Previous chapters of this book have demonstrated that, through a combination of religious change, new communication technologies, institutional networks and a plethora of anjuman-based activity in the urban public sphere, many Shi‘a began to see themselves as adherents of a free-standing Shi‘a religion, and members of a de facto community attached to it. This chapter further elaborates upon the significance of these changes, by examining the development of a distinctive Shi‘a politics in colonial India. Little significant work on the politicization of the Shi‘a in colonial India has been published; by contrast, a far greater emphasis has been placed upon the consolidation of the generic category of the Muslim as a basis of political mobilization. This chapter instead argues that, while a number of Shi‘a were heavily involved in a wider Muslim politics, both in Lucknow itself and in India more broadly, many Shi‘a organized independently and differed substantively on major political questions affecting Muslim and other communities. Implicit in this description of Shi‘a political mobilization is a corrective to long-standing assumptions about Muslim political organization in colonial India. Rather than assessing the respective evocations of Muslim and Shi‘a community as coextensive entities to which the individual could relate in different contexts, it argues that Shi‘a and Sunni political identities were increasingly construed as alternative – and even adversarial – forms of political affiliation, adding a political and very contemporary dimension to the experience of sectarianism in colonial India.

This chapter first offers some comparative reflections on the role of Muslim minorities in politics in the colonial world. It then discusses, in turn, Indian Shi‘a responses to the Aligarh Movement, the application of a rhetoric of jihad, and pan-Islamic mobilization. The focus of this chapter is on a period that has long been identified as a determining moment in the development of Muslim separatism, beginning with the consolidation of the Aligarh Movement in the 1870s–80s, and ending with the collapse of the Khilafat Movement in 1924.

This section offers brief biographical synopses of a number of the most prominent ‘ulama discussed in this book; they are just a select few among the many influential and significant mujtahids and scholars active in north India around 1870–1940. Where appropriate they have been grouped by household (khandan-wada), the wider idea of family relational groups bonded by biradari links and endogamy.

The Kintori ‘ulama

Descendants of the Seventh , Moussa, the sayyids who settled in the qasba of Kintor, Barabanki district, around the thirteenth century were of Nishapuri origin. Many of them matured as ‘ulama, and were settled on nazrana land grants in Barabanki and Bahraich districts of Awadh, which they largely retained into the colonial period. Kintor produced a number of related and exemplary scholars from the eighteenth century onwards; alongside those named here, this biradari included Sayyid Ahmad Moussawi Hindi, the paternal grandfather of Ruhollah Khomeini, who emigrated from India to Iran in the 1830s.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, paralleling simultaneous developments within other Muslim communities, a period of major transformation within Indian Shi‘ism. This chapter, the first of two to interrogate the aforementioned ‘fresh religious life’ within Shi‘ism, explores several aspects of Shi‘a clerical and lay religious expansion. Early sections examine the bureaucratization of religious learning through the expansion of madrasa education, and the reworking of the public role of the senior ‘ulama. Later sections turn away from this focus on the ‘formal’ clerical milieu towards the powerful, and often more diffuse, efforts at lay propagation in the early twentieth century, looking at engagement with printing technology and the language of religious proselytization (tabligh). Throughout, the chapter stresses how Shi‘ism, previously identified with an amorphous blend of sayyid cultural norms, doctrinal orientations and religious observances, was gradually articulated as something approximating a reconceptualized religion, one of objective relevance to a broad constituency of followers (mominin) as well as its sayyid spokesmen and public leaders. Later sections turn towards another facet of this expansion of religious knowledge, namely the growth of inner-Islamic religious polemic (munazara). The chapter thus interrogates the question of why the processes of religious proselytization (tabligh) and disputation (ikhtilafat) within Shi‘ism were apparently so functionally intertwined as to be often indistinguishable.

The formation of shi‘a madrasas in colonial India

As has been described in much scholarship, the late nineteenth century witnessed the foundation of numerous madrasas across the United Provinces, whether the dar-ul-‘ulum at Deoband (1867) and the various seminaries created across north India in its image; the Nadwa’t ul-‘Ulama (established as a madrasa in 1898) as well as equivalent ‘Barelwi’ schools such as Misbah ul-‘Ulum (Mubarakpur, 1898) and Manzar-i-Islam (Bareilly, 1904). Some literature on these Sunni religious schools in India has interpreted them as linking India into transnational patterns of Arabic learning, and facilitating communication between Indian ‘ulama and global scholarly networks. Other studies have emphasized instead the impact of these madrasas within the Indian subcontinent itself, describing their creation of an indigenous clergy and their contributions to processes of Islamic renewal (tajdid) within a South Asian framework. Less frequently remarked upon is the foundation of a striking number of Shi‘a madrasas, especially in Lucknow, from 1889 onwards. These schools show a similarly multi-faceted impact, at once connecting the Indian Shi‘a with scholarly traditions observed in the wider world, but also creating a much enlarged body of Indian ‘ulama and the educational infrastructure for sustaining it on Indian soil. Emerging Shi‘a seminaries bore comparison with their Sunni counterparts in important ways: the formation of a recognized and ordered nisab (curriculum), the dispensation of agreed and distinguished qualifications of learning, and the dissemination of education across the ties of kinship and locality.