and urged them to
assist in every way.71 The geographical space from which he hoped
to get widespread support in India corresponded to the areas of
Muslim networks that spread from Calcutta in the east to the northwestern frontier areas bordering Afghanistan. He pointed the
nizams attention to a letter from India. It reported: The people are
more than anxiously awaiting Y. M [Your Majestys] arrival in or
near Afghanistan. We can safely assure Y.M. beyond doubt that as
Y.M reaches Kandahar or Caubul an open rebellion will take place
in Scinde, the Punjab, North Western provinces [i.e., North India
from Indus to Calcutta].72
Dalip Singh claimed to understand very well the predicaments of
the nizam of Haiderabad and other Indian princes, as they were, as
he said, literally in the palm of the government of India. He was
particularly sympathetic to the nizam of Haiderabad and considered him and other Muslims to be trustworthy allies. In a letter
written from Moscow, he advised his cousins, Do not mistrust the
Mohummedans. They will all co-operate with me when the time
comes if it ever does. The Nizam is heart and soul with me, but he
is obliged to appear loyal to the English in order to save himself.73
His cousins agreed that the Indian princes were all injured in heart
by the English government...that all of them [wanted] to throw
over the British yoke.74
The support of Indian princes was critical as it made Dalip Singhs
position in Russia more secure. In other words, the princes themselves became the points of connection in the imperial assemblages
across which Dalip Singh hoped to move. All the Indian princes
contacted were asked to send some token to convince the czar of
their loyalty.75 Dalip Singh was also required to obtain from them
written assurances of support, which were to be sent to Russia as
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proof that his Indian support base was in place. He also hoped to
appoint an agent in each princely state to coordinate correspondence. The czar also wanted him to make arrangements for a Russian
officer in India who would verify his claims of the support he had
from Indian princes.76 Dalip Singh needed the cooperation of Indian
princes not only to establish and maintain his own personal inroads
into India but also to assure the czar that he too had support within
India. In fact, this was Dalip Singhs major concern, as he was acting
as their international representative. He wrote to his cousin, I
should be both largely helped and supported in order to convince
the imperial government that the Indians are really in earnest.77
He said that huge difficulties would arise in the plan if he was
unable to give the imperial government a proof. And he added,
Unless a substantial one is soon forthcoming I am certain to fail in
the mission I am working out on behalf of my countrymen.78 He
complained that he could not give the names of the princes, as that
would lead them into trouble with the English government. In desperation he called the princes gadhay (donkeys) if they did not understand the gravity of the situation and act accordingly.79
But the most important Indian princely state from the point of
view of Dalip Singhs return to India was Kashmir. Dalip Singh was
confident that the Muslim transimperial networks that he used
would connect with Kashmir with ease. His main agent was Abdul
Rasul, who, as we have seen, was a Kashmiri Muslim with wide-
ranging connections in the region. But Kashmir was important for
other reasons as well. Kashmir was predominantly (over 90 percent)
Muslim. It was strategically located vis--vis the Russian empire. It
was an important conduit through which the imperially embedded
Muslim cosmopolis could interlock with its arteries across India. It
was the biggest native state of British India, ruled by a compliant
Dogra (Hindu) dynasty, although the British resident effectively
controlled it. To its north were the Hindu Kush mountains with the
famous Gilgit passes. And these mountain ranges linked Kashmir
to Russian Turkestan. Kashmir thus had an ideal geographical and
ethnic profile for a Muslim-Sikh alliance.
In 1889, Dalip Singh sent Abdul Rasul as his emissary to the
maharaja of Kashmir. He urged the Kashmir maharaja, Receive
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our messenger with kindness and concern. He reminded the maharaja that if he cooperated with him, then the maharaja could be
sure of [Russian] assistance later on.80 British detective Azizuddin
reported that Abdul Rasul had a plan worked out for Dalip Singhs
success in Kashmir. As per the advice of the Russian military party,
he was to create disturbances in Kashmir on behalf of the Russian
military party, and that would force the party to pressure the czar to
attack the English. The critical part was to have the maharaja of
Kashmir on the side of Dalip Singh, as that would win Sikh
support.81
Diwan Lachman Das, a former minister of the Kashmir state, was
the key link in Dalip Singhs endeavors to make inroads into
Kashmir. He kept in touch with Dalip Singhs cousins in Pondicherry
and was reported to have sent them Rs. 30,000 for the maharaja. In
1887, it was reported that he had dispatched a private servant of his,
named Ghulam Hussain, to Pondicherry to coordinate with Dalip
Singhs cousins in the city. In 1888, he was reported to be in secret
correspondence with Russia. And the same year it was said that, on
the pretext of going to England, he intended to visit France and
Russia to meet Dalip Singh.82 A series of letters written by the
maharaja of Kashmir revealed that he was in constant contact with
Russia as well as Dalip Singh.
On the Russian side, the plan for the entry into India from
Kashmir was in the hands of General Alikhanov. He was a Muslim
who had wiped out an Afghan force at Pendjeh that was en route to
Herat. And the occupation of Pendjeh had brought the Russian
Empire into direct contact with the British one. Because the general
was Muslim, it was virtually ensured that he would quickly become
a close confidant of Abdul Rasul. The British spy Azizuddin confidently noted that he had interested himself in Dalips behalf
through the influence, so he says of Abdul Rasul.83 According to
Abdul Rasul, their joint plan was to make demonstrations in force
against Herat, but direct the real attack toward Kashmir through
the Gilgit passes. Alikhanoff wanted Abdul Rasul to leave Moscow
and locate himself at some point within the reach of the Indian
frontier. His Indian contacts were equally widespread: Diler Jang
was his man in Haiderabad. He also had contacts with Holkar. In
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1891, Abdul Rasul was in touch with Suchet Singh, the wealthy Sikh
from the Chamba region of the Punjab, for financial reasons. But
the English were convinced that this was to blackmail the raja.84
The district superintendent of Ambala, Mr. Warburton, lumped
the Muslim ecumene, which he called wahabi associations, with
the national congress, Singh Sabhas, Hindu Sabhas, Arya Samaj, as
well as with the Kuka sect, because Dalip Singha agents used these
networks to operate within India. He considered them all equally
dangerous political elements and movements intended to increase
disloyalty in the people against the British.85 J.B. Lyall, the lieutenant. governor of Punjab, also grouped the Sikhs and the Muslims
of Punjab together as the warlike tribes who could hold out against
stronger races in the midst of the tumult and anarchy that would
follow in the case of the Russian overthrow of British power. He was
confident that this would not be the case in the other parts of India,
where the people, particularly the educated ones, would curtail
any such anarchy.86
And while some British officers could see the wahabi associations connect with other pan-Indian organizations, they were less
sure of how the Muslim cosmopolis, spread across the imperial
assemblages of Russia and the Ottoman Empires, would connect
with the Muslims and non-Muslims of India. The general consensus
was that Muslims in particular held a dim view of the Russian
Empire. And Dalip Singhs plan of riding piggyback on the Muslim
cosmopolis, embedded as it was in Russian imperial networks, would
backfire in India. B.E. Gowan, commanding the regiment of the
Fourth Sikhs, felt that the fact that Dalip Singh would come with
Muslim mercenaries from Central Asia, who worked for the Russians,
would not please the Sikh population, because, as he stated, they
bear an undying hatred to a Mahomedan. But more important, he
argued that even the Muslims would not be happy, as the accounts
they had heard of the Russian treatment of Muslims were very bad.
He concluded that Muslim soldiers of his regiment were convinced
that the Russians oppressed people...and had no respect for the
zenana [womens quarter]. Gowan said that he had understood that
the Muslim soldiers would stand by the British should Russia invade
India.87
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The 1891 visit of the czarevitch to India provoked a lot of comment in the Urdu press. However, the vernacular selections prepared by government agents included only those items that proved
that the Muslims were indifferent to or negative toward the Russians.
The Alam-i-Taswir of Kanpur published a railway carriage conversation between some Muslim men and a Russian officer regarding
the czarevitchs India visit. To the Russian officers provocative
comment that his countrymen were wild and barbarous, the
Muslim officers reacted that the Russians could not say this was true
about the able politicians and enlightened men that were conversing with them. But they refrained from expressing their opinions about the Russians as a nation. When finally forced to answer,
they replied that the Russians were the most uncivilized people among
the European nations and supported this contention by referring
to the misbehavior of Russian sailors at a Parsi club at Bombay.88 A
later edition of the newspaper reported that the Muhammedans
condemned Russian rule over Muhamedans as oppressive and tyrannical and that they also objected to the sentence in the governor of
Crimeas address to the czar that expressed a hope that the czar
would subdue the Turks and put up the Holy cross in place of the
crescent at the top of St. Sophia mosque.89
News items from the Urdu newspaper from Moradabad, Hamidul
Akhbar, which adverted to the suppression of certain verses in the
Quran by the Russian government, were highlighted to show
Russian religious intolerance.90 News items in the Hindustan of 17
June 1891 that made it clear that the natives were not in the mood to
change masters and that they were aware of the tyranny of the czar
over his subject population were given huge publicity via the vernacular selections.91 Cartoons in the Oudh Punch depicting Muslimdominated regions under the devious gaze of the Russian Empire
helped popularize the negative sentiments Indian Muslims held of
Russia. In contrast, these cartoons presented the British Empire in
a good light. Thus the September 1891 issue of the Oudh Punch from
Lucknow carried the cartoon of a Russian bear lovingly embracing
a Musalman who was marked as Central Asia. The cartoon had
the British lion standing close by and quietly looking on.92 A later
issue of the magazine represented Herat as a mouse protected by a
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British lion and Russia as a cat lying in wait for an opportunity to

seize the mouse.93 Similarly, news items in the Lucknow newspaper
Shokh-i-Oudh critiquing Russia for encouraging the publication of a
new newspaper in Shiraz, Persia, called Aftab-i-Hind, were widely
circulated because they showed how outraged Indians in general
and Muslims in particular were about Russia trying to obtain news
of India via this paper.94
Comments from the diary of the British Peshawar commissioner
regarding the atrocities of the czar on the Muslim population of
Turkestan were dutifully reported to the India Office so that
Turkestan Muslims could be cycled back into Indian society. In
1888, the news that the czar had issued an order that no landed
property was to be appropriated as wakf (charitable land grant) by
private persons in Russian Turkistan, for the support of mosques
and shrines, was noted with concern. Also promptly noted for wide
circulation in India was the news that each woman wearing a veil
was directed to pay a yearly tax of ten rupees. Women without veils
were exempted.95 The British government refused to extend any
cooperation to Russia if it threatened the welfare of its Muslim subjects. Thus in 1899 the Russian request for the establishment of a
consulate in the northwest frontier region of India, bordering
Central Asia, for helping the passage of its Muslim pilgrims was
turned down by the Bombay government. It was seen as a pretext
of spreading dis-affection and intrigue.96
The British officials were convinced that Muslims were not favorably inclined toward Russia. They were equally sure that Muslims
and Sikhs were separate religious categories that could never come
together. A Punjabi Muslim orderly of an English military officer
reported to his master that the Sikhs of Punjab were excited at the
news that Dalip Singh was in Herat with a Russian army waiting to
enter India. The officer minimized the scare with the wishful
thought that the Mahomodan feeling seems to be against him. He
took great solace from the comments of his orderly, who said, Why
have you no Mahomedan regiments as well as Sikh ones? We dont
care about Dhuleep Singh, and are quite ready to fight him.97
Similarly, H.M. Henderson was convinced that the Muhamedans
of the Punjab have no sympathy whatever either with the Sikhs or
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with Dalip Singh. He was of the view that this loss of sympathy had
come about due to the Dussehra and Muharram riots and to the
introduction of local self-government in the Punjab.98
In 1891, after Dalip Singhs plot had been foiled, Suchet Singh had
Abdul Rasul arrested for stealing documents. In response, Abdul
Rasul filed a case against Dalip Singh for claims. He was hopeful that
he could blackmail Dalip Singh and create a scandal. But Dalip Singh
appeared indifferent. He complained that Abdul Rasul, while intoxicated, had threatened to shoot him.99 The Indian princes, who in the
end failed to rise to the occasion, disillusioned a very sick and disenchanted Dalip Singh. In August 1890, after he had determined to go
back to England, he had his wishes conveyed to his son: His highness has learned from sad experience that all his immense sacrifices
in the cause of his countrymen have been in vain. He believed in the
sincerity of the promises and representations sent to him from India.
He has been told that they were empty words.100 However, the
charges and countercharges in this endgame could not detract from
the fact that the network of agents and contacts that Muslim cosmopolitans had spread out between empires remained a critical resource
base for all kinds of people who cared to use it.
The coming together of the Muslim transimperial ecumene with
other pan-nationalists was most evident in Dalip Singhs proposal to
set up a colony of Irish Fenians on the northwest frontier. The Times
correspondent in Moscow said that he had reports of telegraphic
communications between his city and an important and well-known
point on the Afghan frontier. He was keen to follow this Indo-
Muscovite intrigue piloted by Dalip Singh and the Russian military party chief Katkoff on the northwest frontier.101 In Paris, Dalip
Singh was in constant touch with Irishmen. The Irish journalist
John Brenon was known to have often sought interviews with him.
He made promises to raise his concerns in Parliament.102 Dalip
Singh interacted with the Irish not only to hatch conspiracies but
also to use them to mail personal letters from England and Ireland
in order to avoid British surveillance in Paris.103 Letters to Dalip
Singh from an Irishman who was a lieutenant colonel in the British
Army and initialed his letters with a capital C were found in the
possession of his agent Arur Singh.104
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Dalip Singhs interactions with the Irish led to a plot in which the
two military parties of Irish nationalists drew up a proposal for the
establishment of an Irish military colony near the northwestern
Indian frontier. They hoped to lodge six hundred to six thousand
Irishmen in the colony. They hoped that would attract eleven thousand to thirteen thousand Irish deserters from the British army.
The colony was to be commanded by a close associate who would
follow instructions from the imperial government of Russia. It was
hoped that this colony of Irishmen would be ready to march in the
service of any deposed native sovereign and place him on the
throne.105 Dalip Singhs letters to his cousins in Pondicherry, intercepted by the British government, revealed that the military party
in Russia had persuaded him to go to France and enter into relations
with the Irish and American parties in Paris. He was asked to be
their emissary to the Russians and to ask for their help.106
Dalip Singh was confident that the frontier with Afghanistan,
which was home to Muslim rebels from British India, would be the
best location for such a colony, as it would reflect the rebellious spirit
of the Irish deserters. He was keen on establishing this colony
despite the reservations of his cousins who warned that it might be
counterproductive, as it could encourage the English government to
offer the frontier rebels liberty and home rule. This would most
certainly disconnect them from the other trans-Asian actors. This
would not be a very favorable situation for Dalip Singh.107
The Foreign Office also looked into information that said that
Dalip Singh had contacts with the Irish secret societies. But this
could not be confirmed.108 Again, a news item in the Times indicated
that Dalip Singh had traveled to Russia under the name of the well-
known Irish Fenian, Patrick Casey. The Times correspondent believed
that Dalip Singh had lost his passport and belongings in Berlin and
was in dire straits. The article claimed that Dalip Singh had chosen
the Irish disguise because while in Paris he might have gotten Caseys
Irish passport.109 That this was true was revealed years later, when
Dalip Singh, comfortably lodged in the Hotel Dussaux in Moscow,
joked about his fake identity to his son. He wrote, The English resident here and the embassy think that I am Casey who was connected
with affairs in Ireland some time back. It is very amusing.110
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Casey was a member of the Fenian council in Paris and a suspect

in the failed dynamite attack planned for the London celebrations of
Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee. He was a card-carrying Irish
rebel hero who had been involved in the huge explosion at the
Clerkenwell House of Detention in 1867. The attack was intended
to free his brother. But instead, it had caused vast damages to the
London working class. Afterward, he and his three brothers had
fled to Paris, as London had become too dangerous for them. There,
they settled down to a life of journalism, boozing, and revolutionary
politics.111 Casey claimed to know Dalip Singh intimately. In an
interview with the Paris correspondent of the Morning Advertiser, he
revealed Dalip Singhs contacts in Russia, his political ties with the
Irish Fenians, and his ties to the Russian military party and its
leader, Katkoff, in Moscow.112 John Brenon, an Irish journalist and
politician, was said to be in touch with Dalip Singh. He often
arranged appointments with him and according to the Times correspondent, had promised to agitate his pretensions before parliament. Dalip Singh consented to meet him, but in one such 1890
meeting he failed to show up.113 However, his links with the Irishmen
in the British Indian army were on a firmer footing. He was confident of getting the support of fifteen thousand Irishmen in the
British army in India.114

Dalip Singh and the Spirit of 1857

The spirit of 1857, as we saw in earlier chapters, had charged the
transimperial Muslim ecumene in no small measure. It had triggered the movement of Muslims to the northwestern frontier and to
the Ottoman world outside, and it had made them sensitive to rebellions in Dutch Acheh in the north of Sumatra and in Ottoman
Egypt in North Africa, as well as to the Mahdi movement in Sudan.
Dalip Singh, very much like the Muslim cosmopolitans, strategized
his return to India inspired by the spirit of 1857; indeed, modeled
his own efforts on the rebels strategies. He leaned on all the critical
actors of this rebellion and hoped to draw on their networks, which
he was convinced had not been extinguished, despite the failure of
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1857. He invoked both the spirit and the model of protest epitomized by 1857 to energize the transimperial Muslim networks. He
used these invigorated networks to work his way into British India.
Indeed, 1857 had shown how individuals could use imperial networks to make transimperial forays and forge political alliances outside India. The mutiny-rebellion of 1857 had become the benchmark
for a particular kind of transimperial politics.
In 1889, Dalip Singh wrote to his cousins in Pondicherry, who
were coordinating his plans there. He asked, Can you not get up
another mutiny as in 1857 of the Hindustani troops, when I land
with some 10,000 European volunteers. If this could be effected, I
think the thing will easily be done.115 The Indian princes had
played a major role in 1857. With this model in mind, he wrote, But
before you start anything let me have reliable information as to how
far the princes are really with us. He wanted to lean on the princes
for support, as that would broaden his social base instantly. This had
been the case in 1857 as well. And he offered his cousins the following assurance: I shall have say at least 5,000 volunteers...
10,000 Irish in IndiaSikhs and Punjabees in the British service
40,000.Total 55,000 mennot by any means a bad little army. But if
the native princes rise, we might have another 100,000 men.116 He
issued an appeal to the native princes in which he urged them to
raise money for the purchase of arms and ammunitions. He said he
needed 3 to 4 million pounds sterling placed at the disposal of the
Committee of Organization in Europe. He made the princes aware
that both in Europe and in America there were supporters waiting
to participate in this new mutiny-rebellion in India.117 And in 1887,
he arranged to have circulated in the Sikh regiments copies of his
proclamation detailing the unjust treatment he had received at the
hands of the British.118 There were also unconfirmed reports from
his Pondicherry cousin Sardar Gurbachan Singh that an Irish major
was being dispatched from Ireland to win over the Irish troops in
the British Indian army.119
Gurbachan Singh and another Pondicherry cousin, Narinder
Singh, encouraged Dalip Singh to emulate the 1857 model. They
told him that all Sikhs in the Indian army were ready to join the
majesty and that a certain sirdar ha[d] also visited Pondicherry
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with the assurances of loyalty to the Maharaja. According to his

cousins, the Sikhs were so enthusiastic about supporting Dalip
Singh that two of them, accompanying a German baron who had
visited Haiderabad, had traveled to Europe in order to meet him.120
They were sure that if a European army landed in India with a view
to fighting the British, and if the chances of success were bright, the
people would willingly join the uprising. Dalip Singh was also confident of getting money from local bankers and from private individuals in India if the actual war situation developed. Dalip Singhs
cousins felt that the chances of success might incite an 1857-style
mutiny in the Bengal army. The cousins were of the view that since
this army consisted largely of Punjabis, its loyalty could be relied on.
The assistance of Irish officers could only make their case stronger.
One British officer, H.M. Durand, feared that given the post-1857
dependence of the government on the Sikh regiments, any disaffection among our Sikh troops in the face of a Russian advance
would paralyze our operations and make our position a very critical one.121
Dalip Singhs cousins, with the 1857 model in mind, did not have
much hope in the Bombay and Madras armies, which, they said, had
low caste people of no proven record of bravery. They wished to
invoke the same sort of powerful rumors that in 1857 had stoked the
fire of rebellion. They felt that the European army that would
accompany the maharaja should at once capture an important town
and defeat its small garrison. They hoped that when the news of this
momentous event spread out...certainly all of India [would] be in
a blaze.122 They suggested Burma as the possible site of this event:
The Burmese are active, his cousins stated, and our Punjabees
muster there in large numbers...and if we could drive the English
out of Burma we will not have difficulty in reading down the English
raj in India.123
His cousins invoked the symbolism of Burma, which was immortalized in popular memory as the exile station of the last Mughal
emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who had led the 1857 rebels. They
felt Burma was ideal as the first site to be occupied because they
could depend on its local chiefs for military support. They claimed
to have the head prince Myngoonmin of Burma with them at
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Pondicherry. They believed that he was a popular figure and was in

correspondence with other notables of Burma who were willing to
join Dalip Singh in support of the cause.124 The prince received a
pension of 25,000 francs from the French government. The fact that
he was ready to join the plot was evident when on his request it was
agreed to change his location from Pondicherry to Saigon. He felt
this was closer to Burma and it would be easy for him to mobilize
his resources and men from Saigon should the need arise.125 This
change of residence fit Dalip Singhs plans very well. Again, very
much in the way the 1857 mutineers had used religious and spiritual
symbols, Dalip Singhs cousins hoped to use his spiritual position
to galvanize support in India. They wrote to him in particular about
the Kuka community of Sikhs, whose spiritual leaders had sent him
presents as a mark of their support and respect. The Kuka could
muster at short notice eighty to ninety thousand men for Dalip
Singh.126
However, one of the crucial differences between 1857 and 1890
was the emergence of the Nationalist Congress party in India and
the ideas of liberty and freedom encased in its representative and
constitutional forms of government. The return of monarchs was
certainly not the flavor of the times. And thus the cousins were
careful to update the 1857 model, adding fresh suggestions to it. For
example, they offered the following advice to Dalip Singh: Show
sympathy with the Congress in some way or other in such a manner
that the feelings of those who do not like representative system may
not be wounded. However, they felt that Dalip Singh had no real
reason to worry about the Congress because, as they put it, The
people support Congress because they think it is one of the plans to
overthrow the British rule and not because it advocates the cause of
self government, for a very great majority of the people do not want
constitutional government.127
Also, unlike 1857, where the restoration of the Mughal emperor
to the throne was the common agenda of all mutineers and rebels,
the Pondicherry cousins wanted Sikh rule and not that of the
Mughals or any other native prince. Thus, even though they were
happy to tap into the Muslim cosmopolis for the restoration of Dalip
Singh as the maharaja of Punjab, they were quick to reassure him
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that the restoration of the Mughals was no longer a popular idea in

Hindustan. They wrote to him that they had allayed the anxiety of
a trustworthy servant of Ranjit Singh who had expressed the
common fear that anarchy would ensue after British rule ended. He
had expressed his anxiety that the fall of the English government
might be followed by the renewal of the Mohammadan power
which the Hindoos do not like.128 The cousins had offered the
trusted servant the following reassurance: once Dalip Singh lands
in India with a European force and succeeds in driving out the
English, they told him, no other native Prince can resist the Sikh
government.129
And yet 1857 was so etched in popular memory that the rumors of
Dalip Singhs return triggered familiar sentiments of the Hindu-
Muslim unity that had characterized that momentous event. Thus,
for instance, it was reported from Lahore that one Devi Dial
[Dayal] was going about the bazaars saying the throne of England
had been shaken, and that Dalip Singh would return and Hindus
and Muhammadans unite, when he would become himself again.130
Again, the kind of hostility toward Christians and missionaries that
figured in the bazaar gossip of north India during 1857 was conspicuously prevalent in the Punjab as news of Dalip Singhs return
to end English rule spread. In 1887, Mr. Warburton, the district
superintendent of police in Amritsar, said that he had been warned
by a Mission lady that of late the behavior of the Sikhs had changed
in the villages. She reported, They are defiant and insolent now to
Mission ladies and order them out of their houses saying we do not
want you; in a short time you will see what will happen.131 Mr.
Youngson, a missionary, reported that when he asked a government
employee, Sikh Sardar of Sialkot, if he would go against Dalip Singh
were he to approach India by way of Russia, he answered no.
According to him, three Sikh soldiers had said to his preachers in
the bazaar, When Dalip Singh comes, we shall cut your heads.132
Captain Andrew Hearsey feared that if Dalip Singh invoked 1857,
he would also tap into the resentments that the organizational structure of the mutinous Bengal Army had generated. One resentful
group consisted of the Anglo-Indian and Eurasian officers who
had been denied promotions and pushed to the fringe irregular
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regiments
because of their mixed blood. Hearsey was sure that these
men would, as he described it, willingly join the Russian army and
carve their fortunes with their swords as their fathers did before.
He feared that once Dalip Singh was able to put together an army of
twenty to twenty-five thousand Punjabis and Sikhs officered by
Anglo-Indian and Eurasian gentlemen, things would get tough for
the British.133 In 1887, the government of India conducted surveys
of the Sikh regiments to figure out their state of feeling about
Dalip Singh.134 Most of the commanding officers allayed fears of
any trouble. Lieutenant Colonel E. Collen, secretary to the military
department, concluded, There is very little present excitement.
And yet, because of the 1857 precedent, officers felt that the statements of sepoys had to be accepted with a certain degree of reservation. They argued that soldiers seldom speak the truth to their
commandants. G. Chesney, military member of the viceroys coun
cil, was of the view that this was true because, as he explained, when
the mutiny began every Colonel was ready to swear by the loyalty of
his regiment, till it broke out.135 On the eve of Dalip Singhs proposed return, the comparison of contemporary Punjab society with
Indian society in 1857 remained a constant backdrop of all official
discussions on the issue. According to one line of reasoning, if based
on the British experience in 1857 sepoy reports were not always to
be relied on, there was reason for calm in other instances where
circumstances appeared to differ from those of 1857. Officers argued
that unlike the mutiny, where the unemployed class took to arms, in
the Punjab there was no large unemployed class trained to arms.
Officers such as Colonel W.I. Bax felt that the priestly class was
satisfied with the spread of Sikh religion under English rule and that
the classes serving the army and government were also happy with
the government. Thus Punjab society was very different from that
of North India in 1857.136 Bax and his colleagues expected trouble
only from a small group of badmashes (bad characters)people who,
as in the case of the mutiny, were active only because they had
nothing to lose and everything to gain. Lieutenant Colonel H.S.
Marshall, commanding the Twenty-Eighth Regiment Punjab Infan
try, put it in so many words. He felt that as in 1857, trouble might be
expected from certain classes of low Mahomedans, Hindoos and
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Sikhs, in fact among all badmashes who have everything to gain

and nothing to lose in the event of a disturbance in the country.137
Most significant, however, was the British fear of the restoration
of Muslim rule that the mutiny of 1857 had generated. And thus
J.B. Lyall, secretary to the government in the Punjab, feared that an
invasion of India led by Dalip Singh with Russian support might get
the backing of the Muslims. He remarked, If they thought our
power was collapsing, [the Muslims] would be under great temptation to join the northern invaders in order to plunder India and to
tyrannize over the Hindus.138
Of course, the 1857 mutiny-rebellion remained a significant
benchmark not only for Muslim cosmopolitans with global aspirations but also for those who wished to underscore their rootedness
in the territorial confines of British India. Indeed, some defined
their loyalty to British India by distancing themselves from the
transimperial Muslim networks and from figures like Dalip Singh
who tapped into them. In 1892, Suchait Singh, of Chamba in the
Punjab, petitioned the Foreign Office for the payment of a monthly
stipend of Rs. 5,000 that had been promised to him by the government charter of 1848. He highlighted his loyalty to the government
in terms of his role in saving several Englishwomen and children in
1857: During the Indian mutiny he gave shelter to hundreds of
English women and children, who but for his protection, would
have been massacred...he captured and delivered over to the
British authorities, at Dalhousie, five hundred rebel Sepoys although
they were his fellow countrymen...during the Cabul war he asked
for leave to fight against the enemy of England.139 He contrasted
his loyalty to Dalip Singhs treachery, which he described in
terms of his reaching out to and connecting with the Muslim cosmopolis that was spread across the imperial assemblage. He was
upset that while he was left to languish, favors [were] lavished upon
others whose treachery on England ha[d] been proven. He offered
the following example: Maharaja Duleep Singh plotted against
England with Russia, he declared himself the humble subject and
servant of her emperor...he endeavoured by proclamation and
emissaries to stir insurrection in India...although a traitor [he] is
royally pensioned by England.140
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Earlier, in 1886, Dalip Singh himself used 1857 as a metaphor for

Sikh loyalty when he pleaded with the Marquess of Salisbury for
justice. He argued that it was never his intention to settle in England
permanently. He was encouraged to do so by the British government and prevented from returning due to the mutiny in 1857. He
reclaimed his jewels and estate and complained about the broken
promises regarding his status and maintenance money. In so doing,
he underlined his loyalty by his reference to the great service of the
Sikh army in quelling the 1857 mutiny-rebellion. He said that in
1857, contrary to the trouble they had posed at the time of the
annexation of the Punjab, the Sikhs took a noble revenge on their
former foes, by being instrumental in preserving for the English
their Indian Empire during the memorable Mutiny of that year. He
reminded the marquess that if the Sikhs had not responded to Sir
John Lawrences appeal, the English might have lost India. He
referred to the reports sent by Lawrence in 1858 that praised the
loyalty and valor of the Sikh army in reconquering Hindostan.141
Reminding the marquess of the loyalty of Sikh soldiers in Sudan in
1885, he argued, It is incumbent on the British government above
all things to treat with justice, if they cannot show generosity, the
deposed monarch of the Sikh people.142

