Monotheistic Hindus, Idolatrous Muslims: Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī, Dayānanda Sarasvatī, and the Theological Roots of Hindu–Muslim Conflict in South Asia

Abstract

Contrary to popular notions of a perpetual antagonism between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’, played out on Indian soil over the centuries, this article examines the relatively recent origins of a Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia, situating it in the reconfigurations of ‘religion’ and religious identity that occurred under British colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The multivalent and somewhat fluid categories of religious identification found in pre-modern India gave way to much more rigid and oppositional modern and colonial epistemic categories. While much has been written on how colonial policies and incipient Hindu and Muslim nationalisms shaped the contours of modern Hindu–Muslim conflict, little work has been done on the important role religious actors like Muslim and Hindu scholars and reformers played in shaping the discourse around what constituted Hinduism and Islam, and the relationship between the two, in the modern period. This study examines the first-known public theological debates between a Hindu scholar and a Muslim scholar, respectively, Swami Dayānanda Sarasvatī (1824–1883), founder of the reformist Arya Samaj and first exponent of a Hindu polemic against other religions, and Mawlānā Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī (1832–1880), co-founder of the seminary at Deoband and an important exponent of Islamic theological apologetics in modern South Asia, and how they helped shape oppositional modern Hindu and Muslim religious theologies. A key argument that Nānautvī contended with was Dayānanda’s claim that Islam is idolatrous, based on the contention that Muslims worship the Ka’ba, and thus, it is not a monotheistic religion, Hinduism alone being so. The terms of this debate show how polemics around subjects like monotheism and idolatry introduced by Christian missionaries under colonial rule were internalized, as were broader colonial epistemic categories, and developed a life of their own amongst Indians themselves, thus resulting in new oppositional religious identities, replacing more complex and nuanced interactions between Muslims and followers of Indian religions in the pre-modern period.

1. Introductory Query: What Is the Nature of the Relationship Between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’?

The questions we pose can betray our unexamined assumptions and sometimes even the unquestioned frameworks that inform and determine the very manner in which we envisage the subject of our inquiry. The terms of our inquiry did not emerge in a vacuum but have a very particular, often complicated, history to them, a history obscured when constructed ‘objects’¹ are treated as ‘given’. To treat a term or object as given means to posit it as an objective reality outside of history and context. Doing so enables us to escape the often complex historical contestation and political and ideological maneuvering that has gone into establishing a definition of a term as normative, enabling us to speak of it in an uncomplicated way.

I begin with these reflections because they directly bear upon the subject of the inquiry that concerns us here, the oft-posed question when speaking of religion in South Asia: what has been or is the nature of the relationship between Hinduism and Islam? On the surface, this seems to be an uncomplicated question, a question that many have tried to answer with varying conclusions in the last two centuries, from British colonial administrators to Hindu and Muslim nationalists to secular Indians to Western Orientalists and academics. But is this question an unproblematic one?

The contention, which will be elaborated, is that this question is indeed problematic, and the very terms in which it is posed conceal centuries of multifarious historical interactions and programs of power and control. In other words, the manner in which these terms—‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’—are posited firstly enables the obscuring of a rich history of complex exchanges and ‘contact zones’ (see Sila-Khan 2004, pp. 5–6) between different religious, intellectual, and cultural traditions that came to be reified and objectified into the meta-categories of Hinduism and Islam in South Asia. Secondly, it obscures the role of British colonialism and the environment that it established―which came about due both to deliberate policy to control and as historical accident―in bringing about the objectification of these relatively fluid religious traditions into bounded ‘corporate’² entities. Therefore, rather than trying to answer the question about the relationship between Hinduism and Islam, it is more meaningful to trace a history of this question itself and, by doing so, attempt alternate understandings of the objects and terms―Hinduism and Islam―and, specifically, their relationship as designated in the question, and to see how and why these came to be understood in the manner in which they are popularly understood today.

2. Contesting Hindu–Muslim Conflict: The State of the Discourse and a New Approach

If one looks at how Hindu–Muslim conflict has been presented in public discourse from the colonial era to the present, two salient features arguably emerge: one, the given and immutable nature of this binary categorization: the division of South Asians into the perpetually opposed, and often antagonistic, identities of Hindu and Muslim; and two, the representation of these two identities as primarily political or significant primarily in a political context. In this study, I will contest both of these by tracing how multi-faceted and relatively flexible religious and spiritual belongings came to be reified into inflexible and strict modern religious identities, and how the overemphasis on the political aspects and implications of these religious identities, despite their importance, has obscured the significance of religious and theological discourses and their proponents in the modern formation of these religious identities³. Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia has often been seen through a political lens of communalism in post-independence India, and much has been written on the colonial construction of this conflict. Moreover, once particular categories came to be established under colonialism, their adoption became normative among South Asians themselves, and the clearest example of this is the prevalence of communalism and Hindu–Muslim conflict, or, at least, separation, in the diverse nationalisms that emerged in South Asia. Hindu and Muslim nationalisms strongly internalized the Hindu–Muslim divide,⁴ but even purportedly secular nationalism, such as that associated with the Congress party, took the divide for granted, only taking a more liberal approach to unity in spite of the separation and any conflict.⁵ Gyanendra Pandey (1990) has convincingly argued that British colonial policies, such as the introduction of a census, separate legal frameworks, and specific historical narratives, all of which categorized South Asians on the basis of distinct religious identities, created the very conditions for the construction of communalism in South Asia. These opposed religious identities were then mobilized to produce conflict among different religious communities on the ground in colonial India, increasingly by political and social movements that stressed religious difference and exclusivity. There is ample literature on these developments (see Van der Veer 1994; Chandra 1984; Dutta 1999; Malhotra 2002; Gould 2012; Engineer 1989), but the emphasis on communalism and Hindu–Muslim conflict as largely a political, or socio-political, phenomenon has been very widespread.⁶ This has left little room for alternative avenues as important to the production of Hindu–Muslim conflict. Since we are speaking about religious categories, after all, it is surprising that the role of religious actors using religious arguments, for example, in order to articulate or defend their religious perspectives in a modern public context or to foment religious conflict or argue for the superiority of one religion over another, has been almost entirely absent from the discourse. But in order to understand why the British colonial categories of Hindu vs. Muslim came to be so widely accepted in South Asia, we need a more complex approach, one that includes theological and religious arguments made by representatives of Hindu and Islamic traditions in the modern period that, consciously or unconsciously, helped to cement the reified religious classifications introduced by the British. An important aspect of the religious articulation of Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia was its reliance not merely on secular British colonial policies but on the polemical religious discourse of Christian missionaries, which posited religions as rivals in a cosmic battle over right and wrong, truth and superstition, monotheism and idolatry. This gave rise to competitive religious identities that were little-known among South Asians previously, and while religious difference existed, and was sometimes debated among elites,⁷ the idea of religious competition in which one religion was true and all else false, based on the general arguments of Christian missionaries, was a new phenomenon.

While the question of power, and thus the political, cannot be separated from human endeavors sacred and profane, the casting of Hindu–Muslim conflict as largely a matter of politics has often obscured the religious dimension of the question as well as the significance of the role of religious actors in navigating the question. But Hinduism and Islam are, first of all, religious traditions, and whatever political roles they play are deeply affected by and intertwined with their theologies. In this study, I will look at how British colonial policies, categories, and historiography created a new discourse around religion, and thus created the conditions for new and oppositional formulations of Hindu and Muslim religious identities in a religiously competitive public sphere deeply impacted by the discourse and presence of Christian missionaries and their critiques of the religions of South Asia. These identities were not in themselves created by British colonialism—this would be giving it too much credit—but were the result of both centuries of consolidation of Hindu and Islamic traditions in South Asia and reform movements that sought to reformulate these traditions under the conditions of colonial modernity. It was the internalization of these new ways of understanding and contesting religion by South Asians themselves that proved crucial in the production of Hindu–Muslim conflict, especially on a religious and theological level. The role played by religious actors—scholars, theologians, reformists, activists—is significant as they were primarily responsible for formulating religious and theological discourse, often being perceived as ‘experts’ in the field, so to speak, and their emergent discourse, under the conditions of colonial modernity, gave life to the new epistemic categories around religion and religious difference in the broader public arena. This discourse from religious actors played an important role in indigenizing colonial constructs that may have otherwise receded with the end of British colonialism. Instead, they became a central force in the development of Hindu and Muslim nationalisms, in dividing and shaping Hindu and Muslim identities more sharply along religious lines, in constructing a public arena of opposed and competing religious claims, and in bringing interreligious contentions to a broader public audience, among other things, all issues that persist to this day.

Tracing and establishing the multifarious factors that created the reconfiguration of religions and interreligious conflict in South Asia is a primary task of this study. To do this, I will begin by critiquing the idea of an essential and perpetual conflict between Indian traditions and Islam, contrasting this with the fluidity of Hindu–Muslim contact in the pre-modern era, followed by how new epistemic categories and classifications by the British constructed new monolithic and conflictual understandings of religion in South Asia, exacerbated by the activities of Christian missionaries. All this, in turn, led to the emergence of South Asian religious actors and movements that valorized religious distinctiveness and interreligious conflict. I will then highlight one case example of this process: likely the first public debate among proponents of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’ in South Asian history, the late-nineteenth-century exchange between Swami Dayānanda Sarasvatī (1824–1883), founder of the important and influential Hindu reformist movement, the Arya Samaj, and Muhammad Qasim Nānautvī (1832–1880), co-founder of the school at Deoband, which became the most important traditional Muslim institution of learning in modern South Asia. It is quite significant that both these movements were at the forefront of interpreting and reinterpreting their respective religious traditions in a modern colonial milieu, and their debate was both indicative of and influential for the reconceptualization of religion and religious identity in modern South Asia. We will particularly focus on an example of how religious discourse was reconfigured by the conditions of colonial modernity: Nānautvī’s response to Dayānanda’s polemics against Islam on the question of monotheism and idolatry, a subject deeply shaped by the concerns and polemics of Christian missionaries in South Asia in the newly emergent public sphere, both introduced under British rule.

The neglect of religious factors and religious figures and movements in the consolidation of Hindu–Muslim conflict in academic and popular discourse has led to an overemphasis on the formative role of British colonialism, to the detriment of how indigenous actors played significant roles in new articulations of their religious traditions. Similarly, an emphasis on Hindu and Muslim political movements in discussion of Hindu–Muslim conflict has often not probed thoroughly into the religious and theological arguments used by these movements, which were often first coined by religious scholars and reformers. For example, it would be hard to understand Hindutva without the theological reinterpretations that form its intellectual basis, nor would it be possible to understand the global Muslim missionary movement with South Asian roots, the Tablīghī Jamā’at, without understanding the theological emphases and reinterpretations that led to its formation. In the case of the former, a figure like Dayānanda and his Arya Samaj played a major role in the formation of a new Hindu oppositional religious identity, and in the case of the latter, it emerged from the school of Deoband that Nānautvī founded, and was reliant on the school’s Islamic apologia in the face of challenges from modernity and from other religions. Thus, this study aims to apply methodologies from the fields of religious studies and post-colonial theory to formulate a different approach to Hindu–Muslim conflict, one which brings out its theological and religious aspects, both in relation to the colonial reformulation of religion in the modern era, which helped to create the conditions for Hindu–Muslim conflict, and the important role that religious actors played in indigenizing this process, which helped to popularize it.

