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29 results

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  • Religion and the rise of magic in Urdu print culture: the case of Chīn aur Bangāl kā Jādū

  • Markus Daechsel
  • Journal:
    Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society / Volume 33 / Issue 4 / October 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 August 2023, pp. 1041-1050
    Print publication:
    October 2023
    • Article
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  • This article offers a first survey of a novel genre of grimoires published in Urdu-reading India in the early twentieth century. It contained a wide selection of magic material from Islamicate and Tantric sources as well as Western parapsychology and spiritualism. Its applications ranged from remedies of last resort in illness, relationship troubles, and other life problems to common household cures and magical tricks performed for pleasure alone. Produced and read by members of all religious groups in North India, this material indicates important changes in popular attitudes towards magic. Magic by no means declined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but flourished as a viable commercial print genre that became increasingly detached from religion.

  • 7 - Visionary of Another Politics: Inayatullah Khan ‘al-Mashriqi’ and Pakistan

    • By Markus Daechsel, Reader at the Department of History, Royal Holloway College, University of London
  • Edited by Ali Usman Qasmi, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan, Megan Eaton Robb
  • Book:
    Muslims against the Muslim League
    Published online:
    28 February 2018
    Print publication:
    10 July 2017, pp 190-219

  • Summary

    The religious reformer and political activist Inayatullah Khan, better known as ‘Allama Mashriqi’ or ‘al-Mashriqi’ (‘Sage of the East’), has attracted interest among intellectual historians for his idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam as a ‘scientific’ social Darwinism and for his flirtations with European fascism. Born into a well-educated middle-class family in Punjab in 1888, he spent the first 30 years of his adult life as an educationist and civil servant in British colonial service. In 1924, he published al-Tazkirah, his main religious-philosophical work, which he claimed, with characteristic exaggeration, to have narrowly missed a Nobel prize nomination and to have directly inspired Adolf Hitler. But it was only after 1931, when Inayatullah Khan founded the paramilitary Khaksar movement (‘the humble ones’; lit. ‘those with ashes on their head’) that he began to develop a more public and activist political vision. It was underpinned, as this chapter will argue, by a distinctive notion of revolutionary politics that captivated the hearts of millions of South Asian Muslims, just as Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Pakistan movement was gathering pace.

    At the height of his influence, Mashriqi's impact was spectacular enough to overshadow much better remembered events in the great drama of Muslim identity formation in South Asia. The Lahore Resolution of March 1940, for instance, is now universally regarded as a breakthrough moment for Jinnah and the Pakistan movement. But for observers at the time, who did not yet know where history would lead in the years to come, it was ‘al-Mashriqi’ and his Khaksars that made the headlines. In a signature moment of colonial violence, scores of the Allama's followers were shot dead by the police after deliberately defying curfew orders in Lahore's Old City. This was less than a mile away from Minto Park, where the Muslim League delegates were gathering for their historic annual session. In the minds of sympathetic observers, the massacre immediately invoked two of the most famous and significant battles of all of Islamic history. The precise number of Khaksar activists involved was said to be 313, the same as the number fighting under the Prophet Muhammad's very leadership to win their first military victory at Badr.

Islamabad and the Politics of International Development in Pakistan
  • Markus Daechsel
  • Published online:
    05 April 2015
    Print publication:
    19 March 2015
  • This is a highly original account of the design and development of Pakistan's capital city; one of the most iconic and ambitious urban reconstruction projects of the twentieth century. Balancing archival research with fresh, theoretical insights, Markus Daechsel surveys the successes and failures of Greek urbanist Constantinos A. Doxiadis's most ambitious endeavour, Islamabad, analysing how the project not only changed the international order, but the way in which the Pakistani state operated in the 1950s and 1960s. In dissecting Doxiadis's fraught encounter with Pakistani policy makers, bureaucrats and ordinary citizens, the book offers an unprecedented account of Islamabad's place in post-war international development. Daechsel provides new insights into this period and explores the history of development as a charged, transnational venture between foreign consultants and donors on the one side and the postcolonial nation state on the other.

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