The Study of Muslims in
South Asia
by Barbara D. Metcalf
a talk at the University
of California
at Santa Barbara
December 2, 2005
[presented here through
the generous
permission of the author]
In
talking about the study of Muslims in South Asia on the part of recent
generations of scholars, I want to illustrate one theme, in part by
focusing
on the kind of sources that scholars have used over time. My very use
of
the word “sources” with Ainslie [[Embree]] in the room, of course,
immediately
leads one to think of him and, in general, of Columbia’s enormous
influence
on the humanities fields of South Asian Studies through their editions
of “Sources” of Asian traditions. Indeed Ainslie himself edited
the
first volume of the second edition of Sources of Indian Traditions
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), one that probably all of
us
here have used in our teaching. Noting that the new edition was an
“improved”
version, Bob Frykenberg, writing in 1988, spoke for many when he said,
“For over thirty years, anyone seriously interested in India has always
had to keep a copy of this classic within arm's reach.
Sources of Indian
Tradition is so useful – as a reference work, sourcebook, or
textbook
– that it has been indispensable to scholars all over the world.” That
“thirty” is now well on its way to “fifty.” Ainslie in fact was also
key
to putting another important source, Alberuni's India (New
York:
Norton), an edited version of Sachau's translation, into American
classrooms
in 1971, also early on. And his encouragement and editing of a
one-volume
version of Shaikh Muhammad Ikram’s three-volume Urdu trilogy, published
as Muslim Civilization in India, again was an invaluable
resource,
particularly in the early years – this was 1964 – when the study of
India
was just taking off in this country. And these three are not the only
relevant
source collections he has been involved in, I might add.
What
is significant about these volumes and their approach to the study of
Islam
in India? Ikram himself struck several important themes in the preface
to his own early volume. First, he rightly noted, a particular value of
his volume – and this is true of al-Biruni and the “Sources” volumes as
well – was to question the undue emphasis on Arabs, expanded at most to
Persian and Ottoman contexts, for the study of what he called “Muslim
civilization”
– at the expense of huge populations of Muslims in the Indian
subcontinent,
Indonesia, and the Indian diaspora throughout the world. “For several
centuries,”
as he noted, “Islam dominated the subcontinent….” and produced a
“civilization…
full of great achievements,” leaving “a rich cultural heritage.”
Arguably,
however, even more significant than providing new materials for
Islamicists,
these volumes made it more possible to include Muslims in teaching and
thinking about India than otherwise would have been possible. This was
particularly important given that most India specialists had little
interest
in South Asian Islam or the Muslim population. Many scholars, like most
citizens of India, were in fact burdened by a range of ambivalent, even
negative, feelings about Muslims as well as about Islam.
Aside
from documenting “Muslim civilization,” Ikram advanced a theme to
characterize
that “heritage.” “The history of Muslim rule in India, he suggested in
his preface, “[was] the story of Islam in a predominantly non-Muslim
environment
[which] led to conflicts, tensions, and assimilations….” (Ikram 1964:
xx).
Later in the book he went on to say:
This
peculiar situation
has resulted in developments which distinguish the course of Muslim
civilization
in India from those in countries where the population is predominantly
Muslim. The dissimilarity between two main elements [emphasis added] of
Indo-Muslim civilization has resulted in a curious phenomenon. At times
the attractions of the native element proved powerful, and there was a
large-scale assimilation of indigenous elements, as under Akbar, Dara
Shukoh,
and in the writings of Kabir. At other times, there was a vigorous
reaction
against [[296]] non-Muslim elements, resulting in greater repugnance
towards
them than was traditional in the history of Islam. In this connection,
it is significant that puritanical Wahhabism, with its emphasis on the
purity of Islam, had considerable influence in India….
The local situation
has resulted
in a fundamental conflict [on one side Aurangzeb, Shaikh Ahmad
Sirhindi,
Iqbal; on the other, joining Akbar and Kabir mentioned above, Amir
Khusrau,
Dara Shukoh, Shah Wali Ullah, and Ghalib. The latter group, Ikram
wrote,
represent] broad sympathies, deep humanity, and liberal views. This
[fundamental
conflict] has resulted in tensions and occasionally in conflicts,
but outside somewhat narrow circles, the long-term result of two
heterogeneous
elements constituting Indian Islam has been a growth of forbearance and
toleration of conflicting practices and beliefs.
