Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq
Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
by J. R. I. Cole
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the help of many friends and advisers. As a doctoral dissertation submitted in 1984 at the University of California, Los Angeles, it benefited from the direction of Amin Banani and the comments of Nikki Keddie. Virendra Deo Pandey codirected the original dissertation while I was in India. I have been helped in extensively rewriting it by the comments of David Bien, Michael H. Fisher, Jacob Lassner, Victor Lieberman, Francis Robinson, Kaveh Safa-Isfahani, and Thomas Trautmann.
My debts to private libraries and public institutions are large indeed. The director of the Nasiriyyah Library, Mawlana Tahir Jarvali, and his staff showed me endless kindness and helpfulness. The Raja and Maharajkumar of Mahmudabad munificently gave me access to their manuscripts. Naiyir Masoud and Mawlana Kalb-i Sadiq shared with me rare printed works. Shabihu'l-Hasan Naunahravi arranged a guided tour of Shi‘i endowment libraries in Lucknow. I am grateful to the directors and staffs of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives; Lucknow University Library, Amiru'd-Dawlah Public Library, and the Nadwa Academy Library, Lucknow; Mawlana Azad Library, Aligarh; the Regional Archives, Allahabad; the Khudabakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna; National Library and the Asiatic Society Library, Calcutta; Raza Library, Rampur; the National Archives of India, New Delhi; Punjab University Library and Punjab Public Library, Lahore; the British Library and the India Office Library and Records, London; the University Research Library, UCLA; and Hatcher Research Library at the University of Michigan. Mawlanas Kalb-i `Abid and `Ali Naqi Naqvi kindly allowed me to interview them.
All opinions expressed in this book are mine alone. Having absolved them from responsibility for the final product, I can note with gratitude that my research was funded in 1981-83 by sequential grants from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Program and from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. The latter grant helped fund intensive language training at the University of California Berkeley Urdu Program in Lahore. I am especially beholden to the people at Fulbright House, New Delhi. Ursula Sims-Williams of the India Office kindly helped with the illustrations.
I want to thank Barbara Daly Metcalf; Phyllis Killen, Gladys Castor,
Susan Stone, and other members of the staff at the University of California Press for their hard work anti helpfulness.
Consonants and vowels are transliterated according to the Library of Congress romanization for Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, with slight modifications to avoid confusion. Transliteration thus depends on the language of the source being discussed. I have joined personal names in construct state (Burhanu'l-Mulk, not Burhan al-Mulk). In Arabic phrases sun letters are shown. Most names are transliterated as if Persian, but nisbahs deriving from Indian place names are in Urdu. Arabic titles, and phrases within titles, of Persian and Urdu books are transliterated according to the rules for Arabic. Place-names are not given diacriticals.
I am grateful to the editors of Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies for permission to use material in this book previously published in a different form. This manuscript was completed for press in May 1986, and works on Awadh or Shi‘ism arriving after that date could not be integrated into the text.
My debt is to my wife, Sheena, for her support, help, and patience, while this book was being researched and written on three continents.
25 August 1987
Ann Arbor, Michigan
INTRODUCTION
Two modern events, the 1947 creation of Pakistan out of India and the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, underline the importance of religion as an element of state formation in West and South Asia. One could almost speak of "Muslim nationalism," but it has recently been suggested that it might be better to substitute an uncontaminated phrase such as "political identity" for the vaguer "nationalism."[1] Whatever we wish to label it, Muslim separatism and Muslim state-building on a religious basis have profoundly influenced the modern history of Asia, in sharp contrast to the rise of secular government in modern Europe.
How far back to look for the roots of Muslim separatism and religious state building has become a central debate in the study of Asian Islam. The two major approaches to the problem have been called the "instrumental" and the "primordial." The extreme instrumentalist might say, for instance, that ethnicity is "the pursuit of interest and advantage for members of groups whose cultures are infinitely malleable and manipulable by elites."[2] He would argue that pre-1947 Muslims and Hindus in the subcontinent differed little from one another, but that different rates of mobilization and the claims of elites to advantage created a split. The primordialist would counter that Islamic religious conceptions so profoundly shape community identity that "the formation of separatist movements on the basis of religious confession, the assertion of a political identity on the basis of religion... does seem to be an especial characteristic of Muslims."[3]
Neither of these approaches is often held in its pure form. Instrumentalists can point to many places where religion has not played a major role in separatist movements. Clearly, communities can "imagine" themselves variously
Malcolm Yapp, "Language, Religion, and Political Identity. A General Framework," in David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp, eds., Political identity in South Asia (London Curzon Press, 1979), pp. 1-33.
Paul Brass, "Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation, and Ethnic Identity Among the Muslims of South Asia," in Taylor and Yapp, Political Identity, p. 39 (Brass's summary, not his own position, which is instrumentalist but more subtle; see Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India [London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974]).
Francis Robinson, "Islam and Muslim Separatism," in Taylor and Yapp, Political Identity, p. 78; see also the Robinson-Brass exchange in F. Robinson, "Nation Formation: The Brass Thesis and Muslim Separatism," Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 15 (1977): 215-34.
in national terms. Yet the imagination must work with symbols drawn from a collective past, and historical experience and cultural tradition can at least help explain why religious separatism has been more important in North India than in the south, and more important in the Middle East than in East Asia. In North India, even an instrumentalist found that local nationalisms, whether Sikh, Muslim, or Maithili, succeeded best when religious rather than only linguistic bases were used for political identity.[4]
In some ways, of course, the debate between instrumentalists and primor-dialists centers on the relative weight of short-term causes for political identity formation versus long-term ones. I believe that although the short-term causes arc more important in, say, the creation of Pakistan, we must not lose sight of the long and medium durée. An approach taking the primordial seriously will require a study of cultural tradition and lead one further into the past. Since Muslim separatism as a political movement developed earliest on the Gangetic plain (now the province of Uttar Pradesh), the cultural history of Muslims there becomes especially important to an understanding of their attitudes to communal conflict. A large portion of this area was ruled from 1722 to 1856 by a Shi‘i Muslim ruling house, and one of the questions raised here is what Shi‘i rule and religious ideas meant for communalist traditions in the area.
In studying this Shi‘i Muslim-ruled region of North India, I aim at illuminating both some roots of Muslim communalism in the Gangetic plain and some of the historical con text for the rise of clerical dominance in Shi‘i Iran. I ask whether one form of preindustrial religious organization is more likely to produce modern communalism than another, arguing that in North India a process of community formation, promoted by Shi‘i learned men (‘ulama') and notables, formed an essential background to later politicization. By looking at the formation of ulama ideology, I make a contribution to our understanding of the conceptual bases for their contemporary activism.
This study of Shi‘i Islam and its clerics and organization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treats several themes beyond the important one of the roots of religious communalism. It asks about the role of religion in expressing indigenous Asian cultural values at a time of widening European influence, and about the impact of social and economic change on religious institutions and values. It looks at the power relationship between religious experts and officers of the state in a patrimonial bureaucracy. It illuminates the processes whereby a small, powerless sect can become a "church," or formal religious establishment. The approach seeks to combine social history and the historical sociology of religion. Important for the background of religious communalism, the study raises the question of what impact the transi-
See Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India.
tion to a religious establishment had on relations with other religious communities.
In the course of my research I became convinced that my data could be better elucidated with reference to the sociology of religion, deriving ultimately from seminal ideas of Max Weber. This conviction was confirmed, not only in the course of my own writing, but by the appearance, while I was revising this book, of Arjomand's excellent Weberian treatment of Shi‘ism in Iran, 1501-1890.[5] Still, questions of approach remained. Weber has been interpreted variously, and the very terms he made famous, such as "sect" and "church," have been given different content by a host of authors; moreover, their application to a non-Christian milieu raises further questions. I was helped most by the work of Bryan Wilson and Benton Johnson, who have clarified key conceptions in the sociology of religion. An unresolved question, it seems to me, is the role of the state in defining groups as sects and churches, an issue upon which this book dwells.
I also found most useful the work of two "Left Weberians," Bryan S. Turner and Frank Parkin. Both argue for the continued relevance of some Weber-Jan conceptions, even to neo-Marxist debates. I found Parkin's development of the idea of "social closure" especially helpful as a means of understanding both professionalization among nineteenth-century Shi‘i clerics and the setting up of increasing communal boundaries between Shi‘i Muslims and other religious communities. Turner has criticized students of Muslim societies for stressing vertical stratification (the mosaic model of competing religious groups, tribes, and city quarters) often to the exclusion of analysis based on horizontal stratification (social classes as determined by relationship to the means of production). Social stratification plays an important part in my analysis, including my approach to the vexed question of "sect and church." Although modern social classes obviously did not exist in preindustrial South and West Asia, orders or premodern classes (labaqal ) certainly did. The division of Shi‘is into (1) a ruling stratum of large landholders, tax-farmers, and rich merchants, (2) an intermediate stratum of middle and smaller landholders and skilled artisans in the bazaars, and (3) the masses of poorer tradespeople and laborers, clearly had a great impact on their social networks and religious practices.[6] Still, in studying a religious group and its clerics, this book emphasizes the importance of vertical cleavages. To ignore social closure based on religion in West and South Asia would be
See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of interpretive Sociology , ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), ch. 6; Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).
See Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978); and his For Weber: Essay on the Sociology of Fate (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); and Frank Parkin, Marxism and Glass Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1979).
rather like attempting to analyze South African society without taking full account of race.
For all their importance, little has been written about the history of Imami Shi‘i communities in most of West and South Asia. The Imami, or Twelver, Shi‘i branch of Islam, encompassing ten percent of the world's Muslims, has since 1500 often demonstrated a startling dynamism. Shi‘is overwhelmingly predominate in Iran, constitute a majority in Iraq, and form large and important minorities in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and the subcontinent.
Shi‘ism in early Islamic times has attracted scholarly attention, since the question of the Prophet's successor comes up in any discussion of the early Muslim community. Although Imami Shi‘ism developed over two centuries, its seeds lay in an early contest for leadership between the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, ‘Ali, and the elders of Quraysh elected by an oligarchic council. Most early Muslims believed that after the Prophet's death his successor was rightfully the Caliph Abu Bakr, followed by ‘Umar and then by ‘Uthman. ‘Ali finally became the fourth caliph, but was soon assassinated, after which his enemies the Umayyads came to power for a century. The partisans (Shi‘ah ) of ‘Ali believed that he and his descendants should have rightfully ruled the Islamic empire. The Shi‘is evolved into an alternative branch of Islam, often challenging the established government of the time.
Several sectarian divisions emerged among the Shi‘is, depending on which of ‘Ali's descendants they accepted as the legitimate successor to the Prophet. Imami Shi‘is believed that eleven of ‘Ali's descendants succeeded him as rightful leaders of the Muslim community, prevented from ruling by the Orthodox caliphs and then the Umayyad and Abbasid monarchies. They particularly mourned the death of the third Imam, Husayn (d. A.D. 680), slain on the battlefield of Karbala in Iraq after his unsuccessful bid to oppose the Umayyad king Yazid. Imami Shi‘is held that the last of the successors to the first Imam, the Twelfth Imam, vanished as a child into a mystical realm from which he secretly ruled the world immortally, and would return at some future time.[7] Imamis before 1500, largely political quietists, awaited the return of the Imam from his Occultation, or supernatural disappearance.
Modern scholars have written much less about the religions; later medieval and early modern development, which witnessed the establishment of Shi‘i-ruled states in Iran and India. Most recently, the spectacle of the clerically dominated parliament and cabinet in Iran exercising a near-monopoly over political power has bewildered the secular West and pro-
S. H. M. Jafri, The Origins and Early Development of Shi‘a Islam (London: Longmans, 1979): W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1973); Abdulaziz A. Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shi‘ism (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1981); for a useful survey of the entire field, see Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi‘i Islam (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985).
voked a flurry of publications. Important questions have been raised about the uniqueness in the Islamic world of Imami Shi‘i clerical institutions and ideology. Is this form of Islam more incompatible with secular government than are others, and does it contain a special impetus toward theocracy? Such a question can be answered only with historical studies of clericalism in Imami Shi‘ism.
Controversy over the role of that originally informal body of religious experts known as the "learned" (‘ulama ') has emerged in every Imami-ruled state in history: the Buyid, the Safavid, and the Qajar in Iran; the Qutb-Shahi in medieval South India; and the Nishapuri in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North India. Sounder generalizations about the nature of the Shi‘i religious and cultural tradition can only be attained through detailed study of the relationship between the government and the religious establishment in each of these historical Twelver Shi‘i-dominated states. The present study treats Shi‘ism in post-Mughal North India, where a Shi‘i dynasty ruled the state of Awadh (or Oudh, in the older British orthography). This work essays comparisons with contemporary developments in Iraq and Iran and emphasizes the intricate international networks created by ulama immigration, pilgrimage, visitation, and travel for study.
Several hotly debated issues have dominated recent writing on the role of the Shi‘i ulama. Some have to do with the role of the clergy according to the Imamis' own scriptural corpus, whereas others focus on the historical actions of the ulama. Joseph Eliash has forcefully argued that the early Shi‘i canonical collections of oral reports from the Prophet and the Imams contain no designation of authority from the Imams to the clergy, and that although relaters (sing. muhaddith ) of the Imams' oral reports were charged with acting as informal judges in disputes between Shi‘is, the community could reverse their decisions if they found them to be based on oral reports not widely accepted as authentic.[8]
Norman Calder has recently traced the development of Imami jurisprudence from the tenth through the fifteenth century. He showed that after the Occultation of the Twelfth Imam most Shi‘is held that state-related functions could not be carried out until his return. Eleventh-century Imamis largely held that only the Imam could collect and distribute religious taxes, lead Friday congregational prayers, and head up holy war (jihad ) campaigns, and that in his absence such functions of the Islamic state had lapsed. But the scholars adhering to the rationalist Usuli school of jurisprudence gradually assumed the right to act for the Imam as proxies in these and other areas.[9]
Joseph Eliash, "Misconceptions regarding the Juridical Status of the Iranian 'Ulama'," International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979): 9-25
Norman Calder, "The Structure of Authority m Imami Shi‘i Jurisprudence" (Ph.D. diss, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1980). See also Robert Brunschvig. "Les Usul al-Fiqh imâmites ŕ leur stade ancien (xe et xie siecles)," in Tawfiq Fahd, ed., Le Shi‘isme Imâmite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970).
The Usulis advocated the use of independent reason (ijtihad ) and limited sorts of syllogism in deriving legal judgments and counted the consensus of jurisprudents a source of Islamic law. As rationalists, they trusted in the human intellect and Greek philosophical tools to discover the will of the hidden Imam. Since they insisted that laymen emulate their rulings, they emerged as more than legal scholars, approximating a clergy. They were opposed by Imami scholars of the conservative Akhbari school, who limited legal technique to a literal interpretation of oral reports transmitted from the Imams and forbade the use of rationalist tills both in theology and in jurisprudence.
An issue generating controversy has been the relations of the clergy to the state. Some have argued that the Shi‘i ulama in the modern period played an oppositional role to the government, emerging as popular leaders against a tyrannical Qajar state (1785-1925), which increasingly came under hated foreign domination. A corollary proposition stated that the Shi‘i clergy saw the Qajar monarchy in Iran as illegitimate and shunned association with the state.[10] Willem Floor and others have recently argued that, on the contrary, "the revolutionary character ascribed to the Shi‘i ulama in Iran has been greatly exaggerated, and that the ulama's perception of the socioeconomic and political structure of Iranian society often did not basically differ from that of the secular power elite."[11]
One problem has been the "liberal" approach to Shi‘i intellectual history adopted by scholars like Algar. The issue of the role of the ulama is not simply one in the history of ideas, a struggle of a few great minds abstracted from any social context. The clergy, a status group, came from specific social classes. Their views of certain kinds of law, and of their own roles as defined by their principles of jurisprudence, constituted a kind of "political knowledge," or ideology, which can only be studied fruitfully in its social context.[12] On the other hand, such knowledge cannot be reduced to simple economic interest.
An analysis of the kinds of religious organizations a social group creates can be made by looking at the class background of its members and the de-
Harold Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 22-23, 99.
Willem M. Floor, "The Revolutionary Character of the Ulama: Wishful Thinking or Reality," in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi'ism from Quietism to Revolution (New Haven. Yale Univ. Press, 1983). pp. 73-97. For Shi‘i ulama legitimation of the Qajar State, see Said Amir Arjomand, "Shi‘ite Hierocracy and the State in Pre-Modern Iran: 1785-1890," Archives europé de sociologie 22(1981): 40-78.
See Richard Ashcraft, "Political Theory and Political Action in Karl Mannheim's Thought: Reflections upon 'Ideology and Utopia' and Its Critics," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 23-50. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. [1936] repr.) p. 109: "The sociologist in the long run must be able to do better than attribute the emergence and solution of problems to the mere existence of certain talented individuals"; and p. 2: "The principal thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured."
gree of tension that exists between the group and the prevailing values of the state and society. This framework, derived from the sociology of religion, would class a religious organization as "sectarian" where it was in great tension with the outside society, and as a formal religious establishment, or "church," where the tension was minimal. In the twentieth century the heavy influence over Iranian governments by Western imperialists and, later, the rise of a secularist state policy led some prominent members of the clerical establishment to distance themselves from the state.[13] But how legitimate is it to project this state of affairs back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
One way to test the thesis that the Shi‘i ulama, because of their scriptural tradition and training, generally shunned the state, which they considered illegitimate, is to look at Shi‘i communities outside Iran. For this and other reasons, this book concentrates on developments in the Shi‘i community of North India, never before studied academically in the formative period 1722-1859. Indeed, Shi‘ism in Awadh has been thrice orphaned in modern historiography. The eighteenth century, a period of seeming political chaos in the Islamic East, has not attracted the same interest as did the integral Mughal Empire in its heyday. As a regional phenomenon, Awadh tended to be passed over (except at Lucknow University) in favor of a concentration on events in Delhi. Its state religion, Imami Shi‘ism, has been little studied in its Indian environment. Yet a survey of the role of its ulama can fill out Indian, as well as Shi‘i, history.
By looking at about 250 Shi‘i clerics in North India over three generations, I contribute to our understanding of the social history of the region, still an embryonic field. The little work on the regional history of North India produced earlier in this century focused on the reigns of the nawabs of Awadh. More recently, T. Metcalf has investigated the great landholders, Barnett has written on government administrators, and Bayly has delineated the role of Hindu merchants and Muslim middle strata.[14] The history of Shi‘i Muslim religious structures in the nineteenth century, set in the context of social and economic developments, can illuminate changes in the little-studied Muslim intermediate strata from which the clerical personnel were largely drawn. Like Bayly's urban merchants building new commercial networks in the shadow of the East India Company, or like Metcalf's large landholders
For the modern period, see Ann K.S. Lambton, "The Persian 'Ulama and Constitutional Reform," in Fahd, Le Shi‘isme Imâmite, pp 249-69, and the fine study by Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1980).
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1980); and Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979). Also important are the articles of Michael H. Fisher, cited below.
carving out estates in the interior of Awadh, the Shi‘i ulama formed a distinct social group that reacted in novel ways to social change—from the rise of Awadh as an independent post-Mughal state to the rise of European imperialism and industrial capitalism.
The need for study of such minority but regionally important movements as Shi‘ism in Awadh is beginning to be recognized. The standard surveys of Islam in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India have narrowly focused on leaders of the Naqshbandi order of Sufi mystics based in Delhi: Shah Valiyu'llah, his son Shah ‘Abdu'l-‘Aziz, and the latter's disciple Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareli. The Naqshbandi order, with its greater emphasis on strict legalism and on drawing sharp boundaries between Sunni Muslims and others, has struck many scholars, both Western and Muslim, as a precursor of modern Islamic reform and separatism. Yet this approach at the very least ignores a quantitative issue, insofar as Naqshbandis made up a tiny minority of North Indian Muslims throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Of course, even a tiny movement could be influential. But the very influence of this tradition among most nineteenth-century Muslims has been brought into question by recent research.[15] Moreover, the "orthodox" content of Naqshbandi Sufi practice and thought has probably been exaggerated. Showing a greater recognition of diversity even within the Islamic great tradition in the subcontinent, scholars have been investigating local religious movements and regional institutions beyond Delhi that do not so easily fit the "Naqshbandi paradigm," from Sufi leaders of the Chishti order in the Punjab, to the Qadiri learned and holy men of Lucknow's Farangi Mahall, to the reformists of the Deoband schools.[16]
The sources for the present work on the development of Shi‘ism in Awadh from 1722 to 1859, many never before used by a modern historian, include biographies and biographical dictionaries of the clergy, court chronicles, rulings and legal and theological works by the ulama, Iranian and European travelers' accounts, Awadh government documents that survived the events of 1857-58, and British archival records. The most important single repository of manuscript material open to me was the Nasiriyyah Library, a Shi‘i-endowed institution in Lucknow, which few modern scholars have used at all, and none intensively.
This book concentrates on changes in religious practices, structures and
Gregory Charles Kozlowski found good evidence in endowment documents that many practices discouraged by the Naqshbandi revivalists continued to be mandated in wills; see his Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).
David Gilmartin, "Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab," Modern Asian Studies 13 (1979): 485-93; Francis Robinson, "The ‘Ulama ' of Farangi Mahall and Their Adab," in Barbara Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab is South Asian Islam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1984); and for the Deoband, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982)
ideas. But both because the field is so unfamiliar and because some institutions are more fruitfully studied as they develop over time, I have provided a certain amount of narrative. The study is divided into four parts. In Part 1 the background of Imami Shi‘ism in the Middle East and in South Asia is sketched, and the rise of a Shi‘i-ruled state in Awadh examined. Part 2 explores the social origins of the Shi‘i community in North India and the growth of folk religious practices.
Part 3 deals with the rise of Usuli Shi‘ism in Awadh, the struggle of its rationalist jurisprudents to displace literalist Akhbari and mystical Sufi rivals, and the development of formal institutions, beginning with Friday congregational prayers in 1786 and culminating in the founding of a seminary and a judicial system in the 1840s. This process is discussed in terms of church-sect theory and the neo-Weberian theory of social closure. Changes in ulama views on the principles of jurisprudence and on their own place in society are analyzed as ideology. The chapters in Part 3 also treat the patronage system whereby high notables associated with the Awadh state provided funds to the ulama in return for services rendered. Emphasis is laid on the ways in which this patronage system changed, from a prebendal-feudal bestowal of tax-free villages in the eighteenth century to stipends sometimes ultimately deriving from interest on loans or dividends from modern securities. The social origins of the ulama are also explored.
Finally, Part 4 describes and analyzes the relations between the Shi‘is and their clerical leaders and the other major groups in Awadh: the Sunnis, the Hindus, and the British. This section discusses the roots of religious communalism on the Gangetic plain in the nineteenth century. Finally, the Europeans are a constant behind-the-scenes presence in this study, since the way in which industrial capitalism and colonialism influenced the course of Awadh's history and its development as a state made a fascinating and fateful impact also on the clergy and their institutions. British intervention in religious groups' relations also proved crucial for communal identity and violence throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
PART ONE
THE RISE OF A SHI'I STATE IN AWADH
1
Middle Eastern Roots of Awadh Shi‘ism
To provide a background to an understanding of its place in eighteenth-century North India, Iran, and Iraq, it will be necessary to put Shi‘ism in its historical context. But first, in order better to comprehend the role of Shi‘i Islam in the cultural conflict between Asian societies and the imperial West, some general features of Middle Eastern and South Asian history since 1500 may be recalled. Although most Westerners think of the period after 1492 as a time of untrammeled Christian European expansion, they focus solely upon the New World and the oceanic trade empires, first of the Portuguese and Spanish, then of the Dutch, and finally of the French and British. If one concentrated instead on the Afro-Asian land mass, one would be struck by the startling rise of prosperous, dynamic Muslim empires. True, these empires (with the partial exception of the Ottomans) based their power on land, neglecting the maritime periphery—to their ultimate peril.[1]
From 1500 to 1600 the Ottoman Empire expanded from Anatolia into eastern Europe and conquered Syria (1516), Egypt (1517), and Iraq (1534). The Safavid Empire, based in Azerbaijan, subdued the Iranian plateau. The Mughal Empire reached from Kabul down into the Gangetic plain, uniting most of northern India. These three Muslim states, their power based partially on borrowed Chinese and European technical advances in artillery,
Dietmar Rothermund, Asian Trade and European Expansion in the Age of Mercantilism (Delhi: Manohar, 1981), ch. 10. For general issues in this period, see Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires (New York: Minerva, 1965); Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Chicago. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973); Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1976). K N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1978), and Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1985).
Map 1
The Shi‘i World in 1582
each originated in a tribal alliance, which rulers replaced in time by settled bureaucracies and standing armies. They provided a Pax Islamica to the southern regions of the Old World, which encouraged trade and security, allowing a population increase in sixteenth-century Anatolia and probably elsewhere, certainly in some Arab cities. In the sixteenth century these Muslim empires experienced economic advances, territorial expansion, and religious revival.[2]
Ottoman Istanbul, Safavid Isfahan, and Mughal Agra dazzled travelers with their splendor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their wealth, based primarily on agriculture and only secondarily on trade and manufactures, is indisputable. But their rulers and craftsmen borrowed technology from Europe instead of innovating, so that they gave the world few new developments in weaponry or industry. From at least the fifteenth century, Europe produced more made goods, including, for instance, silk textiles, whereas the Middle East and South Asia sent raw materials (raw silk, spices such as pepper) to Europe. But the western European edge in mechanical inventiveness and the ability to accumulate capital only manifested itself with full force after 1760. Until the late eighteenth century, manufacturing and agricultural productivity, and transportation costs and speed, did not improve dramatically in Europe.
The political and economic flowering of the three sixteenth-century Muslim empires in South and Southwest Asia had a religious impact. The Ottomans promoted the Hanafi rite of Sunni Islam as their state religion, developing a highly institutionalized and bureaucratic religious establishment. The Safavids and their Shi‘i Turkoman followers from Anatolia made Twelver Shi‘ism the religion of state and heavy-handedly imposed it on Sunni Iran. They brought in Arab Shi‘i clerics from southern Lebanon and southern Iraq to man the fledgling religious institution and relied also on notable clerical families within Iran who embraced Shi‘ism. The Mughals, originating in largely Turkish-speaking Central Asia, promoted Hanafi Sunnism. Religious ideology and a corps of ulama organized around institutions useful to the state played an important political role in each of the three Muslim empires.
Marshall G. S Hodgson, The Venture of Islam , vol. 3, The Gunpowder Empires and Modem Times (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), book 5; Halil Inalcik, "The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-Arms in the Middle East," in V.J. Parry. and M. E. Yapp, eds., War Technology, and Society in the Middle East (London: Oxford Univ Press, 1975), pp. 195-217; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972-73), Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800-1914 (London Methuen, 1981), pp. 1-23; André Raymond, Grandes villes arabes ŕ l'époque ottomane (Paris: Sindbad, 1985). The population of Mughal India, 1600-1800, increased slowly at about 0.14 percent per annum; see Irfan Habib, "Popultion," in T. Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982-83), 1:163-71.
Of these religious ideologies, Twelver Shi‘ism is the least known. Twelver Shi‘is dwelt in each of the empires. Under the Ottomans, they lived in Jabal ‘Amil (now in Lebanon) and in Iraq. In the Ottoman Arab lands the Twelvers maintained a form of their religion that might be called sectarian, in that they experienced a high degree of friction with the state and with the majority Sunni society around them. They also avoided the development of a great degree of religious organization and structure. Twelver Shi‘is, originally a minority community in Iran, came to form a majority of Iranians under the Safavids, where they elaborated a formal religious establishment, which for the most part cooperated with the Shi‘i state. Organized Safavid Shi‘ism, with its professional clerics and its legitimation of the state, differed starkly from the conservative creed held in most Arab Shi‘i communities.
In South Asia, Twelver Shi‘ism spread on two levels. Iranian merchants and immigrants promoted it among Muslim notables in southern India, so that Shi‘i dynasties came to power in Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, and Golconda. Likewise, a Shi‘i dynasty ruled briefly in sixteenth-century Kashmir. Urban tradespeople and some peasants also created their own form of Twelver Shi‘ism, based especially on mourning rites for the Prophet's martyred grandson, Husayn. The rise of Sunni Mughal power circumscribed the south Indian Shi‘i states and deprived Shi‘is in northern India of governmental protection. The Sunni Mughal Empire gradually absorbed the Shi‘i-ruled polities of the south into itself, disestablishing the rival branch of Islam in the subcontinent.
Early Shi‘ism
Twelver Shi‘i jurisprudence probably began in the eighth century A.D. , when men close to the Imams began arbitrating disputes within their communities.[3] Gradually a body of men grew up who had memorized the oral reports attributed to Muhammad and to the Imams. These believers likewise studied the legal reasoning employed by the sixth Imam, Jacfar as-Sadiq (d. A.D. 765). Roy Mottahedeh has pointed out that the "learned," or ulama, included not only professional religious officials who taught or gave legal judgments, but also part-time scholars and even hobbyists.[4] Out-of-power Shi‘is were even more likely to have "informal," part-time ulama than the dominant groups who evolved into the Sunnis. Partisans of the Imams endured the hostile rule of the Umayyads until the middle of the eighth century A.D.
The sixth Imam, Jacfar as-Sadiq, urged Shi‘is to seek legal judgments from men who related his sayings, rather than from the non-Shi‘i government judges; see Norman Calder, "Judicial Authority in Imami Shi‘i Jurisprudence," British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin 6 (1979): 104-5.
Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 135-50
when a Shi‘i-tinged revolution brought the Abbasids to power. The Abba-sids, however, also refused to recognize the right of the Imams to rule, and often kept them under house arrest as dangerous rivals.
The events following the death of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-‘Askari, in Abbasid Iraq in A.D. 873 or 874, are obscure and yet of great importance for the history of Twelver Shi‘ism. Several schisms occurred, with some groups saying that Imam Hasan al-‘Askari had left no heir. Others, especially wealthy Shi‘is close to the Abbasid court, proclaimed that the Imam had had a small son, who supernaturally disappeared and who would one day return to restore the world to justice. A series of agents (wakils ) arose to lead the Twelvers, saying that they transmitted messages from the hidden child-Imam. After the death of the last special agent, Imami Shi‘is found themselves cut off from any direct charismatic authority. Yet during the time of the agents a saying attributed to the hidden Twelfth Imam began to circulate, declaring that men who related oral reports from the Imams had the deputyship (niyabah ) of the Imams.[5] Obviously, the relaters (muhaddithun ) of Imami oral reports were making a claim to leadership of the community in the wake of the Imam's disappearance. They did not assert as close a relationship to the Imams as did the four agents, since their only link to the Imams was through the Imami sayings as this body of believers had memorized and transmitted them.
The end of the line of Imams came as a powerful shock to the Twelver community. Early Shi‘i thinkers living after the Occultation, or disappearance, of the Imam felt leaderless. In the absence of the infallible Imam, they believed that no one could conduct Friday congregational prayers, lead believers in an aggressive holy war (jihad ), or collect certain types of land taxes (kharaj ).[6] In short, they felt a profound alienation from the world and generally adopted a quietist political policy.
Under the Shi‘i Buyid dynasty (A.D. 932-1055) in Iraq and Iran, Twelver scholars freely collected and studied the oral reports from the Imams. They came from the old Shi‘i centers of Kufa and Qumm to the Buyid capital of Baghdad. In Baghdad, some wealthy Shi‘i intellectuals began employing the cosmopolitan tools of Greek rationalism in Imami theology. But most Shi‘i scholars rejected rationalism in favor of simply quoting the sayings of the Imams as their authority. In this period, the rationalist theologians began to be called Usulis, whereas those rejecting human reasoning in favor of a literalist
Abdulaziz A. Sachedina, Islamic Messianism (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1981), pp. 100-1, 107-8.
For the early doctrine that ritual privileges of the ruler were lapsed (saqit ) in the absence of the Imam, see Norman Calder, "Zakat in Imami Shi‘i Jurisprudence from the Tenth to the Sixteenth Century A.D ," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44 (1981): 468-80; "Khums in Imami Shi‘i Jurisprudence from the Tenth to the Sixteenth Century A.D. ," BSOAS 45 (1982) 39-47; and Calder's thesis, "The Structure of Authority in Imami Shi‘i Jurisprudence" (Ph.D. diss, Univ of London, 1980).
adherence to the words of the Imams became known as Akhbaris. Akhbaris were almost certainly the great majority. At that time, it is important to note, most Shi‘i scholars agreed on the invalidity of such Greek rationalist tools as syllogism in deriving legal judgments. The dispute centered on their use in theology.[7]
The more cosmopolitan, rationalist theologians often had good relations with the Buyid state. Although they considered secular governments to be ultimately unjust (ja'ir ), Shi‘i scholars sometimes felt that there was no objection to working fox the state so long as one's principles were not compromised.[8] The victory of the Saljuq Sunni Turks over the Shi‘i Buyids in the middle of the eleventh century scattered Shi‘i scholars for a time, denied them patronage, and forced them into a low profile. Gradually, however, Shi‘i communities under the Saljuqs reorganized themselves and placed considerable wealth in the hands of their ulama for religious institutions.
The Mongol conquest of I ran and Iraq two centuries later freed Twelvers in many ways from the restrictions placed upon them by the strongly Sunni Saljuqs. In the second half of the thirteenth century, some wealthy Shi‘i scholars, who enjoyed the patronage of the Mongols and based themselves in the Iraqi trading center of al-Hillah, began applying the tools of Greek rationalism to law, rather than solely to theology. This probably reflected the need of dynamic Twelver communities, such as that of al-Hillah in the Mongol era, for a more flexible law. From this period the rationalist Usulis and the strict-constructionist Akhbaris constituted rival schools of jurisprudence.
The conflict between the Akhbaris and the rationalist Usuli jurisprudents centered on two sets of issues. The first concerned the sources of law, with the Akhbaris restricting them to the Qur'an and oral reports (akhbar ) from the Prophet and the Imams. The rationalists saw the consensus of the jurisprudents as another source of legal judgment, as they did the independent reasoning (ijtihad ) of the jurist. The Usulis divided all Shi‘is into formally trained jurisprudents (mujtakids ) and laymen, stipulating that the ordinary believers must emulate the mujtahids in matters of subsidiary religious laws.
The rationalists asserted that the mujtahids, as general representatives of the Hidden Imam, could substitute for him in performing such tasks as giving legal judgments, implementing rulings, collecting and distributing alms (zakal and khums ), mandating defensive holy war, and leading Friday congregational prayers. Although Akhbaris allowed the relater of oral reports from the Imams to perform judicial functions, they often disallowed some or all of the other functions in the absence of an infallible Imam. Akhbaris further re-
Sachedina, Islamic Messianism , pp 32-33; W. Madelung, "Imamism and Muctazilite Theology," in Tawfiq Fahd, ed, Le Shi‘isme imamite (Paris. Presses Universitaires de France, 1910), pp. 13-29.
W. Madelung, "A Treatise of the Sharif al-Murtada on the Legality of Working for the Government," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 43 (1980): 18-31.
jected any division of believers into laymen and mujtahid-exemplars, holding that all Shi‘is must emulate the Twelve Imams. In practice, of course, Akhbaris also made interpretations.
Safavid Iran: Shi‘ism, State, and Society
During the Safavid period the Usuli school, associated with the ruling establishment, burgeoned. In 1501 Shah Ismacil, chief of the militant Safavi Sufi order, became Shah of Iran with the aid of Turkish-speaking Shi‘i tribesmen from Anatolia. The new rulers imposed Twelver Shi‘ism on Iran, ideologically reinforcing their territorial victory. They required that imprecations be ritually pronounced upon caliphs holy to Sunnis, burned Sunni mosques, and expropriated the land of Sunnis. Shi‘i folk practices spread in Iran, such as the feast of the killing of Umayyad commander ‘Umar b. Sacd, an enemy of Imam Husayn. Meetings (rawzah-khvani ) for the recitation of the sufferings and death of Imam Husayn began to be held. Religious processions began to be taken out during the mourning month of Muharram, commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn on the tenth day (‘Ashura').[9]
From the reign of Shah Tahmasp (1533-76), the second Safavid monarch, a corps of Shi‘i ulama attracted from southern Lebanon and Iraq began making extensive changes in the practice of Twelver Shi‘ism which reflected the change in the religion's status from persecuted minority to reigning orthodoxy. The immigrant Arab Twelver clerics went far beyond the Hilli school, or the simple recognition of independent legal reasoning in jurisprudence. They permitted the central functions of the state to be undertaken by someone other than a divinely appointed Imam, making themselves general proxies for the Imam and legitimizing the Shi‘i Safavid regime. They also moved toward the creation of a Shi‘i religious hierarchy, staffed largely by Arabs and based mostly on the newly created offices of Shi‘i prayer leader and Shaykhu'l-Islam (jurisconsult). Safavid Usulism became the ideology of the Arab immigrant ulama within Iran, who wanted upward mobility and the implementation of a new vision of Imami Shi‘ism in cooperation with the Safavid monarchy—an activist, dominating Twelver Shi‘ism rather than the quietist, sectarian version of the religion that had largely predominated before 1500.[10]
Prominent among these innovators was Shaykh ‘Ali al-Karaki (d. 1534), from Jabal ‘Amil.[11] In the first year of Shah Tahmasp's reign al-Karaki
Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980): Farrokh Gaffary, "Evolution of Rituals and Theater in Iran," Iranian Studies 17 (1984): 366-67.
Calder, "Zakat," pp. 477 ff., 'Khums," pp. 44-47; Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), ch. 5.
Muhammad al-Hurr al‘Amili, Amal al-amil , ed. Sayyid Ahmad al-Husayni, 2 vols. (Baghdad: Maktabat al-‘Andalus, 1966), 1:121-22; Yusuf al-Bahrani, Lu'lu'at al-Bahrayn , ed. Muhammad Sadiq al-‘Ulum (Najaf: Matbacat an-Nucman, 1966), pp. 151-54; Arjomand, The Shadow of Cod and the Hidden Imam , pp. 133-34.
ordered that a Shi‘i prayer leader be appointed in every town and village. Since many Shi‘i ulama held Friday congregational prayers invalid in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, this move dismayed conservatives, especially Arab Shi‘is who still for the most part labored under Sunni rule. But al-Karaki wished to create a religious institution under his own authority. The Safavids cooperated in the endeavor, since Shi‘i Friday prayer leaders throughout Iran said blessings on the Shi‘i monarchs in the Friday afternoon sermon. Al-Karaki also allowed the collection of land tax (kharaj ) in the Imam's absence, and wrote instructions for Safavid tax collectors. In so doing he opened up a source of revenue for the fledgling Twelver state. He ordered that Shi‘is stop dissimulating (taqiyyah ) their faith out of fear of Sunnis, since they now had government protection, and instituted the public cursing of the first two Sunni caliphs on a country-wide scale.
Two groups opposed these institutional innovations. Within Iran, Ar-jomand has demonstrated, the old Iranian families in charge of religious institutions such as judgeships and pious endowment supervision, many of whom embraced Shi‘ism, resented the immigrant Arab clerics.[12] Moreover, the Shi‘is of the Arab world found many of al-Karaki's innovations inappropriate to their own situation. Typical of the Arab Shi‘is outside Iran (until the sixteenth century probably the majority of Twelvers) was Shaykh Ibrahim al-Qatifi.[13] A former student turned enemy of al-Karaki, he cautiously accepted the necessity of independent legal reasoning (ijtihad ) and so could be categorized as an Usuli. But al-Qatifi, from the Sunni-dominated Persian Gulf, advocated a conservative Usulism that would not exacerbate Sunni persecution of Shi‘is and clung to the conservative political culture of minority Shi‘ism. He rejected the legitimacy of holding Friday prayers during the absence of the Imam of collecting kharaj land taxes, and of associating with rulers. After 1530 the Sunni Ottomans conquered Iraq, including the Shi‘i shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf where al-Qatifi and many other Arab Twelvers were based. Thereafter the shrine dries remained centers of a more cautious, conservative kind of Shi‘ism similar to that advocated by al-Qatifi.
In Iran, the rationalist, establishmentarian Usulism of al-Karaki largely won out. Isfahan's Imarn-Jumcahs (Friday congregational prayer leaders) from Shaykh ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali al-Karaki on adhered for the most part to Usulism, at least until the late seventeenth century. The mujtahids gained further power through becoming wealthy supervisors of pious endowment properties in the seventeenth century, and through revenue-free grants of land made to them by the Safavid shahs.[14] The Safavid capital, Isfahan, became the cyno-
Arjomand, The Shadow of God , ch. 5.
Yusuf al-Bahrani, Lu'lu'al al-Bahrayn , pp. 159-66; Muhammad Baqir Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat , 8 vols. (Tehran: Maktabat-i Ismaciliyan, 1970), 1:25-29.
