Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium by Joel Blecher

Author:Joel Blecher [Blecher, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Islam, History, Religion; Politics & State, Ancient, General, Middle East
ISBN: 9780520968677
Google: TXQ4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-11-10T00:52:29.026000+00:00

A NEW GENEALOGY OF HADITH COMMENTATORS IN COLONIAL INDIA

As European colonial power expanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Islamic world as a whole witnessed tremendous changes that are difficult to understate. The diverse Muslim community of British India was no exception, and it experienced the deepening influence of colonial rule on their political, military, legal, educational, commercial, financial, religious, and cultural institutions.31 Secularization, new technologies, and new languages transformed the freedom and constraints of social and intellectual practices in these multiple spheres of human activity. The influence of colonialism must have also been psychological, and historian Francis Robinson has even argued that Muslims in British India began to view themselves as “selves” situated in the world in revolutionary ways.32

Within this colonial context, a diverse landscape of traditional and modernist Islamic reform movements emerged, including the Deobandis, the Barelvis, the Ahl-i Hadith, the Ahmadiyya, and the Aligarh Movement.33 Since a comprehensive treatment of each of these groups and their diverging relationships to hadith commentary is not possible within the scope of this book, I will focus my analysis on a number of key figures from the Deobandi movement and the Ahl-i Hadith, as well as their texts, their contexts, and their commentarial strategies.

The Deobandis were founded by a reformist group of Ḥanafī scholars who founded a school in the North Indian locale of Deoband in 1866. While other scholars have undertaken far more detailed studies of the Deobandis,34 my aim here is to tease out some of the key elements of their social and intellectual history vital to understanding the complex context in which commentaries on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and other hadith collections emerged.

The premodern hadith commentators in Egypt and Gujarat enjoyed the rich patronage of the political and military elite. In the case of Ibn Ḥajar and some of his colleagues, they were themselves wealthy merchants and traders. Likewise, the Deobandi scholars and staff descended from the Mughal elite (ashraf) and relied on the support of elite Muslim landowners, civil servants, government officials, military officers, merchants, teachers, judges, and religious authorities.35 Furthermore, these Deobandi scholars linked up with transregional networks to address readers across the Indian Ocean, as Anwar Shāh al-Kashmīrī, a leading figure in the Deobandi school, found patrons for his commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī among merchants in the Muslim South Asian diaspora in South Africa.36 Nevertheless, the power of these elite networks of patrons had been diminished under colonial rule, when compared to the ostentatious wealth of elite families in the Mughal era. Perhaps this helped spur the largely unprecedented move on the Deobandis part to cultivate local support from humble “villagers, craftsmen and agriculturalists.”37

While their Gujarati and Mamluk counterparts were directly appointed by the state to serve as judges, treasurers, and scribes, the Deobandi scholars had far less access to the political and judicial power of the state. Their biggest donors may have worked within British institutions of power, but the early Deobandi commentators served as rectors and teachers in Deobandi schools. In a way,

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