Modern Asian Studies 42, 2/3 (2008) pp. 259281.

C 2008 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0026749X07002922 First published online 30 July 2007

Islamic Reform and Modernities

in South Asia1
FRANCIS ROBINSON

Royal Holloway, University of London

Email: F.Robinson@rhul.ac.uk

Introduction

From the beginning of the Islamic era, Muslim societies have

experienced periods of renewal (tajdid). Since the eighteenth century,
Muslim societies across the world have been subject to a prolonged and
increasingly deeply felt process of renewal. This has been expressed
in different ways in different contexts. Amongst political elites with
immediate concerns to answer the challenges of the West, it has meant
attempts to reshape Islamic knowledge and institutions in the light of
Western models, a process described as Islamic modernism. Amongst
ulama and sufis, whose social base might lie in urban, commercial
or tribal communities, it has meant the reorganisation of communi-
ties . . . [or] the reform of individual behavior in terms of fundamental
religious principles, a development known as reformism.2 These
processes have been expressed in movements as different as the
Iranian constitutional revolution, the jihads of West Africa, and the
great drives to spread reformed Islamic knowledge in India and

1
This article draws on attempts to consider aspects of Islamic reform and
modernity over the past twenty years. See Francis Robinson, Secularization, Weber,
and Islam first published in Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.), Max Webers Sicht des Islams.
Interpretation und Kritik (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany, 1985), and republished in
slightly amended form in Toby E. Huff and Wolfgang Schluchter (eds.), Max Weber and
Islam (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ, 1999), pp. 23146; Francis Robinson,
Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia Since 1800, in South Asia,
Vol. XX, 1, 1997, pp. 115; Francis Robinson, Islam and the Impact of Print in
South Asia, in Francis Robinson (ed.), Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Oxford
University Press, Delhi, India, 2000), pp. 66104; Francis Robinson Other-Worldly
and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic Revival, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
3rd series, Vol. 14, 1, April 2004, pp. 4758.
2
Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2002), p. 457.

259
260 FRANCIS ROBINSON

Indonesia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the process

of renewal mutated to develop a new strand, which claimed that
revelation had the right to control all human experiences and that
state power must be sought to achieve this end. This is known to
many as Islamic fundamentalism, but is usually better understood as
Islamism. For the majority of Muslims today, Islamic renewal in some
shape or other has helped to mould the inner and outer realities of
their lives.
This great movement of religious change in the Muslim world
coincided with a Western engagement with that world of growing
intensity. It should be clear, of course, that the movement of reform
precedes the Western presence, its roots lying deep in the Islamic past,
and being represented classically in the eighteenth century by the
teaching of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Arabia and Shah Wali
Allah in India. Nevertheless, from the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Western imperial powers surged across the Muslim world so
that by 1920 only Central Arabia, the Yemen, Anatolia, Afghanistan
and Iran were free from formal Western control. The process of
decolonisation that spanned the period from the mid-twentieth
century to the 1990s made little difference. The end of formal political
control, more often than not, left elites in Muslim societies with strong
external allegiances, which, for a period, were made to serve the Cold
War rivalries of the Great Powers, and throughout played their part in
submitting their societies, to a greater or less extent, to the influence
of global economic forces. Thus, over 200 years, the old ways of getting
and spending of nomadic and agrarian societies were supplanted by
those of industrialising ones, often driven by global capitalism. The
old social hierarchies, which brought order to many a locality, gave
way to new classes. The old knowledge, hallowed from the Islamic
past, was challenged by new knowledge from what often seemed to
be a Godless West. Powerful material symbols of these changes were
the new Western-style cities, with broad boulevards, apartment blocks
and shopping streets, with banks and cinemas and, perhaps, an Opera
House, which grew up alongside the old Islamic cities, often walled
cities with a Sultans palace, a Friday Mosque, a Grand Bazaar, sinuous
lanes and gated quarters.
It was in this context of change, of the increasingly rapid erosion of
old ways and cherished values, that the process of renewal took place.
If the drive came from the inner compulsion of Muslims to make
their faith live to the best possible effect, it was shaped in constant
interaction with the changing material world in which it existed.
Moreover, while Islamic reform often defined itself, in part at least,
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 261
through its opposition to Western cultural and political hegemony, at
the same time it made use, where appropriate, of Western knowledge
and technology to drive forward its purposes and came to be fashioned
in part by its interaction with it.
There were, associated with the workings of Islamic reform in
these circumstances, changes that, taking into account the Western
experience and noting the trajectories of Western social science, might
be associated with modernityadmittedly, always a relative concept.
They were: (a) the ending of the total authority of the past as Muslims
sought new ways of making revelation and tradition relevant to the
present; (b) the new emphasis on human will as Muslims realised that
in a world without political power it is only through their will that they
could create an Islamic society on earth; (c) the transformation of the
self, achieved through willed activity, leading to self-reflectiveness,
self-affirmation and growing individualism; (d) the rationalisation of
Islam from scripturalism through to its formation into an ideology;
(e) and finally a process of secularisation involving a disenchantment
of the world, which arguably has been followed by a re-enchantment.
These changes will be considered primarily in the context of the
working of Islamic reform in South Asia. The focus will be on those
in the tradition of Shah Wali Allah; some mention will be made
of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his modernist strand, but the main
concern will be with the Deoband School, the Ahl-i Hadith, the Ahl-
i Quran and the Tablighi Jamaat. Attention will be paid to the
evolution of reform into the Islamism of Mawlana Mawdudis Jamaat-
i Islami. Moreover, the insights of that extraordinarily perceptive
poet-philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal, who was admired by Muslims
as different as Mawdudi, Sayyid Abul Ali Hasan Nadwi and Ayat
Allah Khumayni, will be kept firmly in view. This is by no means a
comprehensive list of those figures engaged in reform more generally;
significant individuals such as Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, Inayat
Allah Mashriqi, Shibli Numani and the remarkable Abul Kalam Azad
are left out. Particular attention is paid to those in the Wali Allah
tradition, however, because they embrace a religious change, aspects
of a protestant reformation perhaps, which arguably helped to drive
a broader set of changes in the Muslim world that we might associate
with modernity. This position is adopted on the grounds that there is
value in taking a Weberian perspective, while at the same time being
prepared to recognise its limitations.
Let us identify the key aspects of reform in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century India. First, it is crucial to remember the colonial
context. British rule brutally removed much of the financial and
262 FRANCIS ROBINSON