Let us begin with an illustrative example of how the relationship between Islam and Hinduism has been represented in popular discourse in the recent past. Our example, perhaps now academically outdated but still very reflective of popular discourse in South Asia and the Western media, is proffered by a scholar who was once described as the doyen of the study of Islam in South Asia, Aziz Ahmed (1914–1978). Though he is best known for works on South Asian Islam he composed after moving to England, and then later to Canada, he was educated in England during the years of the Raj, and his perspective was very much a product of the colonial era, as is evidenced in the typology used in his works for describing the relationship of Islam and Hinduism. His work, very influential on South Asian Muslim studies in the West, is most interesting for being an illustration in academic language―rather than the more simplistic language of the media or the sloganeering of political movements―of a particular perspective shared by colonial British historians and orientalists, South Asian Hindu and Muslim nationalists, the popular media, and, until recently, much of academia. This perspective situates Islam and Hinduism in a relationship of perpetual antagonism throughout history in which religious conflict is seen as proceeding from a natural opposition of these religions to one another. It is also very significant for illustrating how European ideas about South Asia introduced during colonization were given a new lease on life by being adopted—sometimes creatively―by South Asians themselves.

In one of his most influential works, Studies in the Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, Aziz Ahmad gives a historical exposition of Hindu–Muslim relations when imagined through the lens of perpetual hostility, citing many an orientalist and missionary from British India. In the introductory section on the "conflicting nature of the two cultures" in a chapter on "the Muslim impact", Ahmad begins his discussion with a quote from the American orientalist and Methodist missionary to British India, Murray Titus (1885–1964):

‘For twelve long centuries … Islam has been in contact with Hinduism in India. For twelve centuries each community has been confronted with the other …. Their differences of belief, together with communal aspirations on the one hand contending with an instinct for communal preservation on the other, have been the source of much friction which continues to the present day.’

(Titus 1930, p. 176; quoted in Ahmad 1964, p. 74)

Ahmad’s immediate gloss on this is as follows: “This is on the whole an understatement”. He adds that the whole “history of medieval and modern India is to a very considerable extent a history of Hindu–Muslim religio-cultural tensions”, which has been punctuated on occasion by individual efforts at mutual understanding and harmony but in which, however, the divisive forces have been much more dynamic than the cohesive ones. Ahmad continues with a quote from a British orientalist, F.W. Thomas (1867–1956), which states that Islam is the "‘very antithesis of Hinduism’"(Thomas 1892, p. 12; quoted in Ahmad 1964, p. 73) a claim that he then painstakingly details with reference to all manners of oppositions between Hinduism and Islam. The binaries he suggests, quoting many sources European and South Asian, include the following: the myriad philosophical and mystical expressions of Hinduism vs. the austere rigor and adhesion to God’s Word in Islam; a psychology geared toward the “concrete and iconographic” vs. one that is “atomistic, abstract, geometrical, and iconoclastic”; the ability to assimilate new ideas, new gods, and other faiths vs. the inability to adapt or compromise; openness to the other vs. “religio-cultural insularity”; “a “spiritually and materially hierarchical view of religion” vs. “religio-social egalitarianism”; traditional vs. revelatory religion; natively Indian vs. foreign; belonging to India vs. belonging to the Ummah; concerned with what is true vs. concerned with what is right; emphasizing religion as private vs. emphasizing “incorporation in the collective body of the faithful” (Ahmad 1964, pp. 73–76); and so on. In addition to the debatable characterizations of both traditions he presents, an aspect of Ahmad’s analysis that is revealing of his methodology and pertinent to our argument is his direct reference to Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), European historians who classified civilizations as units (or organisms in the case of Spengler) that were indicative of a particular genius that was then manifested in all their specific cultural characteristics, including religion. An implication of this perspective is that civilizations and religions are self-enclosed, mutually exclusive units that do not admit of admixture or change. Any change comes to be seen as a corruption of the ahistorical essence of the entity in question. Richard Eaton, a pioneer in what can be called the revisionist school of South Asian history, comments on this view of religion and culture:

Further inclining scholars to locate ‘Islam’ in classical texts or chronicles was a tendency, found in much scholarly writing in Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to collapse religion with culture, and to conflate both of these with civilization and even territory. In this way, human populations became understood as naturally divided into self-contained and mutually exclusive civilizational/territorial units. Reduced to checklists of enduring, ahistorical ‘core’ values, these civilizations were in turn construed as immutable structures … lying beyond the corrosive effects of historical process or change … What is more, many theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries assumed that each civilization’s essential qualities were stamped on it at the moment of birth and persisted through all time. Such a reductive and ahistorical approach attributed special significance to a civilization’s place of origin, for only there could it be construed as truly indigenous and hence genuinely authentic.

(Eaton 2003, p. 11)

Eaton’s analysis helps us to highlight some particular assumptions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European understanding of religions, which are reproduced in the perspectives voiced by Aziz Ahmad above. In this understanding, Hinduism and Islam were civilizations and religions that had specific essential characteristics best found in their origins and that were bounded and mutually exclusive. As such, any point of contact between the two would, at best, be arbitrary, and they would always challenge each other’s core values and authenticity. Furthermore, since authenticity was identified with origin,⁸ any change in a religion, especially through contact with another religion, could only be seen as a corruption and deviation from orthodoxy.⁹ The influence of this schema in South Asia itself cannot be overemphasized, as can be seen in the most public and political examples of it. The two-nation theory, which resulted in the creation of a separate homeland for South Asian Muslims, Pakistan, relies on viewing Hinduism and Islam as completely autonomous and mutually opposed religious and cultural units. Similarly, the rise of the Hindutva movement, which champions India as a Hindu country, drawing directly on an Orientalist reimagining of a golden-age Hinduism that was destroyed by the arrival of marauding Muslims―who are seen as interloping foreigners even if they are of Indian origin because territory is identified here with religion―is a case example of the influence of some of the ideas seen above. Even purportedly secular Indian nationalism often took the opposition for granted but tried to mitigate it through political unity.

One could argue that to speak of a Hindu–Muslim conflict in the context of South Asia prior to the nineteenth century is to speak anachronistically. No doubt, there were practitioners of various Indian religious traditions, who later came to be amalgamated into the categories of Hindu, and Muslims of various persuasions and perspectives that came to be streamlined as Indian Muslims, but there was no Hinduism pitted against Islam or vice versa, as is often imagined today. ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’ in South Asia, and thus, Hindu–Muslim conflict, are, discursively, largely products of the nineteenth century. To look for the beginnings of Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia, one need not go back to the beginnings of a Muslim presence in South Asia, as is the wont of both Hindutva ideologues and Muslim nationalists and, for a long time, even Western academics, but merely to colonial British India. At the same time, it can be affirmed that Hindu–Muslim conflict, as it has developed in the colonial and modern periods, does draw upon historical Muslim and Hindu theological traditions, even as it often reinterprets them.

3. Muslims, Hindus, and Religious Identity in South Asia Before Colonialism

Before further elaboration of the colonial construction of Hindu–Muslim conflict, let us ask a related question: if a dichotomous understanding of Hinduism and Islam is a colonial construct, how did Hindus and Muslims represent themselves and each other in the pre-modern era? The terms Hindu and Muslim as markers of religious difference or identity seldom appear in pre-colonial literature about the other, whether belonging to Indian or Islamic traditions. Similarly, Islam and Hinduism as systems of religious doctrine and practice are conspicuously absent as descriptive of the other. It has been well documented that the term Hindu does not have an indigenous Indian origin but came to be used to denote the cultural groups inhabiting the subcontinent by Muslims and others, by whom it was used primarily as a geographical and not a religious marker.¹⁰ It was not used self-referentially by the religio-cultural groups designated by it until the colonial era, when both Hindu and Hinduism as religious terms and markers came to be increasingly used, first by the British and then by Hindus themselves as well as other South Asian religious communities.¹¹ In the same manner, although the terms muslim and islām have a Qur’anic origin and were long used by Muslims, they were transformed into modern religious identity markers only in the colonial period. Specifically, the manner in which islām became Islam, as it was mapped onto a modern metanarrative of religion, changed the term from its primary etymological meaning of submission to God as an individual’s action to a meaning in which Islam denoted primarily a collective identity and was a species of the genus religion, differentiated from other species like Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and so on.¹² The still useful classic work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, was perhaps the earliest to argue how the modern concept of religion objectified and reified rich and diverse, lived and experienced “cumulative traditions”, to use his preferred alternative for religions, into abstractions fixed in “a system of ideas, beliefs” (W. C. Smith 1964, p. 40). In a characteristic passage on the problems with the term ‘Hinduism’, to which he adds ‘Christianity’ and ‘Islam’, he states:

My objection to the term ‘Hinduism’ of course, is not on the grounds that nothing exists. Obviously an enormous quantity of phenomena is to be found that this term covers. My point, and I think that this is the first step that one must take towards understanding something of the vision of Hindus, is that the mass of religious phenomena that we shelter under the umbrella of that term, is not a unity and that does not aspire to be. It is not an entity in any theoretical sense, let alone any practical one. ‘Islam’ and ‘Christianity’, as we shall subsequently consider, are also in fact, in actual practice, internally diverse and have been historically fluid”.

(Ibid., p. 63)

Furthermore, pre-modern Hindu texts do not use the term Muslim to describe the peoples later designated as Muslim but rather use ethnic terms like turushka (Turk), all-purpose labels for foreigners such as yavana (Ionian, meaning Greek), or terms to denote outsiders from a Brahmanical perspective, whether Indian or non-Indian, such as mleccha, which signifies someone ‘outside the pale’.¹³ Muslims were not recognized as a religious category by non-Muslim Indians until they were officially identified as such by the colonial British through such significant administrative measures as the census, which itself was based on a canon of orientalist classificatory schemas. This categorization was then internalized, and the colonial British identification of Muslim as a religious category opposed to the similar religious category of Hindu came to be adopted by newly self-identified Hindus.

Religious belonging in pre-modern South Asia was quite unlike the strict classification schemes employed by the colonial British and adopted by South Asians themselves in the modern period; rather, it must be locally and temporally contextualized. Dominique Sila-Khan has discussed that “in medieval India people were classified mainly according to the categories referred to as jāt or jāti and panth” (Sila-Khan 2004, p. 12), which refer, respectively, to social or professional caste and spiritual path. Jāti, which is based on an organic and observable social reality and which is a dynamic category, should be distinguished from varṇa, the hierarchical and static, often reified notion of caste popularized by Orientalists in which all Hindus are presented as belonging to one of four castes.¹⁴ Significantly, Muslims in South Asia were socially stratified, just as other groups, with a central division between ashrafs, the Muslim elites who claimed descent from outside India, and ajlafs, converted Indians, and many jātis, for example, those belonging to the artisan classes, among the ajlafs. The other term Sila-Khan references above, panth (as well as similar terms like mārg and sampradāy), referring to particular traditions founded by spiritual masters, was also used by many South Asians over the last several centuries to identify themselves with the panths of Kabīr and Guru Nanak, which later crystallized into the ‘religion’ of Sikhism under British colonial rule,¹⁵ being the most famous. In these two celebrated cases, the creation of a new panth served to distinguish the inner spiritual message from the outward institutional and authority structures represented by the Brahmans and the ‘ulama. In addition, there was a tremendous variety of religious practice and even doctrine among Muslims when one looks beyond the official Islam of the ‘ulama associated with Muslim political rule. In addition to Sunnis, there were many Shi’i groups, and the Isma’ilis, in particular, creatively engaged the Indian environment, not to mention the richness and diversity of Sufism in South Asia.¹⁶ The widespread influence of Sufism facilitated processes by which Muslims in South Asia were seen and saw themselves as part of path akin to a panth, a distinctive spiritual tradition, instead of a legally or theologically rigid religion defined by its opposition to other religions and paths.¹⁷

The important point that emerges from these observations is that for large numbers of pre-modern South Asians, religion emerged from particular, often local, lived traditions and not from identification with an abstract and conceptualized ‘Islam’ or ‘Hinduism’. Instead of an atemporal Islam and an atemporal Hinduism, there existed the particularities of local and temporal contexts, where religious traditions and their interactions were constantly negotiated. Hypothetically, if one were to ask a pre-modern South Asian what their religion was, if it were possible to find the right words to frame such a question, he or she would likely reply by naming the various practices, traditions, and beliefs obtained from their family, their village, their jāti, their panth, or a certain charismatic guru or pir. It must be added that for Muslims, there was no doubt a connection to a larger collectivity as well as holy places and personages not situated in India, but the way such affinities were made concrete was precisely by channeling them through the local. Examples would be a saint buried in the nearby village who represents the sanctity of the Prophet (even though he may be claimed by other religious communities as well),¹⁸ or a family lineage that claims its origins in a companion of the Prophet whose descendants had moved to India; or even more daring theological moves, such as the Satpanth Isma’ili hymns that paint ‘Alī, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet and first Shi’i Imam, as an avatar of Vishnu.¹⁹ Through such associations, Muslims negotiated what Eaton calls the “double movement between the local cultures of South Asia and the universal norms of Islam” (Eaton 2003, p. 6) that is characteristic of the South Asian Muslim experience as a whole.