Let it be said at the outset that Ikram was a member of the Pakistan
Civil
Service, and by his appreciation of his second set of figures was
distinguishing
himself from the classic “Pakistani” genealogy that favored those
purported
to be the strict Muslims, from Mahmud of Ghazna to Aurangzeb to Jinnah.
His overview is in many ways nuanced and insightful. But he shared with
the more simplistic nationalist historians the view, as he put it, “of
two heterogeneous elements,” one native and one Islamic. Both in India
and outside, the categories and the narratives of the colonial, and
subsequently
nationalist, historiography that laid the foundation for this
understanding
still serve as the implicit framework not only of history but of the
humanities
and social sciences as well as general public opinion as they deal with
India. We teach courses on "civilization;" we emphasize classical
texts to explain enduring continuities to being "Hindu" or
"Muslim;"
we attribute explanatory value to these essences in historical
settings;
and we extrapolate from them to bounded sociological categories (Ludden
1994). What seems an intuitive knowledge of what is “Islam” and what is
“Hinduism” is often in fact extrapolation from a contemporary world of
politicized religious identities into the past.
I want
to focus on Ikram’s thesis that Indic Islam consists of two
heterogeneous
elements. The object of study then becomes the “conflicts, tensions,
and
assimilation” of “Islam” in relation to the numerically
predominant
non-Muslim population. At times, in this formulation, “Islam,” raised
or
comes to raise barriers around itself and remains distinctive.Or it
“assimilates”
and shows itself to be truly Indian, maybe not even Islamic. To the
extent
that scholars have accepted the initial premise, and are interested in
the latter variation, they have turned above all to studies of Sufism.
And in those studies, metaphors like “syncretism” and “assimilation”
have
been particularly strong.
I’d
like to review some of the work on Muslims in the Indian sub-continent
that engage the metaphor of “syncretism,” based as it is on the
assumption
that there are indeed “two heterogeneous elements” and, in the term
“syncretism,”
some kind of mixture of these two distinctive essences. To do that,
then,
I’d like to describe a half-dozen scholarly projects of recent decades,
all of them engaging with Sufis and Sufi shrines, which are taken as
the
critical site of “syncretism” and assimilation. I start with an
overview
of this issue from Peter van der Veer, whose work is grounded in both
textual
and anthropological sources.
As
Van der Veer notes, the term “syncretism” has long been used as a
straightforward
description of certain kinds of ritual practices or beliefs. It is,
however,
to reiterate the point made above, in fact embedded in notions of
difference
and identity. Moreover – and this may be his most important point – the
use of the term “syncretism” always lays a claim on power, the power to
assert that there is, and that one can identify, “true” religion, now
compromised
or enhanced, but none the less changed, by admixture. Those labeling
practices
as “syncretic” may identify these practices as enhanced, typically on
the
grounds that they promote “tolerance;” or they may judge them to be
“false,”
on the grounds that they compromise pure faith, and, as a corollary,
entail
a loss of identity.
When competing religious traditions emerged in Europe with the
challenge
of the Protestant reformation, one response was the absolute state;
another
response, the successor to the absolute state, the secular state in
which
religious difference was depoliticized. The focus in such a state is on
national culture, not religion, a focus Americans are familiar with in
terms of the metaphor of the “melting pot” and, subsequently,
“multiculturalism”
and the parading of difference. India entered nationhood with
significant
colonial legacies, not least the institutionalization of difference in
religiously-defined personal law codes, and reservations for backward
and
scheduled castes and tribes. The new secular state presented itself as
even-handed in relation to religion, an arbiter who transcended various
communities.
At
the level of elite nationalism, this role was undergirded by an
ideology,
formulated on the part of Nehru in particular, as well as others who
posited
a “tolerant” “Indian civilization” that included Ashoka and Akbar among
its heroes. Gandhi’s version of this ideology hewed closer to
Vivekananda
in seeing Hinduism’s “spirituality” as the key to that “tolerance.” The
complement of this nationalist ideology was that there is a “folk” or
“popular”
religion at the grassroots that is also “plural” and “tolerant.” A
thinker
like Ashish Nandy, for example, romanticizes what he imagines as the
traditional
faith of the masses, “the people,” in contrast to the ideologues who
incite
religious violence. This emphasis may risk the interpretation that the
“popular” practices in the case of Muslims are not “really” Islamic at
all, but a Hindu sub-stratum that Islam does not reach – a kind of
archaeological
model in which the real foundation of culture is “Hindu” or “Hindutva.”
