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Shi‘ism, Humanity and Revolution in Twentieth-Century India: Selfhood and Politics in the Husainology of ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2014

JUSTIN JONES
JUSTIN JONES*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, [email protected]
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Abstract

The story of Imam Husain's martyrdom at Karbala has been told with variant emphases and interpretations in different historical contexts. This article examines one of the most famous modern tellings of this narrative: that of ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, arguably South Asia's most influential Shi‘i mujtahid of the twentieth century. It argues that, from the 1930s–1940s, ‘Ali Naqi pioneered a novel perspective on Imam Husain, establishing him as a model for human comportment and a figure to be actively emulated, both by Shi‘as and by humanity at large. As well as having implications for transformation within Shi‘ism, this reorientation of Husain's significance pre-empted its politicisation: ‘Ali Naqi's message informed the incorporation of Shi‘i symbology within the 1942 Quit India agitation, and in some senses exhibited parallels with the later revolutionary rendering of the Karbala message in 1960s–1970s Iran. It is the range of the religious and political implications to be drawn from Ali Naqi's interpretation that have ensured both the durability, and ongoing controversy, of his Husainology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 24 , Issue 3: Isna ‘Ashari and Isma‘ili Shi‘ism: from South Asia to the Indian Ocean , July 2014 , pp. 415 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2014 

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References

My thanks to Mustafa Husain Asif Ja’isi and to the Azad and Shi‘i Diniyat Libraries, Aligarh, for providing me with access to most of the texts on which this article is based.

1 For two examples of many studies that have focused on the ritual observance of Muharram in South Asia, see Pinault, David, Horse of Karbala: Muslim devotional life in India (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Schubel, Vernon, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shi‘i Devotional Rituals in South Asia (Columbia, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 An important recent exception to this, and one engaged throughout this article, is Hyder, Syed Akbar, Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (New York, 2006)Google Scholar. For other works which have explored the diversity and nuances of meaning within the Karbala message, see Taleqani, Ayatullah Mahmud, Mutahhari, Ayatullah Murtada and Shari‘ati, Ali, Jihad and Shahadat: Struggle and Martyrdom in Islam (Houston, 1986)Google Scholar; Al-Serat: Papers from the Imam Husayn Conference, London 1984 (London, 1986); Enayat, Hamid, Modern Islamic Political Thought: The Response of the Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims to the Twentieth Century (London, 1982), pp. 181–194 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 “The [Karbala] story. . . provides models for living and a mnemonic for thinking about how to live: there is a set of parables and moral lessons all connected with or part of the story of Karbala. . . to which all of life's problems can be referred.” Fischer, Michael, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge Massachusetts, 1980), p. 21 Google Scholar.

4 Hyder, Reliving Karbala, p. 74.

5 This term is taken from Siegel, Evan, “The politics of Shahid-e Jawid ”, in The Twelver Shia in Modern Times: Religious Culture and Political History, (eds.) Brunner, Rainer and Ende, Werner (Leiden, 2001), p. 153 Google Scholar.

6 On the career of this luminary and some of his immediate descendants, see Cole, Juan, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859 (Berkeley, 1988)Google Scholar; Sajjad Rizvi, “Faith deployed for a new Shi‘i polity in India: the theology of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi”, this volume.

7 Despite their level of influence in late-colonial India, surprisingly little academic work has been done on either ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi or the Imamiya Mission. ‘Ali Naqi is discussed further in Rizvi, Salamat, Sayīd-ul-‘Ulamā: Hīyāt aūr kārnāmē (Lucknow, 1988)Google Scholar. The Imamiya Mission is discussed in Jones, Justin, Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 208–213 Google Scholar.

8 ‘Ali Naqi's tracts on Imam Husain and/or Karbala took on different emphases. Some fell into the genre of munazara [disputation], dispelling alleged Sunni untruths about Husain's martyrdom and preventing the ‘corruption’ (tehrif) of the central message. This was the central theme of his first full-length study, Qātilān-i Husēn kā mazhab (Lucknow, 1932). Other texts were biographies of key figures involved at Karbala, or renderings of the central Karbala narrative, e.g. Ma‘rka-i Karbalā (Lucknow, c.1936); others were correctives to popular observation of Muharram, arguing that practices of excessive weeping and ritual mourning should not detract from the central importance of remembrance and rumination: for example, Azā’i-Husēn kī ahmīyat (Lucknow, c.1935). Other books were intended for distribution to educate the Shi‘a on their religion, while others aimed to instruct non-Shi‘as, e.g. Husēn aūr Islām (Lucknow, c.1940s); some of his biographies of Husain were even meant for children, e.g. Karbalā kī ta‘līmāt (Lucknow, c.1940s).