In an oft-cited article, Yohanan Friedmann offers a schema of Hindu–Muslim relations in which Indian Muslims are viewed as a ‘foreign’ community, out of place in idolatrous, polytheistic India, where the principal options for Muslims were either strict orthodoxy or possibly heterodox conciliation with the alien environment:

There was, on the one hand, the feeling that the Indian Muslims were constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by an environment that could only be described as an anathema to their cherished ideal of monotheism. The apprehension created an intense desire to preserve Islam in its pristine purity and to protect it assiduously from any encroachment of Indian customs and beliefs. The development of strict orthodoxy was, however, only one result of the fact that the Indian Muslims lived in the midst of a non-Muslim, and, in their eyes, idolatrous and polytheistic population. Diametrically opposed to it was the attempt to find a common denominator for the two civilizations, to establish a mutually acceptable modus vivendi for their respective adherents, and to argue that all religions are essentially the same though their external and accidental features are diverse. The conciliatory trend was always weaker than the orthodox one. The few rulers who adopted it to inspire their successors, and the religious thinkers who developed it had few disciples who continued to walk on the path of inter-religious harmony and compromise.

(Friedmann 2003, pp. 50–51)²⁰

The problem with this analysis becomes clearer when we compare it with Dominique Sila-Khan’s alternative perspective, which begins with questioning the very terms that divide Muslims and Hindus into monolithic and unchanging blocs:

Instead of trying to decide whether Hindus or Muslims have been friends or enemies, or if they have been so alternately, one should rather ask the following questions: which Hindus have coexisted and interacted with which Muslims; which Muslims have been hostile to which Hindus; and which Hindus have regarded which Muslims as their enemies? If we assume that religious groups are not defined once and for all, the idea of two compact and uniform blocs can only be a construct.

(Sila-Khan 2004, p. 4)

This perspective, taking into account that there have been many varieties of Muslims who have had many different kinds of relationships with different varieties of Hindus, suggests that we treat every Muslim–Hindu encounter specifically instead of making blanket statements. One of the key issues with Friedmann’s analysis is that it is based on a small selection of works by political and religious elites in South Asia who are mostly Sunni, ashraf, and proud of their foreign lineages instead of taking into account the vast diversity of kinds of Muslims in South Asia and their variant practices and experiences.

Sila-Khan asks the preliminary question “Who is Hindu, Who is Muslim?” and begins to answer it with two quotes, one from Guru Nanak (1469–1549), the founder of the Sikh tradition, “There is no Hindu, There is no Musulman”, and another by the celebrated Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shāh (1680–1757): “I am neither Hindu nor Muslim” (Sila-Khan 2004, pp. 8, 30). What do these eminent personages mean by these utterances? Sila-Khan tries to provide an answer that demonstrates the complexity of religious identity in pre-modern South Asia.

Instead of seeing religious identity in South Asia as bounded, unchanging, and singular, Sila-Khan provides a more nuanced model of four modes of contact (further simplified into two broad categories) between traditions emanating from Indian or Hindu sources and those emanating from Islamic sources. The first broad category includes modes she calls “‘alliances’, ‘sharing’, and ‘borrowing’”, and the second category is described as “referring to a process which may be termed ‘overlapping’, that is connected with ‘liminal’ traditions and communities” (ibid., p. 32). Alliances, which often involve protecting or healing the other, “can be regarded as sacred covenant struck between two different communities” (ibid.) in which “both retain their respective identities” (ibid., p. 34), with the caveat that identity in pre-modern South Asia was based on particular caste or sectarian traditions. Examples of this phenomenon include the notion of Muslim saints protecting Hindu or Jain sacred sites, with their graves found at the entrance or grounds of such sites; the possession by saints or deities of the other tradition, through which one acquires miraculous healing powers; and visitation of the shrines of the other in order to obtain healing. In such cases, “alliances struck for protection are generally connected with the belief in one single ‘power’ whose ‘religious identity’, as we have it now, is of no concern to the devotees” (ibid.). This is ultimately the recognition of a unitary Divine reality that goes beyond formal differences. The saint or a goddess of another tradition becomes a way of connecting to a reality that transcends the divergences of different religious traditions. Such an alliance can also be seen in another mode, that which Sila-Khan calls ‘sharing’. This entails the sharing of sacred time and space by participating in festivals and holy days and visiting and asking for blessings at the shrines and sacred sites of the other without any merging of identities.

The third mode is ‘borrowing’, which “as a specific mode of discourse, is a conscious process through which elements from a different tradition are integrated into one’s own worldview to stress the profound unity of the Divine despite the plurality of vision. In these cases the result is obviously not innovation or creation of a new religious movement.” Examples, among many, include the integration of Nath yogi doctrines and practices into his teachings by the major Sufi saint Shaykh ‘Abd al-Quddūs Gangohī (1456–1637) and of bhakti poetry by Bulleh Shāh (1680–1758), in both cases mediated by the school of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s doctrine of the oneness of being (waḥdat al-wujūd), which enabled them to theorize formal difference while maintaining supra-formal unity. To these three modes of relation, Sila-Khan opposes the fourth, liminality, “where identities become blurred” (ibid., p. 44) (and not only temporarily). Most often, in colonial and later academic scholarship, such identities that combine seemingly heterogeneous elements without resolution were seen as syncretistic and the common unlearned people’s attempt to mix religions. Sila-Khan counters:

… contrary to what the British census officers thought, liminality does not emerge spontaneously as a ‘popular’ phenomenon arising from the ‘ignorance of the masses’, nor does it reflect a pious and somewhat naïve attempt at ‘reconciling two religions.’ It is the result of complex factors that can be analysed with accuracy.

(Ibid.)

These complex factors can be seen, particularly in regard to the Niẓārī Isma’ilis. Through the use of taqīyya, or dissimulation, “the Ismaili preachers and their followers never disclosed to the non-initiated the real nature and origin of their faith which looked outwardly, according to the context, either as one of the numerous medieval panths prevalent in the northern part of the Subcontinent or as a Sufi ṭarīqa” (ibid., p. 45). Furthermore, they saw their doctrine as the culmination of all religious traditions, and as such, they were able to integrate diverse elements of the Indian traditions. In time, some Isma’ili groups forgot their origins and their dissimilatory stance and became absorbed into mainstream traditions, both Hindu and Muslim.

The Sant movement associated with Kabīr, Nanak, and Dadū Mīr is another example of a liminal tradition, as the identification of these figures and their followers with any one religious tradition is problematic, though in the case of Nanak, his primary following crystallized into the Sikh religion, primarily in the colonial period. This is because the tradition consciously chose to operate outside of the established religious traditions. Sila-Khan states, “the Sants seem to have consciously associated a number of Sufi concepts and terminologies with concepts drawn from the Nath heritage or from the indigenous idiom of bhakti, without identifying themselves with any of these traditions” (ibid., p. 49). Saintly figures from these traditions, as with the Isma’ili preachers, could appear as sadhus or as faqīrs to their followers, and their identity is contested to this day, sometimes with dual shrines built next to each other, as in the case of Kabīr, claimed both by Hindus and Muslims today. However, even in the recent past, before the modern fixing of religious identities, his followers sometimes called themselves Kabīrpanthīs, followers of the path of Kabīr.²¹ Although this typology covers a lot of interreligious ground, translation is yet another mode in which interaction between Islamic and Indic traditions occurred. As Tony Stewart argues in the context of Bengal, translation “defines a way that religious practitioners seek ‘equivalence’ among their counterparts” (Stewart 2003, p. 365). In this context, he adds that Sufis, for example, sought to understand Hindu traditions such as those of Vaishnaivas, Saivas, and other Hindus, and ‘translated’ their perspectives into a language that was already resonant with Hindu ideas. Islamic ideas were conveyed in ways that fit Hindu conceptual categories, one of many examples being the use of the Hindu figure of the avatāra to describe the Islamic figure of the nabī, or prophet. In other South Asian Muslim contexts, we also commonly see the opposite of this, a translation of Islamic categories onto Hindu ones. For example, the Sufi and scholar Mirza Mazhar Jan-i-Janan (1699–1781) justified many aspects of Hindu tradition, even idol worship, by translating it into Islamic categories.²² What we can gather from this foregoing analysis is the multivalent nature of religious identity―to the extent it can be called ‘identity’―in pre-modern South Asia and how the categories we are used to simply did not exist, or, even if they did, did not denote fixed entities the way they do today.

4. The Construction of a Hindu–Muslim Conflict in Colonial South Asia

Let us now return to the colonial period and ask: why and by what means did the colonial British construct a Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia? One answer is given by Edward Said, who has pointed to the significance of narrative in the justification of the colonial enterprise:

The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work in it; who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future—these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.

(Said 1993, pp. xii–xiii)

The British, when they had to justify their rule over the subcontinent, like other colonial powers, constructed a narrative that took elements that we have seen above—atemporal and exoticized versions of Hinduism and Islam in perpetual conflict—and expounded it as positivist history. Colonial British historians were, by and large, apologists for British imperialism, and chief among their works is the nine-volume work of Elliot and Dowson, History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, published in 1849. The historiographical method of this publication was to focus on the Turko-Persian chronicles written by court historians of various Muslim kings. These were read in a strictly positivist manner and presented as the authentic history of pre-modern India, completely ignoring their hagiographic intent and semi-mythological dimensions, not to mention the countless internal contradictions between different chronicles.²³ The volumes make selections from these chronicles that highlight the evils of Muslim political rule. This is accomplished through constructing a narrative that identifies the characters represented in these chronicles as representative of Islam and Muslims and their invasion of and rule over India as a total suppression and barbaric intrusion by ruthless foreigners that destroyed Hindu culture. Emerging from this narrative is a tripartite historical schema: a rich, golden Hindu past,²⁴ which was disrupted by its destruction at the hands of fanatical Muslims who overtook India, until the British came to deliver them, defeat the invaders, and establish civilization and order.²⁵ It is, of course, not acknowledged that the majority of Indian Muslims did not come from foreign lands, and even those that did, including the so-called invaders after Maḥmūd of Ghazni, such as the Delhi sultans and Mughal kings, did not rule as a ‘foreign’ power with a power base outside India but settled in India and made it their home. Using this schematization, Elliot and Dawson are able to claim the benevolence of the British Empire, and state that their publication, essentially an exposé of the brutal Muslim past of India, would “make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and equity of their rule” (Elliot and Dowson 1963, vol. 1, p. xxii). In addition to being an apologia for British rule, this selective reading also reduced history to politics and viewed Muslims and Hindus as religio-political groups, a move which came to be adopted by South Asians themselves, with enormous consequences. A narrative constructed to justify empire was internalized by many Hindus, for whom the Muslim period of Indian history became the imagined memory of a trauma that must be redressed if not avenged. It was similarly internalized by many Muslims, who reimagined it as the glorious triumph of Muslim power and civilization when, in sharp contrast to the present losses, Muslims were in control and ascendancy.