Such a stance effectively denies any religious difference; it denies
any
agency to the people. Explicitly, however, someone like Nandy seeks to
make an intervention in public life by blaming the secular state
for destroying the old way of life, both through its modernizing
projects
and through its connivance with the Hindu right.
Whether
explicitly or not, those who have focused on what a recent volume calls
the “lived experience” of Muslims in India have embraced for the most
part
this vision of popular syncretism. In a celebrated debate in the 1980s,
those emphasizing syncretism as against those who did not seemed to
divide
between anthropology, led by Imtiaz Ahmad (who was responsible for an
important
series of edited volumes on South Asian Muslims published in the 1970s
and early 1980s) on one side; and history, the position articulated by
Francis Robinson and to some extent Gail Minault, on the other.
Robinson
(1983) saw Ahmad’s stance as more political than academic, attributing
his argument to his wish to show that Indian Muslims had their roots
deep
in Indian society and that they were good and loyal citizens. For
Imtiaz
Ahmad it was axiomatic that “the Islamic theological and philosophical
precepts and principles on the one hand and local, syncretic elements
on
the other” are integrated in Indian Islam (1981:14), whereas Robinson
emphasized
a long-term trend precisely to strip Islam of what Ikram had called
“native”
features. The sociologist Veena Das joined the discussion with a
passionate
response to Robinson suggesting that he favored repressive Islamic
regimes,
a position that made clear the political stake in a purportedly
academic
discussion.
A recent
collection of essays, Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation,
Accommodation
and Conflict (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2004), edited in fact by
Imtiaz Ahmad along with Helmut Reifeld, makes clear the political
importance
of a focus on “adaptation, accommodation, and conflict.” As Reifeld
explained
in the introduction, after 9/11 “[i]t seemed to us… extremely important
to dispel [the connection of Islam to violence]… and try to
counterbalance
negative stereotypes….” (vii-viii). The essays are largely
anthropological
and are focused primarily – as those studies focused on presenting a
gentle
and Indic Islam typically are – on Sufism, devotionalism, and shrines.
These are deemed to partake of sacred spaces and styles of religiosity
shared across religious boundaries. There are essays on Gujarati
Imamshahi-s
(Dominique-Sila Khal), Gujarati Sidi-s (Helene Basu), the Madari
Brotherhood
(Ute Falasch), and the Jailani Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka (Dennis
McGilvray).
Other essays take up shared Hindu-Muslim shrines in Karnataka (Yoginder
Sikand), Shi`a women’s devotionalism in Hyderabad (Diane D’Souza), and
the Rishi tradition of Kashmir (Mohammad Ishaq Khan). An article on
nationalist
discussions of the languages of “Hindi,” “Hindustani,” and “Urdu”
(Asha Rani) also raises issues of what is understood as religious
mixture.
As Reifeld explains, the volume is intended to “concentrate on
syncretic
and liminal positions as well as accommodation of Islam in South Asia”
(ix). The authors not only want to show what they take to be a softer
side
of Islam than that often portrayed, but they also share a liberal
preoccupation
to assert that Muslims have a place in India. This is also the point of
three theoretical articles that open the volume (by Peter
Gottschalk,
Shail Mayaran, and Jackie Assayag). Thus Peter Gottschalk argues that
Islam
in India has “roots” and should not be identified with its places of
origin,
its “routes” (p.10). The jacket design, featuring what appears to be a
possessed woman and a holy man bending over her, signals the kinds of
experiences
and settings the book as a whole takes not only as a corrective to
“misconceptions”
about Islam (vii), but as key to the reality of Islam in India.