9 On the evolution of these ideas of Muslim selfhood in colonial contexts (often conceived as khudi), see Jalal, Ayesha, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London, 2000)Google Scholar. For a study of how autobiographical writing became a platform for experiments with new ideas of selfhood, especially in these same decades of the 1930s–1940s, see Majeed, Javed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (Basingstoke, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For example, Metcalf, Barbara, “The past in the present: instruction, pleasure and blessing in Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya's Aap Biitii ”, in Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History, (eds.) Arnold, David and Blackburn, Stuart (Delhi, 2004), pp. 116–143 Google Scholar.

11 David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, “Introduction: life histories in India”, in Ibid ., pp. 1–28.

12 Numani, Shibli, ‘Umar al-Farūq (Lahore, 1975 Google Scholar [first published 1898]) and Sīrāt un-Nabī, vol I, (Karachi, 1967 [c.1921]). Coming from the other direction, biographies of the Prophet and other Muslim exemplars were sometimes used by non-Muslim polemicists as means of cataloguing the perceived ills of Islam: for example, Muir, William, The Life of Mahomet: From Original Sources (London, 1861)Google Scholar.

13 ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, Sayyid, Shahīd-i Insānīyat (Lucknow, 1995 [1941–1942]), p. 16Google Scholar.

14 On this definition of khudi, a concept tied to Sufi motifs of transmigration and enlightenment, see Majeed, Javed, Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics, Postcolonialism (London, 2009), pp. 20–24 Google Scholar.

15 Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, pp. 654–694.

16 Ibid ., pp. 182, 288.

17 The view of Husain as having foreknowledge of his martyrdom is a conventional one among Shi‘i scholars. Significantly, however, it has been rejected by some twentieth-century thinkers, particularly Salehi Najafabadi in the 1960s, who have thus depicted Husain instead as launching a real (though failed) bid for temporal power, which is to be renewed by his followers. See Siegel, “The politics of Shahid-e Jawid”, pp. 150–156; Aghaie, Kamran Scot, The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle, 2004), pp. 92–96 Google Scholar.

18 Robinson, Francis, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Delhi, 2000), pp. 105–121 Google Scholar.

19 Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, p. 578.

20 While of course most of Shahid-i Insaniyat focuses upon Husain, the role played by women in the text is highly prominent. One example is an episode featuring Imam ‘Ali's daughter Zainab bint ‘Ali who, seeing a caravan of surviving prisoners brought from Karbala to Kufa, chides Yazid's army for their mistreatment of the women of the Prophet's family. Her “powerful oratory”, damning Yazid's oppressions and exposing the extent of his despotism, is depicted as bringing the crowds of men and women to tears, and as being a critical part of the exposure of Yazid's cruelty and illegitimacy to the world: Ibid ., pp. 526–533. One might infer, then, that ‘Ali Naqi inverts more traditional emphases in the Karbala story upon its women as characters of submission and suffering, instead evoking women as active orators who are critical to the preservation and transmission of Karbala's lessons.

21 For example, Babar, Mir ‘Ali Anis, The Battle of Karbala [1850s], introd; Matthews, David (Delhi, 2003), pp. 21–22, 42–45Google Scholar. It is also worth noting that such an emphasis on the spiritual charisma of Husain was not exclusive to India but had currency in Qajar Iran. For instance, Mirza Muhammad Taqi Sepehr's Nasikh al-tawārīkh (1879), an important Karbala narrative of the later Qajar period, ruminated on the pre-existence of the Imams before the world's creation, and the ritual practices to be observed when in their presence at their tombs. Aghaie, Martyrs of Karbala, p.89.

22 For one late nineteenth-century Lucknawi account that traces the miracles of the Imams Hasan and Husain, see ‘Abd ul-‘Aziz, Majmū‘a-i mu‘jiza’t (Lucknow, 1873). For discussions of tales concerning the apparent appearance of Imam Husain during ta‘ziya processions in his honour, tales which apparently circulated in Bombay and north India, see ‘Ali, Sa‘id ‘Abid, Fāzilat-nāma-i ta‘zīya (Bahraich, 1908)Google Scholar.

23 Ayoub, Mahmoud, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of the ‘Ashura in Twelver Shi‘ism (The Hague, 1978), p. 124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 For example, Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, pp. 367, 371.

25 Hegland, Mary, “Two images of Husain: accommodation and revolution in an Iranian village”, in Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi‘ism from Quietism to Revolution, (ed.) Keddie, Nikki (New Haven, 1983), pp. 218–237 Google Scholar.