Amin Banani, "Reflections on the Social and Economic Structure of Safavid Persia at Its Zenith," Iraman Studies 11 (1978): 95-96.
sure of the Shi‘i clerisy, a center of learning with 48 colleges and 162 mosques, and a place where important career contacts could be made.[15]
The clergy became so powerful that a few openly preached the necessity for the ruler to be not only a Sayyid but also a mujtahid, or senior jurispru-dent trained in Twelver law. This stance disputed the claim of the Safavids, laymen given often to loose morals, though the shahs asserted their descent from the Prophet. The dominant Shi‘i view supported the legitimacy of Safavid rule against clerical pretenders.[16] Not everyone trusted the ulama, as a seventeenth-century folk saying from Isfahan testifies: "Keep a wary eye in front of you for a woman, behind you for a mule, and from every direction for a mulla."[17]
Most of the clergy neither enjoyed great wealth nor refused to associate with the government, since they believed it legitimate to work for the state whenever they would otherwise fear for their lives or whenever they felt they could thereby help the Shi‘i community. Clerical support for the Safavids led the Shi‘i monarchs often to persecute the enemies of the ulama, particularly the leaders of mystical Sufi orders, who competed with them for the spiritual allegiance of the masses. Since most Sufis were also Sunnis, and had a form of mass organization outside both the Safavid state and the Shi‘i religious establishment, Usuli ulama saw them as a threat.[18]
The main opposition to the Usuli school came from Akhbari revivalism. Akhbarism, as was noted above, rejected the legitimacy of independent legal reasoning and denied the need of laypersons to emulate mujtahids. A major intellectual figure in the revival of this strict-constructionist approach to Shi‘ism, Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1624), attacked the mujtahids from his base in Medina, in the Arab world.[19] Astarabadi's reformulation of conservative Shi‘i jurisprudence found great acclaim in the shrine cities of Iraq and, as Arjomand demonstrated, in Iran among ethnically Iranian religious officials in competition with the ethnically Arab mujtahids.
Although Usulism probably predominated in the Safavid capital of Isfahan, the situation outside Isfahan in the late seventeenth century is harder to gauge. In some provincial centers Akhbaris remained influential. The Imam-Jumcah and Shaykhu'l-Islam of Qumm under Sulayman Shah (1667-94), Muhammad Tahir, a committed Akhbari brought up in Najaf, caused a row with the court by censuring the monarch's morals. Al-Hurr al-‘Amili (d. 1708 or 1709) immigrated to Mashhad from Syria, becoming Shaykhu'l-Islam.
John Chardin, Voyages de monsieur le chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l'orient , 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Jean Louis de Lorme, 1709), 3.82.
Ibid., 2:206-8. See A. K. S. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam: An Introduction to the Study of Islamic Political Theory: The Jurists (Oxford. Oxford Univ. Press, 1981 ), ch. 15.
Chardin, Voyages 3:208.
Lambton, State and Government , p. 285; Arjomand, The Shadow of God , pp. 112-21.
al-Hurr al-‘Amili, Amal al-amil 2:246; Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 1:120-39.
A staunch Akhbari, he disallowed the use of reason and wrote against rationalist theology. The family of the Akhbari Nicmatu'llah Jaza'iri (d. 1701) settled in the small Iranian town of Shushtar, in Khuzistan, as Akhbari prayer leaders.[20] Southwestern Iran was a major center of Akhbarism. As was noted, the Akhbari school had found favor with many ulama in the shrine cities of Iraq as well.
The Safavid conquest of Iran and promulgation of Twelver Shi‘ism represented the most startling cultural revolution in the Islamic world for centuries. Neither the Ottoman Turks nor the Mughal Timurids did nearly as much to change the religious beliefs of the people they ruled. The rise of Twelver Shi‘ism is comparable in scope—though emphatically not in content—to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. In both Protestantism and Safavid Shi‘ism, regional rulers' desire for political autonomy coincided with the wish of a clerically led group, branded heretics, to establish new religious institutions. Bloody religious and political wars ensued, dividing a cultural area (western Europe, southwest Asia) that had previously been religiously more uniform.
The Deccan Shi‘i States
Indian Ocean trade routes linked the Persian Gulf with southern India, encouraging a migration of people and ideas between the two areas. Iranian notables, administrators, military men, and literati flooded into southern India, or the Deccan, during the Mongol invasions of Iran in the thirteenth century, and thereafter. Especially after the Safavid victory, these Iranian elites often adopted Shi‘ism. Diplomatically and in its elite culture southern India became a dependency of Iran in the sixteenth century. Iranian notables carried with them their new conviction in Usuli Shi‘ism, providing patronage for Friday congregational prayer mosques and other Usuli Twelver institutions.
The longest-lasting of the Shi‘i-ruled states in southern India, the Qutb-Shahi (1512-1687), began with the political rise in Golconda of a Turkoman adventurer from Hamadan, Iran, named Sultan-Quli Qutbu'd-Din. The rulers in his line gave extensive patronage to Shi‘i ulama and built mosques, buildings (cashur-khanah ) for the commemoration of Imam Husayn's martyrdom, seminaries, and Shi‘i burial grounds. They had the Friday prayer sermons said in the name of the Twelve Imams and of the Safavids. Iranians
For Muhammad Tahir. see Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 4:143-46 Andrew Newman, in a personal communication, first pointed out the continuing appeal of Akhbarism in the provinces. For al-Hurr al-‘Amili, see Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannal 7:96-105, Sayyid Icjaz Husayn Kinturi, Kashf al-hujub wa'l-astar can al-kutub wa'l-asfar , ed. Muhammad Hidayat Husayn (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1330/1912), p. 289; and for Nicmatu'llah, see Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 8:150-59. For Nicmatullah's son ‘Abdu'llah, see Rawdat al-jannat 4:257-61.
immigrated in large numbers, many as merchants attracted by the diamond trade, and some local adoption of Shi‘ism occurred. Twelver ulama of the Usuli school predominated in Golconda. In 1636 the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, forced the Qutb-Shahis to cease their Shi‘i forms in the Friday congregational prayer sermons, including the mention of the Safavids. In 1687 the capital of Hyderabad fell to the Sunni Mughals, who extinguished Shi‘i Qutb-Shahi rule.[21]
The role of emigrant Shi‘i scholars from Iran in spreading Twelver ideas in sixteenth-century southern India is exemplified by Shah Tahir Ismacili From a prominent Ismacili family in Iran, he became a Twelver and later emigrated for political reasons to the domains of Burhan Nizam Shah (1508-53) in Ahmadnagar, southern India. There he convinced the monarch to become a Twelver Shi‘i and became a minister in his government. Shi‘ism remained influential in elite culture for several generations thereafter. The Ahmadnagar Nizam Shahs lost their independence when Akbar made them pay tribute, and Shah Jahan formally absorbed the area into the Mughal Empire in 1633.[22]
The southwestern Deccani kingdom of Bijapur also experienced Shi‘i rule and Iranian influence in the sixteenth century, 1502-34 and 1558-83, under the ‘Adil Shahi dynasty. Shi‘i Iranian merchants plied the horse trade from the Persian Gulf to Bijapur, and Shi‘i notables achieved high office there. Yusuf ‘Adil Shah (1489-1510), an Ottoman Turkish exile with tics to the Safavid Ismacil, proclaimed Shi‘ism the state religion in Bijapur in 1502, on hearing of the Safavid victory. This proclamation encouraged even more Iranians to immigrate, and the ‘Adil Shahis employed them as administrators or military men. The Shi‘i monarchs hired three hundred Iranians to curse the first three caliphs.
The ‘Adil Shahis recognized the Safavids as their ultimate sovereigns, though given their distance from Iran, this recognition remained a mere formality. Shi‘i ulama and notables often came into violent conflict with Sunnis, including local Sufi leaders, and Sunni-Shi‘i riots became endemic during the month of Muharram when Shi‘is cursed the caliphs. From 1583 local Sunni elites came back into power. The Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, com-
Muhammad Qasim Firishtah, [Tarikh-i Firishtah] History of the Rise of Mahomedan Power in India , trans. John Briggs, 4 vols. (Calcutta R. Cambray & Co., 1909-10), 3.321-335, and "Appendix to the History of the Kings of Golconda," 3Š339-484, H. K. Sherwani, "The Qutb Shahis of Golkonda-Hydarabad," in H K Sherwani and P. M.Joshi, eds., History of the Medieval Deccan (1295-1724) , 2 vols. (Hyderabad Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1973), 1:411-90, John N. Hollister, The Shi‘a of India (London: Luzac and Co., 1953), pp. 120-25.
Nuru'llah Shushtari, Majalis al-mu'minin , 2 vols. (Tehran: Chapkhanah-'i Islamiyyah, 1375/1955), 2:234-40, Firishtah, History 3 189-320; Radhey Shyam, "The Nizam Shahis," in Sherwani and Joshi, History of the Medieval Deccan , pp. 223-77; Hollister, The Shi‘a of India , pp. 117-120.
pelled the Bijapuris to pay tribute to him from 1636, and Awrangzib annexed Bijapur into the Mughal Empire in 1686.[23]
Although the sixteenth might be rightly called the Twelver century in the Indo-Iranian cultural sphere, Shi‘is won only limited and temporary victories outside Iran. Only in Iran did Shi‘i rulers succeed in making their creed into a mass religion, by a combination of brutal persecution, the lavishing of wealth on Twelver institutions, and their appeal to a widespread folk cult of the Prophet's family. Southern India's population, however, clung to its Hinduism, and most Sunni notable families stubbornly resisted the call to curse the caliphs. The Deccani Shi‘i ruling classes, with their Persian literary inclinations and their threnodies for the Imams in the new language of Urdu, remained insulated from the Dravidian, Hindu masses. The Mughal Timurid emperors gradually reduced the Shi‘i states of the south to vassals of a Sunni emperor, then finally they absorbed those territories and dethroned the Shi‘i monarchs.
Shi‘ism in Northern India under the Mughals
Twelver Shi‘ism in northern India under the Mughals, sometimes barely tolerated and at others fiercely persecuted. has left far fewer traces in the chronicles than it did in the south.[24] The importance of Iranian immigrants in spreading Safavid-style Twelver Shi‘ism seems indisputable, although hard to trace except at the very top of the social hierarchy. Regions of northern India, particularly Kashmir, had more Shi‘is than others. The popular classes developed creative ways of mourning the wronged Family of the Prophet, although the Mughals sometimes suppressed such displays of proto-Shi‘i piety.
The Mughal, or Timurid, dynasty was begun by Babur (d. 1530), a Chaghatai Turk who originally sought to establish his own state in his native central Asia. Blocked in central Asia by the Uzbeks, he established himself in Kabul and invaded India from this base in Afghanistan. His son Humayun, expelled from India by the Afghan Suri rulers, took refuge in Safavid Iran. There Humayun gained Safavid help in reestablishing his Indian domains, at the price of pretending to embrace Shi‘ism, for which he never showed any actual enthusiasm. Given the great surpluses expropriated by ruling elites in
Firishtah, History 3.3-88. M A Nayeem, External Relations of the Bijapur Kingdom (1489-1686 A D) (Hyderabad. Bright, 1974), pp. 52-72; Richard Maxwell Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700 Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval Indra (Princeton Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp 64-70, 114-24; Hollister, The Shi‘a of India , pp 112-17.
On Shi ism in the period of Mughal ascendancy, see Aligarh Muslim University's Afzal Husam, "Liberty and Restraint—A Study of Shiaism in the Mughal Nobility," MS in the author's possession, and Sajida S Alvi, Shi ism in India during Jahangir's Reign. Some Reflections," Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 27 (1979): 39-65, cf. Hollister, The Shi‘a of India , pp 126-50.
the agrarian bureaucracies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had Humayun actually adopted Shi‘ism he could have done much to spread it in northern India. Humayun's son Akbar (1556-1605) put the Mughal Empire on a sound footing, making coalitions with regional Hindu elites and adopting a syncretic religion of his own invention, which combined elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. Akbar tolerated but did not promote Twelver Shi‘ism, appointing the renowned Nuru'llah Shushtari, a Shi‘i cleric from Iran, chief judge (qazi ) of Lahore. Tolerance of Shi‘ism in Mughal India often fluctuated according to relations with Iran. The sixteenth-century Mughal-Safavid alliance gave way in the seventeenth to disputes over Qandahar, leading to restrictions on Shi‘is in India.[25]
The only instance of state adoption of Shi‘ism in northern India occurred in Kashmir, where the Shi‘i Chak ruling house (1561-89) came briefly to power. Shi‘ism came to Kashmir from Iran, and was embraced by some Sayyids and by the Chak clan. Members of the Nurbakhshiyyah Sufi order came to Kashmir from Iran in the years just before the Safavid victory in Azerbaijan. With the rise of Shi‘i power in Iran, the pro-Shi‘i Nurbakhshis formally became Twelvers. Shi‘i Chak rule caused Sunni-Shi‘i clashes in Kashmir, however, which the Mughal Akbar made a pretext to annex the region into his empire. A minority Shi‘i community continued to exist in Kashmir, as did Sunni-Shi‘i violence. Firishtah noted continuing Shi‘i influence in the Kashmiri military.[26]
The European traveler Manucci wrote that Akbar initiated a deliberate policy of receiving even Shi‘i Iranians who fell from political favor under the Safavids and fled to India. He said that Akbar and his successors gave these political refugees official grants (mansabdari ) and sent them to the province of Kashmir, where they led a comfortable life. When one of them died, rather than repatriating his stipend to the central government, the Iranian Shi‘i political refugees divided it up among the survivors. Ultimately Awrangzib put a stop to this "inheritance" of the mansabdari .[27] Since Kashmir had been ruled by the Shi‘i Chak dynasty and had a minority Shi‘i population, it was a logical place for the Mughals to send the Iranian refugees of whom they hoped to make political use. The wealth and standing of this group probably helped Shi‘ism in Kashmir and the neighboring Punjab.
Rizvi has quoted a central Asian traveler's account of Muharram in Lahore around 1635, which reported that the first five days of the month were given over to merrymaking to celebrate the happy portions of the Imams' lives, with male and female singers and dancers giving frequent perform-
Riazul Islam, Indo-Persian Relations A Study of the Politual and Diplomatic Relalions between the Mughul Empire and Iran (Tehran Iraman Culture Foundation, 1970)
Firishtah, History 4:444-50, 508-30; Hollister, The Shi‘a of India , pp. 141-50
Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor or Mogul India, 1653-1708 , trans William Irvine, 4 vols (London John Murray, 1907-8), 2.16.
ances. From the sixth through the tenth of the month believers mourned, and Shi‘is cursed the enemies of the Imams. On the tenth of Muharram itself, Shi‘is and Hindus stayed at home, but rival Sunni groups took out processions with placards, often, clashing violently.[28]
The French traveler Tavernier noted the many Iranian nobles and military men in the service of the Sunni Mughals, comparing their numbers to those in Bijapur, which had been Shi‘i-ruled. He wrote of these Iranian social climbers:
It is true that although they regarded the Sunnis with horror they, nevertheless follow, in outward show, the religion of the monarch, believing that to make or secure their fortune they might conceal their true belief, and that it sufficed for them to cherish it in their hearts . . . . Although [Awrangzib] had, as I have said, numerous Persians in his service, he did not allow them to celebrate the festival of Hosen and Hosein, sons of All.[29]
Other travelers in the late seventeenth century also remark the presence of Muharram processions of mourning for the Imam Husayn in southern India, and their forbidden character in Awrangzib's northern India.[30] In 1668, Awrangzib prohibited such mourning processions, during which urban groups paraded decorated wood or bamboo replicas of the Imam's tomb, on the grounds that the custom had resulted in a major riot in Burhanpur among rival groups of mourners.[31]
Not only military adventurers and political refugees went to India from Iran. At least two members of the preeminent clerical family in seventeenth-century Isfahan, the Majlisis, emigrated to Awrangzib's India. A grandson of Muhammad Taqi Majlisi, Aqa Muhammad Sacid Mazandarani, emerged as a favored court poet in Delhi, with the pen name "Ashraf."[32] His brother, Aqa Hasan ‘Ali, followed in his footsteps. For sons of Shi‘i ulama to succeed socially in the strongly Sunni atmosphere of the Mughal court they had to concentrate on literary or medical pursuits, which they did with some success.
Shi‘ism thereforc had a furtive character in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal India, which makes its culture difficult to recover. Shi‘ism spread to a slight extent among the ordinary folk, probably from Iran and by way of transplanted Iranian notables and Iranian long-distance merchants.
Mahmud b. Amir Wali, Bahr al-asrarfi manaqib al-akhyar , quoted in S. A. A. Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times (Canberra: Macrifat, 1980), p. 191.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India , trans V Ball, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1889), 2:76-77.
John Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia, Being Nine Years Travel, 1672-1681 , ed. William Crooke, 3 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1909-15), 1:273-74.
Muhammad Hashim Khafi Khan, [Muntakhab al-lubab] History of ‘Alamgir , trans. S. Moniul Haq (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1975), pp. 216-17.
See Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami, Ma'athir al-Kiram , vol. 2 (Lahore: Matbac-i Dukhani-yi Rifah-i ‘Amm, 1913): 116-19.
Most Shi‘is in northern India, Akhbaris, opposed the holding of Friday congregational prayers in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. A minority in Mul-tan and Sindh embraced Twelver Shi‘ism after 1500, and the eighteenth-century Sunni Afghan domination of these areas and Kashmir forced many Shi‘is to migrate southward to Delhi or Awadh. Late in the seventeenth century, after Awrangzib's conquest of Shi‘i-ruled Hyderabad, Deccani Shi‘is came north to join Mughal service, spreading their rituals in Delhi.[33]
Eighteenth-Century Political Transitions and Their Effect on Shi‘ism
In the eighteenth century the three great Islamic empires that had straddled southern and western Asia and North Africa suffered political reversals both externally and internally. Local tribal and peasant groups, suffering from high taxation, pursued successful rebellions against the centralized empires and their standing armies, leading to a decline of bureaucracy in favor of tribal power based on mobility, guerrilla tactics, and hand-held firearms Empires gave way to decentralization, to be replaced by provincial powers. As will be discussed later, the Mughal Empire declined at the center and regional successor states emerged. As the century wore on, the political influence of the British East India Company grew enormously as it swallowed up Bengal and other territories.
The Safavids fell to invading Afghan Sunni tribal armies in 1722, and the Persian Gulf gradually became a British lake. Only one of the three empires, the Ottoman, survived, partially because the European powers could not agree among themselves how to divide it up. Still, the Ottomans suffered loss of control over outlying parts of the empire, such as Egypt and Iraq, with slave-soldier (mamluk ) local regimes taking effective power. These political and economic changes strongly influenced the fortunes of Imami Shi‘ism, disestablishing or crippling clerical institutions in Iran for decades, giving greater autonomy to the Shi‘i shrine cities in southern Iraq under the weak Mamluks, and pcoviding an opportunity for Shi‘i governors in Bengal and Awadh to make a bid for regional independence from the Mughals in India. Moreover, Shi‘i ideological developments in Iraq and Iran had a fateful impact on north Indian Shi‘ism later in the eighteenth century.
The political and financial support that the Safavids gave Shi‘ism and its institutions tied the fortunes of the religion to those of the dynasty. Shah Sultan Husayn (1694-1722) presided over the dissolution of the Safavid Empire. The Shah's secular policies led to weakness, and only in the religious sphere did he take forceful action, giving free reign to the bigotry of clerics such as Shaykhu'l-Islam Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1699). The last Safavid
Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times , pp 190-95.
ordered forced conversions of Jews and Zoroastrians, the expulsion of thousands of Hindu merchants from Isfahan, and the persecution of Sunni tribal groups, such as the Kurds. Changes in provincial administration and neglect of the military made Iran vulnerable to Baluchi tribal raids and incursions by the tribal Ghilzay Afghans, who seized Qandahar in 1709. An Afghan army of twenty thousand took Kirman in 1721 and marched on to Isfahan, which fell, after a long and terrible siege, to the Ghilzays in 1722. Iran also began to feel mililary pressure from the Russia of Peter the Great, and from the Ottomans.
Tahmasp II, a Safavid aspirant to the throne now occupied by the Afghans, found a military strategist to support him in Nadir Afshar. But once Nadir defeated the Afghans, he claimed the throne for himself in 1736. Nadir's military policies barked back to those of Timur ("Tamerlane") or the early Safavids, in that he put together a coalition of tribal Afghan and Qizilbash armies instead of depending on a bureaucratically ordered standing army. The tribal forces. pastoralists, could only be paid in booty and pasturage, which required constant movement and conquest. Nadir invaded Iraq twice, in the early 1730s and the early 1740s, meeting defeat at the hands of the Ottomans both times, and in the late 1730s undertook a long campaign to India, where he conquered Lahore and Delhi and made the Mughal emperor his vassal for a time. But tribal factionalism between the Sunni Afghan and the Shi‘i Qizilbash wings of his army led to Nadir Shah's assassination in 1747.
Regional contests for power divided for a decade and a half the area that had been Safavid Iran, with the Shiraz-based Zands emerging victorious west of Khurasan. Karim Khan Zand's pragmatic rule (1763-79) reunited Iran and aimed at capturing revived Persian Gulf trade by conquering Basra, Ottoman Iraq's port city. Upon Karim Khan Zand's death the Qajar tribe gained political preeminence, creating a new Shi‘i state, which ruled throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
Qajar. Iran (1785-1925), unlike Mughal India or the Ottoman Empire, regained central-government control by the end of the eighteenth century over most of the territories held in the seventeenth. The Zands and Qajars benefited from the preoccupation of the Afghans with the Punjab, and of the British with Bengal, so that two centrifugal forces besetting the Mughals were deflected from Iran. But Iran's economy was disrupted for much of the period 1722-97, and growing Russian and British economic and military power chipped away at its territories and the Qajars diplomatic independence throughout the nineteetnth century.[34]
These events have been studied in Laurence Lockhart, The Fall of the Safam Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958), and Nadir Shah (Lahore al-Irfan, repr. 1976), John R Perry, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747-1779 (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1979), A K.S. Lambton, "The Tribal Resurgence and the Decline of the Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century," in T. Naff and R. Owen, eds., Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 109-29; and Thomas M Ricks, "Politics and Trade in Southern Iran and the Gulf, 1745-1765" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ., 1974)
These political trends made a major impact upon the Shi‘i ulama.[35] Under the last Safavid ruler, Shah Sultan Husayn, the high ulama favoring the rationalist Usuli school of jurisprudence, enjoyed great influence, position, and wealth. But the Afghan conquest of Isfahan in 1722 displaced hundreds of scholarly families and delivered a mortal blow to the dynasty that had assured their fortunes. The Sunni Ghilzays and Nadir Shah expropriated the endowments supporting the clergy, leading to a relative impoverishment and a decline in the influence of this group. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century great numbers of Shi‘i clergymen and merchants fled Iran for the shrine cities of Ottoman Iraq, adding a new ethnic component to the Arab quarters of these cities.
Isfahan, although its population may have declined from 250,000 to only 50,000, remained one of Iran's larger cities and a center of rationalism and mysticism throughout this period, exercising a countervailing influence in those directions. Iranian centers of Usulism remained, though we simply do not know much about intellectual currents in Shiraz, Tabriz, and other centers in this period. The frequent description of the eighteenth century as one of Akhbari dominance appears to derive mainly from the experience of Isfahani emigrants to largely Akhbari Iraq, rather than from actual Akhbari hegemony over most major Iranian centers (though Kirman, Qumm, and Khuzistan appear to have favored Akhbarism).
The Shi‘i ulama of Iran adopted varying strategies to deal with the vicissitudes that struck their status group in the eighteenth century. These included emigration to the Iraqi shrine cities, where a constant stream of pilgrims and long-distance merchants provided them with a livelihood as legal advisers and supervisors of charitable contributions and pious endowments. Some managed to retain religious office in a declining Isfahan; others intermarried with rich merchants or well-off artisans when possible. With the decline of court patronage for scholars and the expropriation of endowments, more were probably forced into low-status trades—becoming cotton or silk weavers, smiths, dyers, bleachers, and hat makers—than would normally have been the case. Many settled in Iran's small towns and large villages, where local tribal leaders came into prominence with the decline of central government. The smaller centers were less likely to attract marauding invaders, prospering as local trade depots even as some large cities declined. Members of the Majlisi family colonized high religious office in several provincial cities and small towns. Finally, some sought employment in Bengal (governed
See Hamid Algar, Shi ism and Iran in the Eighteenth Century," in Naff and Owen, Studies , pp. 288-302.
by a Shi‘i family from 1740 to 1757) as literary men, civil servants, and physicians.[36]
In this period one often sees mullas, clerics, tying themselves to the richer classes of the bazaar, seeking new forms of economic security when their links to the court were so disrupted from 1722 to the rise of the Zands. Their bazaar links and the relative pohtical independence this fostered were to prove crucial to the growth of ulama power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[37]
Crucial developments also occurred in Iraq during the eighteenth century. The Ottoman governor, Hasan Pasha, governed Iraq firmly (1702-24), but Iraq suffered disruptive Iranian incursions under Nadir Shah during Ahmad Pasha's governorship. Thereafter Sulayman Abu Laylah Pasha (1750-62) created a new, regionally based Mamluk state, which continued under his slave-ruler successors until the reassertion of direct Ottoman rule in 1831. The Mamluk state gained independence in all but name.[38]
The Iraqi shrine cities laboring under Sunni Ottoman rule, had remained centers of the more conservative Akhbari school. With the collapse of Shi‘i rule in Iran and the anticlericalism of the new rulers, the ulama in any case lost much of their previous opportunity for an active social role. The congregation of hundreds of Iranian clerical families in the Akhbari strongholds brought them under the conservative influence of that school. The decline of the great Shi‘i clerical centers in Iran lent the shrine cities even more glamour in the rest of the Shi‘i world, and Nadir Shah had won from the Ottomans pledges not to tax the pilgrims who frequented them. The pilgrimage trade brought wealth into Iraq from Iran and India, and the Mamluks granted the shrine cities much relative autonomy in view of the dangers of another Iranian invasion should the Shi‘is there feel mistreated. All this gave the Shi‘i ulama based in Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, and Samarra great wealth, power, and independence late in the eighteenth century.
Political decentralization and realignments had a differential impact upon Shi‘ism in various regions of the Middle East. In Iran, the fall of the Safavids helped disestablish the Shi‘i ulama, reducing them to comparative powerlessness and poverty. In Iraq, however, the influx of clerical families fleeing Nadir Shah, Iranian attempts to annex the shrine cities, continued pil-
This analysis is based on Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani, "Mir'at al-ahal-i jahan-nama," Persian MS Add. 24,052, foll. 17b-43b, British Lib., London For a fuller treatment of eighteenth-century Shi ism, see J. R. I. Cole, "Shi‘i Clerics in Iraq and Iran, 1722-1780: The Akhbari-Usuli Struggle Reconsidered." Iranian Studies 18, no. I (1985). 3-34
Cf. Nikki R. Keddie, "The Roots of the Ulama's Power in Modern lran," in Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500 , N. R Keddie, ed. 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles. Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 211-99.
A.M. K. Nawras, Hukm al-mamalik fi al-‘Iraq , 1750-1831 (Baghdad. Wizarat al-Iclam, 1975); older, still valuable, studies of the eighteenth century are Clement Huart, Histoire de Baghdad dans les temps modernes (Paris Earnest Leroux, 1901 ), and S. Longrigg, Four Centuries of Modern Iraq (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).
grimage and trade, and the emergence of a regional Mamluk regime all contributed to the greater autonomy and wealth of the Shi‘i ulama.
Neo-Akhbari Dominance, 1722-1763, in Iraq
Against a backdrop of geographical and class dislocation, the ulama of the eighteenth century fought out a decisive battle on the interpretation of Shi‘ism.[39] The old struggle between the Usulis and the Akhbaris revived in a new guise. The Akhbarism of the eighteenth century was less conservative than pre-Safavid Akhbarism had been, most Akhbaris in Iran and Iraq having accepted the validity of, for instance, Friday congregational prayers in the Occultation. But Akhbaris still preferred a more conservative approach to juridical decision-making, excluding the rationalist techniques of the Usulis. The Usuli-Akhbari conflict has too often been seen in liberal terms as a battle of great minds. In fact, the ideological struggle reflected the competition of ulama families and of regions, and social and economic forces affected its outcome.
Shaykh Yusuf al-Bahrani (1695-1772), a key figure in the intellectual development of Shi‘ism, grew up in Safavid Bahrain in a family of Usuli clerics who also worked as pearl merchants.[40] He fled first to Shiraz from the 1717 Omani invasion of Bahrain, then to Karbala from the Afghan conquest of Iran. Al-Bahrani adopted the Akhbari school, rejecting his early schooling in Bahrain. As a refugee from Iran in Karbala, he would at first have been dependent on the largesse of Akhbari religious dignitaries. Moreover, the same political instability that expelled him from his homeland and deposed the Safavids apparently made an establishment-oriented school of jurisprudence like Usulism less appealing. As time went on, al-Bahrani moved away from a strict Akhbarism to a neo-Akhbari position that had Usuli elements. Nevertheless, he rejected Usuli principles of legal reasoning, the syllogistic logic Usulis allowed in interpreting the law, and the legitimacy of holy war during the Occultation of the Imam.[41] With the influx of Iranians into Karbala from Isfahan and other Iranian cities, the Akhbari teachers in the shrine cities em-
See J. Cole, "Shi‘i Clerics in Iraq and Iran," and G Scarcia, "lntorno alle controversie tra Ahbari e Usuli presso gli, Imamti di Persia," Rivista degli Studi Orientali 33 (1958): 211-50. The account of Hamid Algae, Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1969), pp 33-41, contains errors and is dated Aqa Muhammad Baqir studied with his father in Isfahan, not Karbala: he lived thirty years in Bihbahan, rather than briefly passing through; he died in 1790/91, not 1803, and the Usuli revival he led was a feature of the Zand period and did not coincide with the rise of the Qajars
For a brief autobiography written in 1768 a few years before his death, see Yusuf al-Bahrani, Lu'lu'at al-Bahrayn , pp. 442-51; see also Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 8:203-8. For the relevant political history, see Lockhart, The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty , pp 115-16; J G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, cOman , and Central Arabia , 2 vols (Calcutta Superintendent Gov't Printing, India, 1908-15, repr 1970), 1:836; Ricks, "Politics and Trade," pp. 77-78.
al-Bahrani, Lu'lu'at al-Bahrayn , pp. 442-43; Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 8:205.
ployed their prestige and patronage to convince them to adopt the Akhbari school.
The trend to Akhbarism after 1722 may be witnessed in another major eighteenth-century figure, Aqa Muhammad Baqir b. Muhammad Akmal (1705-90), born in Isfahan and descended on his mother's side from the prominent Majlisi clerical family. His kin and social networks reached beyond the mosque, since he had half-brothers working in Isfahan and Tehran as money changers (sarraf ) and in Zand Shiraz as money coiners (zarrabi ). The young Aqa Muhammad Baqir, emigrating to Karbala in 1722, came under Akhbari influences there and changed for a while to that. school from his Isfahani Usulism.[42]
Aqa Muhammad Baqir traveled early in the 1730s to Bihbahan on the border of the Iranian provinces of Khuzistan and Fars. Many Isfahani scholarly families scattered to such small towns (qasabahs ) in southern Iran, which, though relatively near to the shrine cities, offered greater security in this period than large cities. Aqa Muhammad Baqir found the religious institutions in Bihbahan dominated by ulama from Bahrain who had newly adopted Akhbarism. Although he may at first have gotten along with them, at some point he reverted to his Isfahani Usulism and engaged in bitter polemics with the Akhbaris. He emerged as a popular prayer leader and teacher and remained for thirty years.[43]
The Usuli elite of Isfahan, dispersed to the Akhbari-dominated shrine cities and to conservative small towns in the 1720s, suffered in the 1730s further disestablishment by Nadir Shah (1736-47), who supplanted both Afghans and Safavids. He made it one of the cornerstones of his policy that Iranians should renounce the Shi‘i. practice of cursing the first two caliphs of Sunni Islam, and tried to have Shi‘ism incorporated into Sunnism as a fifth legal rite. This policy allowed him to keep loyal to himself both his Afghan troops and his Qizilbash cavalry the former fierce Sunnis and the latter staunch Shi‘is. Nadir Shah forced the Shi‘i ulama to agree to this compromise. Wherever they felt it necessary, they went along, but the assent of many surely represented no more than pious dissimulation (taqiyyah ). In addition, Nadir sought to weaken the clergy and defang any potential clerical opposition to his policies by confiscating the rich endowments that had supported the seminaries and mosques of Isfahan.[44]
Bihbahani, "Mir'at al-ahval," foll. 36a, 44a-45b.
Ibid., foll. 45b-46b; ‘Ali Davvani, Ustad-i kull Aqa Muhammad Baqir b. Muhammad Akmal macruf bih Vahid-i Bihbahani (Qumm: Chapkhanah-'i Dar al-‘Ilm, 1958), pp. 129-30
Muhammad Mihdi Kawkabi Astarabadi, [ Tarikh-i Nadiri ], The History of the Life of Nadir Shah , Jones trans. (London, 1773), pp. 66-67; Sayyid Abdu'llah as-Suwaydi, Mu'tamar an-Najaf (Cairc: al-Matbacah as-Salafiyyah, 1393/1973), pp. 16-17; Alagr, Shi ism and Iran," pp. 291ff.
The Usuli Revival in the Zand Period, 1763-1779
Aqa Muhammad Baqir returned to Iraq sometime in the early 1760s. Bihbahani, as he was now known, found the shrine cities an extremely hostile environment for an Usuli. Shaykh Yusuf al-Bahrani, in his late sixties and ten years senior to the newcomer, presided over the religious establishment in Karbala as the dean of Shi‘i scholarship. Al-Bahrani's neo-Akhbaris considered Usulis to be ritually impure, touching Usuli works only with a handkerchief to shield their fingers from its polluting effects. More serious, anyone walking in the street with Usuli literature beneath his arm risked violent assault.[45] The power structure in the shrine cities consisted of an Arab landholding elite, a number of mafia-type gangs, and the leading clerics. Any important figure among the ulama would have to make alliances with the Sayyid landholders and with the chief gangsters who ran protection rackets in the bazaars. At this point, the Akhbaris had the important gangster, or luti , contacts, and could employ these to intimidate Usuli rivals.
Bihbahani at first faced so many difficulties in Karbala that he seriously considered returning to Iran. But he soon began teaching Usuli texts secretly in his basement to a select and trusted number of students, many of them former pupils of al-Bahrani. These included his own nephews. When the Iranians had originally come to the shrine cities in the 1720s, many of them penniless refugees, they had been integrated into the Akhbari ideology of their Arab hosts and benefactors. Forty years later the founding of an Usuli cell in Karbala led by members of the Majlisi aristocracy signaled the increasing financial and social independence of the ethnically Iranian quarters in the shrine cities.[46] Although the Iranian scholarly families originally depended heavily on government land grants and emoluments in Iran, which many of them lost after 1722, the history of the Majlisi family suggests that they increasingly forged links with merchants and skilled artisans in the bazaars, which gave them a new financial base. Though fallen from their notable status and dispossessed of their lands around Isfahan, many Iranian expatriates could increasingly compete with the wealth of merchant-ulama like al-Bahrani. The partial upturn in ulama fortunes in the Zand period, moreover, coincided with the economic rebound of the artisan and merchant classes, to whom they had become tied.[47]
Wealth underpinned the success of a great teacher, since he attracted students by providing them with stipends to live on. It also ensured that the
Mirza Muhammad Tunikabuni, Qisas al-‘ulama' (Tehran: Kitabfurushi-yi ‘Ilmiyyah-'i lslamiyyah, n d ), p. 210; Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 2 95
The ethnic dimension of the Usuli-Akhbari struggle has been pointed out by Vahid Rafati, "The Development of Shaykhi Thought in Shi‘i Islam" (Ph.D diss, Univ of California, Los Angeles, 1979), p. 30, and by Abbas Amanat, "The Early Years of the Babi Movement: Background and Development" (Ph D diss, Oxford, 1981), pp. 13ff
See Ricks, "Politics and Trade," p 268.
gangster bosses took his side. Aqa Muhammad Baqir's wealth probably derived from merchant in-laws, brothers-in-law serving as high administrators in Bengal, and wealthy legal clients. At some point Bihbahani began to feel that he had enough students, monetary support, and security to challenge al-Bahrani openly, an event that led to the polarization of the scholarly community in Karbala during the 1760s. In 1772, when al-Bahrani expired, Bihbahani had attained such a prestigious position that he read the funeral prayers for his late nemesis. Shaykh Yusuf's demise removed the most vigorous Akhbari leader from the field, allowing Aqa Muhammad Baqir, then sixty-seven, to spend his last clear-minded decade in consolidating his position. A number of other formei students of al-Bahrani, including Bihbahani's nephews the young Tabataba'is, and some Arab scholars, now forsook neo-Akhbarism for the Usuli school.[48] These in turn helped their aging mentor to train a whole new generation of youthful mujtahids, who came from Iran to the shrine cities in the last years of Zand dominance and the opening years of Qajar rule.
The Usuli revival was, in Iranian terms, a largely Zand-period phenomenon, .which the Qajars came to support later on. In the shrine cities themselves the Usuli victory coincided with the rise of local Shi‘i power and the decline of central Ottoman control, so that Usuli principles, such as the holding of Shi‘i congregational prayers, could be gradually implemented, something the Ottomans had not tolerated when they had a firmer hand in Iraq. Usulism was promoted in particular by ethnically Iranian immigrant families in the Arab shrine cities, but the school attracted the support of local Arab scholars as well in the 1770s. The Zands provided new patronage and economic security in Iran, encouraging the revival of activist, rationalist Usuli jurisprudence.
Conclusion
The fortunes of Imami Shi‘ism in Iraq and Iran from its inception depended upon two forces. The first, popular-class heterodoxy and love for the family of the Prophet, allowed it to survive among urban artisans in Iraqi and Iranian cities and among the marsh Arabs of Iraq, and to spread among the Turkoman pastoralists of Anatolia. The second, ruling-class support or tolerance, aided the religion in the Buyid period, part of the Mongol period, and under the Safavids and Zands. Popular-class adoption of the religion helped it spread even under hostile governments, such as the Sunni Ottomans and Mughals, though it suffered setbacks in such situations. In seventeenth-
For new Iranian adherents of Usulism. such as Muhammad Mihdi Niraqi and Muhammad Mihdi Shahristani, see Khvansari, Rawdat al-jannat 7:200-3, and Muhammad ‘Ali Mucallim Habibabadi. Makarim al-athar dar ahval-i rijal-i dawrah-'i Qajar , 2 vols (Isfahan. Matbac-i Muhammadi, 1958), 2:611-14
century southern India, ruling-class support for Imami Shi‘ism allowed the development of sophisticated religious and cultural institutions, but failed to secure allegiance to the faith by the masses of Hindus and Sunnis.
The late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century witnessed political setbacks to Imami Shi‘ism of considerable scope. The Sunni Mughals dethroned the remaining Shi‘i monarchs of southern India, the Ottomans ruled the Shi‘i areas of southern Lebanon and southern Iraq, forces from Muscat conquered Shi‘i Bahrain, and Sunni Afghans swept into Iran, dethroning the Safavids. Everywhere Imami Shi‘ism as a religion of the ruling class met defeat, the wealth of its ulama was expropriated, and only the devotion of the common people kept the faith alive. But the second half of the eighteenth century saw a reversal of the Sunni revival. The Mughals grew weak, allowing their Shi‘i governors in Awadh and Bengal to become nearly autonomous. The Zands restored Shi‘i rule to Iran. The declining Ottomans allowed a Sunni Mamluk regime to come to power in Iraq, which granted greater freedom to the Shi‘i shrine cities. The Shi‘i ulama took advantage of the improving political climate in the second half of the eighteenth century to promote their own interests, expressed in the clerical ideology of Usuli Shi‘ism.
2
Shi‘i State Formation in Awadh and the Ulama
The Emergence of Successor States to the Mughals
The eighteenth century witnessed the disruption of political order in much of the Islamic world and the emergence of regionally based successor states to the three great Islamic empires that had held sway from the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire met frequent defeat in military encounters with European states, and the Mamluks in Egypt and Iraq showed independence from the Ottomans in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Iran, Afghan tribal armies invaded and defeated the imperial forces. Out of the chaos emerged Nadir Shah (1736-47), who reunited Iran, assaulted Ottoman Iraq, and invaded India. The Mughal center at Delhi, already weak, never recovered from this blow, thereafter suffering Afghan incursions, attacks from south Indian Maratha armies, and assaults by the British East India Company.
