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The ‘Church of Islam’: esotericism, Orientalism, and religious origin myths in colonial South Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2022
Abstract
This article analyses the construction of religious origin myths for Islam within ‘universal religion’ and esoteric frameworks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia and beyond, and sheds light on the role of ‘Western’ and Anglo-Indian converts in this process. At its core is a case study of the elusive Hamid Snow, founder of the so-called ‘Church of Islam’ in 1891 in Sikanderabad, Deccan. On the following pages, I reconstruct Snow's biography from little-known Urdu and English sources, analyse his writings, and place him within a context of religious modernist, esoteric, and convert networks encompassing South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Philippines, and other parts of the world. By focusing on the nature of the scholarship of religion at the time, and the reconstruction of religious pasts under the influence of esotericism and religious modernism, the article traces the influence of Orientalist and Eurocentric views on perceptions of the Islamic tradition and contributes to larger debates about the role of laypeople, especially those with an interracial background, in interpreting religious history and acting as cultural mediators between different communities during a time of ‘hybrid transnational occultism’.1
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Asiatic Society
Footnotes
1
Nile Green, ‘The global occult: an introduction’, History of Religions, 54.4 (2015), p. 383.
References
2 Johnson, K. Paul, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (New York, 1994), p. 159Google Scholar.
3 John Algeo, ‘Theosophical Society’, in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn, (ed.) Lindsay Jones (Detroit, 2005), Vol. 13, p. 9142.
4 Edward C. Moulton, ‘The beginnings of the Theosophical Movement in India, 1879–1885: conversion and non-conversion experiences’, in Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia: Continuities and Change, 1800–1990, (ed.) Geoffrey Oddie (Hoboken, 2013), p. 113.
5 Neera Burra, A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab: Ruchi Ram Sahni, 1863–1948 (Oxford, 2017), p. 122.
6 Ibid., p. 121.
7 A Kashmiri pandit called Bishan Narain became one of the leading local Theosophists in the city and regularly gave lectures on the topic at the Shikhsha Sabha Hall in Lahore. See Burra, Memoir, p. 120. Cf. also the following two Urdu publications on the topic from that period and region: Bishambar Nath, Khulasah-i Theosophy (Ambala, 1892) and Narayana, Sundara, Char Chaman-i Theosophy (Farukhabad, 1892)Google Scholar.
8 Burra, Memoir, p. 120. Isis Unveiled was heavily plagiarised, as Moulton points out: Moulton, ‘Theosophical Movement in India’, p. 111.
9 Moulton, ‘Theosophical Movement in India’, p. 113.
10 Lubelsky, Isaac, Celestial India: Madame Blavatsky and the Birth of Indian Nationalism (Oakville, 2012)Google Scholar.
11 Annie Besant even gave a lecture on Islam and Theosophy at the annual meeting of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Madras, in 1901. Cf. Annie Besant, Islam in the Light of Theosophy: A Lecture (Madras, 1912). Cf. also Mark J. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004).
12 Green, ‘Global occult’, p. 391.
13 Patrick Bowen, ‘Abdullah Quilliam and the rise of international esoteric-Masonic Islamophilia’, in Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West, (eds) Jamie Gilham and Ron Geaves (Oxford, 2017), p. 39.
14 Malik, Jamal, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Tendenzen am Beispiel von Lucknow (Leiden, 1997), p. 218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 On Snow, compare the brief remarks by Bowen, Patrick, A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States (Leiden, 2015), pp. 154–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Green, ‘Global occult’, p. 384.
17 Tribune, 11 July 1894.
18 Anjuman-i Himayat-i Islam, Mahwari Risalah (hereafter AHI, Risalah), August 1894, p. 13.
19 Snow, Hamid, The Gospel of Ahmad: The Great Arabian Prince, Prophet, and Philosopher (Jabalpur, 1897), Epilogue, p. viiGoogle Scholar.
20 Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (New York, 2015), p. 143.
21 Bowen, Conversion, p. 154. Hamid Snow, The Muslim Art of Hypnotic and Vito-Magnetic Healing: Or ‘Self’, ‘Absent’, and ‘Personal’ Methods for Physical, Mental and Moral Ailments; Without Drugs or Batteries (Lahore, 1902), p. ii.
22 Hamid Snow, The Prayer Book for Muslims (Lahore, 1893), p. 23.
23 AHI, Risalah, August 1894, pp. 14–18.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid. For more information on these services, see below.
27 Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, Epilogue, p. ix.
28 Snow, Prayer Book, p. 1. Compare this with the Confession formula in the Anglican Book of Common Prayers: ‘Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts … Restore thou those who are penitent; according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.’
29 Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, p. 18.
30 Snow, Prayer Book, p. 2.
31 Ibid., p. 3.
32 AHI, Risalah, August 1894, p. 16.
33 In Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, Epilogue, he mentions a person called Abd al-Haqq in Australia; a certain Uthman Nina Merican (sic) in Penang, Straits Settlements; and Syed Irfan Ali, the proprietor of a newspaper called Muhammadan at Triplicane in Madras. The Straits Settlements were a British colony in Southeast Asia, today's Malaysia. Uthman Nina Merican is listed as an officer residing there in N. A., Blue Book for the Year 1912 (Singapur, 1913), K 176.
