Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870-1920.

• Author: DOXLOWSKI, GREGORY C.
• Position: Review

Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870-1920. By USHA SANYAL. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 365 $48.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Muslim religious scholars in India began increasingly to affiliate with one or another of a comparatively few movements that emphasized real as well as perceived differences among them: chiefly, the Firangi Mahalli, Deobandi, Ahl-i Hadisi, and Nadwat al- ulama groups. Thanks to the efforts of Zia al-Hasan Farooqui (The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan) and Barbara Metcalf (Islamic Revival in British India), scholars have, to date, more knowledge of the Deobandis. According to Farooqui and Metcalf, scholars of the Deobandi line are "reformers": people who took the sunnah of the Holy Prophet as their guide; eschewed the superstitions connected with the cults of Sufi saints; emphasized individual responsibility against mediation; and, in general, applied reason when the unlettered preferred nonsense.

By contrast, Usha Sanyal approaches these Muslims dismissed as unlettered with a depth of scholarship and sensitivity hitherto applied only to the ulama of Deoband. Deobandis call their opponents "Barelwis," implying that they are nothing but the blind imitators of Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi. Usha Sanyal's approach is to consider the movement from within. Thus, she refers to members of the group as they identify themselves: "Ahl al-Sunnat wa Jama at" or its Indo-Persian equivalent, "Ahl-i Sunnah wa Jama ah."

That appellation might be jarring to classically trained Islamicists who think of ahl al-Sunnat as the residual category for any Muslim who is not some variety of Shi i. That identity became, however, central to a distinction between so-called Barelwis and other tendencies among religious scholars in the subcontinent at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, all of whom would have affirmed that they were Sunnis. Likewise, though the Ahl-i Sunnah group looks to Ahmad Riza Khan (1856-1921 A.D.) as an important figure--perhaps even the mujaddid (renewer of the faith) of his Hijri century--they do not consider him the founder of a particular sect. They hold that Ahmad Riza Khan reiterated--albeit in a compelling and learned way--the Islamic equivalent of quod semper, quod ubique et ab omnibus. In addition, the group considered itself very much a reformist movement.

Like the other contemporary tendencies...