Muslim Cosmopolitanism and Its Many Usages

This book has highlighted the dynamics of Muslim cosmopolitanism as it functioned at the underbelly of empires. In the shadows
of modern empires, transimperial actors, like the Muslim cosmopolitans of this book, laid out a web of contacts that made borders
porous. Agents, family connections, religious and ethnic bonds,
texts, students, and madrasas constituted the networks that connected empires. If the new techniques of mapping, surveys, surveillance, and identification made political boundaries rigid, the
simultaneous reliance of imperial governments on middlemen and
runaway cultural brokers made them pervious. This created a very
agile subimperial culture at the underbelly of the imperial assemblage constituted by Britain, Ottomans, and czarist Russia. This
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cultural empire of Muslimstheir cosmopoliscould be tapped by

anyone with global aspirations.
The book has argued that the Muslim cosmopolis was vulnerable
and open to various pulls and usages in the age of empires. Its creators and protagonists being Muslim men of religion, and its Islamic
intellectual core notwithstanding, it attracted a range of individuals
who plugged into its networks with ease and pushed it in a variety of
directions. Its Ottoman tanzimat-inspired secular and modern
orientation and its imperially embedded nature lent it the malleability and openness that made it a useful conduit for all. Dalip Singh
is the best case in point as a non-Muslim actor who energized the
Muslim cosmopolis and opened up fresh interstices with the Russian
and the Irish nationalist diasporas.
But if actors such as Dalip Singh appealed to the Muslim cosmopolis for help and widened its political and geographical embrace,
the British and the Ottoman Empires refashioned themselves effectively as its guardians. They kept its networks alive despite its suspicious actors. Paradoxically, the imperially embedded nature of the
Muslim cosmopolis became its lifesaver, even as its protagonists
remained the much sought-after outlawed fanatics of British India.
This book has shown how each one of the Muslim cosmopolitans
derived (directly or indirectly) from imperial networks and benefited from their rivalries. If imperial politics enabled Kairanwi and
Imdadullah Makki to find a new patron in Sultan Abd-al Hamid II
in Istanbul, those same politics also enabled Siddiq Hasan Khan to
amass a huge intellectual readership and clientele in Cairo. Sayyid
Fadl, the Indian-Arab rebel, made his political career as he used
imperial webs and became the much-in-demand interlocutor and
broker in the Ottoman-British political tussle. Ottoman-controlled
Mecca became the safe refuge for each one of the Indian fugitives.
Here, under the nose of the British consulate, and with its full
knowledge, they set up seminaries and established political and
intellectual contacts with the Islamic hubs in the Mediterranean
area, even as they continued to maintain their links with British
India. And finally, the story of Jafer Thanesri, the unfortunate protagonist abandoned in the Andaman penal colony, reveals how
British imperial networks introduced a physicality to his Islamic
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global imaginary. This enabled him to connect with and contribute

to the cosmopolis between empires even if he remained located in
the Andaman Islands.
Indeed, it is this symbiotic relationship between the modern
Western empires (including the Ottoman Empire) and the pan-
Islam networks that helps resolve many seeming contradictions in
the existing scholarship on twentieth-century pro-Ottoman Indian
Muslims. It is no surprise that many of them saw no contradic
tion in being subjects of the British Empire, agitating for their
rights within India, and yet advocating their loyalty to the Ottoman
caliph. In this period of high nationalism, the Muslim cosmopolis enabled their anticolonial activism to spill out of British India
and to influence intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire and its formerly controlled hubs of Mecca, Cairo, and Baghdadcities that
also faced the Western challenge. Indian Muslims supported the
Ottoman cause abroad even as they continued to dig their heels firmly
into British Indian society. From British Indias poet-philosopher
Muhammad Iqbal to the congressman Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and
from the famous Indian Khilafatists, the Ali brothers, to the Delhibased medic Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, there are endless examples of
Indian Muslims who galvanized support for the Ottoman Empire
during the Balkan crisis of 19121915.143 And the scholarly Con
gress man and the most vocal Indian Muslim nationalist, Maulana
Abul Kalam Azad, advocated the Ottoman cause in his journal Al
Hilal even as he carved out a political space for his community
within India.
Azad was born in 1888 to Maulana Khairuddin, an Indian
Naqshbandi Sufi migr settled in Mecca. He shared his intellectual
and social background with the cosmopolitan protagonists of this
book. His father (b. 1832) migrated to Mecca at a very young age
with his maternal grandfather, who was one of the many Muslim
scholar migrs who fled India in the decades that followed the
northwestern frontier disturbances in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed,
Khairuddins life in Mecca in the decade before the 1857 uprising
reveals the intellectual agility of the city and the imperial networks
that connected it to the intellectual hubs at Istanbul, Cairo, and
Baghdad. It is not surprising that post-1857 Mecca became the
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refuge of Indian reformists and scholar migrs who fled to the city
to escape the British clampdown. They happily integrated into the
vibrant intellectual climate of the city. Here, away from the intellectual constraints of British India and the confines of their subject
status, they felt intellectually liberated. This made their in-house
debates shriller. Thus, Khairuddin used his new location not only to
debate freely with the Indian scripturalist reformists, the ahl-i-
Hadith, who opposed his Sufi rituals and customs. But in addition,
he accompanied like-minded Sufi scholars such as Sheikh Ahmad
Dahlan to Istanbul to throw his intellectual net wider.144 The city
became his conduit to the wider Muslim intellectual worldthe
cosmopolisthat lay embedded in imperial networks.
Azads intellectual genealogy firmly placed him in the Muslim
cosmopolis even though he returned to India with his father in 1902
at the age of fifteen. Indian historiography extols him as a fiery
Indian nationalist and stereotypes him as the ideal Muslim anticolonial Congress man. Very few studies view his politics and highlight his rough edges within the Congress Party in the context of the
larger Muslim cosmopolis that framed much of his life and time in
India. As an Indian Muslim nationalist, he made most of the Muslim
cosmopolis, straddling it seamlessly to balance his territorial anticolonial struggle with a fight for the cultural empire of Islam. This
book has shown that British India constituted one end of this empire
and that the other end was firmly within the territorial ambit of the
Ottoman sultan. Thus for Azad the fight to free Calcutta and Delhi
from colonial injustices was naturally routed through Ottoman
imperial cities and took form in his continued support for the sultan.
He traveled across Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq to connect with anti-
imperial activists across the globe. Paradoxically, the imperially
embedded pan-Islamic networks became Azads greatest asset in his
anticolonial struggle against Western hegemony. Indeed, even if his
appeal for global Muslim unity in the fight against imperialism is
seen as jihad, then this call was very much embedded in the Muslim
cosmopolis that Western empires supported.145
The imperially embedded nature of pan-Islam also helps us
understand better why the later Khilafatists appealed to the raj for
help to restore the authority of the caliph. Like many other Indian
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Muslims in British India, the Khilafatists also saw the defense of the
caliphate not merely as a spiritual cause. Nor was it a simple strategy
with an eye to a more long-term anticolonial agenda. Instead, their
dependence on the raj and their negotiations with the allied powers
to save the caliphate together constituted an attempt to save the
cultural empire of Islam. The political isolation of the Ottomans at
the hands of the Allied powers in the 1920s threatened not just the
empire but also the Muslim cosmopolis it nurtured. Indian Muslim
cosmopolitans who traversed this cosmopolis put up a fight to save
it. The defense of the caliph was also a fight for the sultan, who, as
the representative of a formidable Western empire in Asia, was one
of the important pillars of the cosmopolis. The fight to protect the
temporal power of the caliph, who had a global reputation of being
the sultan of an ethnically and religiously diverse population that
stretched across Asia and Europe, is often ignored in the Khilafatists
story. The support for him was a fight to save an important investor
in the cultural empire of Muslims. Using the same logic, it was natural for the Khilafatists to turn for help also to the cosmopoliss
other Western imperial stakeholderthe British Empire.
This book has shown effectively how the management of travel to
Mecca, in particular by Britain and other European powers gave
physicality to the Islamic vision of a global world controlled by the
caliph. The travel to Mecca exposed the reality of this world and the
caliph and triggered a lively debate on the contours of the Muslim
world and the questions of its leadership. This book has argued that
Muslim cosmopolitanism and its protagonists used such debates to
enhance their position vis--vis the imperial powers. The cosmopolitan actors of this book also enticed Western powers by suggesting that some of them, such as the British Empire, could do a
better job of overseeing the Muslim world than the corrupt Ottoman
caliph had done. Their play between empires ensured that the
Muslim cosmopolis, despite all the fears and phobias it elicited in
the British and European official circles, was there to stay. Indeed,
it was in the interest of the British and Ottoman Empires to keep it
energized as a fertile arena they could tap for intelligence, espionage, and the brokering of global politics. And the Muslim cosmopolitans unique blend of their reformist, scripture-oriented core
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and their modern, tanzimat-inspired worldview and leanings on

Western imperial networks also explains why for the Ottomans the
shift from empire to republic, or the move from Istanbul to Ankara,
was not a very painful one. There was no major conflict between the
imperially embedded and reformist-driven pan-Islam that framed
the later empire and the Western reformist orientation of the
republic. It is for similar reasons that for the Indian Muslims who
played in this particular brand of pan-Islam, their endorsement of
the first Turkish nationalist head of the republic, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk (18811938), was as enthusiastic as their earlier support for
the sultan had been. Before the winds of identity politics that ended
in the partition of India on religious lines clouded the intellectual
horizons of the country, scholars and statesmen such as Iqbal and
Jinnah supported Ataturk. Later, however, as they were entrusted
with the onerous task of building a new nation forged in the name
of religion, his political model seemed less useful. The same was the
case in Iran and Afghanistan.
The interdependence between Muslim cosmopolitanism and the
imperial powers in the age of empires has had an afterlife. Neo
imperial powers, such as the United States of America, at appropriate political moments appeal to the Muslim worlds Islamic scriptural core. At other times, such powers fan the Muslim worlds
tanzimat-inspired secular political orientation. The American
support of the royal ruling house of Saudi Arabiawhich upholds
hard-line Sunni Wahabi Islamalongside its support for the Arab
Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, and the countries of the United Arab
Emirates is an important case in point. Such American responses do
not seem that inexplicable when seen in the long history of bonhomie and mutual dependence between imperial networks and the
Muslim ecumene that derived from them.

406

Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Abbr e v i at ions

consult. Consultations.
F Papers for areas outside or on the borders of British India. British
Library, London.
FDS Foreign Department, Secret.
FD/PC Collections of the Foreign Department, Political Consultations.
National Archives of India, New Delhi.
FD/SC Collections of the Foreign Department, Secret Consultations.
National Archives of India, New Delhi.
FO Foreign Office Collection. Public Records Office, Kew, London.
IOR India Office Records.
IOR Neg. India Office Records, Microfilm Negatives. India Office Records
Collection. British Library, London.
IOR/R Records of the British Agencies and Residencies in the Persian
Gulf. Foreign Department Records. British Library, London.
L/Mil Military Department Proceedings. British Library, London.
L/PS Secret Letters and Enclosures from India (Secret and Political).
India Office Records Collection. British Library, London.
L/R Crowns Representative, Nepal. Kathmandu Residency Records,
17921872. India Office Records Collection, British Library,
London.
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi.
R/1 Crowns Representative, Political Department. Indian States
Records, 18811947. India Office Records Collection. British
Library, London.
R/2 Crowns Representative, Indian States Residency Records,
17891947. India Office Records Collection, British Library,
London.

409

No t e s

Introduction

1. Hakim Maulana Muhammad Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq

Ali Ashraf al Khalaq (Delhi: Maktaba Burhan, 1981), 2830.
2. Ibid., 32.
3. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Tawarikh-i-Ajaib (Karachi: Salman Academy,
1962), 122126. Except where noted, all translations are my own.
4. Ibid., 125.
5. Ibid., 129.
6. Ibid., 125.
7. Maulana Asir Adravi, Mujahid Islam: Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi
(Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2004), 288289.
8. Muslim Congressman Maulana Abul Kalam, Azads father, and Maulana
Munawauddin, his great-grandfather, were some of the migrs who
left from Bombay, along with other notables, to settle in Mecca years
before 1857. Azad had a Meccan mother and was born in the city; he
spent the first fifteen years of his life there. See Azad ki Kahani khud
Azad ki Zabani, as dictated to Abdur Razzaq Malihabadi (Calcutta:
Hali Publishing House, 1959; repr., Delhi: Ateqad, 2008), 38, 40.
Citations refer to the 2008 edition.
9. Thanesri, Tawarikh, 125, 129.
10. E. Simpson and Kai Kresse, eds., Struggling with History: Islam and
Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008), xix. I borrow this idea from Kresse and
Lambick, who use the concept of urbane civility as a form of comportment that bonded port city societies together as cosmopolitan centers.
11. Migrants had varied experiences in host societies. For some, like the
Arabs, the association of their place of origin with the sacred spaces of

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No t e s t o pag e s 7 12

Islam offered quick naturalized status in Muslim host societies and

reinforced a firmer link with their past. But this was not the case for all.
Many non-Arabs could not achieve a speedy naturalized status in host
societies. For them, their names, titles, and memory of ancestry
remained reminders of parent societies. See Omar Farouk Bajunid, ed.,
special issue on Arab communities and networks in South and Southeast
Asia, Asian Journal of Social Science 32, no. 3 (2004).
12. For a comparison of Malaysia, Penang, where this happened, and
Kedah, where it did not, see Sharifah Zaleha, History and the
Indigenization of the Arabs in Kedah, Malaysia, Asian Journal of Social
Science 32, no. 3 (2004): 401423.
13. Muzaffar Alam argues that it was the fear of the Naqshbandiya global
networks and the influence they had in Central Asian and Ottoman
societies that made Emperor Akbar suspicious of them and more
inclined toward the relatively indigenized and localized Chishtiya Sufi
orders. Muzaffar Alam, private conversation, New Delhi, 20 July
2014.
14. SyedAtharAbbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India: Early Sufism and
Its history in India to 1600 A.D. (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1978),
104, 206, 396. Abd ur Rahman Jami of Herat had visited the Ottoman
Empire. He was the descendent of Abdul Karim al Jili (13651428),
who had visited India and popularized Ibn-i-Arabi via his commentaries.
15. The biographical compendium is entitled Al Shaqaiq al-Numaniyya
fiUlama-al-Dawlat al-Uthmaniyya.
16. See Hamid Algar, Jami (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013),
132; Muzaffar Alam, Jami in the Indo-Muslim World, paper presented at A Worldwide Literature: Jami (14141492) in Dar-al-Islam
and Beyond, College de France and University of Chicago, Paris, 1415
November 2013.
17 Albert Hourani, Shaikh Khalid and the Naqshbandi Order, in Islamic
Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: Essays Presented by His Friends and
Pupils to Richard Walzer on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Samuel Miklos
Stern, Albert Hourani, and Vivian Brown (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1972), 89103. For Naqshbandis who connected
Central Asia to the Ottoman and the Mughal Empires, see Hamid
Algar, The Naqshbandiya Order: A Preliminary Survey of Its History
and Significance, Studia Islamica 44 (1976):123152.
18. Tony Ballyntine, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealands Colonial Past
(Wellington, U.K.: Bridget Williams Books, 2002).
19. C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the
Age of British Expansion, 17701870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
20. Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate
in Colonial Rule (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002);
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English
Imagination, 18301867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),

412

No t e s t o pag e s 1213

122. Hall examines nonconformists and Baptist missionaries in British

Caribbean Jamaica between 1830 and 1867 as a basis for understanding
antislavery discourse and racial relations in the United Kingdoms
metropolitan center of Birmingham.
21. Ballyntine, Webs of Empire; David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds.,
Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Ballyntine shows how the analytical category of the Aryan produced
by British Orientalists in India traveled across imperial networks to
British colonies in the Pacific; here, it was used by indigenous communities to construct their genealogies and fight their battles of survival. For a discussion of the telling of local tales as imperial narratives
that traveled across empires, see Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections:
India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 18601920 (Ranikhet: Permanent
Black, 2007),9; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The
Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
22. Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire,111; Maya
Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750
1850 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 46; Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized
Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005),19.
23. See, for example, Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman
in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), xxiiixxvi. Colley
maintains that the travels and experiences of Elizabeth Marshan
itinerant Jamaican-born traveler and writerwithin and across British-
controlled territories were a consequence of the global moment of
the late eighteenth century in which Britains imperial drives intensified travel. Colley argues that by 1800 Britain offered the most enduring
imperial grid along which careers were shaped.
24. Richard Drayton, Natures Government: Science, Imperialism, Britain,
and the Improvement of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000); Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.
25. For a critique of the exceptionalism of the British Empire in writing
world history, see Antoinette Burton, Getting outside the Global:
Repositioning British Imperialism in World History, in Race, Nation
and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present, ed. Catherine Hall
and Keith McLelland (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University
Press, 2010), 199216.
26. For a discussion of empire-based global history, see Frederick Cooper
and Jane Burbank, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of
Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 2010.
27. E.Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between
Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012),
1115.
28. Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter? The Kumar of Bhawal and the
Secret History of Indian Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002), 379380. Chatterjee focuses on the individual and on

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No t e s t o pag e s 1317

individual careering as a basis for studying the secret history of

nationalism.
29. Giancarlo Casale, Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty
Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World, Journal
of World History 18, no. 3 (2007):267296.
30. Cemal Kafadar, A Rome of Ones Own: Reflections on Cultural
Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum, in Muqarnas: An Annual
on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, vol. 24, ed. Gulru Necipoglu
and Sibel Bozdogan (Leiden: Brill, 2007),120.
31. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim
between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 13.
32. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the
Age of Discoveries, 14001800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 144; Stefan Reichmuth, The World of Murtada al-Zabidi
(173291): Life, Networks and Writings (Cambridge, U.K.: Gibb Memorial
Trust, 2009).
33. Rothman, Brokering Empire, 811. Rothman views the Venetian
Empires multicultural fabric as being made up of trans-Empire subjects who straddled the Ottoman and Eastern Mediterranean worlds.
Identities of political selfhood, religious confession (and loyalties),
gender, class, and wealth were mediated by these straddling subjects
specific negotiations of imperial crossroads.
34. Reichmuth, The World of Murtada al-Zabidi; Mana Kia, Imagining
Iran before Nationalism: Geo-cultural Meanings of Land in Azars
Atashkadeh, in Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity, ed.
Kamran Aghaie and Afshin Marashi (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2014) 89112.
35. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and Christopher Alan Bayly, Modernity and Culture:
From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia Uni
versity Press, 2002),711.
36. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global
Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 135.
37. Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Traders, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States
along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 18651915 (New Haven, CT; Yale
University Press, 2009), 220; Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans:
North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 18001900 (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 344.
38. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 315341.
39. The bulk of scholarship on 1857 views it as a window through which to
understand the longer genealogy of the nation and nationalist sentiment. See Christopher Alan Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia:
Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001). Bayly equates the Hindustani patriotism of 1857 with the Mughal imperial patriotism that hinged on shared
attachment to land, institutions, and historical memory. See also
Rajat K. Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the
Emergence of Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,

414

No t e s t o pag e s 17 23

2003),357464. Ray views 1857 as precipitating a unique form of patriotism that grew out of and at the same time modified the Mughal
imperial legacy through a sharpened recognition of the religious categories of Hindus and Muslims, who were united via a common attachment to land. He calls this sentiment the felt community.
40. I borrow the idea of the spirit of 1857 from Maya Jasanoffs book
Libertys Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York:
Knopf, 2012). Jasanoff traces the movement of British Loyalists during
the American Revolution to argue that anti-British sentiment, the
complexities of empire, and public debates on the efficacy of the British
Empire and on issues of freedom were triggered in diverse locations via
the movement of Loyalist exiles.
41. Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, introduction to Mutiny at the Margins:
New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 3, Global Perspectives
(New Delhi: Sage, 2013), xviixxvi.
42. Jill Bender, Sir George Grey and the 1857 Indian Rebellion: The
Unmaking and Making of an Imperial career, in Bates and Carter,
Mutiny at the Margins, 2:199218
43. Robert John Morris, Bowld Irish Sepoy, in Bates and Carter, Mutiny
at the Margins, 3:98119.
44. Elena Karatchkova, The Russian Factor in the Indian Mutiny, in
Bates and Carter, Mutiny at the Margins, 3:120133.
45. M. Sullivan Hall, Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857, in
Bates and Carter, Mutiny at the Margins, 3:8797; Juan R. Cole,
Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins
of Egypts Urabi Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993),196197.
46. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, 196197.
47. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 331.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. For the inclusion of Greek subjects in the Ottoman Empire before
1857, see Christine M. Philliou, Biography of Empire: Governing
Ottomans in the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011); for a discussion of the contradiction between Sultan
Abd-al Hamid II and his Greek and Armenian subjects, see Selim
Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of
Power in the Ottoman Empire, 18671909 (London: Tauris, 1998).
51. Cheragh Ali, Modernist Islam 18401940: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles
Kurzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). For pro-
Ottoman speeches at the Chicago conference, see Umar F. Abd-Allah,
A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
52. Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia:
Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern Ulama in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2004), 13, 21. Azra argues that intellectual connections across

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empires and the moral and cultural reawakening in the wake of Western
imperial expansion were not new. Rather, these intellectual contacts
had a long history that can be dated to the thirteenth century, with
intensified connectivity in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.
53. Ibid., 15.
54. Ibid., 1315.
55. Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma
below the Winds (London: Routledge, 2002), 2021.
56. Azra, Origins of Islamic Reformism, 831.
57. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia, 106108.
58. Azra, Origins of Islamic Reformism, 13, 21. The translation of the Persian
works of Sibghat Allah and Tajuddin al Hindi into Arabic and the
introduction of the famous Shattariyyah text Jawahir-i- Khamsah of
Ghauth al Hindi into Mecca went a long way toward producing a neoSufism that brought mysticism (tassawuf) and Islamic jurisprudence
( fiqh) together, in both cases by sharpening the focus on the life of the
Prophet and his teachingsthe Hadith studies.
59. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia, 125130. Hadhrami
Jawi intellectuals, sons of Indonesian elites who studied in Cairo,
leaned toward the Ottoman caliph for Muslim unity. The Ottoman
imperial vision and the reformist agenda were symbolized by their
attireWestern-style suits and fez capswhich summed up their ideas
of Islam in the modern world.
60. Ibid., 134141.
61. Immanuel Wallerstein and Resat Kasaba, Incorporation into the
World Economy: Change in the Structure of the Ottoman Empire,
17501839, paper presented at Congress International dHistoire
Economique et Sociale de la Turquie, Universite de Strasbourg, 15
July 1980, 132.
62. Resat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and The World Economy: The Nine
teenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 36.
63. Michael J. Reimer, Ottoman-Arab Seaports in the Nineteenth
Century: Social Change in Alexandria, Beirut and Tunis, in Cities in
the World System, ed. Resat Kasaba (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1991), 149, 135156. Reimer argues for the resilience of local political
economies in Arab port cities like Cairo, Alexandria, and Beirut. The
shift to a world economy induced changes in local economies, modernizing the connections between port and hinterland via new canals,
roads, railways, and telegraphs.
64. Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous
Life (New York: Random House, 2005), xxi, 231.
65. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968), 404412; see also a critique of Lewis by Resat
Kasaba, Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities, in Rethinking
Modernity and National Identity, ed. Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997),1536. Kasaba found
such models restrictive, divisive, and linear.

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No t e s t o pag e s 29 36

66. Selim Deringil, The Struggle against Shiism in Hamidian Iraq: A

Study in Ottoman Counterpropaganda, in The Ottomans, the Turks
and World Power Politics (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 2000), 70; see also his
Well-Protected Domains,1667.
67. For the official nationalism of the Anderson kind with specific reference to India, see M. Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial
Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).
68. A. Burton, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007), 120.

chapter 1Muslim Reformists and the Transition to English Rule

1. The British labeled Indian reformists Wahabi, as they had unsubstantiated and unproven ideas that these men were linked to the
eighteenth-century Arab reformist Abd-al Wahab, who had politically
resisted British intrusions in the Hijaz region. Throughout this book,
I will refer to these men as reformists.
2. Marc Gaborieau, Sufism in the First Indian Wahabi Manifesto: Sirati-Mustaqim by Ismael Shahid and Abdul Hayy, in The Making of IndoPersian Culture, ed. Muzaffar Alam, Nalini Delvoye, and Marc
Gaborieau (Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 154155. Marc Gaborieau and
Harlan Otto Pearson view Persian reformist literature as integral to
the hyperbolic Indo-Persianate literary genre. Like most literature of
this genre, the reformist literature was also inclusive and combined
Sufi doctrines with a stress on canonical texts like the Koran and the
Hadith. Gaborieau and Pearson maintain that the shift to the canon
and the individual was triggered by the reform movements that
emerged in response to the perceived corruption in Muslim society;
the newly arrived print culture helped because it made it easy for
reformists to disseminate their texts.
3. Francis Robinson makes this point about the stress on the individual in
regard to the greater significance of the Prophet in the late nineteenth
century. See his Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia
since 1800, in Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press 2000),105121.
4. Marc Gaborieau, Late Persian Early Urdu: The Case of Wahabi
Literature (18181857), in Confluence of Cultures: French Contributions
to Indo-Persian Studies, ed. Franoise Delvoye (New Delhi: Manohar,
1995), 170191; Harlon Otto Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in
Nineteenth-Century India: The Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah (New Delhi:
Yoda Press, 2008).
5. See Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 12001800
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2004).
6. Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival,82.
7. Ismael Shahid, Sirat-i-Mustaqim (Lahore: Abdul Aziz Tajir Kitab,1818),
78.

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No t e s t o pag e s 36 47

8. Ismael Shahid, Taqwiyat al-Iman (Lahore: Bait al Koran, 18251826),7.

Shahids translation was later retranslated back into Arabic by
Muhammad Abduh and published under the title Risalah-i-Tauhid
(Cairo: Al-Qahirah al-Matbaah al-Amirah, 1906).
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid.,21.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.,2426.
13. Ibid., 2627.
14. Ibid., 3234.
15. Ibid.,3839.
16. Khurram Ali, Nasihat-i-Muslimin (Lucknow: Nadwa Book Depot,
1999), 11.
17. Ibid.
18 Ibid., 15.
19. Ibid.,20.
20. Ibid.,21.
21. Ibid., 34.
22. Ibid.,3334.
23. Ibid., 36.
24. Ibid.,37.
25. Syed Ismaels Taqwiyat al-Iman follows the same format. Both Ismaels
Taqwiyat al-Iman and the later translation of it (see note 8) are still used
in madrasas today as part of the curriculum. They too popularize the
Arabicist way of life.
26. Ali, Nasihat,40.
27. Ibid.,41.
28. Ibid.,42.
29. Ltr. no. 4, Subedar Muhiuddin Khan, 22 August 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 20, November 1839, no. 66, file A, FD/SC.
30. A good biography of Dehlavi is Maulana Hakim Syed Muhammad
Ahmad Barkati, Hayat Shah Muhammad Ishaq Muhaddat Dehlavi (Delhi,
1992).
31. See Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2008), chapter 1, for the temporal ambitions of
Sayyid Ahmad Shahid.
32. Ltr. no. 264, R. Clarke, secretary to government of India, Fort St.
George, to H.T. Prinsep, secretary to government of India, Fort
William, 18 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10, July 1839, no. 20, file A,
pp.13, FD/SC.
33. Magistrate Nellore to R. Clarke, secretary to government of India,
Fort St. George, 2 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July 1839, no. 21,
file A, p.3, FD/SC.
34. Examination of Abdul Karim, 31May 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July
1839, no. 21, file A, p. 23, FD/SC.
35. Ibid., 25.

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No t e s t o pag e s 47 51

36. For a discussion of the social composition of the Wahabis and their
activism, see Qayamuddin Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India
(Delhi: Manohar, 1994).
37. T.E. Ravenshaw, Memorandum, Selections from the Records of the Govern
ment of Bengal, no. 42, Papers Connected with the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah
of Patna and Others for Conspiracy and Treason (Calcutta: Alipore Jail
Press, 1866),116139 (hereafter cited as Bengal Government Records).
38. This is similar to the agendas of warrior ascetics in north India. See
William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),59103.
39. Tr. of a deposition given before Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident,
Haiderabad, 11 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July 1839, no. 23, file
A, p.4, FD/SC.
40. Ibid., 5.
41. Ltr. no. 9, Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident, Haiderabad, to secretary to government of India, 4 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July
1839, no. 113, file A, p. 5, FD/SC.
42. Tr. of a deposition given before Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident,
Haiderabad, 11 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July 1839, no. 23, file
A, p.6, FD/SC.
43. Ibid., 12.
44. Ibid., 8.
45. Ltr. no. 9, Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident, Haiderabad, to secretary to government of India, 4 June 1839, FDS, consult. 10 July 1839,
nos. 114115, file A, p. 15, FD/SC.
46. The government of India at Fort William also played down the clampdown on the religious activities of the Wahabis. Reacting to such complaints, it urged caution to public officers in their efforts to seize and
indict persons under suspicion of propagating a religious creed. The
government was, however, keen on taking strict action against any
attempt to seduce the troops from their allegiance. Military law
was, however, found lacking in handling such cases. See secretary to
government of India to secretary to government of India, Fort St.
George, 14 August 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 14 August 1839, no. 31,
file A, FD/SC.
47. Tr. of a deposition given before Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident,
Haiderabad, 11 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July 1839, no. 23, file
A, p.13, FD/SC.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 8.
50. Ltr. no 13, tr. of note received from nizams minister by Maj. Gen.
Fraser, officiating resident, Haiderabad, 1 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July 1839, nos.114115, file A, pp.6263, FD/SC.
51. Ltr. no. 17, tr. of note from nizams minister to Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident, Haiderabad, 1 June 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July
1839, nos. 114115, file A, p.73, FD/SC.

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No t e s t o pag e s 51 55

52. Tr. of a note received from nizams minister by Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident, Haiderabad, 27 May 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July
1839, nos. 114115, file A, p.33, FD/SC.
53. Ltr. no.19, Maj. Gen. Fraser, officiating resident, Haiderabad, to chief
secretary to government of India, Fort St. George, 12 June 1839, FDS
1839, consult. 10 July 1839, no. 23, file A, FD/SC.
54. Ltr. no. 227, H.P. Burn, deputy secretary to Board of Administration,
to H.M. Elliot, secretary to government of India, Lahore, 9 August
1849, FDS 1849, consult. 29 September 1849, nos. 4144, file A, p.13,
FD/SC.
55. Enclosure in ltr. no. 86, Ikramullah of Sittana to Husain Ali Khan of
Azimabad, 26 July 1852, political proceedings, 15 October 1852,
Foreign and Political Department, file no. 86.
56. Ltr. no.1057, P. Melvill, secretary to Board of Administration, to Allen,
esq., officiating secretary to government of India, Lahore, 23 October
1852, FDS 1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file A, p.9,
FD/SC.
57. Lt. H. B. Lumsden, commander of Corps of Guides, to Lt. Col.
G. Lawrence, deputy commissioner, trans-Indus, Peshawar, 14 Sep
tember 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 27 October 1849, nos. 5455, p. 3,
FD/SC.
58. Examination of Abdul Karim, 31 May 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July
1839, no. 21, file A, p.23, FD/SC.
59. StephenF. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 16001750
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45, 58, 67; Muzaffar
Alam, Trade, State Policy and Regional Change: Aspects of Mughal-
Uzbek Commercial Relations, c.15501750, Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 37, no. 3 (1994):202227; Claude Markovits,
Indian Merchants in Central Asia: The Debate, in India and Central
Asia: Commerce and Culture, 15001800, ed. Scott C. Levi (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2007),93122.
60. Arup Banerji, Old Routes: North Indian Nomads and Bankers in Afghan,
Uzbek and Russian Lands (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2011),
189190.
61. BenjaminD. Hopkins, Race, Sex and Slavery: Forced Labour in
Central Asia and Afghanistan in the Early 19th Century, Modern
Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2008): 629671.
62. Banerji, Old Routes, 46.
63. Ltr. no. 20, Khurram Ali of Rawalpindi to Meer Abbas Khan of
Ludhiana, FDS 1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file A,
p.53, FD/SC.
64. Ltr. no. 28, Abu Abdul Rahim of Azimabad to Abbad Ali of Ludhiana,
3 Rujub 1268 [22 April 1852], FDS 1852, consult. 26 November 1852,
nos. 6369, file A, p. 53, FD/SC.
65. Ltr. no. 27, Khurram Ali of Rawalpindi to Meer Abbas Khan of
Ludhiana, 3 Rujub 1268 [22 April 1852], FDS 1852, consult. 26
November 1852, nos. 6369, file A, p.53, FD/SC.

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No t e s t o pag e s 56 62

66. Ltr. no. 42, deposition of Maulvi Khoom Ali, resident of Azimabad,
living in Mandi bazaar Rawalpindi, 3 Rujub 1268 [22 April 1852], FDS
1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file A, p. 63, FD/SC.
67. Ibid.
68. No. 403, T.E. Ravenshaw, magistrate of Patna, to commissioner of
Patna division, 9 May 1865, Bengal Government Records, 113.
69. Ibid., 107.
70. Ibid., 89, 108109. Ahmadullah was charged for abetting war against
the government by the High Court, Calcutta. He was given the punishment of transportation for life.
71. Ibid., 110. Ahmadullah was lodged at Ravenshaws premises and not in
the Patna jail. Ravenshaw later asked for his acquittal on account of his
services rendered.
72. Lord Mayo to Duke of Argyll, India Office, Calcutta, 8 March 1871,
Photo Eur. 464, f. 260.
73. Lord Mayo to Duke of Argyll, India Office, Calcutta, 10 January 1871,
Photo Eur. 464, ff. 8687.
74. Ltr. no.179, R. Thompson, officiating superintendent and remembrancer of legal affairs, to officiating junior secretary to government of
Bengal, 30 October 1868, Bengal Jud. 1859, Wahabi Report, November
1868, pp.120143, esp. 134135, Bengal Judicial Proceedings, British
Library, P/433/25.
75. Ravenshaw, Memorandum,Bengal Government Records, 134.
76. High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, 13 April 1865,
trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah, C. B. Trevor and G. Loch, Bengal
Government Records,97, 114.
77. Ravenshaw, Memorandum, Bengal Government Records, 133.
78. Ibid., 136.
79. Judgment by William Ainslie, sessions judge, Patna, Bengal Government
Records, 69.
80. Ibid., 70.
81. High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, 13 April 1865,
trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah, C. B. Trevor and G. Loch, Bengal
Government Records, 96.
82. Judgment by William Ainslie, sessions judge, Patna, Bengal Government
Records, 73.
83. Ibid.,98100.
84. Exhibit no. 18B, Kunj Lal and Sobun Lal statement, attached with
documents of witness to prosecution, Bengal Government Records, 21.
85. Ibid., 138.
86. Ravenshaw, Memorandum, Bengal Government Records, 131.
87. Ibid., 138.
88. Ltr. no. 168, J. OKinealy, office magistrate, Maldah, to under secretary to government of Bengal, 20 October 1868, Bengal Jud. 1868,
Wahabi Report, November 1868, pp. 120143, Bengal Judicial Pro
ceedings, British Library, P/433/25.
89. Ibid.