The political decline of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals cannot be explained monocausally, though it seems likely that economic forces played a major part. But as Owen argued in the case of the Ottomans, political decline does not necessarily imply that an absolute economic decline occurred (as opposed to a relative economic backwardness compared with Europe).[1] In Iran, the silk trade declined in the eighteenth century, but the decline was caused by rather than being the cause of insecure conditions during tribal and elite contests for central power. Halil Inalcik has suggested that, just as
Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914 (London: Methuen, 1981), pp 1-56.
the introduction of cannon early in the sixteenth century had a centralizing effect, so the spread of hand-held firearms among the general populace in subsequent decades contributed to decentralization.[2] For India, Irfan Habib argued that the Mughal nobles progressively overtaxed their peasantry, provoking peasant revolts in the eighteenth century, which proved so costly to put down that they permanently weakened the system. M. Athar All, among others, has suggested that such macroeconomic phenomena as the influx of New World silver and the depreciation of currency could help explain the simultaneous political weakening of the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans[3]
From the early 1970s some historians began suggesting an alternative to finding causes for the political decline at the center in the three empires. They began to see political decentralization not as a decline of the center but as a rise of the region. Thus, the appearance of independent-minded elites in eighteenth-century Egypt was depicted as a consequence of increased wealth among the Egyptian notable, merchant, and ulama classes, deriving from the coffee trade and other economic activities.[4] In Iran, Thomas Ricks found that eighteenth-century regional elites showed a marked continuity even during instability at the center, and John Perry showed how the Zands, based in southwestern Iran, parlayed their regional power into national dominance.[5] Barnett has discussed how, with the rise of successor states to the Mughals in India, more revenue remained in the provinces, with local benefits.[6] The successor states often provided adequate security to allow long-distance trade and local agriculture to flourish. This approach shows the regional and
Halil Inalcik, "The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-Arms in the Middle East," in Parry and Yapp, eds., War, Technology, and Society in the Middle East (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 211; for an application of the argument that the spread of handguns among tribes in Iran contributed to the tribal resurgence, see Nikki R Keddie, Roots of Revolution. An Interpretive History of Modern Iran (New Haven Yale Univ. Press, 1981), ch. 2.
Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556-1707) (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), M. Athar Ali, "The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case," Modern Asian Studies 9 (1975): 385-96: for price rises (at an average annual increase of 1.93 percent, 1591-1750) in the Mughal period, see Irfan Habib, "Monetary System and Prices," in Raychaudhuri and Habib, Cambridge Economic History of India 1:360-81. As Habib notes, in a precapitalist economy even this relatively small rate of increase may have been unsettling.
For the coffee trade, see André Raymond, Artisans et commercants au Caire au XVIIIe siecle , 2 vols. (Damascus: Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, 1973); for other possible factors, see Peter Gran, The Islamic Roots of Capitalism (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979); and D. Crecelius, Roots of Modem Egypt (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1981).
Thomas M. Ricks, "Politics and Trade in Southern Iran and the Gulf, 1745-1765," (Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ., 1974), esp. pp. 55-60; John Perry, Karim khan Zand (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979).
See for instance Richard Barnett, North India Between Empires (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ: of California Press, 1980); Philip B. Calkins, "The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700-1740," Journal of Asian Studies 29 (1970)' 799-806, Bernard S. Cohn, "Political Systems in Eighteenth-Century India: The Banaras Region," Journal of the American Oriental Society 82 (1962): 312-19; Karen Leonard, Social History of An Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979).
limited perspective of the image of unmitigated decline projected upon all of eighteenth-century northern India by Delhi-based Mughal historians as well as by contemporary Europeans.
In India, several successor states to the Mughals emerged. Bengal became increasingly independent, failing to a Shi‘i Muslim elite, until its nawab succumbed to the British in 1757. The Durrani Afghan state swallowed Kabul and much of the Punjab and Kashmir. The old Mughal province of Awadh, southeast of Delhi and northwest of Bengal, with the Himalayas and the Jamuna River as its natural boundaries, became a regional base for the powerful Nishapuri family. In the south, Hyderabad became the autonomous realm of the Nizam, a Mughal-appointed governor and the Hindu Maratha federation ruled much of the Deccan.
The social and urban history of eighteenth-century India supports the argument that the decline of the Delhi-based Mughal Empire and the rise of a regional elite in Awadh, for instance, reflected a shift in resources rather than monolithic decline. H. K. Naqvi described how urban centers west of the Jamuna River, in the regions near the Mughal seat of power, lost population in the course of the eighteenth century, whereas the area (Awadh) east of the river became more urbanized.[7] C. A. Bayly demonstrated that the decline of Delhi, Agra, and Lahore (each with populations of about 400,000 in 1700, down to 100,000 in 1800) was partially offset by the rapid emergence of Awadh's Lucknow and Banaras, both with populations of 200,000 or more in 1800. He found about sixty towns of more than 10,000 in eighteenth-century. North India, the number remaining stable from 1730 to 1800, though some declined and others grew. Again, tile small centers (qasabahs ) of about 3,000 suffered losses in the west, but many new settlements grew up in Awadh during that period. Bayly further showed that climatic changes speeded the shift of resources from Delhi and Agra to Lucknow and Banaras, the area west of the Jamuna suffering dry spells in the late eighteenth century while in Awadh the fertile Baiswara area received ample rainfall.[8]
State formation in many of the successor states to the Mughals involved new local ruling coalitions and the promotion of regional culture. In Awadh, the ethnically Iranian ruling house and many of the notables associated with it favored the Imami Shi‘i branch of Islam. As the province became increasingly autonomous, Shi‘i notables more openly supported the scholars and institutions of their religious community. The declining Sunni elites in Delhi saw both the Awadh nawabate and Shi‘ism as manifestations of decadence, when in reality a shift simply occurred in cultural resources.
H. K Naqvi, "Progress of Urhanisation in the United Provinces, 1550-1800," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10 (1967) 84-85
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 111-13.
Map 2
The Nawabate of Awadh in 1785
The Rise of the Awadh Successor State
In the period 1722-75 three nawabs reigned through several phases of state formation in Awadh. The. state has been described as "a distinct realm of structured political relations that is defined by contention along its boundaries and among politicians and bureaucrats who, in competing for office and influence, rework social and economic conflict into political terms," and emphasis has shifted in the scholarly study of state making from static institutions to the "structured relations between the state and other spheres of society."[9] The question arises of what social forces influenced the rise of the nawabs to regional autonomy in Awadh. As Iranian Shi‘is, the nawabs, originally temporary Mughal appointees, seem at first glance an elite group unlikely to assert strong authority over the Hindu peasants and Sunni townsmen of Awadh. How they made Shi‘i rule at all palatable to Awadh's population must occupy us as a central question. Moreover, it might be asked if there arc any parallels between the rise of Shi‘i rule in Awadh and that of the Safavids earlier in Iran.
The emergence of the province of Awadh as a Shi‘i-ruled state depended in part on developments at the Timurid court, where the Mughal administrative elite allowed Iranian Shi‘i immigrants to rise as provincial governors. On the one hand, pohtical instability in Iran encouraged large numbers of Iranian notables to go to India; on the other, the mood at court after the passing of Awrangzib (d. 1707) grew decidedly more tolerant of Shi‘ism. Awrangzib's successor, Bahadur Shah (d. 1712), leaned heavily toward Shi‘i Islam.[10] The Shi‘i Barhah Sayyids, mere Delhi courtiers, made and unmade Mughal emperors, further demonstrating growing Shi‘i power. Greater tolerance at court allowed more elite recruitment of avowed Shi‘is to high office,
The Iranians made an impact, not only on the Delhi court, but on North India as a whole. Mir Muhammad Amin Nishapuri (d. 1739), the first nawab of Awadh, began a dynasty that ruled for 136 years. Nishapuri. known as Burhanu'l-Mulk, derived from a family of Islamic judges (qazis ) in Khurasan, whom Shah Ismacil Safavi of Iran transplanted there from Najaf as part of his campaign to make Iran Shi‘i.[11] Nishapuri came to India in 1708, where he worked himself up the bureaucratic ladder to emerge as a power broker in Delhi. He helped free the Mughal emperor, Muhammad
Charles Bright and Susan Harding, eds., Statemaking and Social Movements Essays in History and Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 4.
Sayyid Ghulam Husayn Tabataba'i, Siyar al-muta'akhkhirin 2 vols. (Calcutta. n.p., 1248/ 1832), 1:78; S. A A. Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times (Canberra: Ma'rifat, 1980); Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740 (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1959)
Ghulam ‘Ali Naqavi, ‘Imad as-sa cadat (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1897), pp. 5, 8-10.
Shah, of the political control of the Barhah Sayyids in 1720, receiving as a reward the governorship of Agra.[12]
In 1722, after Burhanu'l-Mulk failed to subdue peasant uprisings, the emperor demoted him to the less remunerative governorship of Awadh. There he overcame and co-opted the Sunni Shaykhzadah landholders based in the strategic town of Lucknow, who then collaborated in the emergent Awadh state. Awadh never achieved a high degree of governmental centralization, making the cooperation of such local elites essential to political stability. Burhanu'l-Mulk then brought within his orbit the Hindu Rajput Mohan Singh of Tiloi, who dominated the southern part of Rai Bareli. The Nishapuri satrap spent the next decade and a half establishing stronger central rule in Awadh, greatly increasing its revenue. In something of a declaration of independence, he resisted the Mughal emperor's one attempt to transfer him to the governorship of another province, Malwa.[13]
In January of 1739 Nadir Shah of Iran took Lahore, invading through Afghanistan. Burhanu'l-Mulk brought his forces into the fray on the side of the Mughal emperor, but was defeated and captured. The nawab, after negotiating an Iranian withdrawal, felt disappointed by the Mughal emperor's subsequent political appointments and treasonably suggested to Nadir Shah that it would be quite Facile and highly rewarding to take Delhi. The Iranian conqueror, delighted to take up the suggestion, victoriously marched into the city, the savage looting of the capital later perpetrated by his troops constituting one of the century's great disasters. Nadir reduced the Mughal emperor to a vassal of Iran, making Burhanu'l-Mulk imperial regent. The nawab of Awadh committed suicide on 19 March 1739, either because of his debilitating leg cancer or because Nadir Shah humiliated him.[14]
Unlike Ismacil the Safavid. Burhanu'l-Mulk did not acquire his country, solely by conquest. His authority derived from a Mughal appointment, and he used Mughal troops to assert his power. He gradually did achieve an autonomy of sorts, and his behavior with Nadir Shah indicates rather weak loyalty to the Mughal court. But his attempts to restructure Awadh society
Tabataba'i, Siyar al-muta'akhkhirin 1:38-58; A L Srivastava, The First Two Nawabs of Awadh (Agra: Shiva Lal Agarwala and Co., 2d ed. 1954), pp. 10-21, Barnett, North India Between Empires , pp. 23-27.
Naqavi, ‘Imad, pp. 7-17; Kamalu'd-Din Haydar Mashhadi, Savanihat-i salatin-i Avadh (Lucknow Naval Kishor, 1896), pp 34-38; Srivastava, The First Two Nawabs , pp. 30-35; W. C. Benett, Report on the Family History of the Cheer Clans of the Roy Bareilly District (Lucknow. Oudh Government Press, 1870), pp 38, 40-41, Rustam ‘Ali Shahabadi, Tarikh-i Hindi in The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians The Muhammadan Period , trans and ed. H M. Elliot and John Dowson, vol. 8 (Allahabad Kitab Mahall, repr 1964): 45-46, 56-57 For the Kakori Shaykhs, who later provided personnel for the Awadh administration, see Muhammad Fayzbakhsh, "Risalah dar ahval-i zamindaran-i Kakori," Curzon Coll., Persian MS 87, Asiatic Society Lib, Calcutta
Naqavi, ‘Imad as-sacadat , pp. 24-28, Muhammad Shafic "Varid" Tihrani, Tarikh-i Nadirshahi (Tehran: Bunyad-i Farhang-i Iran, 1349 s. 1971), pp. 160-90; Shahabadi, Tarikh-i Hindi 8:60-65; Srivastava, The First Two Nawabs , pp. 61-75
took place within the framework of Mughal administrative traditions. He co-opted local large landholders instead of strongly dominating or destroying them, which allowed a polyglot cultural system rather than the wholesale conversion to Shi‘ism undertaken by the Safavids. But Burhanu'l-Mulk did make an assault on Sunni ulama and Sufi holders of revenue-free land grants.
Changes in the Status of Sunni Institutions
Secular opposition to the accumulation of religious lands, as Weber noted, often arose in preindustrial societies.[15] The new nawab's determination to carve out a personal power base in Awadh, his Shi‘ism, and the region's exceptionally numerous Sunni revenue-free holdings, all contributed to the conflict. An eighteenth-century observer wrote that in the latter part of the seventeenth century Mughal rulers granted many Muslim scholars in the provinces of Awadh and Allahabad stipends and land revenues (madad-i macash ) for their support. Mosques, seminaries. and Sufi centers proliferated, and great scholars and teachers arose. "Students went in droves from town to town and were everywhere received with helpful sympathy."[16]
The writer, Bilgrami, asserted that when Burhanu'l-Mulk of Nishapur became the governor of Awadh and much of Allahabad under Muhammad Shah, he confiscated the stipends and land grants of both the old established and the parvenu families. The Muslim notables grew anxious about their affairs, financial worries compelling many students to forsake the classroom for full-time employment. The decline in learning and in the state subvention of education continued under Burhanu'l-Mulk's successors, who extended the confiscations to all of Allahabad, ruining many madrasahs, or Muslim institutions of higher learning. Another historian described Burhanu'l-Mulk's 1728 resumption of land grants supporting old Sunni families and institutions in the southern district of Jaunpur.[17] Major exceptions to the Nishapuri family's policy of disendowing Muslim schools included Salon and Lucknow's Farangi Mahall, which received their revenues from Mughal grants throughout this period.[18] Such cities as Allahabad, Lucknow, and Banaras also continued to possess important schools.
Max Weber, Economy and Sociely 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles Univ of California Press, 1978): 1181-83
Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami, Ma'athir al-kiram , vol. 1 (Agra: Matbac-i Mufid-i ‘Amm, 1910). 221-22 Habib estimated that in Akbar's rime the revenue-flee grants to scholars and Islamic officials were concentrated especially m Delhi, Allahabad, Awadh, and Agra, though the grants made up a small proportion of total land revenues m each province (front 5 4 to 3.9 percent) (Habib, Agrarian System , pp. 313-14)
Khayru'd-Din Muhammad Ilahabadi, "Tadhkirat al-‘ulama'," Society Coil, Persian MS 203, foll 3a-5a, Asiatic Society Lib., Calcutta. For the historical background of Jaunpur, see Mian Muhammad Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur. A Political and Cultural History (Karachi Univ. of Karachi Press, 1972) For occasional Mughal resumption of revenue-free grants, see Habib. Agrarian System , pp 310-11, 314-16
See, for Salon, Board of Revenue, Oudh General File 1557, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow, and for Farangi Mahall, Muhammad Riza Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani-yi dars-i Nizami (Lucknow: Nami Press, 1973). pp. 176-78
The Nishapuris' policy of establishing their regional control by calling in land grants to Sunni educational and mystical institutions that had become hereditary hurt the Muslim notables and medium landholders, who relied on these institutions for the training necessary to manage their estates, practice their religion, and celebrate their culture. Yet, as was noted, some prominent Muslim schools survived, chief among them the Farangi Mahall.
The school earned the sobriquet of the "Europeans' Mansion" among the inhabitants of Lucknow's chowk bazaar area because Dutch merchants first built it. In 1692 a group of landholders from his own village murdered Mulla Qutbu'd-Din Sihalavi, a Sunni religious scholar of Sihala near Lucknow, in a dispute over land and the mulla's influence at the Mughal court. In compensation, the Mughal emperor Awrangzib bestowed the Farangi Mahall on the martyr's orphans. One of the younger sons, Nizamu'd-Din Ahmad, a major Sunni scholar, taught with his relatives at home and received land grants and stipends from Mughal emperors. Partially because the nawabs put pressure on the school to train bureaucrats, many of them not Sunni, the students might be Shi‘is or even Hindus, though the teachers, as descendants and disciples of Mulla Qutbu'd-Din, adhered to Hanafi Sunnism. The method of teaching perfected by Mulla Nizamu'd-Din, emphasizing the rational sciences, wore a nonsectarian aspect. Mathematics and Avicennian metaphysics could, after all, be studied with profit by persons from all backgrounds.[19]
The works most often used in the Nizami method are analyzed in table 1. Most of the works or commentaries and glosses used in the Nizami method were written in Iran between A.D. 1200 and 1600. Also represented were some seventeenth-century north Indian figures.[20] This method, concentrating on thought rather than on rote learning, evoked admiration for the speed with which it allowed a student to complete the course of study and for its ability to train Muslim ulama, judges, and administrators to think clearly and to derive solutions to problems.[21] The highly rationalist emphasis of the study list reflects the seminary's latent function of producing bureaucrats for land-
Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani , pp 26, 67, 171-76, 264-65, Azad Bilgrami, Ma'athir 1 209-10; cf. Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami, Subhat al-marjan (Bombay Malik al-Kitab, 1303/ 1885-86), p. 76; for the scholarly traditions of Farangi Mahall, see Francis Robinson, "The ‘Ulama' of Farangi Mahall and Their Adab, " in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley and Los Angeles. Univ. of California Press, 1984), pp. 152-83
Although there was no set syllabus, works typically used are given in M Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London: George Alien & Unwin, 1967). pp. 407-8 They include books by such medieval Iranian scholars as Nasiru'd-Din Tusi, Athiru'd-Din Abhari, ‘Ali al-Jurjani, Sacdu'd-Din Taftazani, Bihari, Baha'u'd-Din ‘Amili, and Sadru'd-Din Shirazi, and by such Indian Muslims as Muhibbu'llah Bihari and Mahmud Jaunpuri
Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani , pp. 259-63.
|
Table 1 |
|
|
Subject |
Number of Works |
|
Logic |
5 |
|
Mathematics |
5 |
|
Dialectical Theology |
4 |
|
Philosophy |
3 |
|
Arabic Rhetoric |
2 |
|
Islamic Jurisprudence |
2 |
|
Qur'an Commentary |
2 |
|
Principles of Jurisprudence |
1 |
|
The Prophet's Oral Traditions |
1 |
revenue administration. The middle landholders, Shaykh and Sayyid families based in the small towns of North India, wanted some of their sons to go into government service. As nawabi rule grew more regionally centered and more autonomous from Delhi, and as the province's revenues increased, more opportunities arose for government service locally. Farangi Mahall produced a rationalist culture useful to the Muslim and Islamized Hindu notable and service classes who administered their own estates or served in the bureaucratic arm of the prebendal state, and its method spread widely in India.
The first phase of Awadh state formation saw the Mughal appointment of an Iranian Shi‘i governor, who used Mughal troops to assert military power in the region and made the province a personal power base from which he refused to allow the Mughal center to dislodge him. He co-opted local big landed elites by drawing them into revenue administration. He released revenue to his government by resuming on a large scale revenue-free grants of land made by Mughal rulers to Sunni scholarly and mystical families, making a frontal assault on the privileges of the Sunni clerical notables. This policy in some respects recalls that of the Safavids. Burhanu'l-Mulk pursued it, however, not primarily for religious purposes, but for financial and administrative ones. He freed up alienated land for distribution as patronage, and for an enlarged tax base. His Shi‘i faith, however, probably made him less loathe to institute such changes, which were damaging to Sunni institutions. The policy was not a blanket one, as the survival of Farangi Mahall and other Sunni-staffed institutions attests, nor is there evidence of Burhanu'l-Mulk's having promoted Shi‘i schools in the stead of the Sunni ones.
Patrimonial Bureaucracy versus Tribal Conquest
Could the Nishapuris become something other than mere foreign governors appointed over Awadh temporarily from the Mughal center? To do so would require them to establish their legitimacy among regional Sunni and Hindu elites, to build their own bureaucracy and military, and to meet the outside challenge of Maratha Hindu warriors, of pastoral invaders from Afghanistan, and of Bangash and Ruhilah Afghan tribespeople settled in the upper Doab.
Burhanu'l-Mulk paid Nadir Shah Rs. 20 million to assure the succession to Awadh's governorship for his nephew, Safdar Jang. That one family could retain control over a Mughal subah, or province, for two successive generations, rare during the zenith of the Mughals' agrarian bureaucracy, shows the decline of the central government. Earlier, Mughal emperors rotated provincial governors at will, preventing them from building up a regional power base, and although local bureaucracies and elites existed, the center retained control over decisions involving revenues· Hereditary Nishapuri rule in Awadh ultimately allowed the family to become independent of the Mughals altogether.
Safdar Jang established his power base by fighting and co-opting the Rajputs in Awadh from 1739 to 1741. He acquired an armed force loyal to himself by hiring six or seven thousand Shi‘i Qizilbash cavalrymen away from Nadir Shah's army before the latter withdrew from India.[22] In Lucknow, he cultivated the local elite, so trusting the Farangi Mahall that he required even Shi‘is to present a diploma from it before he would hire them in the bureaucracy. He appointed members of the Farangi-Mahalli family to judicial posts.[23] Leaders of the Shaykhzadahs in the capital, such as Muci zzu'd-Din Khan and Qutbu'd-Din Muhammad Khan, became Shi‘is in order to cement their relations with the nawab.
The Mughal emperor called Awadh's nawab to Delhi in 1743, promoting him the following year and adding to his responsibilities the governorship of Kashmir. Many Shi‘is from Kashmir joined his military, affecting Persian language and dress but receiving less pay than the Qizilbash horsemen. In February 1745 Safdar Jang showed his mettle when he and his forces accompanied Muhammad Shah against tile Ruhilah Afghan ‘Ali Muhammad Khan, whose growing power north of Awadh and east of Delhi posed a threat to both. The Ruhilahs, Sunni Puhktun tribespeople, emigrated from the mountain fastnesses around Peshawar down into the lush Gangetic plain
Naqavi, ‘Imad , pp 30-32, Muhammad Fayzbakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizabad, Being a Translation of the Tank Farahbakhsh , trans. William Hoey, 2 vols. (Allahabad: North-West Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1888-89), 2:246-47; Srivastava, First Two Nawabs , pp. 91-101
B. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), p. 30; Rahman ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama-yi Hind (Lucknow Naval Kishor, 1914), pp. 219-20.
throughout the medieval period. Safdar Jang's impressive show of force intimidated the Ruhilah, who came to terms with the emperor. His legitimacy as the emperor's standard-bearer also helped him: the ulama of North India gave legal rulings in favor of the emperor's cause, influencing some Ruhilahs to desert their leader.[24]
The year 1748 gave India a new Mughal emperor, Ahmad Shah Timuri, and a new chief minister, Safdar Jang. In the first years of his ministry he struggled against the Afghani Bangash clans settled in the Doab, who, in the summer and fall of 1750, occupied Awadh.[25] The martial Bangash, Pukhtuns like the Ruhilahs, had also emigrated into village North India from largely pastoral Afghanistan. Safdar Jang put together a new political confederation against the Bangash tribes, receiving unexpected support in this campaign from Awadh's urban Sunni Shaykhzadahs, who conducted a remarkable citizens' revolution against the invading tribesmen. The Bangash Afghans who occupied the important Awadh town of Bilgram treated its notables roughly and sacked the town when the locals retaliated by wounding some Afghans. In the streets and quarters, people prepared to defend themselves. In Lucknow, fearful Iranians stored their wealth with Shaykhzadah leader Mucizzu'd-Din Khan, and the haughtiness of the new conquerors and the harshness of their exactions provoked sanguinary riots between the Afghans and the Shaykhzadahs. After a night of rioting in one quarter of the city, seven hundred Afghans assembled against four hundred Shaykhzadahs, the citizens of Lucknow routing the Bangash men and suffering a third fewer casualties.
The Shaykhzadah leader Mucizzu'd-Din Khan, a Shi‘i with strong ties to the Iranians and a man particularly close to Safdar Jang, called a conference of notables, raising an army of live to six thousand men and forcing the Afghans to withdraw. Mucizzu'd-Din Khan then wrote his clansmen in other large towns, detailing the incident and warning of possible Bangash reprisals. In Lucknow and Hardoi districts the "republican" influence of the many large towns historically diluted landed power, leading to a scarcity of very large landlords and a proliferation of small holdings.[26] The urban-based Shaykhzadah middle landholders expelled the Afghans and formed an army to fight for Safdar Jang's restoration.
Once again, the ulama rallied to the imperial forces. Maliku'l-‘Ulama' gave a ruling in favor of the emperor at Safdar Jang's behest. In Sandilah the Shi‘i logician Mawlavi Hamdu'llah, although he did not join the militia,
Tabataba'i, Siyar 2.16-23, Murtaza Husayn Bilgrami, Hadiqat al-aqalim (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1879), pp 140-41; Naqavi, ‘Imad , pp. 45-50, Srivastava, First Two Nawabs , pp. 102-25.
Tabataba'i, Siyar 2:23-24, 30-34; M. H. Bilgrami, Hadiqat al-aqalim , pp. 135-36; Srivastava, First Two Nawabs , pp. 126-65.
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh , 3 vols. (Lucknow: Oudh Government Press, 1877), 2:40. In the nineteenth century, five of Awadh's most populous towns were m Hardoi.
publicly espoused the nawab-vizier's cause, under the banner of which the town's newly militant citizenry gradually rid it of Afghans. The same pattern recurred in Bilgram and Kakori. Safdar Jang completed the task of expelling and overcoming the Bangash forces by forming an alliance with the Hindu Marathas and jointly subduing North India.[27]
The conflict at one level centered on whether Awadh would be incorporated into a patriarchal state presided over by Bangash clansmen or would continue to evolve as a semiautonomous satrapy with a patrimonial-bureaucratic administration inherited from the Mughal Empire. The Sunni middle landholders based in small towns chose the Shi‘i Safdar Jang over the Sunni Bangash tribesmen because his rule offered more continuity of political culture and revenue structure than did that of the coarse new conquerors. However new and alien the development of nawabi Shi‘i rule in Lucknow may appear against the backdrop of Mughal traditions of tight Sunni rule from the center, the nawabs were perceived to participate in Mughal legitimacy as the appointees of the emperor. The first minister, though victorious, squandered his remaining years in office on a fruitless power struggle in Delhi, which he lost to the Turanian forces.
The second phase of Awadh state formation saw the further definition of state boundaries through conflict with outside forces. The Awadh state developed its own, distinctively Shi‘i-tinged military. Further political bonding of local Sunni political elites to the ruling Nishapuri house occurred through an independent social movement of Muslim townsmen to defend Nishapuri Awadh from extraregional military attackers. The struggles with the Ban-gash demonstrated to the Nishapuri family that they could successfully defend a regional, hereditary power base with the aid of their Qizilbash Shi‘i cavalry and Muslim and Hindu troops, and that a dependable coalition against outsiders could be built with local elites, such as the Shaykhzadahs. The destructive struggles in the Mughal capital, along with growing Durrani Afghan and Maratha challenges, cast doubt on the value of devoting so much time to the affairs of the center. Nishapuri. Awadh began to be born.
State Formation and Sunni-Shi‘i Tension
In the third stage of Awadh state formation, the intervention of a new outside power, the British East India Company, proved decisive. Military conflict with the Europeans further demarcated Awadh's borders to the south and east, and military defeat at the hands of the EIC imposed limitations on the Awadh military that led both to internal decentralization and to external dependence on the alliance with the British. The process of subordinating Sunni
Naqavi, ‘Imad , pp. 50-52, 58-60, 64; Tabataba'i, Siyar 2:34-37; Srivastava, First Two Nawabs , 165-95.
religious institutions to Shi‘i priorities continued, witnessed especially in conflict between the regional court and the Farangi Mahall. Finally, nawabi patronage began subventing Shi‘i scholars and institutions.
Shujacu'd-Dawlah, Safdar Jang's eldest son and deputy governor of Awadh in Lucknow, succeeded his father as nawab in 1754. In the first half of his reign he joined with Ahmad Shah Durrani of Afghanistan in defeating the Marathas, became Mughal chief minister in his own right, added the province of Allahabad to his power base, and attempted to expel the British from Bengal. In the last fateful endeavor he failed, and from that defeat in 1764 he showed increasing willingness to make an autonomous Awadh his power base, forsaking any dream of reinvigorating the Mughal Empire in Delhi. The British imposed restrictions on the size of his military that made him increasingly dependent upon them for Awadh's security, and required from him payments of tribute that eventually mortgaged his realm to them.[28]
From 1766 Shujacu'd-Dawlah changed his provincial capital from Lucknow to nearby Faizabad and instituted an ambitious building program, with his engineers and workers completing many of these projects within two years. The establishment of a provincial court of great wealth at Faizabad constituted a major cultural and social event. Artisans and scholars flocked there from all over India, its bazaars attracting numerous long-distance traders from Iran, central Asia, China, and Europe. With the peasant-generated tax monies of Awadh and Allahabad flowing into the city, its tax-farming notables and highly paid administrators helped support masses of skilled workers and retailers, who provided them with luxury goods. The new capital grew with remarkable rapidity during the last nine years of the nawab's life.[29]
The nawab's attack in 1774 in concert with the British on the neighboring Afghan Ruhilah ruler Hafiz Rahmat Khan defanged a potential military threat to the north, filled state coffers with booty, and added to the territory under his control.[30] Shujacu'd-Dawlah's governorship, from 1754 to 1775, marked a watershed in the emergence of a semiautonomous, Shi‘i-ruled state in Awadh and Allahabad. Sunni religious leaders became less secure. Although Shi‘i scholarship and institutions showed no efflorescence in the first half of the reign, in the Faizabad period substantial patronage became available to scholars belonging to the ruler's branch of Islam.
The French traveler Laureston found Bengal and North India remarkably free of sectarian rancor in the 1750s. He wrote:
For a summary and analysis of the political history of these years, see A. L. Srivastava, Shuja-ud-Daulah , 2 vols. (Agra: Shiva Lal Agarvala and Co, rev ed 1961), and Barnett, North India , chaps 2, 3.
Fayzbakhsh, Tarikh-i farahbakhsh , Hoey trans., 2:3-9; Srivastava, Shuja-ud-Daulah 2:168-69.
Naqavi, ‘Imad , pp. 114-18; Tabataba'i, Siyar 2:90-93: Fayzbakhsh, Tarikh-i farahbakhsh , Hoey trans., 2:10-11, Srivastava, Shuja-ud-Daulah 2 248-54.
Muslims are enthusiastic about their religion, but here the sectarian followers of ‘Umar and ‘Ali never dispute among themselves for the purpose of establishing which was the true successor to the caliphate. There are few mosques, even fewer mullas, and the nobles, although they are punctual enough in performing their own devotions, hardly ever go to the mosques.[31]
This idyllic portrait may have been accurate in the 1750s, but Sunni-Shi‘i disputes increased as the Awadh state took on a Shi‘i aspect.
Though Farangi Mahall retained its intellectual leadership, the school's relationship with the government sometimes grew troubled. After Mulla Nizamu'd-Din's passing in 1748, his young son ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali gradually asserted himself as head of the institution. About ten years later, Sunni-Shi‘i tensions in Lucknow put his life in danger. With a Shi‘i potentate ruling the province from Lucknow, ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali felt that he could expect no governmental support against the militant partisans of Imam ‘Ali, and when the Sunni Ruhilah chief of nearby Shahjahanpur, Hafiz Rahmat Khan, offered him patronage, he accepted it.[32]
The challenge of rising Shi‘i militancy in the old Sunni stronghold of Lucknow, coupled with the political dominance of a Shi‘i ruling house, also bedeviled the next head of the school, Mulla Hasan Farangi-Mahalli. At the height of his eminence in Lucknow, Shi‘i-Sunni tensions again rose, two students being killed in rioting sometime after 1766. Mulla Hasan led a delegation of teachers to the new capital, Faizabad, where they protested to Nawab Shujacu'd-Dawlah the government's failure to stop the violence. When the delegation proved unsuccessful, Mulla Hasan decided to join Mulla ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali in Shahjahanpur rather than continue to risk his life in Lucknow.[33]
During Shujacu'd-Dawlah's rule Sunni-Shi‘i clashes ostracized two successive leaders of the major Sunni-staffed institution of learning in his dominions. In both cases the government sided, at least tacitly, with the Shi‘is. Although neither of these major Sunni ulama could be assured of their own lives and property under Shujacu'd-Dawlah, most Farangi-Mahallis remained in Lucknow, future leaders accommodating themselves better to an Imami government.
Barnett has outlined the major criteria of regional autonomy in
Jean Law de Laureston, Mémoire sur quelques affaires de l'empire mogol, 1756-1761 (Paris: Edouard Champion and Emile Larose, 1913), p. 272 My translation.
Valiyu'llah Farangi-Mahalli, Al-Aghsan al-arbacah li'sh-shajarah at-tayyibah (Lucknow Matbac-i Karnamah, 1881), pp 121-26, Rahman ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama-yi Hind , pp 122-23, Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani , pp 103-25, M Shafic, "Bahr al-‘Ulum," EI.,
V Farangi-Mahalli, Al-Aghsan , pp. 8-9, 13, Qiyamu'd-Din Muhammad ‘Abdu'l-Bari Farangi-Mahalli, Athar al-awwal min ‘ulama' Faranji Mahall (Lucknow: Matbac-i Mujtaba'i, 1321/1903-4), pp. 10-11, 24-25, 27, Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani , pp 132-34, Ghulam Husayn Khan-i Zaman, Gulzar-i Asafiyyah (Hyderabad. Muhammadi Press, 1260/1844), p 418; ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama-yi Hind , p 218. Bahru'l-‘Ulum's thought might be considered an example of neo-orthodox Sufism, see Arnold Green, The Tunisian Ulama, 1873-1915 Social Structure and Response to Ideological Currents (Leiden. E.J Brill, 1978), pp 57-62.
eighteenth-century India.[34] Tile governor acquired the ability to appoint his own revenue officials and successors to the governorship; governors seldom remitted revenues to the center and began to conduct independent diplomatic activity. Then regional ruling families established provincial courts with a distinctive architecture. Finally, coins were minted in the name of the local ruler, and the emperor's name was deleted from the sermon (khutbah ) at the Friday congregational prayers. In Awadh, all but the last two criteria for independence had been met by 1775.
Shujacu'd-Dawlah as regional governor in Awadh from 1754 to 1775 remitted very little revenue to the imperial center. A combination of adverse economic conditions and destructive Iranian, Afghan, and Maratha incursions had enervated the power of Delhi. Until his death in 1775 Shujacu'd-Dawlah "still minted coins and had the Khutbah read in the Emperor's name for the sake of protocol, but for all practical purposes he was an independent prince."[35] A further declaration of independence could only come when Friday prayers serrnons were read in the name of the Nishapuris; but that required the emergence of a Shi‘i ulama corps loyal to this regional dynasty.
The Beginnings of Shi‘i Scholarship in Awadh
Shi‘i rule in Awadh necessitated the development of a class of Shi‘i religious experts. Yet, surprisingly, this development took place very slowly. Until the 1780s most Shi‘i scholars in Awadh fell into two categories. They were middle landholding Sayyids in the lineage centers or they served as poets, physicians, or tutors at regional courts. In both cases they resembled gentlemen scholars more than professional clergy. Let us examine the pressures that created a trained, specialized corps of ulama receiving patronage from Awadh's Shi‘i ruling group.
Until 1766, when Nawab Shujacu'd-Dawlah settled down to rule Awadh and Allahabad from Faizabad, he made little patronage available to Shi‘i scholars. Imamis pursued their scholarship on an informal basis, lacking any major institution comparable to Farangi Mahall. Some Shi‘i scholars, such as Mawlavi Sayyid ‘Ata' Husayn Zangipuri, sought and received cash gifts and land grants from Mughal ruler Muhammad Shah, but the increasing confusion at the Mughal center made this form of wealth less and less stable.[36] Scholars functioned as independent agents, taking advantage of political decentralization in North India to find patronage with local magnates in Awadh, in Bengal, or even in Hindu-ruled Banaras.
Barnett, North India Between Empires , pp. 21-22.
Ibid, p. 95
Sayyid Muhammad Husavn Nauganavi, Tazkirah-'i be-baha fi tarikh al-‘ulama' (Delhi Jayyid Barqi Press, n d), p. 212
The Hindu raja of Banaras gave patronage to the greatest Shi‘i scholar in North India in this period, Shaykh Muhammad ‘Ali "Hazin" Gilani (1692-1766). He was given a land grant and cash gifts. For instance, when Jit Singh replaced his father, Balwant Singh, as ruler, he gave Hazin 40,000 ashrafis.[37] Hazin, an Iranian poet and scholar from an elite family in Isfahan, fled Iran for India in 1734 after becoming embroiled in an insurrection against Nadir's governor of Lar province.
Hazin lived in Multan, Lahore, and Delhi. After 1739 he grudgingly reconciled himself to remaining in Delhi as a teacher, but the ridicule he heaped on India and Indians earned him so many enemies in the Mughal capital that he headed southeast toward Bengal in 1748. He arrived in Banaras in 1750, settling there for the last sixteen years of his life and building two mosques and a tomb for himself. Although Hazin accepted the patronage and land grant of a petty ruler, such as Raja Balwant Singh, he earlier refused to pay court to the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah and even refused the latter's offer of high office. His haughtiness as an upper-class Iranian caused him to live out his life in a predominantly Hindu provincial city. Still, elite Hindus there cultivated Persian, and the surrounding districts boasted a relatively large Shi‘i population, which provided him with some religious students in his last years.[38]
Hazin's thought and his role in society were both important for the north Indian Shi‘i tradition. Unlike most Shi‘is in Awadh and Allahabad, he belonged to the Usuli school, believing that a religious scholar had the right to make independent judgments in law based on his own reasoning (ijtihad ). Some of his rulings on religious issues made while in India formed the basis of questions submitted by the faithful to mujtahids even in the nineteenth century. Deeply interested in science and philosophy, he also wrote commentaries on the works of mystical thinkers. In India he devoted the most of his efforts to writing and teaching Persian poetry, without, however, giving up religious subjects. Hazin transported into one of Shujacu'd-Dawlah's cities the intellectual ambience of late Safavid court culture.[39]
Since Banaras constituted part of the nawab's dominions, Hazin lived ultimately under a Shi‘i ruler, Nawab Safdar Jang, who showed him respect.
Ghulam Husayn Khan, "Balwand-namah," ed Subhan ‘Ali Khan, Persian MS 2210, pp 154-55, Nat'l Archives of India, New Delhi
Muhammad ‘Ali Hazin Gilani, The Life of Sheik Mohammed Ali Hazin Written by Himself , trans F C. Belfour (London. Oriental Translation Fund, 1830), pp. 231-36, 255-63, 292-301, Sarfaraz Khan Khatak, Shaikh Muhammad Alt Hazin His Life. Times, and Works (Lahore: Sh Mohammad Ashraf, 1944), pp 82-87, 101, 129-31
Hazin, Life , pp 58-59, 78; as a child he saw on several occasions Muhammad Baqir Majlisi in Isfahan. See also Muhammad ‘Ali Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama' fi tarajim al-‘ulama' (Lucknow: Matbac-i Jacfari, 1302/1884-85), pp. 286-93; his "Fath as-subul fi al-kalam" (Opening Paths m Dialectical Theology) is noticed in Sayyid Icjaz Husayn Kinturi, Kashf al-hujub wa'l-astar can al-kutub wa'l-asfar , ed. Muhammad Hidayat Husayn (Calcutta. Asiatic Society, 1330/1912), p. 397.
When in 1756 Shujacu'd-Dawlah came to Banaras to put down the rebellious Raja Balwant Singh, the nawab conferred with Hazin. The poet-mujtahid urged him to come to terms with the raja, and political events led Shujacu'd-Dawlah to follow this advice.[40] In 1764 Shujacu'd-Dawlah and Shah ‘Alam II visited Hazin in Banaras before their close defeat by the British at the Battle of Baksar. The great Shi‘i thinker reportedly gave them the unwelcome advice that they should not attempt to fight the British, but if they chose to do so, they should depend on their cavalry. On that occasion, Hazin only haft-bowed to Shujacu'd-Dawlah, saying that a full bow is reserved for kings and that escorting is reserved for mujtahids and the ulama. This demonstration of the pride of a Shi‘i mujtahid before temporal authority surprised and incensed the nawab-vizier.[41]
Hazin, though somewhat reclusive in Banaras, did give classes and hold discussions with other Shi‘i scholars.[42] One of his students, Mulla ‘Uyuz, taught for a while in Banaras, eschewing glosses and supercommentaries in favor of a direct encounter with his sources.[43] A mystic and an ascetic, he was part of a generation of Shi‘i scholars in transition from Sufi ideals of the learned man to more scriptural and rational-legal role models.
Whereas some Shi‘i ulama, such as Hazin, sought independence in their private pursuits, others eagerly entered public life. One entered the ranks of the ulama (a status group, not an economic class) by virtue of learning, though a certain amount of property generally served as a prerequisite for such learning. Few ulama from an artisan or laboring-class background are mentioned in the sources for this period. But although most ulama derived from middle landholding families, they could also come from the very upper ranks of the prebendal-feudal notables. Those recognized as ulama from the upper class pursued knowledge as an avocation, in addition to a political career. Sons of middle landholders more often made a living from a purely religious calling.