This
approach poses two problems. Does the devotionalism primarily
associated
with Sufism in fact exhaust the central dimension of Muslim Indians’
history
of worship, ritual, guidance, ethics, and all that we subsume under our
typical definitions of “religion”? Surely any study of historical Islam
in India needs to engage the treasured texts, the great learned
tradition,
the quest to live by moral guidelines, the rituals of everyday life,
the
life cycle ceremonies, and the sacred events of the calendrical year
that
thread through, and may even structure, many individual Muslim Indian
lives.
It needs to take into account political thought, and the fact that in
India
today “Islam,” like “Hinduism,” is an identity in public life, whether
it means the texts about Indian history in Urdu-medium schools in
Maharashtra
or the anxieties of parents in Gujarat that their toddlers not
say
“ammi” in public (Veronique Benei; Jan Bremen). It is also the
conviction
that the symbol of Muslim personal law must stand, so that the largest
demonstration of Muslims since Independence focused on that issue. Thus
court cases on such issues as marriage, divorce, and inheritance engage
the most intimate dimensions of personal life, and, notably in cases on
waqf property, legislate fundamental practices and hallmarks of
identity.
Fatwas, letters, pamphlets, and today television programs, invoke
sacred
texts to provide everyday guidance on every aspect of daily life. Texts
do not exist apart from the contexts that utilize them, and they are
not
only the purview of the elites. All the themes and topics I note here
are
as much a part of local expressions of Islam, the topic of the
anthropological
essays I’ve noted here, as are devotional practices.
There
seems to be a scholarly anxiety about a scriptural or textual Islam in
India – one of the sides of Ikram’s heterogeneous essences. It emerges
in these studies, in fact, as implicitly problematic – rigid,
intransigent,
“foreign”-oriented. This mentality, I believe, implicitly underlies the
attempt to find an alternative Islam. Thus, arguably, a second problem
with the volume’s approach is not only that it excludes a wide range of
practices and institutions, but that, ironically, the singling out of
“syncretism”
reinforces the image of an (unspoken) separate, non-Indian, negative
“Islam.”
As noted above, this emphasis may feed into a Hindutva notion that
Muslims
are really Hindu. It more clearly risks the assumption, evident
especially
in the introduction, that Muslims who preserve the scholarly tradition
stand outside what is Indian. Such assumptions need to be treated not
as
a fact but as a stance that needs to be historicized and contextualized.
Van
der Veer’s insight that the use of the term “syncretism” is inevitably
political precisely calls for attention to the term’s usage as part of
historically specific contestations. Let us turn – half way through –
to
the first of the half-dozen specific studies I said I’d mention, in
this
case to describe a project that does indeed understand that “syncretic”
is part of the subject matter, not a term of analysis.
Ute
Falasch’s study of Madari Sufis is based both on field work and on
historical
texts. The Madari Sufis would indeed appear to fit the category of
syncretic,
with the implication of “adaptation” to Hinduism, “be-shar`”
(i.e.
“non-shari`at) heterodoxy, and so forth, not least because of the
wandering
Malangs associated with them. But as Falasch cogently argues, these
descriptions
must in themselves be historicized as produced by colonialists, modern
reformers – and academics who followed their lead. In the pre-colonial
period, she demonstrates, the Islamic intelligentsia criticized the
Madari
not as Hindu, not even as deviant – simply as less cultivated (be-adab).
The fact, for example, that they adopted Yogic breathing techniques was
never regarded by critics as in any sense problematic “Hindu”
practices.
(This was the also the case in relation to the better known order of
Chishtis
– whom I’ll mention in a project below – who adopted Yogic practices in
much the same way, to an equally non-controversial response.)
Ironically,
moreover, these Madari Sufis, so readily labeled today to the contrary,
have always cultivated Islamic textual guidance, so that the gap
between
“sufi” and “scholar” is not the sociologically distinct one scholars
and
others often imagine. Indeed, Falash suggests that it was British
officials,
ever suspicious of wanderers (and not least when the Madari Malangs
joined
a revolt against the Company), who set the pattern of labeling such
groups
as “be-shar`,” an approach that modern reformers themselves
would
follow. The conclusion to be drawn from this account is that if at some
point, some Muslims choose to claim an authoritative stance that
labels others as deviant, that must be taken as part of the
ethnographic
data, not as some “scientific” labeling – whether it be done by the
state,
other Muslims, or the academy. A category like “syncretic”
is historically contingent and ever shifting.