34 Countless contemporary novels across the world picked up on themes of mysticism, spiritualism, the reincarnation and transmigration of souls, etc. For example, the main character in Jack London's The Star Rover (1915) is a professor who is imprisoned and placed in a straight-jacket in the notorious San Quentin State Prison in the United States, and mentally escapes from his solitary confinement by way of out-of-body experiences. Over the course of the novel, his soul is mystically merged with people who are already dead, and he relives incidents from their lives.
35 Green, ‘Global occult’, p. 388.
36 Lubelsky, Celestial India, p. 2.
37 Bevir, Mark, ‘Theosophy and the origins of the Indian National Congress’, International Journal of Hindu Studies, 7.1–3 (2003), p. 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 As did, in the context of late nineteenth and twentieth-century India, individual attempts to merge ideas and practices from Islam and Hinduism in response to communalist and nationalist ideologies. These often drew on a long-standing historical tradition of exchange and cross-fertilisation between Sufism and other religious thought systems in India, expressed, for example, in shared worship at shrines or joint participation in religious festivals. For a prominent and widely published example in the early twentieth century, see the encounter between the Hyderabadi prime minister Kishan Parshad and the soldier-turned-Sufi figure Taj al-Din, recounted in Green, Terrains of Exchange, Chapter 5 ‘The invention of a Hindu Sufism’, pp. 177–206.
39 For British converts such as Henry Stanley, Abdullah Quilliam, Marmaduke Pickthall, Khalid Sheldrake, and their Indian interlocutors, see especially Jamie Gilham, Loyal Enemies: British Converts to Islam, 1850–1950 (New York, 2014).
40 Gilham and Geaves, Victorian Muslim, p. 10.
41 Bowen, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’, p. 31.
42 Ansari, Khizar Humayun, ‘The quintessential British Muslim: Abdullah William Henry Quilliam, 1856– 1932’, Arches Quarterly, 2.3 (2008), p. 49Google Scholar.
43 Ibid.
44 Gilham and Geaves, Victorian Muslim, p. 18.
45 Ibid., p. xxii.
46 Snow, Prayer Book, p. 5. No further information is available on the other people mentioned here. White Snow might be one of two people: a person called John White, a district judge from Kurnool, a town in the Madras Presidency, today's Andhra Pradesh. In 1892, he apparently visited Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in Qadian, converted to Islam, and swore an oath of allegiance (bayat) to him. See Ron Geaves, Islam and Britain: Muslim Mission in an Age of Empire (New York, 2017), p. 84. John White was also friends with Snow, who mentions him in Snow, The Muslim Art of Hypnotic Healing, p. v, as ‘Brother E. J. S. White (Khan)’. The other person who could be identified as ‘White Snow’ is William Snow, a man who called in at the Ottoman embassy in London in 1898 and stated that he wanted to convert to Islam. I am thankful to Dr Matthew Sharp for the second reference.
47 Crescent, 1.24 (1 July 1893).
48 Crescent, 19.482 (9 April 1902).
49 Bowen, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’, p. 36. Geaves, Islam and Britain, p. 116.
50 In AHI, Risalah, June 1890, pp. 3–4 and 12–13, the AHI printed a translation of the Liverpool Institute's by-laws and objectives and also lists its office-holders.
51 AHI, Risalah, August 1890, p. 8; AHI, Risalah, June 1890, p. 12; AHI, Risalah, October 1890, pp. 9–11; AHI, Risalah, November 1893, p. 27; AHI, Risalah, September 1894, pp. 13–15. See also article in the Paisa Akhbar, 17 October 1892.
52 AHI, Risalah, June 1890, p. 2.
53 Ibid.
54 For the history of the Ahmadiyya mission in Europe, and particularly Berlin, see Gerdien Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress: Missionizing Europe, 1900–1965 (Leiden, 2016).
55 Cf. Umar F. Abd-Allah, A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb (New York, 2006).
56 Ibid., p. 4.
57 Ibid., p. 5.
58 Ibid., p. 61.
59 There is a direct connection with the Lahore Jamaʿat. As Abd-Allah has pointed out, the 1910 version of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's Teachings of Islam has a preface written by Muhammad Ali, in which he thanks Webb for editorial assistance in the final draft of his English Qurʾan translation. See Abd-Allah, Webb, p. 19.
60 Ibid., p. 5.
61 Ibid., p. 132.
62 Bowen, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’, p. 154.
63 Cf. the accounts of Stanley et al. in Gilham, Loyal Enemies.
64 Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (New York, 2010), p. 110.
65 Ibid., p. 115. Webb kept up his contact with the Theosophical Society throughout his life. In 1892, he also met ‘General’ Olcott, and in the same year, he established the first American Muslim mission in New York.