Tafazzul Husayn Khan Kashmiri (d. 1800) strikingly exemplified the upper class Shi‘i gentleman scholar in eighteenth-century India.[44] His grand-
Ghulam Husayn Khan, "Balwand-namah," pp. 125-26
Khayru'd-Din Muhammad Ilahabadi, "Tuhfah-'i tazah," Persian MS 483, foll. 40a-b, India Office Lib. and Records, London: Khatak, Hazin , p. 132, Syed Hasan Askari, "The Political Significance of Hazin's Career in Eastern India," Bengal Past and Present 63 (1943): 1-10
Muhammad Mihdi Lakhnavi Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama' takmilah , 2 vols. (Qumm. Maktabat-i Basirati, 1397/1977), 2:4-5; ‘Abdu'l-Latif Shushtari, "Tuhfat al-calam," Persian MS Add 23, 533, foll 162a-b, British Lib., London Hazin's students in literature are given in Khatak, Hazin , pp 70-75
M. M Kashmiri, Nujum T 1:17-21, 31-33.
For details of his scholarly biography and his family, see Naqavi, ‘Imad , pp 155-57: M A Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama' , pp. 323-28, Sayyid ‘Abbas Ardistani, "Al-hisn al-matin fi ahwal al-wuzara' wa's-salatin," 2 vols, Arabic MSS 235a-b, 1:79-78, Nat'l Archives of India, New Delhi, ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama-yi Hind , pp. 36-37: Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani , pp 126-27. Ardistani's chronicle of Awadh in Arabic, probably written late in the 1850s, has not been used before by modern historians. Ardistani, an administrator in the 1840s, drew on his grandfather's memoirs, and so his chronicle is useful for the entire range of the history of Nishapuri Awadh.
father, Karamu'llah Khan, served the Mughal Empire, receiving Rs. 300,000 from a huge land grant (jagir ). Tafazzul Husayn, born while his father was stationed in Sialkot, moved with his family at age thirteen or fourteen to Lahore and then to Delhi. He studied rational sciences by the Nizami method in the capital. When his family settled in Lucknow, Kashmiri had an opportunity to study at Farangi Mahall itself, working with Mulla Hasan (later head of the school). He asked Mulla Hasan so many difficult questions that the Farangi-Mahalli finally hurled his book to the ground in exasperation and expelled Kashmiri from his classroom. Tafazzul Husayn then studied on his own, mastering difficult philosophical works by Avicenna in Arabic. He embraced Shi‘ism, rounding out his education by attending the lectures of Shaykh Muhammad ‘Ali Hazin in Banaras, making contact with the learned traditions of late Safavid Isfahan.
He used his family's powerful connections to gain an audience with Nawab Shujacu'd-Dawlah, who appointed him as mentor and tutor (ataliq ) of his second son, Sacadat ‘Ali Khan. Such a position served as a means of political advancement for an upper-class intellectual. Kashmiri accompanied Sacadat ‘Ali to Allahabad in 1769, where the young noble was vice-minister to Shah ‘Alam II. There he engaged in disputes on logic with the Shi‘i Mawlavi Ghulam Husayn Dakani Ilahabadi. The two did not meet, but sent their advanced students with questions and answers. These included Tafazzul Husayn's third cousin, Salamu'llah Khan, and Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi. The debates by proxy demonstrate the sorts of intellectual networks that bound together Shi‘i ulama-teachers with thinkers holding high government office.
Tafazzul Husayn Khan's links with the nawabi court gave him influence with his larger family. Not only did his own household (including the servants) embrace Shi‘ism, so that he almost ceased to associate with Sunnis at all, but his cousins on his father's side of the family accepted Shi‘ism. Tafazzul Husayn Khan procured offices for Shi‘i relatives, and some of his relatives married into older Shi‘i ulama and notable families. The Kashmiri service family employed Shi‘ism, Islamic learning, and notable status to penetrate the nawabi administrative structure and to acquire patronage from the new ruling class.
Tafazzul Husayn Khan's career was checkered. He led an abortive assassination plot against Asafu'd-Dawlah on behalf of Sacadat ‘Ali, and lived many years in exile, serving later on as Awadh's envoy in Calcutta. In 1797 the British forced him on Asafu'd-Dawlah as first minister, though the public perception of him as the Europeans' candidate impaired his effectiveness.
Diagram 1
The Kashmiri Service Family and Adoption of
Shi‘ism
After the short-lived anti-British revolt of Asafu'd-Dawlah's successor Vazir ‘Ali in 1798, during which Tafazzul took a pro-British stance, the East India Company put Kashmiri's erstwhile pupil Sacadat ‘Ali Khan into power as nawab. The new ruler sent Tafazzul Husayn Khan back to Calcutta as the Awadh envoy, but Kashmiri soon died, in 1800.[45]
During his twenty years in Calcutta, Kashmiri learned fluent English and studied Latin so as to be able to read European scientific works. He translated books on the new European mathematics and physics, writing also on Sunni and Shi‘i hadiths and Islamic philosophy. He taught mathematics in the morning to students in Calcutta, then visited English friends until noon. In the afternoon he taught Imami law, and after supper expounded Hanafi law. In the evenings he read philosophy alone. A pious notable, a man of wealth and taste, he had but one vice, from a strict Shi‘i point of view: his love of music.[46]
Hazin, the displaced poet-mujtahid, and Tafazzul Husayn Khan, the scholar-diplomat, could hardly be considered professional Shi‘i clerics. They lived at a time when Imami Shi‘i institutions in North India barely existed, when a clerical career in itself made little sense for anyone interested in wealth, prestige, or power. Yet the time when court poets and gentlemen scholars could dominate Shi‘i intellectual life was passing. New religious elites were called into being by the rise of the Shi‘i court in Awadh.
The Physicians of Faizabad
The first phases of Shi‘i state formation in Awadh witnessed the establishment of a Shi‘i ruling group at the top of the social hierarchy, the development of a Shi‘i wing in the military, and the subordination of the old Sunni clerical and mystical families through intimidation or resumption of revenue-free land grants. From 1766 a second process began, the gradual formation of a Shi‘i religious class through notable-class patronage. A struggle commenced over the shape of the religious class, and over the control of religious resources. Traditional Shi‘i gentlemen scholars, used to coexisting with Sunnis and Hindus, were ranged against a growing class of professional Shi‘i clerics who emphasized social closure and Shi‘i communal identity.
Within Shujacu'd-Dawlah's new capital, Faizabad, a cabal of physicians trained in Avicennian medicine and the rational sciences at first established a
Abu Talib Isfahani, History of Asafu'd Dawlah Nawab Wazir of Oudh Being a translation of Tafzihu'l Ghafilin , trans W Hoey (Lucknow. Pustak Kendra, repr. 1971), pp. 15-18; Resident to Sacadat ‘Ali Khan, 26 July 1777, Foreign Department, Secret Consultations [FDSC], 8 September 1777, no. M, Nat'l Archives of India, New Delhi; Harold Afaq Qureshi, "Nawab Wazir ‘Ali Khan: Life and Career (1780-1817)" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Lucknow, 1981), p. 191.
M. A Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama' , pp 324-25 (apparently the author did not consider conspiracy to assassinate the ruler a vice); Purnendu Basu, Oudh and the East India Company, 1785-1801 (Lucknow: Maxwell Co., 1943), pp. 22-24.
virtual monopoly over intellectual pursuits within the new capital. Soon after the nawab returned from his defeat at Baksar and took up residence in Faizabad, five religious-minded physicians from Delhi followed him there and were employed by the nawab and his wife, Bahu Begam, at high salaries. Among themselves, they evinced much factionalism and competition, but they closed ranks against outside physicians or scholars.
In the absence of any formal ecclesiastical Structures in the Shi‘i community of North India, literati with a secular training stepped into roles played by ulama in Safavid Iran. They strove to maintain control over both medical and pastoral functions, and over the vast sums of money available to those who claimed to provide both spiritual and physical health.[47] Hakim Muhammad Mucalij Khan. the leader of the physicians, took charge of distributing charity to poor Sayyids, receiving donations for that purpose from the growing number of Shi‘i notables in Faizabad. Some critics charged him with embezzling substantial amounts of this charity. The number and financial resources of the medical doctors at court grew impressive; on his deathbed the nawab was attended by thirty physicians, whose combined salaries equaled Rs. 100,000 per year.[48] A contemporary manuscript source mentions ten important medical doctors at Shujacu'd-Dawlah's court.[49] These ten Shi‘i Sayyids and notables averaged Rs. 5,600 per year in stipends, exclusive of the substantial fees and gratuities they controlled. The pious physicians, some from Iranian or Iraqi ulama backgrounds, were something more than the elders of a nonconformist sect, yet far less than a professional ministry.
Shi‘i ulama of the traditional sort in Faizabad were subordinate to Mucalij Khan's clique of physicians. They had no control over Islamic charitable institutions, nor did Faizabad's Shi‘is have any public mosques or communal prayers, so that preachers lacked the opportunity to address large crowds. In both respects, Faizabad differed radically from Iran and Iraq. The major gatherings for Shi‘is, the meetings held to commemorate the martyrdoms of the Imams, were dominated by eulogizers, who specialized in chanting techniques, rather than by the scholars of Islam, who often frowned on the folk practices involved in such assemblies.[50]
Muhammad Fayzbakhsh, "Tarikh-i farahbakhsh," ‘Abdus Salam Coll., Persian MS 486/7, foll 243b-244a, Aligarh Muslim Univ, Aligarh; trans. William Hoey, Memoirs of Delhi, and Faizabad , 2 vols. (Allahabad Government Press, 1888-89), 2:41-42. The English translation will hereafter be cued unless a philological issue requires reference to the Persian text.
Harcharan Das, "Chahar gulzar-i shujaci," Persian MS Or. 1732, fol. 217a, British Lib., London.
Sultan ‘Ali Husayni Safavi, "Macdan as-sacadah," Soc. Coll., Persian MS 181, foll. 264b-268b, Asiatic Soc. Lib., Calcutta.
"A'inah-i haqq-nama," Rijal Shi‘ah, Persian MS 1, fol. 79a, Nasiriyyah Lib., Lucknow This source, written m shoot 1816 in Lucknow by an anonymous disciple of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, is a prime source, not only for the latter's biography, but for the history of Imami Shi ism in general in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it has not before been mined for its extensive information on this period
The grants by Shi‘i notables served to attract increasing numbers of Imami ulama to Awadh's major cities. The arrival on the Awadh scene of numbers of trained experts in Shi‘i law with a scripturalist outlook challenged the reign of the physicians and Sufi pirs in the religious realm. As the nawab's court grew more autonomous, the ruling Nishapuri family favored an assertion of specifically Shi‘i law and ritual in order to accent its peculiar local values and authority. The ulama, rather than physicians or Sufis, could best articulate this statement.
The growing friction between these intellectual groups resulted in a confrontation in Faizabad in 1779, which led to a riot. The most important of the Shi‘i ulama in that city at the time, Mawlavi Muhammad Munir, had recently arrived from the Middle East. The eunuch Javahir ‘Ali Khan, the powerful manager of Bahu Begam's estates, gave the mawlavi a stipend for his support. Mulla ‘Abdu'l-Majid, an Iranian scholar who had previously served as the supervisor of a religious endowment in Najaf, backed Munir.
Hakim Mucalij Khan, perceiving these Iranian clerics as a threat to his own position, began to slander Mawlavi Muhammad Munir. The struggle for influence among the physicians and the ulama crystallized around a doctrinal issue. The clique of medical doctors held that the ‘Alid Zayd b. ‘Ali b. Husayn erred in leading Kufa in a revolt against the Umayyad government in A.D. 740. The Bahu Begam's eunuch courtiers, who competed with Mucalij Khan for influence, bearing him great enmity, sought the opinion of Mulla ‘Abdu'l-Majid on this point. He replied that it was wrong to criticize Zayd. Mucalij Khan stood firm, saying that he based his opinion on oral reports from the Imams.[51]
This minor issue most likely became a rallying point more because of its utility in expressing the conflict between these two status groups than because of its substance. The view of the physicians, a more quietist one, suited Shi‘is living in India under strong Sunni Mughal rule and in an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim community. Just as Zayd should not have rebelled against the superior forces of the Umayyads, the physicians may have been implying, so Indian Shi‘is should quietly accept the rule of the Mughals. The immigrant ulama originally came from Iran, where Shi‘is formed a majority and anti-Sunni feeling ran high. Their support for Zayd the revolutionary came from a conviction that Shi‘is must at all odds assert themselves against Sunnis. The foreign-born ulama were more communalist and militant than the Indian intellectuals. With the rapid decline of Mughal power and the ascendancy of the Shi‘i nawab, such militancy became an increasingly viable option for members of the Awadh ruling class, such as the eunuchs in Faiza-bad.
In addition, the eunuchs may have been especially concerned to adopt a
Fayzbakhsh, "Tarikh-i farahbakhsh," foll. 244a-246b; Hoey trans., 2:42.
strong position in order to demonstrate their credentials as Muslims. Eunuchs were the children of defeated Hindu Rajputs, who were mutilated and brought up as Shi‘is to attend upon the family of the nawab.[52] Suspicion of having Hindu sympathies thus attached to them in the upper-class circles in which they moved, and they often attempted to pass some of their wealth on to Hindu relatives. By adopting a militant stance on the Zayd issue they could at once project their orthodoxy and hit out at the physicians, their competitors for the favors of the begam.
The conflict between the physicians and the ulama grew so heated that their partisans at length proposed a public debate. They fixed a day and announced the venue as the house of Bahar ‘Ali Khan, a eunuch in the service of Bahu Begam. The main parties arrived at dawn with slaves and personal troops. Hakim Mucalij Khan attempted to maintain his view by asserting to his opponent, Mulla‘Abdu'l-Majid, that reliable (muctabar ) oral reports (hadiths ) bore him out. The Iranian cleric challenged the elderly doctor on the technical meaning of the term "reliable" in the Shi‘i science of oral reports. When Mucalij Khan, who had studied primarily the rational sciences rather than oral reports, found himself unable to give a quick reply, Mulla ‘Abdu'l-Majid announced the physician's defeat and abruptly left the room. Fighting broke out and raged for hours among the supporters of the two debaters, with Javahir ‘Ali Khan's troops and retainers emerging the victors.[53]
The Faizabad riot of 1779 expressed the competition between Indian lay religious literati and immigrant Iranian professional clergy. It may further have symbolized the tensions brought about by the movement of some in Awadh toward a more scripturalist and communalist interpretation of Shi‘ism. The physicians, most of them formerly Delhi courtiers used to coexistence with Sunni superiors, could not meet the demand for specialists in Shi‘i law generated by the growth of the Awadh state.
Early Religious Policy under Asafu'd-Dawlah
As Shujacu'd-Dawlah's successor, Asafu'd-Dawlah (1775-97), became increasingly a ruler in his own right, and the Mughal Empire no more than a convenient fiction for whoever held Delhi, he reversed the parsimonious policy toward the state subvention of religious scholars and institutions pursued by the first three nawabs of Awadh. Indian traditions of rulership required the nawab to dispense huge amounts of patronage to inferiors and to holy men. Some notables who opposed this new direction were replaced by more amenable Shi‘is. Asafu'd-Dawlah not only reconfirmed long-standing endowments and stipends to Sunni, Shi‘i, and Hindu officials, mendicants, and
Ibid., MS foil 249a ff., Hoey trans., 2:46-47
Ibid., MS foil 246b-247a, Hoey trans, 2 43
Figure 1
Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah. Courtesy of the British
Library.
religious institutions, but restored some that had been usurped. The nawab's religious munificence denoted no streak of puritanism or fanaticism. At least in the early years of his reign, he drank liquor and associated with common Hindus. Indeed, Sunnis and Hindus profited from the policy more than Shi‘is.[54]
Asafu'd-Dawlah grew renowned for bestowing hundreds of thousands of rupees on dervishes. Sayyids, and Shi‘i visitors from the Middle East.[55] The policy served to attract increasing numbers of Shi‘i ulama to the new capital of Lucknow, to which he moved in order to escape the influence of the Faizabad establishment dominated by his father's courtiers and his mother, Bahu Begam. The administrators and civil servants closely related to the nawabate moved with him, but substantial numbers among the service elite remained in Faizabad in the employ of tax-farming and jagir -holding notables.[56]
The Shi‘i ulama in North India still enjoyed few of the advantages that accrued to the Sunni ulama under Mughal rule. Shi‘i scholars, to be sure, did participate in the development of the rational sciences, writing commentaries on the works used in the Nizami method. But just as that syllabus paid relatively little attention to the study of law and oral traditions within the Sunni context, so Shi‘i scholars were seldom well trained in the oral traditions of the Imams, Imami law, and the principles of jurisprudence.[57] As a small minority in a Sunni intellectual world, Shi‘is most often studied with Sunni teachers. Lacking their own mosques and seminaries, they believed that the holding of Friday congregational prayers was illegitimate until the return of the hidden Twelfth Imam, who alone could rightfully lead them. This lack of integrating institutions and physical sites for communal study and worship inhibited the growth of a formal tradition of Shi‘i scholarship in northern India.
Still, a small ulama corps began to form, beginning with scholars who gathered in Faizabad after 1766, attracted by the patronage of the growing Shi‘i notable class there. Shujacu'd-Dawlah summoned the Akhbari Muhammad ‘Askari Jaunpuri to teach Shi‘i sciences in Faizabad.[58] The nawab's wife, Bahu Begam, employed the great and popular teacher Mawlavi Majid Rudauli. Also of note were the legal specialist ‘Ata'u'llah Kashmiri and Sayyid Saricu'd-Din b. Ashraf Mahmud.[59] As was mentioned, these ulama were in many ways subordinate to the court physicians.
Ilahabadi, "Tadhkirat al-‘ulama'," fol 5b.; Asafu'd-Dawlah, "Shuqqah-s," 2 Dhu'l-Hijjah 1188/3 February 1775, Persian MSS 2506, 2507, Regional Archives, Allahabad, Fayzbakhsh, Tarikh-i farahbakhsh , Hoey trans., 2:21
Khayru'd-Din Muhammad Ilahabadi. "‘Ibrat-namah," vol. 2, Persian MS 2210, p 146, Nat'l Archives of India, New Delhi
Naqavi, ‘Imad , p. 126.
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll 60a-b.
Ilahabadi, "Tadhkirat al-‘ulama'," foll 35a-36a
Sultan ‘Ali Husayni Safavi, "Macdan as-sacadah," Soc. Coll., Persian MS 181, foll. 264a-b, Asiatic Soc. Lib., Calcutta.
The Early Career of Sayyid Dildar Ali Nasirabadi
The opportunities for education and patronage available to Shi‘i ulama from 1766 are demonstrated by the career of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi (1753-1820).[60] Born and raised in the large, Sayyid-dominated village of Nasirabad in Rai Bareli not far from Lucknow, as a youth Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali learned Arabic and studied some basic texts in Nasirabad itself. He set out for other towns in order to pursue the rational sciences with individual scholars in the Muslim small towns. Nasirabadi's search for knowledge took him to the provincial capital of Allahabad, which had a relatively large Shi‘i population. He joined the classes of the Imami philosopher Ghulam Husayn Dakani Ilahabadi, with whom he studied most of the basic textbooks for the rational sciences. As was noted above, in 1769-72 Nasirabadi explored cosmography (hay'at ) with Tafazzul Husayn Khan, conveying questions and answers on the abstrusities of logic between his two mentors. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali's student days were hard ones before he found a patron, and at one point he reportedly made a deal with a Hindu shopkeeper to serve as a night watchman for his shop if he could sleep on its doorstep.[61]
Young Nasirabadi's peregrinations also took him north to Shahjahanpur, which served until 1774 as the capital of Hafiz Rahmat Khan's Ruhilah domain. Until that date Shahjahanpur was an important, if small, intellectual center with the Farangi Mahall tradition strongly represented by two former heads of that institution, Mulla ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali and Mulla Hasan. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali furthered his exploration of the rational sciences at the hands of Mulla ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali, one of the foremost contemporary minds in this field. The Shi‘i student at one point engaged in a heated debate with his distinguished tutor. Mulla Hasan Farangi-Mahalli, who had once angrily ejected Tafazzul Husayn Khan from his class, also debated Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali on matters of metaphysics.[62]
The encounter of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali with these former heads of Farangi Mahall in Shahjahanpur is rich in irony. Both were forced to leave Lucknow
".A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll. 30a-b; Sayyid icjaz Husayn Kinturi, "Shudhur al-ciqyan fi tarajim al-acyan," 2 vols., Buhar Coll., Arabic MSS 278-79, 1:135b, Nat'l Lib., Calcutta. In the chronology for Nasirabadi's early travels I have followed Kinturi, who based his account on interviews with the former's close students. "A'inah," a primary source, does not treat this period chronologically. Kinturi's biographical dictionary of Shi‘i ulama, an extremely useful source, remains in manuscript and has not been used by writers on Imami Shi ism in the West.
For Dakani Ilahabadi, see 'Abdu'l-Hayy al-Hasani, Nuzhat al-khawatir , vol 7 (Hyderabad: Matbacat Da'irat al-Macarif al-‘Uthmaniyyah, 1959): 352; for Kamalu'd-Din Sihalavi and Babu'llah, see Ansari Farangi-Mahalli, Bani , pp. 128-29, and Nauganavi, Tazkirah-'i be-baha , p. 146; for Nasirabadi's indigence, see Sayyid Agha Mihdi Lakhnavi, Savanih-i hayat-i hazrat-i Ghufran-ma'ab (Karachi: Jamciyyat-i Khuddam-i ‘Aza', repr. 1982), p. 16.
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama," fol. 58b. Nasirabadi's gloss on Mulla, Sadra's commentary involved a refutation of Mulla ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali's positions, making reference to the stance of Tafazzul Husayn Khan. I was unable to locate a complete copy of this gloss.
by Shi‘i communalists who enjoyed the backing of the nawab. Yet in their exile they taught and engaged in discussions with the future leader of Awadh's Shi‘is. Admittedly, they may not hate known he was a Shi‘i. But even in the face of the most powerful Forces for communal strife and separation, education in Awadh remained strangely ecumenical.
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali left Shahjahanpur for Nasirabad, then journeyed to nearby Faizabad, where a number of Shi‘i ulama were gathering under the patronage of Shujacu'd-Dawlah and his notables. |He fell ill,| and was chided by the old nawab for studying too hard. When he recovered he followed the new court of Asafu'd-Dawlah to Lucknow, where he taught and also completed his studies.[63] The difficulties facing a student without a wealthy patron are illustrated by an incident from Nasirabadi's youth. Unable to afford a servant to bring food from the city market, considered an unclean place where no gentleman would be seen, students had to do their own shopping. One of Nasirabadi's colleagues, Sayyid ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali Deoghatavi, volunteered to go to the bazaar, and was returning when he saw someone he knew coming down the road. He quickly hid himself. Then he considered that to hide a fault indicates a prideful desire to be honored by others. He caught up with his acquaintance, going out of his way to show himself and his bazaar-derived provisions.[64]
Finally, Nasirabadi's diligence was rewarded. His reputation for piety and ability, as well as some of his early compositions, reached the notice of Awadh's chief minister from 1777, Hasan Riza Khan. The illiterate official, having these works read to him, was favorably impressed and began financially supporting Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali, giving him a stipend of Rs. 30 per month and including him among his companions.[65] Still, the young scholar was overshadowed by other, more important recipients of the chief minister's patronage, such as Sufi leaders. The Shi‘i notables in India did not at this point hold the ulama in such high esteem, preferring unlettered mystics to learned scholars.[66]
As the Shi‘i-ruled state of Awadh began developing a more extensive local bureaucracy, and as its notables increasingly felt a need to promote their branch of Islam, the ulama became more important. The patron-client relationship expanded and changed in character. Younger scholars, such as Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali, pioneered a new phase in ulama-state relations in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Yet the need felt by the notables for a Shi‘i
‘Abdu'l-Halim Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u mashriqi tamaddun ka akhiri namunah (Lucknow: Nasim Book Depot, 1974), p. 120, says that Nasirabadi studied at the Farangi Mahall. This is denied by the school's modem historian, Muhammad Riza Ansari (interview, Lucknow, February 1982), and no direct reference to his studying there occurs m the primary sources. But it is clear that the Nizami method played a crucial role m shaping Nasirabadi's thought.
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama." foll 40a-b.
Kinturi, "Shudhur al-ciqyan," foll 135a-b, Ardistani, "Al-Hisn al-matin" 1.93
"A'inah-'i haqq-namah," fol 59.
clerical class was frustrated by the lack of local scholars trained in specifically Shi‘i sciences. In the absence of a Shi‘i seminary in North India, one solution was to have some teachers trained in the Shi‘i intellectual centers of Iran and Iraq.
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali took his place among an increasing flow of Awadh Shi‘i scholars to the Shi‘i shrine cities of Mamluk Iraq, who went to study Shi‘i law and help spread the religion in India upon their return.[67] An important predecessor, Mirza Khalil, went from Lucknow to Iraq, where he studied with the young Sayyid ‘Ali Tabataba'i, the nephew and son-in-law of Usuli leader Aqa Muhammad Baqir Bihbahani. Mirza Khalil, impressed with his teacher, endeavored to convince him to journey with him to India "in order to eradicate unbelief and ignorance." Sayyid ‘Ali, taken aback, fervently expressed his desire that God would never show him India or part him from the shrine cities. He reacted to the pious entreaty as if someone had prayed that evil might befall him.[68] Most high ulama in Iran and Iraq showed reluctance to give up all the benefits they derived from living at the Shi‘i center in order to undertake a missionary career in an alien environment like North India.
Mirza Khalil on his return had his patron, Almas ‘Ali Khan, offer another scholarship of Rs. 2,000 for study in Iraq, to Akhbari notable scholars, but they refused it as too small.[69] Finally Mirza Khalil went to another Akhbari, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, who at first begged off on the grounds that he had just married and lacked means to support his wife while traveling. The moral imperative of such a journey, however, outweighed these considerations, and he set out in 1779 with one young companion, Sayyid Panah ‘Ali. They proceeded arduously overland through Rajasthan to Hyderabad in Sindh, and thence to the coast, where they boarded a ship for the sea journey to Basra.
Nasirabadi brought with him a copy of Muhammad Amin Astarabadi's Al-fawa'id al-madaniyyah , a work hugely popular among Shi‘i thinkers in North India. Written nearly two centuries earlier, this major statement of the Akhbari creed attacked such classical Usuli writers as Hasan ibn al-Mutahhar al-Hilli. During the long boat journey up the Euphrates Nasirabadi made friends with an Arab Shi‘i also en route to Najaf, where he had just begun his studies. Their discussions came around to the principles of jurisprudence. Nasirabadi supported the Akhbari position, whereas his Arab friend took the side of the Usulis. In this discussion Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali first
Kinturi, "Shudhur al-ciqyan" 1 136a, cf "A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll, 44b, 47a-b; Ardistani, "Al-hisn al-matin" 1 92-91. This account is late (1850s?), but the author had access to the memoirs of his grandfather, who was in Lucknow during Asafu'd-Dawlah's reign. It cannot therefore be ignored, especially since it is rich in details lacking in earlier sources.
Kinturi, "Shudhur", cf "A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll. 38a-b.
For this figure, see Sultan ‘Ali Husayni Safavi, "Macdan as-sacadah," Soc Coll, Persian MS 181, fol 264b, Asiatic Soc Lib, Calcutta lionically, he died m Karbala during the Wahhabi invasion of 1801
Map 3
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi's Journey to the
Shrine Cities in 1779-81
encountered the now largely Usuli atmosphere of the shrine cities and found it disturbing.[70]
After performing visitation to the shrine of Imam ‘Ali, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali met with prominent Shi‘i scholars in Najaf, committed Usulis. After several debates with them, Nasirabadi decided that if he insisted on arguing with his teachers, he would learn nothing. He then shifted north to Karbala, studying the oral reports from the Imams with Aqa Muhammad Baqir Bihbahani then seventy-five, and law with Bihbahani's younger disciples. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali determined to throw himself into a study of Usuli works, given their rarity in India. He read widely on the issue of the validity of those oral reports that were related by only a single transmitter in each early generation (khabar al-ahad ).[71] After study of the classical writers, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali began to doubt the validity of Astarabadi's position. In the space of a few months from his arrival in Iraq he adopted the Usuli school, one reason surely being the predominance of this ideology at the centers of Shi‘i scholarship. He later perceived this change of views to be one of the graces he received by virtue of his proximity to the holy tombs of the Imams.[72]
Nasirabadi then sought out another of Bihbahani's students, Sayyid Muhammad Mihdi Tabataba'i, and studied with him briefly. He pointed out to his teacher that in the Usuli system either a believer must be himself a mujtahid, or he must emulate a living mujtahid. But, he continued, the Shi‘is of India were deprived of any opportunity for either, so that they might land in perdition. Tabataba'i replied that Indian Shi‘is must practice caution (ihtiyat ), following the most strict of the major positions on any matter of law. Nasirabadi riposted that Majlisi I once said that the most cautious position was not always the correct one. Sayyid Muhammad Mihdi answered that such instances were rare.[73] Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali's dissatisfaction with the practice of caution as a solution to the dilemma of Indian Usulis suggests that even then he saw the need for religious leadership which the spread of Usulism in Awadh would create.
Because of his Indian background Nasirabadi had great difficulty in being taken seriously as a scholar, some Iranian students insisting that there simply were no ulama in India. They found the very thought of an Indian mujtahid absurd, given that only three scholars at the shrine cities were recognized exemplars.
After about a year and a half, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali returned to India overland via Kazimayn, Tehran, and Mashhad, wintering in Khurasan and
This and succeeding paragraphs are based on "A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll. 48a-49b. For the issue of consensus (ijmac ), see Harald Löschner, Die dogmatischen Grundlagen des sicitischen Rechts (Cologne: Karl Heymans Verlag, 1971), pp. 111-47.
For this issue, see Löschner, Grundlagen , pp. 101-9.
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama," fol. 49b.
Ibid., foll. 20b-24a.
studying there briefly. On arriving in Lucknow he met with Hasan Riza Khan and had an interview with Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah. In 1781 he began teaching and writing in Lucknow, producing a wide-ranging attack on Akhbari ideas and beginning the task of training a new generation of Shi‘i scholars in Usuli sciences.
Conclusion
The religion of the ruling house in preindustrial West and South Asia generally became an clement in state formation. The cultural traditions of Islam dictated that a Muslim stale have its sovereignty proclaimed in the Friday afternoon sermons, and in the grandeur of its cathedral mosques. In a patrimonial bureaucracy, religion became an important bond, the adoption of which allowed eunuchs and courtiers to receive appointments to high office. In Awadh, even Sunni elites outside the ruling circle sometimes adopted Shi‘ism or expressed greater love of ‘Ali and his family within a Sunni framework, in order to bond themselves with the ruling house. As will be seen, Hindu notables and government officials also accommodated themselves to Awadh's newly Shi‘i atmosphere.
Awadh's external borders were demarcated by wars with the Bangash and Ruhilah Afghan clans and with the British. In the Bangash battles, not only professional soldiers but Shaykhzadah clansmen defended their region arid championed Nishapuri rule. This gives a clue to internal processes at work in Awadh, whereby local Sunni elites expressed a preference for even Shi‘i nawabi rule over other alternatives. The nawabs derived their legitimacy from Mughal appointment, and their power from Shi‘i and Hindu troops. Although they expropriated many Sunni revenue-free holdings subventing religious institutions, they were seen by most Sunnis as the lesser of evils when compared with the Afghans.
Awadh's move toward greater autonomy from the Mughals, and the desire of Shi‘i notables for experts in Imami law and theology to service their households, created an increasing need for a professional Shi‘i clergy. At first this exigency was partially met by the court physicians, then by an influx of Iranian and Iraqi Shi‘i ulama seeking patronage. The clash of physicians with foreign ulama pointed to the need for an indigenous, trained ulama corps, who Could help to articulate symbolically the growing autonomy of Nishapuri Awadh and spread Shi‘i sciences. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali's two-year sojourn in Iraq and Iran was a first step toward the formation of such a corps.
PART TWO
THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF POPULAR SHI'ISM
IN AWADH
3
Shi'ism and Muslim Social Groups
The origins and social composition of the Shi‘i population in Awadh are central questions for the social historian of religion, albeit questions difficult to answer. The flowering of Imami Shi‘i popular ritual, and the spread of formal Imami religious institutions in the nawabi period took place, not in a vacuum, but against a background of folk beliefs now difficult to recover. The Shi‘i notables that flocked to the nawabi court, many from Iran, Kashmir, and Delhi, are easier to trace than the partisans of ‘Ali in the small towns and in the bazaars. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century British census takers and administrators collected information useful for a reconstruction of the social origins of Awadh's Shi‘is, and local and family histories sometimes also contain relevant data.
This survey of Shi‘i influence on the major Muslim social groups in Awadh will look first at the "noble" (ashraf ) castes, most of them rural gentry, urban administrators and tax-farmers, or merchants. Since these groups often cannot be precisely identified by social class, they will be discussed as status groups, in the Weberian sense. Then the little available information on Shi‘ism among artisans and craftsmen will be presented. Finally, there will be a discussion of links between Shi‘ism and north Indian Sufi brotherhoods, religious organizations that often had mass followings. Shi‘is always remained a small minority in Awadh, but their influence with the nawabi court gave them an importance out of proportion to their numbers, so that they profoundly influenced Awadh culture.
Shi'is and the Census
The north Indian Shi‘i population in the eighteenth century can only be guessed at, and not until after the fall of the Awadh kingdom do population
Map 4
Geographical Distribution of Shi‘is in North
India, 1881 Census (by
absolute number)
statistics become available for the area. Tables, as of 1881, give Sunni and Shi‘i population figures in each district of the combined British administrative unit of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (an area nearly equivalent to the Greater Awadh ruled by Shujacu'd-Dawlah in the eighteenth century). But census takers did not divide Muslims by sect when they recorded their occupations. We thus know the number of Muslim weavers in Lucknow district, but not how many of them were Shi‘is.
Without census statistics for the occupations of Shi‘is and Sunnis as separate groups, the question of the specific niches in society filled by Shi‘is cannot be answered. Nevertheless, it must be bound up with the social position of the Muslims in general. Even here the British census figures, frustratingly incomplete, have the disadvantage for the period under study of originating late in the nineteenth century. The census of 1891 first gave tables showing caste and occupation by religion in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, and Crooke's classic Tribes and Castes supplemented it for ethnographic information, making it, for all the problems mentioned above, a good analytical starting point.
The census for the area of concern here covered two late-nineteenth-century administrative divisions. The first, the North-Western Provinces, constituted areas the British conquered north of Awadh, as well as provinces they annexed from Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan of Awadh in 1801. The second, "Oudh," was the British name for the area of Awadh that remained under the rule of the nawab after he ceded half of it to the British East India Company in 1801. The British later annexed "Oudh" itself in 1856.
The British census takers extensively employed the category of "caste" (jat ), even for Muslims, and preferred this category over occupational ones, creating conceptual problems in their collection of data. A weaver (julahah ), displaced by the influx of cheap British textiles, who began working as a bearer might give his caste as weaver without mentioning his occupation. Census takers created an even more serious problem for historians by recording high-status "caste" groups such as Mughals and Sayyids only under those rubrics, assigning them no occupation.[1] A Shaykh who wove for a living but simply reported his ethnic identity would be included in the Shaykhs rather than in the weavers.
This confusing procedure has left us with over two million Muslims, 37 percent of the Muslim population in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, classified only as Mughal, Pathan, Sayyid, or Shaykh, all groups being opaque as to actual occupation. Many high-caste Muslims may have been reluctant to admit to being employed, aspiring to at least the appear-
The British overemphasized Muslim high "caste" membership; see Imtiaz Ahmad, "The Ashraf-Ajlaf Dichotomy m Muslim Social Structure in India," Indian Economic and Social History Review 3 (1966) 268-78.
ance of being gentlemen of independent means. Although most Mughals probably owned property and land, and many Sayyids held land, large numbers of Pathans and Shaykhs almost certainly worked as skilled artisans, owning little or no land. On the other hand, the landholding elite no doubt contained numerous Shaykhs and Pathans.
The "Noble" Castes
Although the statistics concerning the "noble" (ashraf ) castes therefore tell us little about social classes, they tell us much about status groups. Max Weber's conception of status groups (Stande ) terminologically derives from the preindustrial European division of society into "orders" based on function and privilege. In the industrializing Germany of the early twentieth century Weber appropriated the word "order" (Stand ) to a new use, in English rendered by "status group." In Weber's exposition, social classes are determined by their economic position and by market forces, whereas status groups are culturally determined bodies with a more ambiguous relationship to economic position.[2] Status groups depend on honor and on a style of life, and the group's solidarity is often reinforced by marrying only within it (endogamy).
Weber gave as an example of status groups American clubs, in which persons of various social backgrounds might meet. He was aware that the variation tended not to be extreme, and that status groups were linked with social classes in many ways. In the long run, he noted, property is always recognized as a status qualification. But then, so might be the lack of property, as in the case of wandering holy men. Status groups tend to monopolize a set of ideal and material privileges. But material privileges are not solely determinative, and a newly wealthy family might be excluded from a wealthy status group because it is seen to lack the ideal qualifications for membership. Weber also pointed out that status groups could evolve into castes, who religiously felt that contact with persons outside their caste defiled them. Status groups become castes when they involve underlying differences that are held to be ethnic.
A Weberian approach to the Muslim ashraf groups solves many conceptual problems, since Weber saw status groups and castes as similar phenomena on a continuum, beginning with purely conventional clubs and ending with full-blown Hindu-style castes. The Muslim noble groups certainly began as status groups, and through endogamy and declarations of common ancestry moved toward becoming castes. Caste formation in their case seldom achieved the completeness witnessed among the Hindu groups.
Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1978), 1:305-7, 2.932-38
For instance, not all members of the Muslim noble castes would see contact with a common Muslim as ritually polluting. Many anthropologists of India have seen the Muslim "castes" as "caste-analogues," social formations that imitated the pure Hindu castes. Weber's approach allows us rather to see them as consequences of status-group development along ethnic lines. Thus, the Sayyids, or putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, would be "castes" in the Weberian sense in many parts of the Muslim world, and not only in India. This fact in itself brings into question the necessity of seeing Indian Sayyids as a "caste-analogue" created by the influence of a Hindu environment. The genuine influence of Hindu conceptions on Muslim status groups in transition toward becoming castes can hardly be denied, but influence differs from causation.
The highest status group among Muslims, the Sayyids, included a quarter of a million persons in the area under study, constituting only about 4 percent of the total Muslim population and 10 percent of the noble castes taken as a group. The Sayyids asserted their descent from the Prophet Muhammad or from one of his close relatives. This link to the holy and revered person of the Messenger of God gave Sayyids special status and privileges within the Muslim community. Many who declared their Sayyid descent in India did so as a means to or statement of upward mobility, and lineage claims must be
|
Table 2 |
|||||||||||||||
|
Oudh (Awadh) |
N-W. P. & Oudh |
||||||||||||||
|
Caste |
No. |
% of Ashraf |
% of Muslims |
% of Pop. |
No. |
% of Ashraf |
% of Muslims |
% of Pop. |
|||||||
|
Mughals |
31,220 |
5.7 |
1.9 |
0.3 |
76,683 |
3.3 |
1.2 |
0.2 |
|||||||
|
Pathans |
198,560 |
36.2 |
12.2 |
1.6 |
700,393 |
29.8 |
11.0 |
1.5 |
|||||||
|
Sayyids |
65,814 |
12.0 |
4.0 |
0.5 |
242,811 |
10.3 |
3,8 |
0.5 |
|||||||
|
Shaykhs |
253,353 |
46.1 |
15.6 |
2.0 |
1,332,566 |
56 8 |
20.9 |
2.8 |
|||||||
|
Total |
548,947 |
100.0 |
33.8 |
4.3 |
2,352,453 |
100.0 |
37.1 |
5.0 |
|||||||
|
Total |
1,620,930 |
100.0 |
12.8 |
6,346,651 |
100.0 |
13.5 |
|||||||||
|
Total |
12,650,831 |
100.0 |
46,905,085 |
100.0 |
|||||||||||
treated with circumspection. But the biological reality of such sources of family honor is sociologically irrelevant when the public generally accepts the lineage as authentic. A little over 10 percent of noble Muslims living in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh were Sayyids, whereas in Oudh the percentage was twelve. This slight disproportion may represent Sayyid families attracted to Awadh during the rule of the nawabs, themselves Sayyids, and who, as Shi‘is, guaranteed a special place in their dominions for members of the Prophet's family.