421

No t e s t o pag e s 62 6 6

90. Ibid.
91. High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, 13 April 1865,
trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah, C. B. Trevor and G. Loch, Bengal
Government Records, 93.
92. Ltr. no. 168, J. OKinealy, office magistrate, Maldah, to under secretary to government of Bengal, 20 October 1868, Bengal Jud. 1868,
Wahabi Report, November 1868, pp. 130131, Bengal Judicial Pro
ceedings, British Library, P/433/25.
93. Ibid., 120143.
94. High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, 13 April 1865,
trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah, C. B. Trevor and G. Loch, Bengal
Government Records.
95. Ravenshaw, Memorandum, Bengal Government Records, 136.
96. Judgment by W. Ainslie, sessions judge, Patna, Bengal Government
Records, 68.
97. Ibid.
98. Deposition attached to ltr. no. 168, J. OKinealy, office magistrate,
Maldah, to undersecretary to government of Bengal, 20 October 1868,
Bengal Jud. 1868, Wahabi Report, November 1868, pp. 120143,
Bengal Judicial Proceedings, British Library, P/433/25.
99. Lt. Col. A.H. Mason, Report on Hindustani Fanatics Compiled in
Intelligence Branch, Quarter Master Generals Department, 1895,
p.7, L/Mil/17/13/18. Hereafter Report on Hindustani Fanatics.
100. Ibid., 9.
101. Ibid., 11.
102. High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, 13 April 1865,
trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah, C. B. Trevor and G. Loch, Bengal
Government Records, 96.
103. Ravenshaw, Memorandum, Bengal Government Records, 137.
104. Ibid.,132133.
105. Ltr. no. 16, deposition of Waliullah of Farrukhabad, n.d., FDS 1852,
consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file A, pp.3637, FD/SC.
106. Ltr. no. 1057, P. Melvill, secretary to Board of Administration, to
Allen, esq., officiating secretary to government of India, Lahore, 23
October 1852, FDS 1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file
A, pp.36, FD/SC.
107. Ravenshaw, Memorandum,Bengal Government Records, 134.
108. See Banerji, Old Routes, for an excellent survey of India/Central Asian
and Russian trade networks.
109. Ltr. no. 38, James Abbot, deputy commissioner, Hazara, to Maj. G.
Lawrence, deputy commissioner, Peshawar, Hazara, 19 July 1849, FDS
1849, consult. 29 September 1849, nos. 4144, file A, FD/SC.
110. See the case of Ursula Khan, who abducted and assaulted twelve merchants. He could never be captured. H.B. Lumsden, commander of
Corps of Guides, to Lt. Col. G. Lawrence, deputy commissioner,
trans-Indus, Peshawar, 20 September 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 27
October 1849, no. 53, file B, p. 5, FD/SC.

422

No t e s t o pag e s 6 6 71

111. Lt. H. B. Lumsden, commander of Corps of Guides, to Lt. Col. G.

Lawrence, deputy commissioner, trans-Indus, Peshawar, 14 September
1849, FDS, consult. 27 October 1849, nos. 5455, file B, p. 3, FD/SC.
112. See FDS files, consult. 27 November 1839, nos. 41, 43, file A, FD/SC.
Also see Foreign Political consult. 14 March 1838, no. 65, file A.
113. Ltr. from the acting assistant resident in the Persian Gulf, 11 August
1840, FDS1841, consult. 1 February 1841, nos. 12, file A, para. 8, FD/
SC.
114. Abstract, Capt. Alexander Burnes, mission to Kabul, September 1837,
nos. 6567, 20 October 1837, p.113, FD/PC.
115. M. Cubbon, commissioner, Bangalore, to officiating secretary to governor of India, with governor general, 28 September 1839, FDS 1839,
consult. 20 November 1839, no. 59, FD/SC.
116. Ibid. See also Enseng Ho, Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across
the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
117. Mason, Report on Hindustani Fanatics, 3.
118. Ltr. no. 49, Capt. James Abbot, deputy commissioner, Hazara, to G.I.
Christian, secretary to Board of Administration, Punjab, 10 July 1849,
FDS 1849, consult. 29 September 1849, nos. 4144, file A, FD/SC.
119. Mason, Report on Hindustani Fanatics,45.
120. Ibid., 5.
121. Ibid., 6.
122. For a description of the destruction of Sittana, see ltr. no. 102, Capt.
James, in charge of telegraph office, Allahabad, to G. F. Edmonstone,
Lahore, 7 May 1858, FDS 1858, consult. 28 May 1858, no. 569, file A,
FD/SC.
123. Mason, Report on Hindustani Fanatics, 6.
124. Ibid., 7.
125. Ibid., 12.
126. Ibid., 13.
127. Ibid., 14.
128. Ibid., 15.
129. Ibid., 3.
130. The British were very aware of this. See P. Melvills comments on the
matter, in ltr. no. 1057, P. Melvill, secretary to Board of Administration,
to Allen, esq., officiating secretary to government of India, Lahore, 23
October 1852, FDS 1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file
A, p. 8, FD/SC.
131. Enclosure in ltr. no. 47, Capt. James Abbot, deputy commissioner,
Hazara, to Maj. G. Lawrence, deputy commissioner, trans-Indus,
Peshawar,10 July 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 29 September 1849, nos.
4144, file A, p. 19, FD/SC.
132. Tr. of a deposition of Uzum Khan, 1 August 1849, FDS 1849, consult.
29 September 1849, nos. 4144, file A, p.22, FD/SC.
133. Lt. H. B. Lumsden to Lt. Col. G. Lawrence, deputy commissioner,
trans-Indus, Peshawar, 14 September 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 27
October 1849, nos. 5455, p.3, FD/SC.

423

No t e s t o pag e s 72 75

134. Ltr. no. 227, Maj. H.P. Burn, deputy secretary to Board of
Administration, to H. M. Elliot, secretary to government of India,
Lahore, 9 August 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 29 Sept. 1849, nos. 4144,
file A, p.14, FD/SC.
135. Minute by governor general in council, 7 September 1852, 15 October
1852, no. 91, FD/PC.
136. Ltr. no. 701, Maj. H.P. Burn, deputy secretary to Board of
Administration, to Maj. James Abbot, deputy commissioner, Lahore, 9
August 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 29 September 1849, nos. 4144, file
A, pp. 2425, FD/SC.
137. Ltr. no. 300, R. Clarke, secretary to government of India, Fort St.
George, to H.I. Prinsep, secretary to government of India, Fort
William, 9 July 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 14 August 1839, no. 29,
FD/SC.
138. Ibid.
139. Government of India, Fort William, to secretary to government of
India, Fort St. George, 14 August 1839, FDS, consult. 14 August 1839,
no. 31, FD/SC.
140. Ltr. no. 15, D.C. Macnabb, officiating commissioner and superintendent, Pashawar division, to L.H. Griffin, office of the secretary to govern
ment of Punjab, 13 April 1872, no. 104-A, June 1872, pp. 67, FD/PC.
141. Ibid.
142. Ltr. nos. 130843, D.C. Macnabb, officiating commander and superintendent, Peshawar division, to L.H. Griffin, officiating secretary to
government of Punjab, 25 April 1872, no. 106-A, June 1872, FD/PC.
143. Mason, Report on Hindustani Fanatics.
144. Banerji, Old Routes.
145. Timothy Robert Moreman, The Arms Trade and the North West
Frontier Pathan Tribes, 18901914, Journal of Imperial and Common
wealth History 22, no. 2 (1994): 187216, http:/dx.doi.org/10.1080
/3086539408532925.
146. Ibid., 194202. Moreman shows how in this period the government
retaliated by tightening the Arms Act and by introducing new regulations to curtail the flow of arms: restrictions on passes for arms,
requirements for registration of rifles, curbs on gifts of arms, and so
forth. These steps resulted in the mushrooming of new arms factories
in the Tirah and Dir areas, which were staffed by armorers trained in
India and Kabul.
147. Enclosure no. 1 in ltr. no. 34 of 1899, Col. W. Hill, assistant adjutant
general for musketry, to secretary to government of India, 1 December
1898, Foreign Department, L/PS/7/111.
148. Enclosure no. 2 in ltr. no. 4, L.H.E. Tucker, inspector general, Punjab
police, to secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, 5
February 1899, L/PS/7/111. Tucker noted how he was told that arms
from the Persian Gulf passed from hand to hand and that people could
buy them in the valley of Helmand in Afghanistan and sell them to

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No t e s t o pag e s 75 8 0

wazirs. The wazirs admitted that they had bought Martini rifles from
the tribals but thought they were ones stolen from government arsenals. Tucker said he never saw the Gulf arms here, but political officers
in the region vouched that they had seen them. In addition, in many
depositions people from the region said that they could buy arms
without any problem at Muscat when they returned from their pilgrimage in Baghdad.
149. No. 253, Sir F. Plunket to Marquess of Salisbury, 27 December 1897,
part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc.,
FO881/7093.
150. Ibid.
151. Enclosure no. 254 in ltr. 61, R. Menzies, vice consul, to Sir F. Plunkett,
21 December 1897, part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in
Persia, Muscat, etc., FO881/7093.
152. No. 68, Marquess of Salisbury to Sir P. Currie, 30 December 1897, part
1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc.,
FO881/7093.
153. No. 122, C. Hardinge to Marquess of Salisbury, Tehran, 31 December
1897, part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia,
Muscat, etc., FO881/7093. Hardinge reported that the governor in
Bushire derived a large revenue by imposing a duty from 8 percent to
10 percent ad valorem upon imported items or by levying a tax of 3
tomans (12 shillings) on each rifle.
154. Ibid.
155. Enclosure in ltr. no. 124, memorandum by Lt. Col. Picot, part 1,
correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc.,
FO881/7093.
156. Enclosure no. 2 in no. 151, H. Kennedy to E.C. Cox, 16 August 1899,
part 2, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms,
FO881/7463.
157. Enclosure no. 5 in no. 11, Dr. Hauck, imperial German consul, to
British consul, Muscat, 19 June 1898, part 3, further correspondence
respecting the traffic in arms in the Persian Gulf, FO881/7578.
158. Enclosure no. 7 in no. 11, Gopalji Walji to German Persian Trading
Company, 15 July 1898, part 3, further correspondence respecting the
traffic in arms in the Persian Gulf, FO881/7578.
159. Report on the Recent Importation of Martini Henry Rifles into Persia
by Ghulam Khana British Subject, 27 August 1901, part 5, further
correspondence respecting the traffic in arms in the Persian Gulf,
1902, FO881/8199.
160. Enclosure no. 6 in no. 20, Capt. Cox to Lt. Col. Meade, 24 June 1900,
part 3, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms in the
Persian Gulf, FO881/7578.
161. Enclosure no. 7 in no. 20, Capt. Cox to Commander Phillipps, 11
January 1900, part 3, further correspondence respecting the traffic in
arms in the Persian Gulf, FO881/7578.

425

No t e s t o pag e s 8 0 82

162. No. 153, Acting Consul General Cordeaux to Marquess of Landsdowne,

25 November 1901, part 4, further correspondence respecting the
traffic in arms in the Persian Gulf, FO881/7986.
163. Enclosure no. 3 in no. 94, Brigadier General Maitland to government
of Bombay, 26 September 1901, part 4, further correspondence
respecting the traffic in arms in the Persian Gulf, FO881/7986.
164. Enclosure no. 15, Lt. Col. Swayne to Acting Consul General Cordeaux,
31 January 1902; enclosure no. 16, government of India to government
of Bombay, 13 January 1902, part 5, further correspondence respecting
the traffic in arms in the Persian Gulf, 1902, FO881/8199.
165. Enclosure in ltr. no. 124, memorandum by Lt. Col. Picot, part 1,
correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc,
FO881/7093.
166. Enclosure no. 2 in no. 123, sadr-i-azam to C. Hardinge, 18 December
1897, part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia,
Muscat, etc., FO881/7093.
167. Enclosure in ltr. no. 124, memorandum by Lt. Col. Picot, part 1,
correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc.,
FO881/7093.
168. No. 128, India Office to Foreign Office, 9 February 1898, part 1,
correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc.,
FO881/7093.
169. Enclosure no. 2 in ltr no. 146, notification of C.G.F. Fagan, consul,
Muscat, 13 January 1898, part 1, correspondence respecting trade in
arms in Persia, Muscat, etc., FO881/7093.
170. Enclosure no. 3 in no. 315, proclamation of chief of Bahrain, 6 February
1898, part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia,
Muscat, etc., FO881/7093.
171. No. 315, A. Godley, India Office, to Foreign Office, 9 August 1898,
part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc.,
FO881/7093.
172. No. 112, Foreign Department (secretary) external to G.F. Hamilton,
secretary of state for India, 30 July 1903, L/PS/7/156.
173. Enclosure no. 2 in no. 37, extracts from camp diary of Col. Yate, n.d.,
part 5, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms in the
Persian Gulf, 1902, FO881/8199.
174. Enclosure no. 16 in no. 9, Mr. Gell to government of Bombay, 16 June
1902, part 5, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms in
the Persian Gulf, 1902, FO881/8199.
175. No. 63, Anglo-Arabian and Persian Steamship Company, London, to
Foreign Office, 28 December 1897, part 1, correspondence respecting
trade in arms in Persia, Muscat, etc., FO881/7093.
176. Enclosure no. 1 in no. 146, Messrs. Bucknall Brothers to India Office,
18 February 1898, part 1, correspondence respecting trade in arms in
Persia, Muscat, etc., FO881/7093.
177. No. 72, C.A. Bleckly and others to Marquess of Salisbury, 18 January
1899, part 2, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms,

426

No t e s t o pag e s 82 8 9

FO881/7463. The petitioners denied that their arms were being used
by the Afridis against the British in India.
178. Gopalji Walji and Co. to political agent and consul, Muscat, 3 March
1903, L/PS/7/156.
179. C.G. Bonehill, manufacturer, to H. M. Durand, 29 April 1899,
part 2, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms, FO881/
7463.
180. Enclosure no. 4 in no. 139, H. M. Durand to C.G. Bonehill, 23 June
1899, part 2, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms,
FO881/7463.
181. Enclosure no. 46, copy of statement of head constable, third grade,
Ghazi Khan Inayatullah Khan, 22 October 1898, part 2, further correspondence respecting the traffic in arms, FO881/7463.
182. Enclosure no. 1 in no.112, government of India to G. Hamilton, 23
February 1899, part 2, further correspondence respecting the traffic in
arms, FO881/7463.
183. Enclosure no. 2 in no. 112, Col. Hill to government of India, 1
December 1898; enclosure 5 in no.112, Col. Tucker to government of
India, 5 February 1899, part 2, further correspondence respecting the
traffic in arms, FO881/7463.
184. Enclosure no. 6 in no. 150, Captain R. Keppel to H.S. Barnes, 16
August 1899; enclosure no. 3 in no. 150, Captain R. Keppel to government of Punjab, 2 August 1899, part 2, further correspondence
respecting the traffic in arms, FO881/7463.
185. Tr. of a Persian letter from Muhammad Ali to his cousin Abdul Nabi
in Nellore, 9 November 1838, FDS 1839, consult. 10 July 1839, no. 21,
file A, p.7, FD/SC.
186. Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival, 77.
187. Tr. of a deposition of Abdul Qadir, of Nellore, 31 May 1839, FDS 1839,
consult. 10 July 1839, no. 21, file A, p. 16, FD/SC.
188. Ltr. no. 4, examination of Subedar Muhiuddin Khan, 22 August1839,
FDS 1839, consult. 20 November 1839, no. 66, file A, FD/SC.
189. Ltr. no. 43, abstract of a letter found in Ludhiana, n.d., FDS 1852,
consult. 26 November, nos. 6369, p.74, FD/SC.
190. Ltr. no. 1, examination of Muhammad Muhiuddin Ali Khan, 9
September 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 20 November 1839, no. 63, FD/
SC.
191. Ltr. no. 398, H. Montgomery, acting superintendent, Astagram division, Mysore, to secretary to the commissioner for the government of
the territories of the raja of Mysore, Bangalore, 30 July 1839, FDS
1839, consult. 20 November 1839, no. 61, FD/SC.
192. Ltr. no.1, examination of Muhammad Muhiuddin Ali Khan, 9 Sep
tember 1839, FDS 1839, consult. 20 November 1839, no. 63, FD/SC.
193. Ibid.
194. Ibid.
195. Ltr. no. 227, Maj. H.P. Burn, deputy secretary to Board of
Administration, to H. M. Elliot, secretary to government of India,

427

No t e s t o pag e s 8 9 95

with governor general, Lahore, 9 August 1849, FDS 1849, consult. 29

September 1849, nos. 4144, file A, FD/SC.
196. Ltr. no.2, Sayyid Ahmad to Muslim people, specially to Maulvi Wilayat
Ali, Ramzan Ali, Imamuddin and Hafiz Nasseruddin, Inayat Ali,
etc., FDS1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, file A, p. 17,
FD/SC.
197. Ibid.
198. Ltr. no. 17, deposition of Waliullah of Farrukhabad, FDS 1852, consult. 26 November 1852, nos. 6369, pp.3637, FD/SC.

chapter 2The Making of the Indian Arab and the Tale

of Sayyid Fadl

1. Omar Khalidi, Sayyids of Hadramawt in Early Modern India, in

special issue on Arab communities and networks in South and Southeast
Asia, Asian Journal of Social Science 32, no. 3 (2004): 329352. See also
Omar Khalidi, Muslims in the Deccan: A Historical Survey (New Delhi:
Three Essays Collective, 2006); Enseng Ho, Graves of Tarim: Genealogy
and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006).
2. Khalidi, Sayyids of Hadramawt, 330. Khalidi shows that the sayyid
families taught the Shafi school of jurisprudence rather than the
Hanafi, which was prevalent in India.
3. Omar Khalidi, The Hadhrami Role in the Politics and Society of
Colonial India, 1750s to 1950s, in Hadrami Traders, Scholars, and
Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s1960s, ed. Ulrike Freitag and
WilliamGervase Clarence-Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 6781.
4. Omar Khalidi, Memoirs of General El-Edroos of Hyderabad,
Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 42, no. 2 (1994):
182213.
5. Minute by the governor of Bombay, 17 August 1878, FO78/3615.
6. Charles B. Saunders, Political Report Haiderabad (Haiderabad: Deccan,
1872, 1873, 1874).
7. Juan Cole, Religious Dissidence and Urban Leadership: Bahais in
Qajar Shiraz and Tehran, Journal of Persian Studies 37 (1999): 123142.
Cole shows that the opening of the Suez Canal posed a political challenge to the Iranian state as a result of an energized Bahai faith. The
Suez opening benefited rich Bahai merchants, who amassed fortunes
and established trans-Asian trade houses in Bombay and Hong Kong.
These wealthy merchants attracted artisans to the Bahai faith and
stressed its egalitarian virtue vis--vis Shite elitism. They turned their
barbs against the Shite state, which they hinted was responsible for the
artisans plight.
8. C.E. Farah, Beginning of Imperial Rivalries in the Persian Gulf, in
Arabs and Ottomans: A Checkered Relationship (Istanbul, 2002), 531551.
9. Ho, Graves of Tarim.

428

No t e s t o pag e s 9 6 103

10. C.E. Farah, Reaffirming Ottoman Sovereignty in Yemen, 182540,

in Arabs and Ottomans, 487500. Initially the British tried to punch
holes in the legal claims of the Ottomans on Aden. When they failed
to make any headway, they instead sought a political solution, working
with tribal chiefs to end Ottoman controlan approach that was pursued with success.
11. Farah, British Challenge to Ottoman Authority, 467486.
12. For a discussion of British management of Muslim pilgrims in Ottoman
Hijaz via passport regulations, see Radhika Singha, Passport, Ticket,
and India-Rubber Stamp: The Problem of the Pauper Pilgrim in
Colonial India, 18821925, in The Limits of British Colonial Control in
South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region, ed. Harald
Fischer-Tine and Ashwini Tambe (London: Routledge, 2009),4983.
13. File no. 23296, pp.23, 3943, Boards Collection F/4/895.
14. For an engaging discussion on the issue of the Dutch officials controlling their porous borders to check contraband smuggling, see Eric
Tagliacozzo, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast
Asian Frontier, 18651915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005); see also Saunders, Political Report Haiderabad.
15. Saunders, Political Report Haiderabad, 189.
16. Ibid.,190
17. Ibid.,192
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 196.
20. Ibid.,197.
21. Ltr. no. 13, Foreign Department, government of India, to Marquess of
Hartington, secretary of state for India, 6 February 1882, f. 371, part 1,
L/PS/7/31.
22. Ltr. no. 1714, tr. of rookah from nizams minister to the resident, 7 July
1890, file no. 652 of 1890, Haiderabad Residency Political Office,
Rules Regarding Arabs and Rohillas in H & H Territory, p.59, IOR/
R/2/80/176.
23. Ibid.
24. Enclosure no. 3 in ltr. no. 157, Col. R.J. Meade, resident, Haiderabad,
to T.H. Thornton, office of the secretary to government of India,
Foreign Department, Haiderabad, 24 February 1877, FO78/3615.
25. Nizams minister to Barak Jang Bahadur, 29 November 1876,
FO78/3615.
26. Barak Jang Bahadur to nizams minister, n.d., FO78/3615.
27. Ltr. no. 160, rookah to nizams minister from resident, Haiderabad, 26
January 1877, FO78/3615.
28. Rookah from nizams government to Barak Jang, 30 Muharram, 1294
Hijri [13 February 1877], FO78/3615.
29. Ltr. no. 181-1057, FrancisA.E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to C.
Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, 24 September 1877,
FO78/3615.

429

No t e s t o pag e s 10 4 10 9

30. Ltr. no.1657A, Capt. C.B.E. Smith, first assistant resident, Haiderabad,
to C. Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, 6 September 1877,
FO78/3615.
31. Ltr. no. 3352, Col. Meade, resident at Haiderabad, to C. Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, 5 February 1877, FO78/3615.
32. Capt. F. M. Hunter, first assistant political resident, Aden, to Brig.
Gen. FrancisA.E. Loch, political resident, Aden, 19 September 1877,
FO78/3615.
33. Abdullah Bin Omer Al Kaieti to Francis A. E. Loch, political resident,
Aden, 10 November 1877, enclosure in ltr. no. 252-1429, Francis A. E.
Loch to C. Gonne, 11 December 1877, FO78/3615.
34. Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to C. Gonne, secretary to
government of Bombay, Political Department, 26 October 1878,
FO78/3615.
35. Ltr. no. 1560A, FrancisA. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to E.G.
Hulton, naval officer, 19 October 1881, f. 61, part 1, L/PS/7/33.
36. Minute by the governor of Bombay, 17 August 1878, FO78/3615.
37. Ltr. no. 224-1410, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to
C. Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, Political Department,
26 October 1878, L/PS/7/33.
38. Ltr. no. 323-1697, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to J.B.
Peile, acting chief secretary to government of Bombay, Political
Department, 28 October 1881, ff. 4243, L/PS/7/33.
39. Ibid.
40. Ltr. no. 343-1792, Maj. Gen. FrancisA. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to J. B. Peile, acting chief secretary to government of
Bombay, Political Department, 21 November 1881, f. 47, part 1, L/
PS/7/33.
41. Enclosure no. 19 in ltr. no. 343-1792, J.B. Peile, acting chief to government of Bombay, Political Department, to Maj. Gen. Francis A. E.
Loch, political resident, Aden, n.d., f. 50, part 1, L/PS/7/33.
42. Ltr. no. 368-1952, Maj. FrancisA. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to
J. B. Peile, acting chief secretary to government of Bombay, 15
December 1881, f. 52, part 1, L/PS/7/33. For details of the investment
of this money, see ltr. no. 47, secretary of government of India, Foreign
Department, to Earl of Kimberley, secretary of state for India, 2 April
1883, ff. 1517, part 1, L/PS/7/36.
43. Ltr. no. 60, Lt. Col. S.B. Miles, British consul general, Zanzibar, to
FrancisA. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, 8 February 1882, f. 65,
part 1, L/PS/7/33.
44. Ltr. no. 1560A, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to E.G.
Hulton, naval officer, 19 October 1881, f. 61, part 1, L/PS/7/33.
45. Tr. of an extract from the Arabic newspaper Sanaa, 20 Shawal 1298 [20
August 1881], f. 35, part 1, enclosure no. 3 in ltr. no. 294-1558, Maj.
Gen. Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to C. Gonne, chief
secretary to government of Bombay, Political Department, 15 October
1881, FDS 1882, no. 66, 14 July 1882, no. 2, part 1, L/PS/7/33.

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No t e s t o pag e s 10 9 112

46. Tr. of an extract from the Arabic newspaper Burham, Alexandria, 6

October 1881, part 1, f. 36, enclosure in ltr. no. 294-1558, Maj. Gen.
Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to C. Gonne, chief secretary to government of Bombay, Political Department, 15 October 1881,
FDS 1882, no. 66, 14 July 1882, no. 2, part 1, L/PS/7/33.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Enclosure no. 4 in ltr. no. 5373, C. Gonne, chief secretary to government of Bombay, Political Department, to C. Grant, secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, 4 November 1881, f. 37, part 1,
L/PS/7/33.
50. Ltr. no. 303-1607, Maj. Gen. Francis A. E. Loch, political resident,
Aden, to C. Gonne, chief secretary to government of Bombay, Political
Department, 24 October 1881, f. 37, L/PS/7/33.
51. Ltr. no. 318-1653, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to J.B.
Peile, secretary to government of Bombay, 1 November 1881, f. 39, L/
PS/7/33.
52. Ibid.
53. Enclosure no. 4 in ltr. no. 5373, C. Gonne, chief secretary to government of Bombay, Political Department, to C. Grant, secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, 4 November 1881, f. 37, L/
PS/7/33.
54. Sayyid Ahmad Fadl, Al-Anwarul Nabwiyat-wal-Asrar ul Ahadita (manuscript copy, n.d.), 2.
55. Ibid.,3.
56. Ho, Graves of Tarim, 6061.
57. S. Tufan Buzpinar, Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha of
Hadramawt: An Arab Dignitarys Ambitions (18761900), Journal of
Ottoman Studies 13 (1993):47.
58. Ibid.,49.
59. Syed Hamid bin Syed Boobaker Moonuffer to Abdul Razzack, vice
consul, Jeddah, 27 October 1889, part 2, FO685/2. There were a large
number of Muslims with Arab names and genealogies going back to
Hadramawt who had become indigenized in the society of Malabar,
which they considered home. The dual status of such Arab migrs
often created problems for imperial powers. Consider the case of Syed
Hamid bin Syed Boobaker Moonuffar, who though clearly a Hadramawt
Arab had lived in Calicut, which he considered his home. In 1889,
while in Mecca, he petitioned the Indian government asking for help
to get back home to Calicut. He said he had come to Mecca for haj and
that the Indian government had denied him permission to return. He
had at that time lived in Mecca for forty years and still yearned to get
back to Calicut.
60. Khalidi, Sayyids of Hadramawt.
61. Stephen F. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas
of Malabar, 14981922 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
127137. The shrine still exists.

431

No t e s t o pag e s 112117

62. Buzpinar, Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha, 227239. Buzpinar

talks about Fadls attempts to become the independent ruler of the
Dhofar region in Hadramawt area of Arabiathe region between
Oman and Aden. This area was controlled by Muscat. Fadl hoped in
vain to get Ottoman support for his political ambition. But given the
danger of a British reaction to Ottoman interference in southwest
Arabia, Abd-al Hamid II could not oblige Fadl. However, given Fadls
high standing in Muslim society, Abd-al Hamid made him a guest at
Istanbul. It is there that Fadl lived, wrote several books, connected
with Muslims from all over the world, and, in 1901, eventually died.
63. Stephen F. Dale, The Hadhrami Diaspora in South-Western India:
The Role of the Sayyids of the Malabar Coast, in Freitag and ClarenceSmith, Hadrami Traders, Scholars, and Statesmen, 175184.
64. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier, 156158; Conrad Wood,
The Moplah Rebellion and Its Genesis (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing
House, 1987), 49. Fadls son Ahmad bin Fadl, who records his biographical details, mentions his migration to Mecca in 1851. He does
not, however, mention the deportation. See Fadl, Al-Anwarul, 3.
65. M. Sukuru Hanioglu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Suraiya Faroqui,
The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London: I. B. Tauris,
2004).
66. Dale, Hadhrami Diaspora, 179.
67. Buzpinar, Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha,239.
68. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier, 6; K. N. Panikkar,
Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar,
18361921 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 220. Wood,
Moplah Rebellion, 4546.
69. Anthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of
Sumatra (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), 226248. Reid
also views pan-Islam in the nineteenth-century Acehnese context as
being a reaction to increasing European influence in the region. It was
basically anti-European and colonial and thus linked to nationalism.
70. For Afghani see Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008), 176191.
71. See Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in
South Asian Islam since 1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000), 191192. Jalal debunks the idea of pan-Islam, calling it a construct created by non-Muslims to voice their fear and anxiety of
Muslim politics. She argues that the issue of Muslim universalism as
caliph-centric was part of normative theory only. Territorial nationalism could coexist with Muslim universalism in many different combinations. The caliph was not the only consensual reference point of
universalism.
72. Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma
below the Winds (London: Routledge, 2002),123.
73. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty,188195

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No t e s t o pag e s 119 123

74. Under secretary of state in Foreign Office to India Office, 9 June 1879,
FO78/3615.
75. See Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th
Century: Daily Life, Customs and Learning: Muslims of the East Indies
Archipelago, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 262265. Hurgronje
offers fascinating details of political discussions that the pilgrims from
India and Indonesia ( jawahs) had about their European political masters and the strategies they worked out to come to terms with new
circumstances. For secret societies of all political hues in Mecca, see
Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul,
Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah, 6 August 1879, ff. 381386, FO685/1.
76. Ltr. no. 230-1317, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to
J. Jardine, officiating secretary to government of Bombay, 20 Novem
ber 1877, FO78/3615.
77. Ibid.
78. Enclosure no. 4 in ltr. no. 250-1556, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to C. Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, Polit
ical Department, 22 November 1878, FDS 1878, p. 2, FO78/3615; see
also ltr. no. 230-1317, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to
J. Jardine, officiating secretary to government of Bombay, 20 November
1877, FO78/3615.
79. Enclosure no. 3 in ltr. no. 10, D.F. Carmichael, chief secretary to government of Madras, to J. Jardine, acting secretary to government of
Bombay, 9 January 1878, f. 615, L/PS/7/17, IOR Neg. 31123.
80. Ltr. no. 11/70, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to secretary
to government of Bombay, Political Department, 15 January 1878,
FO78/3615.
81. Enclosure no. 4 in ltr. 250-1556, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident,
Aden, to C. Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, Political
Department, 22 November 1878, FDS 1878, FO78/3615.
82. Sayid Abdal Rehman bin Hosain bin Sahl to Hasan Ali Rajab Ali, agent
to high government, 13 Shawal 1295 [9 October 1878], FDS 1878,
FO78/3615.
83. Ibid.
84. Ltr. no. 11/70, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to secretary
to government of Bombay, Political Department, 15 January 1878,
FO78/3615.
85. Ibid.
86. Ltr. no. 3-9, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to C. Gonne,
secretary to government of Bombay, Political Department, 3 January
1879, FDS 1879, FO78/3615.
87. See Jalal, Partisans of Allah.
88. Ltr. no. 11/70, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to secretary
to government of Bombay, Political Department, 15 January 1878,
FO78/3615.
89. Awadh Bin Abdulla, sheikh of the Kathiri tribe at Dhofar, to Saleh
Jaffer, 18 Mohurram 1296 [11 January 1879], FDS 1879, FO78/3615.