We have seen the roots of some of the categorizations adopted by the colonial British from modern European historians, such as the positing of multiple autonomous civilizations, each wedded to its central religious ideas.²⁶ When mapped onto India, this generated the categories of the dominant religions, and accompanying civilizations, of Hinduism and Islam, opposed to each other in almost all their general and particular characteristics. British colonial histories of South Asia then translated this schema onto historical data from South Asia read through a positivist lens without regard to context or intent, generating a historiography of perpetual mutual antagonism between the two religions and civilizations.

5. Religion as a New Discursive Formation in Colonial South Asia

To contextualize the religious polemics of late colonial India, such as that between Nānautvī and Dayānanda, it is informative to trace their genealogy to the major transformations—religious, epistemic, political, and social—that were occurring in South Asia under British colonial rule. A particularly useful tool for such analysis is anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s notion of new ‘discursive formations’ in colonial India and how they established new epistemological spaces, fashioned new discourses, and re-invented categories, in the process “converting Indian forms of knowledge into European objects” (Cohn 1996, p. 21). Cohn examines how new discursive formations came into being in colonial India in the domains of language, law, governance, and art due to British modes of appraising Indian forms of knowledge with a view toward control; by defining and classifying a thing, one can establish control over it.

As Cohn puts it, “the conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge” (ibid., p. 16). He divides this investigation of South Asian knowledge into various kinds of modalities: the historiographic, the observational/travel, the survey, the enumerative, the museological, and the surveillance (ibid., pp. 4–11). Although his work focuses primarily on the way that language, law, and governance were transformed under British rule through new classifications and codifications, similar processes of objectification and the creation of a new discursive formation can be seen in the delineation and evaluation in the colonial period of what came to be termed ‘religion’. Instead of multivalent, constantly negotiated, lived traditions that interacted with diverse elements of culture, with which they overlapped, religion became an object that could be investigated, classified, defined, and, thereby, controlled. Using this approach, the construction of Hinduism and Islam discussed above can be seen as applications of a metanarrative of ‘religion’ under which they are subsumed. The modalities mentioned above are not exhaustive, and almost all of them were used in order to understand and delineate an arena of life that was deemed essential to the South Asian ‘mentality’ and culture (as opposed to the modern secular West): their religious beliefs and practices.²⁷ This was, in a sense, a logical consequence of the modern European separation of the religious and the secular. By claiming the secular, European modernity also distanced itself from the religious, which became its ‘other’ and came to be increasingly identified with the colonized and native populations of the non-Western world. The device of classifying South Asians into clear-cut categories and accompanying taxonomies denoting different religions thus served the purpose of claiming to know, and thereby control, the messy and variegated religious life of India, and to establish a process of othering in which the chief identity of Indians became their schematized religious affiliation, as opposed to the secular and rational identity claimed by the colonial West.

Out of Cohn’s investigative modalities stated above, we have already seen the employment of the historiographic modality in the construction of South Asian religions in which “History in its broadest sense was a zone of debate over the ends and means of their [i.e., the British] rulership in India” (Cohn 1996, p. 5). The other modalities can be seen as similarly supplying the information and tools for the construction of religion, among other things, in South Asia. The observational/travel modality enabled the British, through observation and travel accounts, to categorize “particular sites, social types, practices, and encounters with India and Indians” (ibid., p. 7), and these became supplementary tools to establish the religious identities of different Indians. The survey modality enabled the British to survey all aspects of a given region of India, from its zoology and economic produce to its people, customs, and history, all of which were “deployed by the colonial state in fixing, bounding, and settling India” (ibid., p. 8). The enumerative modality was particularly significant for the construction of religion on an administrative level, for it is by the census that religious groups were defined and enumerated. Cohn comments:

What was entailed in the construction of the census operations was the creation of social categories by which India was ordered for administrative purposes. The British assumed that the census reflected the basic sociological facts of India. This it did, but through the enumerative modality, the project also objectified social, cultural, and linguistic differences among the peoples of India. The panoptical view that the British were constructing led to the reification of India as a polity in which conflict, from the point of view of the rulers, could only be controlled by the strong hand of the British.

(Ibid.)

Since the census designations were by religion, South Asians had to choose and tick off one religion they belonged to. Thus, the British had, with one stroke, officially abolished the not-uncommon phenomenon of belonging in different ways to multiple religious traditions or adhering to religious traditions/panths that were not officially recognized in the census.²⁸ South Asians were henceforth condemned to be either Hindus or Muslims, or one of the few other religions recognized, such as Christian, Parsi (Zoroastrian), and eventually Sikh.²⁹ Processes of what Sila-Khan calls ‘Sanskritization’ and ‘Ashrafization’ (See Sila-Khan 2004, pp. 51–65) among Hindus and Muslims were likely already happening without colonial interference. What this entailed was that communities practicing localized religious traditions were increasingly coming under the influence of the elite traditions associated with the Brahmins and the ashrāf due to the prestige of the latter. What the British classification of Indians into religious categories did was to speed up and consolidate this process but also to enshrine it using Enlightenment forms of rationality. The debates between Nānautvī and Dayānanda would not have been possible without this reification, which differentiated the religious traditions of South Asia, reconfiguring them into precisely defined systems of belief and practice that not only did not overlap but were fundamentally opposed to each other. This, in turn, created corporate religious identities among South Asians themselves, as we will see further below, that focused on the assertion of difference as a way of making space for one’s own identity in a multi-religious context also challenged by secular identities. In this process, however, other factors, such as the proselytism of Christian missionaries and the mapping of other religions on the model of Christianity by European scholars and Orientalists, also played a significant role.

Geoffrey Oddie describes some of these processes regarding the Indian religions, which are also applicable to Islam in India, and the modern development of the idea of religions as rival and rigidly self-enclosed systems:

Imbedded in the notion that Indian religions or ‘Hinduism’ was one among a number of world systems, was the idea that it shared with them certain characteristics. It was, first and foremost, an objective ‘system’ which like all religious systems was an echo of the Christian model. All religions, including ‘Hinduism’, had boundaries which separated them from rival systems; and marking the boundaries between Hinduism and other religions eventually became one of the functions of the census commissioners at a later date. Religions were unified systems internally coherent with parts that depended on each other; so, for example, ‘Hinduism’ was like the workings of a clock … In all religions, according to this view, there were elites (usually priests) who controlled everything from the top down. There were sacred texts or writings…and there was a belief system or ‘creed’, including something like an essence or hard core of belief…that was its chief characteristic.

(Oddie 2010, pp. 45–46)

The process that Oddie describes represents another strand, one of the most important, in the construction of modern religious identities and religious conflict and competition in South Asia. Cohn commented that prior to all the investigative modalities that the British employed, there was the production of knowledge about India by British scholars (Cohn 1996, pp. 4–5). The scholarly construction of Hinduism and Islam by Orientalists and of the modern concept of religion, which was then applied to the individual religions, analogous to the model of genus and species, by scholars of comparative religions was a central move in the creation of modern South Asian religious identities. The religious categories described by Orientalists came, as was the case with other European forms of knowledge introduced under colonial rule, to be internalized and reproduced by South Asians themselves.³⁰

Certain specific practices employed in British Orientalism can be pinpointed for their contribution to the differentiation of Hindu and Islamic traditions in South Asia. The a priori British Orientalist categorization of Indian religions into strict ‘high tradition’ forms of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’ led to both the differentiation and homogenization of these traditions. In order to classify the messy hybridity and fluidity of the religious landscape of colonial India, the British posited ‘pure’ and ‘pristine’ forms of Hinduism and Islam of which the myriad local variations were degradations. In a religious landscape with numerous robust and growing vernacular traditions, the identification of Hindu traditions with Sanskrit and of Islamic traditions with Arabic and Persian—an identification that came to be institutionalized in British educational policy in India—further led to the differentiation of Hindu and Muslim religious traditions from each other and to the marginalization of religious traditions that differed from the official orthodox constructs, or to the incorporation of these forms into the ‘high tradition’.³¹ This mapping of ‘high’ and ‘low’ and pure versus adulterated traditions came to be championed by Hindu and Muslim reformers and fundamentalist movements. Through them, it contributed to new interpretations of Hinduism and Islam, in which they were defined ever more narrowly and increasingly exclusionary of a multiplicity of interpretations, not to mention interaction with other religious traditions. Localized and pluralistic interpretations becoming marginalized also meant that there was less and less scope and possibility for Hindus and Muslims to communicate in the interpenetrative ways that they did in the pre-colonial period.

6. Orientalism, Anglicism, and the Christian Missionary Critique of South Asian Religions

Let us turn to another aspect of the colonial experience that directly contributed to the emergence of what I call oppositional religion in South Asia. While religious and mythological ideas, narratives, and practices had been an important part of the South Asian social imaginary in pre-modern times, with certain exceptions, they had been experienced as facets of culture, not as self-standing propositional truths that were either right or wrong and interminably in competition with other claims to propositional truth. It is this transformation that brings us to the roots of the first public theological debates between Hindus and Muslims in India. In order to understand this transformation, we have to pay attention to the central role played by Christian missionaries in aggressively introducing new ways of imagining and defining religion into the South Asian religious landscape. It was the combination of Christian missionary rhetoric with the discourses and spaces of colonial modernity that allowed a religious public sphere shaped by competition to emerge.

British Orientalism may have played an important role in mapping the culture and religious traditions of South Asia, which was used by the colonial regime for the tasks of classification and control we saw above. It did, however, possess another side that is sometimes overlooked in post-colonial literature. This was the sympathy and even affection that the Orientalist vision of India had for South Asian knowledge traditions, as seen in the work of men like the polymath linguist and scholar Sir William Jones (1746–1794). This resulted in British efforts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to preserve Indian high culture through the cultivation of classical languages and the establishment of educational institutions that dispensed classical Indian learning. Delhi College, where Mamlūk ‘Alī, Nānautvī’s principal teacher, was one college among many established through such efforts, and its British staff had an eminent interest in preserving and translating classical Muslim texts and literature and bringing them in conversation with British knowledge. Against this sympathetic current, there was an oppositional current, that of Anglicism, which saw little of value in indigenous South Asian culture, learning, and religion and advocated the imparting of English norms, values, and learning to the benighted Indian natives. Perhaps the most celebrated of this form of sentiment is encapsulated in Lord Thomas Macauley’s Minute on Indian Education to the British Parliament, in which he asserted that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (see Cutts 1953). Although Anglicism was championed by British liberals, such as the colonialist historian James Mill (1773–1836), it found an unexpected bedfellow in Evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christians in Britain, in the midst of their own religious revival, saw the British mission in India as not merely economic exploitation and political rule but as a God-given opportunity for an evangelization of the subcontinent sunk in heathenism and backwardness, needful of the spiritual renewal of Evangelical Christianity. This fit nicely with the liberal Anglicist aim to reform and modernize India, as in both cases, the method would be to actively intervene and challenge the religious traditions and customs of South Asia, with the purpose of bringing Indians to either Christianity or liberal modernity. Backing the Orientalist camp, the British government had initially strongly opposed any kind of intervention in the religions and customs of the natives as it could lead to religious and political unrest. A chief example of this had been not allowing Christian missionaries to operate freely in India. However, the political tide was turning in Britain itself, and after much debate, the Anglicists won out in this contentious episode of Anglo-Indian history known as the Orientalist–Anglicist controversy.³² In 1813, Parliament opened the gates to Christian missionary activity in India, with monumental results for local religious traditions.