Awadh's Sayyids divided themselves genealogically into many subgroups, the most numerous being those asserting descent from the Prophet through his daughter, Fatimah, and her husband, ‘Ali. For extra honor, or to stress their Shi‘ism, some emphasized descent from ‘Ali and Fatimah through one of their descendants, most often one of the Twelve Imams revered by the Imami Shi‘is. Over a quarter of Awadh's Sayyids asserted descent from Imam Riza, the eighth Imam, and almost 10 percent from Imam Husayn, the third Imam. Another 10 percent reported their lineage as going back to Zayd, another ‘Alid. Altogether, those asserting descent from Fatimah and her descendants, including the Twelve Imams, constituted 67 percent of the Sayyids. The rest gave their forebear as another relative of the Prophet, such as his uncle ‘Abbas, or identified themselves according to Sufi order (Chishti, Qadiri, Jalali Suhravardi) or place of origin (Baghdad, Bukhara, Sabzavar).[3]
A powerful link existed between Sayyids and Shi‘i Islam. Since the majority of Sayyids emphasized descent from an Imam revered by the Imami Shi‘is, they often sympathized with Shi‘i figures against their foes, the latter often portrayed as heroes by Sunnis. Though most Sayyids remained Sunnis, even they tended to have pro-‘Alid sympathies. The Sayyids were particularly susceptible to the Shi‘i ideas filtering into the Mughal Empire from Iran after 1501. A sociologist who studied Shi‘i marriage customs found that, in a sample drawn from middle- and upper-class social networks in several geographical locations, fully half his respondents said they were Sayyids. A strong Shi‘i presence among Sayyids appears in other sources, many Sayyid families in the upper Doab, for instance, being Shi‘is.[4] Such data, admittedly impressionistic, nevertheless give a strong and consistent impression.
Nearly a quarter of Awadh's Sayyids late in the nineteenth century lived in Lucknow district, and another 12 percent dwelled in Faizabad district. Bara Banki, Gonda, and Hardoi also possessed large Sayyid populations, but all the other districts of Awadh had only three to four thousand Sayyids each. The privileges, patronage, and charities bestowed on Sayyids in the nawabi
W. Grooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh , 4 vols (Calctta. Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1896), 4:302-9
Sheikh Abrar Husain, Marriage Customs among Muslims India A Sociological Study of the Shia Marriage Customs (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1976); Sayyid Zafaryab Husayn Nanautavi, Tarikh-i anvar as-sadat (Lahore: al-Qa'im Art Press, 1972).
centers of Lucknow and Faizabad acted as a magnet for them. The rural Sayyids congregated, not in the very small Hindu villages that accounted for most human habitation in North India, but in large villages or small towns (qasabahs ), where they formed part of the landholding class.[5]
In the qasabahs , local trade depots with small permanent bazaars, landholders built forts, water tanks, mosques, and irrigation facilities. Despite their rural setting, these islands of semiurban settlement fostered some literate culture among the Muslim gentry based there, allowing them to send some of their sons to the imperial court as civil servants and religious dignitaries, and so to maintain links with the cosmopolitan center. Indeed, both rentier and courtly service status were crucial to the qasabah elite families, and if both were not maintained, their fortunes could easily decline.[6]
The small landholding families based in the provincial towns originally were of several types. The Mughal monarchs often granted revenue from land (madad-i macash ) to religious scholars, mystics, and Sayyid or other noble families. The Mughal rulers did not thereby alienate the land and could resume the grant at any time. A more permanent form of landed wealth was the zamindari , and old provincial zamindar families built up hereditary estates. As Muzaffar Alam has shown, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Delhi court treated holders of madad-i macash favorably in tax assessment, encouraging their power as a balance to the increasingly insubordinate old zamindari families. Many learned and Sayyid families holding revenue grants used their wealth to purchase zamindaris .[7] In the nineteenth century some small landholding (zamindar ) houses built up estates consisting of hundreds of villages, becoming very large landholders (tacalluqdars ). Despite their sometimes positive role in keeping up irrigation facilities and in providing security through their forts, many zamindars , whether Muslim or Hindu, preyed parasitically on the labor of the Hindu peasants who worked their estates and lived outside the fort's protecting walls.
Insights into the Sayyid gentry can be gained from considering the histories of some prominent families. In the Akbarpur parganah of Faizabad district twelve Hindu and twelve Muslim landed houses predominated from medieval times. One of the Muslim houses, whose numerous nineteenth-century members were Shi‘is, asserted their descent from Sayyid Taj, said to
For landloids, see Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556-1707) (London Asia Publishing House, 1963), ch 5, and B R Grover, "Nature of Dehat-i taaluqa (Zamindari Villages) and the Evolution of the Taaluqdari System during the Mughal Age," Indian Economic and Social History Remew , 2 (1965) 166-77, 259-84.
C A Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen. and Bazaars (Cambridge. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp 46-47, 346-68, C A Bayly, "The Small Town and Islamic Gentry in North India: the Case of Kara," in K Ballhatchet and J Harrison, eds., The City m South Asia Pre-Modern and Modern (London Curzon Press, 1980), pp 27-28
Muzaffar Alam, "Some Aspects of the Changes m the Position of the Madad-i Maash Holders m Awadh, 1676-1772," Indian History Congress Proceedings 35 (1974) 198-207.
have emigrated from Arabia in the mid-fourteenth century. Another family traced itself back to Sayyid Ahmad, also from "Arabia," through the medieval magnates Sayyid Phul and Sayyid Piyare, the Hindi names perhaps indicating Hindu background masked by later usurpation of Muslim noble status.
Also of note were the progeny of Sayyid Sulayman Nishapuri, who settled in Awadh in 1403 and married into the family of the aforementioned Sayyid Ahmad. He acquired a huge estate, and even in the nineteenth century believers venerated his tomb by an annual ceremony. His descendants, Shi‘is, are numerous. They include the Pirpur and Kataria tacalluqdar landholding houses, which produced great-estate builders in the nineteenth century. Shaykh Ahmad Qattal Luristani, said to have come from Iran, arrived in tile early 1400s. At one time eleven distinct branches of his family owned land in Akbarpur parganah, but these villages were absorbed into the tacalluqah estates of Pirpur and Samanpur. Luristani's putative descendants are Shi‘is. In the Birhar parganah, the Sayyids of Nasirabad asserted their descent from Sayyid Nasiru'd-Din, said to have fled Iran during the disruptions caused by Timur's military campaigns. Akbar granted the family revenue-free holdings, although these were partially confiscated by Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan in the nineteenth century.[8]
In Bara Banki, Muslim Shaykhs and Sayyids owned almost half the villages, though they constituted only 2.6 and 0.6 percent of the district's population, respectively, in the late nineteenth century. In some small towns, Sayyids exercised unquestioned dominance. The Shi‘i Sayyids of Zaydpur had ten mosques and seventeen imambarahs in the late nineteenth century, but permitted no Sunni mosques or Hindu temples.[9] In Kintur, Bara Banki, Sayyids held two-thirds of the village lands, including a number of rent-free (mucafi ) grants.[10] The Sayyids there asserted their descent from the brothers Sayyids Sharafu'd-Din and Muhammad of Nishapur, said to have forsaken Iran for Awadh in the time of Hulagu the Il-Khanid Mongol ruler. The Nishapuri Sayyids of Kintur produced several outstanding Shi‘i religious scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[11]
Sayyid landholders exerted great social and cultural influence from tile small towns they helped create in Hardoi, as well. In the nineteenth century a thousand Sayyids owned half the land in parganah Bilgram, saying they were descended from Sayyid Muhammad Wasiti, who conquered it in A.D. 1217. (He is also held to be the progenitor of the Barhah Sayyids in Muzaffarnagar
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh , 3 vols. (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1877), 1:14-17, 324
Ibid., 1:141, 179, 901; 2.82-83, 99-100
H.R. Nevill, ed., Bara Banki DG (Allahabad: Government Press of the United Provinces, 1904), pp. 224-25.
Muhammad ‘Ali Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama ' fi tarajim al-‘ulama ' (Lucknow: Matbac-i Jacfari, 1302/1884-85), p. 420.
north of Awadh.) In the time of Shah Jahan, Sayyid Ismacil Bilgrami adopted Shi‘ism.[12] Even in the heavily Sunni atmosphere of Awrangzib's India, Bilgrami Sayyids wrote elegies for members of the Prophet's family, such as ‘Ali, thus exalting their own genealogy.[13] Some prominent Bilgram Sayyid families embraced Shi‘ism in the late eighteenth century. Their putative cousins. in Barhah, of course, became Shi‘is centuries earlier, and they wielded paramount influence at the Mughal court in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The Sayyids were also important in Sandila, another renowned qasabah of Hardoi, where they owned 8 percent of the surrounding villages in the nineteenth century.[14]
The Sayyids of Ja'is and Nasirabad in Rai Bareli district further exemplify the pattern of early settlement, imperial land grants, and later adoption of Shi‘ism. They hold themselves to be in the line of Sayyid Najmu'd-Din Sabzavari, who they say accompanied Salar Mascud Ghazi on his eleventh-century expedition into North India. (Their own genealogies belie such antiquity, going back, at 24.1 years per generation, only to the fourteenth century.) The Sayyid qasabah at Ja'is split seven generations after Sabzavari's arrival when Sayyid Zakariyya moved three miles away, founding a new settlement inside a fort at what became Nasirabad. The Sayyids of Ja'is and Nasirabad held land grants from the central government, dominating surrounding villages, but coming into sanguinary conflict with Hindu martial clans, often having to submit to powerful rajas. They benefited from the trade between Delhi and Allahabad, and, later, from the area's thriving textile trade. One of their number tutored Bahadur Shah (r. 1707-12). During his reign, a time of great Shi‘i influence at court, a few Sayyids in Nasirabad embraced Imami Shi‘ism. Later, Shi‘i nawabi rule in Awadh accelerated the adoption of Shi‘i beliefs.[15] Nasirabad produced an important Shi‘i cleric, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali (1753-1820), whose career will be described in later chapters.
In Jarwal, Bahraich, the Sayyid line derived from Sayyid Zakariyya, who fled Iran during the Mongol invasion by Genghis Khan, obtaining a 15,000 bigha grant from the Delhi sovereign, Ghiyathu'd-Din. In 1800 the Jarwal Sayyids, some of them Shi‘is, displaced the Ansari Shaykhs and came to hold 276 out of 365 villages in the parganah, although their holdings thereafter de-
Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Nauganavi, Tazkirah-'i be-baha fi tarikh al-'ulama ' (Delhi: Jayyid Barqi Press, n.d.), pp. 4-5.
Sayyid Muhammad Bilgrami, "Tabsirat an-nazirin," Persian MS H. L. 158, pp. 294-99, Khudabakhsh Oriental Public Lib., Patna.
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 1:313-16; 2:32-34; 3:298-303.
Hashim ‘Ali Rizavi, "Mir'at al-bilad," Persian MS 2551, pp. 226-31, Government Manuscript Lib. Allahabad; Sayyid ‘Abid Husayn, Tarikh-i Ja'is (Allahabad: Matbac-i Jalali, 1878), pp. 5 ff.; Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali, Makhzan-i Ahmadi (Agra: Matbac-i Mufid-i ‘Amm, 1299/1882), p. 47; Ramasahaya Tamanna, Afdal at-tawarikh (Lucknow Matbac-i Tamanna'i, 1879), pp. 150-52.
clined rapidly to (a still formidable) 76 villages in 1877.[16]
The ‘Alid genealogies of all Sayyids, and the pro-Shi‘i sentiments of many, led them to develop origin myths that tied in with the tragedy of Karbala (where the Prophet's grandson Husayn b. ‘Ali died fighting the Umayyad government in A.D. 680). One Sayyid author from Ja'is wrote of the Awadh qasabahs in the nineteenth century that most of their headmen were Sayyids or Shaykhs because these groups, having supported ‘Ali and the Imams against other claimants to rulership of the Islamic Empire, fled the central Islamic lands for fear of their lives when the holy figures met defeat. They made their way through Afghanistan down to North India, settling in Ja'is, Nasirabad, Manekpur, Salon, Bilgram, Sultanpur, Sethan, Rudauli, Amethi, and so forth. Through royal edicts, they became rent-free landholders (jagirddars ) and middle landlords (zamindars ).[17]
This myth held that Sayyids and some Shaykhs toiled as Muslim pioneers in an alien and hostile Hindu environment because of the same injustice that struck down ‘Ali and Husayn and denied the Prophet's immediate family
Diagram 2
The Genealogy of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali of Nasirabad
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 1:141; 2:83, 99-100.
Husayn, Tarikh-i Ja'is , p. 9.
political power after his passing. Even in their exile, he wrote, the Sayyid and Shaykh partisans of ‘Ali found themselves pursued by fanatical Sunnis, such as the Pushtu-speaking Afghan immigrants to North India. The Afghans, antagonistic toward the Sayyids, refused to give them their daughters in marriage.[18] Families declaring themselves Sayyids often competed for land with Shaykh houses tracing their descent from Abu Bakr or ‘Umar, and Shi‘ism had the ideological advantage for Sayyids of rendering the Shaykhs' ancestry a source of shame rather than pride. Shi‘is held that the caliphs usurped rights belonging properly to the family of the Prophet.
Sayyids also pursued trades in urban centers. In the eighteenth century the Sayyid artisans of Amroha were renowned for their gilded pottery decorated with colorful floral designs.[19] In Lucknow, Sayyids engaged in all professions and arts save trading.[20] Mrs. Ali, who lived among Lucknow's Shi‘is for a decade in the early nineteenth century, wrote of the urban Sayyids: "They rarely embark in trade, and never can have any share in banking, or such professions as would draw them into dealings of usury. They arc chiefly employed as writers, moonshies, maulvees, and moolahs, doctors of the law and readers of the Khoraun; they arc allowed to enter the army, to accept offices of state."[21] She noted that a special charity existed among Shi‘is for indigent Sayyids, pious believers giving one-fifth (khums ) of certain kinds of income to them in charity. Mrs. Ali reported that no self-respecting Sayyid with sufficient means of support would accept this charity. Moreover, she indicated that many Sayyids refused gifts if they suspected that the donor gained the money through usury.[22]
Among the Sayyids, the conflict between status and class can be clearly discerned. Mrs. Ali said that conscientious Sayyid families always regarded birth before wealth in contracting marriages. Some poor Sayyid families preferred that their daughters remain spinsters rather than marry into rich families not of Sayyid background. Since the father's need to provide a costly trousseau (jahiz ) for his daughter posed a major obstacle to marriage for the poor, one form of charity consisted in a well-to-do Shi‘i presenting an indigent Sayyid father with such a trousseau.
Mrs. Ali described a poor Sayyid household with unmarried girls. Highly educated, they could read the Qur'an in Arabic and its commentaries in Persian. This family preferred that the girls spend their days performing needlework rather than wed a wealthy non-Sayyid.[23] Those in this situation attempted to maintain their status honor by upholding social conventions of
Ibid
Murtaza, Bilgrami, Hadiqat al-aqalim (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1879), p. 138.
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 2:378.
Mrs Meer Hasan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India , ed. W. Crooke (London: Oxford Univ Press, repr. 1917), p. 137.
Ibid., pp. 3-4, 137.
Ibid., pp 4-5.
hypergamy (where the daughter marries a social equal or superior) and by engaging in a style of life not incompatible with their status pretensions.[24] Although Mrs. Ali said that "conscientious" Sayyids followed this behavior, less strict Sayyid families sometimes traded their high status for increased economic security by marrying their girls to well-to-do non-Sayyids. Also, no doubt some risked their honor by claiming the "share of the Sayyids" (sahm-i sadat ) even though they were not particularly indigent.
At the nawabi court in Lucknow, courtiers took respect for Sayyids seriously in social intercourse. For instance, in military parades the Sayyid regiments marched ahead of the others. Relevant anecdotes on this theme were recounted by Mir In-sha'a'llah Khan, a Sayyid whose family said they immigrated to North India from Najaf in Iraq, and a respected poet and boon companion of Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan (1799-1814).[25] Once in a conversation with the nawab, by a slip of the tongue he referred to a garden called "Imambagh" (the garden of the Imam) as "Imambap" (the father of the Imam). This unintended allusion to the Prophet would ordinarily have been a serious breach of etiquette, but Sacadat ‘Ali Khan grinned and excused the poet on the grounds of his own Sayyid origin. Once the powerful eunuch Afarin ‘Ali Khan had an altercation with Mir In-sha'a'llah Khan. Later at a salon, the poet quoted a verse in which he satirically pronounced imprecations upon himself. Afarin ‘Ali Khan pounced on the opportunity to second the sentiments. The poet angrily replied that a non-Sayyid who curses a Sayyid is himself accursed. The nawab, upset at any hint of disrespect for the House of the Prophet in his court, begged forgiveness for Afarin ‘Ali Khan. Upon seeing that his foe had lost face, Mir In-sha'a'llah pardoned him.[26]
Sayyids enjoyed ceremonial marks of honor at court and in polite Muslim society, but their position was hardly unassailable. Although Sayyid-oriented philanthropies acted as a safety net, members of this group could become quite badly off. Further, they did not necessarily enjoy political privileges. When Sacadat ‘Ali Khan agreed to cede half his dominions to the British in 1801 to pay off debts that the governor-general maintained the previous nawab had incurred, he grew reluctant to make any more grants of state land to traditional recipients such as Sayyid families. Indeed, he resumed former Sayyid grants in such areas as Birhar, Faizabad, and Sandila, Hardoi.[27]
The Sunni-Shi‘i schism caused problems for Sayyids, for although both branches of Islam respected the descendants of the Prophet, they revered
Weber, Economy and Society 2 935-36, for Sayyid hypergamy, see H H. Risby and E. A Gait, "Report," m Census, of India, 1901 , vol 1 (Calcutta Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903) 543
Muhammad ‘Ali Azad, Ab-i hayat (Allahabad. Ram Narayan Lal Beni Madhu, 1950), pp. 259ff. Some say the family was actually from Kashmir or central Asia
Mir In-sha'a'llah Khan, "Lata'if as-sacadah," Persian MS Or 2021, foll. 6a, 9a-b, British Lib, London.
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 1.324, 3.298-303.
only those adhering to their own branch. For instance, the chief mujtahid of Lucknow from 1820 to 1867, Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi, ruled that if a Sayyid does not have real faith (i.e., if he is not a Shi‘i), then his being a Sayyid does him no good whatsoever.[28] A Sayyid family wishing to maintain high-status honor among both Sunni and Shi‘i neighbors would face difficulties. Ultimately such a family might have to choose which community it desired honor from, and the wealth of Shi‘i notables and patrons in nawabi Awadh helped attract Sayyids to the Imami community.
The Mughals often possessed greater wealth and held higher office than the Sayyids, though they, had lower status.[29] Indians applied the term "Mughal" (mughul ), literally meaning "Mongol," indiscriminately to all immigrants from central Asia, including Iran. These Iranians and ethnic Turks generally filled high-ranking posts with the government or served in the cavalry. Though they frequently received land grants in remuneration for their services, they were most often absentee landlords, remaining out of touch with the provincial, rural Muslim elite in the qasabahs .[30] Some Mughals also came to India as long-distance merchants.
The Mughal Empire employed Persian both for administrative purposes and as the polite language at court. This meant that educated Iranians immigrating to wealthy India possessed special advantages in procuring positions as administrators, bureaucrats, and men of the pen. Since the Safavid regime in Iran presided over a mass conversion to Imami Shi‘ism, immigrants during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often brought with them a Shi‘i identity. Nor were the numbers of such settlers small. The French jeweler and merchant Chardin gave as one reason for Iran's under-population in the late seventeenth century the exodus to India.[31] In fact, it seems unlikely that enough Iranians left for the subcontinent to affect Iran's population, but Chardin's observation underscores the large number of Iranians he saw in India. In the 1660s, most of these immigrants must have been Shi‘is. During the early reign of the Mughal emperor Awrangzib, 1658-78, out of 486 high-office holders 136, or 28 percent, were Iranians.[32] These mostly Shi‘i Iranians often hid their beliefs at the Sunni Mughal court. If one added to the Iranians the number of Indian Shi‘i officeholders (e.g., the Barhah Sayyids), the proportion of Shi‘i nobles would reach one-third. Moreover, nearly half of the fifty-one highest-office holders were Ira-
Musharraf ‘Ali Khan Lakhnavi, ed., Bayaz-i masa'il , 3 vols. (Lucknow: n.p., 1251/1835-36), 3·85. This is an important collection of legal decisions made in the early 1830s by Lucknow's chief mujtahids, particularly S Muhammad and S Husayn Nasirabadi.
Crooke, Tribes and Castes 4 3-6
Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906. A Quest for Identity . (Delhi Oxford Univ Press, 1981), pp. 14-15
Sir John Chardin Travels in Persia (London Argonaut Press, 1927), pp. 130, 139
M. Athai Ali, The Mughal Nobility, under Aurangzeb (Bombay Asia Publishing House, 1966), pp. 19-20, 175-271.
nians. The conflict between the Shi‘i Iranians and the Sunni central Asian Turks along religious and ethnic lines much influenced court politics.[33]
In 1891 nearly half of all the Mughals in the North-West Provinces and Oudh resided in the comparatively small area of Awadh (Oudh) proper. Although they constituted only 3 percent of the noble castes in the whole area, they were almost 6 percent of the ashraf in Awadh. This without doubt reflects the employment opportunities offered them by the Awadh state during the nineteenth century, as the British abolished the old Muslim bureaucracies in Delhi and Bengal.
More than 50 percent of the Mughals in Awadh resided in Lucknow and Faizabad districts, the two great administrative centers of the region, over 40 percent dwelling in Lucknow alone. The only other major Mughal population center was Sitapur district; but Mughal immigration there was probably spurred by the post-annexation splendor of the Mahmudabad estate and most likely did not represent a feature of nawabi Awadh. Two-thirds of the Mughals were not classed under any ethnic subdivisions in the census, but large numbers were Shi‘i Iranians. The remaining third fell into three groups: Chaghatai Turks, Turkman, and Qizilbash. Of the three, the Qizilbash constituted the smallest group, with only 1,237 listed. All Shi‘is, they played an important role in establishing Shi‘ism both in Iran and in the subcontinent, and most of them lived in Awadh proper.
The Qizilbash, originally a federation of Turkish-speaking tribes in Anatolia, moved east in the fifteenth century because of increasing Ottoman control over their grazing lands. They lent their aid in the establishment of the Shi‘i Safavid state in Iran.[34] Over two centuries later some served in Nadir Shah's army, playing a central role in the invasion of India and in the sack of Delhi in 1739. The second nawab of Awadh, Safdar Jang (1739-54), made it a point to employ Iranian Mughals for his cavalry, as well as Kashmiri Shi‘is who imitated the Iranians in speech and dress. He hired away six or seven thousand Qizilbash warriors from Nadir Shah's army. Their subsequent career was checkered, and after the defeat of his forces at the hands of the British at Baksar in 1764, Nawab Shujacu'd-Dawlah dismissed many of them and even razed some of the Mughals' houses.[35] Nevertheless, the Iranian traveler Shushtari found large numbers of Qizilbash notables in Lucknow in 1796.[36] Many Qizilbash cavalrymen may have sunk into the laboring classes in Faizabad and Lucknow, losing their original identity, and the confused lineage of Mughals, owing to their tendency to intermarry with other groups,
Jagadish Narayan Saikar, A Study of Eighteenth Century India , vol. 1, Political History. 1707-1761 (Calcutta Saraswat, 1976), pp 24ff
Amin Banani, "Reflections on the Social and Economic Structure of Safavid Persia at Its Zenith," Iranian Studies 11 (19781. 90ff
Muhammad Fayzbakhash, "Tarikh-i farahbakhsh," trans William Hoey, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizabad , 2 vols. (Allahabad: Government Press, 1888-89), 2·4
‘Abdu'l-Latif Shushtari, "Tuhfat al-calam," fol 193b, Add. 23, 533, British Lib.
including Hindus, may have caused their reported numbers to be low.[37] On the other hand, the Qizilbash would have taken local wives and raised substantial numbers of Shi‘i children. Some Rajput converts to Islam attempted to create a Mughal identity for themselves, which may often have involved affecting Iranian, Shi‘i ways.
Although most of the Turkish Mughals adhered to Sunnism, even they sometimes, like others in the upper class, adopted Shi‘ism in the eighteenth century. An example is the family of Khwaja Musa Khan, a professed descendant of the Sufi leader Baha'u'd-Din Naqshband. Emigrating from central Asia to India early in the eighteenth century, he married into the Mughal royal family. Under the influence of Burhanu'l-Mulk, the first nawab of Awadh, he became a Shi‘i. His son, Madaru'd-Dawlah, refused to practice dissimulation in Sunni-dominated Delhi, openly mourning the Imam Husayn during Muharram. His daughter married Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan of Awadh, and his son-in-law granted him a huge rent-free holding worth Rs. 60,000 per year.[38] This Turkish family with staunch Sunni origins employed its adherence to Shi‘ism as a means to cement relations with rising Shi‘i powers, such as the nawabs of Awadh.
By far the most numerous of the ashraf groups were the Shaykhs and Pathans. Over half of the "noble" caste members in North-Western Provinces and Oudh were Shaykhs.[39] In Awadh the proportion was slightly less, about 46 percent. Most asserted their descent from the first three caliphs or from other companions of the Prophet. The upper-class Shaykhs, often middle or large landholders in the districts, dwelt in qasabahs alongside the Sayyids. But many village and urban artisans and skilled laborers said they were Shaykhs, which accounts for their huge numbers. Shaykhs tended to be Sunnis, though some became partisans of ‘Ali and his eleven descendants. Many Sunni Shaykhs did commemorate the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn, though they frowned on the violent self-flagellation of the Imamis and could not abide the Shi‘i practice of pronouncing imprecations on the first three caliphs.
Pathans, descendants of Pushtu-speaking tribesmen, roamed down into North India from Afghanistan and the area around Peshawar throughout the medieval period. The eighteenth century witnessed a particularly great influx of Pukhtun tribesmen, who in their Indian environment became "Pathans" if they were accepted as noble, but remained known simply by their tribal names (e.g., Ruhilah) if such pretensions were rejected. The 700,000 of them in the province in the late nineteenth century constituted a third of the members of the "noble" castes. Earlier in the century many of
Husayn, Tarikh-i Ja'is , pp 9-10.
Ghulam ‘Ali Naqavi, ‘Imad as-sacadat (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1897), p. 126.
Crooke, Tribes and Castes 4·314-17
them roamed as pastoral nomads, some settling as landlords and warriors in the fortified qasabahs . Many became artisans and skilled laborers before the 1891 census. Rajput converts often attempted to usurp Pathan status.
Pathans, mostly originally Sunnis, generally retained their ancestral faith in North India. Some few may have been Persian-speaking Shi‘i Hazaras who joined Pukhtuns in southward migrations, or Shi‘i Afghans from the Upper Bangash.[40] Elphinstone, who visited the Peshawar region in 1808-9, found Afghans extremely hostile to Shi‘i practices.[41] Many Pathans in North India did take up the practice of commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, though in the middle of the nineteenth century some abandoned the rituals under the influence of Naqshbandi revivalism.[42]
The piety and spiritual feelings of those who adopted Shi‘ism cannot be glibly explained by the social scientist on an individual level. But the spread of religions among large groups of people does often present patterns amenable to sociological analysis. >From the above discussion, it seems clear that noble castes or status groups reacted to Shi‘i ideology differently according to its implications for their own honor and specialized traditions, and for their economic position. Sayyids, as descendants of the Imams revered by the Shi‘is, gained ideologically by embracing Shi‘ism, and in Shi‘i-ruled nawabi Awadh they could often benefit materially from such a move. They received special charities from the believers, as well as gaining favor with the ruling class. Still, the vast majority of Sayyids remained part of the Sunni community, within which they also had great honor. Mughals were Shi‘i when they were from Iran, strong Sunnis when they were from, say, . In the atmosphere of nawabi Awadh, even Sunni Turkish notables of Mughal status sometimes adopted Shi‘ism. Since Mughal status usually required specialization in the higher levels of administration or in the cavalry as military men and officers, Mughals associated closely with the court and came under special pressures to adopt Shi‘ism.
Shaykhs largely remained Sunni, perhaps partially because most dwelt in provincial cities and towns away from the influence of the Nishapuri court. Moreover, for this group to adopt Shi‘ism required them ritually to curse their own putative ancestors, the caliphs and companions of the Prophet who competed with ‘Ali. This requirement posed no insuperable problems to the adoption of Shi‘ism, but may have slowed the rate at which proud Siddiqi, Faruqi, and ‘Uthmani qasabah elites became partisans of ‘Ali. Pathans, with their strong Sunni feelings, seldom embraced Shi‘ism and more often competed with the established Sayyid families in Awadh for land and power.
Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul , 2 vols. (Karachi: Oxford Univ. Press, repr. 1972), 2:51.
Ibid, 1:269-71.
Nauganavi, Tazkirah-'i be-baha , pp. 175-76.
Artisans and Craftsmen
Many members of the four ashraf groups just discussed came from landholding and military families. In the province under study, Muslims were proportionately represented in these rules. They very seldom, however, labored in the countryside, constituting only about 3 percent of the agricultural work force.[43] The Muslim laboring classes worked far more often as village or urban petty artisans and entertainers than as farming peasants.
Muslims were particularly well represented in some occupations. For instance, of 1.8 million weavers almost half were Muslims, though in the general population Muslims constituted about 13 percent. Large weaver conversions to Islam were typical of North India.[44] Indeed, weavers, with 12 percent of the Muslim population, formed the largest Muslim occupational group. Only Shaykhs (21 percent) were more numerous, but the latter is an ethnic rather than an occupational category. In fact, many Skaykhs actually worked as weavers, depending on agriculture part of the time.
Weavers in their urban and semiurban settings strongly felt their Muslim identity, the British ethnographers describing them as "factious and bigotted."[45] Weavers often knew enough of Islamic law in the late nineteenth century to follow the Islamic Law (sharicah ) in matters of marriage and inheritance. But Muslim weavers in small villages sometimes revered local gods. To some extent their anti-British feelings reflected their competition with European textiles and the adverse impact on them of British commerce even from the eighteenth century.[46]
No overall estimate of the number of Shi‘is among the weavers can be given. In the extremely important textile center of Tanda, thirty-six miles east of Faizabad, Shi‘is represented 3 percent of the Muslim population.[47] This accords with other estimates of Shi‘is in the general population of Awadh, although no conclusions can be drawn from one city. Moreover, the small number of persons identifying themselves explicitly as Shi‘is may be misleading, since they often practiced dissimulation out of fear of Sunni neighbors. Shi‘is had great influence even where their numbers were small.
See the chart "Occupation by Religion" in D.C. Baillie, Census of India, 1891 , vols. 26-28, The North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad: N-W P. and Oudh Government Press, 1894), vol. 28, table D. See also Arshad All Azmi, "Position of Agriculture in the Economy of Awadh during the Nawabi Regime," Indian History Congress 29, no. 2 (1967): 82-90, which estimates that 50% of the population was nonagricultural. based on payment of British trade tax. It is likely that even many payers of the tax, however, engaged in at least seasonal agricultural work.
Baillie, Census of India, 1891 , vol. 26, maps at back.
Crooke, Tribes and Castes 3:493.
H Hossain, "The Alienation of Weavers: Impact of the Conflict between the Revenue and Commercial Interests of the East India Company, 1750-1800," Indian Economic and Social History Review 16 (1979): 323-45.
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 3:493.
Tanda had forty-four mosques, thirty-four imambarahs for the commemoration of Imam Husayn's martyrdom, and nine Hindu temples. Clearly, in their devotional lives even the Sunnis included mourning for the wronged family of the Prophet.
A methodological question arises when one speaks of Sunnis and Shi‘is among the artisans and laborers. A revealing passage in the 1891 census suggests that rather inadequate criteria were used to distinguish the two groups: "For the less instructed of Muhammadans and especially amongst Sunnis, the difference between the two sects is little understood, and the enumerator had in general to ascertain the sect by a question as to how the hands were placed in prayer. Sunnis pray with one hand placed over the other in front of the body, Shias with both hands depressed by the sides."[48]
For the many laboring-class Muslims who did not say their daily prayers, such criteria would have been meaningless. Even for those who did, the Shi‘i willingness to compromise out of fear made members of that group less likely to insist on performing rituals in their own way. Those who reported themselves as Shi‘i were therefore much more likely to be literate and well-off, laboring-class Shi‘is being undercounted.
Other Muslim occupational groups with large numbers included barbers, oil-dealers, tailors, butchers, water-bearers, washermen, and blacksmiths. These seven groups together with the weavers accounted for more than a quarter (26.5 percent) of all Muslims. Other, smaller, such occupational castes brought the total in the category of skilled and specialized workers to 37 percent. Given that many Shaykhs and Pathans also worked as artisans, one receives the impression that most Muslims formed part of a premodern petty bourgeoisie. The successful traders, shopkeepers, owners of small workshops, and skilled artisans among these nonlanded Muslims often had some appreciation of the requirements of scriptural religion, as the ethnographic reports make clear. Low-caste and unskilled groups, and recent converts from Hinduism, tended to practice many Hindu usages.
Muslims were far more likely than Hindus to live in urban settings. The 1881 census showed that only 7 percent of Hindus lived in towns and cities, whereas 25 percent of Muslims did.[49] Since over 96 percent of agricultural laborers were Hindus, the Muslims who did not live in towns dwelt in large rather than small villages, where they could pursue their skilled crafts. Of course, the very large proportion of Hindus in the population (87 percent in 1891) meant that they constituted a majority in most urban settlements. They also dominated commerce. Bayly has insightfully described the rural and urban relations of Hindus and Muslims as a mirror image. The qasabah-
Baillie, Census of India, 1891 26.177.
Edmund White, ed., Report on the Census of the North-Western Progenies and Oudh . . . Taken on the 17th February, 1881 (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1882), p. 8.
based Muslim landholders employed Hindu peasant labor on their lands, whereas the urban Hindu merchants and traders employed Muslim craftsmen.[50]
One traditional explanation for Hindu-Muslim conversion has been that low-caste groups or those who lost their caste standing attempted to take themselves out of the Hindu system to remove the stigma.[51] Conversion, however, also clearly followed patronage networks. Indeed, one explanation for the high number of Muslim weavers in North India may lie in the production of such groups for the Muslim landed classes and for Muslim rulers. The links built up between the weavers and their Muslim patrons facilitated conversion to Islam, especially in a society where people felt strongly about purity and pollution in something as personal as clothing. Likewise, Muslim water carriers (bihishtis ) served Muslim households.[52]
The same principle of conversion along lines of patronage applied to the spread of Shi‘ism. With a rising Imami regional court in eighteenth-century Awadh, the patronage of Shi‘i notables became a major input into the economy. One finds groups servicing the elite split into Sunni and Shi‘i factions, which often became endogamous. An example is the bards and storytellers (naqqals ), Sunnis except in Awadh urban centers, where they became Shi‘is. Members of the two sectarian divisions did not intermarry. Likewise, the dyer caste, which dyed cloth, divided into endogamous Sunni and Shi‘i groups. In the upper Doab, servants and peasants of Shi‘i Sayyid proprietors became Shi‘is under the influence of their masters. This phenomenon occurred widely in Awadh as well. Many artisans had reason to be grateful for Shi‘i rituals, such as parading replicas of the Imam Husayn's tomb, which generated work for them and even brought into being new crafts, such as that of the ara'ishvalas who constructed the cenotaphs. Cenotaph construction became a major craft in Awadh, and the makers of these ritual props took their place in the bazaars beside the butchers and greengrocers.[53]
Courtesans (tava'if ), another lower-class group dependent on patronage, became Shi‘is in great numbers. About 85 percent of the courtesans counted by the British were Muslims, many of them Shi‘is. Originally mostly low-caste Hindus, often these women came from the ranks of widows. The men of the caste married, and their wives remained faithful, being purchased from other castes. The women born into the caste became dancing girls and often prostitutes. Girls began to be educated in the appropriate arts at age eight, at which time their parents offered sweetmeats at the local mosque, to be given
Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars , p. 193
White, Report on the Census, 1881 , pp 62-63.
Crooke, Tribes and Castes 2:99-101.
Ibid., 1:256-59; 4.229-32; Nnautavi, Tarikh-i anvar as-sadat , pp. 468-69; W Hoey, A Monograph on Trade and Manufactures in Northern India (Lucknow. American Methodist Mission Press, 1880), p. 56.
to the poor. Shi‘ism attracted this group, since its law permitted temporary marriage (mutcah ), an institution that provided limited legal protection to the courtesan, which simple prostitution did not.[54] Shi‘ism also provided a link of identity with the propertied classes, who patronized and exploited the courtesans, a bond that might have proven especially useful to the men of the caste, who acted as pimps. In the rural areas zamindars often assigned lands to Muslim dancing girls and prostitutes.[55]
Among Sunni groups that did not embrace Shi‘ism, Shi‘i figures and holy days had an impact, though often in a transformed manner. Sunni shopkeepers of the Ranki caste cornmemorated Muharram, the Shi‘i month of mourning for the Imam Husayn, by getting drunk. The Sunnis of Dalmau held a fair at Muharram, which 6,000 people attended annually.[56] Days that might for strict Shi‘is be a solemn period of bereavement, in which they pursued no economic activity, became for Sunni villagers an occasion of gaiety or an opportunity for trade. This implied no hostility to Shi‘ism, since all honored the Imam Husayn. It did represent a more typically Indian response to the sacred time of Muharram than the austere mourning rites that Imamis imported from Iran.
Shi‘ism among artisans and laborers went through various permutations, partially because they had little personal contact with the literate of their own branch of Islam, often not having close links with the high ulama identified with the court. The grain parchers (bharbunja ) included Muslims who, when they married, called a Hindu pandit first, then a Muslim mawlavi. 57 Indigent Muslims could not afford the services of the official qazis and ulama, resorting instead to the unofficial "mawlavis" of the Dafali caste. Muslim beggars and musicians devoted to the cult of Salar Mascud Ghazi centered in Bahraich, they officiated at the weddings and funerals of the poor.[58]
A devotion to the family of the Prophet existed among Muslim artisans and laborers, but this seldom involved a willingness to curse the caliphs. The nawabi high notables and the Shi‘i clerics sought to play on pro-‘Alid sentiments among the popular classes so as to mobilize them into a scripturalist Imami Shi‘ism that did include ritual imprecations on the first three caliphs. The Shi‘i notables' attempt to bring the popular classes into Imami Shi‘ism
Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 2.395-96; Crooke, Tribes and Castes 4 364-71 This pattern emerged outside Awadh as well, many courtesans in Lahore preferring Shi ism. See Prakash Tandon, Punsabi Century, 1857-1947 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1961), pp 188-89.
Donald Butter, Outlines of the Topography and Statistics of the Southern Districts of Oud'h and the Cantonment of Sultanpur-Oud'h (Calcutta' Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1839), pp. 153-54.
Crooke, Tribes and Castes 3:1-8; Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh 3:205, cf. A. R. Saiyid, "Ideal and Reality in the Observance of Moharram: A Behavioural Interpretation," in Imtiaz Ahmad, ed., Ritual and Religion among Muslims in India (New Delhi. Manohar, 1981 ), pp. 113-42.
Crooke, Tribes and Castes 2:13-19.
Ibid., 2:239-44.
succeeded most fully when these artisans and laborers worked for a Shi‘i patron. On the one hand, Imami religious ideas spread along patronage networks among the poorer classes; on the other, artisans and laborers clearly created their own religious culture, devoting themselves to the family of the Prophet for their own reasons. The sense of oppression and martyrdom that pervades Shi‘i stories of the Imams no doubt aroused the sympathies of people themselves oppressed by North India's prebendal feudalism.
Sufism and Shi'ism
In addition to the Dafalis a huge. number of Muslim holy men wandered North India, many of them holding the Shi‘i Imams in special reverence and helping spread Imami ideas among laborers and artisans. The holy men (faqirs ) of the largest of the mass orders, the Madariyyah, did not strictly follow the prescriptions of scriptural law. The 150,000 holy men of the Madariyyah in late-nineteenth-century North India constituted 2.3 percent of the Muslim population. The number of lay devotees must have run into the millions. The Madariyyah cult centered on the shrine of Shah Madar at Makanpur, a saint who arrived in India from Aleppo, Syria, in the fifteenth century. The Madari holy men imitated the Hindu holy men (sanyasis ), seldom prayed or fasted, and used bhang (akin to hashish) freely. Some were settled family men; others wandered about. They revered in particular four sacred personages: Muhammad, Imams ‘Ali and Husayn, and Hasan al-Basri.[59] The emphasis on ‘Ali and Husayn, rather than on Abu Bakr and ‘Umar, represented a proto-Shi‘i devotion to the family of the Prophet.
Other, much smaller unorthodox (bi-sharc ) orders included the Qalandar, Azad, Bi-Nava, and Sain groups. The literate, urban orders of the Qadiriyyah, Chishtiyyah, and Jalaliyyah Suhravardiyyah averaged only four or five thousand faqirs each. Although almost all historiography of Islam in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North India has been locked into a fascination with the Delhi-based Naqshbandiyyah order, it was clearly not very important in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, where census enumerators found only 658 Naqshbandi faqirs.[60] If one takes the number of faqirs enumerated as an indicator of popular support, it is clear that only the Madariyyah was a truly mass order. As such, it was most influential, though it has been greatly neglected in the historical literature. Among the literate
For Shah Madar and his cult. see George Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egvpt in the Years 1802. 1803. 1804, 1805 and 1806, 4 vols. (London: F. G and J. Rivington, 1811). 1:160-63, Jacfar Sharif, Islam in India, or the Qanun-i-Islam , trans. G. A. Herklots (London: Oxford Univ Press, 1921), pp. 195-96, Crooke, Tribes and Castes 3 397-40 Mian Muhammad Saeed. The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur A Political and Cultural History (Karachi: Univ of Karachi Press, 1972), pp 274-77; and M Gaborieau, Minorités musulmanes dans le royaume hindou du Nepal (Nanterre: Laboratoire d'Ethnologie, 1977), pp 122-27
Crooke, Tribes and Castes , orders listed in alphabetical order.
orders, the Chishtiyyah often showed a tolerance of Shi‘ism.[61] Shirvani, who visited India early in the nineteenth century, found that members of the Jalali Suhravardi order considered themselves Shi‘is and cursed the Sunni caliphs. Many of these dervishes, he reported, neglected orthodox rituals and used drugs.[62] The thousands of members of the Jalali order in North India no doubt helped spread Shi‘i ideas among the popular classes.