433

No t e s t o pag e s 123127

90. Enclosure no. 6 in ltr. no. 42-208, Toorkee Bin Saeed bin Sultan, imam
of Muscat, to Sheikh Awadh bin Abdulla of Dhofar, 31 October 1878,
FDS 1878, FO78/3615.
91. India Office to the under secretary of state, Foreign Office, 9 June
1879, FDS 1879, FO78/3615.
92. Enclosure no. 8 in ltr. no. 57, Lt. Col. S.B. Miles, political agent and
consul, Muscat, to Lt. Col. E.C. Ross, political resident in the Persian
Gulf, 20 February 1879, FDS 1879, FO78/3615.
93. Enclosure no. 91 in ltr. no. 62, Lt. Col. S.B. Miles, political agent and
consul, Muscat, to Lt. Col. E.C. Ross, political resident in the Persian
Gulf, 27 February 1879, FDS 1879, FO78/3615.
94. Nakib Omer, saleh of Makalla, to Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, 5 February 1879, FDS 1879, FO78/3615. Fadl also tapped
the independent states of Makulla and Shehr for help.
95. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 17801870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); Michael Fisher The Office of Akhbar Nawis: The
Transition from Mughal to British Form, Modern Asian Studies 27, no.
1 (1993): 4582.
96. T.C. Prousis, British Consular Reports from the Ottoman Levant in an
Age of Upheaval, 18151830 (Istanbul: Isis, 2008),16.
97. Bayly, Empire and Information.
98. Ltr. no. 363, secretary to government of India to secretary to Abdur
Razzack, Jeddah, 14 August 1882, III Misc. 18731882, FO685/1.
99. Ltr. no. 457, secretary to government of India to Abdur Razzack,
Jeddah, 25 August 1882, III Misc. 18731882, FO685/1.
100. Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, Report on the Establishment
Required to Carry on the Duties of His Majestys Consulate at Jeddah,
political, Zohrab, vice consul, Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah, ff. 445446,
FO685/1.
101. Ibid., f. 451, FO685/1.
102. Ltr. no. 28-154, Brig. Gen. J.W. Schneider, political resident, Aden, to
C. Gonne, secretary to government of Bombay, 7 February 1876,
FO78/3615.
103. Ltr. no. 661-137, Capt W. F. Prideaux, Office of the Political Resident
in the Persian Gulf to T. H. Thornton, Office of the Secretary to
Government of India, Foreign Department, 5 July 1876, FDS, no. 36,
4 September 1876, FO78/3615. This was similar to the British views
about Nawaz Jang and other Indian Arabs from Haiderabad claiming
independent status in the southwest rim of Arabia.
104. Ibid.
105. Ltr. no. 130, Lt. Col. W. F. Prideaux, political resident in the Persian
Gulf, to T.H. Thornton, Office of the Secretary to Government of
India, Foreign Department, 18 May 1877, FDS, no. 20, 25 June 1877,
FO78/3615; see also Lt. Col. S.B. Miles, political agent, Muscat, on his
investigations into the claims over Dultan by the sultan, his punching
of holes into all the claims, and his doubts regarding the veracity of

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No t e s t o pag e s 127 132

these claims, in ltr. no. 210, Lt. Col. S.B. Miles, political agent and
consul, Muscat, to Lt. Col. W. F. Prideaux, Office of the Political
Resident in the Persian Gulf, 10 May 1877, FDS, no. 20, 25 June 1877,
FO78/3615.
106. Ltr. no. 20, Foreign Department to Marquess of Salisbury, secretary of
state for India, 25 June 1877, no. 2, 30 January 1877, FO78/3615.
107. Ibid.
108. Ltr. no. 230-1317, Francis A. E. Loch, political resident, Aden, to
J. Jardine, officiating secretary to government of Bombay, 20 November
1877, FO78/3615.
109. Enclosure no. 2 in ltr. no. 109P, C.V. Aitchison, secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, to J. Jardine, secretary to government of Bombay, 14 January 1878, f. 614, L/PS/7/17, IOR Neg. 31123.
110. For an excellent account of the late Ottoman Empire, see Hanioglu,
Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire.
111. Ltr. no. 1098, resident, Istanbul, to Marquess of Salisbury, 12 February
1880, FO78/3615.
112. Buzpinar, Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha.
113. Ltr. no. 1098, resident, Istanbul, to Marquess of Salisbury, 12 February
1880, FO78/3615.
114. J.G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central
Arabia, vol. 1, part 1 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing
Press, 1915), 599. The British refused Fadl permission to return to
Dhofar.
115. Ltr. no. 32, T.S. Jago, vice consul, Jeddah, to Sir W.A. White, British
ambassador, Constantinople, 16 December 1885, f. 1098, L/PS/7/49.
116. Ltr. no. 46, government of India, Foreign Department, to Earl
Kimberley, secretary of state for India, 16 March 1886, f. 1089, L/
PS/7/49.
117. Ltr. no. 27, Lt. Col. S.B. Miles, political agent and consul, Muscat, to
Col. E.C . Ross, political resident in the Persian Gulf, 18 January 1886,
f. 1095, L/PS/7/49.
118. No. 46, abstract of contents of a dispatch to the secretary of state for
India, 16 March 1886, enclosure in telegram no. 3, government of
Bombay to Foreign Department, 14 January 1886, f. 1091, L/PS/7/49.
119. Telegram no. 9, Foreign Department to government of Bombay,18
January 1886, f. 1091, L/PS/7/49.
120. Ltr. no. 26-95, Brig. Gen. A.G.F. Hogg, political resident, Aden, to
chief secretary to government of Bombay, 20 January 1886, f. 1097, L/
PS/7/49.
121. Enclosure in telegram no. 3, political secretary, Bombay, to foreign
secretary, Calcutta, 14 January 1886, f. 1093, L/PS/7/49.
122. Ltr. no. 26-95, Brig. Gen. A.G.F. Hogg, political resident, Aden, to
chief secretary to government of Bombay, 20 January 1886, f. 1097, L/
PS/7/49.
123. T.S. Jago, consul, Jeddah, to Brig. Gen. A.G.F. Hogg, political resident, Aden, 16 December 1885, f. 1098, L/PS/7/49.

435

No t e s t o pag e s 132137

124. No. 46, abstract of contents of a dispatch to the secretary of state for
India, 16 March 1886, enclosure in telegram no. 3, government of
Bombay to Foreign Department14 January 1886; enclosure in telegram
no. 8, government of Bombay to Foreign Department,16 January 1886,
f. 1091, L/PS/7/49.
125. Telegram no. 4, resident, Aden, to Foreign Department, 15 January
1886, f. 1091, L/PS/7/49.
126. Telegram nos. 6 and 7, political resident in the Persian Gulf to Foreign
Department, 16 January 1886, f. 1091, L/PS/7/49.
127. Telegram no. 12, government of Bombay to Foreign Department, n.d.,
f. 1092, L/PS/7/49.
128. Ltr. no. 26-95, Brig. Gen. A.G.F. Hogg, political resident, Aden, to
chief secretary to government of Bombay, 20 January 1886, f. 1097, L/
PS/7/49.
129. Ibid.
130. T.S. Jago, consul, Jeddah, to Brig. Gen. A.G.F. Hogg, political resident, Aden, 16 December 1885, f. 1098, L/PS/7/49. Jago reported that
Sayyid Saleh had arrived in Mecca from Istanbul in 1880, and that he
had continued to live in Mecca since then.
131. Ltr. no. 1098, resident, Istanbul, to Marquess of Salisbury, 12 February
1880, FO78/3615.
132. Ltr. no. 164, resident, Istanbul, to Marquess of Salisbury, Constan
tinople, 6 February 1880, FO78/3615.
133. Ltr. no. 164, conversation with Fadls son reported by resident, Istanbul,
19 February 1880, FO78/3615.
134. Nile Green uses the phrase cosmopolitan modernity in describing
Bombay to argue for the citys postsecular enchantment; he suggests
that Hijaz was characterized by a similar ambience. See Green, Bombay
Islam: The Religious Economy of the Western Indian Ocean, 18401915
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
135. Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century, 262265.
136. Green, Bombay Islam.
137. Singha, Passport, Ticket, and India-Rubber Stamp, 4983.
138. Abdur Razzack, Report on Mecca Pilgrims: Sanitation and Medical
Report, 1879, W-4087, British Library.
139. Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century,260.
140. British consulate, Jeddah, to Earl K.G. Granville, 8 February 1881,
Records of the Hijaz, 17981925, ed. A.L.P. Burdett (Slough: Archive
Editions, 1996), 3:727729.
141. Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, political, Zohrab, vice consul,
Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah, 14 May 1879, ff. 204206, FO685/1.
142. Abdur Razzack, Report on Haj, 1882, part 1, p. 8, FO881/4845. For
other forms of harassment of Indians at the hands of Turkish officials,
see Report from Moncrieff to Consulate, 24 October 1882, FO78/3421.
Razzack complains of excess taxation on Indians. See also Abdur
Razzacks report on Cameroon Islandthe place of the quarantine
during the cholera epidemicand the difficulties faced by Indian

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No t e s t o pag e s 137 143

pilgrims,
Misc. 18731882, FO685/1. For problems of looting faced on
the roads leading to the holy cities, see Abdur Razzacks detailed report
sent to Earl Granville, 7 September 1883 and 15 September1883, in
Burdett, Records of the Hijaz, 4:247288.
143. Abdur Razzack to Consul T.S. Jago, Jeddah, March 1885, f. 2,
FO881/5113.
144. Abdur Razzack to government of India, 26 October 1893, Misc. 1897
1900, FO685/3. For Ottoman refutation of these charges, see
Muhammad Arif, collector of customs at Jeddah, to British consul,
Jeddah, 2 July 1891, Misc. 18971900, FO685/3. The Ottomans refuted
these charges, arguing that only full bags of food (rice, biscuits, beans,
lentils, etc.) brought by pilgrims from all countries for purposes of sale
and trade were taxed, not half full bags, which were seen as goods for
personal consumption.
145. Muhammad Arif, collector of customs, Jeddah, to acting British consul,
Jeddah, 3 October 1873, Misc. 18971900, FO685/3.
146. Abdur Razzack to vali, Taif, 11 July 1894, Misc. 18971900, FO685/3.
147. Neil B.E. Baillie, Is the Sultan of the Turks the Caliph of the Mussulmans
and Successor of the Prophet? (London, 1877),12.
148. Consul at Jeddah to Earl Granville, 8 February1881, in Burdett, Records
of the Hijaz, 3:727729.
149. Ibid.
150. Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul,
Jeddah, to consulate, 6 August 1879, f. 445, FO685/1.
151. Ibid.
152. Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul,
Jeddah, to consulate, 6 August 1879, ff. 445446, FO685/1.
153. H. M. Durand, Foreign Department, to T.S. Jago, consul, Jeddah,
part 2, FO685/2. Durand constantly pressured Jago to supply news and
to keep tabs on mutiny rebels who were located in Jeddah. He was particularly curious about information on Maulvi Rahmatullah Kairanwi
a mutiny convict. Kairanwi was said to be preaching sedition and
circulating seditious literature among British subjects at the haj.
154. Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul,
Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah, 6 August 1879, ff. 446447, FO685/1.
Hurgronje offers an interesting account of the political discussions in
the Indonesian and Malay pilgrim camps both about pilgrim views on
Dutch powers as well as their evolving sense of self as they came to
terms with the larger political context in which they lived; see
Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century, 262265.
According to Hurgronje, while by and large the Dutch subjects appreciated their rulers, the British Indian subjects were vocal about their
many grievances vis--vis their rulers.
155. H. M. Durand, Foreign Department, to T.S. Jago, consul, Jeddah,
part 2, FO685/2.
156. Consul Zohrabs letter book, 1879, political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul,
Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah, 6 August 1879, f. 383, FO685/1.

437

No t e s t o pag e s 143151

157. Ibid., political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul, Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah,
6 August 1879, f. 384, FO685/1.
158. Ibid., political, no. 1, Zohrab, vice consul, Jeddah, to consulate, Jeddah,
6 August 1879, ff. 385386, FO685/1.
159. Ibid., political, no. 3, Zohrab, vice consul, Jeddah to consulate, Jeddah,
26 April 1879, f. 138, FO685/1.
160. The British participation in the Ottoman critique was triggered by the
movement of subject people into the Ottoman-controlled Hijaz. As
the Ottoman monopoly on overseeing all Muslims globally began to
be questioned, the British tried to fill the vacuum.
161. Zohrab, vice consul, to Marquess of Salisbury, Cairo, 9 January 1880,
in Burdett, Records of the Hijaz, 3:249250.
162. Ibid, 253265.
163. Ibid.,265.
164. Ibid., 261262.
165. Zohrab to Mr. Alston, Cairo, 12 January 1880, in Burdett, Records of the
Hijaz, 3:272273.
166. Zohrab to Marquess of Salisbury, 28 February 1880, in ibid., 280281.
167. Ibid.,281.
168. Abdur Razzack, Report on Haj, 1882, part 1, FO685/1. A copy is also
included in FO881/4762.
169. A.L. Lyall, secretary to government of India, to Col. O.L. Burne,
secretary, Political and Secret Department, India Office, 16 August
1880, FO685/1.
170. Ltr. no. 108, Office of the Magistrate of Meerut to commissioner of
Meerut, 24 May 1880, FO685/1.
171. T.S. Jago, consul, Jeddah, to Earl Granville, Foreign Office, Mecca,
January 1884, FO78/3649.
172. Abdur Razzack to Consul T.S. Jago, March 1885, FO881/5113.
173. Ltr. nos. 2223, extract from letter from commissioner of Rohilkhand,
10 October 1896, Foreign Department, confidential B, internal branch,
secret B, proceedings 1897, R/1/11263.
174. Abdur Razzack, Report on the Proposal of an Indian Hospital in the
Hijaz, 1883, part 1, FO685/2.
175. Ibid.
176. Memorandum for Consul Razzack, relative to establishment of a hospital at Jeddah, 1883, FO685/2. One of the objections of the government to the hospital was that it would be used by the indigent and
pauper pilgrims as a permanent lodging place.
177. Remarks of secretary of the government of India, Foreign Department,
on Dr. Razzacks Report on the Proposal of an Indian Hospital in
Hijaz, 1883, FO685/2.
178. Ltr. no. 221, secretary, Foreign Department, to Marquess of Hartington,
secretary of state for India, 12 October 1880, f. 1583, part 6, L/PS/7/26.
179. Ibid., f. 1585, part 6, L/PS/7/26.
180. Political resident, Aden, to secretary to government, Bombay, Aden
residency, 16 February 1880, ff. 15201521, part 5, L/PS/7/24.

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No t e s t o pag e s 151163

181. Ltr. no. 190, Foreign Department to Marquess of Hartington, secretary of state for India, 24 August 1880, f. 805, part 4, L/PS/7/26.
182. Ltr. no. 15, confidential, Foreign Office, to government of India, 3
December 1888, part 2, FO685/2.
183. Ibid.
184. Ibid.
185. Resident, Istanbul, to Marquess of Salisbury, Constantinople, 6
February 1880, FO78/3615.
186. Ibid.
187. India Office to under secretary of state, Foreign Office, 12 March
1880, FO78/3615.
188. Tr. of a letter, Sayyid Fadl, amir of Dhofar, to Sayyid Toorkee, amir of
Muscat, 13 May 1880, FO78/3615.
189. India Office to under secretary of state, Foreign Office, 6 September
1879, FO78/3615.
190. Foreign Office, 3 February 1881, FO78/3615.
191. Resident, Istanbul, to India Office, 8 February 1881, FO78/3615.
192. Sayyid Fadl Moplah, government of Dhofar, to government of Aden,
20 Ramzan 1294 [8 September 1877], FO78/3615.
193. Resident, Constantinople, to Marquess of Salisbury, Constantinople,
13 December 1879, FO78/3615.
194. For Fadls stay as the guest of Abdulhamid II at Istanbul, see Buzpinar,
Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha.
195. Ltr. no. 192/916, Aden residency to secretary to government at Bombay,
5 June 1879, FO78/3615.
196. Memorandum of Hugo Marometh, 30 August 1879, Istanbul, FO78/3615.
197. Fadl, Al-Anwarul,4.
198. Ibid.,5.
199. Ibid.
200. Ibid.,7.
201. Ibid.,11.
202. Reid, Indonesian Frontier, 226248; Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and
Colonial Indonesia, 114141.
203. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 190194.
204. Resident, Constantinople, to Marquess of Salisbury, Constantinople, 7
April 1880, FO78/3615.
205. Anthony Reid, Habib Abdur-Rahman az-Zahir (18331896), Indonesia
13 (April 1972): 3759.
206. Ibid. Reid offers a detailed account of Zahirs brokerage across the
European, British, and Ottoman power centers.
207. Reid, Indonesian Frontier,237, 241. And yet hopes of Ottoman help lingered. In 1890, a Turkish warship in Singapore created excitement as it
revived hopes of protection. Letters from Acheh were sent to its
Turkish commander, but clearly nothing came out of this.
208. Ibid.,238.
209. Ibid. Some Singapore Arabs launched an appeal among their compatriots in the straits settlements and Java, which was said to have

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No t e s t o pag e s 16316 9

raised 100,000 Spanish dollars for the Achenese cause by the end
of 1874.
210. Enclosure no. 6 in ltr. no. 42-208, Brig. Francis Loch, political resident, Aden, to secretary to government of Bombay, Political
Department, 4 February 1879, FDS 1879, FO78/3615.
211. Resident, Constantinople, to India Office, 20 January 1881.
212. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier, 157, 166. Fadl tried
to return to India after his deportation to Arabia in 1852 but was
stopped by consuls at Jeddah. His group of companions arrived in
India and were promptly arrested by Conolly. Two were deported.
Several other attempts by his grandnephews in 1895 to return were
also stalled.
213. Ibid.,166167. It was this living martyr status coupled with the correspondence he engaged in with the people of Malabar that made Fadl a
suspect in the murder of Conolly.
214. India Office, Moplah Outrages Correspondence, 5:391.
215. Logan, commissioner, Calicut, to consul, Jeddah, 29 December 1881,
III Misc. 18731882, FO685/1.
216. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier168. The nercca ceremony that commemorated the shahids of 1848 was enacted at Fadls
fathers shrine at Mambram every year until the early twentieth century.
217. Ltr. no. 348, chief secretary to British consul, Jeddah, 5 July 1881, III
Misc. 18731882, FO685/1.
218. Resident, Constantinople, to Marquess of Salisbury, Constantinople,
13 December 1879, FO78/3615.
219. Seema Alavi, Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed Fanatics: Indian
Muslims in Nineteenth Century Trans-Asiatic Imperial Rivalries,
Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 6 (2011):13371382.
220. A. Block to India Office, 14 December 1880, FO78/3615.
221. Resident, Istanbul, to India Office, 6 January 1881, FO78/3615.
222. Ltr. no. 307, resident, Therapia, to Earl Granville, 31 August 1880,
FO78/3615.
223. Resident, Therapia, to Earl Granville, 21 September 1880, FO78/3615.
224. Resident, Therapia, to W.P. Burrell, 9 September 1880. FO78/3615.
225. Resident, Therapia, to Earl Granville, 21 September 1880, FO78/3615.
226. Resident, Therapia, to Earl Granville, 22 September 1880, FO78/3615.
227. Ltr. no. 156, Lord Dufferin to Earl Granville, Constantinople, 4 March
1882, IOR L/PS/3/252.
228. Buzpinar, Abdulhamid II and Sayyid Fadl Pasha, 239.

chapter 3Rahmatullah Kairanwi and the Muslim Cosmopolis

1. Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-mutiny India (Surrey,

U.K.: Routledge, 1993),221222. Powell observes that both Kairanwi
and his father had stints as mir-munshis in the service of Maharaja
Hindu Rao and that the maharaja had earlier given refuge to followers

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No t e s t o pag e s 16 9 177

of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid. This may have influenced him in favor of

their monist Tariqa-i-Muhammadiya ideology.
2. See ibid., 221, for a detailed biographical account of Kairanwi.
3. Maulana Asir Adravi, Mujahid Islam: Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi
(Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2004), 288289.
4. Ibid.,293.
5. Marc Gaborieau, Late Persian Early Urdu: The Case of Wahabi
Literature (18181857), in Confluence of Cultures: French Contributions
to Indo-Persian Studies, ed. N. Franoise Delvoye (New Delhi: Manohar,
1995), 170191; Harlon Otto Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in
Nineteenth-Century India: The Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah (New Delhi:
Yoda Press, 2008).
6. Mahmud Ahmad Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi aur un ke Mu asirin
(Lahore: Tahqiqat, 2007), 185187.
7. Ibid., 188206.
8. This is in contrast to what Azmi Ozcan argues about the role of
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Shibli Nomani, and other Indians hosted by
Sultan Abd-al Hamid II. According to Ozcan, there was a simple connect between patronage and these men working for the spread of
Ottomanism. Ozcan also notes that the sultan lamented the marginalization of the Indian Muslims in British India and stepped in to support them. In return, their propaganda strengthened him by improving
his relations with his own subjects at home and vis--vis the British.
See Azmi Ozcan, The Ottomans and Muslims of India during the
Reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, in The Turks, ed. Hasan Celal Guzel,
Cem Oguz, Osman Karatay, and Murat Ocak (Ankara: Yeni Turkiye,
2002), 4:299303.
9. Ibid., 302303. Dahlan was the intellectual patron of a range of diverse
scholars from the Malay-Indonesian and Egyptian worlds as well. He
became the epicenter for Muslim networks across the Ottoman and
British territories.
10. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,318; Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 480481.
11. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,319.
12. Maulana Muhammad Salim, Risala Nida-i-Haram, Karachi, AprilMay
1851 [Shaban Hijri 1380], cited in Adravi, Mujahid Islam, 322323.
Adravi also notes the royal treatment (shahana istiqbal) and the award of
Rs. 5,000 and gifts, including a precious rosary that Kairanwi received
from the caliph.
13. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,324.
14. Ibid., 326330.
15. British consulate, Jeddah, to secretary to government of India, 22 June
1883, part 1, FO685/2.
16. Junior secretary to government of Northwest Provinces and Oudh to
secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, 3 September
1883, part 1, FO685/2.
17. Extract from the list of persons eminent for disloyalty in the district of
the Meerut Division, 24 November 1858, part 1, FO685/2.

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No t e s t o pag e s 178 184

18. Foreign Department to T.S. Jago, consul, Jeddah, 27 July 1888, part 2,
FO685/2.
19. David Dean Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late
Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 9092.
Midhat Pasha, the author of the constitution that was abandoned by
Abd-al Hamid II, was one such Turkish bureaucratic reformer who
allied with the salafis in Syria.
20. Ibid., 2429.
21. Ibid., 89103. Tahir al-Jazairi was one of their principal leaders. Arab
renaissance societies emerged all over to give an articulate voice to
what so far had been the ad hoc Salafi idea of liberalism.
22. Ibid.,99.
23. For an excellent discussion of the emergence of Cairo as a different sort
of Islamic intellectual hub than Mecca or Istanbul, see Michael Laffan,
Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds
(London: Routledge, 2002), 127133. Laffan shows that caliph-centric
pan-Islam had little appeal in Indonesia because of distance and language constraints. However, late nineteenth-century Cairo saw new
ideas of Islamic unity. An active press and nontraditional schools, plus
the growing anticolonial movement against British occupation, made
Cairo the harbinger of an Islamic unity. This was premised differently
from that imagined in the pan-Islam of Istanbul or the amorphous
modernist ideas of civilizational unity of the umma that emanated from
the Ottoman provinces and Mecca. Javanese reformist literature began
to be published from Cairo. In the case of the Java, Cairo saw the transition from pan-Islam to territorial nationalism.
24. Ilham Makdisi, Theater and Radical Politics in Beirut, Cairo, and
Alexandria: 18601914 (occasional paper, Center for Contemporary
Arab Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, George
Washington University, 2006), 818, 2324.
25. Ibid., 1112. For Afghani, see A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal
Age, 17981939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
103129; Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political
and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968).
26. Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia:
Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern Ulama in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2004),13, 21.
27. Ibid.
28. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia, 114141.
29. Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain
(18771924) (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 4063, 7478, 111126. Ozcan shows
how even the collection of funds at the time of the Russo-Turkish War
in 1877 was intended to impact British policy. It was not implemented
for financial benefit. However, only the latter objective was realized.
Even investments in the vernacular press in India and the setting up of

442

No t e s t o pag e s 184 191

consulates were geared toward tapping the Indian Muslim as a pawn in

larger imperial fights. See also Selim Deringil, Legitimacy Structures
in the Ottoman Empire: Abd al-Hamid II, 18761909, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no. 3 (1991): 345359.
30. Abdur Razzack, Report on Mecca Pilgrims: Sanitation and Medical
Report, 1879, p.121, W-4087, British Library.
31. Abdur Razzack, Report on Educational Facilities in the Hijaz in
1885, in Records of the Hijaz, 17981925, ed. A.L.P Burdett (Slough:
Archive Editions,1996), 4:402.
32. Abdur Razzack, Report on Educational Facilities in the Hijaz in
1885, 383403.
33. Eik Mujahid Maimar (Mekka: Markazi daftar Darul Uloom haram
Saulatiya, n.d.), 3637, 4647.
34. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi,463.
35. Ibid.,465, 468469.
36. Adravi, Mujahid Islam, 313. Faiz Ahmed Khan of Aligarh gifted
Kairanwi a part of the house that he owned in Mecca. A Patna raees,
Mir Wahid Husain while on haj donated a substantial amount of money
with which a hostel for fifty students was built. In addition, Kairanwi
bought the malba (debris) of a library located in the courtyard of the
haram for Rs. 1,500.
37. Maulana Muhammad Masud Shamim Kairanwi, Mecca Muazamah
Almi Tareekh kaa Eik Roshan Baab [Mecca the Brightest Chapter of
Global History] (unpublished typescript, in private collection, n.d.),
7071.
38. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 474475. The story goes that Begum
Saulat-un Nisa dreamed that she was in a beautiful house in heaven, but
that it had no water supply. She experienced immense thirst and kept
looking for water. This dream inspired her to donate the rest of her
money to Kairanwis madrasa so that it would have proper water facilities.
39. For a discussion on the making of the Dars-i Nizamiya in Awadh, see
Francis Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahal and Islamic Culture in
South Asia (London: C. Hurst, 2001), 4655.
40. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 472473.
41. Robinson, Ulama of Farangi Mahal, 240251.
42. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 483, citing the Safar-i-Hijaz of Maulana
Sarf-ul Haq.
43. Ibid.,517.
44. Ibid.,484.
45. Nos. 18, Col. P. D. Hendersons note, 21 July 1888, Foreign
Department, secret 1, proceedings June 1889, R/1/1/98.4.
46. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi,482.
47. Ibid,482483.
48. Ibid.,521. See list of fourteen qaris. These include Qari Abdul Rahman
of Allahabad, Maulvi Suleiman of Bhopal, Qari Mizan Shah of Nadwat
ul-Ulama, Lucknow, and Qari Abdul Malik of Madrasa Furqania in
Lucknow.

443

No t e s t o pag e s 19119 6

49. Ibid.,484.
50. Ibid.,473.
51. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia,38.
52. Ibid.,61. Abd Allah Zawawi was the son of the famous qadi of Jeddah,
Muhammad Salih Zawawi.
53. For Javanese scholars in Mecca and Cairo and the Arabic press
reportage on their Arabic and scholarly potential, see Michael Laffan,
Another Andalusia: Images of Colonial Southeast Asia in Arabic
Newspapers, Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 3 (2007): 689722.
54. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi,518520. See the list of names of his students and their placements.
55. Kairanwi, Mecca Muazamah Almi Tareekh kaa Eik Roshan
Baab,74.
56. Muhammad Abdullah converted the madrasa into an English middle
school. It soon it became a government school, which is how it exists
even now. At different times several Muslim luminaries of Bengal, such
as Sufi Qadri Muhammad Mustaqim, remained associated with it.
Begum Saulat-un Nisa set up other schools and cheap hotels for the
poor Muslim students of Calcutta and helped a lot in spreading the
knowledge of the Koran and Arabic learning in the region. Zafar,
Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 474475.
57. Basir Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki (Delhi: Kitab
Bhawan, 2005),50.
58. Ibid., pp.51. Financial networks between Indian Muslims and Palestine
waqfs as well as between trusts of Indian royalty and Shia ulema of Iraq
and Iran provided the base for social relations and political manipulations across the imperial assemblages of the nineteenth century; these
have been documented by Omar Khalidi and Meir Litvak, respectively.
See Omar Khalidi, Indian Muslims and Palestinian Awqaf, Jerusalem
Quarterly, no. 40 (2009/2010): 5258; Meir Litvak, Money, Religion,
and Politics: The Oudh Bequest in Najaf and Karbala, 18501903,
Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 1 (2001):121.
59. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 5253.
60. Ibid.,53.
61. Nisar Ahmad Faruqi, Marqumat-i-Imdadiyah (Delhi: Maktab Burhan,
1979),77.
62. Maktubat Akabar Deoband (Deoband: Miraj Book Depot, n.d.),29.
63. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 502503.
64. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 121142.
65. Ibid.,130.
66. Imdadullah Makki, Faislah Haft-i-Maslah. Tausihhat wa Tashreehat,
translated into Urdu by Mufti Muhammad Khalil Khan Barkati (Delhi:
Faruqia Book Depot, 1974),49.
67. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 8586.
68. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,305.
69. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 306.
70. Ibid., 306.

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No t e s t o pag e s 19 6 20 9

71. Ibid., 307308.

72. Maulana Muhammad Salim, Risalah Nida-i-Haram (AprilMay 1951):
n.p.
73. Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Izharul Haq, 6 vols. (Qatar: Al-shuun-al
Islamia, 1864), translated into Urdu by Maulana Akbar Ali as Bible Sei
Koran Takk, 3 vols. (Karachi: Maktaba Darul ulum1968).
74. Kairanwi, Bible Sei Koran Takk, 2:1.
75. Ibid.,2.
76. Ibid.,23.
77. Ibid.,24.
78. Ibid.,3435.
79. Ibid., 3637.
80. Ibid.,99.
81. Ibid., 99101.
82. Ibid.,135.
83. Ibid., 136137.
84. Ibid.,139.
85. Ibid.,141143.
86. Ibid.,166.
87. Ibid.,167.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.,168.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.,186.
93. Ibid.,191194.
94. Ibid., 264265.
95. Ibid.,254255.
96. Ibid.,270271.
97. Ibid.,273.
98. Ibid.,271272.
99. Ibid.,276.
100. Ibid.,277.
101. Ibid.,281.
102. Ibid.,303.
103. Ibid., 309.
104. Ibid., 310316.
105. Ibid.,323.
106. Ozcan, Pan-Islamism, 18.
107. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Muhammedanism and the Negro Race,
Frasers Magazine, 1 November 1875, repr. in Edward Wilmot Blyden,
Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1967), 3.
108. Ibid.,309.
109. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,309.
110. Kairanwi, Bible Sei Koran Takk, 2:358.
111. Ibid., 358362.

