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The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim fanatic in mid-Victorian India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

JULIA STEPHENS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University Email: jasteph@fas.harvard.edu

Abstract

In the late 1860s and early 1870s the British colonial government in India suppressed an imagined Wahhabi conspiracy, which it portrayed as a profound threat to imperial security. The detention and trial of Amir and Hashmadad Khan—popularly known as the Great Wahhabi Case—was the most controversial of a series of public trials of suspected Wahhabis. The government justified extra-judicial arrests and detentions as being crucial to protect the empire from anti-colonial rebels inspired by fanatical religious beliefs. The government's case against the Khan brothers, however, was exceptionally weak. Their ongoing detention sparked a sustained public debate about the balance between executive authority and the rule of law. In newspapers and pamphlets published in India and Britain, Indian journalists and Anglo-Indian lawyers argued that arbitrary police powers posed a greater threat to public security than religious fanatics. In doing so, they embraced a language of liberalism which emphasized the rule of law and asserted the role of public opinion as a check on government despotism. Debates about the Great Wahhabi Case demonstrate the ongoing contest between authoritarian and liberal strands of imperial ideology, even at the height of the panic over the intertwined threat of Indian sedition and fanatical Islam.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Sugata Bose, Deborah Cohen, David Lunn, Johan Mathew, Emma Rothschild, and Judith Surkis for their critical comments at various stages in the preparation of this paper.

References

1 Nineteenth-century writers used numerous transliterations of Wahhabi, including Wahabi, Wahabee, and Wahhaby. Here I have used the transliteration Wahhabi, unless quoting directly from a source. With all other transliterated words, I have used phonetic spellings and omitted the use of diacritical accents. All translations of Urdu texts, unless noted, are my own.

2 The most important scholarly work on the Wahhabi movement in India is that of Ahmad, Q. (1966). The Wahabi Movement in India, Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, CalcuttaGoogle Scholar. See also Balkhi, F. (1983). Wahabi Movement, Classical Publishing, New DelhiGoogle Scholar; and Husain, M. (1960 and 1961). ‘The Successors of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid: Jihad on the North-West Frontier’ and ‘Trials and Persecution’, in A History of the Freedom Movement, Vol. II (1831–1905), Pakistan Historical Society, Karachi, Part 1: pp. 145169Google Scholar; Part 2: pp. 366–389. Peter Robb has used documents from one of the trials to reconstruct the history of popular anti-colonial religious movements in Robb, P. (1993). ‘The Impact of British Rule on Religious Community: Reflections on the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna in 1865’, in Robb, P. (ed.) Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History Presented to Professor K.A. Ballhatchet, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 142176.Google Scholar For a more general overview of scholarly and popular literature on jihadi movements in the northwest frontier, see Hopkins, B.D. (2009). ‘Jihad on the Frontier: A History of Religious Revolt on the North-West Frontier, 1800–1947’, History Compass, 7:6, pp. 14591469CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 For a more general discussion of this ideological contest, see Metcalf, T.R. (1995). Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge University Press, CambridgeCrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robb, P. (2007). Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation: Empire, Identity, and India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, especially Chapters 1–3Google Scholar.

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13 Officiating Secretary to Resident of Hyderabad, 29 June 1840, no. 96 of 29 June 1840, IOR/P/Sec/India/40; Fraser, C.H. (1885). Memoir and Correspondence of General James Stuart Fraser of the Madras Army, Whiting & Co., London, pp. 4164Google Scholar; and Jaffar, G.M. (1991). ‘Nawwab Mubariz al-Dawlah and His Activities in Hyderabad (Dn)’, Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, 39:3, pp. 299306Google Scholar.

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19 Correspondence Connected with the Removal of Mr. W. Tayler from the Commissionership of Patna, John Gray, Calcutta Gazette Office, Calcutta, 1858, pp. 12–127.

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21 Tayler, Brief Narrative of Events, p. 19. Emphasis in original.

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28 Bayley to O.T. Burne, 20 April 1871, Lord Mayo Papers, Cambridge University Library, Add MS 7490/39/7.

29 Thanesari, M.M.J. (circa 1974). Tawarikh-i-Ajib, al-maruf, Tarikh-i-Kala Pani [Strange Histories Commonly Known as the History of the Andaman Islands], Idarah-i-Ishatulmarif, Faisalabad, Pakistan, p. 40.

