Husain Ahmad Madani

The Jihad for Islam and India's Freedom

Barbara D. Metcalf

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780742106
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani (1879 – 1957) was a political activist, Islamic scholar, and supporter of Gandhi during the struggle for India's independence. Humane and fiercely dedicated whether campaigning against the separation of Pakistan, or in favour of democracy and inter-religious peace, he brooked no nonsense and fought relentlessly for what he believed in. Spanning a lifetime of campaigning and controversy, Barbara Metcalf's compelling biography draws from Madani's letters and autobiographies, as well as detailed knowledge of the prevailing political climate, to create an intimate and revealing account of one of the most important men in the history of modern Islam.

THE ARREST OF THE “UNDESIRABLE INDIANS,” 1916

The Sharif of Mecca, newly installed thanks to a British-backed coup against the Ottoman sultan, knew what he had to do to please his patrons. On December 2, 1916, he dispatched his police officers to arrest Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani in the house where he was lodging in Mecca. Colonel C. Wilson, the British pilgrim officer and link to the Government of India’s Criminal Intelligence Office, had summoned the Sharif to Jeddah where he directed him explicitly to apprehend not only Husain Ahmad but also several sojourners, “undesirable Indians,” who had come to the Hijaz for pilgrimage. Husain Ahmad was a well-known and respected Islamic scholar, an Indian who had been resident in Arabia his whole adult life. Now implicated in an Islamic plot to involve the Ottomans against the British in India, he was destined for extended detention in an island prison camp on Malta on the grounds of sedition, when his crime, if crime it was, can better be called devotion.

To that point in his life, the critical impetus to Maulana Husain Ahmad’s actions had been devotion, devotion to his family elders as well as to intellectual and spiritual mentors like the one he was linked to in 1916 (Madani 1953 (hereafter Naqsh-i hayat): I, 9–13). Foremost among these was his father, who in 1899 had decided to fulfill his heart’s desire of living in the Prophet Muhammad’s city of Medina. He had brought with him his large family, including Husain Ahmad, his third son. Husain Ahmad was still a student at that point, in his final year of seminary training at the influential north Indian madrasa, the Darul ‘Ulum at Deoband. Reluctant as he was, he could not resist his father’s wishes.

In the ensuing seventeen years, Maulana Husain Ahmad had returned to India three times in order to meet with his spiritual guide and teachers, to get married, and to attend to other family business. He had even taught at the Deoband seminary for a year. But his real base was in the Holy Places, and, at the time of his arrest, as a man in his late thirties, he had overcome enormous odds to establish himself as a respected Islamic teacher, particularly learned in prophetic traditions or hadith. His circle of students, who were drawn from many countries, met in the Prophet’s Mosque. In this he was a testimonial to the high quality of Indian scholarship in the cosmopolitan tradition of sacred Islamic learning. Husain Ahmad was also a responsible member of his family, which had faced great hardships in making the transition to another country.

The Holy Places of Mecca and Medina, located in the Ottoman province of the Hijaz, was home in those years to extensive networks of an Indian diaspora. It included Islamic scholars like Husain Ahmad, holy men with circles of disciples, as well as students who had come for the intellectual and spiritual blessing of residence in the Holy Places. Many individuals and schools in the Holy Cities were patronized by wealthy Indian aristocrats and traders. Maulana Husain Ahmad was among the recipients of Indian largesse, receiving in those years monthly stipends from two of the rulers whom the British called “princes,” the pious woman grandee known as the Begum of Bhopal and the Nawab of Bahawalpur (L/PS/10/648 1917). The wealthy also supported facilities for the comfort of pilgrims. Shortly before their arrest, Husain Ahmad and his companions, for example, had found lodging in the port city of Jeddah in a hospice established by the ruler of Rampur state, another Indian prince. Another significant group within the Indian diaspora were traders, including a core group with ties to Delhi, and they, in fact, were often the conduit for transmitting charitable gifts from home. Many were agents for India-based companies. Others were petty entrepreneurs, dealing in books, sweets, rosaries, and the like for the pilgrim market (PRO/TNA: FO686/149/ff. 202–208).