66 Ibid., p. 114.
67 Abd-Allah, Webb, p. 117.
68 Ibid., p. 65.
69 Ibid., p. 68.
70 Snow, H., ‘Islam as the Religion of Peace’, Literary Digest, 11.18 (1895), p. 531Google Scholar.
71 Guy G. Stroumsa, ‘Jewish Christianity and Islamic origins’, in Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone, (eds) Asad Q. Ahmed, Robert G. Hoyland, Behnam Sadeghi and Adam J. Silverstein (Leiden, 2015), p. 72.
72 Ibid., p. 73. On the Gospel of Barnabas, see also Jan Slomp, Pseudo-Barnabas in the Context of Muslim-Christian Apologetics (Rawalpindi, 1974).
73 Stroumsa, ‘Jewish Christianity’, p. 83.
74 Ibid., p. 82.
75 Ibid.
76 Cf. Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Surrey, 1993) and Leirvik, Oddbjorn, ‘History as a literary weapon: the Gospel of Barnabas in Muslim-Christian polemics’, Studia Theologica, 56.1 (2002), p. 10Google Scholar. In his book Jesus in India (published in 1899), Mirza Ghulam Ahmad referred to the Gospel of Barnabas as well, but Muslim interest in the text only took off on a much larger scale after an English translation was published in London in 1907. An Arabic translation followed in 1908 in Egypt and an Urdu translation in 1916: Muhammad Inshaullah, Injil-i Barnabas ka Urdu tarjamah (Lahore, 1916).
77 Powell, Muslims and Missionaries.
78 See Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, ‘Preface to First Edition’. Other books and pamphlets by Snow include Merits of Islam, What is Islam, Guide to Namaz, History of Ahmed, Articles of our Faith, A Catechism of Islam, What is Christianity, Was Christ Crucified?, Is there a God, and Who is He?, An Address to Eurasians on Social Regeneration through Islam Alone, and The Church of Islam Liturgy. In addition, he published a hymn book and handbook for new converts explaining ‘Islamic’ ritual to them, written in English and Roman Arabic with translations. Many of these titles were published by the Muhammadan Tract and Book Depot in Lahore, which also published the writings of Quilliam and Webb. A history of the Book Depot, which was a centre of Muslim modernist activity in North India, still remains to be written.
79 Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, p. i.
80 Ibid., p. iii.
81 Ibid., p. iv.
82 Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, Introduction to the second edition.
83 Ibid., pp. 1–4.
84 Ibid., pp. 18–32.
85 Ibid., p. 20.
86 Compare the chapters ‘Post-Solomonic Proverbs of the Islamic Bible’ and ‘Song of Solomon of Islamic Sufis’, in ibid., pp. 107–111 and 116–125, respectively.
87 Ibid., p. 33.
88 Ibid., p. 34.
89 Ibid., pp. 126f.
90 Ibid., pp. 134f.
91 Ibid., p. 141.
92 Ibid., p. 67.
93 GhaneaBassiri, Islam in America, p. 117.
94 Ibid.
95 Green, ‘Global occult’, p. 389.
96 Quoted in GhaneaBassiri, Islam in America, p. 118.
97 Abd-Allah, Webb, p. 129.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid., p. 139.
100 Ibid.
101 AHI, Risalah, August 1894, p. 16.
102 Ibid., p. 17.
103 Pioneer, 12 October 1893 and Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 October 1893.
104 AHI, Risalah, August 1894, p. 16.
105 Snow, Gospel of Ahmad.
106 Cf. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997) and Luzia Savary, Race and Public Spheres in India: Vernacular Concepts and Sciences, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2019).
107 GhaneaBassiri, Islam in America, p. 123.
108 Ibid.
109 Elwood Morris Wherry, Islam and Christianity in India and the Far East (New York, 1907), p. 189.
110 AHI, Ijlas Jalsah-i ʿAmm, session of 19 August 1894.
111 AHI, Risalah, August 1894, p. 18.
112 Ibid.
113 Timothy S. Dobe, Hindu Christian Faqir: Modern Monks, Global Christianity, and Indian Sainthood (New York, 2015), p. 70.
114 AHI, Register Ijlas Managing Committee, session of 2 September 1894.
115 Ibid.
116 Tribune, 20 October 1894.
117 Tribune, 23 February 1895.
118 Ibid.
119 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 11 March 1895.
120 Tribune, 26 June 1895.
121 Tribune, 24 July 1895.
122 Ibid., 14 August 1895.
123 Tribune, 14 August 1895.
124 Wherry, Islam and Christianity, p. 189; Crescent, 22 January 1896; Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, Publisher's note.
125 Snow, The Gospel of Ahmad, Epilogue, p. III.
126 Powell, Avril A., ‘Islamic modernism and women's status: the influence of Syed Ameer Ali’, in Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia, (eds) Powell, Avril A. and Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan (New Delhi, 2006), p. 286Google Scholar.
127 Crescent, 5 December 1900.
128 Lubelsky, Celestial India, p. xiii.
129 Snow, The Muslim Art of Hypnotic Healing, p. 184.
130 Bowen, Conversion, p. 161.