institutional support for Islamic society. This helped to create a

general anxiety about how a Muslim society might be sustained
without power. Specifically, it meant that ulama, who had once
received land grants and jobs in government, now turned to society
at large to sustain them in their role. They would survive only if they
provided services society wanted.
The theme of emphasising tawhid (the unity of God) and condemning
shirk (actions that compromised the unity of God) ran through all the
movements of the time. There was a running attack on all sufi customs
that, following Ibn Arabi, suggested that God might be immanent
rather than purely transcendent, which was expressed most frequently
and forcibly in attacks on any practices that suggested that sufi saints
might be able to intercede for man with God. At their most extreme,
these attacks aimed to wipe out Sufism altogether.3 By the same
token, there were assaults on indigenous customs that had come to be
incorporated into Islamic practice, for instance, following the Hindu
custom of not marrying widows.
A major concern of all reformers was to review the knowledge
handed down from the past to see what should be used to enable
them to operate effectively in the present. At one level, that of the
Deoband School, it meant no more than a shift in emphasis in the
madrasa curriculum from theology and philosophy, and the triumphs
of medieval Persian scholarship, to the Quran and Hadith and those
subjects that made these central messages of Islam socially useful.
Ulama in this tradition firmly followed the precedent of medieval
scholarship in these fields, that is, observed taqlid. At another more
exacting level, ulama circumvented medieval scholarship and the
schools of law to exercise ijtihad (independent reasoning), on the
Quran and Hadith, if they were Ahl-i Hadith, or on just the Quran,
if they were Ahl-i Quran. As the stream of reform flowed into ever
more challenging contexts from an Islamic point of view, the demand
for ijtihad became even stronger. It was used, after the mode of the
Ahl-i Hadith, by both Islamic modernists and Mawdudis Islamists.
A major concern of all movements was to spread knowledge of
their reforming message as widely as possible. All to a greater or

3
It should be noted, however, that some sufis adjusted their practices not just to
take account of reform but also to embrace its transformative processes. Nile Green,
The Politics of Meditation in Colonial South Asia in this volume, pp. 283315,
is a good example of the former. The classic study of reform led by a sufi and his
Naqshbandi followers is: Serif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The
Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (State University of New York Press, New York, 1989).
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 263
lesser extent founded madrasas or other educational institutions.
The Deoband madrasa, founded in 1867, and supported by public
subscription alone was the model. By 1967, it claimed to have founded
more than 8,000 madrasas in its image. From these institutions
came the teachers and scholars who provided the knowledge and
the guidance to enable Muslim society not just to survive but also
to entrench itself further. One important development at Deoband
was the establishment of a Dar al-Ifta ready to receive questions and
to issue fatawa all over India. A key development in supporting this
self-sustaining community of Muslims was the introduction of print
and the translation of the Quran and large numbers of important
texts into the regional languages of India. The reforming ulama were
amongst the very first to use the printing press; rightly, they saw it as
the means to fashion and to consolidate their constituency outside the
bounds of colonial rule.4 Reform, moreover, reached beyond the world
of the literate. From the 1920s, it was carried forward by the Tabligh-i
Jamaat, or preaching society, in which the devout set aside a period
each year to work in teams that transmitted the reforming message
orally to small town and village communities.5 The Tabligh-i Jamaat
is said now to be the most widely followed society in the Muslim world.
Thus, the reformers created a broad constituency for reform in Indo-
Muslim society at large, and amongst the literate, a growing body of
Muslims who, without the constraints of a madrasa education, reflect
upon the sources of their faith and interpret them for themselves.
The impact of the growing availability of knowledge of how to
be a Muslim was only enhanced by the way in which the reforming
movement made it clear that there was no intercession for man with
God. Muslims were personally responsible for the way in which they
put His guidance to them into practice on earth. Thus, the leading
Deobandi reformer, Ashraf Ali Thanwi, in his guide for women (but
also men) in the tradition, Bihishti Zewar (The Jewels of Paradise), which
is said to be the most widely published Muslim publication on the
subcontinent after the Quran, paints a horrific picture of the Day of
Judgement and the fate that will befall on those who have not striven
hard enough to follow Gods guidance. To help believers avoid this fate,

4
Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 18601920
(Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 46260.
5
Muhammad Khalid Masud (ed.), Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jamaat as
a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Brill, Leiden, 2000); Yoginder Singh
Sikand, The Origins and Development of the Tablighi Jamaat (19202000): A Cross-Country
Comparative Study (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2002).
264 FRANCIS ROBINSON

he instructs them in regular self-examination, morning and evening,

to ensure purity of intentions and to avoid wrongdoing.6 Thus, those
in the Deobandi way, which was at the heart of Indias reforming
movement, were made powerfully conscious that they must act to
sustain Islamic society on earth, if they were to be saved.
Emphasis on personal responsibility before God, as well as on the
need to act on earth to achieve salvation, ran though the many
manifestations of reform in India.7 It was a central issue for Sayyid
Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), who hailed from the reformist tradition but,
in his development of the principles of Islamic modernism, travelled
far beyond it: I regard it as my duty to do all I can, right or wrong,
he said of his striving to realise his faith on earth, to defend my
religion and to show the people the true, shining countenance of
Islam. This is what my conscience dictates and unless I do its bidding,
I am a sinner before God.8 This sense of personal responsibility was,
if anything, even more enhanced in Muhammad Ilyas (d. 1944), the
founder of the Tablighi Jamaat. He was oppressed by fear of Judgement
and by whether he was doing enough to meet Gods high standards.
I find no comparison between my anxiety, my effort and my voice,
he wrote, and the responsibility of Tabligh God has placed upon my
shoulders. If he shows mercy, He is forgiving, merciful, and if He
does justice, there is no escape for me from the consequences of
my guilt.9 Barbara Metcalf has cast doubt on the levels of anxiety
amongst Islamic reformers.10 But anxiety does seem to be abundantly