Conclusion
Imami Shi'ism existed in Awadh as a popular and not just a ruling-class cultural force. Admittedly, its most powerful proponents were the ethnic Iranians in the upper echelons of government administration and the middle landholding Sayyids. Among some other groups, including the semiurban and urban artisans and laborers, a cult of the Prophet's family existed, although the status of some of these persons as Shi‘is remains unclear. Early in the eighteenth century most of these popular-class believers probably saw no contradiction between devotion to ‘Ali, his wife Fatimah, and their descendants, on the one hand, and honoring the first three caliphs, on the other. As the nawabi state and its clerical clients began promoting Shi‘ism as an exclusivist ideology, some artisans and laborers made a choice for the family of the Prophet and against the caliphs. The group that was mobilized into exclusivist Shi‘ism grew throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The majority of the Muslim population, however, continued to honor both the family of the Prophet and the caliphs.
The centers of Shi‘i population, as revealed by the 1881 census, show a barbell stretched across the North-Western Provinces and Oudh from Muzaffarnagar to Ghazipur.[63] Ironically, aside from those in Lucknow and Faizabad districts, most Shi‘is lived in the upper Doab and in Banaras division. Nawab Shujacu'd-Dawlah had controlled these areas, but the nawabs gradually ceded them to the East India Company in 1775-1801. In the north, the number of declared (and therefore probably only the literate) Shi‘is approached or exceeded 10,000 in Muzaffarnagar, Bulandshahr, and Moradabad, with Bijnor at nearly 6,000. In the southeast the districts with about 10,000 included Allahabad, Jaunpur, and Azamgarh. At the center of the Shi‘i demographic map stood Lucknow district, with 34,550 Imamis, the only district where they exceeded or even approached 5 percent of the population, being 30 percent of the Muslims there. Faizabad had over 11,000 Shi‘is, and Bara Banki over 5,000. The rest of Awadh proper had few Shi‘is.
Ibid., 2:228-30; Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah ‘Abdu'l-‘Aziz : Puritanism, Sectarian Polemics, and Jihad (Canberra: Macrifat, 1982), pp. 373-77.
Zaynu'l-‘Abidin Shirvani, Bustan as-siyahah (Tehran: n.p., 1897), pp. 122-23.
White, Report on the Census of 1881 , Form II:2-3.
This pattern suggests that, although the nawabi court encouraged conversion in, and attracted Shi‘is to, its administrative centers, in several districts outside their dominions in the nineteenth century Shi‘ism formed a popular movement independent of the nawabs. The great numbers of Imamis in Lucknow and Faizabad also represent to some extent the amount of talent attracted to the nawabi centers, not only from Awadh, but from the upper Doab and Banaras and Allahabad divisions. Although the census revealed a relatively small number of Imami Shi‘is in northern India, about 3 percent of the Muslims, the movement extended over large areas geographically and attracted adherents from all social classes and status groups. For the reasons discussed above, the census probably undercounted Shi‘is. Whatever their numbers, the Imamis represented a vigorous and influential subculture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century northern India.
4
Popular Shi'ism
The account of the Awadh Shi‘is' social origins in the preceding chapter explains why scattered Shi‘i lineages existed to support the Nishapuri nawabs and to benefit from their rule. But it does not explain how these Shi‘i or proto-Shi‘i groupings developed into a community. In the Mughal period, and especially under Awrangzib, Shi‘is had no public rituals separate from Sunnis which could serve as the matrix of community formation. Religious identity and social networks within a genuine religious community could only grow up around a set of uniting public rituals. Under the patronage of the nawabs and their Shi‘i courtiers and notables, such public rituals developed in Awadh.[1]
The Shi‘is of nawabi Awadh created a distinctive set of practices and rituals. Many new believers in the Imams entered the fold in this period, making their own contributions. Their rituals changed over time, shrines grew up, and lay believers of various classes and both sexes practiced their faith in their own ways, sometimes in opposition to the strictures of the growing corps of scripturalist ulama. Large numbers of Sunnis and Hindus were drawn into participation in the mourning rites for the martyred Imam Husayn, bringing their own influence to bear. Yet popular Shi‘i practices most often resulted from the cultural dynamism and creativity of ordinary laborers, artisans, and shopkeepers, themselves partisans of ‘Ali, rather than de-
My conception of a growing community identity that could lead to communalism derives from Sandria Freitag, "Religious Rites and Riots: >From Community Identity to Communalism in North India, 1870-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1980); clearly, however, here I am discussing a much earlier phase, which might be called community formation.
riving from "corruption" by Hinduism. As Turner argues, popular religion involves a specialization of religious services for different lay markets.[2]
The rites of popular Shi‘ism in early-nineteenth-century Awadh had two conflicting effects. On the one hand, widespread urban participation in Muharram rituals helped integrate, through a central ritual, the nawabi cities' diverse and growing populations. Lucknow's patron saint became the Imam Husayn. On the other hand, the divisive nature of some Shi‘i practices, especially cursing the caliphs honored by Sunnis and forbidding Hindu celebrations during Muharram, encouraged the growth of an incipient communalism.
The Nawabi Transformation of Lucknow
Under the nawabs, Lucknow became the Realm of the Shi‘ah (Dar ash-Shi‘ah). There, artisans and laborers who newly adopted the faith of the Twelvers inventively honored the Imams. The nawabs' administrative and architectural transformation of the city formed a crucial prerequisite for this development. Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah (1775-97) moved the Shi‘i nawabi court from Faizabad to Lucknow in 1775. Already more than a small town then—indeed, a major textile-producing center—it had often served as the region's administrative capital.[3] Nevertheless, the 1775 move marked the beginning of a new era.
When the nawabs lived primarily in Delhi they could change the provincial capital according to their perception of military and security needs.[4] From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, they found themselves increasingly boxed in by the British. Unchanging territorial boundaries after 1801 and a stabilization of revenue collection within them brought into existence a fixed capital wherein the service elite congregated. For several decades Faizabad, with its begams, large landholders, and tax-farmers, continued to compete with Lucknow. But the capital soon grew so large that it constituted the only true metropolis in Awadh and one of the great cities of the subcontinent.
The huge expenditures by the notables based in the capital supported tens of thousands of artisans and attracted merchants "of large property" from all over India.[5] The substantial textile and horse trade between Kashmir and
Bryan S. Turner, For Weber (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 126.
See Rosie Llewelyn-Jones, "The City of Lucknow before 1856," in K. Ballhatchet and J. Harrison, eds., The City in South Asia, Pre-Modern and Modern (London: Curzon Press, 1980), pp. 91-98; and H. K. Naqvi, Urban Centres and Industries in Upper India, 1556-1803 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1968), p. 139.
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 115-17.
Viscount George Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India , 4 vols. (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811), 1:120.
Bengal passed through Lucknow, and the town increased rapidly in extent and population. In 1799 Tennant put the city's population at half a million (probably an exaggeration) and marveled at the wide-ranging architectural works undertaken under Asafu'd-Dawlah. "There are," he wrote, "perhaps no buildings in Britain equally brilliant in external appearance as the palaces of Lucknow."[6] But he also remarked on the city's great poverty, filth, and vice, and on the large number of idle workers and artisans.
Asafu'd-Dawlah implemented an extensive building program, tearing down old buildings to landscape spacious gardens in the Persian style. Indeed, the city grew so fast in the 1770s and 1780s that Azfari found it "unbalanced" (na-mawzun ). The: building program was given added impetus by the drought years of 1784-85, when, even in Awadh, no rain fell for an entire year. The areas to the west were even more badly hit, causing a great influx of refugees into Lucknow. Laborers and peasants suffered terribly, many being sold as slaves, and the price of wheat in the capital went up to an astronomical nine or ten sers to the rupee. Sayyid ‘Abbas Ardistani's grandfather could remember the drought and told him that people were reduced to eating animal dung.[7]
Asafu'd-Dawlah, Hasan Riza Khan, and Tikait Ray, in response to this crisis, initiated construction projects on an almost pharaonic scale as a means of absorbing the influx of laborers thrown off the land and of avoiding urban food riots. In 1785 several large works began, including a market, Tikaitganj; a huge gate, the Rumi Darvazah; and the Great Imambarah. Thousands of workers labored day and night on these projects for several years. Tradition has it that even men of respectable family worked incognito at night to earn food. The nawab-vizier spent a million rupees a year on buildings, and his many projects fueled a spiraling inflation rate as construction materials and food soared in price.[8]
Lucknow's population may have increased in the period 1775-1800 from two hundred to three hundred thousand.[9] In about 1805 Shirvani estimated that the city had 100,000 dwellings, 30,000 shops, 2,000 taverns, and 1,000 mosques.[10] The expansion was spurred not only by government-sponsored employment and markets and the famine but also by a spurt in the growth of
Reverend Wilham Tennant, Indian Recreations , 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1804), 2:405.
‘Ali Bakht Azfari, Vaqicat-i Azfari , ed. T. Chandrasekharan (Madras Nuri Press, 1957), p 96; cf. Incam ‘Ali, "Awsaf al-Asaf," Farsi Tarikh, MS 95, foll. 63a-65a, Mawlana Azad Lib., Aligarh Muslim Univ., Aligarh, and Murtaza Bilgrami, Hadiqat al-aqalim (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1879), p. 155; Sayyid ‘Abbas Arsistani, "Al-hisn al-matin fi ahwal al-wuzara,' wa's-salatin," 2 vols., Arabic MSS 235a-b, 1.94, Nat'l Archives of India, New Delhi; see also H. R. Nevill, ed., Lucknow DG (Allahabad: Government Press, 1904), p. 30.
Abu Talib Isfahani, Tafdih al-ghafilin , trans. W. Hoey (Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, repr. 1971), pp. 72-73
Llewelyn-Jones, "The City of Lucknow before 1856," p. 104.
Zaynu'l-‘Abidin Shirvani, Bustan as-siyahah (Tehran: n.p., 1897), p. 523.
the textile trade with Calcutta. The resulting influx of uprooted Muslim and Hindu laborers and artisans into the city created new social networks and cultural traditions. Because of the pervasive influence of the Shi‘i ruling class in the capital, they often adopted some Imami practices even where they retained a formal adherence to Sunnism or Hinduism. Urban immigrants held Shi‘i-style mourning sessions for the Imam Husayn, and Muharram processions, organizing them on a neighborhood basis.
The Institution of the Imambarah
The need for a physical site where the partisans of Imam ‘Ali could publicly mourn his martyred son, Husayn, brought into being the Great Imambarah and smaller similar structures. Nawab Safdar Jang raised a building for this purpose in Delhi, though the term imambarah (Urdu for house of the Imam) had not then come widely into use. During Shujacu'd-Dawlah's reign ,Aqa Baqir Khan constructed an imambarah in Lucknow for his nephew, a high Mughal official, and the edifice served as a model for the Husaynabad Imambarah almost a century later. The north Indian imambarah of the eighteenth century may have been influenced by the Iranian Husayniyyah , or takiyyah , and by the south Indian cashur-khanah .[11]
The court invited architects to submit designs for the Great Imamabarah, the winner being the Delhi architect Kifayatu'llah. Because neither the Mughal emperor nor the nawab-vizier controlled Rajasthan any longer, the sort of marble used in the facade of the Persianate Taj Mahal proved unobtainable, and Kifayatu'llah was forced to have his engineers fall back on more native Indian techniques. They used clay bricks and stone, with ingenious mud molding that allowed the architect to achieve an immense, unsupported ceiling "more durable. . . than our most scientific Gothic vaulting."12 Mashhadi estimated the cost of the building at half a million rupees, but the Iranian traveler Shushtari put the Imamabarah and mosque complex with its lavish decorations at a million rupees.[13]
Isfahani also attested to the huge expenditures made by the nawabi court on the Imambarah and its ornamentation.[14] He said that even after the building's completion in 1791 (A.H. 1205) the nawab spent four or five hun-
K. A. Nizami, "Imam-bara," EI 2 ; S. Agha Mihdi Lakhnavi, Tarikh-i Lakhna'u (Karachi: Jamciyyat-i Khuddam-i ‘Aza, 1976), pp 152-53
James Ferguson et al., History of Indian and Eastern Architecture , 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1910), 2·328-29.
For the building of the Imambarah, see ‘Abdu'l-Latif Shushtari, "Tuhfat al-calam," add. 23,533, British Lib. fol. 194a (the figure mentioned is 2 crores, but an Iranian crore equals half a million, or five lakhs); Murtaza Bilgrami, Hadiqat , p 155; Kamalu'd-Din Haydar Husayni Mashhadi, Savanthat-i Salatin-i Avadh (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1896), p 112; Nevill, ed, Lucknow DG , pp 30, 203.
Isfahani, Tafdih al-ghafilin , Hoey trans., pp 73ff
dred thousand rupees on its decoration annually. Hundreds of gold and silver replicas of the Imam Husayn's tomb in Karbala were placed in the edifice as offerings to the Imam, along with innumerable glass chandeliers and candelabra. These offerings left no room for spectators and mourners to sit in the main hall. Valentia wrote that the Imambarah was stunningly illuminated with candles during the month of Muharram, and that in various parts of the building believers said prayers. He remarked that "every evening all unbelievers and followers of Omar, Othman, and Abu Bakr were anathematised, to the edification of the Hindoos, who, on this occasion, crowded there in great numbers."[15]
Asafu'd-Dawlah's courtiers emulated his construction program in their own areas, so that in every neighborhood they put up new mansions, imambarahs , and mosques.[16] Hasan Riza Khan built an imambarah and a mosque, and as soon as his mosque was ready he transferred Friday prayers there from his palace. Later they were held in the large mosque Asafu'd-Dawlah constructed next to the Great Imambarah.[17] Most of Lucknow's Shi‘i grandees, the likes of Afarin ‘Ali Khan, Tahsin ‘Ali Khan, Ramadan ‘Ali Khan, and Tajammul Husayn Khan, built imambarahs in this period, as did many Sunnis and Hindus. In the early 1800s some 2,000 large imambarahs and 6,000 smaller tacziyah-khanahs embellished Lucknow.[18] The eminent Shi‘i cleric Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi constructed an imambarah in the early 1790s, which became a major center of religious culture and a burial site for many Shi‘i ulama.[19] For the notable class, imambarahs performed many functions. They served as places for ritual mourning and worship, as literary salons, as personal monuments, arid as family cemeteries. Increasingly the endowment (waqf ) of such buildings became a secure means of passing on wealth to future generations, since they could not then be sold and any income associated with them could be assigned to descendants as remuneration for supervision.[20] This institution also provided employment to subaltern ulama, who served as caretakers and read Qur'an verses for the deceased.
Notables spent much less on such buildings than did the nawab and his immediate circle, however. For instance, Mirza Jangali had a monthly allowance of Rs. 3,000 from his brother, Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan. He bought a
Valentia, Voyages and Travels , 1:122-23.
Isfahani; Tafdih al-ghafilin Hoey trans., p. 72.
Mihdi Lakhnavi, Tarikh-i Lakhna'u , p. 49.
See, e.g., ibid., pp 49-50, 77.127, 182-83, 192-93; and Zaynu'l-‘Abidin Shirvani, Riyad as-siyahah , 3 vols. (Moscow: Shucbah-'i Adabiyyat-i Khavar, 1974), 3:1053.
Mihdi Lakhnavi, Tarikh-i Lakhna'u , pp. 154-55; M. H. Zaidi, "Eine Einführung zu der Muharram-Feierlichkeiten von Lucknow zur Zeit der Avadh Dynastie, 1722-1856," Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morganlandische Gesellschaft Supp. 3 (1977) 639.
Cf. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, "Najat as-sa'ilin," Fiqh Shi'ah, Persian MS 256, fol. 7a, Nasiriyyah Lib, Lucknow. This is a collection of legal rulings by Lucknow's first chief mujtahid, made in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
piece of land in Patna toward the end of his life for Rs. 3,000 and built a mosque and an imambarah on it. He appointed Rs. 50 per month for a manager, a caretaker, and the expenses of Qur'an readings and prayers. When the Mirza died he was buried on the grounds of this complex. Later nawabs continued the pension to his descendants, including the money for the upkeep of the imambarah and the mosque, but the British cut it off because of the family's involvement in the 1857-58 rebellion.[21] In contrast to Iran, such endowments rarely came under the supervision of the high ulama. In the case just cited the deceased's own sons supervised the endowment.
The elegiac poetry that dominated the religious culture of the imambarahs gave more public exposure to poets and reciters than to the staid ulama. Asafu'd-Dawlah's court attracted numerous poets and reciters of elegies (marsiyyah-khvans ), who came to hold an important place in public life. Mirza Muhammad Riza, a friend of Hasan Riza Khan's and the greatest reader of elegies in his day, used to chant from the Qur'an at the commemorations of Nawab Shujacu'd-Dawlah's passing held by his widow in Faizabad.[22] Elegy reciters, such as Mulla Muhammad Shushtari and Shah Husayn Vilayat, came to Lucknow from Iran, and found appreciation at the nawab's court. Asafu'd-Dawlah appointed Shushtari, a poet and rawzah-khvan with some clerical training, to recite elegies in the Great Imambarah. An expert in music (an art forbidden by the legalistic ulama), he had a beautiful voice, which could melt peoples' hearts.[23]
Poets, such as Mirza Raficu'd-Din Sawda and Mir Taqi Mir, began making their way to Lucknow from fading Delhi, where they often turned their talents to religious elegiac, or marthiyyah , poetry. Some, such as Miyan Sikandar, Gada, Miskin, and Afsurdah, began specializing in the marthiyyah . In the late eighteenth century poets replaced the four-line form of the Urdu elegy, favored in the Deccan, with a more reflective six lines, beginning a transition to the almost epic feel of the mid-nineteenth-century elegies- of Imam Husayn.[24]
The poetry had both a literary and a ritual purpose. As ritual, reciters read it at mourning sessions as a means of making present the eternal, sacred time of ‘Ashura', when the Prince of Martyrs redeemed Muslims with his
Farzand ‘Ali Khan to Chief Commissioner. Oudh, 7.9 60, Board of Revenue, Lucknow File 2607, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow.
Muhammad Fayzbakhsh, Tarikh-i farahbakhsh , trans William Hoey, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizabad , 2 vols (Allahabad: Government Press, 1888-89), 2 112.
Shushtari, "Tuhfat al-calam," foll. 197b-198a; Azfari, Vaqicat , pp. 104-5.
See Muhammad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature (London: Oxford Univ Press, 1964), ch. 9; Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Three Mughal Poets. Mir, Sauda, Mir Hasan (Cambridge. Harvard Univ. Press, 1968); ‘Abdu'l-Halim Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u: mashriqi tamaddun ka akhiri namunah (Lucknow: Nasim Book Depot, 1974), pp. 100-1; trans. E. S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussam as Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976), p. 84. Cf. Zahra Eqbal, "Elegy in the Qajar Period," m Peter J. Chelkowski, ed, Tacziyeh : Ritual and Drama in Iran (New York New York Univ. Press, 1979)
blood. The rhythmic character of poetry lent itself to this task better than prose, the mourners working the rhythms into their fiagellations. The symbolic appeal of Husayn for the Shi‘is of Awadh, who felt themselves to be in exile from Arabia or Iran, is well demonstrated by one of Mir's verses. Imam Husayn stands facing his bloodthirsty foes after the loss of most of his supporting troops, holding his infant son, ‘Ali Asghar. He addresses the Syrians, saying:
I now swear to you an oath
that I shall restore my honor
I shall go elsewhere, having left this Arab
army; I shall make India my abode.[25]
Even Sunni scholars, such as Mawlavi Mubin Farangi-Mahalli (d.1810), made contributions to devotional literature mourning the Imam Husayn. Shi‘i ulama worked the events of Karbala into their sermons, and produced studies of the tragedy based on Arabic oral reports from the Imams.[26]
The development of the imambarah as an architectural form under the patronage of the nawabi court and courtiers provided a crucial meeting place for Shi‘is. The Shi‘i community, previously scattered and reticent, could now come out in public to commemorate the death of its Imams. Although the notable classes met in salons in any case, Shi‘i tradespeople and laborers might otherwise have had no place to make one another's acquaintance. The imambarahs and smaller buildings, as well as the homes of believers, became centers of new Shi‘i social networks and places where displaced Sunnis and Hindus could adopt Shi‘ism.
The Shrine to the Standard of Hazrat ‘Abbas
Popular religion in northern India often centered on the tombs of holy men, and Shi‘is no doubt yearned for a like institution within their own branch of Islam. In the late eighteenth century such a shrine grew up. One Mirza Faqir Beg returned to Lucknow with a relic from the shrine city of Karbala in
Mir Taqi Mir, Kulliyai i Mir .
ed. S Ihtisham Husayn, 2 vols. (Allahabad Ram
Naram Lal Beni Madhu. 1972), 2·259
Yeh karta hun main tum se payman ab
keh namus apna utha'un ga sab
kis-su aur ja'un ga chhora 'Arab
javsh Hind apna karun ga maqam
For Mir's marthiyyahs , see Safdar Ah,
Mir aur Miriyyat (Bombay ‘Alavi Book
Depot, 1971), pp 342-46
S. Agha Ashhar Lakhnavi, Tadhkirat adh-Dhakirin (Jhansi Shams Press, 1942), p. 26; the death of one of his sons prompted Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali to pioduce one such Karbala hadith study, see his "Itharat al-ahzan," Arabic MS H L. 2292, Khudabakhsh Oriental Public Lib., Patna.
Mamluk Iraq during the reign of Asafu'd-Dawlah (1775-97). He said that a dream helped him unearth the rectal crest that had surmounted the banner of ‘Abbas, the Imam Husayn's half-brother, at the battle of Karbala. He kept the crest. at his home in Rustamnagar, where people began bringing offerings (sing. nazr ) and giving them into his care. The building at first consisted of four bare walls, an unadorned roof, and a small courtyard.[27] The site's growing popularity attracted Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah's attention, and he built a dome for the dervish's house, rendering it a proper shrine.[28] The place became popular for the little people in search of healing, sons, and spiritual blessings, and flower and sweets merchants began doing a booming trade in front of the gate. Brigands and ruffians also began gathering in that part of the town, attracted by the new wealth the shrine brought to Rustamnagar.[29]
A turning point came when Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan fell seriously ill, in about 1801, making a vow to construct a splendid new building for the standard should he recover. Restored to health in 1803, he took out a magmficent procession with his courtiers to the shrine of ‘Abbas, distributing money along the way to the thronging multitudes lining the streets. At the shrine he said a prayer of thanksgiving, then ordered that a new edifice, with an impressive gilded dome, be raised on the site. He established a fund to cover the shrine's expenses, and people began gathering there regularly on Thursday evenings.
As members of the notable class gradually appropriated the shrine to themselves, it became necessary to provide more security. The nawab stationed patrolling police in the vicinity, with a daroghah over them, who cleared out the ruffians.[30] Mrs. All reported that during Muharram "by the condescending permission of the Sovereign, both the rich and the poor are with equal favour admitted," implying that during other months access for the poor was more restricted.[31] Ever more precious offerings were kept at the shrine, including a collection of fifty-two priceless jewels. A woman's quarter was added so that females of the notable class could pray in private.[32] Notable-class women took out processions to the shrine, with great pomp and parade, after giving birth to a male child and after his circumcision. Female relatives and friends, as well as domestics and eunuchs, accompanied them, with the men riding behind and helping guard the sanctuary while the women were inside. Similar processions were taken out by both men and
Ghulam ‘Ali Naqavi, ‘Imad as-sa'adat (Lucknow Naval Kishor, 1897), p 172
Mihdi Lakhnavi, Tarikh-i Lakhna'u , pp 116-17.
Naqavi,Imad , p. 172
Ibid, Ardistani, "Al-hisn al-matin" 156-57
Mrs Meer Hasan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India (London Oxford Univ Press, 1917), p. 36
Mihdi Lakhnavi, Tarikh-i Lakhna'u p 116.
women of the upper classes on their recovery from illness or their preservation from possible danger.
After Mirza Faqir Beg's death his son Fath-‘Ali succeeded him as caretaker of the shrine, which in the 1820s yielded great amounts of cash and clothes, some of which the guardian of the shrine distributed to the poor in charity if he was "a good mart."[33] Finally, the shrine was integrated into the mourning rites of Muharram in Lucknow, a process discussed below. A Sufi Shi‘i whom the ulama would have excoriated as a heretic founded the shrine of ‘Abbas, a purely folk phenomenon. It remained under the supervision of the founding family. Some ulama cast doubts on the authenticity of the crest of ‘Abbas's standard, which the shrine allegedly housed, and this may indicate their own frustration at having so popular a religious phenomenon outside their control.[34] This expression of skepticism had no discernible effect upon the great numbers frequenting the shrine. The notable class made a more successful attempt to assert control over the spiritual resource, and by their patronage they gradually made it and its environs so wealthy that the area had to be strictly policed. The notable class partially restricted the access of the common people, whose creation the shrine had been, so that their ladies might safely visit it.
The shrine was only one manifestation of popular love for the family of the Prophet and belief in the efficacy of supplicating its members. In the event of sickness or loss of property Shi‘is called upon the particular Imam whose characteristics made him suited to deal with the problem. On Fridays believers wrote supplications to the Twelfth Imam, who they thought to rule the world from a supernatural sanctuary until his millennial advent, folding them up and placing them in the Gomti River, certain that they would reach the Imam Mahdi.[35]
Some Shi‘is drew pictures of the Messenger of God and the Imams, based on what they knew of their virtues and appearance, and set them up as household shrines, to which they performed visitation (ziyaral ). When informed of this practice. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali ruled that drawing living things large enough to have a shadow was strictly forbidden in Islam, and that the "visitation" of such images had no meaning.[36]
Another indication of popular beliefs diverging from the mujtahids' orthodoxy was the widespread existence of millenarian expectations among Awadh's Shi‘is. Mrs. All reported that many north Indian Shi‘is believed that the Twelfth Imam would return in A.H. 1260 (A.D. 1844), and that "'When the four quarters of the globe contain Christian inhabitants, and
Ali, Observations , pp 34-35; Naqavi, ‘Imad , p. 172, Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristies of Hindostan , 3 vols. (London. Wm. H Allen and Co., 1835), 2:180.
Mihdi Lakhnavi, Tarikh-i Lakhna'u , p 116.
Ali, Observations , pp. 91, 156.
Nasirabadi, "Najat as-sa'ilin," fol. 21b.
when the Christians approach the confines of the Kaabah, then may men look for that Emaum who is to come.'" The Imam, they believed, would be accompanied by Jesus Christ, and together they would purge the world of wickedness so that" 'all men shall be of one mind and one faith.'"[37]
The Shi‘is of North India keenly felt that they were encompassed by Christian power, which had effectively penetrated their quarter of the globe. The insecurity and cognitive dissonance produced by the extension of East India Company rule were involved in the sentiments expressed to Mrs. All that the old world order was about to be rolled up in 1844. Such millenarian expectations devalued existing institutions, posing. a threat to Establishment figures like the mujtahids.
Household shrines to images of the Imams, and the shrine of ‘Abbas's standard made the sacred, manifested for Shi‘is in the Imams, present to the ordinary folk of Lucknow. Yet the sacred, like material goods, became the object of a struggle for control by various social groups. As the shrine to ‘Abbas's standard drew multitudes, including neighborhood toughs running protection rackets, its prestige caused the court and notables to invest it with wealth and with their own aspirations. This patronage in turn made it necessary for the state and the notables to assert control over the shrine through police and restricted access for the public, who had created the shrine by their hopes. In times of large-scale public ritual performances the notables allowed greater access to the shrine. At the same time, scripturalist ulama attempted to discourage such practices as keeping household shrines to the Imams, with their decentralizing implications for religious authority, and beliefs like millenarianism that undermined faith in the Establishment. Nevertheless, the popular classes in Awadh appropriated the Imams for their own devotion.
Observance of Muharram
The story of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his family, and the ritual observances Shi‘is developed to commemorate it, proved central to the formation of a Shi‘i community in Awadh. This central story, called by Fischer the "Karbala paradigm," communicated profound existential truths about justice and injustice, life and death.[38] The distinctive manner in which Awadh Shi‘is, as well as Sunnis and Hindus, responded to the mourning month of Muharram merits investigation in its own right. But their response is all the more important in that it had implications for communal relations.
Ali, Observations , p 76.
Fischer defines a paradigm as having three elements (1) a story that could include every-day problems, history, and cosmology, (2) a background contrast (e.g., Sunnism), and (3) ritual, or physical drama; see Michael M .J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 13-27
Extravagance marked the observance of the month of ritual mourning, Muharram, during the Asafu'd-Dawlah period. In 1784 the nawab beat himself so violently on the tenth of that month that he bled profusely, falling seriously ill after accompanying representations of the Imam's tomb to the river, into which they were thrown at the end of the day. The nawab's officers followed his example in demonstrating particular munificence during the mourning session. Khwaja ‘Aynu'd-Din, the tax-farmer of Bareli as of 1779, used, "every year, after the 10th of Muharram, to scramble his household furniture, and refuse no one who asked him for a present."[39]
Sacadat ‘Ali, Asafu'd-Dawlah's British-imposed successor, set a rather more restrained tone. Because of his territorial, and hence financial, losses to the British, he pursued greater economy, melting down several of his predecessor's gold ornaments for bullion and spending far less on Muharram ceremonies. Although the scale of expenditure for the ceremonies never again matched that of Asafu'd-Dawlah's days, it remained far from inconsiderable. Roberts, expecting a "fast of the most mournful kind," remarked with surprise that it was "accompanied by so much pomp and splendour that strangers are at some loss to distinguish it from festivals of pure rejoicing."[40] Believers manifested the impulse of generosity in many ways. To commemorate the thirst Imam Husayn and his companions felt when denied water by their tormentors, Muslims in Lucknow distributed rose water. Some ladies gave out milk in the streets, and often people erected stands beside their houses where passersby could quench their thirst.[41]
In the early 1800s, only the high notables had their own imambarahs , whereas the middle notables held mourning ceremonies in their large homes.[42] In the 1820s, when Mrs. All lived in the capital, many more of the wealthy had built imambarahs . They erected them on the public, male (mardanah ) side of the house, designing them as square buildings with cupola tops. Their size depended on the wealth of the builder, and they often served also as family mausoleums. Guests sat on a calico covering overlaying a cotton carpet on the floor of the imambarah . Its walls boasted many mirrors, intended to multiply the candles and reflect the brilliance of the chandeliers, and the notables competed in decorating their imambarahs with great splendor.
Two ritual props graced the room, a stairway-like pulpit (minbar ) and a replica of the tomb (zarih or tacziyah ) of the Imam Husayn in Karbala, both facing Mecca. The pulpit, constructed of silver, ivory, ebony, or other fine materials, often matched the cenotaph. The reciter of elegies sometimes sat,
Harcharan Das, "Chahar gulzar-i shujaci," British Lib., Or 1732, foll 254a-b; Isfahani, Tafdih al-ghafilin , Hoey trans., p 35
The quote is from Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics 2 178-79, see also Valentia, Voyages and Travels 1:121.
Ali, Observations , p. 13.
Valentia, Voyages and Travels , 1 121
and sometimes stood, on the steps of a pulpit covered with gold cloth or broad cloth (green, if owned by a Sayyid). On each side of the cenotaph were ranged banners of silk or with gold or silver embroidery and fringes, hanging from staffs topped by crests with outspread hands whose five fingers represented the "five pure souls": Muhammad, Fatimah, ‘Ali, Hasan, and Husayn. At the base of the cenotaph the host arranged objects that might have been used by the Imam, such as a fine sword and belt, set with precious stones, a shield, bow and arrows, or a turban.[43]
Believers fashioned the cenotaphs from all sorts of materials, from pure silver. to paper and bamboo, depending on the wealth of the owner. Different styles of cenotaphs developed in Lucknow, Delhi, Calcutta, and Hyderabad.[44] In the Great Imambarah stood fourteen tombs of pure silver, one for each of the Twelve Imams, the Prophet, and Fatimah.[45] The tomb replicas designed for an imambarah or a private residence were often made of ivory, ebony, sandalwood, or cedar. Mrs. Ali saw some wrought in silver filigree, and admired one the nawab had made in England of green glass with brass moldings. The inexpensive cenotaphs, made in the bazaar from bamboo and colored materials, ran from two to two hundred rupees in price. The laboring and lower middle classes set these up in their homes during Muharram and carried them in street processions.[46]
The imambarahs of the notables inspired wonder in the artisans and laborers, who visited them in the early evening before the services began. However, notables did not allow the popular-class pilgrims to remain during the mourning sessions in the imambarahs , to which they invited only their friends and relatives and their servants.[47] The imambarahs made statements not only of piety but of wealth, power, and status. They constituted an interface between the wealthy and the poor who honored Husayn. But they also served to demarcate social lines, since the participatory mourning sessions held in them were very exclusive affairs.
The upper-class form of mourning spread from Lucknow into the rural provinces through the influence of the prestigious nawabi court at Lucknow. The nawabs of Farrukhabad became Shi‘is in the late eighteenth century. In Awadh, the great landholder Imam ‘Ali Khan of Bhatwamau (d. 1815) was the first Sunni tacalluqdar to become a Shi‘i and begin mourning practices in his provincial seat of power.[48] Some Shaykhzadah leaders in Lucknow had
Ali, Observations , pp. 19-21
Syed Husain Ali Jaffri, "Muharram Ceremomes in India," in Chelkowski, ed, Ta'ziyeh , pp. 222-23
‘Abdu'l-Vahhab Qazvini, "Siyahat-namah-'i mamalik-i hindustan," p 220, Persian MS in the library of Professor Amin Banam, UCLA
Ali, Observations , p. 18; cf Jacfar Sharif, Islam in India, or the Qanun-i-Islam , trans. G. A. Herklots (London. Oxford Univ. Press, repr 1921), p 164
Ibid, p 27.
Muhammad Imam ‘Ali Khan, Asar-i yadgar (Lucknow. Tasvir-i ‘Alam Press, 1902), pp. 47-48.
converted to Shi‘ism under Safdar Jang, maintaining marital links with the Sunni rural magnates. Muhammad Imam Khan (d. 1760s) of the large Mahmudabad estate in Sitapur married a Shi‘i Shaykhzadah woman. One of their sons, Muhammad Mazhar ‘Ali Khan (d. 1790s), under the dual influence of his mother and the Lucknow court, converted to Shi‘ism, inheriting the smaller portion of the estate in Belehra, Bara Banki. Although his conversion gave him an entiée into the ruling circles in Lucknow, he faced a great deal of hostility from his father and other relatives.
The larger Mahmudabad portion of the estate remained under the control of Mazhar ‘Ali Khan's Sunni brother, Ikram ‘Ali Khan (d. ca. 1775). One of Ikram's sons, Musahib ‘Ali Khan, ruled tile Mahmudabad estate 1805-19, ruthlessly building up his holdings to a huge 232 villages and establishing good relations with the Awadh court by supporting it against rebels. Although he remained a Sunni, he initiated mourning rites for the Imam Husayn in a building inside the fort at Sitapur. He had no male issue, and in 1836 his widow adopted a son of the Shi‘i Belehra branch of the family, Raja Nuvvab ‘Ali Khan, who had lived long in Lucknow and become close to Nasiru'd-Din Haydar's court. From his accession, Mahmudabad, one of the largest rural estates in Awadh, was Shi‘i-ruled.[49] Even the Sunni Raja of Nanpara kept Shi‘i ulama, many of them from Kashmir, at his provincial seat to read elegies for the Imam Husayn.[50]
The accounts of European travelers make it very clear that the poor as well as the wealthy commemorated Muharram. Even in villages, Shi‘is during that month marked their homes with the spread-hand symbol.[51] Although notable Mughals and Sayyids may have been most prominent in promoting Shi‘i practices. many of the popolino , the little people of Awadh's urban centers, enthusiastically embraced the cult of the Imam Husayn during Muharram. Roberts wrote that "every person who has a small sum to spare subscribes, with others of the same means, to purchase the necessary articles for the purpose."[52] The public processions in the streets, where mourners displayed bamboo cenotaphs, banners, and parasols, were easier for the popular classes to participate in, as they did not require ownership of a large room. Persons of all classes took out processions for the Martyr, filling the streets, some effusing pomp and splendor, and "others content with a very humble display."[53]
Since the lower-middle-class mourners could not afford to build a separate imambarah , they decorated the best room in their dwelling as a substitute. The
‘Ali Hasan, "Mahmudabad ki tarikh." 5 vols., Urdu MS in the library of the Raja of Mahmudabad, Lucknow, 1:38-82, interview with the Maharajkumar of Mahmudabad, 17 June 1982, Lucknow
Interview with the Raja of Nanpara, April 1982, Lucknow
Ali. Observations , p 20 note.
Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics 2:181-82.
Ibid.
banners about the cenotaph in these humble homes were of coarse materials, tinsel or dyed muslin, with cheap metal staffs. Where mirrors proved too expensive, they resorted to oil-burning lamps of various shapes, brightly painted and decorated with cut paper.[54]
Oil for the lamps came dear to people on the edge of subsistence, and many families of lower-middle-class means scrimped and saved all year so that they could put on an extravagant show for the Imam (and for their neighborhood).[55] Such zeal denoted not only piety but something of the same striving for status through lavish expenditure that characterized Awadh's magnates. In this practice as in the extravagant expenses associated with weddings, the artisan and laboring classes attempted to usurp status by emulating the lifestyle of the notables, an emulation financially ruinous for classes more often exploited than exploiting. Only through collectivism, pooling their resources to share in the paraphernalia of Muharram, could many laborers participate in the commemorations at all.
The Mourning Session
Two central rituals for Shi‘is dominated Muharram: the mourning session (majlis ), held in an imambarah or a private dwelling, and the procession. The procession, by far the more ancient of these rituals, originated at least by the time of the Shi‘i Buyid dynasty in early-tenth-century Iraq. The stylized mourning session developed during the Safavid period in Iran, though gatherings to mourn the martyred Husayn had more ancient antecedents.[56] In Awadh in the early nineteenth century, notables held mourning sessions in their imambarahs twice a day during the first ten days of Muharram. The evening sessions, with their dazzling lighting derived from myriads of candles, mirrors, and chandeliers, were the best attended. The host and his male relatives sat on the carpeted floor near the cenotaph, the guests crowding in wherever they found room. The host hired a mawlavi to read that day's passage from a Persian prose text that described the sufferings of the Imam Husayn and his supporters and family in their struggle against the Umayyads. Among the Persian-educated notable class in Awadh, such readings could be extremely effective, particularly if the mawlavi wept and groaned with great sincerity from his minbar.[57]
AliObservations , p 21
Ibid., p. 28.
For mourning sessions, see Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam A Study of Devotional Aspects of 'Ashura' in Twelver Shi ism (The Hague Mouton, 1978), pp 158ff., Jean Calmard, "Le Patronage des Ta'ziyeh Elements pour une étude globale," in Chelkowski, ed, Ta'ziyeh , pp 121-23, and Peter J. Chelkowski. "Ta'ziyeh. Indigenous Avant-Garde Theatre of Iran," in ibid., pp 3-4.
All, Obserations , p 22
Figure 2
Rawzah-Khvani (mourning session). Courtesy of
the British Library.