445

No t e s t o pag e s 20 9 222

112. Ibid., 362363.

113. Ibid., 380.
114. Ibid.,372.
115. Ibid., 378.
116. Ibid.,384385.
117. Ibid.,408.
118. Ibid., 408409.
119. Ibid., 409413.
120. Ibid., 414415.
121. Ibid.,412413.
122. Ibid.,415.
123. Ibid., 417.
124. Ibid.,386.
125. Ibid.,387.
126. Ibid., 393395.
127. Ibid.,418419.
128. Ibid., 421422.
129. Ibid.,422423.
130. Ibid., 425427.
131. Ibid., 504508.
132. Ibid.,527528.
133. Ibid.,532533.
134. Ibid., 535537.
135. Ibid.,537538.
136. Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi, 514515.
137. Selections from the vernacular press in the Northwest Provinces and
Oudh, 1899, in the Liberal, 8 August 1899, p.426, L/R/5/76.
138. Ibid.
139. Ibid.,515.
140. Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South
Asian Islam since 1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
141. Quoted in Zafar, Rahmatullah Kiranvi,516.
142. Ozcan, Pan-Islamism, 6970. Their names figure only in Ottoman
documents, as probably they sent the money and kept a low profile for
fear of making the British government suspicious. Indian Muslims had
formed many other societies as well to send money to Turkey. These
included Anjuman-i-Islam at Bombay. It soon spread branches to
Delhi, Haiderabad, Lahore, Calcutta, and Lucknow. Hindus from
Madras, Allahabad, and Amritsar also contributed to the Ottoman
relief fund, which showed that these efforts were not really about the
caliph but about support for an Asian imperial power.

chapter 4Haji Imdadullah Makki in Mecca

1. Basir Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki (Delhi: Kitab

Bhawan, 2005), 13. For Makkis links with the Thanawi family, see
Hakim Maulana Muhammad Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq

446

No t e s t o pag e s 222 225

Ali Ashraf al Khalaq (Delhi: Maktaba Burhan, 1981), 16.This is a

description of the life and times and malfuzat of Imadadullah Makki.
2. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,15; Thanawi, Imdad
al-Mushtaq, 6.
3. Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq, 6.
4. BarbaraD. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 18601900
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 76.
5. Thanawai, Imdad al-Mushtaq, 1719.
6. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,16.
7. Ibid.,17.
8. According to one version, Qudus had taken an oath on Sayyid Ahmad
and had thus been initiated into the Naqshbandi order. Ibid., 1819,
21.
9. Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq,1213.
10. Ibid.,12.
11. Ibid.,13.
12. Ibid.,14.
13. Ibid.
14. Metcalf thinks that Imdadullahs migration to Mecca was not due to
the events of 1857, and that the movement of migrs like Imdadullah
is explained with reference to the 1857 unrest only in later nationalist
historiography. But this does not seem to be the case, as arrest warrants
were issued for him and Kairanwi. Their later requests for return to
India were denied because of police cases against them in Meerut.
Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 76.
15. Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq,2730.
16. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 49; Maulana Asir
Adravi, Mujahid Islam: Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi (Delhi: Farid
Book Depot, 2004),301.
17. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,301; Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir
Makki,4950.
18. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,301.
19. Seema Alavi, Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed Fanatics: Indian
Muslims in Nineteenth Century Trans-Asiatic Imperial Rivalries,
Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 6 (2011):13371382.
20. Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma
below the Winds (London: Routledge, 2002); Juan R. Cole, Colonialism
and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypts
Urabi Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia:
Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern Ulama in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2004).
21. For an excellent discussion of the Hijaz under Ottoman rule, see Saleh
Muhammad Al-Amr, The Hijaz under Ottoman Rule, 18691914:
Ottoman Vali, the Sharif of Mecca, and the Growth of British Influence
(Riyadh: Riyadh University Publications, 1974),60110.

447

No t e s t o pag e s 225 231

22. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th
Century: Daily Life, Customs and Learning: Muslims of the East Indies
Archipelago, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2007). For a British report on
the secret societies of all political hues in Mecca, see FO 685/1, Consul
Zohrabs letter book, 1879, ff. 381386.
23. Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim
Medical Tradition, 16001900 (Delhi: Permanent Black Press, 2008),
216235.
24. Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadvi, Sirat Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid, 7th ed. (Lucknow: Academy of Islamic Research and Publica
tions, 1986; originally published 1939); Sayyid Muhammad Mian,
Ulema-i-Hind kaa Shandar Maazi, vol. 2 (Delhi: Kitabistan, 1957).
25. JuanR.Cole, Of Crowds and Empires: Afro-Asian Riots and European
Expansion, 18571882, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31,
no. 1 (1989):106133. For Jeddah riots triggered by the slave trade controversy, see William Oshenwald, Religion, Society and State in Saudi
Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 18401908 (Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1984), 137144.
26. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East,196197. Militant
Indian Sufi Ahmadullah Shah, who had been active in the 1857 riots in
Lucknow, led the crowds in Cairo as well.
27. Cole, Of Crowds and Empires,9.
28. Alavi, Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed Fanatics.
29. Muzaffar Alan, private conversation, New Delhi, 20 July 2014.
Professor Alan is working on the Naqshbandi networks and their
impact in Mughal political culture.
30. Katib Celebi wrote Mizan ul Hak in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. This was a perfect consensus text, written to unite the umma in
the face of the diversity and growth of an urban city.
31. Imdadullah Makki, Tazqiat-ul-Qulub, translated into Urdu by Syed
Abdul Mateen as Zia-ul-Qulub (Delhi: Matba-i Mujtaba, 1927), 3.
32. Mateen, Zia-ul-Qulub,23.
33. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,124.
34. Ltr. no. 6, Maktubat-i-Imdadiya [Letters Written to Maulana Ashraf
Ali Thanawi] (Lucknow: Maktaba Ahmadi, 1915), n.p. Hereafter
Maktubat.
35. Ibid.
36. Radhika Singha, Passport, Ticket and India-Rubber Stamp: The
Problem of the Pauper Pilgrim in Colonial India, 18821925, in The
Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the
Indian Ocean Region, ed. Harald Fischer-Tine and Ashwini Tambe
(London: Routledge, 2009),4983.
37. Mateen, Zia-ul-Qulub, 3.
38. Francis Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahal and Islamic Culture in
South Asia (London: C. Hurst, 2001),240251.
39. Mateen, Zia-ul-Qulub,5.

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No t e s t o pag e s 232 245

40. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 124125.

41. Ibid.,125.
42. Mateen, Zia-ul-Qulub,5059.
43. Ibid., 5975; Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,126.
44. Mateen, Zia-ul-Qulub,75107.
45. Ibid.,83. For example, Imdadullah urges people to bathe, to use perfume, to imagine the Prophet sitting in front of them, and so forth.
46. Ibid.,5.
47. Ibid.,127.
48. Ibid.,15.
49. Ibid., 23.
50. Ibid.,24.
51. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 114115.
52. Ibid.,128129.
53. Ibid.,109111.
54. Nisar Ahmad Faruqi, Marqumat-i-Imdadiya [Writings of Imdadullah]
(Delhi: Maktab Burhan, 1979),70. Hereafter Marqumat.
55. Ltr. no. 8, n.d., Maktubat.
56. Ibid.
57. Ltr. no. 11, n.d., Maktubat.
58. Ltr. no. 30, 1896, Maktubat.
59. Ltr. no. 41, 1898, Maktubat.
60. Marqumat,85.
61. Ibid., 87.
62. Ibid., 88.
63. Ibid., 93.
64. Ibid., 87.
65. Ibid.,130.
66. Ibid.,55.
67. Ibid., 65.
68. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,130; Marqumat,
Imdadullah to Qasim and Rashid,4345.
69. Marqumat,45.
70. Ibid.,53.
71. Ibid.,130.
72. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,140.
73. Marqumat,9.
74. Ibid.,12.
75. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, 138139.
76. Ltr. no. 34, 1896, Maktubat.
77. Ltr. no. 18, 1895, Maktubat.
78. Ltr. no. 11, 1894, Maktubat.
79. Ltr. no. 19, n.d., Maktubat.
80. Marqumat,38.
81. Ltr. no. 42, Maktubat.
82. Marqumat,105.

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No t e s t o pag e s 245 256

83. Ltr. no. 18, 1895, Maktubat.

84. Imdadullah Makki, Sharah Faisla Haft Masala, translated into Urdu by
Mufti Muhammad Khalil Khan Barkati as Faislah Haft-i-Maslah:
Tausihhat wa Tashreehat [A Book on Seven Controversial Issues] (Delhi:
Faruqia Book Depot, 1974),49.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.,128129.
87. Ibid., 58.
88. Ibid.,67.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.,72.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.,73.
96. Ibid.,43.
97. Ibid.,134.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.,136.
100. Ibid.,140.
101. Ibid., 143144.
102. Ibid, 144.
103. Ibid.,143.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.,145.
107. Ibid., 184.
108. Ibid.,189.
109. Ibid.,204.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.,226.
112. Ibid.,233.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid.,272273.
115. Marqumat,47.
116. Ibid.,55.
117. Ltr. no. 11, Maktubat.
118. Ltr. no. 17, 1895, Maktubat.
119. Ltr. no. 18, 1895, Maktubat.
120. Ltr. no. 30, 1896, Maktubat.
121. Ltr. no. 46, 1898, Maktubat.
122. Ltr. no. 50, 1899, Maktubat. In this letter, Imadadullah was also
informed that Hafiz Muhammad Yusuf had died.
123. Ltr. no. 38, 1897, Maktubat.
124. Marqumat,55.
125. Ltr. no. 34, 1896, Maktubat.

450

No t e s t o pag e s 256 265

126. Marqumat,61. Risal Hafiz sahib Raham allah.

127. Ibid.,68.
128. Ltr. no. 16, 1895, Maktubat.
129. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India,99102, 156159.
130. Ibid.,161162.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid.,149152
133. Marqumat,16.
134. Ibid.,8486.
135. Ibid.,8889.
136. Ibid.,93.
137. Ibid.,87.
138. Ibid.,43.
139. Ibid.,45.
140. Ibid.,53.
141. Ibid.,97.
142. Ltr. no. 36, 1897, Maktubat.
143. Marqumat,51.
144. Ibid, 115.
145. Ibid.,70.
146. Ibid.,113.
147. Ibid.,65.
148. Ibid.,76.
149. Ibid.,77.
150. Ibid.,111112, letter to Ziauddin, in which he says that he gets news via
hajis and whatever he cant write he asks the returning hajis to convey
(zabani hajaj kei malum hoga).
151. Thanawi, Imdad al-Mushtaq,33. Imdadullah thus was married to the
granddaughter of Bibi Nurun Calcutvee, who was the wife of Syed
Haider Ali. His wife was called Bibi Khadija, daughter of Haji Shafat
Khan Rampuri. She was an orphan and had been brought up by her
grandmother.
152. Marqumat,119. In a letter to Hakim Muhammad Ziauddin, Imdadullah
objects to the fact that relatives and associates had collected funds for
him in Hindustan and sent them across to Mecca. He says this is the
second time that this has happened. He accepted it the first time, but
he expresses his displeasure at their making it a practice. He says that
the fakir wants the welfare of people not their money/assets. (Fakir
aan azizon kee bahbudi chahta hai unkei mal par nazar nahin hai. Haq
tala unhei khush aur khurram rakhei.) He repeats that he is happy
only if they are on the right path (rah-i-rast) and prays for their well-
being. He is not interested in anything else.
153. Ibid.,109.
154. Ibid.,108.
155. Ibid.,121.
156. Adravi, Rahmatullah Kairanwi,301.
157. Marqumat,37.

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No t e s t o pag e s 26 6 272

158. Ahmad, Tazkirah Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki,7677,101102.

159. Ibid.,102.
160. Ibid.,113115.
161. Ltr. no. 7, 1892, Maktubat. The madrasa had one qari and one hafiz,
besides Qari Ahmad Makki, who taught Ilm-i-tajvid and dinyat.
162. Ibid.

chapter 5Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan and the Muslim Cosmopolis

1. Saeedullah, The Life and Works of Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan: Nawab
of Bhopal (18321890) (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1973), 13.
2. Ibid., 14.
3. BarbaraD. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 18601900
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 268271.
4. Saeedullah, Life and Works of Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan, 43. Khan
remained with these new friends for twelve days, during which he read
the Hadith with Husain ibn Muhsin. He also read the works of
Muhammad ibn Ismail al Amir al Yamani.
5. Ibid., 14.
6. Ibid., 1415.
7. Ibid., 9394.
8. Ibid., 5472.
9. Ibid., 6061.
10. Juan Cole uses this phrase to comment on the anti-Christian or anti-
European riots in Jeddah, Lebanon, Cairo, Damascus, and Alexandria
between 1860 and 1880. JuanR.Cole, Of Crowds and Empires: AfroAsian Riots and European Expansion, 18571882, Comparative Studies
in Society and History 31, no. 1 (1989):2.
11. For a strong case for locating nineteenth-century South Asian and
Ottoman history in the connected worlds of the British and Ottoman
Empires, see DinaRizk Khoury and Dane Keith Kennedy, Comparing
Empires: The Ottoman Domains and the British Raj in the Long
Nineteenth Century, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the
Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007):211244. For a comparison of Ottoman and
Indian political economies, see C.A. Bayly, Distorted Development:
The Ottoman Empire and British India, circa 17801916, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 332344.
12. Cosmopolitan Ottoman regimes in Lebanon and Syria were encouraged by Abd-al Hamid II, who wanted his image as a Muslim sovereign
to project ideas of benevolence, justice, and the rule of law. Such ideas
were seen in the mutasaffariya of Lebanon, in Egyptian semiautonomous rule under Ottoman sovereignty, and in Syria, where Muslim and
Christian landowning bureaucrats formed the Ottoman government.
See EnginDeniz Akarli, The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 18611920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 35, 38; Hasan Kayali,
Greater Syria under Ottoman Constitutional Rule: Ottomanism,
Arabism, Regionalism, in The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century:

452

No t e s t o pag e s 272 282

The Common and the Specific in the Historical Experience, ed. Thomas
Philip (Stuttgart: Berliner Islam Studies, 1992), 28; PhilipS. Khoury,
Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 18601920
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2646.
13. Of the extraordinarily large number of works attributed to Siddiq
Hasan Khan, some eighty-four were in Urdu and focused on akhlaq,
deportment, and morals. Fifty-four of his works were in Arabic,
including seventeen on Hadith, and forty-three were in Persian.
Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 278.
14. Siddiq Hasan Khan, Tarjuman-i-Wahabiyah (Agra: Matba Mufid-iAam, 1884),26.
15. Ibid.,27.
16. Ibid.,45.
17. Ibid., 9.
18. Ibid.,12.
19. Siddiq Hasan Khan, Hidayat al Saail Ila Adillatil Masaail (Bhopal:
Matba Raisul Mataabi Shahjahani, 1875), 34, 1015. These fatwas
generally denounce emulation, rituals, and celebrations. They advocate a tightly tailored regime as per the scriptures.
20. Khan, Tarjuman,16.
21. Ibid.,17.
22. Translation of Hidayat al Sail by Sayyad Muhammad, assistant district
superintendent of police, Delhi, FDS 1, July 1886, R/1/1/33.
23. Khan, Tarjuman,3235.
24. Ibid.,91.
25. Francis Robinson, Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South
Asia since 1800, in Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press 2000),105121.
26. Sayyid Siddiq Hasan, Alikhtawa ala Maslaul Istawa (Lucknow: Matba
Gulshan-i-Awadh, 1869).
27. Ibid., 14.
28. Ibid.,128.
29. Siddiq Hasan Khan, Fathul Mughees ba Fiqhul Hadith (Bhopal: Matba-
i-Shahjahani Press, 1883),513.
30. Ibid.,1017.
31. Ibid.,2737.
32. Ibid.,47.
33. Siddiq Hasan Khan, Terazul Khumrat min Fazail ul Hajwal Umra (Agra:
Matba Mufid-i-Aam, 1883 [1301 Hijri]), 1932, 5455.
34. Siddiq Hasan Khan, Salaho Zatealben ba bayan Malezaujen (Agra: Matba
Mufid-i-Aam, 1883), 45.
35. Ibid., 67.
36. Ibid., 9.
37. Ibid.,12.
38. Ibid.,21.
39. Ibid., 77.
40. Ibid.,78.

453

No t e s t o pag e s 283 28 6

41. Ibid.,24.
42. Ibid.,95.
43. Ibid.,4551.
44. Ibid.,57.
45. Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the
Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, 18581895 (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black Press, 2007).
46. Different motives have been attributed to this migration, which started
in the late eighteenth century. According to the British, the Muslims
migrated in order to wage a jihad against them. According to others
who participated, it was to fight the Sikh powers. And still others argue
it was to establish Islamic temporal power over the tribal fringes of
empire. See BenjaminD. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, Fragments of
the Afghan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),
75100; Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Ranikhet
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), 58113.
47. Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier.
48. Memorandum by Mr. Lambert, deputy commissioner of police,
Calcutta, regarding circulation of certain Wahabi books by the
nawab consort of the begum of Bhopal, in demi-official letter from
H. Cockrell, secretary to Bengal government, 12 February 1881,
Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings July 1886, nos. 6579,
R1/1/32.
49. Memorandum from Mr. Lambert, Foreign Department, 1881, in
demi-official letter from agent to governor general, central India,
R/1/1/32.
50. Demi-official letter from Sir H. Daly, agent to governor general, central India, 20 January 1881, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings
July 1886, nos. 6579, R/1/1/32.
51. No. 46, 16 November 1889, Northwest Provinces, abstract of political
intelligence, 1890 Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings April
1890, nos. 416, R/1/1/106.
52. Demi-official letter from Sir H. Daly, agent to governor general, central India, 20 January 1881, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings
July 1886, nos. 6579, R/1/1/32.
53. No. 3, l no. 20, Col. T. Weldon, commissioner of police, Madras, to
Foreign Department, 17 November 1886, Foreign Department, secret
1, proceedings December 1886, nos. 13, R/1/1/48.
54. Demi-official letter from A. B. Barnard, deputy commissioner of
police, Calcutta, 14 October 1886, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings December 1886, nos. 13, R/1/1/48.
55. Lt. Col. A. R. Wilkinson, to G. S. Forbes, Police Office, Calcutta, 6
November 1886, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings December
1886, nos. 13, R/1/1/48.
56. Telegram no. 3989, Foreign Department, Simla, to chief secretary,
Madras, 9 November 1886, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings
December 1886, nos. 13, R/1/1/48.

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No t e s t o pag e s 28 6 29 0

57. Demi-official letter from D. McCracken, Punjab Police Inspector

Generals Office, Simla, 18 July 1885, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195,
R/1/1/33.
58. Demi-official letter from D. MacCracken, Punjab police, to secretary,
7 October 1885, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
59. D. MacCracken to H. M. Durand, 7 October 1885, secret 1, July 1886,
nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
60. Lepel Griffin to H. M. Durand, 10 March 1886, secret 1, July 1886,
nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
61. Extract from political abstract of intelligence, Punjab police, no. 86, 26
September 1885, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33. The suggestion that the nawab be deported from India was not considered feasible given the relations with the begum of Bhopal. But based on
information in Lepel Griffins report on the misgovernment of Bhopal,
he was removed from positions of power in the state. He was deprived
of his title and salute and directed to sever his connections with the
affairs of the state.
62. Extract from political abstract of intelligence, Punjab police, no. 17, 1 May
1886, Lahore, no. 2 of 17 April, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
63. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
64. No. 101, enclosure E to Bhopal memorandum, translation of private
revelations made by Syed Akber Ali, late kotwal of Bhopal state, 23
September 1885, Foreign Department 1890, secret 1, proceedings
April 1890, nos. 416, R/1/1/106.
65. Demi-official letter, 21 June, forwarded copy of book called Ranzat ul-
Nadiya, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings July 1886, nos.
6579, R1/1/32.
66. Lepel Griffin to H. M. Durand, 10 March 1886, secret 1, July 1886,
nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
67. Ibid.
68. Nawab Abdul Latif Khan, former minister to Lepel Griffin, political
agent, 4 June 1886, Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings
August 1886, nos. 2228, R/1/1/39.
69. Nawab Abdul Latif Khan, former minister to Lepel Griffin, political
agent, 6 June 1886, Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings
August 1886, nos. 2228, R/1/1/39.
70. Nawab Abdul Latif Khan, former minister to Lepel Griffin, political
agent, 4 June 1886, Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings
August 1886, nos. 2228, R/1/1/39.
71. Ibid.
72. Demi-official letter from Col H. Wylie, political agent, Bhopal, 27
February 1890, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings April 1890,
nos. 416, R/1/1/106.
73. Extracts from Indian newspapers, Reis and Rayyet, Anarchy in
Bhopal, 15 February 1890, Foreign Department 1890, secret 1, proceedings April 1890, nos. 416, R/1/1/106.

455

No t e s t o pag e s 29 0 29 8

74. Ibid.
75. No. 124, translation of a kharita (an official or imperial order) addressed
by T. L. Petre, agent to the governor general, central India, to begum
of Bhopal, 16 February1886, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings April 1890, nos. 416, R/1/1/106.
76. Affairs in Bhopal: A Defence of the Nawab Consort, Bombay, 1887, secret 1,
proceedings April 1890, nos. 416, R/1/1/106.
77. Ibid.,1. For its initial diatribe against the Hanafites, see also pp.23.
78. Ibid.,4.
79. Ibid., 1213.
80. Ibid.,5. The pamphleteers argued that the preconditions for launching
jihad did not exist in India, and thus the nawab was sure that the publication of Dewan Khutab would cause no harm there.
81. Ibid.,6.
82. Ibid.,7.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., 1722.
85. Ibid.,28.
86. Ibid.,31.
87. Ibid.,49.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.,50.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.,51.
93. Claudia Preckel, Begums of Bhopal (New Delhi: Roli Books,
2000),129.
94. Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain
(18771924) (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 117118. Ozcan cites both Foreign
Office and Ottoman sources in discussing this newspapers distribution.
95. Ltr. no. 212, Foreign Department to Marquess of Hartington, secretary of state for India, 1880, f. 1251, part 6, L/PS/7/26.
96. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 256, 3rd series, 31
August 1880.
97. Foreign Office to India Office, 11 July 1880, L/PS/3/227; Ozcan, Pam
Islamism,11920. Ozcan details the reaction of the Urdu press on the
ban on the Paik-i-Islam. The progovernment papers, like Koh-i-Noor
and Oudh Akhbar, as well as the Aligarh Institute Gazette, refuted the
provocative claims of the Paik about the caliph. Others, like the Sahnsul
Akhbar, supported the Paiks stand on the significance of the caliph for
all Muslims.
98. Foreign Office to India Office, 11 July 1880, L/PS/3/227.
99. Ltr. no. 212, Foreign Department to Marquess of Hartington, secretary of state for India, 1880, f. 1252, part 6, L/PS/7/26.
100. Ozcan, Pan-Islamism,120. Iran had banned Sabunjis newspapers at the
request of the Ottoman government. Sabunji had published two other

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No t e s t o pag e s 29 8 30 4

newspapers before Al Khalifa. But these, Al-Nahla and Mirat-ul-Akhbar,

were not anti-Ottoman.
101. See Foreign Office, 888/4341. See also Ozcan, Pan-Islamism, 120.
Ozcan argues that the British complied in exchange for the stoppage of
the Paik-i-Islam.
102. Ozcan, Pan-Islamism,120.
103. Ibid.,121.Ozcan suggests that this was because the government thought
that a paper published in London would have less impact on Muslim
opinion than one like the Paik, which was published in Istanbul.
104. Demi-official letter from Maj. Prideaux, 22 March 1881, Foreign
Department, secret 1, proceedings July 1886, nos. 6579, R1/1/32.
105. Memorandum from Mr. J. Lambert, 10 February 1881, Foreign
Department 1881, in demi-official letter from agent to governor general, central India, R/1/1/32.
106. Abdur Razzack, vice consul, Jeddah, to secretary to government of
India, Foreign Department, 12 October 1885, part 2, FO685/2.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. Abdur Razzack, vice consul, Jeddah, to secretary to government of
India, Foreign Department, 6 November 1885, part 2, FO685/2.
110. Col. W. Kincaid to Sir Lepel Griffin, 26 September 1885, secret 1, July
1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
111. Ibid.
112. T. S. Jago, vice consul, Jeddah, to secretary to government of India, 15
February 1886, part 2, FO685/2.
113. Abdur Razzack, vice consul, Jeddah, to secretary to government of
India, Foreign Department, 24 October 1889, part 4, FO685/2.
114. No. 723, junior under secretary to government of India to British
consul, Jeddah, 2 April 1889, part 4, FO685/2.
115. No. 233, Lt. Col. H. Wylie, political agent, Bhopal, to British consul,
Jeddah, 15 March 1888, part 3, FO685/2.
116. H. M. Durand, Foreign Department to T. S. Jago, vice consul, Jeddah,
27 July 1888, part 3, FO685/2.
117. Ibid.
118. Abdur Razzacks estimate totaled Rs. 578 a year for his Mecca establishment. It included rent for a house (Rs. 200); pay of a doorkeeper
(Rs. 84); pay of a Persian scribe to keep confidential correspondence
(Rs. 144); and presents, charities, and other incidental expenses (Rs.
150). See his memo enclosed in government of India, confidential draft,
Jeddah, 7 January 1888, part 4, FO685/2.
119. For example, Kairanwi was given money by the Ottomans to set up a
printing press in Mecca.
120. Memorandum by Mr. Portal on the religion of Sheikh Mahomed bin
Ali Senoussi-el Mahdi, 27 July 1885, part 4, FO685/2.
121. Ibid.
122. Interestingly, the British tried to both suppress and befriend the Sudan
chief because of his control of the slave trade and his cooperation in

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No t e s t o pag e s 30 4 30 9

their attempts to stop it. See enclosures in memorandum by Mr. Portal

on the religion of Sheikh Mahomed bin Ali Senoussi-el Mahdi, 27 July
1885, part 4, FO685/2.
123. Note on Din Muhammad, enclosed in no. 41P-242, Lepel Griffin,
agent to governor general, central India, to H. M. Durand, secretary to
government of India, Foreign Department, 22 June 1886, Foreign Depart
ment1886, secret 1, proceedings August 1886, nos. 2228, R/1/1/39.
124. Ibid.
125. Lepel Griffin to H.M. Durand, 22 December 1885, secret 1, July 1886,
nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
126. No. 41P-242, Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India,
to H. M. Durand, secretary to the government of India, Foreign
Department, 22 June 1886, Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings August 1886, nos. 2228, R/1/1/39.
127. Note on Din Muhammad, enclosed in no. 41P-242, Lepel Griffin,
agent to governor general, central India, to H.M. Durand, secretary to
government of India, Foreign Department, 22 June 1886, Foreign
Department1886, secret 1, proceedings August 1886, nos. 2228,
R/1/1/39.
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid.
130. See Din Muhammads correspondence with the nawabs agent, Abdul
Kayum, and his petition to Lepel Griffin, 10 December 1885, in
Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings August 1886, nos.
2228, R/1/1/39.
131. No. 41P-242, Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India,
to H. M. Durand, secretary to the government of India, Foreign Depart
ment, 22 June 1886, Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings
August 1886, nos. 2228, R/1/1/39. The story was more complicated, as
Din Muhammad and his networks constituted a political economy of
their own. It was certainly more than a law-and-order issue.
132. J. Lambert, esq., to H. M. Durand, foreign secretary, 11 May 1886,
Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings August 1886, nos.
2228, R/1/1/39.
133. Confidential letter from Alexandria, 2 April 1888, Foreign Department,
secret 1, proceedings June 1889, nos. 18, R/1/1/98. The Foreign
Department was always eager to know of the extent to which Indian
hajis were influenced by seditious literature and ideas. They wanted
Vice Consuls Abdur Razzack and Jago to be paid extra to collect this
kind of intelligence. Abdur Razzack sent information about two of the
nawabs books in circulation in the Hijaz. See demi-official letter from
Abdur Razzack, acting consul, Jeddah, to secretary, 17 July 1888,
Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings June 1889, nos. 18,
R/1/1/98.
134. Extract from a letter from H.S. Ahmad Raja to Lepel Griffin, n.d.,
Foreign Department 1886, secret 1, proceedings August 1886, nos.
2228, R/1/1/39.

458

No t e s t o pag e s 30 9 316

135. Ibid.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid.
138. Memorandum from Mr. J. Lambert, 10 February 1881, Foreign
Department 1881, in Demi-official letter from agent to governor general, central India, R/1/1/32.
139. Col. W. Kincaid to Sir Lepel Griffin, 26 September 1885, Foreign
Department, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
140. Lt. Gen. H.D. Daly, agent to governor general, central India, to A.C.
Lyall, secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, Indore,
8 February 1881, Foreign Department 1881, R1/1/32.
141. Col. W. Kincaid to Sir Lepel Griffin, 26 September 1885, secret 1, July
1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
142. No. 94, note of Lepel Griffin on the nawabs writings, translated into
Hindustani and delivered to begum on 28 August 1885, Foreign
Department, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
143. Ltr. no. 20P-110, Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central
India, to secretary to the government of India, Foreign Department,
30 March 1881, Foreign Department 1881; demi-official letter to Lepel
Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, 22 February 1881,
R/1/1/32.
144. Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, to H. M.
Durand, secretary to government of India, September 1885, Foreign
Department, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
145. Ibid.
146. No. 94, note of Lepel Griffin on nawabs writings, translated into
Hindustani and delivered to begum on 28 August 1885, Foreign
Department, secret 1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
147. Ibid.
148. Lepel Griffin, political resident, Indore, to H. M. Durand, 17 May
1885, Foreign Department 1890, secret 1, proceedings April 1890, nos.
416, R/1/1/106.
149. Ibid.
150. Lt. Col. W. F. Prideaux to A. C. Lyall, 9 March 1881, Foreign
Department 1881; demi- official letter to Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, 22 February 1881, R/1/1/32.
151. Gen. Sir H. D. Daly, agent to governor general, central India to A. C.
Lyall, secretary to government of India, Foreign Department, 20
January 1881, Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings July 1886,
nos. 6579, R1/1/32.
152. No. 68, Col. P. W. Bannerman to Lepel Griffin, agent to governor
general, central India, 21 March 1881, Foreign Department 1881;
demi-official letter to Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central
India, 22 February 1881, R/1/1/32.
153. No. 333, political agent, Bhopal, to agent to governor general, central
India, 23 May 1881; demi-official letter to Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, 22 February 1881, R/1/1/32.