26 For example, Syed Husain Arif Naqvi, “The controversy about the Shaykhiyya tendency among Shia ‘ulama’ in Pakistan”, in The Twelver Shia, (eds.) Brunner and Ende, pp. 142–148.

27 Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, pp. 178–180.

28 Ibid ., p. 16.

29 Interestingly, the main religion to receive reprimand from ‘Ali Naqi is not Sunni Islam but Christianity; for Jesus’ divine character is perceived as compromising his claims to suffering, unlike that of Husain. Ibid ., pp. 371–372.

30 For details, see Jones, Shi‘a Islam, pp. 186–199.

31 Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, pp. 645–646. The word ‘azooz refers to the gnashing of horses, and so again is resonant of the opposing armies at Karbala.

32 Ibid ., pp. 646–647.

33 Cole, Roots of north Indian Shi‘ism, pp. 273–274.

34 Hyder, Reliving Karbala, pp. 137–169.

35 For an excellent discussion of the reworking of Husainology before and during the 1979 revolution, many features of which overlap with ‘Ali Naqi's reinterpretation of the qualities of the Imam, see Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, pp. 87–112.

36 See, for example, works on questions of the use of reason, the response to modern commerce, the decline of Arabic education in India and the inviolability of personal laws. Respectively, ‘ Naqvi, Ali Naqi, Mazhab aūr ‘aql (Lucknow, 1941)Google Scholar, Tijārat aūr Islām (Lucknow, 1933), Tazkira-i hifāz Shī‘a (Lucknow, 1933) and Muslim Parsanal Lā: nā qābil tabdīl (Delhi, c.1973).

37 One might include here not simply those in the Muslim ‘modernist’ tradition but also ‘Islamist’ thinkers, such as Egypt's Hassan al-Banna and Hyderabad's Abu’l Ala Mawdudi, who have been well known for their synthesising of Islamic values and laws with ‘Western’ political institutions and constructs of statehood.

38 Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, p. 40.

39 Studies have frequently shown how ‘moderate’ Congress nationalists, among them Dadabhai Naoroji and Surendranath Banerjea, engaged the language of “liberty, equality, fraternity” as well as an array of other ideas and terms drawn from European liberal political thought: see Hay, Stephen (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition, volume II: Modern India and Pakistan (New York, 1988), pp. 89–101 Google Scholar.

40 Prominent members included the Lucknawi advocate Brijnath Sharghi and Mohan Lal Saxena, the latter best known as a lawyer for the defence in the Kakori Conspiracy Case (1925–1927) and the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1928–1931).

41 Ja‘far Husain, Mirza Muhammad, Rapōrt-i Luckna’u Husēn Dēy Kamitī, mukamil rū’īdād-i jalsa-i hā’ī sēzdah sad-sāla-i Yādgār-i Husēnī, munaqīda 16–18 Āugust 1942 (Lucknow, c.1943)Google Scholar, passim.

42 Ibid ., p. 191.

43 Ibid ., pp. 41–44.

44 Ibid ., pp. 79–80.

45 Ibid ., pp. 100–101.

46 Ibid ., pp. 44–46.

47 Ibid ., p. 3.

48 Major Shi‘i political organisations of north India like the All India Shi‘a Political Conference, which wielded considerable influence in the UP in the decade before independence, aligned themselves with Congress rather than the Muslim League.

49 This implied but clear political connotation relates to what Aghaie calls the “multi-vocality” of Karbala's symbology: the unspoken identification of a government with Yazid meant that a regime could be publicly criticised in sermons on Karbala without ever being directly named, as was the case in Pahlavi Iran. Aghaie, Martyrs of Karbala, p.111.

50 Husain, Rapōrt-i Luckna’u Husēn Dēy Kamitī, pp. 98–99.

51 Ibid ., p. 204. For context on Azad's amalgamation of the ethics of jihad with the project of anti-colonial resistance, see Jalal, Ayesha, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 192–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Azad's own extensive poetic compositions concerning Husain's martyrdom, which can partly be interpreted within this context of resistance, see Hyder, Reliving Karbala, pp. 150–151.

52 Husain, Rapōrt-i Luckna’u Husēn Dēy Kamitī, p. 204.

53 Gandhi is widely known to have lauded Husain's example, and indeed, his diaries record his reading of a biography of Imam Husain during his detention in the aftermath of the civil disobedience movement of the early 1930s. See “Diary 1932, January 10”, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 55 (Delhi, 1999), p. 447. This might be linked to Faisal Devji's suggestion that Gandhi widely applied the theme of shahadat in his political ruminations, one in many contexts highly resonant of Shi‘ism. Devji, Faisal, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (London, 2008), p. 19 Google Scholar.

