Ulama Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The life and work of a historian steeped in Islām’s fourteen-century, intellectual tradition, Maulānā Ḥakīm Sayyid ‘Abdul Ḥayy al-Hasanī, serves as a model for rethinking the history of Muslims in India during the British Colonial period. Moreover, the life-story and writings of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy promoted resistance to imperialist agendas, especially those focused on controlling the ways indigenous groups understood their own history and would carve out their futures through education pursuits.

As a late nineteenth-century, Islāmic historiographer of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’ in British India, Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy explicitly calls upon all Muslims to learn about the intellectual heritage of Indian ‘ulamā’. In creatively engaging the practice of the Islāmic historiographical tradition, he implicitly invites all Muslims to resist Western epistemic pressures and reclaim past Muslim glory, offering a path to liberation through the preservation and revival of traditional, indigenous curricula.

In providing a short biography of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy and a cursory examination of three of his important works, I venture to ask three questions: What material conditions animate Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historical writings? What message does he try to convey? Whom does he seek to reach? What techniques does he employ to achieve his goal?

Why are these questions worth pursuing? For centuries, Western historians have portrayed the Muslim world in ways that have led the West to view Islām with an eye of fear and suspicion. This distrust has legitimized countless acts of violence and continues to prevent nations from building bridges of understanding and mutual respect. How then might a Muslim’s approach to history – a view from within – offer a different way?

Thus this study explores three historical texts written by Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy in order to offer the reader a view into his social world and the material conditions to which he reacts, an introduction to the Islāmic historiographical tradition, and the significant historiographical intervention that he makes in light of dramatic changes brought to the India by Western colonialism and modernity.

Chapter one summarizes Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s rich educational upbringing and his professional career as a physician, historian, and director of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’. I offer observations about the three key texts of this study. This chapter is significant because it depicts the communal structure of education in northern India that collapsed during Mualānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s lifetime. This biographical sketch grounds my argument that his historiography preserves a rich heritage while at the same time it creatively resists compromise to Western historiography and epistemologies and calls for the revival of Muslim identity in India and the broader Muslim world.

Chapter two transitions into a broader discussion about the milieu in which Mualānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy operates. I reconstruct the social, political, and educational environment in late nineteenth-century British India. I give particular attention to how colonization causes both ruptures from the past and how it augments pre-colonial social processes. Moreover, in light of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s life and work, I explore how British imposition in education – along with subsequent Indian abandonment – systematically caused traditional educational systems in India to wither. I then discuss how the founding of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’ and Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s leadership within the movement was a response to the intellectual challenges facing Muslims in India. Finally, I show how Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historiography fits with the larger aims of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’. As a sayyid and a member of the ‘ulamā’, he communicates his message of resistance and revival in Arabic to the broader Muslim world and specifically Arabs.

That Indians were never fully granted autonomy over educational institutions after the rise of the British Raj forced the hand of Indians who sought to preserve their intellectual heritage and reassert the prestige, if not the superiority, of traditional education. In chapter three, I explain how Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy creatively enacts this resistance from within the Islāmic historiographical tradition. What do I mean by Islāmic historiography? How is it an effective way to get the attention of the Muslim world – namely, the ‘ulamā’? Seeing that colonialism stimulated intellectual vigor and the emergence of new technologies, as is discussed in chapter two, how does Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy adopt such new techniques while still operating as a traditional ‘alim, a member of a millennium-long historiographical tradition? Where do we find Islāmic historiography? Which brand of scholarship produces works of Islāmic historiography? In light of these questions, I begin this chapter by parsing out the term word-by-word in order to arrive at an accurate conception. Then I highlight three literary genres that preserve Islāmic historiography. In short, what I mean by Islāmic historiography is historical writing, historically done by an ‘ālim, written according to the practice of a tradition that pursues certain goods. In other words, in addition to communicating his message of resistance and revival in Arabic, Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy utilizes the conventional genres of Islāmic historiography in order to make himself intelligible to the ‘ulamā’ across of the world and to present himself as an authorative member of the social class.

In chapter four, I bring together the premilimanary observations in chapter one of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historical texts and conduct an indepth analaysis of one the books in which he particularly seeks to preserve the rapidly vanishing traditional curricula of the Indian Muslim world. His study offers to posterity tremendous insight into what was lost as well as a way to revive the tradition of learning characteristic of education in India prior to colonial rule and nationalist ideologies.

Finally, I conclude by offering a set of inquiries into how Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s model indicates ways Muslims might become empowered to “write” their histories as a way to resist hegemonic and epistemic pressures in contemporary global settings.