Christian missionaries immediately began to target Hindu traditions, focusing not only on theological error but even more strongly on the supposed moral degeneration of Hindu rituals, religious practices, and idolatry. These attacks were many and wide-ranging and were to be followed in time by Hindu responses to Christianity, the first historical instance of polemics against other religions by self-identified Hindus.³³ By the 1830s, Christian missionaries had also begun to challenge Islam in a bid to attract converts among Muslims, with this process leading up to the celebrated 1853 debate between the German Pietist missionary Karl Pfander (1803–1865) and the Muslim ‘ālim Mawlānā Raḥmat Allāh Kairānvī (1818–1891) in Lucknow. Kairānvī was able to get the better of the seasoned Pfander, who had written several works against Islam, by the arguments provided by his companion at the debate, Dr. Wazīr Khān, who, in his studies in London, had made acquaintance with the new field of modern European higher biblical criticism, which Pfander was unfamiliar with. Kairānvī was likely the first and most influential Muslim scholar to use modern European higher biblical criticism as a tool for Muslim polemics against Christianity.³⁴ His work against Christianity, Iẓhār al-Ḥaqq, was translated into many Islamic languages and became a standard work of polemics all over the Islamic world as Muslims were debating Christians everywhere with the spread of colonialism and Western power. Kairānvī’s utilization of the new biblical criticism became an important technique for other Muslims debating Christians as it could easily be used to bolster the Qur’anic claim of textual corruption (taḥrīf) in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. These techniques of using biblical criticism to support claims of taḥrīf were also consistently used by Nānautvī in his debates with Christians.

The critique of Christian missionaries became a central component of nineteenth-century Hindu and Muslim movements in South Asia, but this also meant that Hindu and Muslim South Asians, paradoxically, in responding to Christian criticisms, came to, often inadvertently, adopt the terms of their discourse, as we will see in the case of idolatry. This influence was more pronounced among Hindus, who were being subjected to an alien religion and its novel discourse for the very first time, in comparison with Muslims, whose very scripture had critiqued Christian views and who could look to the resources of a long tradition of debate with Christians.³⁵ But even for Muslims, the circumstances were novel in many ways, with the rise of Protestantism and its new theological categories and the link between Christianity and colonial rule. Among Hindus, the most significant response to Christian missionary activity was by Swami Dayānanda Sarasvatī, the founder of the most successful Hindu reformist movement of late nineteenth-century India, the Arya Samaj.³⁶ Dayānanda received a traditional Shaivite Brahmanic education and became an ascetic early in his life, and even before encountering Christianity, he exhibited iconoclastic tendencies toward traditional Hindu practices and interpretations, which he criticized as degenerate.³⁷There is some discussion in the scholarship on the origins of his criticism of idolatry or image worship, whether it was from Hindu sources or reflected an influence from Christianity or even Islam, or even modern rationalism. In his own autobiographical account, Dayānanda attributed his rejection of idolatry to a personal experience from childhood. As he had little direct exposure to Christian missionaries until later in life and very little exposure to Muslim learning, unlike the other major reformist Hindu iconoclast, Rammohun Roy, his iconoclasm likely drew on aniconic strands within Hindu traditions themselves, beginning in the Vedic corpus itself, and his monotheism on Vedic and Upanishadic notions of the formless One. Later traditions in bhakti and the Sant movement, for example, continued to discuss these. Even if Dayānanda’s rejection of idolatry owed itself to strands of the larger Hindu Nirguna tradition, his discourse nonetheless functioned in a specific and new way due to the colonial public religious environment in India, shaped by Christian missionary polemics against idolatry. As Salmond observes, “Hindu polemics against idolatry were catalyzed by exposure to Muslim and Protestant positions but drew on authentic Indian precedents and resources” (Salmond 2004, p. 7).

Dayānanda’s chief mature work, Satyarsh Prakāsh,³⁸ was an articulation and championing of Vedic religion based solely on the Vedas combined with an aggressive criticism of all non-Vedic religions, which included all later Hindu traditions as well as Christianity and Islam. Despite his avowed antipathy to Christianity and debates with Christian missionaries, Dayānanda’s perspective bears a strong similitude to the concerns of Protestant Christianity and repeats many Protestant critiques of Hinduism. This can be seen in his vehement rejection of the traditional Hindu thought and norms of Brahmanical elites and their authority, his condemnation of the idea and practice of idolatry, his rejection of rituals, his proclamation that Vedic religion is the true and only monotheism, his application of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura to the Vedas as the repository of all knowledge, and his claim that Vedic religion alone was true, infallible, and of divine origin, all other religions being false and man-made. This deep coincidence with, or internalization of, modern Christian categories made Dayānanda’s vision a near-perfect amalgamation of the concerns of the Orientalist camp with the critiques of the Anglicist camp as it combined the advocacy of the Orientalist idea of a pure golden-age Hinduism of the Vedas with the rejection of the traditions and customs of contemporary Hinduism made by the Anglicists and Christian missionaries. Among Muslims, the closest counterpart to the Arya Samaj was perhaps the Aḥmadiyya movement of Mirzā Ghulām Aḥmad of Qādian, which combined a deep combativeness toward Christian critiques of Islam with a radical reinterpretation of the classical Islamic tradition.³⁹ Like that of Dayānanda, Ghulām Aḥmad’s religious vision could only be forged in the competitive and oppositional religious public sphere of colonial India.

The Christian missionary critique of South Asian religion and the responses it engendered should be further seen in the light of the rise of the public sphere in colonial India,⁴⁰ or more aptly, the emergence of “public arenas” of discourse, to use Sandra Freitag’s terminology (see Freitag 1989). Christian missionary criticisms and Hindu and Muslim responses, as well as intra-religious polemics among Hindus and Muslims, were a central component in the formation of public arenas where religious identity and religious difference were increasingly established and articulated. The issues that the missionaries raised, such as monotheism and idolatry, which we will look further at below, became general topics of discourse among and between religious traditions in South Asia. Thus, a discourse on religion, fashioned in exchange with Christian missionaries and reflective of their concerns, emerged in the public sphere. A key development indebted to Christian missionary activity was that religious communities increasingly came to defend and define themselves in debate with other religious traditions, as they also did vis-à-vis the modern scientific and rationalist perspectives introduced through British colonialism. Such a discourse came to be carried out between Hindus and Muslims (as well as other South Asian religious traditions) with or without the presence of Christian missionaries but often indicative of their discourse, as can be seen in the debate between Christians, Muslims, and Hindus at the Maylā-i Khudāshināsī (The Festival of the Knowledge of God) at Shahjahanpur in 1875, in which Dayānanda and Nānautvī both participated, with exchanges between Dayānanda and Nānautvī addressing the former’s critique of Islam, which we will look at below. Such exchanges and debates came to constitute the ‘public face’ of different religions in South Asia, which was not internally determined but contested and negotiated through those of other religious and philosophical perspectives.

Additional factors that went into the making of the polemical context of late 19th century India were the new configurations of religious authority and the rise of print culture.⁴¹ Among Muslims, the loss of political authority actually led to the empowering of religious scholars unaffiliated with any political power in producing new public articulations of Islam,⁴² and also led to the diffusion of religious authority among competing groups of religious scholars, religious movements, and the modernist elite that had come into being in the post-1857 period. The expressions of these religious scholars and groups in public articulations of Islam, such as in debates with other Muslims as well as non-Muslims, in the printing of religious tracts, in the establishment of new educational institutions, and in various demonstrations of public piety, were markers of their religious authority to a Muslim public at a time of religious, intellectual, and social ferment. Combined together, all these variant factors—the colonial and Orientalist differentiation of and homogenization of religion, the Anglicist and Christian missionary critique of religion and the responses to these critiques, the emergence of new forms of religious authority and of public arenas for religious discourse—were all components of the new discursive formation that South Asian religious traditions came to operate and express themselves in the late nineteenth century.

7. Nānautvī and His Defense Against Dayānanda’s Accusation of Muslim Idolatry: Qibla-numā

Mawlānā Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī (1833–1880) was one of the towering figures of modern Sunni Islam in South Asia.⁴³ A prominent ‘ālim, Sufi, and philosophical theologian, he is best remembered for being the co-founder of the school of Deoband, which became the most influential South Asian Sunni seminary of the last two centuries, as a means to preserve traditional Muslim learning under British colonial domination. His participation in interreligious debates and his polemical and apologetic writings addressing Hinduism and Christianity, though lesser known, stress the intelligibility and rationality of the Islamic tradition as opposed to other religious traditions, which becomes a central theme in modern Muslim apologetics. He was also among the earliest critics of the emergent Muslim modernism of Sayyid Ahmad Khan.⁴⁴

Traditional Deobandi accounts of the polemical encounters between Dayānanda and Nānautvī highlight their public and novel nature. These accounts by disciples of Nānautvī, who were present with him during the events of the encounters, preface each of the three written works of Nānautvī, responding to the attacks of Dayānanda and, later, another even more aggressive Arya Samaji missionary, the prolific Pandit Lekh Ram (1858–1897), who is best known for his contentious debates with Ghulām Aḥmad Qādianī. Nānautvī often did not name his own works, so the published titles of these are as follows: Qibla-numā (Nānautvī 1969), Intiṣār al-Islām (Nānautvī 1981),⁴⁵ both of which respond to Dayānanda, and Javāb turkī ba turkī (Barahīn-i Qāsimiyya 1967),⁴⁶ which is a response to Dayānanda as well as Lekh Ram. They state how Dayānanda, animated by his mission to propagate a newfangled interpretation (maẓhab jadīd) of Hindu religion rejected by Sanskrit scholars, had taken it upon himself to denounce each and every other religious interpretation as false. This he did not only through his writings, such as the aforementioned Satyarsh Prakāsh, but more dramatically, through public speeches deprecating Islamic beliefs and practices, such as those at the bazaar in the town of Roorkee—the bazaar setting denoting the presence of all classes of people of different religions and educational backgrounds. Not satisfied with what the Muslim sources describe as creating a fitna, an event causing moral strife, in the smaller provincial town of Roorkee, he then proceeded to do the same in the much larger town of Meeruth, drawing larger crowds. Nānautvī, after protracted but fruitless negotiations for a formal debate with Dayānanda, eventually sent his disciples to answer the allegations in the same bazaar in Roorkee. After recovering from an illness that would eventually lead to his demise a short time later, he himself finally appeared to give lectures for three days to a large assembly of people of different religious affiliations and educational levels.⁴⁷ Nānautvī’s stated reason for his actions was specifically the public nature of Dayānanda’s polemical speeches, laced with theological and philosophical language the locals could not refute, which threatened to intellectually and religiously lead common people astray. Additionally, they were incendiary at a time when the boundaries between Islamic and Indian religious traditions were becoming more and more rigid, with Dayānanda’s polemical attitudes and activities providing an intellectual foundation for the growth of communalism in colonial India. Nānautvī’s actions were also taken to reassure the Muslim community that they and their traditions can be defended. This, in itself, is a sign of the increasing role of moral and communal authority that the ‘ulama had come to wield when other forms of Muslim traditional authority had declined or disappeared under colonial rule. Nānautvī had previously debated Christians and Hindus at the Festival in Shahjahanpur, as mentioned, and had also written against Christian theological claims in a number of works such as Ḥujjat al-Islām. After his public speeches at Roorkee, Nānautvī distilled their contents into the two works mentioned above, elaborating his response to Dayānanda’s critiques. Nānautvī wrote eleven answers to eleven specific charges Dayānanda had brought against Islam. Ten of these were collected in an untitled tract containing a series of responses to very specific metaphysical, eschatological, and ethical issues raised by Dayānanda against Islam, which was later published as Intiṣār al-Islām (The Victory of Islam).⁴⁸ These included answers to such questions of Dayānanda’s critique of Islamic views as the omnipotence of God, the existence of Satan, the legal doctrine of abrogation, the question of transmigration, actions yielding rewards in paradise, the possibility of forgiveness for sins, Muslim views on alcohol, the consumption of meat, the burial of the dead, and the stages of the afterlife. The eleventh answer, far longer than the other ten put together, was titled Qibla-numā,⁴⁹ being a detailed theological response to Dayānanda’s contention that Muslims were idolatrous due to the reverence they paid to the Ka’ba.