6
This is done in book VII titled: On Comportment and Character, Reward and Punishment;
Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawis Bihishti Zewar: A
Partial Translation With Commentary (California University Press, Berkeley, CA, 1990),
pp. 177239.
7
Haniffa emphasises the indissoluble connection between piety and social action.
Farzana Haniffa, Piety as Politics amongst Muslim Women in Contemporary Sri
Lanka, in this volume.
8
Speech of Sayyid Ahmad Khan quote in Altaf Husain Hali, Hayat-i-Javid,
K. H. Qadiri and David J. Matthews (trans.) (Idarah-i-Adabiyat-i-Delli, Delhi, 1979),
p. 172.
9
S. Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, Life and Mission of Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, Mohammad
Asif Kidwai (trans.) (Academy of Islamic Research and Publications, Lucknow, India,
1979), p. 108; Huq emphasises the seriousness with which a contemporary womens
Islamic student organisation in Bangladesh takes the Day of Judgement. Maimuna Huq,
Reading the Quran in Bangladesh: The Politics of Belief Among Islamist Women,
in this volume.
10
Barbara Daly Metcalf, Weber and Islamic Reform, in T. E. Huff and W.
Schluchter (eds.), Weber, pp. 21729, no. 1.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 265
present amongst its leaders, at least.11 It is reflected, moreover, into
life in general. In his autobiography, the nephew of Ilyas, Muhammad
Zakariyya Kandhlawi, shows himself to be constantly aware of time,
concerned about punctuality, worried about wasting resources (on
marriages for instance), punctilious in all money matters and delights
in the story of a colleague who kept a note of the minutes taken up by
visitors when he was teaching in the madrasa so that he could repay
an appropriate amount from his salary at the end of the month. His is
witness to a life lived anxiously in the sight of God.12
The sense of personal responsibility and the centrality of action
on earth to the Muslim life were expressed most completely by the
sensitive and remarkable thinker, Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938). For
Iqbal, man was chosen by God, but was equally free to choose whether
he followed Gods guidance or not. Man realised himself in the creative
work of shaping and re-shaping the world. The reality of the individual
was expressed most explicitly in action. The final act, he declares in
the closing sentences of his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, is
not an intellectual act, but a vital act which deepens the whole being
of the ego and sharpens his will into creative assurance that the world
is not just something to be seen and known through concepts, but to be
made and remade by continuous action.13 Man was the prime mover
in Gods creation. As the prime mover, man was Gods representative
on earth, his vice-regent, the Khilafat Allah. Thus, Iqbal draws the
Quranic reference to Adam as his vice-regent, or successor, on earth,
which had been much discussed by medieval commentators on the
Quran, and not least among them, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Arabi, into
the modern politico-Islamic discourse of South Asia. In doing so, he
both emphasises the enormous responsibility of each individual human
being in the trust he or she has received from God and encapsulates
that relationship in the concept of the caliphate of each individual
human being.14 The idea was further taken by Mawlana Mawdudi

11
Francis Robinson, Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia Since
1800, pp. 10810; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, p. 2690,
no. 4.
12
Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi, Aap Beeti: Autobiography, 2 vols.
(Idara Ishaat-e-Diniyat, Delhi, 1993).
13
M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Muhammad Ashraf,
Lahore, 1954), p. 154.
14
For a discussion of this, see Francis Robinson, Other-Worldly and This-Worldly
Islam and the Islamic Revival, p. 54, no. 1.
266 FRANCIS ROBINSON

who added his considerable weight for its acceptance.15 Indeed, the
idea is present in much of the movement of reform in the Shia as well
as the Sunni world.16
Taken together, these key aspects of reform come close to that mix
of aspects of Protestantism that Eisenstadt argued some years ago
gave it transformative potential. They were its strong combination
of this-worldliness and transcendentalism, its strong emphasis on
individual activism and responsibility and the direct relationship of
the individual to the sacred and the sacred tradition, which in South
Asia becomes stronger, the closer the reform moves into the modes of
the Ahl-i Hadith and the Islamists.17
Let us turn to those new facets of Muslim life and thought that seem
to spring, in part at least, from the religious changes of reform and
represent aspects of what we might associate with modernity.

The Assault on the Authority of the Past

There is the assault on the authority of the past. While never forgetting
that Islam expresses itself in different ways in different contexts,
we may assert that a pervasive feature of Muslim societies has been
what Bill Graham has termed the isnad paradigm.18 At the heart
of this, of course, is the system for the transmission of Hadith
in which the authority of a tradition lies in the isnad or chain of
individual transmitters from the Prophet, or his companions, down
to the most recent receiver. The defining elements of the paradigm
are that authority is derived from linkage to the origins of the tradition
through an unbroken chain of personal transmission. Central is the
belief that truth does not reside in documents, however authentic,
ancient or well preserved, but in authentic human beings and their
personal connections with one another. Authoritative transmission of
knowledge through time was by people both learned and righteous,

15
S. A. A. Maudoodi, Fundamentals of Islam (Markazi Maktaba Islami, Delhi, 1979),
p. xviii, and for a disquisition on the role of man as Gods trustee on earth, see
pp. 2930.
16
Francis Robinson, Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic
Revival, pp. 5456, no. 1.
17
S. N. Eisenstadt, The Protestant Ethic Thesis in an Analytical and Comparative
Framework, in S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A
Comparative View (Basic Books, New York, 1974), p. 10.
18
William A. Graham, Traditionalism in Islam: An Essay in Interpretation, in
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. XVIII, 3, Winter 1993, pp. 495522.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 267
the person-to-person transmission of the golden chain of sincere
Muslims. This was a model that expanded to embrace sufis, the Shia
and the descendants of the Prophet in general. It was also a model
that applied to all forms of learning. So when a pupil had finally
demonstrated his mastery, say, of Suyutis Jalalayn, he would be given
an ijaza or permission to teach that would have all the names of those
who had transmitted the book going back to Suyuti himself.19 Should
he wish, he could consult the tazkirahs, or collective biographies, and
see how many like him had received the central messages of Islamic
knowledge from their teachers and transmitted it to their pupils. It
was thus that authoritative knowledge was passed to the present.
Reform assaulted this authority from the past in two main ways.
Firstly, there was the jettisoning by the reformers of much of the
medieval scholarship of the Islamic world. If the Deobandis cut out
much of the great Persianate traditions of scholarship in maqulat, the
rational sciences, the Ahl-i Hadith, the Ahl-i Quran, the modernists
and the Islamists cut out the great traditions of Islamic scholarship
altogether. In their concern to make contact with the Quran and
Hadith afresh, in making them relevant to the modern world, they cast
aside a thousand years of intellectual effort in fashioning a Muslim
society, and the authority that came with direct connection to that
effort.
Secondly, there was reforms vigorous support for the adoption
of print. From the very beginning, print was the weapon of reform.
Amongst the first printed works in Urdu were two tracts of the 1820s,
the Sirat al-Mustaqim and the Taqwiyat al-Iman of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi
(d. 1831), who led a jihad on the Northwest Frontier. During the
nineteenth century, religious titles formed the largest category of
Urdu books. The town of Deoband was renowned for the numbers
of its bookshops. Certainly, reformers insisted that readers should
only consult religious books in the company of an alim, a learned
man, so that the possibility of proper understanding and authoritative
transmission could be maintained. But, in practice, anyone could
now read the sources and, as they came to be translated into Indian
languages, read the great textbooks of the past and decide, without
the benefit of a great sheaf of ijazas, what they meant for Islam in the
present.20
It is difficult for us, so profoundly moulded by our modern experi-
ence, to grasp the psychological impact, indeed the pain, of jettisoning