Aside
from problematizing the very term “syncretic,” Falasch points to the
larger
issue that recent generations of scholars have examined, to get beyond
the politicized issues endemic to the field: namely, the false
dichotomies
of text and practice / high and low / great and little / elite and
folk,
and so forth. A false dichotomy imputes a distinction between Sufis and
those learned in texts. A second false dichotomy is the labeling of a
range
of practices as necessarily “Hindu,” when they may simply be shared and
local. Falasch also signals the importance of a method: letting the
subjects
of one’s study speak. In this case, she brings fresh insights to field
work by her study of Persian Sufi texts, colonial documents, and
contemporary
contestations about truth.
Now,
on to brief comments about the work of several other scholars that
help,
even if one limits the discussion to Sufis, in getting out of the
“syncretism”
box.
I might
begin with my own study of Deoband, published almost a quarter of a
century
back. I came to the topic of a new kind of modern organization for
transmitting
Islamic learning in the colonial period out of a desire to challenge
the
notion that only the Westernized who knew a metropolitan language were
engaged, in the colonial period, in projects of intellectual and social
reform. But in the course of my study of the scholarly leadership, I
learned
two things relevant to the issue of syncretism. One, made real through
reading letters, notebooks, volumes of charms, and records of dreams of
these Islamic scholars, was the extent to which they were immersed in
the
initiatory chains, disciplinary practices, and traditions generally of
the Sufi orders. They were holy men as well as scholars, and their
influence
derived from both these roles. They were, to be sure, reformers, and
part
of that reform extended to issues surrounding the Sufi tomb shrines.
But
they couched their opposition to certain practices in terms of basic
morality
– avoiding display, showing off, eschewing doctrinal error (shirk,
bida`,
imputing partners to God) – not in terms of following Hindu practice.
Their
targets were internal: misguided Sufis, the Shi`a. Moreover, to the
extent
they were devoted to the elders, traveled to their tombs, invoked
stories
of their holiness, and so forth, they themselves cherished the tombs.
As
my former student Warren Fusfeld pointed out, moreover, in relation to
the l9th century Delhi Naqshbandis, they did so on the grounds that
this
was their tradition, never with the argument that such practices were
conducive
to harmony with Hindus. They followed these practices because they were
continuous with a sanctified past (1987). It continues to fascinate me
that so much of colonial-period Islamic reform is intra-Muslim – yet
the
scholarly common sense that it must be anti-Hindu, drawing lines
between
Hindus and Muslims, always prevails.
To
turn to a third project, one that focused on figures whose primary
identity
is as Sufis, Richard Eaton’s two major books on Bijapur and Bengal are
centrally important; here the sources range from the textual to the
environmental/ecological.
One point of the Bijapur book is that Sufis, like Yogis, may well be
warriors.
Another is that, mesmerized as outsiders may be by saying what is Hindu
and what is Muslim, people themselves may not be. I quote Willie
Dalrymple,
simply because he is so engaging, summarizing part of Eaton’s Bijapur
book:
One
Bijapuri production
of the period, for example, was the Bangab Nama, or the Book of the Pot
Smoker, written by Mahmud Bahri – a sort of medieval Indian Allen
Ginsberg.
The book is a long panegyric to the joys of cannabis:
"Smoke your pot and be
happy –
Be a dervish and put your heart at
peace.
Lose your life imbibing this
exhilaration."
In the course of
this book, Bahri
writes: "God's knowledge has no limit... and there is not just one path
to him. Anyone from any community can find him." This certainly seems
to
have been the view of Bijapur's ruler, Ibrahim Adil [Shah] II. Early in
his reign, Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the
rudraksha
rosary of the sadhu. In his songs he used highly Sanskritised language
to shower equal praise upon Saraswati, the Prophet Muhammad, and the
Sufi
saint Gesudaraz of Gulbarga.
Perhaps the most
surprising
passage occurs in the 56th song where the Sultan more or less describes
himself as a Hindu God: "He is robed in saffron dress, his teeth are
black,
the nails are red... and he loves all. Ibrahim whose father is Ganesh,
whose mother is Saraswati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck...
and
an elephant as his vehicle….
