‘Indian Money’, Intra-Shīʿī Polemics, and the Bohra and Khoja Pilgrimage Infrastructure in Iraq's Shrine Cities, 1897–1932

Abstract

Using sources in Arabic, Gujarati, Ottoman, Persian and Urdu, this article examines the foundation of Bohra and Khoja pilgrimage institutions straddling western India and Iraq's Shīʿī shrine cities between 1897 and 1932. As manifestations of ‘locative piety’, these institutions were an outgrowth of the commercial capital Bohra and Khoja merchants had acquired in Indian Ocean trade over the previous half century, and the distinct caste and sectarian identities this wealth augmented. The Bohra and Khoja (both Twelver and Ismāʿīlī) mercantile and religious elites supplied their constituents with a well-ordered pilgrimage to Iraq, certainly by the standards of contemporary Hajj. To achieve this, community-run institutional nodes in Karachi, Bombay and the Shīʿī shrine cities were integrated into wider transport, administrative, and financial infrastructures connecting India and Iraq. Yet at a time when Najaf and Karbala's economic and religious fortunes were plagued by sectarianism, political upheavals and divisions among the mujtahids, the growing presence of western Indian Shīʿīs in the shrine cities was fiercely condemned by some Twelver Shīʿī clerics. One of their number, Muḥammad Karīm Khurāsānī, published a substantial polemic against the Bohras and Khojas in 1932, signalling how these pilgrimage infrastructures worked to exacerbate intra-Shīʿī disputes.