Since this role only required some Persian education, the mawlavi could be one of the subaltern ulama or even relatively untrained in specialized religious sciences. High ulama often held their own sessions, where they tied their recitations of the martyr's sufferings more closely to Arabic oral reports from the Imams, a style known a hadis-khvani . One of his students described Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi, then Lucknow's chief mujtahid, reciting oral reports from the Imams with translation: "I found him on the tenth of Muharram in the mourning session mentioning the calamities that befell the Martyr at Karbala, weeping violently, as was his audience. Then he descended from the minbar, barefoot, bareheaded, tears streaming from his ruddy cheeks. This was always his wont on such days. He thereafter went home and people gathered there."[58]
After the Persian reading, called the "ten sessions" (dah majlis ) because the works read from had ten chapters (one for each of the first ten days of Muharram), came an intermission during which servants handed around sweetened rose water to the gathering of mourners. Devout Shi‘is in the 1820s refrained from chewing betel leaves during Muharram, so servants passed about an assortment of spices on small silver trays. The highest-ranking members of the assembly smoked water pipes during the intermission, though the rest of the guests, of even slightly lower rank, dared not join them.[59]
After the refreshments, specialized reciters chanted elegiac poetry in Urdu. Even the illiterate could understand this part of the session, which must have formed the core of popular mourning sessions. Some of the verses had refrains, and the whole assembly often joined in.[60] In the early nineteenth century some reciters of such poetry employed a vocal technique that approximated singing. Readers presented verse works commemorating the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn in various rhetorical styles. The ulama favored the straightforward reading of the poetry (taht al-lafz-khvani ), similar to that practiced by poets in secular poetry readings. Another style, antedating in India the rise of Shi‘i culture in Awadh, involved the chanting (suz-khvani ) of elegies. In Asafu'd-Dawlah's time Haydari Khan, a great singer, further innovated in this field, teaching Sayyid Mir ‘Ali, a highly respected performer at the court of Sacadat ‘Ali Khan. In such performances the musical modes (raginis ) could be emphasized or played down, according to taste. Women, and artisans and laborers, whether Shi‘i, Sunni, or Hindu, greatly loved the more musical styles. At the time of Ghaziyu'd-Din Haydar (1814-27) people came from all over Awadh to Lucknow during Muharram in hopes of hearing the courtesan Lady Haydar sing elegiac lyrics mourning
Muhammad Mihdi Lakhnavi Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama " takmilah , 2 vols. (Qumm. Maktabat-i Basirati, 1397/1977), 1 245.
Ali, Observations , p 23; cf. Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u , p 358, Eng trans, p. 216
Ali, Observations , p 23; Roberts, Scenes 2:192.
the Imam.[61] Women commonly sang marthiyyahs in public, though the ulama condemned such mixed meetings.
Some of the more strict, legal-minded Shi‘is questioned Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi about the singing of elegiac poetry. He replied that listening to elegiac verses for the Imam Husayn, weeping for him, and mourning him all have great rewards. If read with a sorrowful and pained voice, they presented no difficulty at all. But he disapproved of chanting marthiyyaghs with remodulation (Persian tarjic , Urdu katkar ) as being too close to music, promising that anyone who avoided listening to such performances would be spiritually rewarded.[62]
After the mourning verses the entire congregation rose and enumerated the legitimate successors after the Prophet Muhammad according to Shi‘is, the Twelve Imams, asking blessings upon them individually. Then they repeated the names of the early caliphs, whom Shi‘is regard as usurpers, pronouncing imprecations on them. These two rituals consisted of taking an oath of allegiance (tavalla ) to the Imams and pronouncing imprecations (tabarra ') on the caliphal usurpers.[63] The mourning session concluded with a frenzied period of self-flagellation called the obsequy (ma'tam ). Even Shi‘i notables practiced it, Mrs. All reporting of upper-class ceremonies: "I have even witnessed blood issuing from the breast of sturdy men, who beat themselves simultaneously as they ejaculated the names 'Hasan'! 'Hosein'! for ten minutes, and occasionally during a longer period, in that part of the service called Mortem."[64]
Again, the ulama disapproved of flagellation. Mrs. All wrote that "Maul-vees, Moollahs, and devoutly religious persons" never joined in beating their breasts, although they were present in the audience while others thus violently expressed their grief. The ulama carried on their own mourning practices for longer than most believers in the 1820s, for a full forty days. They apparently did not participate in the mourning processions.[65] Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi, asked about self-flagellation in the 1820s or 1830s, replied that wailing and healing one's chest over the calamities that befell the family of the Prophet was only permissible if one lost control of one's self.[66]
Women also commemorated Muharram, though only a few princesses and wealthy courtesans had their own imambarahs . Almost all the hostesses made their best room in the ladies' quarters into a temporary imambarah , allowing only females in. Mrs. All thought the grief of women during the first ten days of Muharram greater than that of men, such that pious women
Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u , pp 211-17, trans, pp 139, 147-50 and notes.
Nasirabadi, "Najat as-sa'ilin," fol. 22a
Ali, Observations , p 23, Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u , p. 105, Eng trans, p 86.
All, Observations , pp 22-23.
Ibid., p. 30.
Musharraf ‘Ali Lakhnavi, ed, Bayaz-i masa'il , 3 vols. (Lucknow n.p., 1251/1835-36), 3:37.
Figure 3
An upper-class Shi‘i woman of Awadh: Nawab Raj
Begam Sahibah.
Born c. 1832, wife of Vajid ‘Ali Shah. Courtesy
of the British Library.
would neglect their private sorrow during that period. In Hyderabad, Shi‘i women beat their breasts in self-flagellation, just as did men.[67] In Lucknow, women gave up betel leaves, the wearing of jewelry, and bright (especially red) clothes, instead loosening their hair and garbing themselves in dark colors. Some even mortified themselves by wearing their mourning clothes in torrid, sultry Lucknow for ten solid days. Mrs. Ali's serving-maid went the entire time without drinking water during the day. Every evening the ladies gathered about the cenotaph they had set up. with female friends, slaves, and servants surrounding the hostess.[68]
As elsewhere in the Shi‘i world, educated women presided at these distaff sessions.[69] In Awadh they derived for the most part from indigent Sayyid families that lacked the dowry to attract a high-status Sayyid groom but refused to accept one from a less prestigious caste, in accordance with the hypergamy (marrying up bu?? not down) widespread among Indian Muslims. They often served as Qur'an teachers for the daughters of notable families. Hostesses hired them for the first ten days of Muharram, presenting them in remuneration not only with a fee but with fine gifts as well. They read both the Ten Sessions in Persian and the elegiac poetry in Urdu.[70]
The mourning sessions held in homes during Muharram and during other months of the Shi‘i sacred calendar provided crucial opportunities for the development of social networks among Shi‘is, whether male or female, notable or commoner. Mourners went from session to session, spreading news and giving Shi‘is of one neighborhood or village a sense of unity with their coreligionists elsewhere. Lucknow became a place where Shi‘is from all over Awadh could meet at Muharram and thus overcome their sense of being isolated minority communities through congregation in the Realm of the Shi‘ah. The sessions reflected in their social composition the class and status of the host, with tradespeople excluded from notable gatherings. But within social classes and neighborhoods, the sessions did much to foster a sense of community identity.
Processions
The mourning sessions held in homes or imambarahs , although public, largely reflected kin and friendship ties in their composition. The truly civic rites, the
Sharif, Qanun-i-Islam , Herkloi trans, p. 159
Ali, Observations , pp. 23-29; cf. Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u , p 289, Eng. trans., pp 182-83
Compare Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Guests of the Sheikh An Ethnography, of an Iraqi Village (Garden City, N Y Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), pp 107-15, 196-97; and Robert Fernea and Elizabeth W. Fernea, "Variation m Religious Observance among Islamic Women," m N. R. Keddie, ed., Scholars, Saints and Sufis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 385-401.
Ali, Observations , p 29.
processions, brought together in the streets persons from all over each major city, as well as many visitors from nearby villages. With the development of processions, Shi‘ism came into its own as a religion in Awadh. No longer the furtive creed of isolated Sayyid communities in the service towns, it blossomed as the court's favored rite, central to the ritual life of cities like Lucknow and Faizabad.
Particular activities marked each of the ten days of Muharram. At the end of the preceding month, Dhu'l-Hijjah, middle- and working-class men brought that year's bamboo cenotaphs home from the bazaar with great ceremony. Notable families with permanent cenotaphs prepared a room or an imambarah to receive guests for the mourning sessions. The first day of Muharram witnessed, not activity, but an eerie quiet as shops closed and families began mourning at home.
On the second day, the public marveled at the imambarahs of magnates and visited the cenotaphs of friends. The devout saw such visitation as a ritual obligation substituting for the expensive pilgrimage to Karbala itself.[71] From this day multitudes crowded the streets and alleys, most on foot, but with some notables on horseback or in palanquins, making social rounds, visiting cenotaphs, and participating in the twice-daily mourning sessions. On the third day of Muharram women sent sweet dishes to friends and relatives, as well as to poor families, in remembrance of the Imam's passing, just as they would have on the third day after a loved one's death. They repeated this on the seventh and fortieth days after the first of Muharram.[72]
On the fifth of Muharram believers took out processions throughout Lucknow to Rustamnagar, where they had their standards blessed at the shrine of ‘Abbas. Mrs. Ali witnessed a notable's entourage undertaking the trip. At the head of the procession walked a guard of soldiers around four elephants, which carried men and silk-and-gold banners. In the train of the elephants came a band playing Indian instruments, as well as trumpets. Next in order came a mourner holding a black pole from which two swords hung on a reversed bow. Behind him walked the owner of the banners, accompanied by reciters of verse elegies and a large number of friends. The verses chosen for the procession particularly concerned the sufferings of ‘Abbas. Thereafter came a horse, representing Husayn's steed, Duldul a fine white Arabian. His legs were stained with red, and arrows appeared to be stuck in various parts of his body. A turban rode on the tragically empty saddle. Friends of the family, servants, and private foot-soldiers brought up the rear.[73]
Thousands of other, less affluent mourners also headed for the shrine with
For the significance of visitation to Karbala for Shi‘is, see Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering , pp 180-96.
Ali, Observations , pp 17-18. 32. 57.
Ibid., pp 36-38
their banners. They entered it by a flight of steps-from the courtyard. A shrine attendant took the banner of each person through the right entrance and touched it against the crest of ‘Abbas's own staff. Each mourner moved on after his banner touched quickly to the sacred crest. Mrs. All estimated that shrine attendants consecrated forty or fifty thousand banners in a single day.[74] Whatever the number, the ritual demonstrates a rather high level of organization and corporate cooperation for a premodern South Asian city, given that neighborhoods of all religions and classes apparently took part.[75]
The next big day, the seventh of Muharram, commemorated the battlefield wedding of Qasim, the Imam Husayn's doomed nephew, to the Imam's daughter. In Awadh, mourners remembered the wedding through the staging of premarital processions and formalities. Notables took out processions to the imambarah of a social superior, reproducing the pattern of hypergamy as practiced by Indian Muslims. At the imambarah the mourners reposited a model of Qasim's tomb. After the completion of prenuptial ceremonies for Qasim and his bride, notables distributed money to the poor, just as they would have at a real wedding. Middle- and laboring-class people also commemorated the ill-starred wedding, but did so at home rather than with costly processions.[76] Elsewhere in India mourners introduced variations on this ritual. In Hyderabad to the south, a man sometimes impersonated Qasim and was prepared for burial at the imambarah . On the seventh of Muharram in that city mourners painted a representation of the Imam's horse made of wood and decorated it with jewels.[77]
The climax of the mourning period came on the tenth day, the anniversary of the Imam Husayn's own martyrdom. Participants rose in the early hours of the morning and began preparing for the procession, women sometimes lighting candles at the cenotaph before dawn and making requests. At dawn the mourners set out for a symbolic burial ground on the outskirts of the city, called a Karbala. In Safavid Iran, the laboring classes participated in street processions; the wealthy favored the mourning sessions inside.[78] In Awadh, however, many notables joined the street processions with great fervor. The wealthy put together a military funeral parade, with elephants, bands, a bearer of the sword staff, banners, and a caparisoned and bloodstained Duldul with a royal umbrella above his head. Friends and family of the owner, elegy chanters, incense bearers, and the owner of the cenotaph display himself walked behind, often barefoot and with heads exposed
Ibid., pp. 34, 36
Cf. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars , ch. 4.
All, Observations , pp. 42-46.
Sharif, Qanun-i-Islam , Herklot trans., pp 161, 166, for Muharram in Hyderabad, see Ghulam Husayn, "Khan-i Zaman," Gulzar-i Asafiyyah (Hyderabad: Sayyid Rustam ‘Ali, 1260/1844), pp. 560ff.
See Samuel R. Peterson, "The Tacziyeh and Related Arts," in Chelkowski, ed., Tacziyeh , pp. 67-68.
to the sun. Next came the cenotaph of Husayn surrounded by banners and covered by a canopy supported by silver poles, in the style of a Muslim funeral, then the cenotaph of Qasim and the wedding paraphernalia. Several elephants brought up the rear, from which servants threw money to the poor, who crowded behind the processions of the grandees. These not only sought money and blessed bread from the train of the notable's parade, but conducted their own humble processions in its wake, with their coarsely made cenotaphs held high. They thereby also sought security, since the wealthy had a guard of matchlock-men in case of trouble from brigands or Shi‘i-Sunni violence.[79]
From time to time the procession halted, sometimes as often as every five minutes. Then the notables listened to the elegies being chanted, or mourners flagellated themselves to the accompaniment of drums. Although the laboring-class mourners could not compete with the splendid pageants of the notables, they could nevertheless gain divine rewards and social status among their peers through extreme breast-beating. In north Indian cities at this time, tens of thousands of people assembled in the streets. The processions often arrived after nightfall at their Karbalas, four or five miles distant, where mourners ritually interred the cenotaphs and performed the whole ceremony of a funeral. Tempers ran high on this day of collective grief, and Sunni-Shi‘i riots sometimes broke out among Awadh's habitually armed men.
On their return home the rich distributed food, money, and clothes to the poor. The horse Duldul and his expensive attire was donated to a poor Sayyid family.[80] In the 1820s the mourning ceremonies were effectively over on the tenth of Muharram. On the third day after, men began shaving their beards again, women threw off their mourning vestments, bathed, and put on jewelry. The populace began chewing betel leaves once more. Only a few very devout persons continued to mourn for forty days.[81]
Shi‘i ulama took a critical attitude toward some of the Muharram practices, incidentally reinforcing their own status as purists. In 1808 the Iranian immigrant scholar Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani endeavored to convince notables in Faizabad to give up the practice of beating drums to the accompaniment of their breast-beating.[82] A believer in Lucknow asked chief Shi‘i cleric Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi whether it was proper to employ drums and symbolic horses and camels on the tenth of Muharram. He replied that drums were a heretical innovation, but that using camels to evoke the cara-
Ali, Observations , pp 46-49
Ibid, pp 50-53; Roberts, .Scenes and Characteristics 2 194; Fanny Parkes. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque , 2 vols (London Pelham Richardson. 1850), 1:298
Ali, Observations , pp 56-57
Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani, "Mir'at al-ahwal-i jahan-nama," Buhar Coll., Persian MS 96, fol 194b, National Lib., Calcutta.
van of the doomed Imam's family for the purpose of rendering hearts tender presented no difficulties.[83] In later years camels draped in black were brought during the month of Muharram to the Nasirabadis' imambarah itself.[84] Some later Shi‘i ulama condoned other folk practices. Mawlavi Abu'l-Hasan Kashmiri wrote in defense of even the use of drums in mourning the Imam.[85]
Ende has discussed how some Arab ulama in the modern period have defended flagellation, suggesting that they felt it to be in their interest, pecuniary or otherwise, to encourage mass participation in Muharram rites.[86] Since the Awadh ulama in the early nineteenth century received their patronage from the semifeudal notables rather than from the bazaar, they could afford in general to take a much more elitist approach. Even then, they often had to come to terms with the folk practices of the notables; Sayyid Muhammad's ruling allowed flagellation if the mourner forgot himself, providing a convenient out to those who wished to practice it. The ulama's exclusion of music, including drums, from Muharram practices derived from their greater scrip-turalism, but it had the effect of further differentiating them as a status group from their notable patrons.
In Iran very late in the eighteenth century a new practice associated with mourning the Imam grew up, the passion play (tacziyah ). From representational acts in the tenth-of-Muharram processions, wherein mourners poitrayed Husayn and his enemies, a tradition emerged of folk theater centered in a fixed playhouse. In Awadh, no such indigenous development occurred during the period under discussion. Shi‘i notables there did sponsor Hindu-style plays about Krishna, and perhaps these performances preempted the development of alternative theatrical traditions. Accounts by travelers in Bengal and Bihar reveal a higher level of playacting and representing during Muharram than existed in Awadh.[87] Ulama in Awadh gave rulings against the use of tableaux or religious paintings as backdrops during mourning sessions.[88]
The processions of Muharram filled the streets of Awadh's cities with flagellating mourners. The frenzied multitudes that so impressed Western travelers with their zeal hid, in their numbers and the seeming chaos of the
Nasirabadi, "Najat as-sa'ilin," fol 25a
Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u , p 359. Eng trans, p 216
Nauganavi. Tazkuah , p 54
Werner Ende, "The Flagellations of Muharram and the Shi‘ite 'Ulama'," Der Islam 55 (1978): 19-36
Tennant Recreations 1 · 218-19. 184, Roberts, Scenes 2 180-81
Musharraf ‘Ali Lakhnavi, ed., Bayaz-i masa'il 3 13 Sharar, Guzashtah Lakhna'u , p 360, Eng trans, pp 216-17 and note 539, says that m the late nineteenth century Mawlavi Mihdi Husayn introduced painted cuitams into the mourning session. The women of his household even staged dramas similar to Iran's tacziyahs But these late innovations, a fad. had no lasting effect in northern India In the Urdu Sharar bfames the development of drama on the laxness of the Nasirabadis themselves, which for some reason does not appear m the English text
crowded streets, an underlying organization. Procession marchers grouped themselves by neighborhood, by patron, by status group. The degree of organization that must have been necessary to consecrate thousands of standards at the shrine to the standard of ‘Abbas bespeaks a vast increase in Lucknow's cohesion and a sophistication in Shi‘i and non-Shi‘i Muharram networks.
Non-Shi‘i Participation in Muharram
The culture of Awadh, a preindustrial society, demonstrated syncretic tendencies. Cultural mediators, such as Sufi pirs, drawing their clientele from both Muslim and Hindu, transmitted symbols from one group to another. Muharram rites in Awadh began to serve the same mediating function for some groups. Boundaries between religious communities existed, and riots occurred between Hindu and Muslim or Sunni and Shi‘i. But to a greater extent in the early nineteenth than in the early twentieth century, cultural mediators linked popular-class groups.[89]
Sunni Muslims in Awadh in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also held mourning sessions, but frowned on the breast-beating and ritual cursing of the Shi‘is. Sunnis likewise participated in Muharram processions, but in various ways differentiated themselves from Shi‘is. For instance, although the latter held up five fingers to symbolize the Prophet's immediate family, the Sunnis would hold up three fingers, for the first three caliphs.[90] For Awadh's Sunnis, ‘Ali and his sons were the rightful successors of the caliphs, not their victims. Although Sunni-Shi‘i violence frequently broke out on this occasion, it derived from a different conception of the caliphs, rather than from any sympathy for the Umayyad enemies of Husayn. After the 1820s some Sunnis began to speak well of the Umayyads, probably as a reaction against the Shi‘i atmosphere of Awadh. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century did the two communites became so estranged that even Sunnis who mourned Husayn began taking their model cenotaphs to different burial fields than the Shi‘is for interment.[91]
The vast Hindu majority often also took part in the mourning for Imam Husayn, incorporating his cult into their ritual calendar as yet one more divinity in the pantheon. The Iranian traveler Shushtari saw Hindus com-
For premdustrial Hindu-Muslim cultuial mediation and syncrcetism in Bengal, sec Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton Princeton Uuiv Press, 1983). ch 2
Roberts, Scenes 2 192-93: Sharif. Qanun , trans Herklots, p. 159
For the twentieth-century development of Muharram m Lucknow, see Sarojini Ganju, "The Muslims of Lucknow 1919-1939," in Ballhatchet and Harrison, ed, The City South Asia , p. 290, Imtiaz Ahmad. "The Shia-Sunni, Dispute m Lucknow, 1905-1980," in M. Israel and N. K Wagle. eds. Islamic Society and Culture Essays in Honor of Professor Aziz Ahmad (Delhi Manohar, 1984), pp. 335-50, Keith Hjortshoj, "Kerbala in Context A Study of Mohurram in Lucknow, India" (Ph D diss., Cornell Univ, 1977). Sandria Freitag, "Religious Rites and Riots," ch 7
memorating Muharram all over North India in the late eighteenth century. He wrote that in Delhi wealthy Hindus with not the least trace of Islam about them went to great trouble to construct imambarahs . They fasted during Muharram, recited elegies for the Imam in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian, pelted each other with stones in mortification, and fed the poor. They constructed replicas of the Imam's cenotaph, bowed to them, and supplicated them for favors. After the tenth of Muharram they threw the cenotaphs in the river or buried them. Shushtari found some of the Hindu approaches to fasting and self-mortification during Muharram quite strange, maintaining that Indian Muslims copied them.[92]
The Kayastha scribal caste in particular adopted Muslim customs, owing to their long association with Muslim rulers as secretaries and revenue-department civil servants. Many Kayastha notables built their own imambarahs .[93] But Hindu popular-class participation in Muharram processions and attendance at public mourning sessions, such as those at the Great Imambarah, cut across caste lines. Roberts wrote, "Hindoos . . . are frequently seen to vie with the disciples of Ali in their demonstrations of grief for the slaughter of his two martyred sons: and in the splendour of the-pageant displayed at the anniversary of their fate. A very large proportion of Hindoos go into mourning during the ten days of Mohurrum, clothing themselves in green garments, and assuming the guise of fakeers."[94]
Fanny Parkes's Hindu cook spent forty rupees on a bamboo cenotoph for the Imam, performed all the Muharram rites, and then resumed his Hinduism when he had interred his cenotaph with funeral offerings of rice, corn, flowers, and cups of water.[95] In the Hindu-ruled provinces of central and southern India, as well, Hindus celebrated Muharram with processions and illuminations. Strict, scripturalist Brahmins often opposed this practice, but even some of them mourned Husayn. In Sunni-ruled Hyderabad riots would sometimes break out between Hindus and Muslims during Muharram, and the Hindus participating in the mourning rites would actually take the Muslim side against their coreligionists.[96]
Hindus therefore not only widely participated in the Muharram rites but helped influence their shape in India by introducing practices that even high-caste Muslims adopted. Garcin de Tassy pointed out that Muharram, like
Shushtari, Tuhfatal-calam," foll. 199a-b.
Cf K. Leonard, The Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1978), pp. 81-89, 103-4; for Kayasthas in northern India, see W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh , 4 vols. (Calcutta: Office of the Sup't of Government Printing, 1896), 3:184-216.
Roberts, Scenes 2:186.
Parkes, Wanderings 1 296.
Roberts, Scenes 2:186; W. H. Sleeman, A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849-1850 , 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 1:276; Sharif, Qanun-i-Islam , Herklots trans., pp. 166-67.
the festival for the Goddess of Death, Durga, lasts ten days. On the tenth day of Durga puja Hindus cast a figurine of the goddess into the river, paralleling the Shi‘i custom of often casting the Imam's cenotaph into the river on the tenth day of Muharram. The Muslims made the same offering to the Imam that Hindus proffered their sacred figures.[97] Since high-caste Shi‘is and Hindus considered each other ritually impure and unbelievers, popular-class syncretism of this sort sometimes posed problems for strict Shi‘is. Someone asked the chief mujtahids in the early 1830s whether an unbeliever could properly give an offering in cash or kind to the Imams and distribute cooked food to poor believers during Muharram. The mujtahid replied that the most cautious course was for them to bring such food only if the host of the mourning session asked them to do so (ahvat ast kih bar tibq-i guftah-'i malik arand).[98]
Widespread, though not universal, Sunni and Hindu participation made Muharram rites trans-communal. Sunnis in Awadh genuinely loved and supported Husayn, and the tears they shed for the Prophet's grandson helped soften hardline Shi‘i attitudes toward them. Hindus commemorated Muharram as well, adopting Husayn as a god of death, his bloodstained horse and his severed head lifted aloft on Umayyad staves presenting no less terrible an aspect than Kali Durga with her necklace of skulls. Syncretism and cultural intermediaries, such as readers of elegiac poetry, helped create a Shi‘i tinged traditional culture in a society where, among the popular classes, religious communal identity was still weak or at least not exclusivist in tone.
Conclusion
Muharram rituals constituted a complex of practices carried out on a mass scale. These rituals were highly ambiguous, both in regard to vertical stratification among religious communities and in regard to horizontal stratification within the Shi‘i grouping. Some of these practices, bearing an ecumenical aspect, were joined in by many Sunnis and Hindus. Others helped spread Shi‘i ideals among the masses and promoted social networks among believers, not only within city quarters, but between city dwellers and visitors from the qasabahs in the hinterland. More than anything else, the practice of cursing the caliphs helped erect communal barriers between Shi‘is and others, and the violence it provoked helped reinforce internal Shi‘i solidarity. Yet that solidarity did not completely obscure the social distinctions separating notables and commoners.
The Muharram commemorations, including the "pilgrimages" to the cenotaphs and the focus on death, demonstrate the coexistence of structure
M. Garcin de Tassy, Mémoire sur des particularités de la religion musulmane dans l'inde (Paris: L'Imprimerie Royale, 1831), pp. 11-12, 30, 38-41.
Musharraf ‘Ali Lakhnavi, ed., Bayaz-i masa'il 3:97.
and anti-structure. On the one hand, social distinctions temporarily broke down into liminality and a generalized feeling of leveled community (communits ), which the late Victor Turner found typical of such rites.[99] The notables of both sexes demeaned themselves in bereavement for the Imam, men walking barefoot and bareheaded under Lucknow's harsh sun, and highborn ladies wearing the same sweaty clothes for ten days in a climate that called for frequent baths.
The mourning processions and the notables' distribution of largesse created a sense of solidarity among social classes. But in important ways mourners intensified structure, emphasizing distinctions of class and status in the exclusivity of the mourning sessions at imambarahs and in the primacy of notable pageants during the Muharram processions. Indeed, the processions constituted a microcosm of Awadh's prebendal hierarchical social structure. Muharram was a prime opportunity for the display of wealth and various sorts of expenditure that contributed to the expression of high status. Moreover, at the same time that the ceremonies drew together the participants from various classes and religious communities, they often sparked communal violence because some Sunnis and Hindus objected so strongly to them.
The mourners of Husayn in the bazaar or in the large villages worked their own genius on Muharram rites, such that they often created ritual forms later usurped by the notables, including veneration at the shrine of ‘Abbas. Although the notables excluded the popular classes from the services at their private imambarahs , and forced them to march behind their elephants in the procession, the popular classes in many ways led the way in venerating the Martyrs, expressing their grief in everyday ways that helped make the Imam and his family real to them. For they were, after all, the experts in what it meant to be oppressed.
The Shi‘i notable class, whose distribution of gifts and cash during processions helped ensure the participation of the poor, promoted the extensive mourning rites for Husayn. Fenced in by the East India Company, the notables had little opportunity to invest in territorial expansion, expressing their culture and prestige through religious architecture and patronage instead. In addition, informal laboring-class associations shared expenses and promoted the rites. In some places Sufi faqirs organized the ceremonies, during which they received offerings.[100]
People used the story rhetorically and allegorically as well as ritually.
Victor Turner, Process, Performance and Pilgrimage. A Study in Comparative Symbology (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1979), ch. 4 "Death and the Dead m the Pilgrimage Process," and The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell Univ. Press, repr. 1977), pp. 94-130.
Marc Gaborieau, Minorités musulmanes dans le royaume hindou de Nepal (Nanterre: Laboratoire d'Ethnologie, 1977), pp. 121-22, 182-83.
Some notable-class Shi‘is depicted the encroaching British as the evil Yazid in the 1857-58 rebellion. Among laboring-class devotees of the Imam the tax collectors and police of the Shi‘i government itself may have been seen at times as the real Yazid. Moreover, where Muslim villagers were a small minority surrounded by unbelievers, the Umayyad armies attacking Husayn came to be portrayed as Hindus.[101]
The artisans, laborers, and peasants depended on the largesse of the Shi‘i rulers, and this link of dependency encouraged the little people to share with the rulers in their religious practices. In this way a general Shi‘i community came into being, still loosely organized, but enjoying new and wide-ranging social networks built around the sacred calendar of Imami mourning sessions and processions. In the early nineteenth century this calendar was also shared by many Sunnis and some Hindus. Yet some Awadh government policies helped make Muharram rites, at times, divisive of religious communities. When the early stages of political mobilization began late in the nineteenth century, Muharram processions and violence began serving a new purpose in creating communal identities, which grew into political ones in the twentieth century.[102]
Ibid., p. 121
See, especially, Freitag, "Religious Rites and Riots."
PART THREE
THE GROWTH OF A SHICI CLERICAL HIERARCHY IN
AWADH
5
The Beginnings of Formal Shi‘i Institutions in
Awadh
Imami Shi‘ism in eighteenth-century Awadh originally possessed features that Western sociologists would define as "sectarian." But the distinction between sect and "church" deriving from Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, fruitful in the sociological study of religious groupings in Protestant countries, clearly must be employed cautiously in a labyrinthine religious milieu like Mughal India.[1] Moreover. one must carefully note that in this context the term "sect" bears no pejorative connotation. Although many definitions of sect and church have been proposed, most suffer from lack of precision and our inability to plot their primary attribute on a continuum, as a scientific definition would demand. Benton Johnson offered a widely accepted solution to this difficulty by restating the sect-church distinction "in terms of a single-variable property, namely the extent to which a religious body accepts the culture of the social environment in which it exists."[2] I will
For a strong argument for the typology's applicability outside of Christianity, see Roland Robertson, The Sociological Interpretation of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp 120-28. Some application of the conception to Hinduism has been attempted; see Bradley R. Hertel, "Church, Sect, and Congregation in Hinduism: An Examination of Religious Authority," Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 16 (1977): 15-26. For a recent application of the typology to Shi‘i Islam, see S. A Arjomand, The Shadow, of God and the Hidden Imam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. pp. 160-70. Troeltsch himself wrote, "It would be an interesting subject of inquiry to find out to what extent the monotheistic universal religions (non-Christian) contain similar differences It may well be supposed that similar phenomena occur within Islam." See his The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches , trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 1:340, note 165b.
Benton Johnson, "Church and Sect Revisited," JSSR 10 (1971): 127-28; cf. B Johnson, "On Church and Sect," American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 539-49; and Rodney Stark and W. S. Bainbridge, "Of Churches, Sects, and Cults: Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Religious Movements," JSSR 18 ( 1979 ): 122-26. B. R. Wilson, some of whose work provoked this conceptual clarification, seems to have accepted the critique; see his Magic and the Millennium (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 19.
amend this definition slightly to include antagonism or indifference to the state. Sects, then, are religious groups in some tension with the prevailing culture and the state. In what I will term formal religious establishments, called "churches" in Western sociology, this tension lessens, though it seldom disappears altogether.
Accepting this single variable as the central one, we may look at other attributes of sects delineated by researchers like B. R. Wilson as frequent although not universal correlates.[3] Many attributes of sectarianism appear in Awadh Shi‘ism, and the primary variable certainly does, since its ethos opposed the prevailing values of Sunni-dominated Mughal society. Shi‘is conceived of themselves as the "saved sect" (firqah-'i najiyah ), the elect of believers who supported the wronged family of the Prophet. Rather than a formal hierarchy of trained jurisprudents, north Indian Imamis possessed merely private experts in the oral reports of the Imams—experts differentiated from the lay community only in their slightly higher level of education. The Akhbari ulama resembled Pentecostalist ministers, who rejected priesthood and whose training emphasized scriptural knowledge, eschewing rationalist theology.[4]
Akhbari north Indians, denouncing the strong division between the lay and the clerical that marked Usulism, had an egalitarian religious structure within the congregation. The crucial distinctions divided, not laymen and clerics, but notables and commoners. As was noted above, believers segregated their mourning sessions along class lines. Since few north Indian Imami clerics attained a high degree of jurisprudential learning, the typical Usuli jurisprudent immigrated from Iran, and ethnic tensions may also have been involved in the Akhbari attacks on mujtahids.
Awadh's Akhbaris forbade the formal worship of Friday congregational prayers on the grounds that the perfect leader who alone could lead them had departed into supernatural Occultation. The central ritual of sectarian Shi‘ism was the mourning session (majlis ) held for the martyred Imams, particularly Imam Husayn, in which personal piety could be expressed by open demonstrations of grief. In laboring-class processions believers spontaneously showed their faith through violently beating their breasts. Upper-class ceremonies tended to be more restrained, although they still involved weeping
B. R. Wilson, "An Analysis of Sect Development," in B. R. Wilson, ed., Patterns of Sectarianism: Organisation and Ideology in Social and Religious Movements (London: Heinemann, 1967), pp. 23-24. Cf. Max Weber, From Max Weber , trans. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, repr 1979), pp. 305ff.
B. R. Wilson, "The Pentecostalist Minister: Role Conflicts and Contradiction in Status," in Patterns , pp. 154-55.
and a touching of the heart. Both the rejection of Friday prayers and the emphasis on mourning sessions underlined the feeling of tension with the outside world that most north Indian Imamis felt.
Shi‘is saw India as the land of unbelief (kafiristan ), chafing under the rule of the Sunni Mughals. Some Muslim caste leaders forbade Sunni-Shi‘i marriage, another sign of sectarian tension. Shi‘is from the propertied classes often departed from a sectarian attitude enough to achieve high rank in the Mughal government, although even here they remained conscious of a distinction between their private inclinations and their duties to the Sunni Mughal sovereign, which strongly emerged during Awrangzib's conquest of the Shi‘i-ruled Deccan.[5] The widely scattered Imamis in North India existed on the periphery of the Shi‘i centers in Iraq and Iran. Their loose religious organization and sectarian outlook approximated that of tenth-century Shi‘is in the wake of the Imam's Occultation. But just as the rise of the Safavid state in Iran helped transform Shi‘ism into a formal religious establishment, so the nawabs in Awadh had a similar impact in North India.
Although a Johnson-Wilson description of the sect as an ideal type corresponds to what we know of Imami Shi‘ism under the Mughals, the cultural complexity of India makes it necessary to define our terms more precisely. First, the "prevailing" culture in India, with which a sect would be expected to conflict, was dual. In a sense, two notable class orthodoxies coexisted, Mughal-supported Sunnism and the Hinduism of the twice-born castes. Even though Hinduism suffered some disabilities under Muslim rule and so sometimes also exhibited sectarian tensions with it, Hindus were the great majority of the population, and enough Brahmins and Hindu martial groups were integrated into the Mughal system of prebends and benefices to constitute them as junior partners in the Mughal enterprise. C. A. Bayly has suggested that the Jains and some Hindu ascetic orders constituted sects in eighteenth-century Awadh, and that they avoided entanglement with the government and possessed some degree of corporate organization.[6] The definition of sect I am using would agree with the tendency to antagonism toward or indifference to the state, although it would not absolutely require any particular form of organization, which I have not taken as a primary variable. In Mughal India, then, Shi‘is could be considered sectarian in the same way as Jains could, since they opposed and subsisted outside the orthodoxy of the Sunni Muslim establishment, with its ulama, qazis , muftis, and seminaries, much as the Jains subsisted outside Brahminical Hinduism.
Another issue in the definition of sects and religious establishments has been raised implicitly by a group of sociologists considering the dominant
Sajida S. Alvi, Shi ism in India during Jahangir's Reign." Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 27 (1979): 47-48
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen. and Bazaars (Cambridge Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). pp. 139-44.
ideology, thesis. Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner showed that although Marx and subsequent sociologists considered the church to have ideologically dominated medieval Europe, in fact the authority of the ecclesiastical institutions sat rather lightly on the majority of the peasant population.[7] European peasants continued to practice an autochthonous religion far removed from the theology and ritual of the literate priests who presided over the churches of the aristocracy, though only intermittently did peasant groups come so strongly into conflict with the church as to develop an alternative religious collectivity in the form of a sect. The formal religious establishment provided an ideology and an ecclesiastical structure primarily useful in uniting the ruling class and in socializing members of that class to values appropriate to their social position. It only lightly encompassed the peasant majority, and the underprivileged strata (the great majority in preindustrial societies) threw up most of the sectarian challenges to the religious establishment.
The rise of a Shi‘i ruling class in Awadh, composed of members of the Nishapuri ruling family, high administrators, and tax-farmers, and powerful eunuchs raised as Shi‘is at court, created the need for a formal Shi‘i establishment that could minister to the often literate notables. One of the functions of this religious establishment would be to justify Shi‘i rule. No Shi‘i formal religious establishment had existed in North India under the Sunni Mughals, so that an entire range of institutions needed to be newly created by Shi‘i elites.
The foundation of a formal Shi‘i establishment required specialized clerics. The Shi‘i ulama sought through professional closure practices to assert control over the monetary resources that notables poured into religious institutions, no easy task in the traditional, ecumenical setting of India.[8] Among Shi‘i clerics, Usulis attempted to exclude all Shi‘i holy and learned men who did not possess a diploma (ijazah ) that allowed them to derive legal judgments and preside over ritual activity. To monopolize religious authority and the patronage of the Shi‘i state would require the exclusion of popular Sufi leaders and institutions, who mediated between Muslim and Hindu disciples. It also implied the displacement of Sunni ulama already occupying official religious offices.
The growth of sectarian folk practices among Shi‘is in Awadh, discussed in the preceding chapter, paralleled the growth of a formal, literate religious establishment among the notables. The two processes dovetailed only a century and more later, as literacy increased, the printing press spread formal religious ideas and practices, and urbanization brought the need for a clearer
Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), esp. chaps. 1, 3.
For professionalization as closure, see Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 54-60.
communal (as opposed to village kinship or caste) identity. The process of Shi‘i Islamization (parallel to "Sanskritization" among modernizing Hindus) occurred first of all among the Awadh notables and clerics involved in constructing their dominant ideology.
The Establishment of Friday Prayers
The institution of Friday congregational prayers, the first major religious innovation undertaken by the notables and clerics of Awadh in creating a formal religious establishment, seems in retrospect a natural step. But this move aroused bitter controversy at the time, since it broke with all north Indian Shi‘i tradition. North Indian Akhbarism saw the holding of such prayers as a usurpation of the absent Twelfth Imam's authority, and Shi‘is associated mosque ritual with the arrogance of the Sunni majority. Moreover, the Awadh nawab's authorization of such prayers constituted a slap in the face to the Sunni Mughal emperor and a further declaration of regional independence, not to be undertaken lightly. Only a powerful congruence of secular and religious motives could have brought about this change.
The growth in numbers and authority of Usuli ulama helps account for the change. As the promise of patronage attracted Shi‘i clerics from Kashmir and from Iraq and Iran to Awadh, the number of scholars belonging to the Usuli school, dominant in those areas, increased. Greater political stability in the Middle East and North India in the last quarter of the century and more secure trade routes increased Awadh's contacts with the Shi‘i centers of West Asia. The Imami newly rich could afford pilgrimages to the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf, and could in addition afford to subvent such travel for scholars such as Mirza Muhammad Khalil and Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi.
On his return to Lucknow, Nasirabadi rejoined Chief Minister Hasan Riza Khan's inner circle, his penetration into the corridors of power and influence a tribute to his brilliance and ambition. But he was still the junior-most religious thinker patronized by the chief minister. The Sufi pirs Shah Khayru'llah and Shah ‘Ali Akbar Mawdudi wielded more influence. Even the Shi‘i notables of Awadh maintained the Mughal noble tradition of showing respect for Sufi leaders. The chief minister's first cousin Aqa Mirza was a devoted Sufi.[9] Hasan Riza Khan saw no contradiction between Sufism and Shi‘ism, and whereas the growing clerical class in Faizabad had primarily to contend with the power of the physicians, in Lucknow their rivals for patronage and influence were Sufi leaders.
In the early 1780s, after Nasirabadi had returned from his sojourn in Iraq and Iran, a new controversy began to polarize the Imami community. The
Gulam ‘Ali Naqavi, ‘Imad as-sacadat (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1897), p. 136.
foreign Usuli ulama wished to see Shi‘i Friday congregational prayers established in North India, whereas Indian Imamis of the Akhbari school resisted this initiative. One early source attributes the dominance of Akhbarism in North India to the school's pro-laity (camm-pasand ) tendencies. The same source states that Akhbaris in Awadh avoided the few mujtahids there completely, some even ritually cursing them. They criticized the Usulis for believing in independent legal reasoning (ijlihad ), allowing considered opinion (zann ) as a basis for legal rulings, employing analogy just as did the Hanafi Sunnis, and recognizing scholarly consensus as a source of law.[10] Akhbaris perceived the Usulis to have compromised with Shi‘i principles, adopting the Sunni tenets of their Mughal oppressors. Moreover, Akhbaris may have projected their hostility to the Establishment Sunni clergy onto the professional Usuli ulama. Although the issue of Friday prayers was not one strictly between Usuli and Akhbari, since members of both schools took varying stances on it, north Indian Akhbaris on the whole tended to feel that they were impermissible in the absence of the Imam.[11]
Many Indian Akhbaris opposed Friday congregational prayers on doctrinal grounds; others feared chat such separate rituals would provoke a Sunni backlash. In the previous decade, Muhammad ‘Askari Jaunpuri (d. 1777), a local Akhbari scholar appointed to the post of court mufti, advised against such prayers.[12] Awadh's Shi‘is did not believe that congregational prayers were held even in the majority Shi‘i areas of Iraq and Iran, and they were not customary anywhere in North India.[13]
Mulla Muhammad ‘Ali "Padshah" Kashmiri, arriving in Awadh in the carly 1770s, lacked this caution and timidity. He settled and taught in Faizabad and in about 1785 wrote a treatise on the virtue of congregational Friday prayers for Shi‘is. The author dedicated the book, five chapters long, to Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah, calling upon him to establish Friday prayers. In the fourth chapter he mentioned three individuals qualified to lead the prayers. Two of these, Mirza Muhammad Khalil and Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, were local scholars who had adopted Usulism in Iraq. Kashmiri argued that instituting this measure would aid the nawab in his quest to spread the Islamic revelation (i.e., in its Imami form) more widely in his dominions. When Chief Minister Hasan Riza Khan went to Faizabad on a visit, Mulla Muhammad ‘Ali Padshah presented him with a copy of the treatise. Hasan Riza Khan made the proposal public on his return to Lucknow. But when he sounded out Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali about the idea, he rejected it. Nasirabadi
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama," Rijal Shi‘ah, MS 1, fol. 47a, Nasiriyyah Lib., Lucknow.