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No t e s t o pag e s 316 322

154. Translation of Nawab Siddik Hasans defense against the charges

brought against him. Enclosed in demi-official letter from Sir Lepel
Griffin to H. M. Durand, 19 September 1885, secret 1, July 1886, nos.
84195, R/1/1/33.
155. Ibid.
156. Ibid.
157. Ibid.
158. Ibid.
159. It is significant that he chose Badayuni and not Abul Fazl as a point of
comparison. The former was a devout Muslim critical of the syncretic
court culture of Akbar.
160. No. 4657, government of Bombay to secretary to government of India,
28 September 1881, and no. 1354, secretary to government of India to
Bombay government, 17 March 1881, Foreign Department, secret 1,
proceedings July 1886, nos. 6579, R1/1/32. It was later reported that
Siddiq Hasan himself refused to meet this Arab, and he returned to
Arabia.
161. Ltr. no. 2721, Sir F. H. Souter, commissioner of police, Bombay, to
C. Gonne, chief secretary to government, Bombay, Political Depart
ment, 24 September 1881, Foreign Department 1881; demi-official
letter to Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, 22 Feb
ruary 1881, R/1/1/32.
162. Ibid.
163. Ltr. no. 2407, E. P., secretary to government of India, Foreign Depart
ment, to agent to governor general, central India, 8 October 1881,
Foreign Department 1881; demi-official letter to Lepel Griffin, agent
to governor general, central India, 22 February 1881, R/1/1/32.
164. Ltr. no. 778, Sir F. H. Souter, commissioner of police, Bombay, to J. B.
Peile, acting chief secretary to the government, Bombay, Political
Department, 14 March 1882, Foreign Department 1881; demi-official
letter to Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, 22
February 1881, R/1/1/32.
165. Lepel Griffin, agent to governor general, central India, to H. M.
Durand, secretary to government of India, 25 September 1885, Secret
1, July 1886, nos. 84195, R/1/1/33.
166. Ibid.
167. For Zia-ul-Haq, see R/1/1/1247.
168. No. 3046-A, C. R. Curland, Crime Intelligence Office, to J.B. Wood,
secretary to government of India, 26 September 1916, R/1/1/1154,
IOR 931.
169. C. E.W. Sands, Crime Intelligence Office, to O. V. Bosanquet, agent
to governor general, central India, 26 October 1917, R/1/1/1154, IOR
931.
170. Ibid.
171. Statement of Maulvi Sayyid Muhammad Murtaza Hasan, son of Hakim
Bunyad Ali of Chandpur, Bijnor, 5 October 1916, R/1/1/1154, IOR 931.
At Deoband he was once declared a heretic because he said that

460

No t e s t o pag e s 322 330

non-
Muslims could get salvation provided they made clear that they
had not had the opportunity of embracing Islam.
172. Ibid.
173. Ltr. no. 1177, M. R. Burn, chief secretary to government of United
Provinces, to H. Wheeler, secretary to government of India, Home
Department, 14 November 1914, R/1/1/1124, IOR 936.
174. Ltr. no. D.O. 785:W, A. H. Grant, foreign secretary to government of
India, Foreign and Political Department, to L. Davidson, chief secretary to government of Madras; L. Robertson, secretary to government
of Bombay, Political Department; J. H. Kerr, chief secretary to government of Bengal; R. Burn, chief secretary to Agra, Oudh, United
Provinces; chief secretary, Assam, Punjab, Burma, Baluchistan, North
west Provinces; etc., 4 July 1916, file no. 4, 19/6. Secret. Arab revolt
against Turkey: reluctance of begum of Bhopal to make a public
announcement, R/2/418/1.
175. Ibid.
176. Ibid., read from the announcement by the begum of Bhopal, file no. 4,
19/6. Secret, R/2/418/1.
177. Ibid.
178. Ibid., F. MacDonald to O. V. Bosanquet, agent to governor general,
central India, Bhopal, 12 July 1916, file no. 4, 19/6. Secret, R/2/418/1.
179. Ibid.
180. Ibid.
181. Ibid., F. MacDonald to O. V. Bosanquet, agent to governor general,
central India, 16 July 1916, file no. 4, 19/6. Secret, R/2/418/1.
182. Ibid.
183. Ltr. no. D.O. 725:W, D. Gray, viceroy, Simla, to O. V. Bosanquet, 11
November 1916, secret, file no. 4, 19/6. Secret, R/2/418/1.
184. Telegram P no. S. 3565, viceroy, Simla, to secretary of state for India, 4
July 1916, secret, file no. 4, 19/6. Secret, R/2/418/1.
185. ABF, Indian Muslims and the Hijaz, Arab Bulletin, no. 34, in Arab
Bulletin: Bulletin of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, 19161919, ed. Robin Leonard
Bidwell, vol. 1, 1916 (Buckinghamshire, U.K.: Archive Editions, 1986),
521.
186. Ibid.
187. Ibid.,523.
188. DGH, Arabs and Turks, Arab Bulletin, no. 48, in Arab Bulletin:
Bulletin of the Arab Bureau in Cairo,vol. 2, 1917, 173177.
189. Ibid.,177.
190. DGH, Arabia: The Next Caliphate, Arab Bulletin, no. 49, in Arab
Bulletin: Bulletin of the Arab Bureau in Cairo,vol. 2, 1917, 191192.
191. The Caliphate, Arab Bulletin, no. 101, in Arab Bulletin: Bulletin of the
Arab Bureau in Cairo, vol. 3, 1918, 286290.
192. The Caliphate, Arab Bulletin, no. 102, in Arab Bulletin: Bulletin of the
Arab Bureau in Cairo, vol. 3, 1918, 299.
193. Ibid., 300301.
194. Ibid., 303.

461

No t e s t o pag e s 331 336

Chapter 6Maulana Jafer Thanesri and the Muslim Ecumene

1. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Tawarikh-i-Ajaib (Karachi: Salman Academy,

1962), 36.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. Eleven thousand copies were printed, and sold at a price of Rs. 4
and 50 paise.
4. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Sawaneh Ahmadi (Delhi: Matba-i-Faruqi,
1895).
5. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, translated from English
(History of Port Blair) into Urdu by Jafer Thanesri (Lucknow: Munshi
Neval Kishore Press,1879), available in Jamia Hamdard Library, New
Delhi, PNo. 15287. Second edition published 1892 in Karachi; the
sixth part of the book is deleted from the later edition.
6. For a state-centric analysis of convicts and penal colonies, see Satadru
Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the
Andaman Islands (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); Clair
Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 18578: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion
(London: Anthem Press, 2007). For Thanesri as a symbol of changing
notions of family and domesticity in the colonial era, see Satadru Sen,
Contexts, Representation and the Colonized Convict: Maulana
Thanesri in the Andaman Islands, Crime, History and Societies 8, no. 2
(2004):117139. Sen looks at the experience of Thanesri more from a
sociological point of view, taking into account the impact of labor performed at the penal colony on Thanesris professional career and social
standing, as well as the reconfigurations of family, Hindu-Muslim
relations, and domesticity.
7. Jamal Malik, Letters, Prison Sketches and Autobiographical Liter
ature: The case of Fadl-e-Haqq Kahirabadi in the Andaman Penal
Colony, Indian Economic and Social History Review 43, no. 1 (2006):
8889; Seema Alavi, Muslim Jihadis and Hindu Sepoys: Rewriting
the 1857 Narrative, Biblio 12, nos. 34 (MarchApril, 2007): 1012.
8. Thanesri, Tawarikzh, 130, 127128. Upon arrival at Andaman Island,
Thanesri was relieved to know that here as well his services as a munshi
would be needed in the sarkari daftars. But earlier, upon arrival at
Bombay, in Thane, he was surprised that the colonial daftars used no
Persian or Urdu, but only Marathi. Thus despite his training in one
daftar, there were limitations to his finding a job.
9. Ibid.,123.
10. Ibid., 95. Of course, the governor general rejected this plea on the
grounds that even if this were true, the trial would have to proceed as
the convicts were a threat to the sarkari amaldari.
11. Ibid.,95.
12. Ibid.,72, 78.
13. Ibid.,79.
14. Ibid.,77.
15. Ibid., 9091.

462

No t e s t o pag e s 336 343

16. Ibid., 79.

17. Ibid.,8081.
18. Ibid., 8283.
19. Ibid., 91.
20. Ibid.,103. Thanesris sentence was converted from death by hanging to
life imprisonment because the English did not want him to achieve the
status of a martyr.
21. Ibid.,97.
22. Ibid.,109.
23. Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian
Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
24. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in
the Age of Discoveries, 14001800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
25. MichaelN. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 15001800: Studies
in Economic, Social and Cultural History (London: Ashgate, 2005).
Pearson seems to suggest that 1800 marked the end of the Islamic
hegemony of the world order.
26. Ho, Graves of Tarim, offers an excellent discussion on the conflict that
earlier genealogically derived identities of Yemeni travelers had with
those inscribed later via national passports.
27. Barbara Metcalf gives a fascinating account of heightened pilgrimage
traffic in the postmutiny period; see her essay The Pilgrimage
Remembered: South Asian Accounts of the Haj, in Muslim Travellers,
Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, ed. DaleF.
Eickelman and James Piscatori (London: Routledge, 1990), 85107.
See also Anderson, The Indian Uprising.
28. Thanesri, Tawarikh,211
29. Ibid., 211.
30. Ibid.,215216. In London Thanesri hoped to meet WilliamW. Hunter
to apprise him of the situation in India.
31. Ibid.,97.
32. Ibid.,117.
33. Ibid.,127.
34. Ibid.,119.
35. Ibid.,123.
36. Ibid.,125.
37. Ibid., 129.
38. Ibid.,122.
39. Ibid.,125.
40. Ibid.,126.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.,151.
43. Ibid.,133.
44. Ibid., 134.
45. Ibid.,135.
46. Ibid.,136.

463

No t e s t o pag e s 343 356

47. Thanesri, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, preface, 34.

48. Ibid., preface [English], n.p.
49. Ibid.,8.
50. Ibid.,6.
51. Ibid.,7.
52. Ibid.,1213.
53. Ibid,15.
54. Ibid.,16.
55. Thanesri, Tawarikh,128.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.,147.
58. Ibid.
59. Thanesri, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb,16.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.,17.
62. Ibid., 1819.
63. Thanesri, Tawarikh,175.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.,176.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.,178179.
69. For an insightful discussion on many ideas of jihad in the subcontinent,
see Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black Press, 2008). See also nationalist ulema biographies:
Ghulam Rasul Mehr, Syed Ahmed Shahid (Lahore: Kitab Manzil, 1952);
Maulana Syed Muhammad Mian, Ulema-i-Hind kaa Shandar Maazi,
vol. 2 (Delhi: Maktab-i-Mehmoodiya, 1957); Maulana Syed Abul
Hasan Ali Hasani, Nadwat-ul-Ulama (Lucknow: Nadwat-ul-Ulama,
1975.).
70. For an excellent discussion of this in modern Muslim liberal thought,
see Jalal, Partisans of Allah; Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual
and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
71. Thanesri was literally referring to jobs in the vast legal apparatus that
the British were laying out, but he was more generally conveying the
idea of service in the British administration.
72. David Lelyveld, Aligarhs First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British
India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1978.
73. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Bahadur, On Dr. Hunters Our Indian Mussulmans
Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen (London,
1872),73.
74. Ibid., 10, 8687. Sir Sayyid enumerated the many religious liberties
that Indian Muslims enjoyed in British India: the call for prayer,
refuting Christian literature, converting Christians to Islam. He further replied to Hunter that it would not be the religious duty of any
Muslim to renounce the aman of the English.

464

No t e s t o pag e s 356 36 4

75. Ibid.,2528.
76. Ibid.,9095.
77. Ibid.,94100.
78. See Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Causes of Indian Rebellion, translated from
Urdu by Jaweed Ashraf (Delhi, 2007); Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, History
of the Bijnor Rebellion, trans. Hafeez Malik and Morris Dembo (Delhi:
Idarah Adabiyat, 1982).
79. Singha shows how begging ones way to pilgrimage began to be seen by
modern states as a form of professional mendicancy and an anachronism in the modern regime of international travel. Radhika Singha,
Passport, Ticket and India-Rubber Stamp: The Problem of the Pauper
Pilgrim in Colonial India, 18821925, in The Limits of British Colonial
Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region, ed.
Harold Fischer-Tine and Ashwini Tambe (London: Routledge, 2009),
4983.
80. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan to A.P. MacDonnell, secretary to government
of India, Calcutta, 9 March 1890, part 4, FO 685/2.
81. Ibid.
82. Altaf Husain Hali, Hayat-i-Javed: A Biographical Account of Sir Sayyid
(Delhi: Qaumi Council, 1979), trans. K.H. Qadiri and David J.
Matthews (Delhi: Idarah-i-Adabiyat, 1979),7487.
83. Ibid.,77.
84. Ibid.,78. This tract on Christianity pleased neither the Muslims nor
the Christians. The Christians did not like their Holy Trinity idea
being called falsification, and the Muslims did not like the fact that Sir
Sayyid had denied any tahrif lafzi (charges of changes and falsification)
in Christian texts.
85. Ibid., 81, 119121. Sir Sayyid wrote another book while in England
called Khutbat-i-Ahmadiya to show the compatibility between Christi
anity and Islam.
86. Ibid.,122131.
87. Hali, Hayat-i-Javed, 211.
88. Maulana Asir Adravi, Mujahid Islam: Maulana Rahmatullah Kairanwi
(Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2004),69.
89. Hali, Hayat-i-Javed,119.
90. Adravi, Mujahid Islam,70.
91. Many other Muslims, like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, also refuted
Hunters charges regarding the Muslims.
92. Thanesri, Sawaneh, 8283. He laments the fact that the British hate
Wahabis more than they do the Afghan maulvis who have assassinated
many of their officersand that they have done so because of the influence of Hunters text.
93. Ibid.,186.
94. Ibid.,8283.
95. Thanesri, Sawaneh, 335337.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid.,5.

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No t e s t o pag e s 36 4 373

98. Ibid.,335337.
99. Ibid.,91.
100. An English indigo trader of the Rae Bareilly area came to him for
ziyarat and offered him food and money; see ibid.,61. For traders of
Mirzapur and zamindars, see6263.
101. Ibid.,92.
102. Ibid.,75. Camels arrived on their own at the port of Aden to carry him
to the city, and then disappeared before he could even pay their
drivers.

Conclusion

1. Copy of a letter addressed to the czar by Dalip Singh, March 1887, L/

PS/20/H/3/9.
2. Copy of a letter from Dalip Singh to Katkoff, n.d., L/PS/20/H/3/9.
3. Copy of a letter from Dalip Singh to Sardar Trekar Singh, 20 March
1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
4. Dalip Singh to Victor D. Singh, n.d., L/PS/20/H/3/7.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Dalip Singh to children, 21 May 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
8. Correspondent from Paris, 7 June 1890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
9. F. H. Villier to Maitland, 14 April 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
10. Dalip Singh to unknown addressee, Moscow, 17 April 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
11. Dalip Singh to unknown addressee, Moscow, 2 August 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
12. Dalip Singh to unknown addressee, Moscow, 17 June 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
13. Foreign Office information about Dalip Singh, sent to India, 23 March
1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
14. Capt. Andrew Hearsey, letter concerning Dalip Singh, 9 August 1887,
L/PS/20/H/3/9.
15. Letter concerning Dalip Singh, 29 August 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
16. Dalip Singh papers, communicated by Foreign Office, 12 September
1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
17. Daniel R. Brower, Islam and Ethnicity: Russian Colonial Policy in
Turkestan, in Russias Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700
1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2001),115135.
18. Adeeb Khalid, Representations of Russia in Central Asian Discourse,
in Brower and Lazzerini, Russias Orient, 188202.
19. Edward J. Lazzerini, Local Accommodation and Resistance to
Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Crimea, in Brower and Lazzerini,
Russias Orient, 169187, esp. 179.
20. Dalip Singh, draft proclamation, Moscow, 22 October 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/9.

466

No t e s t o pag e s 373 378

21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., Foreign Office to Edward Bradford, 20 November 1888, L/
PS/20/H/3/9.
24. Dalip Singh to czar, n.d., L/PS/20/H/3/9.
25. C. J. Rich, resident at Baghdad, to chairman of Secret Committee of
Court of Directors, 10 June 1817, Baghdad letters, L/PS/9/79.
26. Arminus Vambery, The Coming Struggle for India (London: Cassell,
1885),125128, 130133, 138164.
27. The 1891 official India visit of the czarevitch triggered a range of
reports on the Russian government in the Urdu press of north India.
Hardly any report indicated the Muslim inclination toward Russia.
The Nairang of Agra reflected on Russian atrocities toward Jews and
the silence of European nationswho always raised concerns for the
Christians in Ottoman lands. The Hamidul Akhbar of Moradabad
alluded to the religious intolerance of the Russian government. It
warned those who were inclined to them that it had tampered with
Muslim religious texts in its territories. And the Alam-i-Taswir from
Kanpur reported how Muslims saw the Russians as the most uncivilized people among European nations. See selections from vernacular
texts received up to 24 March 1891, pp.205206, L/R/5/68; and selections from vernacular texts received up to 10 February 1891, p. 97,
L/R/5/68.
28. Tuti-i-Hind, Meerut, 8 October 1892, selections received up to 12
October 1892, p. 373, L/R/5/69; Tuti-i-Hind, Meerut, 16 October
1892, selections received up to 16 October 1892, p.389, L/R/5/69.
29. No. 8, telegram no. 77, MacLean to foreign secretary, Simla, 29 July
1888, IOR/R/1/1/99.
30 No.11, telegram no. 110, MacLean, on special duty to Khurasan frontier, to H. M. Durand, secretary to government of India, Foreign
Department, IOR/R/1/1/99; see also no. 12, tr. of a letter from Malik
Marwarid, agent, to Gen. MacLean, 27 July 1888, IOR/R/1/1/99.
31. No. 21, demi-official letter from W. J. Cunningham to Lt. Col. R. P.
Nisbet, 12 December 1888, IOR/R/1/1/99.
32. No. 23, Nawab Hasan Ali Khan, Meshd agent, to Brig. MacLean, 5
October 1888, IOR/R/1/1/99.
33. Ibid.
34. Ltr. no. 28, extract from Nawab Hasan Ali Khan, Meshd Agent to Brig.
MacLean, 15 October 1888, IOR/R/1/1/99.
35. Foreign Department, secret 1, proceedings July 1889, nos. 4445,
R/1/1/100. Copy of a special branch political diary for the week end
ing 25April 1889 maintained by Political Agent H. M. Temple,
R/1/1/100.
36. Correspondent from Paris, 24 May1890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
37. Ibid.
38. Correspondent from Paris to Foreign Office, 20 May 1890, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.

467

No t e s t o pag e s 378 382

39. Gurbachan Singh and cousins to Dalip Singh, 26 February 1889, L/

PS/20/H/3/9.
40. No. 45, E. Baring, Cairo, to viceroy, 24 April 1888, p.6, R/1/1/77.
41. M. H. Durand to Col. Edward Bradford, 23 April 1888, Foreign
Department, secret 1, proceedings May 1888, nos. 4149. Particulars
regarding Abdul Rasul, an emissary of Maharaja Dalip Singh at Cairo
and information about Soudan intrigues carried on by certain Egyptian,
Turkish and French officials, p. 7, R/1/1/77.
42. No. 24, secretary of state to viceroy, 30 September 1889, p. 373, L/
PS/20/H/3/9.
43. Christy Campbell, The Maharajahs Box: An Imperial Story of Conspiracy,
Love, and a Gurus Prophecy (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 330.
According to Aziz, he had been used by the French in bribing the
Turkish court in their anti-British deeds in Egypt.
44. Ibid., 318.
45. M. H. Durand to Col. Edward Bradford, 23 April 1888, Foreign
Department, secret 1, proceedings May 1888, nos. 4149, R/1/1/77.
Particulars regarding Abdul Rasul, an emissary of Maharaja Dalip
Singh at Cairo, and information about Soudan intrigues carried on by
certain Egyptian, Turkish, and French officials, p.7.
46. Foreign Office, 29 July 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
47. No. 41, Munshi Azizuddin to foreign secretary, 2 April 1888, Abbats
Hotel, Alexandria, p.2, R/1/1/77.
48. Ibid., p.4. Lal-din wanted to be restored to the position he had held in
the service of the late maharaja of Kashmir, and he wanted the sultan
of Turkey to pressure the British government to help him.
49. Ibid.
50. Azizuddin, attach to Foreign Department, government of India, to
Sir E. Baring, consul general, Egypt, 28 March 1888, Foreign
Department secret 1, proceedings June 1888, nos. 1621, R/1/1/79;
proceedings of Maharajah Dalip Singh and of his emissary Abdul
Rasul in Egypt in connection with the Soudan intrigues, enclosure 2
in no. 157, Cairo, 28 March 1888, p.2, R/1/1/79.
51. Proceedings of Maharajah Dalip Singh and of his emissary Abdul
Rasul in Egypt in connection with the Soudan intrigues, enclosure 2
in no. 157, Cairo, 28 March 1888, p.3, R/1/1/79.
52. Azizuddin, detective, to foreign secretary, 14 May 1888, Foreign
Department, secret 1, proceedings August 1888, no. 1316, particulars of an interview with Abdul Rasul an emissary of Dalip Singh
at Cairo, R/1/1/82. Alikhanoff was of the view that the attack
should target Kashmir, even though the forceful demonstration was at
Herat.
53. Tr. of a letter from Amrik Singh, Cairo, 20 May 1888, R/1/1/82.
54. Tr. of a letter written in Turkish and found in the private papers of one
Abdul Rasul, p.5. R/1/1/79.
55. Correspondent from Paris, 10 January 1891, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
56. Campbell, Maharajahs Box, 331.

468

No t e s t o pag e s 382 38 9

57. C. A. Hopessad to Maitland, 7 October 1889, pp. 375376, Duleep

Singh, demi-official correspondence, 18851890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
58. Foreign Office to Lord Cross, 31 December 1889, p. 382, Duleep
Singh, demi-official correspondence, 18851890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
59. Correspondent from Paris, 10 January 1891, p. 480, Duleep Singh,
demi-official correspondence, 18851890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
60. Correspondent from Paris, 11 April 1891, pp.484485, Duleep Singh,
demi-official correspondence, 18851890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
61. Correspondent from Paris, 7 July 1889, Duleep Singh, demi-official
correspondence, 18851890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
62. H. M. Durand to Edward Bradford, Political and Secret Department,
India Office, London, 9 September 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
63. H. M. Durand to Edward Bradford, 28 April 1888, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
64. Extract from a letter from Maj. Gen. M. Dillon to Sir Y. Roberts,
September 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
65. H. M. Durand to Edward Bradford, 4 February 1888, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
66. Ibid.
67. Dalip Singh to Husen Khan, 7 October 1885, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
68. H. M. Durand to Edward Bradford, 19 August 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
69. Tr. of a letter from AS [detective], 23 May 1888, Foreign Department,
secret 1, proceedings August 1888, nos. 1316, R/1/1/82.
70. Dalip Singh to Sirdar Delour Jung, 19 May 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
71. Ibid.
72. Dalip Singh to nizam, 30 October 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
73. Dalip Singh to cousins, 27 November 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
74. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
26 February 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid. There was, however, no proof that any positive response had been
obtained from any of the Indian princes.
77. Dalip Singh to Gurbachan Singh, 18 November 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Dalip Singh to maharaja of Kashmir, 2 October 1889, L/PS/20/
H/3/9.
81. Campbell, Maharajahs Box, 333.
82. H. M. Durand to E. Bradford, 11 March 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
83. AS [detective] to foreign secretary, 24 May 1888, Foreign Department,
secret 1, proceedings August 1888, nos. 1316, R/1/1/82.
84. Correspondent from Paris, 17 May 1891, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
85. Andrew Hearsey, memorandum, 15 June 1887, pp. 3435, L/PS/20/
H/3/9.
86. Minute by J. B. Lyall, lieutenant governor, Punjab, 18 June 1887, L/
PS/20/H/3/9.
87. B. E. Gowan, commanding Fourth Regiment, to Maj. Gen. W. K.
Elles, adjutant general, India, 10 June 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.

469

No t e s t o pag e s 39 0 393

88. Alam-i-Taswir, Kanpur, 3 February 1891, selections from vernacular

newspapers published in Northwest Provinces, Oudh, Central
Provinces, and Rajputana, received up to 20 January 1891, pp.9798,
L/R/5/68.
89. Alam-i-Taswir, Kanpur, 10 February 1891, selections from vernacular
newspapers published in Northwest Provinces, Oudh, Central Prov
inces, and Rajputana, received up to 17 February 1891, p. 116,
L/R/5/68.
90. Hamidul Akhbar, Moradabad, 12 March 1891, selections from vernacular newspapers published in Northwest Provinces, Oudh, Central
Provinces, and Rajputana, received up to 24 March 1891, p. 206,
L/R/5/68.
91. Hindustan, 17 June 1891, selections from vernacular newspapers published in Northwest Provinces, Oudh, Central Provinces, and Rajputana,
received up to 18 June 1891, p.419, L/R/5/68.
92. Oudh Punch, Lucknow, 3 September 1891, selections from vernacular
newspapers published in Northwest Provinces, Oudh, Central Prov
inces, and Rajputana, received up to 17 September 1891, p. 637,
L/R/5/68.
93. Ibid., p.638.
94. Shokh-i-Oudh, Lucknow, 16 February 1883, selections from the vernacular press received up to 22 February 1883, pp.158159, L/R/5/60.
95. Secretary to government of India to Secret Political and Secret
Department, London, Peshawar confidential diary, no.1, 7 January
1888, f. 403, L/PS/7/52.
96. Northwest Provinces selections, no. 2, 1899, L/PS/7/111.
97. Col. J. E. Waller, commanding Nineteenth Punjab Infantry to Maj.
Gen. W. K. Elles, Adjutant General, India, 9 August 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
98. H. M. Henderson, memorandum, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
99. Dalip Singh to Foreign Office, July 1891, Paris, 1891, p. 499, L/PS/20/
H/3/9.
100. Dalip Singh to Prince, 15 August 1890, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
101. Moscow correspondent, The Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, Times
(London), 26 May 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
102. Correspondent from Paris, 1 June 1890, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
103. Dalip Singh to his son the prince, 15 June 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
104. H. M. Durand to Edward Bradford, 19 August 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
105. Ibid.
106. P. D. Henderson, memorandum, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
107. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
26 February 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
108. Dalip Singhs letter, Foreign Office correspondence, 19 May 1887,
pp. 9096, L/PS/20/H/3/7; memorandum, 1 November1887, L/
PS/20/H/3/7.
109. Moscow correspondent, The Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, Times
(London), 26 May 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.

470

No t e s t o pag e s 393 4 0 0

110. Dalip Singh to son, Moscow, 17 April 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/9.

111. Campbell, Maharajahs Box, 104.
112. Ibid., 275276.
113. Correspondent from Paris, 24 May 1890, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
114. Dalip Singh to cousins, 7 January 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid.
117. Dalip Singhs appeal, Brother Princes and People of India, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
118. W. M. Young, note by the secretary to the government of Punjab, 16
June 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7; comments on Mr. Durands demi-official
on Dalip Singh, 8 June 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
119. P. D. Henderson, memorandum, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
120. Summary of letter from Gurbachan to Dalip Singh, 1 January 1889, L/
PS/20/H/3/9.
121. H. M. Durand to lieutenant governor, Simla, 22 July 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
122. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
26 February 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
123. Ibid.
124. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
7 May 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
125. Correspondent from Paris, 28 January 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
126. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
7 May 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
127. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
26 February 1889, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
128. Gurbachan Singh, Narinder Singh, and Gurdit Singh to Dalip Singh,
4 February 1890, L/PS/20/H/3/9.
129. Ibid.
130. Andrew Hearsey, memorandum, 15 June 1887, p.30, L/PS/20/H/3/7,
131. Ibid., p.34.
132. Letter from Mr. Youngson, a missionary, 3 February 1887, section 2,
Opinions of Various Officers Regarding Sympathy with Dalip Singh
on the Part of the Sikh Soldiers, p.5, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
133. Andrew Hearsey, memorandum, 15 June 1887, p.38, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
134. State of Feeling in Certain Sikh Regiments about Maharajah Dhulip
Singh. Replies from Commanding Officers, June 1887, L/PS/20/
H/3/7.
135. G. Chesney to Lt. Col. E. Collen, 21 June 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
136. Col. W. I. Bax, commanding Eleventh Bengal Lancers, to Maj. Gen.
W. K. Elles, adjutant general in India, 11 June 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
137. Lt. Col. H. S. Marshall, commanding Twenty-Eighth Regiment,
Punjab Infantry, to Maj. Gen. W. K. Elles, adjutant general in India, 1
August 1887, L/PS/20/H/3/7.
138. Ibid., p.44.
139. Suchait Singh to Foreign Office, 17 June 1892, L/PS/20/H/3/9.

471

No t e s t o pag e s 4 0 0 4 0 4

140. Ibid.
141. Duleep Singh, demi-official correspondence, 18851890, L/PS/20/
H/3/7; Dalip Singh to Marquess of Salisbury, 16 January 1886, L/
PS/20/H/3/7.
142. Ibid.
143. M. Naeem Qureshi, Ottoman Turkey, Ataturk, and Muslim South Asia
(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2014),2340.
144. Azad ki Kahani khud Azad ki Zabani, as dictated to Abdur Razzaq
Malihabadi (Calcutta: Hali Publishing House, 1959; repr., Delhi:
Ateqad Publishers, 2008), 45, 50. Khairuddin, like many of the cosmopolitan actors discussed in this book, enjoyed the patronage of Caliph
Abd-al Majid. He stayed in Istanbul for two years and received a government scholarship. His time in the city was spent in the company of
scholars, in libraries, and copying books that interested him. He developed a long-lasting friendship with Sheikh ul Islam Sheikh Mosi in
Istanbul. His Istanbul connections took him to other intellectual hubs
in Konya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. In Baghdad he shared the intellectual
camaraderie of the famous Alusi scholarly family. He initiated Sheikh
Abd-al Rahman, Naqib al Sharaf, of Iraq, to the Naqshbandi Sufi order,
and the Naqib initiated himself into the Qadariya order.
145. For Azads definition of jihad as an anticolonial struggle against
Western injustices, see Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South
Asia (Ranikhet: Permanent Black Press, 2008), 192202.

472

Ack now ledg m e n t s

The research for this book was done in New Delhi and Lucknow in India, in
Cambridge and London in the United Kingdom, and at Harvard University in
the United States. In New Delhi, the staff of both the National Archive of
India and the Jamia Millia Islamia Library offered support and cooperation,
for which I am grateful. In Lucknow, Mr. Obaidur Rahman helped me explore
the rich collections at the Shibli Library at the Nadwa ut Ulema seminary. The
award of the Cambridge-Singhvi Fellowship in 2009 enabled me to access the
rich records at the Cambridge University Library and the Centre of South
Asian Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom. The British Library and the
Public Records Office at Kew offered a much-needed trove of Urdu tracts and
official records on migrs. The prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard
in 20092010 enabled me to use the rich Urdu collections at the Widener.
The book was written in the peace and quiet of the Radcliffe Institute at
Harvard. During my yearlong stint on campus, I made many friends in the
Middle Eastern Studies Department who helped me analyze better the connected histories of the British and the Ottoman Empires. I owe a huge intellectual debt to Professor Cemal Kafadar, who very kindly permitted me to sit
in on his delightful lectures on the early Ottoman Empire. His galaxy of studentsall accomplished Ottoman scholars in their own righthelped me
navigate the complex world of the later empire. I am particularly indebted to
Professors Cemil Aydin, Dana Sajjid, and Ilham Makdisi for their help. I was
lucky to get valuable insights from some of the most admired Middle Eastern
scholars in America: Professors Juan Cole, Leila Fawaz, Enseng Ho, and
Michael Laffan. Sunil Amrith and Eric Tagliacozzo introduced me to the study
of migr lives and their lesser-known world at the underbelly of empires.
In the United Kingdom, my friend from my student days at Cambridge,
Timothy Harper, familiarized me with the enigmatic world of transimperial
actors via his own insightful studies on Southeast Asia and its global outreach.

473

AC K NOW LEDG M ENTS

During my many research stints at Cambridge University, Professors C. A.