Traders, scholars, and patrons all had their bonds to India reinvigorated through their own travel and through visits from Indian pilgrims and others, especially after the introduction of steam travel in the late nineteenth century. In 1915, one of Maulana Husain Ahmad’s revered teachers from Deoband, the luminous scholar and elder, Maulana Mahmudul Hasan (1851–1920), had led a group of pilgrims to Mecca. It was common for pilgrims to seek out an occasion to undertake the hajj with such a person in order to secure the additional blessing of his companionship while performing the sacred ritual. Husain Ahmad would later conclude that among Maulana Mahmudul Hasan’s own group were loyalists to British colonial interests bent on currying favor, or prosecuting their own designs, by bringing harm to Maulana Mahmudul Hasan and the others. This was a reasonable surmise given the Kiplingesque cast of spies, “approvers,” and “loyal” Indians evident in any perusal of colonial records in these years – and the disproportionate colonial fear of Muslim conspiracy.

In his book about the detention on Malta, The Prisoner of Malta, written in the guise of a travelogue about Mahmudul Hasan, Husain Ahmad provided details about the arrest (Madani n.d., hereafter Asir-i malta). The problem had to do with a declaration that reproduced an argument about Islamic authority initiated by the Arab Bureau in Cairo and other British officials claiming expertise in Islam. This argument was predicated on the assumption that there was a happy coincidence between British geo-political ambitions and “correct” Islamic interpretations. It denounced the Turks as infidels, kafirs. It also asserted that the “caliph,” the holder of that ancient position linked to the earliest years of Islamic rule, and later adopted by the Ottoman sultan, could only be of Arab descent. It thus presumed to give complete legitimacy to the Sharif’s revolt against the Ottoman overlord. It also assumed that “Islamic doctrine,” not, for example, good governance, was all that any Muslim cared about. In fact, no Arab units of the Ottoman army ever came over to the Sharif; a few thousand tribesmen, paid off by British money and famous thanks to Colonel T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” formed his troops (Fromkin 1990: 219).

The Indians in the Hijaz did not hesitate to speak out. Maulana Khalil Ahmad Ambahtawi (1852–1927), another of Maulana Husain Ahmad’s revered Deobandi teachers, was described by the British agent as among those most outraged by the claims of the king:

. . . this was the man who had told King Hussein to his face in Mecca in 1916 that his pretensions to the caliphate were presumptuous and would not be entertained in India, and many more unpalatable truths to the same effect. The king has never forgotten and is said to be extremely frightened of the moulvi, who is a very outspoken man, and who intends, so I am told, to give the king un mauvais quart d’heure at Mecca on the subject of the latter’s intrigues and aspirations in the Islamic world [FO 868/26 1920].

With opinions like these circulating in India as well, colonial officials hoped somehow to turn the tide.

A declaration in support of the British argument was presented to Mahmudul Hasan and his companions on behalf of one Khan Bahadur Mubarak ‘Ali, who had arrived from India to secure signatures from respected Islamic scholars of Mecca. Mubarak ‘Ali gained the support of the Shaikhul Islam, the chief Meccan religious official, committed as he was to securing support for the Sharif. As his British title “Khan Bahadur” suggests, the Indian was, in Maulana Husain Ahmad’s words, “a government man” (Asir-i malta: 58). Mubarak ‘Ali particularly wanted signatures of well-known Indian scholars, and of these, apparently, none was more important than Maulana Mahmudul Hasan.

Not surprisingly, Mahmudul Hasan declined to add his signature to the declaration, advancing first what might be called the technical ground that the declaration was presented as the opinion of Meccan ‘ulama teaching in the sanctuary. He did not hesitate, however, according to Maulana Husain Ahmad, to point out to the official that the justification of the Sharif’s coup was clearly in conflict with shari‘a law. Husain Ahmad prudently asked the official to report the technical demurral only. To no avail. He soon returned with a version that dropped the assertion of Ottoman unbelief. Maulana Mahmudul Hasan still refused to sign. At this point, the Khan Bahadur thought it best to leave for India with whatever signatures he had garnered. And Mahmudul Hasan concluded that he ought to get out of Mecca.

