In the summer of 2001 a major controversy erupted following a Jewish Chronicle report (18 May 2001) that the Honorary Officers and Executive Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews had decided to offer for sale, at Messrs Christie's auction rooms in London, a hitherto unpublished work by the nineteenth-century explorer, writer and diplomat Sir Richard Francis Burton. In the event, and in the glare of worldwide media attention, the reserve price of £150,000 was not reached (6 June 2001). The lot – one of the very few Burton manuscripts still in private hands – was therefore withdrawn and returned, amidst yet further controversy, to the safe-keeping of the Board. In this article we trace the history of this work from its creation in the early 1870s, and offer some thoughts on its contemporary significance.

This article considers two well-known texts that deal with questions of education and appropriate conduct for respectable Muslims in colonial India. The texts under scrutiny are Mirat al-Arus (The Bride's Mirror), and the Taubat-al-Nasuh (Repentance of Nasuh), completed in 1867–68 and 1873 respectively. The author was a Muslim publicist and a prolific writer who published numerous books in diverse genres. Nazir Ahmed (1830–1912) came from a family of distinguished maulavis and muftis of Bijnor (in the state of Uttar Pradesh) and Delhi. His father, a teacher in a small town near Bijnor, taught him Persian and Arabic. In 1846, Nazir Ahmad enrolled at the Delhi College and studied there till 1853. He began his career as a maulavi in Arabic, but soon (in 1856) became a deputy inspector of schools in the Department of Public Instruction. Later, after he had produced a superb translation of the Indian Penal Code in Urdu, he was nominated for the Revenue Service. He was posted as deputy collector in what was then called the North-West Provinces (i.e. modern U.P.), whence the name ‘Diptee (Deputy) Nazir Ahmad’ by which he is popularly known.

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendicants are really men in disguise”.1 None of these holy men were considered more dubious – more superstitious and reactionary – than the dervishes and faqīrs. In popular Indian usage the terms darwīsh and faqīr referred to a class of Muslim holy men who were considered to possess a range of miraculous powers, powers which served to demonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turn to underwrite their considerable authority.2 For many British officials, it was this authority that stood at the heart of what they saw as the faqīr problem. As the rumours that surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of the nineteenth century demonstrate, faqīr s were seen as the perpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition. Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than in the circles of India's colonial armies, which more than any other aspect of colonial society relied on loyalty to a formalised and rational chain of command. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) of these fears, the commanders of the various armies under British command in India were anxious to demonstrate their respect for the autonomy of the religious rights of the Indian soldier. Through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indian soldier fell in between this tension of covert suspicion and official respect, and in different ways the careers of a series of Muslim holy men attached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by this tension. Over the following pages, this essay examines the careers of three faqīr s connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the army under British command in the nominally independent princely state of Hyderabad in South India, better known as the Nizam's State. Looking out from this princely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, the essay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts in Urdu to begin to reconstruct the religious history of the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were, and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in the colonial armies of the British Empire.3

The commitment of North-West Frontier Province Pakhtun religious politics towards the quest for a society and state governed by religious leaders was directed through the colonial period, and into the national period, predominantly by the ulama known as Deobandis. These ulama took their title from the madrasa Darul Ulum Deoband in the United Provinces in north-India and came to prominence through championing Muslim interests in colonial NWFP. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the United Provinces remained in India, separating Pakistani scholars trained in Deoband from Indian Deobandi theologians, and indeed from the school itself. But these ulama continued to call themselves Deobandis and were central to the successful demand for the constitutional declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state; and brought Islam to bear on national and provincial legislation from positions in parliament. Increasingly well-organised and well-funded, NWFP Deobandi ulama established madrasas and mosques in the province, strengthening the preserve of religion and their own authority. When the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation began in 1978, a section of the resistance organisation working in exile in Peshawar gravitated towards these Deobandi institutions, drawing the Deobandi ulama of the NWFP into the jihad. Sustaining links to the Afghan fighters even after the withdrawal of the Soviets, the NWFP Deobandis contributed to and encouraged the emerging organisation of the Taliban, becoming champions of their reactionary brand of Islam.

Since the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate underwent a form of apotheosis after his death, it is not surprising that a hagiographic tradition was quick to establish itself. This tradition attributed superhuman qualities to Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), and its lingering influence is still to be seen. His admirers paid particular attention to his supposed bookishness, the object being to demonstrate that his sinological learning rendered him fit to rule according to the Chinese construction of the desired attributes of a ruler. For those who came later, this bookishness served in retrospect to mark him out from his successors, but for his contemporaries it detached questions of legitimacy and fitness to rule from his recent successes on the battlefield and it defined fitness to rule in accordance with the sinological leanings of the new samurai élite.