19
Ibid., pp. 51122.
20
Francis Robinson, Islam and the Impact of Print in South Asia, pp. 8081, no. 1.
268 FRANCIS ROBINSON

so much of the past, the especial connectedness this gave to the work of
fashioning the community through time and the authority that came
with it. This, moreover, was just one amongst a series of challenges
to Muslim civilisational authority at the time, to be seen alongside
that of Western science to theology, Western biomedicine to Unani
Tibb, that of Western literary forms to Muslim ones, that of Western
manufactured goods to the output of Muslim craftsmen and that of
Western powers to remnants of Muslim might. Arguably, all was
brought to a head in the outpouring of emotions that accompanied
the ending of the Turkish Khilafat between 1919 and 1923, the
breaking symbolically of the continuous chain of leadership of the
Muslim community back to the Prophet, an event that resonated at a
deep psychological level. Akbar Ilahabadi, summed it all up:
The minstrel, and the music, and the melody have all changed.
Our very sleep has changed; the tale we used hear is no longer told.
Spring comes with new adornments; the nightingales in the garden sing a
different song.
Natures every effect has undergone revolution.
Another kind of rain falls from the sky; another kind of grain grows in the
field.21
In the outcome, the revolution was not quite so complete as Akbar
suggests. The old style of authority rooted in connectedness to the
past has remained in the ulama of the Deobandi tradition, as in
those of the followers of Ahmad Rida Khan Barelwi (d. 1921). But the
breaking of the continuous link with the past has enabled new forms
of religious authority to emerge, an authority that could be made
and remade in each generation, and make use of the new resources
of the timesa very modern kind of authority. Arguably, Mawlana
Mawdudi was representative of this new form. He had been educated
outside the madrasa system and vigorously attacked the ulama for
their attachment to old forms of authority. Indeed, his only claim
to authority derived from Islamic tradition was his assertion that he
was a mujaddid, a renewer of the faith, in the mould of al-Ghazali (d.
1111), Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) or Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624).
Otherwise, Mawdudis authority was derived from the following: his
charactera man of principle, self-reliant, dedicated and courageous,
quite unmoved when condemned to death by the Pakistani authorities
in 1953; his stylehis aristocratic manners and his beautiful Urdu,

21
Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, the Satirical Verse of Akbar Ilahabadi
(18611921), in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 8, 1, 1974, p. 9.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 269
deploying reason rather than rhetoric; and his life in which he defined
himself in opposition to traditional authorityI recognize no king or
ruler above me, he declared, nor do I bow before any government;
nor do I view any law as binding on me . . . nor do I accept any tradition
or custom.22 Thus, the reformers, the Deobandis apart, drove a coach
and horses through the old authority resting on a connectedness to
a sacred past and created new forms, future-oriented forms, which
could be regularly remoulded with the materials then available.

The New Emphasis on Human Will

The second outcome of reformism was the new emphasis on human

will. In the absence of Muslim power, it was the will of each individual
Muslim, which was to fashion an Islamic society. Knowledge of
the central messages of the faith was made accessible and widely
spread, and it was the individual human conscience, working with this
knowledge, which now had sole responsibility to ensure rightly guided
behaviour. Thus, reformed Islam was a willed faith, a protestant
faith, a faith of conscience and conviction.
In the reformed world, the will of women was emphasised no less
than that of men. Indeed, under colonial rule, the responsibility for
fashioning a Muslim society fell particularly heavily on women. As non-
Muslims dominated public space, women moved from their earlier
position of being threats to the proper conduct of Muslim society
to being the mistresses of private Islamic space, key transmitters of
Islamic values and symbols of Muslim identity. It was for this reason
that Ashraf Ali Thanwi wrote Bihishti Zewar for women so that with
the learning of a mawlwi, as he put it, they could play their parts
in asserting tawhid and in fashioning an Islamic society.23 It was for
this reason, too, that Mawdudi insisted that women should acquire
the same level of Islamic knowledge as men, as well as examine their
consciences in the same way. This said, their task was to be the rulers of
domestic space, sealed off from all those elements of kufr that polluted
public space. The harim, he declared, is the strongest fortress of

22
Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi & the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford
University Press, New York, 1996), p. 138; for a general discussion of Mawdudis
authority, see pp. 12638.
23
Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawis Bihishti
Zewar: A Partial Translation With Commentary, pp. 138, no. 6.
270 FRANCIS ROBINSON

Islamic civilization, which was built for the reasons that, if it [that
civilization] ever suffered a reverse it [that civilization] may then take
refuge in it.24
The new emphasis on human will heightened ideas of human
instrumentality in the world. Indeed, it runs through all the
manifestations of reform, often laced with a sense of urgency. The
very life of Sayyid Ahmad Khan is testament to his belief that he, as
an individual, must take action for the good of the community and of
Islam.25 Reformers from Ashraf Ali Thanwi to Mawdudi emphasised
that if a man knew what he should do, he must do it. Knowing
meant doing. They were depicted as terrified by the thought that they
might not be doing enough to be saved. Thus, Hasan Ahmad Madani,
principal of Deoband in the mid-twentieth century, would weep at
the thought of his shortcomings. And, of course, no one laid as much
emphasis on the Muslim as a man of action as Iqbal. Man as the prime
mover in Gods creation would by his repeated effort bring the world
closer and closer to being a Quranic society. Thus, the reforming
vision empowered Muslims on earth.26 Thus, too, that most sensitive
observer, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in his Islam in Modern History (1957)
referred to the extraordinary energy that had coursed through the
Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, talking of
dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at a level
of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism. . ..27
Women, too, have felt empowered, although almost invariably it
has been at the cost of enduring the tensions generated between
their desire and capacity to act, on the one hand, and the demands
of patriarchy and the symbolic requirements of community on the
other. Historically, these tensions have been most acute amongst
women from well-off families, but as time has gone by, they should,
in all likelihood, have become more widely spread. In his recent
book, Yoginder Sikand has surveyed some of the womens madrasas