But before the group could secure transport, the head of the pilgrim guides – men licensed by the Hijaz government to take responsibility for foreign pilgrims – arrived at their lodging. He announced that their “government” (the English word was used), whose subjects they were, had summoned them. Maulana ‘Uzair Gul, a disciple of Maulana Mahmudul Hasan from the Indian northwest frontier, burst out in indignation. He denied the legitimacy of any infidel government and claimed security in Mecca on the basis of its status as a sanctuary – as it had in fact been for Indian Muslims who had settled there during the brutal reprisals visited on Muslims after the uprising of 1857. The Arab official at this point retreated (Asir-i malta: 64).

What could they do? The group decided that Maulana Husain Ahmad with his fluent Arabic and good reputation should be the one to intercede with the Shaikhul Islam on the group’s behalf. Sayyid Amin ‘Asim, their own pilgrimage guide, agreed to go along. He would meet the Shaikhul Islam first and only then would Husain Ahmad speak. Amin ‘Asim was apparently a man of great courtesy, as well as some Islamic learning himself. He of course had an interest in restoring good relations with the officials for the sake of his own reputation.

The Shaikhul Islam did not stand on ceremony. He greeted Husain Ahmad by saying that Mahmudul Hasan was the enemy of the Sharif’s regime, heard even to call them “Kharijis,” a term used for a group of dissidents active in the early centuries of Islam. Why else had he not signed? Husain Ahmad rehearsed the argument that Maulana Mahmudul Hasan and the rest could not sign because they were not Meccans. He then asked the Shaikh to give the group one more day until the Sharif himself returned to town so that they could meet him directly. The Shaikh responded by upping his accusations with the charge that Mahmudul Hasan was holding political meetings in the Sanctuary Mosque after the sunset prayer. Husain Ahmad denied this staunchly and insisted that Mahmudul Hasan only went to the mosque to teach and to pray. What about political discussion? Only about what was in the newspapers, Husain Ahmad insisted, and that too not about Arabia but affairs outside.

Maulana Husain Ahmad then found himself put on the spot since the Shaikh had gotten wind of a conversation in the shop of the Delhi trader, Hajji ‘Abdul Jabbar, in which Husain Ahmad himself purportedly had denounced the extent of English control. Husain Ahmad insisted that the conversation was simply spurred by the arrival of someone with a book bound in the European style. He had indeed, he admitted, lamented that nowadays tastes ran only to what was European. When Husain Ahmad returned to his lodgings and recounted the conversation to the others, all agreed that they should use their day of grace to find a way to escape.

When ‘Abdul Jabbar, the Delhi trader, heard this plan, he thought it was a mistake. He urged the group instead to crave forgiveness in the most abject way from the Shaikhul Islam. Would Husain Ahmad be willing to kiss the official’s hand and beg his pardon? Husain Ahmad did not hesitate a minute. If it would help Maulana Mahmudul Hasan, he said, he would kiss the Shaikh’s feet. ‘Abdul Jabbar went on ahead to the Shaikh’s in-laws’ house, where the Shaikh gathered with others every evening, and, in due course, Husain Ahmad followed and did exactly as ‘Abdul-Jabbar suggested. He kissed the Shaikh’s hand, begged forgiveness, and went off to sit quietly at the side of the room. According to Husain Ahmad, the Shaikh commented that whether it was right or wrong to fight the Turks, now that they had started, they had to continue. After coffee, the penitents returned home, optimistic that all had been settled.

But in the new context of British influence, the old formalities no longer worked. The Sharif insisted on an immediate arrest. When Husain Ahmad and the others got word of this, they decided that Mahmudul Hasan, accompanied by the youngest of their group, Husain Ahmad’s nephew Wahid Ahmad, should go off and hide. The others now hoped that if some of them spent a few days in jail, the matter could be resolved. When the police came they found Husain Ahmad alone and accordingly placed him under arrest. The commissioner greeted him with words that made clear who was behind his arrest: “You denounce the English; now you can have a taste of them” (Asir-i malta: 68). Arrests of the animated ‘Uzair Gul and a second companion, the sober Hakim Nusrat Husain, followed. The bewildered Hakim thought that suspicion might have fallen on him, as well as on his nephew, who had actually left for India before the arrests took place, simply because of wholly innocent transfers of money they had made. The nephew would in fact be arrested and jailed upon his arrival in India.