The structure of these two works is quite illustrative of the changes brought out by the introduction of religious and theological discourse into the modern public sphere. This was a context that was no longer an internal conversation between Muslim elites, as most of the discourse—written and oral—of Muslim scholars had been in the pre-modern era, but one in which not only lay and modern educated Muslims participated but also the lay persons and scholars of other religious traditions. This publicization of Islamic discourse that had once been their provenance alone was one of the major changes that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim scholars have had to address. The question raised for Nānautvī by the public presentations of complex theological ideas was how to address them in a way that would be comprehensible by the ordinary public, many of them unlearned, and yet be intellectually rigorous for non-Muslim religious scholars like Dayānanda. Nānautvī’s solution in these two tracts was to provide two answers for every question, one for the ordinary people represented by the kind of people gathered in the bazaar and one for the intellectual elite represented by educated Muslim and Hindu scholars. The first answer was easy to understand, succinctly presented, and a summarized version of the second, which was much longer, complex, and rooted in classical Islamic philosophical and theological traditions. One could also say that the first was relatively accessible, often remaining at a rhetorical level written for an engaged public audience, and the second was, as Nānautvī’s commentator Ishtiyāq Aḥmad mentions, “based on intellectual verification (taḥqīqī) and supported by intellectual and rational proofs” (Nānautvī 1969, p. 21). This intellectual (‘aqlī) response was further divided into two parts: one a summary and the second detailed. These kinds of divisions show that Nānautvī was very sensitive to the notion that different people needed to be addressed differently. The situation of colonial India, where he had to simultaneously address multiple audiences, consisting of Muslim publics, other Muslim scholars and intellectuals, non-Muslim publics, and non-Muslim scholars, was a novel one, but one which was to become a norm in the modern world that Muslim scholars would have to contend with from then on. Nānautvī is very conscious of addressing himself to an audience composed not only of his co-religionists but of religious others and states that he is using a rationalist language because his opponents do not share the religious basis of his thought.⁵⁰ However, since this rationalist language itself was based on a particular intellectual tradition, that of Islamic Hellenistic philosophy and Islamic philosophical theology, it had its own genealogy, which was not shared by those like Dayānanda, whose thought was heavily influenced by Vedantic philosophical traditions as well as nineteenth-century British empiricist philosophy, nor was there as of yet a well-established standard of public reason amongst the multiplicity of intellectual and religious perspectives of colonial India. In this way, these debates can be seen as part of the attempt by religious actors in South Asia to establish a public reason that, unlike the secularizing developments of modern Europe, included religious discourses.

The basis for the composition of Nānautvī’s tract Qibla-numā was Dayānanda’s contention that Vedic Hinduism alone was the true monotheism, and Islam, like Christianity, was idolatrous. Islam’s idolatrous nature, according to Dayānanda, was typified by Muslim reverence of and implied worship of the Ka’ba, which was not, he contended, very different from the popular Hindu worship of idols, which Dayānanda equally dismissed as antithetical to his interpretation of Vedic doctrine. A brief analysis of certain aspects of Nānautvī’s response can help us examine certain aspects of the new discursive shifts among Muslim scholars and elites that emerged as a result of the factors delineated above and in conversation with other religious traditions. The novelty of the polemic between Dayānanda and Nānautvī and its public nature has been noted by Nānautvī’s chief twentieth-century biographer, the prolific scholar Manāẓir Aḥsan Gilānī (1892–1956), who states that there is very little evidence—textual or historical—of any serious polemical intellectual exchanges between Muslims and Hindus in the long history of Muslim presence, and that it was the originality of Dayānanda’s confrontational approach toward Islam that launched this new chapter in Hindu–Muslim relations in South Asia (Gilānī n.d., vol. 2). The debate between Nānautvī and Dayānanda emerges as the first of its kind as a public polemical encounter between two major representatives of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’. As such, it is a key moment in the modern consolidation of oppositional religious identities in South Asia, for it represents not only ‘external’ impositions of new religious identities, such as the colonial census, but an internalization and publicization of them by religious scholars representing South Asian religious traditions.

At the beginning of Qibla-numā, Nānautvī quotes Dayānanda’s critique regarding the Ka’ba: “Muslims call Hindus idolaters (but-parast) and you yourself prostrate before a place (makān) that is made of stones. Whatever response Muslims give could be repeated exactly by idolaters. Thus, Muslims are nothing less than idolaters” (Nānautvī 1969, p. 30). After ridiculing Dayānanda’s assertion as intellectually incoherent, Nānautvī divides his ‘simple’ answer into seven parts, which we will examine here, and follows up with a detailed ‘intellectual’ (aqlī) answer argued from within the ḥikmah tradition.⁵¹ His basic answer is the argument that the Muslim approach to the Ka’ba consists simply of istiqbāl-i Ka’ba, the physical act of turning one’s face in the direction of the Ka’ba, and thus does not entail any kind of intentionality toward the Ka’ba in which it would be perceived as an object of worship, as would be the case with the worship of idols. Therefore, Muslim orientation toward the Ka’ba is fundamentally different from idol worship. The first part of his seven-part answer furthers his basic contention that orienting oneself to the Ka’ba is a question of concentration (tawajjuh) and not one of worship, as would be the case in idolatry. Furthermore, he uses a populist argument that if Dayānanda were to ask any Muslim about the notion of Ka’ba worship (Ka’ba-parastī), that person would not even understand what that term meant (Nānautvī 1969, p. 30). Here, Nānautvī demonstrates a key part of his methodology, which is to tear down grand statements like comparing turning to the Ka’ba with idol worship by paying close attention to the linguistic terminology used by religious practitioners and the intentionality that language conveys. Also, Nānautvī, despite his championing of the ‘ulama as sole interpreters of the normative standard of Islamic practice against Muslim modernists such as Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, who challenged their interpretive authority, here, against non-Muslim opponents, holds the normative understanding and practice of the whole Muslim community as indicative of an integral Islamic perspective.

The second part of the answer is based on the notion of intention. What separates Muslim orientation toward the Ka’ba from prayer or worship is that the latter needs a corresponding intention, without which it is invalid, while the former requires no intention, but merely involves turning one’s face in a particular direction (ibid., pp. 31–32). While this distinction that Nānautvī makes may be rooted in Islamic legal definitions of intentionality, he extends the notion of intention to all forms of worship, so that any form of idolatry would necessitate a corresponding intention to worship. Nānautvī argues that if any Hindu worshipper of idols was asked if such intention was necessary, he would reply affirmatively, again arguing for a communal understanding of religious normativity as well a publicly corroborated reason against what he claims are the idiosyncratic interpretations of Dayānanda.

The third part of his answer is based on the signal unimportance of the Ka’ba in the details of Muslim worship, particularly its most important form, the canonical prayer (salāt). The Ka’ba’s lack of importance is demonstrated by the fact that it is never mentioned in the prayer nor in any of the parts of the prayer cycle. Nānautvī individually comments on each of the parts of the prayer cycle in a detailed analysis, showing that it is directed toward God alone and is intended to glorify Him alone, accompanied by the awareness of one’s own imperfection. He contrasts this with the worship of idols, in which the physical idol, which has been fashioned into a particular deity like Shiva⁵² or Vishnu and is then imagined as such, is glorified (Nānautvī 1969, pp. 32–37). One of Nānautvī’s contentions here is that there is no ontological relation established between God and the Ka’ba the way there is between an idol and the deity that it signifies, or rather, that it substantially becomes for the worshipper.

The fourth part of the answer refers to a difference in sacred spatiality between the Ka’ba and Hindu idols. He argues that Muslims need not be physically present before the Ka’ba in order to worship God, whereas an idol needs to be present before the devotee in order to effect worship. He contends that even if the physical structure of the Ka’ba ceased to remain, the directionality of the qibla would remain intact, as it did when the Ka’ba was, in fact, partially demolished in the era of ‘Abd Allāh ibn Zubayr.⁵³ Thus, it demonstrates that the physical structure is not what Muslims worship. This stands in contrast, Nānautvī states, to ordinary Hindu practice, where the sacrality of a place is determined precisely by the presence of idols in it, so that if idols were to be moved, as sometimes happens, the temple they were stored in loses its significance and sacrality and becomes an ordinary building. Again, the ontological identity of divinity with idols is contrasted with the Ka’ba. He supports this further by stating that for Hindus, that which is worshipped (ma’būd), prostrated toward (masjūd), and sought after (maqṣūd) is to be found in the idol, whereas such an intentionality is utterly absent in a Muslim’s orienting himself to the Ka’ba (Nānautvī 1969, p. 37).

This point about the contrast between the Ka’ba and idols is again brought out in the fifth part of the answer. Nānautvī here mentions, again asking Dayānanda to pay attention to the terminology that is used, that Muslims call the Ka’ba the ‘house’ of God (bayt Allāh), not God Himself. The Ka’ba’s being the ‘house’ of God, not God Himself, shows that “the place is not that which is sought, but He who resides in the place” (ibid., p. 39). Idolaters, on the other hand, do not think of idols as the ‘place’ or ‘seat’ of God but substantially as God Himself in the form of Shiva, Ganesh, etc. Since idol worshippers think of these honorable beings as worthy of worship, their worship is really directed at their idols (ibid., pp. 39–40).

In the sixth part of his answer, Nānautvī reiterates his general conception of God. He states that Muslims believe that only He is worthy of worship who is Existent (mawjūd) through Himself.⁵⁴ All others derive their existence from Him, and all good and ill is through His will alone. His Perfection (kamāl), Majesty (jalāl), and Beauty (jamāl) are essential (dhātī), and these qualities, when present in the universe, are bestowed by God alone. He suggests that if Muslims would worship anyone other than God, it would be the Prophet Muhammad, for he is greater than all humans, all angels, and even the throne of God Himself, as well as the Ka’ba. However, they do not do so, for even he, God’s highest creature, can do nothing without God. In contrast, he suggests many Hindus regard God the Absolute as being utterly beyond this world and, thus, contend that it is not possible to direct worship toward Him. The affairs of this world, instead, are in the hands of the trinity of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, and it is they that Hindus worship (Nānautvī 1969, pp. 40–44). Here, Nānautvī seems to be arguing that if one understood the whole conception of God for Muslims adequately, it would be impossible to compare it with the ordinary beliefs of Hindus.