30 Between 1864 and 1870, the Calcutta Review published four unsigned articles on the Indian Wahhabis. W.W. Hunter revealed that he had authored the first article (cited above) and cited James O'Kinealy, the officer in charge of the Wahhabi prosecutions, when quoting from one of the 1870 articles. Hunter, Indian Musalmans, p. 29, n. 2; p. 147, n. 1. ‘A Sketch of the Wahhabis in India Down to the Death of Sayyid Ahmad in 1831’, Calcutta Review, 50:100, 1870, pp. 73–104; and ‘The Wahhabis in India’, (in two parts), Calcutta Review, 51:101, 1870, pp. 177–192; and 51:102, pp. 381–399. See also Rehatsek, E. (1880). ‘The History of the Wahhábys in Arabia and in India’, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 14:38, pp. 274401.Google Scholar

31 See, for example, Robb, ‘The Impact of British Rule on Religious Community’ and Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India. In addition to colonial histories and administrative documents, Qeyamuddin Ahmad also used a wide range of Urdu texts and materials from the families of convicted Wahhabis in his history of the movement.

32 Great Wahabi Case, ‘Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus’, p. 15; and ‘Argument on the Rule Nisi’, p. 22.

33 On the police investigation, see Enclosures of Judicial Despatch from the Government India, to Her Majesty's Secretary State for India, No. 52, dated 10 October 1872, IOR/L/PJ/3/1281. From 3 June 1871 to 5 August 1871, The Indian Daily News provided day-by-day coverage of the court proceedings in Patna. The Records Department of the Patna Sessions Court reports that all records from this period were destroyed in a fire.

34 O'Donoghue, D.J. (2004). ‘Ingram, Thomas Dunbar (1826–1901)’, rev. Marie-Louise Legg, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Lee, S. (2004). ‘Anstey, Thomas Chisholm (1816–1873)’, rev. K.D. Reynolds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, <http://www.oxforddnb.com>, [accessed 13 May 2008].

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42 Great Wahabi Case, ‘Judgment of Mr. Justice Norman’, p. 12.

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55 Today these reports are the most important source of Urdu and Bengali articles on the trial since very few vernacular newspapers from this period have been preserved.

56 The Indian Observer, 29 July 1871, p. 409.

57 Report on Native Papers [Bengal] [hereafter RNP], 3 December 1870, Microfilm, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, p. 15.

58 Iftekhar Iqbal has discussed the fusing of religious and class-based identity in the Faraizi movement, which promoted both Islamic revival and anti-landlord agitation in Bengal. In popular discourse Faraizis were often referred to by their critics as Wahhabis. Iqbal, I. (2010). The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 6792.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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64 Ingram, Two Letters, p. 16.

65 ‘The Wahabee Case’, Times of India, 9 August 1870, reprinted in The Indian Daily News, 15 August 1870.

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77 ‘A Word for the Wahabees’, Friend of India, 15 June 1871, pp. 687–688; ‘Another Grievance of the Defenders of Ameer Khan’, Friend of India, 17 August 1871, p. 955.

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80 The pamphlet (VT 543) is part of the India Office's collection of Urdu printed books, which lists it as published in Madras in 1867. For a longer history of debates about India's status as dar-ul-harb or dar-ul-islam, see Jalal, Partisans of Allah, pp. 68–69; 132–149.

81 Jalal, Partisans of Allah, p. 135; and Khan, Review on Dr. Hunter, pp. 46–47; xvi–xxii.

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83 The Indian Daily News, 2 August 1871; ‘Another Grievance of the Defenders of Ameer Khan’, The Friend of India, 17 August 1871, pp. 954–955; and The Friend of India, 28 December 1871, p. 1505.

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87 For examples of pamphlets attacking Wahhabi beliefs and practices, see Husain, S. (1297 AH [circa 1881 AD]). Masa'il-i-Wahhabiyan-i-Gustakh [Propositions of the Arrogant Wahhabis], Sayyid-ul-Akhbar, DelhiGoogle Scholar; and Ibrahim, Q.M. and Nuruddin, M. (1295 AH [circa 1878 AD]). Jamal ul-Millah wa ul-Din fi Radd Aqa'id il-Wahhabin [The Beauty of the Followers of Muhammad and the Faith on the Refutation of the Tenants of the Wahhabis], Matba-i Haidari, BombayGoogle Scholar. The quarterly catalogues of books published in the Punjab, Bengal, and the North West Provinces include dozens of similar pamphlets published in the years following the trials. See British Library shelfmark SV 412/8 (Bengal); SV 412/38 (NW Provinces); and SV 412/44 (Punjab). On the use of the term Wahhabi by Ahmad Riza Khan, the founder of the Ahl-i-Sunnat, see Sanyal, U. (1996). Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870–1920, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 231267.Google Scholar

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