The loyal Delhi traders went in delegation directly to the Sharif on behalf of the prisoners, insisting on their innocence and asking that at least they not be turned over to non-Muslims. Apparently the Sharif was frank enough to explain to them that at this point he simply could not offend the British over a matter like this. He announced immediately that if Mahmudul Hasan did not surrender himself that day, ‘Uzair Gul and the Hakim would be shot dead; Mahmudul Hasan’s pilgrimage guide would lose his license and be lashed. Maulana Mahmudul Hasan presented himself that evening, dressed in the ihram of the pilgrim as if he had simply gone outside Mecca in order to enter the city for ritual purposes. This stratagem was of no avail. He was taken directly to Jeddah under armed guard (Asir-i malta: 63–70).

MAULANA MAHMUDUL HASAN, DEOBAND, AND NEW POLITICAL STRATEGIES

Maulana Mahmudul Hasan was without doubt the most influential of the second generation of ‘ulama associated with the seminary at Deoband, a small town northeast of Delhi. The school had been founded in 1866 in the face of colonial repression after the great uprising of 1857. Mahmudul Hasan’s father, a deputy inspector in the colonial educational service, had been one of those involved in the school’s founding and subsequently served on its consultative council. The founders wanted to bring the structure, and even teaching techniques, of modern education to the transmission of the classic religious sciences even while eschewing the subject matter of the colonial schools. Deoband set the pattern for popularly funded schools that would transmit Islamic learning and practice independent of state control during the colonial period. Such innovations in all religious traditions in the colonial period fostered sectarian identities and disseminated religious teachings more widely than they had ever been before (Metcalf 2002).

Mahmudul Hasan was the school’s legendary first student, completing his course of study in 1873. He subsequently served as teacher, becoming principal in 1890, and, upon the death of one of the school’s founders in 1905, he took on the position of patron as well. He was primarily a scholar of hadith, of the traditions that narrate the acts and words of the Prophet Muhammad, and of Qur’an. Maulana Husain Ahmad called him “the seal of the hadith scholars,” modeling the phrase on the epithet of Muhammad as “the seal of the prophets”; he was also “the chief of the Qur’an commentators” (Asir-i malta: 3). Knowledge was not a separate thing from holiness, but both were intimately linked in the confidence of his followers that he embodied prophetic teachings in a way that was unique for his time and perhaps even beyond. Although Maulana Mahmudul Hasan was not Husain Ahmad’s Sufi pir, he was a powerful presence at every point in his life from school days until his own death. Husain Ahmad himself described him as someone with “a heart more expansive than the width of the seven seas; the seven climes could not locate themselves in even a corner . . .” (Asir-i malta: 7). Others remembered him as a small, intense man with piercing eyes (Minault 1982: 27).

What cause, then, was there for official suspicion of Maulana Mahmudul Hasan, the school, or its leadership in general? From the beginning the Deobandi ‘ulama, like virtually every other institutionalized group in British India in the late nineteenth century, had expressed their loyalty to the Crown in the aftermath of the brutally repressed rebellion of 1857. It was no small achievement to gain credibility for this stance given that Muslims were disproportionately blamed for the uprising and some of the ‘ulama specifically targeted. The Deobandis as a group had not subsequently engaged in political activities at all, leaving to the western-educated the world of meetings, pamphlets, petitions, and addresses – the newly emerging framework of public life in the late nineteenth century. By the first decade of the new century, however, changes were afoot, notably in the large province of Bengal where nationalist protest and even terrorism were beginning to be felt after the 1905 decision, ostensibly on administrative grounds, to partition the province. The partition was seen as diminishing the political clout of Bengali political activists. It also created a Muslim-majority province in the east.