This creative
coexistence
finally fell victim, not to a concerted communal campaign by Muslim
states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but instead to the shifting
alliances
of Deccani diplomacy [emphasis added].
This last is the important point, and as
Falasch
warns us, our labels are one thing, the labels of people of the time
may
well be another.
From
the Bengal material, I would like to point to one particular document
studied
by Eaton, the late-16th-century Bengali Nabi Bamsa (“The Family
of the Prophet”) of Saiyid Sultan, that makes the major Hindu deities
into
successive prophets preceding such figues as Adam, Moses, Jesus, and
Muhammad.
Rather than see this as “syncretic,” Eaton points out that it
replicates
the classical sira literature, like that of the 8th-century Ibn
Ishaq, which claimed Judaism and Christianity as the heritage of Islam,
just as Saiyid Sultan claimed the pre-modern heritage of Bengal. For
Saiyid
Sultan, God was Prabhu and Niranjan, nabi-s were understood as
avatars,
each Veda was a prophetic book. For Saiyid Sultan and his
readers,
his was a profoundly Islamic book (288).
Another
example of how misleading essentialist distinctions can be comes from
the
work of Carl Ernst. Ernst has for some time been studying the Amritakunda,
the Pool of Nectar, which for centuries has been available in multiple
versions and translations unto Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and
Urdu,
making known to Muslim readers practices of the Nath Jogis and the
teachings
of hatha Yoga: breath control through each nostril, summoning of
yoginis,
meditations on the cakra centers accompanied by recitation of Sanskrit
mantras (31). He notes that technical terms like mantra, yantra
(diagram), and cakra are not mentioned, though the phenomena
are
described at length; they are subordinated to Islamicate categories and
represented by Arabic terms: zikr, shakl, mawda
(place);
yoga is replaced by riyada, asceticism. The interest in these
texts
was wholly practical, or technical, and did not generally engage with
philosophical
issues. The Sufis and the Yogis shared overlapping interests, competed
for recognition, shared such customs as burial, were both patronized by
the Mughals. Yet, and this is a crucial point, there is clearly always
a recognition of difference, of distinction, even competition, between
Sufis and Yogis – clearly not obliteration of difference, in some
purported
middle space, through such interaction. Again, there is no reason to
assume
that those engaged with this text saw it as part of “accommodation” or
“syncretism.”
Another
(5th!) example of study of what might be labeled a liminal or syncretic
expression is the shrine in Bahraich of Ghazi Miyan, a wholly legendary
figure alleged to be the nephew of the arch-villain of nationalist
history,
Mahmud of Ghazni – a villain because in the nationalist imagination,
all
conquest was unjust. Shahid Amin’s recent ambitious work on this site
and
figure challenges a critical valance of the “syncretic” theme by the
simple
fact of insisting that one must recognize violence in the world of
Muslims,
including the world of Muslim saints, not least in the case of someone
whose very title, “Ghazi,” points to that military role. Amin looks at
folklore, contemporary popular histories, and a hagiography from 1600
(centuries
after this figure was said to have lived). As Amin points out,
historians
have countered the anti-Muslim story of conquest by stressing the
mystics.
He quotes the great Aligarh historian Muhammad Habib, who saw the Sufis
as following “the footsteps of their great Hindu predecessors,” and
even
being enrolled among the Hindu rishis. Amin wants to hold on both to
the
fact that “these shrines attract both Hindus and Muslims as devotees,”
and to what he calls “our vaunted syncretism.” He simply wants to add
that
conflict goes into shaping it; it is part of the process. Syncretism
without
conflict, as he puts it, “leaves the field of sectarian strife as the
special
preserve of … ‘communal’ historians.”
Amin
therefore retells the story of Ghazi Miyan’s conquests, his claim to
turn
Bharaich into a sacred Islamic site instead of a place for the
unbelievers.
But he also tells the story of Ghazi Miyan with what he calls Indian
tropes:
he was someone who restricted his acceptance of cooked food, chewed
betel,
stressed cleanliness and pure garments and fragrances, and was
especially
attached to the mahua tree.
When Amin turns to the ballads still
sung, the
stories are above all of barren women seeking male offspring, the story
of Ghazi Miyan’s own mother, who then sees her son die on the day
intended
to be his marriage day (an episode not mentioned in the l7th-century
story).
