“Major turning points for Shiʿi Islam in modern South Asia: Princely states, partition, and a revolution,” in Chiara Formichi (ed), Routledge Handbook on Islam in Asia (London: Routledge, 2021), 138-153 (original) (raw)
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2015
This dissertation rethinks the common center-periphery perspective which frames the Middle East as the seat of authoritative religious reasoning vis-à-vis a marginal South Asian Islam. Drawing on 15 months of archival research and interviews conducted in Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate how Shīʿī and Sunnī religious scholars (ʿulamā) in colonial India and Pakistan negotiate a complex web of closeness and distance that connects them to eminent Muslim jurists residing in the Arab lands and Iran. The project attempts to move beyond scholarly paradigms that investigate the transnational travel of ideas in terms of either resistance and rejection, on the one hand, or wholesale adoption, on the other. Rather, I show how local South Asian scholars occupy a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of modern and contemporary Islamic thought. Relying on unexplored sources in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, the dissertation examines these dynamics through the lenses of sectarianism, reform, and religious authority. It demonstrates how Indian Shīʿīs in the 1940s were haunted by the specter of Pakistan as a potentially exclusively Sunnī state. These substantial cleavages resurfaced in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Khomeini's model of the Rule of the Jurisprudent led sectarian Deobandīs to frame Shīʿīs as detrimental to their vision of creating a model Sunnī Islamic polity which was supposed to fulfil the promise of Pakistan. In the context of internal Shīʿī debates, I pay close attention to modernist challenges to Lucknow's Shīʿī clerical establishment in the late colonial period. Building on this conflict, I discuss how both reformist ʿulamā and their traditionalist, esoteric critics sought to appropriate the authority of leading Iranian and Iraqi Ayatollahs in order to emphasize their faithfulness to the Shīʿī mainstream. Both groups advanced their own, diverging vision of how to achieve a rapprochement with the Sunnī majority. The question of religious authority also plays a central role during the succession struggle after the death of a major “Source of Emulation” (marjaʿ al-taqlīd). I highlight the ability of Pakistani scholars to acquire religious clout during such periods of uncertainty. Similar agency is reflected in the unique ways in which Pakistan's Shīʿīs gradually made sense of the Iranian Revolution and how they filtered its transnational implications through the prism of their local religious needs. This study in its transnational scope speaks to historians of South Asia, the Middle East, and Islam, as well as to scholars working in the fields of Islamic thought, transnational history, Shīʿī studies, and religion more broadly.
Politics of Shi'i Identity in South Asia: Syed Jawad Naqvi's Concept of Wilayat-i Fiqh
This thesis examines the discourse of a contemporary Pakistani Shi‘i cleric, Syed Jawad Naqvi. It focuses on his sermon The Role of Women towards the System of Wilayat. Like many prominent Shi‘i scholars, he studied in both Iraq and Iran. He also has met Ayatollah Khomeini, a very significant inspiration for some of his ideas. This thesis links the concept of wilayat-i fiqh, governance of Shi‘i juridical authority or the Ayatollah, in relation to the heightened debates of political Islam in Pakistan and questions the natural alliance between Islamism and Pakistani nationalism through discussing Navi’s concept of wilayat. The thesis starts with a brief account of the significant question of political legitimacy during the Mughal Dynasty and the waxing and waning ulema authority. It also introduces the colonial effects on religious publishing and examines how it affected sectarian relations and the political consciousness of certain Muslims in South Asia. The thesis then traces the sectarian contestations and the attempts to construct an overarching Islamic legal framework in modern-era Pakistan. Naqvi is responding to these historical concerns and to contemporary politics, namely, the 1979 Islamic Revolution that took place in Iran. While his rhetoric extends beyond borders at times, Naqvi hesitates to suggest a similar revolution for Pakistan. This thesis situates Naqvi’s writing within the Shi‘i tradition both in South Asia and beyond. It examines the rhetoric of the politicians that laid the foundation for Pakistan’s state religion—Islam—as well as sermonizing rituals of the Shi‘is in South Asia to give context for Naqvi’s political style. It explains the fiery rhetoric of Naqvi by providing accounts of violent sectarian conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan. The intense level of violence exhibited by both state and non-state actors questions the nation state’s legitimacy and rhetoric of universalism. Finally, this thesis provides gender analysis of Naqvi’s sermon within the context of Islamic reform (tajdid) since late colonial South Asia. Similar to the writers of the colonial era, Naqvi posits women as potential agents for carrying out the revolution. He suggests pious Shi‘i women should adopt certain changes for a better societal foundation that could usher the arrival of the Hidden Imam and a truly just society. At the same time, Naqvi also advises them to fulfill domestic chores and duties. His sermon inherited characteristics from the late colonial era’s advice literature genre.
The Shi‘a in Modern South Asia
American Journal of Islam and Society
The volume at hand brings together recent advances in and new avenues forthe study of both Ithna ‘Ashari and Isma‘ili Shi‘ism in South Asia. As FrancisRobinson notes in his introduction, the region’s roughly 60 million Shi‘aswere grossly neglected in scholarship until the mid-1980s. Since then, andparticularly from the turn of the twenty-first century onward, the situation haschanged significantly. Indeed, some of the most interesting and promising recentstudies of various historical and contemporary aspects of Shi‘ism in generalhave focused on those very communities. Justin Jones, one of the spearheadsof this development, has acted as co-editor of this important collectionof eight thematically highly diverse essays.After Robinson’s overview of the field’s existing literature and the volume’scontents, Sajjad Rizvi tackles a major desideratum in the study of IndianShi‘i scholarly history by closely examining the life and works of Sayyid DildarAli Nasirabadi (d. 1820). A major scholar...
American Journal of Islam and Society
Although Southeast Asian Muslims are overwhelmingly Sunni, alleged historicalShi‘i influences have been a recurring feature in academic debates onthe region’s Islamization, the content of local traditional literatures, and certaincontemporary manifestations of religiosity. Moreover, the emergence of localShi‘i communities from the 1950s onward has been frequently noted but rarelystudied. This collection of path-breaking research seeks to help fill this gap inthe literature.Unfortunately, the book’s catchy title may initially obscure its outstandingtheoretical and thematic depth, for most of the chapters are about Alidpiety and devotion to the Prophet’s household as found in different Sunnitraditions. By highlighting the pervasiveness of the latter in other regionsof the Muslim world, the editors’ introduction represents a major reconsiderationof such commonly found earlier notions as “Shi‘itic elements,”“crypto-Shi‘ism,” and “de-Shi‘itization.” Many of the papers show that itwould b...