The seventh part of his answer relies on a subtle discussion of the Ash’arī theological relationship between actor (fā’il), act (fa’l), and what is acted upon (maf’ūl), with the significant conclusion that orientation toward the Ka’ba does not depend on any form of knowledge or faith or certainty, but only on the command of God. Contrasting this with idol worship, Nānautvī said that the latter requires intellectual certainty (yaqīn) that the idol is worthy of worship, whereas Muslims turn to the Ka’ba only due to God’s commanding them to do so. The real theological reason, he states, that God has established the Ka’ba as the orientation of Muslims is that it is a tajalligah-i rabbānī, a locus of divine theophany. It is this point that Nānautvī laboriously examines in his second, ‘aqlī’ answer to Dayānanda’s contentions. God, he states, is free of any directionality (jihat), and the human being, a physical being, is bound by directionality; this is the reason humanity was given a direction for worship. If one is permitted to worship in any direction one chooses, there would be no possibility of order (intiẓām) and unity (ittifāq) amongst human beings (ibid., pp. 46–52). Thus, the intention of Muslims in turning toward the Ka’ba is to worship God, and direction is given by God in order to eliminate spiritual obstacles and unite and organize the community. Here, Nānautvī interestingly combines a mystical interpretation of the Ka’ba as a locus of divine theophany with a rational explanation of the function of the Ka’ba in Muslim worship.

This combination of theological, philosophical, and mystical modes of reasoning is central to Nānautvī’s larger intellectual methodology and to the intellectual tradition he can be situated in, that of ḥikmah combined with late Sunni philosophical theology, which flourished particularly in South Asia. The significance of Nānautvī’s being rooted in this tradition is that through it, he was able to access a form of rationality that claimed to stand above particular religious frameworks and provide a form of objectivity. In an intellectual landscape of competing religions, competing intra-Muslim interpretations, and the clash between traditional and modern modes of knowing, Nānautvī applied the categories of this philosophical theology in order to argue his points. Whether or not his opponents always understood these arguments or found them convincing may not be the most important question; what he accomplished was to articulate a methodology for an influential modern Islamic discourse that relied on certain forms of reasoning, drawn from this tradition of philosophical theology, to express the meaning of Muslim beliefs and practices in public arenas that relied on rational arguments. It may be illuminating to compare Nānautvī’s application of a form of Islamic reason to emergent questions in a modern colonial polemical milieu with the attempt of Muslim modernists like al-Afghānī, Abduh, and, in South Asia, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, and, later, Iqbal, to resurrect aspects of classical Muslim theological and philosophical perspectives to respond to the challenge of modernity. The similarities and differences between them would help us see more clearly the multiplicity of Muslim uses of rationality and avoid the tendency to equate rationality and modernity.

In addition to Nānautvī’s rational mode of argument, his invocation of Hindu practices and texts is striking. This familiarity with the texts of one’s opponents is one of the new strategies developed by Muslim scholars to successfully debate with non-Muslim opponents in the modern public sphere, as seen in how Kairānvī used a knowledge of the biblical criticism of Christian scriptural texts. Dayānanda himself, echoing a Protestant focus on scripture, used Qur’anic texts to refute Islam. Nānautvī similarly used Hindu texts to answer Dayānanda in creative ways. Nānautvī’s use of the Hindu tradition in his works was multifarious: he used it to make contrasts with Islamic norms, but at other times, he invoked it against Dayānanda’s novel interpretations, portraying them as antithetical to traditional Brahmanical positions or to popular Hindu practice. Surprisingly, he even sometimes utilizes traditional Hindu views as supporting the Islamic position on a particular point against what he decries as Dayānanda’s idiosyncratic modernist and reformist positions. In Intiṣār al-Islām, for example, he used texts from the Vedas and the Hindu epics, particularly the Mahabharata, to confirm the Islamic position on various issues Dayānanda criticized. To give one example out of many, Dayānanda, holding a strong interpretation of karmic doctrine, had argued that the idea of repentance for and forgiveness from sins was invalid. Nānautvī states in response, knowing full well Dayānanda’s particular interpretation of Hinduism:

Perhaps the Pandit [Dayānanda] might not consider other books legitimate, but regarding the four Vedas, he has expressed in our correspondence that there is not one word which is faulty in them. So: in the Atharva Veda, it is written that the remembrance of the rememberer [God] wipes out the sins of lifetimes. If justice was only served by punishment [as Dayānanda had argued], then how is this wiping out possible without punishment.

(Nānautvī 1981, p. 77)

In another place, critiquing Dayānanda’s selective use of the traditional Hindu corpus, Nānautvī states, “that book which the learned men of Hinduism deem authentic and trustworthy cannot be made untrustworthy by one’s saying so” (ibid., p. 76). Nānautvī’s use of the Islamic rational tradition and of Hindu religious texts highlights the discursive shifts encountered by Muslim scholars and theologians in the modern context of religious rivalry in the public sphere, where reason and a thorough knowledge of the opponent’s tradition become central to a successful defense of and advocacy for one’s own tradition. In responding to Dayānanda’s criticisms, Nānautvī was forging a theological discourse that would frame various aspects of Islamic doctrine and practice in a new manner, cognizant of the critiques of Hindus and Christians, and which would itself affect Muslim self-understanding and identity. Modern Muslim revivalism in South Asia, of which Nānautvī was a chief exponent as a founder of the Deoband madrasa, was forged in a crucible in which its discursive norms were framed in conversation—or rather, debate—with other religious traditions as well as emergent modernity, and not merely the latter, as many studies of Islamic reform and revival assert.

8. Concluding Reflections

To conclude, let us briefly return to the issue of idolatry discussed above and trace the genealogy of its construction in the colonial era and the discursive shifts that occurred as an example of the transformations of religious and intellectual categories in nineteenth-century South Asia. Such transformations were paralleled by similar developments in multiple colonial and modernizing contexts. The contention over the issue of idolatry specifically arose with the arrival of Christian missionaries in India, who began to target idolatry through both ethical and theological arguments as the root of the heathenism and ignorance that they believed engulfed Hindu India. With this stigmatization of idolatry, the boundaries of the discourse regarding it began to be set. It was following this that Dayānanda began to articulate a new vision of Vedic Hinduism, which internalized the Christian critique, and made the criticism and eradication of ‘idolatry’ a central part of his campaign of Hindu reform. A corollary to his anti-idolatry pronouncements was his championing of monotheism, again reflective of Christian missionary discourse. He was able to find such a monotheist perspective validated in the Upanishadic interpretation of the Vedas. This vision of Dayānanda was combined with his contention, again based on the model of oppositional religion introduced through Christian missionaries and the colonial British understanding of religion, where religions are reduced to incompatible propositional truths, that Vedic religion represented the only truth. All other religions, whether of Indian origin, like Buddhism, Jainism, or even conventional Hinduism, or of foreign origin, like Christianity or Islam, became fallacies. Subverting the Christian missionary critique of Hinduism that denigrated idolatry and preached monotheism, he applied the same criteria to not only Christianity but also Islam. The Muslim response, as expressed by Nānautvī, stressed the monotheism of Islam and identified idolatry essentially with Hinduism. A discourse among the three religious traditions was thus consolidated in which each, despite very variant theological beliefs, claimed monotheism as their own true identity and decried idolatry as characterizing the others. In such a situation, the terms ‘monotheism’ and ‘idolatry’ lose their normative meanings and become terms of contestation between religions. To apply Jonathan Z. Smith’s distinction, a shift has been made from an ‘ontological’ understanding of idolatry and monotheism to a relational and situational one, as the other is now seen as the other not only ontologically but relationally (J. Z. Smith 2004, p. 275). Simply put, the traditional Muslim discourse regarding the other, that of islām and kufr, has given way to a discourse about ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Islam’ and ‘Christianity’, corresponding to the conversion of relatively fluid religious traditions into tightly bounded ‘religions’ in a modern sense. Modern Hindu and Muslim revivalism, and Hindu–Muslim theological conflict, were born from a discourse of religious otherness and difference that directly shaped self-identity in turn.

One of Nānautvī’s key projects was to fashion a rational Islamic theology for the public sphere. One of the aims of this theology was to enable a strong presentation and defense of the Islamic tradition in the competitive religious milieu of nineteenth-century South Asia—a milieu that had been enabled by the rapid transformations brought through the colonial modernity of British rule. While Nānautvī’s participation in interreligious debates may, at first sight, seem to be a continuation of earlier forms of polemics and apologetics practiced by Muslims, the picture we saw above shows that the reality is far more complicated due to the particular conditions of colonial modernity. Christians, Muslims, and Hindus might have been inviting each other to convert to each other’s religions, but this call was situated in and shaped by a context of a broader process of what Peter van der Veer has termed “conversion to modernity” (van der Veer 1996, p. 4). As such, it was a new discourse, enabled by developments such as the rise of spaces like the modern public sphere, the emergence of new ways of imagining religion in the image of modern Protestant Christianity, the construction of the modern notion of ‘religion’ as a discrete object and its separation from the ‘secular’, and the internalization of modern European categories by colonized Hindus and Muslims, among other things.

The theological debates between these two giants of nineteenth-century religious revivalism in South Asia, Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī and Swami Dayānanda Sarasvatī, illustrate this transformation and reconfiguration of religious traditions in colonial South Asia. Although the idea of a perpetual Hindu–Muslim antagonism has become conventional today largely due to the narratives of British colonialism and South Asian nationalism, these debates were, perhaps surprisingly, the first of their kind in the sense of public and polemical encounters between representatives of a self-conscious ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’ in Indian history. By tracing the genealogy of these debates, we can identify the processes of the making and remaking of religious identities and traditions that resulted in an increasingly conflictual and competitive relationship between Hindu and Islamic traditions and communities in the last hundred and fifty years. This examination of the causes of this encounter between Nānautvī and Dayānanda highlights the diverse ways that Indian and Islamic traditions interacted in the pre-colonial period, how British colonial policy enabled the development of new forms of religious identity and new epistemic spaces for reconfigured religious expressions, the role of Christian missionaries in the development of new and oppositional religious discourses, and how South Asian religious scholars and actors internalized these new religious identities, refashioned traditional modes of religious discourse, and introduced these to the emergent publics of modern South Asia. It is this process, and not an atemporal perpetual antagonism, that is an important factor in the production of modern Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia, particularly in its religious and ideological senses.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Footnotes

Notes

1. The manner in which I use ‘object’ here is based on Bernard Cohn’s understanding of the way colonial Britons engaged in an ‘objectification’ of South Asian knowledge traditions, which will be discussed further below. See (Cohn 1996, pp. xiv–xv).

2. See Carl Ernst’s discussion of the emergence of a ‘corporate’ Islam in the modern era in his Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (Ernst 2002, pp. 38–47). Ernst’s use of the term is apt if the Latin roots of the term are taken into consideration: “to make into a body.” This is a useful way of envisaging how disparate, even if related, traditions were categorized as part of a meta-unit in the modern construction of religion.

3. I do not mean to suggest that the political and the religious are unrelated or function completely independently, but rather that an exclusive focus on the former has led to a neglect of the latter on this particular question, or sometimes, the latter has been seen as merely a function of the former.

4. For Hindu nationalism, including its view of the Hindu–Muslim divide, Christopher Jaffrelot’s classic study The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (Jaffrelot 1996) still remains relevant. See also (Bapu 2013). For the emergence of Muslim nationalism in South Asia, see (Jalal 2000) and for its role in the creation of a Muslim nation-state in South Asia, see (Devji 2013).

5. For example, William Gould, in his Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Gould 2004) examines how Hindu nationalism deeply affected the approach and even language the Congress party came to adopt regarding Indian Muslims.