Bayly and Joya Chatterjee enriched my work with their valuable suggestions.
Professor Francis Robinson of Royal Holloway College offered much-needed
direction at the initial stages of my research.
This book has been influenced by compelling recent research in South Asian
studies that has urged me to think beyond the binaries of nationalism and communalism and of nationalism and pan-Islamism. I am particularly indebted to
Professors Ayesha Jalal, Sugata Bose, Kris Manjapra, and Syed Akbar Hyder for
their intellectual input. Their effort to see the making of Indian nationalisms
beyond the borders of the nation-state shaped this book in no small measure. I
am also grateful to Professor Muzaffar Alam, who provided me with valuable
references that enriched the discussion of premodern India in this work.
Professors Antoinette Burton and Maya Jasanoff shared with me many valuable
references from their own work on the British Empire. Professors Upinder
Singh, William Pinch, Margrit Pernau, and Sajjad Rizvi, as well as my journalist cousin based in Muscat, Sabeena Sagheer, took time out of their busy
schedules to read and comment on different parts of this book. Farina Mir,
Benjamin Hopkins, Sunil Sharma, Robert Travese, Durba Ghosh, and Neeti
Nair made valuable suggestions at numerous presentations that I made in the
United States at Harvard University, Michigan University, George Washington
University, Cornell University, Boston College, and Tufts University.
I wish to thank the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, for a
travel grant in 2012 that enabled me to visit the British Library in London. I
am grateful also to Uma Bhattacharya, who very kindly agreed to create the
map for me at short notice. At Harvard University Press, my thanks to Sharmila
Sen, commissioning editor, and her colleague, Heather Hughes, for their
patience and supportiveness. Kathleen Richards, who led the production team,
made the last stages of this project smooth and tension free through her professionalism and gentle manner. My copy editor Anne Sussmans exceptional
talent and sensitivity in preserving the essence of my arguments was truly
remarkable. I am grateful to both her and Kathleen. I also wish to put on
record that sections of this book are informed by themes developed in earlier
essays that have appeared in Modern Asian Studies (2011), in the Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient (2011), and in Mutiny at the Margins:
New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, volume 3, Global Perspectives, ed.
Crispin Bates and Marina Carter (New Delhi: Sage, 2013).
My loving friends in Delhi, London, and Boston have, as always, stood by
me through the often lonesome journey of research and writing. My special
thanks to Upinder Singh, Farhat Hasan, Radhika Singha, Ravi Vasudevan,
Hari Vasudevan, Rukun Advani, Meena Bhargava, Farida Khan, Uma Singh,
Jaideep Gupta, Vidya Raghunathan, Shohini Ghosh, Sabeena Gadihoke,
Sheena Jain, Katherine Prior, Simon Dunkley, Colm OHiggins, Tomoko
Stein, Cynthia Becker, Elaine Witham, Sugata Bose, Ayesha Jalal, Vijay Pinch,
and Jos Gommans. My nieces Maryam and Ayesha not only provided hours of
welcome joy and mirth to break the routine of writing but also helped me with
their computer skills. Finally, I owe special gratitude to my parents, Roshan
and Shariq Alavi, for their love, affection, and unflinching support.

474

I n de x

Abbas I, Al Khidvi, Pasha, 159

Abbot, James, 6566, 67, 71, 73, 89
Abdul Rahman-ul Zahir, Sayyid, 161,
162163, 167
Abdul Wahid, Seth, 147, 148
Abdul Wahid Bengali, Maulana, 237, 260
Abdullah, bin Abbas, 255
Abu Hanifa, 270. See also Hanafi jurisprudence
Acheh, 23, 161162, 163, 269. See also
Indonesia; Java
Aden, 99, 111, 120, 125, 217, 429n10;
British political resident in, 96, 97,
9899, 125; British treaty with, 96;
residents role in Ottoman territories,
102103, 105109, 128, 132, 151, 163,
164, 166
Afghani, Jamaluddin, 2526, 115, 167,
181, 371, 383
Afghanistan, 44, 47, 66, 145, 163, 165,
268, 331332, 327; and arms trade, 75,
76, 79, 8081; and reformists, support
for, 71
Ahmad, al-Qushashi, 23
Ahmad Dahlan, Sayyid, 173174, 192,
404, 441n9
Ahmad Fadl, Sayyid 111, 159160;
Al-Anwarul Nabwiyat-wal-Asrarul
Ahadita, 111, 159160
Ahmad Shah, Sayyid, 63
Ahmad Shahid, Sayyid, 3536, 45, 50, 56,
63, 68, 169, 188, 223, 226, 231, 268, 269,

293, 331, 332, 338; British opinion of,

354, 362; Jafar Thanesris biography of,
354355 (see also Sawaneh); sainthood
for, 8890; Sayyid Ahmad Khans views
on, 356; and Tariqa-i Muhammadiya,
35, 226, 231, 354, 363, 365; and wahabi
movement, 331, 332, 362 (see also
Wahabis); and war on frontier, 63,
122, 284. See also Sirat-i-Mustaqim
Ahmad Sirhindi, Sheikh, 9, 10, 11,
33, 35
Ahmadullah, Maulvi, 60, 61, 62, 421n70,
421n71; trial of, 5659, 60
Ahmadullah Shah, Sufi, 18
Ainslie, W., 63
Akbar, 182; and Chishtiya Sufis,
228229
Akbar Shah, Sayyid, 6869
Aktar-ab-us-saat, Siddiq Hasans
defense of, 317
Al-Anwarul, 159160
Al-Gayrat, 298
Al Ghurrah tribe, 119, 120, 121122
Al Kaieti tribe, 107
Al Kathiri tribe, 120, 122, 123
Al Khalifa, 298
Al-Khalife, 220
Alam, Muzaffar, 14, 54
Alawi, Sayyid, 111, 112
Alawiyya tariqa, 111112
Alexander II, Czar 18
Ali, Inayat, 70, 71

475

i n de x

Ali, Khoom, 5556

Ali, Khurram, 35, 39; Nasihat-i-Muslimin
(see Nasihat-i-Muslimin)
Ali, Muhammad, 2627; and Koranic war
ethics, 8586
Ali, Wilayat, 89, 90
Alikhanov, General, 388
Alikhtawa ala Maslaul Istawa (Existence
of God on Heaven), 279280, 288
Alkusaiyar, Muhammad bin Ibrahim,
318319
All India Muslim League, pro-Turkish
sentiment, 322323
Allah, Sibghat, 23
Alusis, Shihabuddin, 179
Andaman islands, 4, 2, 21, 332, 338, 339,
342, 343, 345, 347348, 350351, 403;
settlement as civilizing mission, 343,
344, 345, 346
Anglo-Arabian and Persian Steamship
Company, 8182
Aqwam al-Masalik li Marifat Ahwal alMamalik, 1819
Arab Bulletin, 327328
Arab caliph, demand for, 139140, 141,
144
Arab jurisprudence, 155156
Arab Renaissance, 178, 180, 442n21
Arab revolt, 323, 327328
Arab theater, 180181
Arabian Peninsula, 117; British involvement in, 9596, 100, 129; and BritishOttoman imperial rivalry, 96, 130; and
Muslim cosmopolitanism, 328329;
Ottoman interest in, 114, 117
Arabic language, 28, 45, 85, 319; dissemination via Urdu texts, 3334, 35; language of Islamic scholarship, 34
Arabicist cultural grid, 5152; and British
colonialism, 91; and cult of saint, 8485,
87, 88, 90, 91; and idea of social levelling, 34 (see also Social leveling, concept of); India specific, 33, 8485, 9091,
98; self-interpretation and tauhid at
core of, 84 (see also Tauhid). See also
Reformists
Arabist Islamic tradition, 34, 35, 269.
See also Arabicist cultural grid;
Reformists
Arabs, 328; Begum of Bhopals support
of, 324326; and British, 106, 144, 146,
323; imperial networks and, 8, 105; and

Turks, 144, 145, 146. See also Hadrami

Arabs; Indian Arabs
Arms trade, 424n146, 424n148; arming
of Persian tribesmen, 80; British restric
tions on, 80, 8183, 424n146; British
subjects role in, 7980; European
commercial firms and, 7579; Francis
Times and Company and, 76, 7778,
81; imperial networks and, 76; Persian
traders and, 7677; profit motive and,
81, 82; Somalis and, 80; trans-Asia network and, 76, 79
Asad Ali, Munshi, 309
Asbab-i-Baghawat-i-Hind (Causes for the
Revolt in India), 357, 367
Aurangzeb, 277
Awadh, bin Abdulla, 123
Azad, Abul Kalam, Maulana, 403404
Aziz, Abd-al, Caliph, 5, 19, 175, 178,
195
Aziz, Abd-al, Shah, 10, 39
Azra, Azyumardi, 23
Badayuni, 318, 460n159
Bahadur, Barak Jang, 100, 101, 102,
103104, 105, 106, 107, 109
Bahadur, Nawaz Jang, 100, 103, 104,
105106, 109; invasion of Makulla,
107; political ambitions of, 101102
Bahai faith, 428n7
Bahrain, 81, 95
Baillie, Neil. B. E., 140
Baksh, Elahi, 58, 60, 61, 64
Banerji, Arup, 54
Barak Jang. See Bahadur, Barak Jang
Bargash, Sayyid, 107, 108
Bari, Abdul, 308
Bayly, C. A., 12, 15
Begum of Bhopal, 267, 326, 330; and
Arab revolt, view of, 327; Arabs, support to, 324325; and British, alliance
between, 323, 324, 325; and caliph,
desacralized view of, 325326; and
Muslim cosmopolitan world, 326, 327;
and Turkey, ambivalence towards,
323326
Bender, Jill, 17
Bey, Osman, 158, 159, 165
Biddat (heresy), Islamic concept of, 37,
38, 231, 247, 248
Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 208
Bombay, 23, 4

476

i n de x

Bose, Sugata, 15
Britain: imperial ambitions in Arabian
Peninsula, 9596 (see also Arabian
Peninsula); and Russia, relations
between, 113 (see also Russia); and
Turkey, relations between, 328
(see also Turkey). See also British
British: and Al Kaieti tribe, 107; Arab
Muslim subjects of, 9596, 100 (see also
Indian Arabs); and Arabian Peninsula,
intervention in, 9596, 100, 129; and
Arabs, 106, 144, 146, 323; and Begum
of Bhopal, 323, 324, 325; Broom, intervention in, 107, 108, 109; consulates,
significance in Ottoman territories, 124
125; empire, hegemonic frame of, 12;
and Handrami Arabs of Haiderabad,
97; Hijaz, influence in, 148150; imperialism, and the Ottoman Empire,
271272; and Makulla-Shehr dispute,
106107, 108; Muslim cosmopolis and,
326, 405; and Nawaz Jung (see Bahadur,
Nawaz Jang); and Ottomans, 9, 13, 96,
100101, 106, 113, 129; and politics of
Hijaz, 109; as protector of Muslims,
96, 100, 144145, 146; rule of law, 333
334; and Sheriff of Mecca, alliance
between, 143145, 146; subjecthood
and ethnic categorization, notion of,
103, 105; and Sultan of Muscat, support
for, 154, 155; surveillance networks of,
125126, 142, 228, 300, 302, 306, 308,
392, 321, 401; and Syyid Fadl, relationship between, 130, 131, 133134, 151,
153155
Broom, British intervention in, 107, 108,
109
Bucknall Brothers, 82
Bukhari, Imam, 189, 216
Bukharisharif, 188, 189
Burn, H. P., 67, 69, 73
Burn, M. R., 322
Cairo, 3, 4, 5, 22, 2527, 30, 225; and
Javanese nationalism, 183, 442n23
Caliph, 21, 219, 220, 329, 442n23; Arab
unacceptability of, 143; Begum of
Bhopals desacralized view of, 325
326; challenge from European nationstates, 136, 139; desacralization of,
183184; ethnic origins, debates on,
136, 140; ideal, debates on, 135136,

139140; Indian Muslims support for,

403405; status of, ambiguity regard
ing, 117; as temporal and spiritual head
of Muslims, 115, 116, 160, 161, 167,
329; tradition of, 329330
Carmichael, D. F., 121
Casale, Giancarlo, 14
Casey, Patrick, 393394
Chishti, Nizamuddin, 90
Chishtiya Sufis, 36, 181, 182, 226,
228229, 232, 235, 241, 412n13
Clancy-Smith, Julia, 16
Codex, 204
Cole, Jaun, 25, 228
Conolly, Henry, 112, 113, 115, 163, 164,
440n213
Consensus. See Ijma
Consulates, setting up of, 230
Consuls, powers of, 124, 125
Cubbon, M., 6768
Cuningham, W. J., 367
Dale, Stephen, 54, 163, 167
Dalhousie, Lord, 72
Dalip Singh, Maharaja, 368, 386, 389,
391, 397, 392; and Abdul Rasul (see
Rasul, Abdul); agents of, 383385; and
Ayub Khan, links with, 371; British
fears regarding, 398400; and Irish,
links with, 392394; Kashmir, importance of, 370, 387388; Muslim princes
and, 385387; and Muslim cosmopolis,
370377, 402; new mutiny, call for,
395396; political ambitions, 369
370, 373; return to India, plans for,
395399; Russia, move to 368370,
371, 374; Russia, support for, 3734;
and spirit of 1857, 394401; and trans
imperial networks, 375377
Damascus, 143
Darul ulum Deoband. See Deoband
madrassa
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 14
Dayly, General H. D., 312
Deccan, 103; and Hadramawt, con
nection between, 94 (see also
Haiderabad)
Dehlavi, Shah Muhammad Ishaq, 45
Dehlawi, Ismael, and the Hanafi sect,
276277
Delhi Naqshbandiya Sufi Shahwaliulla.
See Shahwaliulla

477

i n de x

Deoband madrassa, 193194, 223, 243,

251, 254, 321322; and Imdadullah
Makki, 228, 238, 240, 241243, 255,
256, 257, 258259, 261262, 263, 264;
Sufi format, adoption of, 257258,
261262; syllabus at, 262; tauhid and
scriptures, stress on, 257
Deobandi Sufism, 257258
Deringil, Selim, 29
Dhofar, 105, 118123, 128, 130, 159; annex
ation by Sultan of Muscat, 123124,
131; Sayyid Fadls claim over, 126127,
155156, 158; Sayyid Fadls efforts in
reclaiming of, 130133, 151, 154, 163,
166
Digha, Osman, 299, 301, 305, 309, 381
Din Muhammad, 291292, 303,
304308
Diwan-ul-Khutab-lil-Sanat-il-Kamila,
292293, 312; Siddiq Hasans self-
defense of, 315316
Djajadiningrat, Aboe Bakar, 192
Dragomans, role of, 125
Durand, H. M., 178, 302
Durud (salutations and blessings), 235,
236, 249
Effendi, Mustafa, 383
Effendi, Seid Sachel, 134
Egypt, 18, 23, 26, 180. See also Cairo
Eid, Aziz, 181
European commercial firms, and arms
trade, 7579
Fadl, Sayyid, 5, 8, 9, 13, 16, 94, 105, 106,
109115, 126, 144, 146, 151, 154155,
156, 159, 324, 402, 440n213; and Abd-al
Hamid II, 114, 115, 116, 124, 151153,
167, 432n62 (see also Caliph, critique of,
below); and Abdullah Arab Moonuffe,
152, 153; and al Ghurrah tribe, 121122;
and al Kathiri tribe, 120, 122, 123; antiBritish activities in Malabar, 112113,
115, 123; and Arab jurisprudence, 155
156; biography of, 111, 159160; British,
friendly overtures towards, 130, 131, 134,
153155, 166; British, global ambitions
and, 116, 117, 118, 130; British reaction
to rise of, 127128; British surveillance
of, 110; and as broker for Ottomans,
106, 113, 117, 133, 155, 156157, 158,
160; caliph, critique of, 133134, 135,

153, 154, 166; caliph, as Islamic head,

views on, 115, 116, 167; cosmopolis of,
124141; deportation to Hijaz, 112113,
163, 164; Dhofar campaign, 131133
(see also Dhofar); Dutch Indonesia,
influence in, 163; Fundamentals of Islam,
The, 114; as governor of Hadramawt
region, 110; Hijaz, influence in, 164,
165166, and imperial contest over
Muslim subjects, 150160; imperial
interest in, 117, 118, 119, 126; and impe
rial networks, 128, 130, 132; imperial
politics, role in rise of, 128129; Indian
Muslims, influence on, 163165, 166;
Istanbul, stay in, 30, 109, 114, 124,
130, 151152, 155, 158, 159160, 164,
165, 166167, 432n62; and Jamaluddin
Afghani, 167; Learning to Avoid Unbe
lievers, 114; and Moplah revolt, 5, 112
113; and Makulla, supervision of, 106;
and Osman Bey, 165; Ottoman Porte,
contacts with, 113, 119; and pan-Islam,
160168; pan-Islamic activism and
trans-Asian networks, 115116; political ambitions of, 113; political model,
155; as ruler of Dhofar, 118124, 126
127 (see also Dhofar); Sayyid Ahmad
Fadls biography of, 111112, 159160;
Sayyid card, use of, 154, 155, 158, 159;
self-representation as leader of Muslims,
156; and Sultan of Muscat, 151, 157,
158; Tanbih al-Ukala, 114, 115; Tarikat
al-Hanifa, 114; and trans-Asian Muslim
network, 167168; and trans-Asian military labor market, 161; as transimperial
broker, 114, 116117, 119, 130, 153154,
156157; transimperial cosmopolis of,
116117, 161; transimperial rivalries
and, 113114, 115119, 129131, 133,
156167; tribal feuds, role in, 119, 120,
122123; tribal opposition to, 122123;
Turkey, influence in, 165; use of Islam
in state building, 121; writings of,
114115
Fadl, Sayyid Ahmad, 159160
Fagan, C. G. F, 80
Faislah Haft-i-Maslah (Verdict on Seven
Issues), 195, 245253, 256, 258; Arab
Wahabiya extremism, critique of, 250
251; biddat, redefinition of, 248249;
consensus, advocacy of, 245, 246, 254,
258; Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, 276, 277; Fathul

478

i n de x

Mughees ba Fiqhul Hadith (Seeking

Blessings in the Light of Hadith),
280283, 288; fatihaa, discussion of,
246, 249251; Itemad (faith), Islamic
principle of, and Muslim unity, 226,
232; invitation to Islam, 253; mouloud
(celebration of Prophet), discussion of,
246248; murrawaja

(customs), discussion of, 246; qawwali as a form of devotion, 246, 252; urrs (celebration of the
cult of the saint) justification of, 246,
251252, 258
Fatihaa, 246, 249251
Fawaz, Leila, 15
Fazl, Sayyid, 108
Fazl-i-Haq, Maulana, 260, 333
Fitrat, Abdurrauf, 372
Fitterah, Islamic concept of, 61, 62
Francis Times and Company, and arms
trade, 76, 7778, 81
Fraser, I. S., 67; and reformists, view of,
4950; and Wahabi network, investigation of, 5051, 52
Gangohi, Abdul Quddis, 257
Gangohi, Rashid Ahmed, 223, 241, 255,
257, 258, 261, 262, 263, 265; and Zia-ulQulub, 256
Gasprinskii, Ismael Bey, 372373
Ghiza-i-Rooh, Imdadullah Makkis commentary on, 194
Ghubal-i-Tarikh-I Bhopal (History of
Bhopal), 313
Girbal (History of Bhopal), 270, 288,
318
Global history, and non-European
worldview, 1415, 28
Global moment, 12, 16, 413n23
Gray, D., 326
Grey, Sir George, 17
Griffin, Lepel, 290, 310; and Din
Muhammad, 303, 305, 306307, 319,
320; and Siddiq Hasan, report on, 287,
288, 303, 305; Siddiq Hasans literature,
views on, 312313, 314; and Tarjumani-Wahabiya, criticism of, 313
Gulab Singh, Maharaja, 66
Hadramawt region, 93, 102, 110, 111, 157,
158; British intervention in, 100101;
and Deccan, connection between, 94.
See also Dhofar; Makulla

Hadrami Arabs, 93, 94, 95, 97, 103 112; as

British subjects, 100; and Ottoman
caliph, 116. See also Indian Arabs
Hafiz, 45, 203, 204, 211
Hafiz-i-Koran, 171, 203, 204, 211, 215, 217
Hai, Abd-al, Maulana, 36
Haiderabad, 4748, 85; Arab migrants in,
9394, 97, 98100. See also Bahadur,
Barak Jung; Bahadur, Nawaz Jung;
Nizam of Haiderabad
Haj, 124, 233, 281; Caliphs vs. European
management of, 136139
Hajutullah al Baligha, 190
Hakm, 256
Halat Pasha, 185
Hali, Altaf Husain, 359, 360
Hambal, Imam, 276
Hamid, Abdul, 301, 302
Hamid II, Abd-al, Caliph, 5, 6, 21, 25,
26, 29, 151, 152153, 167, 184, 269, 272,
304, 329, 402, 441n8, 452n12; administration in Hijaz, criticism of, 135136,
137139 (see also Sayyid Fadls critique
of, below); back to Islam policy, 117
118, 129; caliphate, institutionalization
of, 329330; caliph-centric pan-Islamism,
328; global ambitions of, 5, 124, 129
130, 184, 272; Indian emigrs, patronage
of, 19, 21, 24; mismanagement of haj
pilgrims, Indian critique of, 137139;
modernization efforts, 272; pan-Islamic
networks and, 19, 175; and Rahmatullah
Kairanwi, 174176, 184, 190, 217218;
and Sayyid Fadl, 114115, 127, 151, 157
158, 166, 432n62; Sayyid Fadls critique
of, 133134, 135, 153, 154;tanzimat
reforms, opposition to, 21, 178, 179.
See also Caliph
Hamidiyah library, 176
Hamidullah (son of Begum of Bhopal),
support for Turks, 322, 326
Hanafi jurisprudence, 270, 276277, 279
Hanafites, opposition to Siddiq Hasan,
270, 289, 290, 291
Haq, Zia ul, 375
Hasan, Abid, Maulvi, 262
Hasan-al, al-Wazzan, 14
Hayat-i-Javed, 359360
Hayey, Abd-al, Maulana, 270
Hearsey, Captain Andrew, 399400
Hidayat al Saail Ila Adillatil Masaail, 270,
276277, 286287, 293, 313, 316, 453n19

479

i n de x

Hifz, 171, 190. See also Hafiz; Hafiz-iKoran

Hijaz, 21, 118, 144, 145, 146, 307; British
consulate in, 124125; British influence
in, 109, 148150; British Muslim subjects in, 167; caliphs administration,
criticism of, 135136, 137; cosmopolitanism of, 135; distribution of Siddiq
Hasans books in, 298301, 302; ideal
caliph, debates on, 135136; Indian
merchants contribution in, 147; political discussions in, 142; political refugees in, 126, 142; political significance
for Ottomans, 152; Sayyid Fadls influence in, 164, 165166
Ho, Enseng, 111, 112
Hogg, A. G. F., 132, 133
Hunter, William, 357, 358; The Indian
Musalman, 332, 356, 361362
Hurgronje, Christiaan Snouck, 137, 192,
225
Ibn Taimiyyah, 179, 268269
Ibn-i-Arabi, 9, 10, 33, 35
Ibrahim, al-Kurani, 23
Ibrahim, Shaykh, 18
Ijaz-i-Iswi, 360
Ijma (consensus) Islamic tradition of, 5,
6, 1011, 20, 36; Imdadullah Makkiss
emphasis on, 20, 225, 226, 228229, 238,
252253, 254255; moderators role in,
195; Mughal tradition of, 228229; and
Muslim unity, 85, 226, 228229, 232,
233, 2345, 238, 272
Ijtihad (independent judgment), 179;
Siddiq Hasans emphasis on, 268,
269, 271
Iktirabussa, 313
Ilm-i-tajvid, Islamic tradition of, 266
Imdadullah Makki, Haji, 12, 3, 13, 20,
26, 30, 220, 221, 222225, 243, 266, 402,
451n151; balance between scripture
and Sufi practice, 195, 256, 262; belief
in universalism of tauhid, 226; biddat,
redefinition of, 248; book exchanges
with India, 254, 255256; consensus
literature of, 194195, 229; cosmopolitanism of, 20, 25, 229, 232, 234235
238, 240, 243 251252, 254, 256; and
Deoband seminary, 194, 223, 243, 257
258, 261; and Deobandis, correspondence with, 228, 238, 240, 2413, 255,

256, 258259, 261262, 263, 264; Faislah

Haft-i-Maslah (see Faislah Haft-i-Maslah);
global connectivity of Muslims, quest
for 230; guide (murshid), emphasis on,
195, 230232, 234, 236237, 240, 253,
254, 262, 265266; Hakm, 256; and
Hazrat Shah Muhammad Ishaq Muhajir,
224; Hindustan, influence in, 256; and
Hindustani Naqshbandi mujadids, inter
action with, 263; and imperial networks,
dependence on, 240, 255; intellectual
exchange with Hindustan, 243, 255256;
and Islamic principle of consensus,
stress on, 20, 225, 226, 228229, 238,
252253, 254255; Jihad i-Akbar, 229;
Jihad, definition of, 259; and Madrasa
Saulatiya, 228, 263, 264, 265; Masnavi
Maulana Rum, 194195, 229, 243245;
Masnavi of Maulana Rum, influence of,
222, 223; Mecca, migration to, 2, 224,
225, 226227, 228, 447n14; model of
conduct as basis of muslim unity, 237
(see also Zia-ul-Qulub); publication of
books in Hindustan, 260261; and
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, relationship
between, 225, 228, 263, 264265; and
Saluk (devotion), discussion of common
format, 231232, 233, 259, 260; Sharah
Faisla Haft Masala, 229; and Sufi devotional prescriptions, 262 (see also Ziaul-Qulub); and Sufi order in Mecca,
226; Sufi orientation, 223, 226, 232;
Sufi Shahwaliullas influence on, 226;
and unity of umma, 254255; Zia-ulQulub (see Zia-ul-Qulub)
Imkaane Kazab, 246
Imkaane Nazeer, 246
Imperial borders, hardening of, 227, 228
Imperial expansion, and Islamic reform,
23
Imperial history, hegemonic frame, 12
Imperial moment, of post mutiny decade,
20, 228, 271, 272
Imperial networks, 34, 15, 22, 24, 57;
Arabs and 8, 105; and arms trade (see
Arms trade); and Muslim connectivity,
1314; and Muslim cosmopolitanism,
6, 20, 22, 24, 27, 310; and reformists,
5960, 61, 64 (see also Reformists); as
response to official nationalism, 30
Imperialism, 12; and Muslim cosmopolitanism, 3031; and Naqshbandi global

480

i n de x

connections, 11; and official nationalism, 227; role of individuals in study

of, 1516; study via porous borders, 1516
Indian Arabs, 8, 92, 93110, 431n59; and
Arabian feuds, involvement in, 100101;
British categorization of, 97; British
interest in, 9; and British-Ottoman
rivalry, 96, 101; Charles B. Saunders
view of, 97, 98, 99; exodus from India,
concern regarding, 100; Haiderabad,
influence in, 98, 98, 99100; imperial
networks and, 8, 105; imperial rivalries
and, 89, 100101; and Muslim cosmopolis, 79
Indian Musalmans, The, 332, 361362, 367
Indian Muslim League, 326
Indonesia: caliph-centric pan-Islam, limited appeal in, 183, 442n23; Hadrami
migrants, and the caliph, 116; Sayyid
Fadls influence in, 163. See also Acheh;
Java
Indonesian nationalism, 183
Indonesian scholars in Mecca, 2324
Indo-Persian imperium, disintegration
of, 33, 34
Injeel of Jesus (Anjeel Masee), 201
Intiqad Fi Sherhal Etiqad. See Alikhtawa
ala Maslaul Istawa
Iqtrab us Sait, 294
Irish Fenians, in Northwest frontier,
392393
Islam, Arab version of, 117
Islam, Badrul, 65
Islamic charity, categories of, 6162
Islamic reform, and imperial expansion, 23
Islamic schools of jurisprudence, 279280
Ismael, Haji, 49, 241, 256
Ismael Shahid, Sayyid, 35, 3637, 87,
295; Nasihat-i-Muslimin (see Nasihat-iMuslimin); Sirat-i-Mustaqim, 32, 34, 35
36, 37, 85, 86, 91, 295, 363; Taqwiyat
al-Iman (see Taqwiyat al-Iman)
Istanbul, 3, 4, 5, 22, 18, 20, 28, 30; British
consul at, 125; crisis in, 272; Fadls stay
in (see Fadl, Sayyid); as hub of Muslim
networks, 166; Indian cosmopolitans in,
21; Jewish orientalists in, 29; opposition
to tanzimat reforms, 272; Rahmatullah
Kairanwis visit to, 175176, 197; as sacred
space, 151, 155; as symbol of Ottoman
modernism, 29; tradition of consensus
literature, 11. See also Turkey

Itbai Sunnat (the belief in Prophet

Muhammad), 37, 38
Itedal (mutual trust), and Muslim
unity, 36
Itemad, and Muslim unity, 226, 232
Izalatul al-Shakuk, 171, 172173
Izharul Haq (The Truth Revealed), 30,
171, 175, 176, 181, 190, 196, 197207,
263; aesthetic appeal of Koran, comments on, 212; authenticity of Bible,
comments on, 202203, 205; Bible, historicity of, 204; Christian beliefs, critique of, 205207; Christian religious
literature, critique of, 199200; demystification of Koran, 190, 198, 208211,
214, 217; English translation, 208;
Hadith tradition, discussion of, 215
216; Hafiz, importance of, 203, 204,
211; Injeel of Jesus (Anjeel Masee), comment on, 201; Islamic oral tradition,
comments on, 203204, 211, 215, 216;
Koran and Jewish texts, difference
between, 215; Koran as exceptional
text, focus on, 198199, 203, 208209,
212, 213215, 216; Koran vs. Hadith,
216; Koran, historicity of, 210; Koran,
poetic style of, 209210; Koranic proph
ecies, discussion on, 212213; literary
format, 198; medical virtues of Koran,
comments on, 210211; memorization
style of Koran, 211; and Muslim cosmopolitanism, 196; oral tradition of
learning, discussion of, 203, 204; royal
patronage, 196; scientific nature of
Islamic religious texts, 204; Torah,
critique of, 200, 202; translations of,
207208; transmission style (balaghat)
of Koran, comments on, 208209;
unreliability of Christian religious
texts, commentary on, 201202
Jadidi reformist, 372
Jalal, Ayesha, 115, 117, 160
Jami, Abd ur Rahman of Herat, 10, 182,
412n14
Jasanoff, Maya, 12
Java, 23, 140141; Muslim secret societies, 137, 141; territorial nationalism
in, 26, 442n23
Jawahir-i-Khamsah, 182
Jeddah, British consulate at,
125126

481

i n de x

Jhanjhanwi, Miyanji Nur Muhammad,

223224
Jihad, 86; Imdadullah Makkis definition
of, 259; Siddiq Hasans views on,
277278
Jihad-i-Akbari 259
Kafadar, Cemal, 14
Kairanwi, Badrul Islam, 176
Kairanwi, Rahmatullah. See Rahmatullah
Kairanwi, Maulana
Kashmir, 387388
Katkoff, 368, 369, 374, 392
Kemal Ataturk, Mustafa, 406
Kennedy, Dane, 12
Khairuddin, Maulana, 403404, 472n144
Khalil Ahmad, Maulvi, 321
Khan, Abdul Wahid, 260, 262
Khan, Mubaraz, 69
Khan, Muhammad Hussain, 309
Khan, Nawab Hasan Ali, 377
Khan, Nusrat Ali, 297
Khan, Rai Abdullah, 1
Khan, Siddiq Hasan. See Siddiq Hasan
Khan, Nawab
Khan, Sir Sayyid Ahmad. See Sayyid
Ahmad, Sir
Khatib, Ahmad, 24, 26
Khayr al-Din, al-Tunisi, 16, 1819
Khilafatists, 404405
Khuddam-i-Kaba, pro-Turkish sentiment,
322323
Kia, Mana, 15
Kitabut-tufi, 318
Koranic war ethics, 8586
Kuwait, 95
Lachman Das, Diwan, 388
Laffan, Michael, 25, 116, 183
Lambert, David, 12
Layard, Henri, 297
Lebanon, 25, 178, 180, 452n12
Lester, Alan, 12
Loch, Francis A. E.: and Makulla-Shehr
dispute, report on, 104, 1056, 108,
109110; and Sayyid Fadl, report on,
119120, 128, 132133, 157, 158, 163
Lohani Afghans, 54, 65
Madrasa Saulatiya, 21, 31, 185190, 263,
264, 266; books from Hindustan, 18990,
192; curriculum at, 187, 188189, 190,