24
Cited in Faisal Fatehali Devji, Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement
of Womens Reform, 18571900, in Z. Hasan (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender,
Communities and the State (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1994), pp. 3536.
25
Altaf Husain Hali, Hayat-i-Javid, no. 8; C. F. I Graham, The Life and Work of Sir
Syed Ahmed Khan, K.C.S.I., new and rev. ed. (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1909).
26
Francis Robinson, Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia Since
1800, p. 9, no. 1.
27
W. C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ,
1957), p. 89. In harmony with Smiths insight, Haniffa emphasises how the womens
piety movement in Sri Lanka has made its Muslims into a highly energized force of
some magnitude within Sri Lankas polity. Farzana Haniffa, Piety as Politics, in this
volume, pp. 347375.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 271
that have grown up in India since independence. They range from
madrasas in the Deobandi tradition through those of the Jamaati
Islami to those of the Mujahids, an Ahl-i Hadith-style group in Kerala.
The outcomes were different in different reforming traditions and
environments. Deobandi womens madrasas in north and central
India, while insisting on strict purdah and patriarchal control, do
enable women to become both teachers in girls madrasas in India
and abroad and to set up their own madrasas.28 In the case of the
less conservative Jamaat-i Islami madrasas, girls study traditional
and modern subjects, including English. The aim is that they should
become religious authorities in their own right as well as teachers,
founders of madrasas or even practitioners of Unani Medicine.29 In
the Mujahid madrasas of Kerala, the empowerment of women has
gone much further. The senior Mujahid leader, Abd al-Qadir, made
it clear that women could be the teachers of men. In fact, Mujahid
women work outside the home alongside men, including being elected
to local councils, the main restriction being that they should not be
left alone with a man. Islam, declared Zohra Bi, a leading figure in
Mujahid education, is wrongly thought of as a religion of womens
oppression. Through our work in the college, we want to show that
Islam actually empowers Muslim women to work for the community
at large.30

Transformation of the Self

A third outcome of reformism was a crucial transformation of the

self, which, under the guidance of Charles Taylor and others, we have
come to associate with modernity. This transformation involves in part
an inward turn, the growth of self-consciousness and reflectiveness,
which Taylor argues is an important part of the constitution of the
modern self,31 and in part the affirmation of ordinary life, which
Taylor asserts although not uncontested and frequently appearing
in secularized form, has become one of the most powerful ideas in
modern civilization.32

28
Yoginder Singh Sikand, Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in
India, Penguin India, (New Delhi, 2005) pp. 21821.
29
Ibid., pp. 22122.
30
Ibid., p. 136.
31
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1989), p. 111.
32
Ibid., p. 14.
272 FRANCIS ROBINSON

We have noted that self-examination was a key aspect of Islamic

reform; a willed Islam had to be a self-conscious one. This stimulated
an inward turn and the growth of a reflective habit. Muslims had to ask
themselves regularly if they had done all in their power to submit to
God and to carry out His will in the world. In book VII of Bihishti Zewar,
Ashraf Ali Thanwi has a charming way of illustrating the process of
regular self-examination to ensure purity of intention and avoidance
of wrongdoing. He suggests to the believer that she sets aside a little
time in the morning and the evening to speak to her lower self, her
nafs, as follows:
O Self, you must recognize that in this world you are like a trader. Your
stock-in-trade is your life. Its profit is to acquire well-being for ever, that is,
salvation in the afterlife. This is indeed a profit! If you waste your life and do
not gain your salvation, you suffer losses that reach to your stock-in-trade.
That stock-in-trade is so precious that each hourindeed, each breathis
valuable beyond limit.
O Self, recognize Gods kindness that death has not yet come.
O Self, do not fall into the deception that Almighty God will surely forgive
you.33
This theme of self-consciousness and self-examination is to be
found in many religious thinkers of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, whether we look at Muhammad Ilyas and Mawdudi or Sayyid
Ahmad Khan and Iqbal. In Reformation Europe, the process was
accompanied by the emergence of the spiritual diary.34 Something
similar, though not directly comparable, exists from the India of
Islamic reform. There is, for instance, Mawlana Mahomed Alis semi-
spiritual My Life a Fragment, which was written while he was interned
during World War I, or Dr Syed Mahmuds record of his spiritual
reflections while in jail after the non-cooperation movement.35 There
is also a great deal of correspondence with sufis, which often contains