6. See the following survey of different scholarly perspectives on communalism, which largely attribute it primarily to economic and political factors, without taking into account religious factors: (Misra 2020).

7. An example is the Mughal emperor Akbar conducting debates among scholars of different religions. See (Rezavi 2008).

8. A widespread example of this among Orientalist scholars of the religions of the world was to divide the religions into Aryan and Semitic, thus reducing the rich temporal and cultural diversity in religious traditions to supposed racial and cultural origins. Tomoko Masuzawa, in her widely cited study of the origins of the category of world religions, describes how Islam was classified as a Semitic and Arab religion based on its origins, which were supposed to be part of its immutable essence. See (Masuzawa 2005, pp. 179–96).

9. The concept of ‘orthodoxy’ itself, originating in a Christian context, is itself a problematic category to use without context for other religious traditions. It has often been used in the South Asian context, to delineate between official orthodox Islam and local heterodox Islam, a classification that creates more problems than it solves.

10. See (Ernst 1992, pp. 22–37). Nonetheless, it has been argued that it is largely through Muslim engagement with India that a collective idea of Indians or Hindus even comes about: “It … appears to us that the Indian or Hindus acquired a collective identity in interaction with Islam”. (Wink 2002, vol. I, p. 5).

11. There is an increasing body of literature about the origins and construction of Hinduism. For a representation of the various perspectives on the issue, see the following collection of essays: (Bloch et al. 2010). While many scholars opine that Hinduism was largely a colonial construct, there are some who argue that there were signs of Hindu self-awareness and identity formation in late pre-colonial India, citing, for example, the poetry of Kabīr or Guru Nanak, which criticized both Hindus and Muslims by name. An example of such a perspective is to be found in (Lorenzen 2006). A good discussion of the role of colonialism and Orientalism in the construction of Hinduism can be found in (Pennington 2005).

12. More study is necessary for this transformation of islām as an individual act to the reified use of Islam as a particular religion associated with a particular historical religious community, and even more so, the application of the modern category of religion to Islam. The term islām is interpreted by most early Qur’ānic commentators not in a communal but in an individual sense, and it is only with later commentators like Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373) that a collective sense comes to predominate. For a discussion of this and the use of the term islām in classical Qur’ānic commentaries, see (J. I. Smith 1975). Wilfred Cantwell Smith gives a short overview of this change of meaning in the term from the early to the modern period in The Meaning and End of Religion (W. C. Smith 1964, pp. 75–108), which can be used as a background to a full study. Ernst also offers a useful overview of the reification of Islam in the modern period in his (Ernst 2002, pp. 37–69).

13. See (Chattopadhyaya 1998). For a study of the later pre-colonial period regarding Hindu views of Muslims, see (Talbot 2003, pp. 83–117).

14. See the classic study by Louis Dumont (1970). This perspective has been strongly challenged by scholars working from a post-colonial perspective, who argue that the Orientalist notion of caste was an ahistorical application of Hindu scriptural ideals to the far more complex and messier reality on the ground in modern colonial India. See, for example, (Dirks 2001).

15. For the transformation of Sikhism into a religion in the colonial period, see (Mandair 2009).

16. For a wide-ranging historical study of Sufism and its diverse expressions in India, which references many instances of the interaction of Sufis with the Indian religions, see (Rizvi 1978, vols. I–II).

17. The widely used Sufi term tarīqa approximates and was sometimes used in the sense of panth, a distinctive spiritual perspective and path founded by a spiritual teacher and generally transmitted through his successors.

18. Richard Eaton, citing Ernest Gellner’s classic study of the saints of the Atlas in which he describes how these saints do not represent Islam but ‘are’ Islam to non-literate Berbers who are not able to access the Arabic textual tradition of Islam, describes how this can also be applied to Indian Muslims, for whom saints and their shrines played a similar role of providing religious authority and sacred presence. See (Eaton 1984, pp. 333–56).

19. See Tazim Kassam (1995) for a study and translations of these hymns, referred to as gināns.

20. There have been surprisingly few broad overviews of the Hindu–Muslim encounter in South Asia. Carl Ernst has written a more recent overview of the Hindu–Muslim encounter that does not make the mistake of dividing most or all Indian Muslims into two diametrically opposed camps but which still largely limits itself to the perspectives of Muslim elites. See (Ernst 2011).

21. Indeed, the main organizer of the Festival of the Knowledge of God (maylā-i khudashināsī) at Shahjahanpur, one of the instances in which Nānautvī and Dayānanda debated, was precisely a Kabirpanthi. For more on this festival and the interreligious debates in which Nānautvī participated, see (Tareen 2023, pp. 79–114).

22. For more on Jan-i-Janan, see (Tareen 2023, pp. 58–65).

23. The varying contents of these chronicles are well summarized in Romila Thapar’s Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (Thapar 2005, pp. 36–72), an important work that deconstructs the event of the destruction of the temple at Somnath by Maḥmūd of Ghaznī by looking at multiple sources, including Sanskrit inscriptions and Jain court histories, instead of the Turko-Persian chronicles alone used by British colonial authors and Hindu and Muslim nationalists. It is remarkable that these indigenous sources make much less, if anything, of the destruction of the Somnath temple, unlike the triumphalist zeal of the Turko-Persian chronicles. The claims of vast destruction and looting made in the chronicles are much harder to find in Indian sources, and there is little evidence of a lasting trauma, so often claimed by Hindu fundamentalists picking up colonial interpretations, as the temple was quickly rebuilt. In addition, temple destruction was something that was not uncommon among Indian rulers themselves whenever one state conquered another, revealing that temple desecration and plunder was a political and economic, and not primarily religious, act and was already established in India as a means of humiliating the vanquished or of acquiring wealth. See Richard M. Eaton’s insightful article on the subject: “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States” in (Gilmartin and Lawrence 2000, pp. 246–81) (later expanded into the monograph Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (Eaton 2004)).

24. This image was indebted to a Romanticist Orientalism that saw ancient Hindu India as the cradle of spirituality, in contrast to the modern industrializing and rationalistic modern West. See (Inden 2000).

25. This schema originates in the first major British colonial account of the history of India: James Mill’s History of British India, published in 1818. For further discussion of this tripartite schema, see (Ernst 1992, 23ff).

26. The exception, of course, was the modern secular West, which, in the progressive version of this theory, advanced beyond the stage of religion with the emergence of modern Western science and rationalism, a feat the others had not yet accomplished. There were theorists like the aforementioned Spengler with a more pessimistic and conservative view, which saw the move away from religion as an indicator of the decline and impending destruction of that civilization, but such views were scarce.

27. A dimension of this bifurcation between the colonizer and the colonized was the distinction between the rational, enlightened West, liberated by science and progress, and the superstitious, unenlightened East, mired in religion and backward beliefs and customs.

28. For more on the census in British India and the way it influenced the classification of religions, see Barrier (1981), especially the chapters “Religious Identity and the Indian Census” by Kenneth W. Jones and “The Census of India as a Source for the Historical Study of Religion and Caste” by Frank F. Conlon.

29. As the work by Mandair referenced above details, the construction of Sikhism as a separate religion was a sometimes quite arbitrary process negotiated between different groups of Sikhs and the British when some followers of the Sikh panth refused to be subsumed under the category of Hinduism.

30. For a critical examination of the role of Orientalism in producing knowledge about India, see (Inden 2000). In an influential study on Orientalism, modern categories of religion, and how Europeans have studied the Indian religions, Richard King discusses how the modern study of Hinduism and of religion was produced out of Christian, Enlightenment, and Orientalist perspectives: (King 1999).

31. An aspect of this mapping was also prioritizing Muslim legalism as orthodoxy and local traditions as syncretic or deviant. See Pirbhai (2009) for an original revisionist view on how Orientalist notions of supposed Muslim legalism and local customs as transgressive has distorted the understanding of the religious landscape of South Asian Islam.

32. For a very useful overview of the Orientalist–Anglicist debate with many supporting primary documents from both sides, see (Moir and Zastoupil 1999).

33. For a study of the Christian critique of Hinduism in colonial India, see (Barua 2015).

34. See Avril Powell’s study, focusing on the Kairānvī–Pfander debate and the events leading up to it: (Powell 1993). For more on the role of Dr. Wazīr Khān, see (Powell 1992, pp. 77–92).

35. For an overview of this long tradition, see (Bennett 2008).

36. For the Arya Samaj, see (Jones 1976).

37. The only full scholarly study of Dayānanda and his ideas is still (Jordens 1978). For his iconoclasm, see (Salmond 2004).

38. For a select overview of its contents, see (Salmond 2004, pp. 71–89).

39. There is still no study of Ghulām Aḥmad that contextualizes him in the context of nineteenth-century South Asian Islam. The most widely cited treatment of his thought is by Friedmann (1989), which, however, tries to trace his ideas to the larger classical intellectual tradition and not his immediate context. It also has little to say about his polemical activities, which were a central aspect of his life and thought. A newer study, Adil Hussain Khan’s (2015), deals mostly with the larger Aḥmadī tradition.

40. For more on the emergence of the public sphere in colonial and modern South Asia, see (Ingram et al. 2016; Reetz 2006).

41. For the significance of the rise of print culture for the ‘ulama in colonial India, see (Metcalf 1982, pp. 199–215). See also (Robinson 2003, pp. 66–104).

42. For more on the intimate connection between the loss of political sovereignty and the rise of new articulations of religious authority among South Asian Muslims, see (Tareen 2020).

43. For more on Nānautvī, see (Naeem 2015; and Siddiqui 2020). The latter work, Ḥujjat al-Islām, is his key work in response to Christianity and one of his chief works on Islamic apologetics.

44. For his critique of Khan, see (Ahmad and Von Grunebaum 1970; Tareen 2024).

45. This was originally published in 1880 along with Qibla-numā, as they technically are one larger work divided into two. Much of the discussion here is based on the introduction of this work, pp. 12–24, as well as (Nānautvī 1969, pp. 19–25).

46. See the introduction for the historical circumstances leading up to these polemics, pp. 3–16.

47. Nānautvī also briefly describes the circumstances himself at the beginning of (Nānautvī 1969, pp. 26–30).

48. The compiler has added in his introduction, purportedly reflecting Nānautvī’s own opinion, that some of these responses might be equally an answer to the fallacies of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for he and Dayānanda share some errors. Nānautvī had written a previous work theologically critiquing some of the modernist views of Khan in his Taṣfiyat al-‘aqā’id.

49. A qibla-numā is a traditional instrument for orienting oneself to the qibla, the direction toward the Kā’ba.

50. The very basis of his important work of Islamic apologetics, Taqrīr Dilpazīr, is to use rational language, comprehensible to people of all religious persuasions, to articulate the principal religious tenets, ethics, and practices of Islam in a modernizing context. For more on this work, see (Naeem 2015, chap. 2).

51. The ḥikmah tradition, which flourished especially in Persia and Muslim India in the later period of Islamic intellectual history, integrated philosophy, theology, and mysticism. For more on its development and contours, see (Nasr 2006).

52. He refers to him in the text as Mahādev, a popular designation for Shiva.

53. Ibn Zubayr (624–692) was a companion of the Prophet who established an independent caliphate in Mecca after refusing to pledge allegiance to the Yazīd I. In an attack against him and his rule, which led to his death, the Umayyad army, on the orders of Yazīd, laid waste to Mecca, significantly damaging the Ka’ba in the process.

54. This is the Avicennan idea of the Necessary Being (al-wājib al-wujūd), whose essence and existence are one.

Footnotes

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