54 Husain, Rapōrt-i Luckna’u Husēn Dēy Kamitī, p. 204.

55 For a frequently quoted example of Nehru's description of India's incorporative cultures and history which to some degree mirrors these statements, see Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery of India (Bombay, 1969 [1946]), pp. 49–63 Google Scholar.

56 Husain, Rapōrt-i Luckna’u Husēn Dēy Kamitī, pp. 13–14.

57 Gould, William, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late-Colonial India (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

58 Other twentieth-century Shi‘i zakirs have similarly adopted a Gandhian rubric and spoken of Husain's campaign as a satyagraha. See Hyder, Reliving Karbala, p. 91.

59 For an extremely deft discussion of the post-1979 Iranian state's co-option of the language of martyrdom and definition of martyrs in service of state legitimisation, see Kaur, Ravinder, “Sacralising bodies: on martyrdom, government and accident in Iran”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, XX, 4 (2010), pp. 441–460 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 C.f. Hyder, Reliving Karbala, pp. 80, 102.

61 Naqvi, Shahīd-i Insānīyat, pp. 349–353.

62 Sherwani, Zafar, Kitāb-i shahīd-i insānīyat: azhār-i hāq (Hyderabad, 1954), pp. 4–34 Google Scholar.

63 Rizvi, Sayīd-ul-‘Ulamā, pp. 75–79.

64 ‘Askari, Notably Sayyid Ghulam, Pīyās (Bombay, 1973)Google Scholar.

65 Rizvi, Sayīd-ul-‘Ulamā, pp. 75–79.

66 Khomeini's paternal grandfather was descended from a line of sayyids based in Kintor, a qasba [township] in rural Awadh outlying Lucknow. His grandfather emigrated from India to Iran around the 1830s.

67 See examples from Khomeini's public ruminations on Husain in Algar, Hamid (ed.), Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (London, 1985)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 31, 108, 113. An equally striking resemblance to ‘Ali Naqi's work is shown in the writings of the revolutionary ideologue ‘Ali Shari‘ati. His reflections on the need for the individual to take control of destiny to free society of injustice and deceit, and his talk of the recovery of an objectified ‘self’, share deep parallels with ‘Ali Naqi's thought, even if they lack direct connection: for example ‘Ali Shari‘ati, “Intizar, the Religion of Protest” [1971] and “Return to the Self”, both translated and republished in John Donohue and John Esposito (eds), Islam in Transition, pp. 297–307; c.f. ‘Ali Shari‘ati, “A discussion of Shahid”, in Taleqani et al, Jihad and Shahadat, pp. 230–243.

68 On efforts at taqrib in revolutionary Iran, see W. Buchta, “Tehran's Ecumenical Society (Majma‘ al-Taqrib): a veritable ecumenical revival or a Trojan horse of Iran?”, in The Twelver Shia, eds. Brunner and Ende, and Menashri, David, “Khomeini's vision: nationalism or world order?”, in The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World, (ed.) Menashri, David (Boulder, 1990)Google Scholar.

69 C.f. Jones, Shi‘a Islam, pp. 20, 227–228.

70 The question of the extent to which the Shi‘a of the Indian subcontinent practice taqlid (deference or discipleship) towards marja‘s (exemplars) outside of India at all is a highly nebulous one, even before we consider whether any such transnational ties link them to Iran or Iraq. For some discussion of an arguably increasing, if still highly marginal, Iranian influence among the Indian Shi‘a, see Nasr, Vali, “The Iranian revolution and changes in Islamism in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan”, in Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, (eds.) Keddie, Nikki and Matthee, Rudi (Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 327—354 Google Scholar. For further reflections on the issue of the influence, or otherwise, of Iranian clergy and intellectual traditions within modern South Asian Shi‘ism, see Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, “Third wave Shi‘ism: Sayyid ‘Arif Husain al-Husaini and the Islamic revolution in Pakistan”, in this volume.

71 Shepard, William, “Sayyid Qutb's doctrine of ‘Jahiliyya’”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, XXXV, 4 (2003), p. 526 Google Scholar.

72 Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, passim. To pick up on an example appearing throughout this article, Devji notes how during the Islamic revolution in Iran, “it is startling how often the words human, humanity and human being were used. . . humanity seemed to have replaced properly theological identifications like Shi‘ism, Islam or even religion in general, so that. . . it becomes a synonym for all three” (pp. 28–29). <>