33
Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawis Bihishti
Zewar: A Partial Translation With Commentary, p. 234, no. 6; Farzana Haniffa, Believing
Women: Piety and Power Amongst Muslim Women in Contemporary Sri Lanka,
no. 7, and Maimuna Huq, Reading the Quran in Bangladesh: The Politics of Belief
Among Islamist Women, no. 9, are both excellent studies of projects designed to
construct a new Islamic self-hood amongst women.
34
See, for instance, Tom Webster, Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual
Journals and Early Modern Spirituality, in The Historical Journal, Vol. 31, 1, 1996,
pp. 3536.
35
Mohamed Ali and Afzal Iqbal (ed.), My Life: A Fragment: An Autobiographical
Sketch (Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Lahore, Pakistan, 1942). Syed Mahmuds spiritual
reflections may be found in the Farangi Mahall Papers, Karachi.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 273
processes of self-examination. With such evidence for the reflective
habit, alongside the widespread exhortation to examine the self, it is
arguable that the development of Islamic reform helped to open up
an interior landscape. While in the past, the reflective believer, the
mystic, might have meditated on the signs of God, the new type of
reflective believer reflected on the self and the shortcomings of the
self. Now the inner landscape became a crucial site where the battle of
the pious for the good took place. Doubtless, there had been Muslims
in the past, in particular times and in particular contexts, for whom
this had been so. Who can forget the anguished reflections of the
great eleventh-century scholar, al-Ghazali, in his autobiography, The
Deliverance from Error?36 Nevertheless, the importance of Islamic reform
was that self-consciousness and self-examination were encouraged
to become widespread. Moreover, once the window on the inner
landscape had been thrown open by reform, it could stay open for
purely secular purposes.37
With the inward turn, there also came the affirmation of the things
of the self, the ordinary things of daily life. We can see this process at
work in the new trends that emerge in the biographies of the Prophet,
whose number increase greatly in the twentieth century. Increasingly,
Muhammad is depicted not as the perfect man of the Sufi tradition,
but as the perfect person. Less attention, as Cantwell Smith has
pointed out, is given to his intelligence, political sagacity and capacity
to harness the new social forces in his society and much more to his
qualities as a good middle-class family man: his sense of duty and his
loving nature, and his qualities as a good citizen, his consideration for
others and in particular those who are less fortunate.38 The transition
is also mirrored in changes that take place in biographical writing
generally; the concern is less with what the individual might have
contributed to Islamic civilisation and more on his life in his time and
his human qualities. Even in the writings of the ulama, it is possible to
see them responding to the humanistic preferences of their times and
depicting much more rounded lives to support their didactic purpose.
Another dimension of this process was the growing discussion of family

36
W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali (Oneworld: Oxford,
1994).
37
Francis Robinson, Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia Since
1800, pp. 2425, no. 1.
38
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis (Gollancz, London,
UK, 1946), pp. 6467. See also Amit Dey, The Image of the Prophet in Bengali Muslim
Piety, 18501947, PhD thesis, University of London, 1999.
274 FRANCIS ROBINSON

and domestic issues, and particularly women, in public space. This

discourse was begun by men such as Nazir Ahmad, Hali and Mumtaz
Ali in the late nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century, it was
increasingly taken up by women, and not least by the tens of women
who aired their views in those remarkable journals, Ismat and Tehzib un-
Niswan. All matters were discussed in public, from education, diet and
dress to love marriages, divorce and sources of womens inferiority.
The writing is often assertive in style, demanding that women be
given respect. Alongside these developments, there came the rise of
the short story and the novel, which indicated the new value being
given to understanding human character and the many ways of being
human. The themesfamily life, relationships, feelings, sexoften
shocking in their day, which were taken up by leading practitioners
such as Manto and Ismat Chughtai, indicate the new areas in which
Muslims were finding meaning. Of course, not all of these striking
changes can, by any means, be laid at the door of Islamic reform; the
influence of the West and developments in wider Indian society all
had their part to play. Nevertheless, such was the importance of these
profoundly human matters that religious thinkers could not afford
to ignore them.39 The Islamic pattern of life, declared the religious
philosopher Syed Vahiduddin, finds expression in religious and moral
acts, in prayer, in love, in forgiveness, in seemingly mundane activities
such as sex and domestic life, which should be radiated by the glow of
the world beyond.40

Rationalisation

Rationalisation of religious belief and practice was a further outcome

of Islamic reform. In using the term, however, it is not given the full
weight of the Weberian concept in which areas of modern life, from
politics to religion to economics, become increasingly marked by the
impact of science, technology and bureaucracy, though there is much
of value in the rationalising trajectory.
By emphasising the development of a scriptural faith focussed on
the Quran and Hadith, by attacking local custom around which many
superstitions revolved and by attacking all idea of intercession at Sufi

39
Francis Robinson, Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia Since
1800, pp. 1011, no. 1.
40
Christian W. Troll (ed.), Islam in India: Studies and Commentaries, 3: The Islamic
Experience in Contemporary Thought (New Delhi, 1986), p. 153.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 275
shrines, indeed at times by attacking Sufism itself, Islamic reform
rationalised belief and practice. Print was ever the handmaid, as it
made available the Quran in forms that believers could read, as well
as it produced guides that specifically stated what practices should
be followed and what customs abandoned.41 Reforming ulama used
their organisations developed through the Deoband madrasa and its
political wing, the Jamiyat al-Ulama-i Hind, to put pressure on the
colonial state to remove all elements of custom from the personal law.
Thus, between 1918 and 1920, reforming ulama successfully pressed
the state to remove Hindu custom that persisted in law governing
Muslims in the Punjab, Memons in Western India and Mapillas
in Kerala. Then from the 1920s, the Jamiyat waged a campaign
to impose sharia law over custom in the personal law throughout
India, a rationalising campaign crowned with success in the Shariat
Application Act of 1937. Through this work of rationalisation, which
began to reorient Muslims from local cults towards widely shared
practices and symbols, Islamic reform helped to prepare Muslims for
the world of the modern political party and the modern state.
Side by side with this there went the reification of Islam. The
reforming impulse, in which submitting to God became an act of
will rather than an unquestioning following of the folkways of the
faith, drove the development, although some responsibility must
be attributed to the impact of the colonial state. Men and women
consciously embraced a particular set of beliefs and practice that they
identified with true Islam, and abandoned others that could not be
so identified.42 But this reification process stemmed in part, too, from
two additional influences: the distancing impact of print that enabled
Muslims to stand apart from their faith, analyse and conceptualise it,
and their growing consciousness, which was especially strong in India,
that they were living alongside other faiths, at times real competitors,
which were also reified, or being so. For the first time, in the late
nineteenth century, Muslims begin to use the term Islam not just
to describe their relationship to God but also to describe an ideal
religious pattern, or a mundane religious system, or even just Islamic
civilisation. Thus, it appears in the title of the poet Halis masterwork,
Musaddas, Madd-o jazr-i Islam, of 1879, or Amir Alis Spirit of Islam of

41
Book VI of Thanawis Bihishti Zewar, for instance, specifically discusses the whole
issue of custom; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawis
Bihishti Zewar: A Partial Translation With Commentary, pp. 89161, no. 6.
42
At every turn, Haniffa records, I was told by members of Al-Muslimaat that
they were Muslims by choice as well as by birth. Farzana Haniffa, Piety as Politics,
pp. 347375.
276 FRANCIS ROBINSON