217; Darul ulum Deoband and, 193

194; financial support for, 192193;
hafiz and qirrat, emphasis on, 190191;
Imdadullah Makki and, 228, 263, 264,
265; and India, connection with,
218219; India-specific Arabicist grid,
center of, 187; Javanese scholars at, 192;
Muslim cosmopolitanism and, 191196;
Naqshbandiya Sufi tradition, influence
of, 187, 188; Salafi ideas, influence of,
188; trans-Asiatic Muslim networks
and, 189; and Wahabi tradition, 31
Mahdi of Sudan, 295, 302, 304, 305, 313,
314
Mahmud Hasan, Maulana, 321
Makdisi, Ilham, 180
Makki, Ahmad Imdadullah, madrassa of,
266
Makki, Imdadullah Makki. See Imdadullah
Makki, Haji
Maktubat al-Durar al-Maknunat alNafisa, 11
Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani, 10
Makulla, 100, 101, 102; and Indian Arabs
in, role in, 109; Nawaz Jungs invasion
of, 1012, 107; and Shehr dispute, British
intervention in, 105, 106107, 1089
Malabar, 112, 117, 121, 431n59; Sayyid
Fadls anti-British activities in,
112113, 115, 123
Malik, Jamal, 333
Maliki School of jurisprudence, 279
Mambram, Sayyid Alawis shrine at,
112
Mansab-i-Imamat, 295
Markovits, Claude, 54
Marun, al-Naqqash, 181
Masnavi, of Maulana Rum, 188, 189, 222,
223
Masnavi Rum, Imdadullah Makkis commentary, 194195, 243245
Mason, Lt. Col., 63, 71
Mauj-i-Nashadda, 288
Mawaidul Awaid min Deunal Akhbar wal
Fawaid, 277, 294
Mayo, Lord, 59
Meade, R., 104
Mecca, 3, 4, 5, 22, 2324, 146, 149150,
227, 238, 302, 405; anti-British literature, British concerns regarding, 177
178; anti-caliph sentiments in, 2425;
anti-Western politics in, 225; cholera

482

i n de x

epidemic, Abdur Razzacks report on,

147; as cultural melting pot, 20, 226
227; debates on ideal caliph, 135136;
exceptional status of, 46; Imdadullah
Makkis stay in, 2, 25, 224, 225, 226227,
228, 253255, 447n14; Indian brand of
Sufism in, 253254; Indian fugitives in,
402, 404; Indian philanthropic projects
in, 148; Indian reformists in, 23; Indone
sian scholars in, 2324; Muslim cosmopolitanism in, 2324, 225226; religious
scholarship in, 238; secret society, anticaliph agenda of, 142143
Medina, 23, 46, 143, 226; Muslim secret
society in, 137, 141, 142
Mediator/interlocutor, 254, 265; decline
in importance of, 33, 34, 35, 238. See
also Murshid (guide), importance of
Mehdi (saint), cult of, 87, 88, 90, 91
Melvill, P., 52
Metapedia, ship, 132, 133
Metcalf, Barbara, 257, 268, 273
Mizan-ul-Haq, 213
Montgomery, H., 87
Moonuffe, Abdullah Arab, 152153
Moreman, Timothy Robert, 75
Mouloud (celebration of Prophet),
246248, 252, 258, 262
Mowullud, 94
Mubarazdaula, 4750, 51
Mughals, 10, 33, 35, 72; ashraf culture
of, 355; global aspirations of, 15; and
Naqshbandi global network, 10; political culture of, 182; and tradition of
consensus, 228229; and tradition
of social balancing, 34, 39, 85
Muhadiseen, 279. See also Alikhtawa
Muhammad Fadl, Sayyid, Dhofar campaign, 131133
Muhammad Murad, al-Manzalawi, 11
Muhammad Yusuf, Hafiz, 229230
Muhiuddin, Subedar, 4445
Mujahid Wahabi convict, category of,
338339. See also Wahabis
Mulk (homeland), idea of. See Thanesri,
Jafer
Murshid (guide), importance of, 195, 230
232, 234, 236237, 240, 253, 254, 262,
265266. See also mediator/interlocuter
Muscat, 96; and arms trade, 5, 7980, 81,
8384, 425n148
Mushir Qaiser, 220

Muslim cosmopolis, 4, 6, 19, 402, 405406;

and India, connection between, 217
218; Arabicization of, 31; British and,
326, 405; extent of, 4; imperial interest
in, 217; imperial networks and, 183, 402;
Indian Arabs and, 79; Jafer Thanesri
and, 333 (see also Thanesri, Jafer);
Rahmatullah Kairanwi and, 183 (see
also Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Maulana);
Sayyid Fadl, and, 124141; transasian
networks and, 117. See also Muslim cosmopolitanism
Muslim cosmopolitanism, 37, 911, 13,
15, 24, 30, 31, 310, 327328; Arabcentric,
328329; Begum of Bhopal and, 326;
British view of, 311319, 320321; Caliph
Abd -al Hamid ll and, 6; migrs role
in making of, 5, 15, 13, 1920; fugitive
scholars and, 30; Imdadulah Makki and
(see Imdadulah Makki, Haji); impe
rial networks and, 6, 1314, 24, 196,
310, 402; and imperial powers, interdependence, 405406; imperialism and,
3031; Izharul Haq as blueprint for, 196
(see also Izharul Haq); Jafer Thanesri
and, 22, 361; and Muslim connectivity,
1314 (see also Muslim cosmopolis);
Mutiny of 1857 and, 229; of Mecca, 24;
Ottoman imperial cities and, 2230;
Ottoman imperial vision and, 5, 6;
print culture and, 5, 11, 1314, 22, 30,
91, 92, 283; Rahmatullah Kairanwi
and, 2021, 17385, 191; and Siddiq
Hasan (see Siddiq Hasan Khan, Nawab);
and transnationalism, 67. See also
Muslim cosmopolis
Muslim migrs, 36, 911, 12, 1617, 19;
as agents of change, 13; and BritishOttoman connectivity, 18, 1920; British
surveillance of, 302303; in Cairo 25, 26,
27; Caliph Abd -al Hamids patronage
of, 5, 19, 21; as carriers of 1857 spirit,
17, 19; global aspirations, and transAsiatic networks, 150; imperial networks,
access to, 34; and Muslim cosmopolitanism, making of, 5, 15, 13, 1920;
and Naqshbandi Sufi network, 10.
See also Reformists; indiviual migrs
Muslim subjects, imperial rivalries over,
148, 150160
Muslim universalism, 160, 432n71; and ter
ritorial nationalism, coexistence, 219

483

i n de x

Notovich, Nicholas N., 370, 378

Nuri Pasha, 174
Nussimbaum, Lev, 29

Mutiny of 1857, 1, 2, 3, 5, 2122, 91, 338

339, 396, 397, 400, 414n39; and antiChristian riots, connection between,
227; global impact of, 1718, 19; Jafer
Thanesri and, 331, 332; Muslim cosmopolitanism and, 229; Rahmatullah
Kairanwis role in, 169170; Siddiq
Hasans views on, 277278; and transimperial politics, 394395
Nafahat al-Uns, 10
Naqshbandi mujadids, 254, 258, 263
Naqshbandi Sufis, 23, 33, 36, 85, 121, 182,
222223, 226, 233, 235; and compromise,
spirit of, 188; global networks of, 1011,
182183, 228, 412n13; and individual
interpretation, emphasis on, 231, 238;
and scripture-based jurisprudence,
182. See also Shahwaliulla, Sufi
Nasihat-i-Muslimin, 32, 35, 3943, 85;
Arabicized reformist orientation, 40;
Hindu customs and rituals, criticism
of, 42; prescriptive norms for Allah,
40; saint worship, dictums against,
88; Shirk, discussion of, 40, 41, 42,
43; sijda, discussion of, 41; tauhid,
focus on, 39, 40, 42, 43
Nasiruddin, Maulvi, 66, 86
National identities, imposition of, 227, 230
Nawaz Jang. See Bahadur, Nawaz Jung
Nazarat-ut-Muariful Korania, 321, 322
Nejd Wahabis, 274275, 276, 277. See also
Wahabis
Neo-Sufism, 182
Nizam of Haiderabad, 49, 102, 103; and
Arabs, 93, 99100, 101; as ally of British,
51; Dalip Singh, and, 386; and ShehrMakulla dispute, 103, 104. See also
Mubarazdaula
Northwest frontier, 3, 4, 9, 10, 52, 53, 56,
59, 268, 284, 306, 338, 370371; arming
of, 7476, 78, 8384 (see also arms trade);
British fears regarding, 284; disturbance
in, Patna connection, 56, 58, 59; Irish
Fenian colony, proposal for, 392393;
and Muslim men of religion, migration
to, 284, 338, 454n46; Ravenshaws memo
on, 59; reformists in, 3, 9, 10, 44, 54,
5760, 6566, 69 (see also Reformists;
Sittana); religious dimension of problem,
Lord Dalhousies views, 72

Oath of allegiance to sheikh, Sufi

emphasis on, 223, 224, 231, 254,
257
Obaidullah, and Deoband madrassa,
321322
Official nationalisms, imposition of,
240
OKinealy, J., 63
Ottoman caliph. See Caliph; Hamid II,
Abd-al, Caliph
Ottoman imperial cities, 10. See also
Cairo; Istanbul; Mecca
Ottoman reformists, 20, 175, 193, 198,
272; Abd-al Hamid II opposition to,
269; agenda of, 178179
Ottoman territories: Aden residents role
in, 105106, 107, 108109; British consulates, significance of, 124125
Ottomans, 21, 96, 272; Arabian Peninsula,
interest in, 114, 117; and British, 9, 13,
96, 100101, 106, 113, 129; British critique of, 144147, 438n160; and British
empire, imperial networks between, 34;
from empire to republic, 406; Indian
Arabs and, 106; Indian Muslims and,
403, 441n8; modernity of, studies on,
2829; and Muslim cosmopolitanism,
56, 405406; patronage of Indian
migrs, 19; political isolation, 405;
reformists in, 56 (see also Ottoman
reformists); and revolt of 1857, 18;
Sayyid Fadl and, 119, 133, 151, 154, 155,
156157, 160 (see also Fadl, Sayyid);
Siddiq Hasans connection to, 272273;
and tanzimat reforms, 113, 114, 118,
129, 178, 272. See also Caliph; Hamid,
Abd-al, Caliph
Paik-i-Islam, 220, 296297
Pan-Islam, 160, 173, 432n71; as British
phobia, 160; and Caliph Abd-al Hamid
II, 19; caliph-centric, 183, 328; cosmopolitan nature of, 217; Muslim cosmopolitanism and, 6; and nationalism, 403,
432n69; Sayyid Fadl and, 160168;
secret societies and, 141142 (see also
Secret societies)

484

i n de x

Pearson, Harlon O., 35

Peile, J. B., 108
Persian Gulf commerce, British control
over, 95
Persian reformist literature, 417n2
Petre, T. L., 289
Pfander, Carl Gottlieb, 190, 195; and
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, debates
between, 171, 175
Porous borders, 7, 111, 240, 243, 401; and
multiple identities, 103, 221, 255; and
study of imperialism 1516
Prideaux, W. F., 127, 298, 314
Print technology, 19; and dissent, 227;
and Muslim cosmopolitanism, making
of, 5, 11, 1314, 22, 30, 91, 92, 283; and
trans-Asian communities, 303. See also
Siddiq Hasan Khan, Nawab
Prothero, Major M., 332, 344
Public conduct, Islamic notion of, 6, 20,
27, 254, 255, 264, 266. See also Faislah
Haft-i-Maslah; Zia-ul-Qulub
Qadariya Sufi order, 36, 226, 233
Qajar Iran, 66; British control over
trade, 95
Qari Abdulla, 191
Qasim Naunatawi, Maulana, 194, 220,
223, 234, 237, 242, 255, 260, 261, 262
Qawwali as a form of devotion, 246, 252
Qudrat-ullah Benarsi, Sayed, 224
Qureish tribe, 140, 282, 295
Rahim, Abdul, Maulvi, 284, 285
Rahman, Latifur, 384
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, Maulana, 23,
13, 20, 26, 142, 165, 169170, 173, 183,
186, 226, 278, 302, 324, 402, 437n153,
440n1; and Abd-al Hamid II, 174176,
184, 190, 196197, 217218; British
suspicions regarding, 177178, 302
303; concern for muhajirs (migrants)
in Mecca, 186, 187, 189; contact with
Deoband seminary, 194; cosmopolitanism of, 2021, 17385, 191; darrs at
Mecca, 174, 178; debates with Christian
missionaries, 171, 172, 175, 190, 217;
definition of authenticity, 216; demystification of Koran, 214, 217; desacralization of caliph, 183184; Ijaz-i-Iswi,
171172; and Imdadullah Makki,

connection
between, 225, 228, 263,
264265; and Indian National Con
gress, opposition to 219; influence
of Sufi brotherhoods, 182; Izalatul alShakuk, 172173; Izharul Haq (see
Izharul Haq); Jeddah consuls report
on, 176177; links with India, 193; literature of, British reaction to, 190;
madrasa at Mecca, 174, 178, 184, 185
187, 443n36 (see also Madrasa Saulatiya);
and Mutiny of 1857, 169170, 177; and
Ottomans, 175, 178, 181, 184; pan-
Islamic network and, 173, 175; politics
of, 216221; relocation in Mecca, 2021,
2425, 173174, 177, 182; royal patron
age, 2930; and Sayyid Ahmad Dahlan,
173174; Sayyid Ahmad Khan, difference of views, 359, 360; as state guest
in Istanbul 175176, 197; stress on education of Muslims 193; superiority of
Koran, emphasis on 171172 (see also
Izaltah Alshakuk; Izharul Haq); tahrif
lafzi in Christain books, criticism of,
171; Tanbihat, 197; trans-Asian networks and, 218220; transasiatic politics, role in 173; writings of 170,
171172 See also individual books
Raja, S. Ahmad, 309310
Rangoon, 284, 299, 300, 305
Ranzat-ul-Nadiya, 288
Rashid, Abdul, 301302
Rasul, Abdul, 370, 378383, 385, 387, 388,
392; contacts in India, 388389; trans
imperial connections, 379382; and
Zubair Pasha, 380, 381, 382, 383
Ravenshaw, T. E., 47, 5759
Rawalpindi, 55
Razzack, Abdur, 139, 148, 149150, 225,
303; cholera epidemic in Mecca, report
on, 147; distribution of Siddiq Hasans
books, report on, 299302, 458n33;
Indian haj pilgrims, report on, 137138,
185; Ottoman corruption, report on,
137138; as vice consul at Jeddah, 125
Reformist doctrine, 34; and alternate
Muslim imperium, creation of 34;
Arabicist flavor, 33, 87; centrality of
individual, 33, 85; historicization of,
87; limited appeal, 8788; reinterpretation of, 8687; tauhid at core of, 8485
(see also Tauhid, ideology of)

485

i n de x

Reformist literature, 32, 34, 43, 85, 88,

195, 417n2; Arabicist tradition, shift to,
3334, 3543; centrality of individual
in, 33, 36, 43, 44, 85, 87; Koranic war
ethics in, 8586; and Muslim unity, 34.
See also Nasihat-i-Muslimin; Sirat-iMustaqim; Taqwiyat al-Iman
Reformists, 13, 5556, 60, 6667, 72, 179,
269; Abd-al Hamid II patronage of, 24;
Afghans, support of, 71; Arabicist tradition and, 44, 46, 47, 48, 72; and arms
trade, 7484; and colonial infrastructure, 92; and cult of the saint or mehdi,
87, 88, 90, 91; demystification of Koran,
179; financial/economic support, 53,
54; and imperial networks, 5960, 61,
75; and India specific Arabicist cultural grid, 8485; I. S. Frasers view of,
4950; and Islamic intellectual circuit,
623; and labor market, 50; and mercantile and banking networks, 6061;
Mubarazdaulas patronage of, 4748,
49; Mughal emperors restoration,
support for, 72; and Muslim mercantile
diaspora, 5455; and Naqshbandiya
Sufi spirituality, 181; and networks of
Islamic charity, 6162; northwest frontier politics, role in, 5759, 71 (see also
Sittana); personal ambitions of, 45, 4647;
poaching of men and materials, 6465;
poaching of sepoys, 4647; political
activism, 43, 44, 45; political economy
of network, 5765; political value of,
50; as power brokers, 65; regimentalized routine of, 6364; regional rulers
and, 5152; of Sittana (see Sittana);
T. E. Ravenshaws memorandum on,
47; and tauhid doctrine, 43, 44, 45, 8485
(see also Tauhid, ideology of); townships
of, 64; as traders, 5254; and trading
networks, 53, 5456; and trans-Asian
Arabicist grid, 85; as trans-Asian military labor force, 4647; trans-Asian
potential, British fears regarding,
6768; and trans-Asian rivalries, 44,
6668; tribal politics, role in, 6566,
6971, 74; and unity of umma, 179;
and Wahabis, 88, 284, 417n1 (see also
Wahabis); and western radical politics,
influence of, 180
Reichmuth, Stefan, 15
Reid, Anthony, 160

Reign of Terror in the Bhopal State, The,

320
Reiss, Tom, 29
Religious traffic, and colonialism,
337338
Revolt of 1857. See Mutiny of 1857
Rich, Claudius James, 374
Risalah I-Jihad, 86
Robinson, Francis, 278
Rothman, Natalie, 15
Russia, 8, 55, 65, 66, 67, 71, 113, 140, 284,
309, 312, 328, 329, 390391, 467n27;
British fears regarding, 67, 68, 374375;
British treaty with Aden, reaction to,
96; and Catherinian compromise,
372; and Crimean war, 113, 129, 143;
and Dalip Singh, 368370, 371, 373
374; impact of 1857 revolt, 18; Indian
Muslims and, 389391; Muslim frontier of, 371373; Muslim transimperial
networks and, 377378; and Ottomans,
329
Saduddin, Sulayman, 10
Saint, cult of, 8485, 87, 88, 90, 91, 246.
See also Urrs
Salafis, 25, 26, 227, 238; and Arabicists,
180
Salaho Zatealben ba bayan Malezaujen
(Discussion regarding Relationship
between Spouses), 281283
Salar Jung, Sir, 94, 98, 101102
Salatmullah, Maulvi, 309
Saluk (devotion), 231232, 233, 259,
260
Sarkashi zilla Bijnor, 367
Saulat-un-Nisa, Begum, 187, 192, 443n38,
444n56
Saunders, Charles B., views on Indian
Arabs, 97, 98, 99
Sawalat Kairanwi. See Izaltah Alshakuk
Sawaneh Ahmadi, 332, 354355, 361367;
political power of Sayyid Ahmad, 365,
366; pro-British image of Sayyid Ahmad,
362, 367; rehabilitation of Sayyid Ahmad,
363; Sayyid Ahmads jihad against Sikhs,
364, 366; style of, 363; transimperial
spiritual appeal of Sayyid Ahmad, 354,
365366
Sayyid Ahmad, Sir, 221, 355361, 272273;
anti-British muslim sentiments, views
on causes, 357358; and Christian

486

i n de x

literature,
study of, 359361, 465n84;
and haj pilgrims, concern for, 358359;
Indian Musulman, response to, 367;
loyalty, definition of, 355356, 357;
Muslim frontier tribes, views on, 356;
Muslim loyalty, views on, 357358; and
Ottoman reformist ideas, 1819; and
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, difference of
views between, 359360; religious
freedom under British, views on, 356,
464n74; and Sayyid Ahmad Shahid,
356
Sayyid Fadl Alawi. See Fadl, Sayyid
Secret societies, 151, 153, 177; anti-caliph
agenda, 137, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146;
British surveillance of 141, 142143,
144; as cradles of pan Islamism,
141142
Selim I, Emperor, 329
Senousi, Sheikh, of Alexandria,
380
Senousi, Sidi Mahommed, 303304
Senoussi sect, 303304
Shafi jurisprudence, 23, 112, 173, 279,
428n2
Shaghal, 262
Shah, Mahmud, 74
Shah, Mubarak, 74
Shahjahan, Begum of Bhopal. See Begum
of Bhopal
Shahwaliulla, Sufi, 9, 33, 35, 44, 85, 169,
187, 188, 226, 254, 268, 269; brand of
Arabicism, 33; and consensus or compromise formula, 1011, 33, 35, 85, 188,
189; Deoband and, 254, 257; and Hanafi
sect, 276277; and individuation of
religion, 231; madrasa at Delhi, 10,
32, 182; and Madrasa Saulatiya, 187,
263. See also Naqshbandi Sufis
Shattariyyah Sufis, 182
Shawkani, 268269
Shehr, 100, 101, 106, 109; arms flow to,
British concerns over, 102; and
Makulla dispute, British intervention
in, 105, 106107, 1089; Nawaz Jangs
political ambitions in, 101102
Sheriff of Mecca, and British, alliance
between, 143145, 146, 158
Shirk ( heresy), concept of, 35, 36, 3739,
40, 4142, 43
Siddiq Hasan Khan, Nawab, 5, 13, 2728,
30, 179, 267272, 287, 309, 402, 455n61;

487

Adam, views on, 274275; agents of,

307, 308310; Alikhtawa ala Maslaul
Istawa (Existence of God on Heaven),
279280; and Arabicists, interaction
with, 269; biddat, critique of, 269, 276;
book distribution through imperial
networks, 287288; and British, 270,
285, 315; and British imperial grid,
importance for 278; British objection
to books of, 270, 312313, 314, 316;
cosmopolitanism of, 22, 27, 268, 273,
280, 311, 314316; cosmopolitanism,
British view of, 311313, 318320; and
Delhi Naqshbandi Sufi Shahwaliulla,
267; and Din Muhammad, 303, 304307;
dissemination of literature, 285286,
298300; distribution of books in Hijaz,
298301, 302; Education Societys pam
phlet in defense of, 290296; encyclopedic style of writing, 292294; Fathul
Mughees ba Fiqhul Hadith (Seeking Bless
ings in the Light of Hadith), 280281;
Girbal, defense of, 288, 318; Griffins
charges, self-defense to, 315318; Hanafi
opposition to, 270, 289, 290, 291; Hidayat
al Saail Ila Adillatil Masaail (see Hidayat
al Saail Ila Adillatil Masaail); Ijtihad,
emphasis on, 268, 269, 271, 276; and
Indian Muslims, defense of 316317;
Iqtirab al Saah, 270; Islamic jurisprudence, commentary on 279280; khutbas,
compilation of, 292293, 312; literature
of, 27, 28, 270, 271; and Mahdi of Sudan,
connection with 302, 313 (see also Din
Muhammad); Mawizah Hasanah, 270;
Mawaidul Awaid min Deunal Akhbar
wal Fawaid, 277, 294; Mecca, connection with, 302; merchants role in dissemination of books, 286287, 301;
mutiny of 1857, views on, 278; as nawab
consort, 269270; newspapers and period
icals, influence on, 288289; and north
west frontier politics, 284; Ottomans,
connection with, 272273; pirs and
saints, dislike of, 268; prescriptions
for bodily deportment and morality,
280283; printing of books, 287288,
310; public sphere of books, 273; and
Rahmatullah Kairanwi, 302; Salaho
Zatealben ba bayan Malezaujen (Discus
sion regarding Relationship between
Spouses), 281283; scriptures as a

i n de x

Siddiq Hasan Khan, Nawab (continued)

unifying force, comments on, 278280;
sedition charges, defense against (see
Tarjuman-i-Wahabiya); Sudan, links with,
295, 302, 304305, 308, 309, 313, 314;
taqlid, critique of, 269, 276; Tarjumani-Wahabiya (see Tarjuman-i-Wahabiya);
Terazul Khumrat min Fazail ul Hajwal
Umra (Benefits of Haj and Umra), 281;
and trans-Asiatic network, 269270;
and transimperial Muslim public sphere,
318319; and transimperial networks,
307309, 310; and transimperial print
ing rivalry, 296298; and unification of
umma, 268, 275, 276; unpopularity in
Bhopal, 289290; use of print culture,
283, 296311; W. F . Prideauxs opinion
of, 314; Wahabis, connection with,
267, 284285, 294; works of, 453n13
(see also individual works); Yemeni
ulema, interaction with, 268269
Sikhs, 66, 67, 68, 69, 362, 364, 391, 395;
Sayyid Ahmads jihad against, 45, 295,
354, 356, 362, 364, 366. See also Dalip
Singh, Maharaja
Silsila Imdadiyah ( Imdaduddin brotherhood), 266
Sindh, 47, 53, 6667, 85, 334, 335
Sirat-i-Mustaqim, 32, 34, 3536, 37, 85,
86, 91, 295, 363
Sittana, 63, 89; British apprehensions
regarding reformists of, 7273; as
center of trans-Asian rivalries, 71;
intratribal wars in, 7374; reformists
colony in, 64, 6566, 6869, 70
Slave trade, 54, 95, 101, 106, 125, 137
Smith, C. B. E., 104
Social leveling, concept of, vs. social balancing, 33, 34, 39, 85, 91
Stark, Ulrike, 283
Strange, Thomas L., 112, 115,
163
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 14
Sudan, 303, 313, 380, 381, 457n122; Siddiq
Hasans links with, 299, 300, 301, 302,
304305, 308, 309
Suez Canal, 95 114, 118, 129, 428n7
Sufi sheikh, 258; oath of allegiance to,
223, 224, 231, 254, 257
Sufi silsilahs (brotherhood), 87, 182;
Deobandis and, 261262

Sufism, Indian brand of, 253254. See also

Naqshbandi Sufis; Shahwaliulla, Sufi
Suhrawadiya Sufis, 182, 226
Sultan of Muscat: and Al Kathiri tribals,
123; British support for, 131132, 154,
155; capture of Dhofar, 123, 131; Sayyid
Fadl and, 151, 157158
Syria, 180
Tafsir, 255
Tagliacozzo, Eric, 1516
Tahrif lafzi, (the practice of changing
words), 171
Tahzib ul Akhlaq ( journal), 360
Tales of an Indian Traveller, 372
Tanbih al-Ukala, 114, 167
Tanbihat, 197
Tanveer, 255
Tanzimat reforms, 6, 18, 2425, 31, 129,
178, 272; and rise of ethnic nationalism, 113, 114, 129
Taqwiyat al-Iman, 32, 35, 3639; demystification of Koran, 37; rituals for God,
38; shirk, category in, 3839
Targhib-I-Jihad, 86
Tarikat al-Hanifa, 167
Tarikh-i-Ajeeb (History of the
Wondrous), 332, 343, 344351; concept
of mulk, 345348, 350; ethnographic
observations of Andaman islanders,
347348, 350351; significance of,
344. See also Thanesri, Jafer
Tarikh-i-Port Blair. See Tarikh-i-Ajeeb
Tarikh Sarkashiy-i-Zilla Bijnor, 357,
367
Tarim, tradition of Islamic learning in,
93, 111
Tariqa-i Muhammadiya (The Muhammadan
Way), 3536, 226, 354, 363, 365
Tarjuman-i-Wahabiya, 270, 276; defense
of, 294; Griffins objections to, 313;
Indian Wahabis, definition of, 294;
Nejd Wahabis, discussion on, 274
275, 276, 277; Siddiq Hasans self-
defense in, 273, 277278, 313, 317
Tasfitah Alqalub, 241
Tathirul Atekad, 319
Tauhid, ideology of, 32, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42,
43, 89, 91, 214, 226; and Muslim unity,
36, 38, 39, 44, 45; reformist reinvention
of, 8485

488

i n de x

Tawarikh-i-Ajaib, 332, 334337, 349, 352;

English language, discussion of, 352
353; Thanesris account of travel to
Andaman islands, 339343; Thanesris
critique of his arrest, 334, 335336,
337
Temple, Richard, 106
Terazul Khumrat min Fazail ul Hajwal
Umra (Benefits of Haj and Umra), 281
Thanawi, Asharaf Ali, 191, 223, 238239,
244, 245, 256, 257, 261, 266
Thanesri, Jafer, 2, 3, 13, 2122, 60, 62, 63,
64, 278, 331333, 335, 402, 403; biography of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid (see
Sawaneh Ahmadi); class, views on, 347,
348, 349; commutation of sentence,
463n20; criticism of British rule of law,
335337; deportation to Andaman
Islands, 2, 22, 331, 332; and English
language, 352353; felt community
identity, 340343, 344345, 355, 361
(see also mulk, below); felt patriotism,
anti-colonial profile, 339, 340; Hunters
Indian Musalman, response to, 361362;
linguistic skills of, 332, 351352; mulk
(homeland), idea of, 22, 334335, 337,
342351; and 1857 mutiny, 331, 332;
and race, views on, 347, 348, 349350;
representation of Hind vs. Andaman
islands, 343344; Sawaneh Ahmadi (see
Sawaneh Ahmadi); settlement of Andamans
as civilizing mission, 345, 346; Tarikh-iAjeeb (see Tarikh-i-Ajeeb); Tarikh-i-Port
Blair (see Tarikh-i-Ajeeb); Tawarikh-iAjaib (see Tawarikh-i-Ajaib); and transAsian cosmopolitanism, 361; trial of,
335, 336; and Wahabi movement, 331,
332; writings of, 332333. See also individual books
Thompson, R., 59
Tilawat, 212, 235, 236, 247
Tribal politics, and reformists, 6566,
6971, 7374
Tucker, L. H. E., 75, 83
Tufi, Suleiman bib Abdul Kawi, 318
Turkey, 68, 145, 154, 165; anti-arms
efforts in, 81; and Britain, relations
between, 129, 158, 328; significance in
Muslim cosmopolis, 327328. See also
Istanbul; Ottomans
Turkish identity, 14

Tusseer Moradiya, 63
Tutwaa, 6263
Urrs (celebration of the cult of the saint),
246, 251252, 258. See also Saint, cult of
Vambery, Armenius, 375
Vice consuls, role of, 125, 126, 302303
Villier, F. H., 369
Volpert, 380, 384
Wahab, Abd-al, of Nejd, 31, 45, 47, 274,
277, 294, 362, 417n1. See also Wahabis
Wahabis, 31, 32, 45, 47, 59, 83, 86, 88,
275, 284285, 294, 362, 389, 406, 417n1,
419n46, 465n92; extremism of, cri
tique in Faislah Haft-i-Maslah, 250251;
I. S. Frasers investigation of, 5051,
52; Jafer Thanesri and, 331, 332, 334,
335, 336, 361; Siddiq Hasan and, 273,
274, 284285, 294, 306, 309, 310, 314,
316317; state suspicions regarding,
338. See also Wahab, Abd-al, of Nejd
Wahdat-ul-shahud (unity of existence), 9,
181
Wahdat-ul-wajud (unity of being), 9, 181
Wahid Khan, Maulvi, 240, 241, 260, 262
Waliullah, Mohamed, 6465
Wilayat Ali, Maulvi, 71
Wylie, Colonel H. 289290
Yaqub Nanatawi, Maulana, 194, 220, 255,
259, 260
Yusufzai tribe, 6566
Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 72, 396, 300
Zakat, 61, 62, 281
Zayn al Abidin, Sheikh, 269
Zia-ul-Haq, Sheikh, 320
Zia-ul-Qulub, 229243, 256, 262; Arabic
translation, 238239; bodily deportment formats, discussion of, 235236;
circulation in Hindustan, 240243; and
Deobandi scholars, 261262; discussion
of zikr, 232, 233, 235237, 238, 241, 247,
257, 258, 262; emphasis on consensus,
232, 233, 235; focus on Chishti prescriptions, 232; forms of devotion of
Qadariya silsila, 233, 235; importance
of guide (murshid), 230232, 234, 236
237, 240, 253, 262; as murshid-i-kamil

489

i n de x

Zia-ul-Qulub (continued )
(perfect guide), 237238, 240, 241, 259
260, 262; norms of virtuous public conduct, 230, 231233, 234235, 237, 238,
240, 259260; prescriptive norms of
Naqshbandi Sufis, 233; promotion in
Hindustan, 259261; publication in
India, 241242; review by Maulana

Rashid, 240241, 256; synthesis of Sufi

sects, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 240
Zikr. See under Zia-ul-Qulub
Zohrab, and surveillance of Muslim netwoks, 125126, 137, 141, 142143,
145146, 153, 154, 177
Zubaida Aqueduct, 147, 148
Zubair Pasha, 380, 381, 382, 383

490