Westernized Muslim leaders were beginning to question British policy. They focused on a number of issues concerning the interests of Muslims, among them challenges to Urdu (written in a modified Arabic script) as the sole official vernacular language in the United Provinces; inadequate recognition of Muslims in governing councils; and the revocation of the Bengal partition in 1911. They were also troubled by British foreign policy in the Middle East. In regard to this last, some among the Muslim leadership saw with alarm the shift from support of the Ottomans (as a counter to Russians), which had been British policy at such points as the Russo-Turkish war of the 1870s, toward support of dissident Ottoman provinces, notably in the Tripolitan and Balkan wars of 1911–1913. There were now Urdu newspapers critical of government policy and new organizations like the “Servants of the Kaaba.” This organization was intended principally to render service to pilgrims to the Holy Places, but it also concerned itself with threats to the Sultan’s role as their protector.

Leadership in these activities for the most part was in the hands of the western-educated men associated with the English-medium college at Aligarh that had been founded in 1875. Husain Ahmad (testifying in apparent honesty after his arrest) pointed out that Deobandis had been puzzled when two of the chief organizers of the Kaaba society came, unsuccessfully, to try to interest the ‘ulama in participating. Deoband’s rector, Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, far from political involvement, had even received the government title of “Shamsul ‘Ulama” (The Sun of the ‘Ulama).“[The activists] are what we call men of the new light (Nai Roshani),” Husain Ahmad said, “and look down upon us as old-fashioned” (PRO/TNA: FO686/149/ff. 208).

It is likely that Deobandis began to fall under suspicion because of a single figure who had ties both to Deoband and to the political activists, Maulana ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872–1944). In 1909–1910, the leadership at Deoband, including Maulana Mahmudul Hasan, hoping to consolidate the school’s scholarly influence, decided to bring a half dozen of their most able graduates back to the school, among them Husain Ahmad and ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi, an orphaned Sikh who became a Muslim as a teenager and entered Deoband in 1888. Husain Ahmad’s appointment at the school was soon made permanent, to be resumed whenever he returned from Medina. Both intellectually and financially, this was an excellent arrangement. He served as a teacher for a year, beginning late in 1909, his only significant period in India between his initial departure and the arrest described above.

In 1910 the school’s leaders, as part of their new initiative at the school, decided to hold a three-day convocation, a dastarbandi or “tying of the turban” to recognize the accomplishment of graduates by a visible symbo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Sources and Acknowledgements
• Maps
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE ARREST OF THE “UNDESIRABLE INDIANS,” 1916
• Maulana Mahmudul Hasan, Deoband, and new political strategies
• The War and the “Silk Letter Conspiracy”
• 2 “THE PRISONER OF MALTA,” 1916–1920
• The tribunal
• Travel
• Malta
• Everyday routines: mutual bonds, common commitments
• Colonial internment as a school for anti-colonialism
• 3 FLASHBACK: BECOMING AN ISLAMIC SCHOLAR IN COLONIAL INDIA AND MEDINA
• The family
• Everyday life and education in Tanda
• The formation of an Islamic scholar
• The Sufi path
• A sectarian conflict
• India, 1909–1911 and 1913
• Maulana Husain Ahmad at thirty-five
• 4 BECOMING A “NATIONALIST MUSLIM”: INDIA IN THE 1920s
• Bombay, the Khilafat Movement, and political awakening
• The Shaikhul Hind, Maulana Madani, and non-cooperation
• The double strand of activism: the “Karachi Seven” and Islamic renewal
• Calcutta and Sylhet
• Principal of Deoband
• Mass politics, minority politics
• 5 WHO SPEAKS FOR MUSLIMS? THE CHALLENGES OF THE 1930s
• Maulana Madani’s character
• Non-cooperation and round tables
• Izhar-i Haqiqat, “A Declaration of Truth”
• The elections of 1936
• Defending “Composite Nationalism”
• Differences: against the ‘ulama, among the ‘ulama
• The Shi‘a–Sunni dispute in Lucknow
• Transitions
• 6 “THE GLORIOUS WARRIOR”: AGAINST BRITAIN, AGAINST PARTITION
• A voice crying in the wilderness?
• Words as weapons: anti-colonialism, Muslim freedom fighters, sacred India
• Protesting and negotiating throughout the war
• Dividing India
• Partition
• CONCLUSION: INDIAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE CONTINUING JIHAD
• A final story
• In conclusion
• Bibliography
• Husain Ahmad Madani’s writings
• Biographical writings about Husain Ahmad Madani
• British official documents
• Other printed and electronic sources
• Index