1891. It does not appear in the title of Ashraf Ali Thanwis Bishishti
Zewar, although the contents of the book are very much the forerunners
of the host of how-to-be-a-proper-believer books that have followed, for
instance, Mawdudis Towards Understanding Islam of 1940, Muhammad
Hamidullahs Introduction to Islam of 1959 or Manzoor Nomanis What
Islam is of 1964.43 In the latter part of the twentieth century, along
with mass education, this reification of Islam in Muslim consciousness
has become widespread.44
The final stage in the reification of Islam, but arguably also in its
rationalisation, was its conceptualisation as a system. This was the
particular achievement of Mawdudi, growing out of his concern to
establish an Islamic vision of life to set against that of the West, and
which was to be protected against the West. He describes Islam as a
nizam, a system, which was comprehensive, complete and covered all
aspects of human existence. These aspects, moreover, were integrated
as the human body was integrated into one homogeneous whole. God
in another image was the great engineer in his workshop; he had
created the world and in the sharia had given man a complete set of
principles on which to conduct himself in that place. It is his explicit
Will, Mawdudi states,

that the universethis grand workshop with its multifarious activities

should go on functioning smoothly and graciously so that manthe prize of
creationshould make the best and most productive use of all his powers
and resources, of everything that has been harnessed for him in the earth
and in the high heavens . . . . The Shariah is meant to guide the steps of man
in this respect.45

This vision of Islam as a system, which may also be seen as an

ideology, meant that the sharia must be united to power on earth.
Mawdudi described the pursuit of power, by which he meant capturing
the machinery of the modern state, as a jihad obligatory on all his
followers. In fact, he was not particularly effective in politics. But he
did set a standard against which the conduct of the first thirty years of
government in Pakistan might be set, and a model that General Zia
ul-Haq tried to introduce into the country from February 1979.

43
Francis Robinson, Islam and the Impact of Print in South Asia, p. 91, no. 1.
44
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996), pp. 3745.
45
Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, Towards Understanding Islam, (UK Islamic Mission,
London, 1980), p. 108.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 277
Secularisation

Finally, let us turn to the relationship between Islamic reform and

secularisation. This is, of course, a much disputed concept. For the
founding fathers of sociology, as science and technology increasingly
controlled and explained the social and physical world, and as the
modern state grew to provide security within it, religion was to
become more and more marginalised. On the other hand, strong
critics of the concept have emerged amongst sociologists, arguing that
religion remains an important force in modern societies, though often
expressed in new forms.46 The impact of Islamic reform supports the
latter view.
At one level, we can see Webers secularisation at work. We see his
process of disenchantment of the world, or using his term entzauberung,
the driving of magic out of things: the attack on all ideas of intercession
for man with God, the rationalisation of belief and practice and
the emphasis on action on earth to achieve salvation. We can also
see a further process associated with disenchantment, which is a
fragmentation of human understandings of the world, though this
outcome owes as much to the impact of the West as to Islamic reform.
We can see it, for instance, in the way in which the Muslim modernists
make Western science the measure of Islamic belief, and that in which
Muslim socialists, progressive writers and their ilk, come to think in
terms of a Godless world.47 This said, while noting how Islamic reform
would seem to have driven matters down a Weberian secularising
path, we should also note that, as in the West, this has not resulted
in a complete eradication of magic. Deobandi ulama at the heart of
the reforming process prepared amulets for followers to use in case of
illness.48
One criticism of a focus on disenchantment in Weberian thought is
that it is a trajectory derived from the European Christian experience.
Arguably, the process of secularisation should be considered in Islamic
terms, indeed, as Weber might have done in terms of the unique
developmental history of Islam, that is in terms of its development as

46
Anthony Giddens, Sociology, 4th ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2001), p. 545.
47
Francis Robinson, Secularization, Weber, and Islam, pp. 2367, no. 1.
48
Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi, Aap Beeti: Autobiography, Vol. 2,
pp. 3146, no. 12; Marsden makes a similar point about reform-minded Muslims in
Chitral. Magnus Marsden, Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistans North-
West Frontier (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005), p. 241.
278 FRANCIS ROBINSON

a rationalisation of worldviews. In this light, it has been suggested that,

as Islam has always had a considerable interest in this world, being
more concerned with how men behave than in what they believe,
the developmental criterion must rest with Muslim behaviour. The
sharia, ideally the distilled essence of the Quran and the Life of
the Prophet, which offers guidance for every aspect of human life,
represents the criterion. So Muslim society is Islamic to the extent
that it follows the sharia and Muslim states are Islamic to the extent
that they support the sharia. Here, we have a possible criterion of
secularisation in Muslim societies and states.
If we apply this criterion to India, on the one hand, we can reasonably
argue that Islamic reform led to scriptural knowledge becoming more
widespread and more widely followed than before. On the other hand,
the pressure brought by Islamic reformers on the state led to the
sharia, at least in its personal law aspects, being more completely
imposed by the state than before. Of course, if this trajectory is taken
through into the history of Pakistan, it is possible to see a continuing
expansion of the realm of the sharia and an Islamisation of the state.
Alongside this theme stands the ideal created by Mawdudi and his
Islamist followers of an ideological system in which the sharia is
asserted over all of human life and backed by all the authority of
the modern state. We conclude by noting a paradox. If we take the
Weberian trajectory of disenchantment, we can see Islamic reform
driving magic out of the Indo-Muslim world, to some degree at least.
But, if we take the developmental approach, arguably the pressure of
reform on society and on the state, in British India and Pakistan at
least, has led to greater levels of sharia application/Islamisation than
ever before.49
Before concluding, we need to note the broader context in which
religious reform amongst South Asian Muslims was taking place.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were across the
Muslim world moves towards this-worldly faith, or forms of Islamic
Protestantism, expressed in varying ways.50 Similar processes were
also taking place at the same time amongst other South Asians; the
faith of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists were all acquiring this-worldly