See Vajid ‘Ali Shah, Bahr-i hidayat (Lucknow: Matbac-i Sultani, 1267/1850-51), p 12.
Mirza, Jacfar Husayn, Qadim Lakhna'u ki akhiri bahar (New Delhi: Taraqqi Urdu Bureau, 1981), p. 229. Husayn does not give a source for his statement that Jaunpuri opposed the prayers in the 1780s, something his death date makes impossible.
Naqavi, ‘Imad , p. 137.
feared that such a public display would arouse the hostility of the majority Sunnis, and he asked the chief minister to dismiss the proposal. To avoid further pressure, he retired with his family and attendants to Nasirabad.[14]
With Nasirabadi gone, Hasan Riza Khan spent more time with other companions, especially with Shah ‘Ali Akbar Mawdudi.[15] A leader of the Chishti order orginally from Delhi, he settled in Faizabad in the 1770s. Under the influence of Awadh's court culture, and perhaps in order to gain easier access to court patronage, he accepted Imami Shi‘ism. He did so, however, without giving up his Sufi ideas and rituals and while retaining his followers among the largely Sunni Chishtis.
One Friday afternoon Hasan Riza Khan was shocked to discover that the Sufi leader said congregational prayers with his followers, but Shah ‘Ali Akbar was quick to enumerate the virtues of the ritual in Shi‘ism. The pir's strong support for Friday prayers, coming on the heels of Mulla Padshah's similar proposal, determined Hasan Riza Khan to institute them. Ironically, foreign-born Usulis and local former Sunnis pushed the Awadh court into beginning this ritual, a move doctrinally opposed by local Akhbaris. Even an Usuli like Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali felt uncomfortable with the idea, which demonstrates how strongly Indian Shi‘is felt the need to maintain a low profile and to avoid conflict with the much stronger Sunni community. Other Shi‘is also attempted to dissuade the chief minister from this plan, warning that it might provoke the Sunni Afghan chief ‘Abdu'r-Rahman Qandahari to revolt.[16]
When Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali returned to Lucknow, Hasan Riza Khan once again pressed him to lead the Friday prayers. The young cleric consulted with some trusted advisers and came to the conclusion that it would be ungrateful not to help with such worthy work. (Moreover, such a slap in the face to his patrons might have signaled the decline of his so far promising career as a court religious scholar.) Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali, however, clearly retained some ambivalence about the prayers. When he first led them, in May 1786 (13 Rajab 1200), some believers from the notable class gathered at the palace, where they prayed the noon and afternoon prayers in congregation. But they followed the same ritual form as if they were praying congregationally on any other day of the week, rather than the special Friday form.[17] This may have been an attempt at compromise, though it lasted only a short
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll. 65b-67a.
For his defense of Sufism and his chains of mystical initiation, see S. ‘Ali Akbar al-Mawdudi, "Al-fawa'id al-Mawdudiyyah," Delhi Collection, Arabic MS 953c, India Office Lib. and Records, London. For a biographical notice, see ‘Abdu'l-Hayy al-Hasani, Nuzhat al-khawatir , 8 vols. (Hyderabad, 1959), 7:329-330.
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama," foll. 67a-b; Sayyid ‘Abbas Ardistani, "Al-hisn al-matin fi ahwal al-wuzara' wa's-salatin," 2 vols. (New Delhi: Nat'l Archives of India, MSS 235a, 235b), 1:89; for Qandahari's career, see Naqavi, ‘Imad , p. 143.
S. Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, "Favaid-i Asafiyyah va mavaciz-i Hasaniyyah," Hadith Shi‘ah, Persian MS 152, fol. 4b, Nasiriyyah Lib., Lucknow; "A'inah-'i haqq-nama," fol 67b.
time. The controversies behind this incident can no longer be traced.
Two weeks later the same group prayed the Friday congregational prayers (jumcah ) according to the prescribed forms. Some sources indicate that before he agreed to preside over this ceremony, Nasirabadi wrote a treatise on the congregational Friday prayer, showing it to be an "obligation of preference" (vujub-i takhyiri ) rather than an individual, absolute duty (vujub-i cayni ). He firmly disputed the most conservative (and earliest) post-Occultation view that Friday congregational prayers are forbidden in the absence of the Imam.[18] In taking the "obligation of preference" position he cautiously required the prayers. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali said that since some scholars forbade them and others considered them obligatory, caution dictated that believers pray both the Friday prayer in congregation and the individual noon prayer (zuhr ).
The beginning of Friday prayers in Lucknow, a victory for the rationalist Usuli ulama, came about because of a coalition of forces. Sufi leaders, intermediaries between Sunni and Shi‘i disciples, may have hoped to unite their followers in a single congregation by having formal ceremonies to which the Sunnis were accustomed. High Awadh secular officials probably wanted the prayers as symbols of regional autonomy. Foreign Usuli ulama promoted them because they believed them religiously necessary, and as part of their clericalist ideology. Local Usuli ulama, more cautious, finally acquiesced in holding the prayers, more because of outside pressure than inner conviction. Sufi leaders appear not to have recognized the possibility that leadership of the prayers might be taken over by the Usulis, displacing them and bringing a new religious elite to the fore.
Ideological Justification for Friday Prayers and Clerical Authority
The holding of Shi‘i Friday prayers provoked opposition from several quarters. Sunnis disliked it, though the feared violent reaction from them never materialized. Even with the Shi‘i community, many felt misgivings and refused to participate. Shi‘i artisans and laborers apparently rejected the prayers as an upper-class whimsy. The largely Akhbari notables opposed them as a heretical innovation. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali's response to the criticisms emerged in his Friday afternoon sermons, some of which he collected into a manuscript volume.
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali wished to justify the need for a professional clergy of the Usuli sort. On that afternoon in May 1786 he told his audience in the chief minister's palace that a man either is a religious scholar or is not. If not,
See his fatwa , preserved in Vajid ‘Ali Shah, Bahr-i hidayat , pp. 84-85; see Muhammad Aman Lakhnavi, "Vajizah dar salat-i jumcah," Kalam Shi‘ah, Persian MS 206, fol. 39b, Nasiriyyah Lib., Lucknow.
he must emulate an expert on Islamic law in subsidiary matters. Emulation, necessary in practical matters of complicated law, is forbidden in matters of essential creed (masa'il-i usuliyyah ). Even in areas of belief, however, Shi‘is have the duty of reaching the orthodox conclusions through their own effort. Nasirabadi saw his sermons as one way of sharing his knowledge as a scholar with his lay audience.[19] Since his eighteen months in Iraq hardly made him a mujtahid, his attitude was somewhat presumptuous. But in a north Indian context, with few Usulis, someone with even a short experience of studying with mujtahids in Iraq could project an aura of authority.
The prayer leader argued that if Shi‘is did not produce ulama, then they would have to depend on Sunni scholars to teach them, and might be misled by the latter, who would not instruct them in the oral reports from the Imams. Although he drew on an oral report from Imam Jacfar as-Sadiq for this point, Nasirabadi was describing the actual situation in India; he himself had studied extensively with Sunnis. Without ulama, he insisted, people would soon not know to which religion they belonged, and ulama were necessary to guard the moral order.[20] In a pluralistic society like India, he believed, only a cadre of professional clerics could maintain a strong sense of communal identity.
That summer in the fasting month of Ramadan, the prayer leader warned his aristocratic audience against deliberately neglecting Friday prayers, fasting, or religious charity (zakat ). He said that whoever refused to say Friday prayers in congregation would receive no benefit from his individual daily prayers; he complained that he needed to voice such warnings because most Shi‘is did not observe the religious laws, owing to their worldly concerns. He urged that religious donations be given to an experienced, upright (‘adil ) mujtahid, and that he be allowed to distribute them to the poor.[21] He attacked the Awadh custom of putting religious charities in the hands of court physicians, claiming jurisdiction over this institution for the professional clergy. The handful of Usuli ulama not only would have a platform for the propagation of their views in the official congregational prayers, but also would gain control over vast sums of money.
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali's first sermon contained a second theme: the need for works and not only faith. It did not suffice, he insisted, to swear allegiance to the Imams and to mourn their martyrdom, but one must also obey, be pious, say one's daily prayers, and help the poor. He condemned those who argued against the prayers because they would tempt some believers to perform this good work in order to be seen of men, pointing out that the believers are commanded, not only to inner purity (safa-yi batin ) but also to outer purity (safa-yi
Nasirabadi, Sermon of 27 Rajab 1200, Mavaciz , foll. 15b-17a
Ibid., foll 21b-22a
Nasirabadi, Sermon of Ramadan, 1200, "Mavaciz," foll. 37a-38b.
zahir ), suggesting that Friday prayers were an outward sign of internal piety.[22]
The first sermon dcalt also with religion and state relations. The young Usuli cleric argued that Shi‘is had not held Friday prayers in India in the medieval period, because of the dominance of tyrannical Sunni emperors, just as they had avoided them in pre-Safavid Iran. The Safavids, he said, established the institution, and he urged the nawab of Awadh to emulate them in continuing to sanction the prayers. He denied that in agreeing to lead them he had sold himself (Shi‘is unhappy with the government obviously had accused him of doing so).[23]
Nasirabadi felt some tension between his values as a religious scholar and those of even a Shi‘i aristocracy. Sensitive to the charges some hurled at him of moral turpitude in becoming involved with the state and helping move Shi‘ism toward a formal religious establishment, he noted that Sunni and Shi‘i ulama differed over the referent of the qur'anic verse "Obey God and obey the Prophet and those in authority among you" (4:59). Sunnis, he said, made it refer to rulers and nobles, whereas Shi‘is restricted it to the Imams. Shi‘is held that God would not order us to obey someone who might command something not in accord with the religious law. The Sunnis, he continued, branded Shi‘ism worldly and said that Shi‘is had no other aim than to draw close to the notables.
He responded that the opposite was true, and that Sunnis interpreted Qur'an 4:59 in this way precisely in order to please the powers that be. He also pointed out that Shi‘i ulama forbade the wearing of silk, using gold or silver vessels, listening to music, gazing at unrelated women, and homosexuality. Therefore, Shi‘i norms conflicted most strongly with the lifestyle of the Muslim ruling classes. He ended by staking out his own moral independence, saying, "It should not be thought that I have in the course of this talk, when giving thanks to the nawab, embellished my words for the sake of being seen of men or pleasing him, hut only because the holy law demanded it. Giving thanks where due is incumbent."[24] Nasirabadi needed to make this disclaimer because he had so highly praised the bibulous, arbitrary Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah as the establisher of the holy Law, the promulgator of the religion of the Imams, and the center of the sky of justice, and had prayed God to render his rule eternal.[25]
In his Ramadan sermon for 1786, the prayer leader painted the holding of prayers as the most cautious course, attempting to steal the high ground from critics who felt that they should not be performed in the Occultation on grounds of caution. Such critics objected that uprightness (‘adalat ) in the prayer leader was a prerequisite, but without the direct appointee of an
Nasirabadi, Sermon of 27 Rajab 1200, "Mavaciz," foll. 14b-15a, 18a.
Ibid., foll. 12a-13a.
Ibid., foll. 22b-26a.
Ibid., fol. 3b.
Imam it would be an attribute difficult to establish. (That is, the appointee of an ordinary mortal might secretly have some vices.) Nasirabadi replied that the same difficulty attended the appointment of Shi‘i qazis and muftis, who must also be upright, yet no one raised similar objections in this regard.[26]
Even after the passage of a year, the Friday congregational prayers remained controversial. In August 1787 Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali discussed openly the nature of the opposition. He reported that some of the deniers, wealthy men, privately maintained that the Friday prayers actually were not the nawab's idea and that he remained ambivalent about them.[27] Quite possibly, he did have mixed feelings. Hasan Riza Khan most strongly sponsored the ceremonies. Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah, still the titular first minister of the Mughal Empire, may have felt apprehension about the political repercussions of sanctioning the ritual of a branch of Islam different from that of his nominal sovereign. He remained reluctant to cut his last symbolic ties with the empire, even though he refused to respond positively to calls of the emperor that he come to Delhi or provide troops to the center.[28]
Of course, the political value of ties to the emperor plummeted even further in the late 1780s, which may help explain why the nawab-vizier approved the holding of Shi‘i Friday prayers at all. In the period 1786-87, when they commenced in Lucknow and Faizabad, the Mughal emperor, Shah ‘Alam II, had been reduced to a figurehead over whom the Hindu Marathas and the Sunni Muslim Ruhilah Afghans fought because of his remaining authority as a symbol.[29] On the other hand, the visiting Mughal prince, Javan-Bakht Mirza, was allowed to attend the Lucknow prayers, and his presence probably indicates that Delhi did not perceive them as rebellious.[30] The nawabs of Awadh became firmly committed to holding Shi‘i ceremonies and supporting the Usuili ulama. As they resorted less and less to the Mughals for the legitimation of their rule, they cast about for other sources of legitimacy. The creation of a supportive Shi‘i clerisy was, in Awadh as in Qajar Iran, one means to this goal.[31]
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali attacked the upper-class opponents of Friday prayer for their pride reminiscent of the pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance (hamiyyat-i jahiliyyah ). They did not want to bow behind a prayer leader, because it
Nasirabadi, Sermon of Ramadan, 1200, "Mavaciz," foll 28b-29a.
Nasirabadi, Sermon of 22 Shawwal 1201, "Mavaciz," foll. 47b-48a.
Michael Herbert Fisher, "The Imperial Court and the Province: A Social and Administrative History of pre-British Awadh (1775-1856)" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1978), pp 55-56.
W. Franckiln, The History of the Reign of Shah-aulum, the Present Emperor of Hindostaun (Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, 1974 repr. of 1798 ed.), pp. 122ff.
Kamalu'd-Din Haydar Mashhadi, Savanihat-i salatin-i Avadh (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1896), pp. 113-14.
See Said Amir Arjomand, "The Shi‘ite Hierocracy and the State in Pre-Modern Iran, 1785-1890," Archives européenes de sociologie 22 (1981): 50-51.
Figure 4
Mosque of the Great Imambarah, a Friday prayers
mosque. Courtesy of the
British Library
would detract from their social status. These notables, among the wealthiest and most powerful men in North India, may well have balked at allowing the son of a small landholding qasabah family to lead them in prayer. Nasirabadi depicted his opponents as licentious aristocrats who spent their time listening to music, wearing silk, drinking from gold vessels, hanging paintings on their walls, and patronizing unveiled singing girls.
He denounced their pretensions to religious learning as arrogant, ridiculing them for saying that since Shi‘is at the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq did not openly hold Friday congregational prayers, believers should not hold them in Lucknow either. Since his opponents, as Akhbaris, objected to emulating anyone but the Imams, he pointed out the inconsistency of their imitating the practice in the shrine cities. Moreover, he denied that believers never held Friday congregational prayers in the holy centers of Iraq.
He said the ritual had not previously been performed in North India because the Sunni emperors forced Shi‘i notables to practice dissimulation. The situation, he continued, had now changed and Islam forbade the aping of one's ancestors. He argued that some scholars, such as Aqa Muhammad Baqir Bihbahani in Karbala, considered the Friday group prayers to be preferentially incumbent (vujub-i takhyiri ), holding them privately. Nasirabadi said that he wished to make Bihbahani's stance clear, even though he recognized that most of his opponents, as Akhbaris, either emulated the dead or emulated no one. He emphasized that he himself, as a mujtahid, had come to his own conclusions and was not emulating Bihbahani. He neglected to mention that other scholars he studied with in Iraq, such as Aqa Sayyid ‘Ali Tabataba'i, took a more cautious position on this matter. Neither group in Lucknow referred to the practice in Iran, which indicates that they only considered that of the shrine cities in any sense normative.[32]
Artisan and laborer Shi‘is also tended to react with hostility to the Friday prayers. Since the court began them in a notable's mansion, the prayers obviously were not meant to encompass the popular classes at this point. Later the nawab had a cathedral mosque (jami cmasjid ) constructed in Lucknow so that the public could attend. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali betrayed impatience at opposition from this quarter, dismissing the common people as animals and beasts that needed a shepherd who could use his staff to force them to the attainment of happiness.[33] A week later, Nasirabadi stressed that all Shi‘is were not saved, and that some were worse than Sunnis. He said that some
Nasirabadi, Sermon of 22 Shawwal 1201, "Mavaciz," foll. 48a-51; for Tabataba'i, see Abu Muhammad "Muhammad Aman" Lakhnavi, "Vajizah dar salat-r jumcah," Kalam Shi‘ah. MS 206, foll. 47a-b, Nasiriyya Lib., Lucknow. Both the Zands and the Qajars appointed prayer leaders, for the practice under Asafu'd-Dawlah's contemporary Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar, see Algar, Religion and Start in Iran, 1785-1906 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1969), p. 44.
Nasirabadi, Sermon of 22 Shawwal 1201, "Mavaciz," foll 47a, 47b.
put Ali on the same level as Muhammad, while others made him God. Such Shi‘is, for all their love of the Imams, were unbelievers. He thundered that most of the ignorant Shi‘is in his own time deserved to enter hellfire on these grounds. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali rejected as effeminate the view of some that one should not speak badly of anyone who believes in the Imams[34]
From his newfound pulpit Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali promoted the Usuli school of Shi‘ism as orthodoxy. He claimed extensive prerogatives for ulama of that school and attempted to displace other competitors for the patronage of the Shi‘i high notables, such as Sufis and Akhbari scholars. He strove against Akhbarism as the ideology of wealthy Shi‘i gentlemen scholars, and against the extremist theological views of the little people. The rituals, law, and religious donations of the Shi‘i community, he argued, should be controlled by the Usuli ulama.
The Spread of Friday Congregational Prayers
The practice of holding Shi‘i Friday prayers and building Shi‘i mosques spread to other cities, and then to smaller towns and villages. Through this institution, Shi‘i medium landholders in the lineage centers enhanced their local prestige and authority. Further, service positions as prayer leaders opened up for them in the cosmopolitan cities where rich and powerful Shi‘i patrons lived. Like the imambarahs , the new mosques united Shi‘i communities, though fewer attended the formal services, which probably catered more to the landed, literate strata.
The same year that Friday prayers began in Lucknow they commenced in Awadh's other major urban, center, Faizabad. As in the case of the riot seven years earlier, Javahir ‘Ali Khan (d. 1799) took the lead in supporting the program of the Usuli ulama. Sayyid ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali Deoghatavi (1749-1827), from a village near Ghazipur, was appointed to lead the prayers in Faizabad. He came there in 1770 to study, pursuing his education with Mulla Muhammad ‘Ali "Padshah" Kashmiri and becoming a mujtahid. He received a land grant (mucafi ) worth Rs. 1,000 per month from Asafu'd-Dawlah to support him in the office of prayer leader.[35]
Not many Shi‘is attended the prayers at first, being unused to them. Especially in the rainy season and in winter, attendance dropped off sharply. Javahir ‘Ali Khan, who zealously supported the institution, hired twenty men as servants to bring companies of people to the mosque, not only for Friday prayers but for the five daily prayers as well.[36] As in Lucknow, the posi-
Nasirabadi, Sermon of 29 Shawwal 1201, "Mavaciz," foll. 54b-56b.
Muhammad Mihdi Lakhnavi Kashmiri, Nujum as-sama 'takmilah , 2 vols. (Qumm: Maktabat-i Basirati, 1397/1971), 2:440-41, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Nauganavi, Tazkirah-'i be-baha fi tarikh al-‘ulama ' (Delhi. Jayyid Barqi Press, n.d.), pp. 212-13.
Muhammad Fayzbakhash, "Tarikh-i farahbaksh," trans. William Hoey, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizabad , 2 vols. (Allahabad: Government Press, 1888-89), 2:57.
tion of Friday prayer leader in Faizabad became hereditary. It was next held by Sayyid Muhammad Deoghatavi (d. 1849), Sayyid ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali's son, who studied with Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, becoming a mujtahid.[37] His son, Sayyid ‘Ali (d. 1897), failed to reach the rank of ijtihad , even though he became Friday prayer leader. By that time personal charisma and specialized training for the post, originally an important consideration, had grown irrelevant in favor of traditional family claims and the charisma of office.[38]
As was noted, the prayers began to be held in the lineage centers as well. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali constructed a Friday prayers mosque in his home town of Nasirabad in 1812. In 1807 Sayyid ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali built an impressive mosque in Deoghata. After 1803 the British took over many areas of northern India formerly under Sunni Mughal rule, providing a safe atmosphere for Shi‘is to build mosques and hold Friday prayers.
Mawlavi Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ibadat, having studied with Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali in Lucknow, began leading Friday congregational prayers in Amroha at an old imambarah . In 1808 Hajji Ashraf ‘Ali of Patna settled in Amroha and built a Friday prayers mosque.[39] The position of Friday prayer leader passed to the incumbent's son, who likewise trained with Lucknow's mujtahids.[40] Later in the century Mawlavi Sayyid ‘Ali Husayn, a zamindar and mucafidar who had studied in Lucknow with Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali's son Sayyid Husayn, also served as prayer leader in Amroha.[41] Prominent families and middle landholders in the towns of the area began to enhance their local prestige and authority by having some members study in Lucknow and return to perform such religious leadership functions as leading prayers in the public mosques that these same families had built.
In Awadh the ruling elite appointed mostly Indians to religious posts, despite the large number of qualified Iranian immigrants. The Indian ulama, better acquainted with local protocol, excluded their Iranian competitors. After failing to procure patronage in Awadh, Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani, the grandson of Aqa Muhammad Baqir, became prayer leader of British-ruled Patna in 1809, supported by local Shi‘i notables. He said the sermon in the name of the "king of Islam" (padshah-i Islam ), probably referring to the Qajar monarch. In British-ruled territory Bihbahani felt no compulsion to recognize the weak Mughals in Delhi.[42]
Nauganavi, Tazkirah , pp. 328-29.
Ibid., p. 24-3. See Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1978), 2:1139-41.
Nauganavi, Tazkirah , p. 216
Ibid., p. 172.
Ibid., p. 245.
Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani, "Mir'at al-ahval-i jahan-nama," Buhar Coll, Persian MS 96, fol 211a, National Lib., Calcutta.
Shi‘i Religious Education
The handful of Usuli ulama trained more scholars in their school on an informal basis. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali in addition to bringing up his own five sons as ulama, taught a number of other religious students, though not all became clergymen. Of thirty-one long- and short-term pupils listed in Nasirabadi's biography, eight were clearly gentlemen scholars of the notable class. One sees a contrast between Mirza Kazim ‘Ali, a high notable who taught law and the prmciples of jurisprudence as an avocation, and Mirza Javad ‘Ali (1760-1842), a poverty-stricken student who never composed much because he had difficulty in finding patronage. Another four "students" were Nasirabadi's colleagues, who traded knowledge with him.
Of the remaining nineteen, mostly young men of a religious turn of mind, some came of middle landholding families in the qasabahs . These, like Sayyid Muhammad Quli Kinturi (later principal Sadr Amin at the British court in Mccrut) and Sayyid Muhammad Deoghatavi (later Faizabad's chief prayer leader), went on to careers in the religious or judicial fields. Some of his students, from families specializing in medicine, went on to become physicians themselves. Many of the younger scholars became committed Usulis, writing polemics against Akhbarism, Sufism, and Sunnism. Some of the younger notables trained by Nasirabadi also produced such works. Not everyone who studied with Nasirabadi came to support him; most of his students derived from an Akhbari background and some remained Akhbaris. Moreover, two young men very close to him, his cousin Sayyid Yad ‘Ali Nasirabadi and his old traveling companion Sayyid Panah ‘Ali, turned against him after studying with him, and remained his bitter critics.[43] Very firm bonds of loyalty and shared ideology emerged from the social networks centered on informal teaching and study, but sometimes those same networks accommodated strong enmities.
Many other scholars, including Iranian and Kashmiri immigrants, taught in Awadh. In addition to class sessions, notables held salons centered on religious discussion. The prayer leader in Faizabad, Sayyid ‘Abdu'l-‘Ali Deoghatavi, trained numbers of Usuli clerics. Through these informal tutoring systems Usuli ideas spread among Shi‘i literati and notables, not only in Awadh but beyond it to Banaras and Allahabad divisions, the upper Doab, and Bihar. In the next generation Nasirabadi's sons and major students taught hundreds of scholars, and in the 1840s the Awadh rulers finally founded a Shi‘i seminary (madrasah ).
The networks of learning extended even beyond India to Iraq and Iran, as in the case of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali. Ironically, the Indian connection proved highly lucrative for the Usuli cleries in the shrine cities. In the late 1780s Chief Minister Hasan Riza Khan remitted Rs. 500,000 to Najaf through the
"A'inah-'i haqq-nama,' foll. 35b-44b.
Iranian firm of Hajji Karbala'i Muhammad Tihrani for the construction of a canal in the middle Euphrates, which would bring water to perpetually dry Najaf. The project, aimed at sparing inhabitants and pilgrims inconvenience, was completed in 1793. Later Asafu'd-Dawlah sent another Rs. 200,000 to the mujtahids in Iraq.[44] The nawab's channeling of such large sums to the chief Usuli ulama in the shrine cities, on the advice of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali, strengthened them and further contributed to Usuli dominance. Tafazul Husayn Khan Kashmiri, as chief minister in 1795-98, remitted a great deal of money to Aqa Sayyid ‘Ali Tabataba'i for the poor and the ulama in Karbala.[45]
The Judiciary and Ulama-State Tensions
Shujacu'd-Dawlah probably appointed a chief qazi , as well as qazis in the provinces, since the Mughal system assumed these. Civil administrators performed many judicial functions. In rural areas large landholders often tried civil and criminal cases according to customary law (‘urf ).[46] Elliot gave evidence that religious-law qazis , appointed to each parganah, continued to exist in Awadh right up to the 1856 British annexation. These Sunni provincial qazis often held the post on a hereditary basis, having been given service grants by the Mughal government for undertaking judicial duties. They decided disputes, appeased enmities, performed marriage ceremonies, decided inheritance cases, wrote decrees, led ritual prayers, and instructed the people in religious law. Typical of the evidence available for the continued appointment of qazis in the parganahs is the petition to the nawab from Hafiz Muhammad Basir, who wished to be made judge in Sandila on the death of his father, the former holder of the post. In Kakori as well, the post of qazi was held in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century on a hereditary basis.[47]
In the eighteenth century the rudimentary judiciary of the central government lacked any great authority. Shujacu'd-Dawlah appointed as mufti the Farangi-Mahalli Ghulam Hazrat who held a similar post early in Asafu'd-Dawlah's
For the impact of Awadh donations in Iraq, see J Cole, "'Indian Money' and the Shi‘i Shrine Cities of Iraq, 1785-1850," Middle Eastern Studies 22, no. 4 (1986). 461-80. See also Muhammad Muhtashim Khan, "Tarikh-i Muhtashim Khani," Persian MS H.L. 156, foll. 129b-130a, Khodabakhsh Oriental Public Lib., Patna; Mashhadi, Savanihat , p. 113; Ardistani, "Al-hisn al-matin" 1:70; Jacfar Al-Mahbubah an-Najafi, Madi an-Najaf wa hadiruha (Sidon: Matbacat al-‘Irfan, 1353/1934), p. 131 and n.
Bihbahani, "Mir'at al-ahval," Brit. Libr. MS, foll. 58a-58b.
Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Shuja-ud-Daulah , 2 vols., rev. ed. (Agra: Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1961), 2:319.
Charles Alfred Elliot, Chronicles of Oonao, a District in Oudh (Allahabad: Allahabad Mission Press, 1862), pp. 113-16; Hafiz Muhammad Basir, "Arzah," Persian MS 1545, Nat'l Archives of India, New Delhi, Muhammad Fayzbakhsh, "Risalah dar ahval-i zamindaran-i Kakori," Curzon Coll., MS 87, foll. 170a-190a, Asiatic Soc. Lib., Calcutta.
Dawlah's reign.[48] Isfahani painted a black picture of the judiciary under Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah as altogether ineffective. He said that in 1783, as a result of pressure exerted by the British resident, Bristow, the deputy chief minister, Haydar Beg, appointed Mawlavi Mubin Farangi-Mahalli as civil judge. After a while the government replaced him with a Shi‘i Iranian, Muhammad Nasir Khan (a cousin of the assassinated chief minister, Mukhtaru'd-Dawlah), a notable rather than a religious scholar. In 1792 the Sunni Mufti Ghulam Hazrat became Lucknow's chief qazi , but the payroll for his court employees was, owing to treasury department problems, always in arrears.[49]
Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan (r. 1798-1814) likewise depended largely on the Sunni ulama of the Farangi Mahall for his court judges.[50] These Sunni judges sometimes came into conflict with the nawab; Sacadat ‘Ali removed Mawlavi Zuhuru'llah (d. 1840) from office after a dispute. Such disputes with the court could be ruinous both to careers and to finances, but Zuhuru'llah sought and received the patronage of a Shi‘i tax-farmer, becoming mufti once again after Sacadat ‘Ali's death.
The judiciary remained weak, and the British, worried about the impact of insecurity on property, constantly urged Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali to establish courts of justice and police throughout his dominions. He astutely turned this demand around and used it as a bargaining chip, saying that such a court system could be established only when the rebels in the countryside were extirpated, an indirect way of asking for more British troops to help his tax collectors.[51]
The Sunni background of the government qazis made many Shi‘is uncomfortable about resorting to them. A believer asked Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi if, where two Shi‘is had an unsettled legal dispute, they were permitted to take it to an upright Imami religious scholar. He replied that it was not only permissible, it was the preferred course.[52] The Shi‘i ulama enhanced their moral authority and circumvented the Farangi-Mahall judges through giving informal rulings on disputes between Shi‘is.
Sultan ‘Ali Husayni Safavi, "Macdan as-sacdah," Soc Coll., MS 181, foll. 251b-252a, Asiatic Soc. Lib, Calcutta, al-Hasani, Nuzhat al-khawatir 7:353; Rahman ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama-yi Hind (Lucknow, Naval Kishor, 1914), p 154 Another judicial figure of that era was Qazi S Muhammad Taqi b Qazi Mustafa see Safavi, "Macdan, fol 351b, and Barnett, North India between Empires (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 179, where it is noted that he had a jagir yielding Rs 5,347 per year.
Abu Talib Isfahani, History of Asafu'd Dawlah Nawab Wazir of Oudh Being a translation of Tafzihu's Ghafilin , trans. W Hoey (Lucknow. Pustak Kendra, repr. 1971), pp. 55-57.
R ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama , p 15. ‘Abdu'l-Bari Farangi-Mahalli, Athar al-awwal min ‘ulama ' Faranji Mahall (Lucknow, 1321/1903-4), pp. 7-8, 16; ‘Ali, Tazkirah-'i ‘ulama , pp. 99-100.
Resident to Vazir, 29 August 1812, Foreign Department Political Consultations [FDPG], 2 July 1813, no 65, NAI.
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, "Najat as-sa'ilin," Fiqh Shi‘ah, MS 256, fol. 26a, Nasiriyyah Lib., Lucknow.
Only in the 1840s did the government institute a Shi‘i judiciary in Awadh. The major reason for the long delay in this development was that the Shi‘i ulama simply did not trust the nawabs to let them make rulings according to Islamic law and their own consciences. Partially, they may not have wished to put themselves in a position where they would have been sure to come into conflict occasionally with their benefactors, for long remaining content to let Farangi-Mahallis like Mufti Zuhuru'llah undertake this often dangerous and morally compromising work.
An incident in the continuing rivalry between the Indian and Iranian Shi‘i ulama demonstrates the difficulties they faced in this regard. Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani came to India late in the eighteenth century and stayed in Hyderabad, Murshidabad, and Patna. He then came to Awadh in search of patronage, settling at first in Faizabad. In fact, he ought to have gotten the ulama in Lucknow to have the nawab extend an invitation to him, but perhaps because of his Iranian pride he did not abide by-that etiquette. He then committed the even more serious breach of coming to Lucknow without the nawab's permission.[53]
At the end of Ramadan in 1222 (1807), some believers came to Bihbahani in Lucknow and stated that they had seen the moon, a sign that the month of fasting was over. Aqa Ahmad gave a ruling that the next day was the first of Shawwal and the Holy Day (‘Id al-Fitr ) marking the breaking of the fast. He sent the ruling to Nawab Sacadat ‘Ali Khan, who, he said, at first accepted it. Later the nawab changed his mind and issued orders that the Holy Day would be celebrated a day later. Some friends advised Bihbhani to go along with the nawab's judgment, but he replied that in such matters the mujtahid must be obeyed, not obedient. He asserted that given the Shi‘i faith of the nawab, practicing dissimulation with him could have no meaning, and the Imams forbade the sort of worldly greed that would impel a cleric to obey him on this issue.
The next day Sacadat ‘Ali Khan went to the mosque for the Holy Day prayers, which Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali led. Aqa Ahmad insisted that the Law forbade holding the prayers a day late, but the Lucknow ulama justified it on grounds of pious dissimulation (taqiyyah ) Bihbahani sent a letter to the ulama, protesting that such actions gave an excuse to the Sunnis to criticize them. In reply, they quoted oral reports from the Imams living under the Sunni Abbasids about pious dissimulation, which he felt inappropriate. He complained that many in Lucknow thought that simply receiving a diploma (ijazah ) permitting one to transmit the oral reports of the Imams made a scholar a mujtahid, cattily remarking that in all of North India he never found any true ulama.[54] These barbs, directed at Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali, aimed
Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani, "Mir'at al-ahval-i jahan-nama," Buhar Coll., MS 96, fol. 166b, Calcutta.
Ibid, foll 168a-168b.
at disputing his status as a mujtahid.
Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali angrily riposted that he had on many occasions opposed the nawabs, but insisted on the legitimacy of practicing pious dissimulation with them. He gave as an example the time that Nawab Asafu'd-Dawlah fell ill and British friends suggested that he have some liquor for its medicinal effects. The nawab had given up drinking some time before, repenting before Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali. He asked Nasirabadi about this medical advice through a notable. The prayer leader replied without hesitation that many oral reports said that forbidden things have no curative effect. He could not permit the drinking of wine for medicinal purposes, on grounds of Islamic law.
Nasirabadi explained that he had not practiced pious dissimulation in that case because the nawah asked him a direct question. In the incident of the late Holy Day prayers, Sacadat ‘Ali Khan never bothered to inquire as to his opinion, but simply issued orders postponing the ceremonies. Had he asked, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali would have informed him that he was wrong to do so. But for the prayer leader to have volunteered such information would have been, he insisted, so serious an infraction against court protocol that it might well have put his life in danger. Temporary visitors such as Bihbahani might have been able to defy the nawab, he allowed, but local religious officials were in a much more precarious position.[55]
This sort of awkward situation made Shi‘i ulama unwilling to accept positions as government-appointed judges. At one point the government of Sacadat ‘Ali Khan attempted to appoint Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali to a judgeship. Nasirabadi explained that his acceptance would have been conditional on the nawab's assurance that the Islamic Law would be implemented. Since this would have meant that Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali would be judging the nawab, he declined to accept.[56]
Conclusion
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed two religious processes at work among notable-class Shi‘is in Awadh. As the Shi‘i-ruled state became more autonomous from the Mughals in Delhi, notable Shi‘is felt less tension with their own government, moving away from a sectarian sort of religion to a more formal establishment. As a corollary of this lessening tension with the state, Shi‘is brought into being formal Shi‘i religious institutions, some of them for the first time in North India. These institutions, in turn, required specialized staff, setting in motion the second religious process, the creation of a professional clergy.
"A'inah-i haqq-nama," foll. 142b-146a.
Ibid., fol. 144a.
The major cause for the transition to a formal religious establishment was clearly the rise of a Shi‘i regional ruling group in post-Mughai Awadh. Just as it produced a new, local patrimonial bureaucracy, it encouraged a more rational and bureaucratic approach in its own branch of Islam. Moreover, the cathedral mosque and Sunni Friday prayers had been powerful symbols of empire in Mughal Delhi. Some said that Asafu'd-Dawlah intended the Shi‘i cathedral mosque he built in the 1790s to rival the one in Delhi.[57] The ruling elite, desirous of celebrating its increasing autonomy in Awadh with a new capital, new bazaars, and extensive architectural works, appreciated the symbolic political value of Shi‘i Friday prayers. Thus, the move to a more formal religious establishment paralleled a further stage of state making in Awadh, in which the regional court openly threw off even the emperor's favored form of religion.
A more autonomous Shi‘i state reduced the tension with the Shi‘i community by providing security to it for its religious practices. A little over a century after Awrangzib forbade all Shi‘i rituals in India, Awadh's Shi‘is freely and openly practiced their faith. One of the classic prerequisites recognized by Shi‘i ulama for the holding of Friday prayers was that it be safe to do so.[58] In authorizing the prayers, the nawab and the chief minister made a declaration of security for Shi‘is in their realm. Nasirabadi had to accept the sincerity of that declaration before he could agree to lead the prayers, and even then he adopted a rhetoric of independence, urging Shi‘is to obey the Imams before any secular authority. Behind this idiom of independence, however, lay the inescapable fact that Shi‘i clerics like Nasirabadi were being co-opted by the state as adjuncts to its moral authority. In return, the highly trained Usuli ulama, who demanded absolute obedience from laymen on religious matters, were given financial support by the state, beginning their transformation into a professional clergy. This emergence of a body of paid religious experts is one correlate of a formal religious establishment, as opposed to a sect.
Obstacles to the achievement of a religious establishment among Shi‘is remained. The Akhbari gentlemen scholars of the notable class at first refused to bow behind the petty landholding ulama. The ulama themselves still distrusted the state, refusing formal judicial duties. Moreover, since the Friday prayers began among a small circle of the chief minister's intimates in Lucknow, artisans and laborers of the bazaar were excluded. Like the office of mulla-bashi in late Safavid Iran, the office of prayer leader in Awadh resembled in its initial stages the chaplaincy of the ruling household.[59] But just as the nawab's arbitrary, patrimonial power had to extend throughout Awadh,
Tota Ram Shayan, Tavarikh-i nadir al-casr (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1863), p. 159.
Muhammad Aman Lakhnavi, "Vajizah," fol 38b
See Said Amir Arjomand, "The Office of Mulla-Bashi in Safavid Iran," Studia Islamica 57 (1983): 141-42.
so too did the official school of Shi‘ism he adopted make universal claims to authority.[60] Only some Awadh notables at first recognized these claims, as Usuli Shi‘ism became their dominant ideology, and most Shi‘i artisans and laborers retained a more sectarian form of Shi‘ism.
Much of this chapter deals with professional closure by the Usuli ulama.[61] The beginning processes of clerical professionalization described here ended in widespread exclusionary practices, which will be dealt with in the next chapter. In this first stage in their appropriation of social and economic opportunities, the Usuli ulama specified a set of religious offices—prayer leader, jurisconsult, endowment and religious charities supervisor, and teacher—which they sought to fill. These often highly remunerative offices, required by the conventions of Muslim states and institutions, attracted pre-bends, benefices, and stipends for their support. The Usulis, having defined the services offered, strongly made the argument that untrained laypersons lacked the professional expertise to provide them. In this first stage of professionalization, the Shi‘i jurisprudents attempted to exclude literate gentleman scholars from what they saw as properly clerical posts. They excluded from their demands for a monopoly on such offices only the Muslim court judgeships. (Here the tendency to professional closure and the demands of their status group's style of life, of fidelity to scriptural principles, came into conflict.) To some extent. this attempt at clerical closure represented the demand by sons of small and middle Shi‘i landholders that service opportunities with the Shi‘i state be expanded for them and wealth shared beyond the narrow circle of notables and administrators.
The professional closure attempted by the handful of Usuli clerics was incomplete in the late eighteenth century. Unwilling to assume the risks and accept the moral compromises involved in the formal judiciary, they left that traditionally ulama-dominated institution to the Sunni Farangi-Mahallis. The Usulis' reluctance indicates both their incomplete transition from sectarian to establishmentarian views and their conviction that the ulama had not yet successfully socialized the Shi‘i ruling class to scriptural values. Competitors for state patronage abounded, in the form of Sufi Shi‘i leaders, conservative Akhbari ulama, and even Sunni and Hindu learned and holy men, so that the Usuli ulama had anything but a monopoly on religious patronage. Yet with the foundation of Friday congregational prayers, and with Nasirabadi's teachings on the authority of mujtahids over laymen and over religious donations, the foundations were laid for the emergence in Awadh of a full-blown hierocr