He dies because Jaso Rani, (recalling Jashoda, Krishna’s foster
mother),
arrives with the word that they have lost cows and lives to the
treacherous
Raja Sohal Deo. Ghazi Miyan responds to the cry of ‘save the cows’ and
is martyred, as Amin puts it, “in the cause of Cows/Islam.” In the
written
versions from the 16th and l9th centuries, the trope becomes the
unmarked
“cattle”, mawashi, but not so in the oral accounts. This story
stands
in contrast to the texts that Hindu revivalists from the Arya Samaj
onward
have written about Ghazi Miyan, trying to wean Hindus from his shrine:
there Ghazi Miyan is only a Muslim, an iconoclast, an eater of cows.
Amin,
in contrast, wants to save the story of a “Sword of Islam” who is simultaneously
a protector of herdsmen and women and their cows – a story in
which
the herdsmen do not, to be sure, become Muslims, but they do become
devotees.
Amin has collected wonderful material, but one element is missing: what
exactly brings those devotees.
In
concluding these thoughts on the “syncretic,” I return to van der Veer
– my final story – and his material about a Gujarati Rifa’i tomb
(published
in the Journal of Asian Studies in the 90s). What is
interesting
about this study is that it includes extensive material on the Hindus
who
frequent the shrine, an element missing, for example, from the Amin
study
of Ghazi Miyan. At this tomb in Surat, the `urs is widely attendend,
and
it is understood as a day of powerful blessing. The descendant of the
saint
replaces the cover on the tomb and smears it with sandalwood. The
disciples
play with swords and pierce themselves, part of their practices toward
inducing ecstatic experiences. Hindus are in fact the majority of those
in attendance, not least because these practices have come into
question
on the part of many Muslims. But the Hindus who come do so on their own
terms. They call the shrine a Samadhi (a Hindu saint in meditation),
not
a dargah. They do not participate in the activities inducing a
trance
or hal. They cultivate no relationship with the living
descendant
of the saint, and thus have no exposure to the discourse of Sufism.
They
do not join the Rifa’i who combine their procession with congregational
prayer, the descendant of the saint serving as imam (so that for the
Muslims
present, the tomb does not exist in isolation from other Islamic
practices).
The
Hindus attribute power to the saint, but do so specifically in relation
to illnesses – above all, to misfortunes caused by spirits. For them,
Muslims
are held to be closer to a world of spirits and demons, and able to
master
it, like untouchables, who can also be specialists in exoricism. Saint
worship is for them in that sense a lower and impure practice. There is
no evidence of any conversion to Islam, nor of participation in any of
the dimensions of the Sufi tradition other than healing and magic; nor,
given the tensions about Islam, would they even talk of possible
substantial
influence on non-Muslims.
This
review of several projects in the general field of Indo-Muslim studies
is, I hope, suggestive of productive approaches generated by scholars
in
recent decades in relation to a central theme in the study of Islam in
India, namely the persistent fascination with what is taken to be
“syncretism.”
By now, roughly four decades into the fostering of “area studies” in
the
U.S. and increased interest in India in Europe, scholars are working in
a wide range of languages – Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, as well as Arabic,
Persian, and English, in the sources represented in the projects
described
above. Moreover, there is much more familiarity with the relative
importance
of various texts. Ernst argues, for example, that in terms of sheer
numbers,
few pre-colonial manuscripts in the field of Sufism match the
Amritakunda,
which was so widely copied and circulated. Al-Biruni's work,
unparalleled
as it is for knowledge of Ghaznavid court culture, was of little
interest,
Ernst points out, within India itself: it was virtually uncopied, and
came
to prominence only in colonial times.
In
several cases, it is the juxtaposition of field work with textual
sources
that yields productive results. Arguably, no change has been more
important
for the study of religion generally than this move from the wholly
textual
to the ethnographic. Working in such a broad range of sources, focusing
on concrete cases, these projects have shown the limits of the term
“syncretic”
as a category of analysis – even while the division created by
contemporary
politicized identities, which label symbols and material objects of
every
kind as Hindu or Muslim, coupled with a desire to overcome this very
division,
makes the use of the term virtually irresistible.