49
Francis Robinson, Secularization, Weber, and Islam, pp. 23941, no. 1.
50
Francis Robinson, Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic
Revival, pp. 5458, no. 1.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 279
protestant forms, which were in time to develop fundamentalist
dimensions.51
So where does this leave the relationship between Islamic reform
and modernity? Much as the vision and brio of Webers Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is to be admired, and although the
impact of Islamic reform is full of Weberian echoes, there is no
evidence for the emergence of some quasi-Calvinistic group, whose
this-worldly moral energy and ascetic self-discipline have stimulated a
continued capitalist development, not even among the Ahl-i Hadith.52
This is said, moreover, in spite of the success of Islamic reform
among the Muslim merchant classes. Arguably Webers friend, the
religious historian Ernst Troeltsch, gives us helpful direction when he
argues that Protestantism had a unique role in fashioning the modern
religious spirit: this religion of personal conviction and conscience,
he declared, is the form of religion which is homogeneous with
and adopted to modern individualistic civilisation, without, however,
possessing in detail any very close connexions with the creations of
the latter.53 Ernest Gellner, in considering some thirty years ago
the impact of Islamic reform in North Africa came to a similar
conclusion: the severe discipline of puritan Islam, he declared, far
from being incompatible with modernisation might be compatible
with, or positively favourable to modern social organisation.54
In the arguments already surveyed, there is plentiful evidence of the
way in which Islamic reform both opened the way to modernity and
then worked with it. Islamic reform destroyed much of the authority
of the past, making possible a more creative engagement with the
present. It emphasised human will, preparing the way for the modern
understanding of undiluted human instrumentality in the world. It set

51
Francis Robinson, Fundamentalism: Tolerance and Indias Heritage, in Journal
of the Asiatic Society, Vol. XLV, 3, 2003, pp. 513.
52
For a sceptical approach to Islamic Protestantism as a preparation for
modernity, see Martin Reixinger, How Favourable is Puritan Islam to Modernity?
A Case Study on the Ahl-i Hadith (late 19th/early 20th centuries), unpublished
paper.
53
Troeltsch put this argument to the ninth conference of German historians at
Stuttgart in April 1906 when he gave the lecture that Weber had been supposed to give
on the meaning of Protestantism for the rise of the modern world. Ernst Troeltsch,
Protestantism and Progress; The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World
(Fortress Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1986), p. 100.
54
Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981),
p. 170; twenty years later the argument is put much more forcibly by I. M. Lapidus,
History of Islamic Societies, pp. 81722, no. 2.
280 FRANCIS ROBINSON

off transformations of the self that we associate with modernity, the

emergence of an internal landscape and the affirmation of the ordinary
things of life. It helped set off a rationalisation and reification of
Islam, which, amongst other things, prepared Muslims to engage with
a broad-based political identity and conceive of their faith as an entity,
even a system. And finally, it set going processes that offered both a
disenchanted world and one in which paradoxically the transcendent
was reasserted, indeed, the world itself was re-enchanted.
This, then, is the relationship between Islamic reform and modernity
in South Asia, one of preparing the way and then engagement with
the worldwide forces of modernity, shaping them to its particular
purposes. This said, should not the Islamist insistence on reasserting
the transcendent over all creation give us pause for thought? This
is, after all, not the outcome of the modernising process that the
founding fathers of sociology anticipated. Now, it is a commonplace
of modern scholarship on Islamism, or any other form of religious
fundamentalism, that it is a profoundly modern phenomenon, being
fashioned by modernity, as it strives to shape itprotesting against
the outcomes of Enlightenment rationalism, what Bruce Lawrence
terms the heresies of the modern age.55 It seeks to assert the moral
community, the transcendent and moral absolutes, in order to confront
the uncertainties, as well as relativisms of the time. It raises the
question of whether modernity should necessarily be dominated by
Enlightenment rationalism.
In an excellent recent work, Roxanne Euben has juxtaposed the
critique of the nature and limits of modern rationalism by a series
of Western social theorists (Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Alisdair
MacIntyre, Richard Neuhaus, Robert Bellah and Daniel Bell) with that
of Sayyid Qutb, who was with Mawdudi, the most influential Islamist
thinker of the twentieth century. She notes that, although coming from
different angles of vision, all see in modernity a crisis due to rupture
with tradition, the dual rejection of theology and teleology inaugurated
by Enlightenment rationalism and the subsequent diminishment of
meaning in authority, morality and community. . ..56 Turning to Qutb,
she finds similar anxieties, similar analysis. Where, of course, he differs

55
Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern
Age (I. B. Tauris, London, 1990).
56
Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of
Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 1999), p. 124.
 ISLAMIC REFORM AND MODERNITIES 281
from the Western theorists is in insisting on divine sovereignty as the
answer to the crises of authority, morality and community.57
These arguments proposed in relation to Qutb could be applied
no less to Mawdudi. Thus, Islamism, which is the current end point
of Islamic reform, is not only a profoundly modern phenomenon but
also offers an answer to widely shared modern anxieties. Research
devoted to Islamism in West Asia has demonstrated its modernising
impact.58 Articles in this volume reveal similar possibilities for South
Asia. Indeed, if we accept that the Islamist concern to build a moral
community, to reassert the transcendent and to re-enchant the world
is one possible answer to the problems of modernity, it is arguable
that Islamic reform not only helped to prepare the way for modernity
but also in its Islamist form has become a modernising force in its
own right. As Haniffa states, The promise that feminism . . . holds
for transforming womens lives does not necessarily require a secular
framework within which to flourish.59
This leads us to a final reflection. It is clear that there is no one
modernity, as once Western modernisation theorists vainly believed,
but many or multiple modernities. Different societies fashion their
modernities as arguably do different individuals. The reforming
traditions of Muslim of South Asia, from Shah Wali Allah to the
Islamists of the present, are powerful strands amongst Muslim
modernities. But they form only one set of strands amongst Muslim
modernities, just as those modernities are a larger set of strands
amongst those fashioned by humankind in general.60

57
Ibid., pp. 4592, 15467.
58
See, for instance, B. O. Utvik, The Modernizing Force of Islamism, in J. L.
Esposito and F. Burgat (eds.), Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in the
Middle East and Europe (Hurst, London, 2003), pp. 4368; B. O. Utvik, The Pious Road
to Development: Islamist Economics in Egypt (Hurst, London, 2006); Geneive Abdo, No
God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000);
F. Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran (Hurst, London, 1998); Jenny B. White, Islamist
Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (University of Washington Press,
Seattle, WA, 2002).
59
Farzana Haniffa, Piety as Politics, in this volume. This point has also been made
at length and to great effect by Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety; The Islamic Revival and
the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005).
60
S. N. Eisenstadt, Changing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and
Culture., in Daedalus, Vol. 129, No. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 130; Amit Chaudhuri,
Changing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (Peter Lang, Oxford, UK,
forthcoming).