Political Power, Religious Authority, and the Caliphate in Eighteenth-Century Indian Islamic Thought

Abstract

This article examines how Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), one of the most prominent scholars of eighteenth-century India whose thought has continued to be influential in many Muslim circles to the present day, conceptualized the interplay of political power and religious authority. Though several of Wali Allah's numerous writings have received considerable scholarly attention, this aspect of his political and religious thought has, oddly, been much neglected. A close reading of Wali Allah's writings reveals him to be keenly interested not just in the immediately relevant issues of the chronic political instability afflicting his age but also in the broader, theoretical, questions of how political power undergirds the moral force of religious norms and institutions. It is his unusually blunt but robust recognition that power is part of what enables a religious tradition to evolve and change that this article explores. That recognition—buried in writings that purport to be about the merits of Islam's first caliphs—has other important implications, too, notably for an understanding of the broad political context in which the sacred law itself undergoes change.

Abū Yaʿrub al-Marzūqī and His Critique of the maqāṣid Theory

“…The Prophet of Islam (d. 632) embodies the prototype of authority, the model of community guidance (followed by his first successors according to Sunnis until 661 CE (Crone and Hinds 2003, p. 115)), where religious authority and political power were united. The schisms of early Islam, which resulted in the establishment of the first Muslim dynasty, the Umayyads, in 661 in Damascus, alienated religious authority from political power, creating continuing problems of legitimacy as successive dynasties often failed to live up to the expectations of the caliphate for Sunnis and the imamate for Shī " īs; in sum, religious authority has opposed political power from the late seventh century CE until the contemporary period, although close alliances have linked various jurists and sultans, and solutions were worked out to ensure relative autonomy for religious authority while remaining under close control of the ruling dynasty (Zaman 2020;Siddiqui 2017). In Islamic political ethics, however, the alienation between religious authority and political power was thought of as an irregularity.…”

Translating scholars: Theorizing modern South Asian ‘Ulama’ studies

“…This is why he avoids engaging with the rise of "sovereignty" as an analytic in a study of the interplay among political power and religious authority in the writings of the Delhi-based Sufi and Hadith scholar Shah Waliullah (d. 1762). 21 This raises the question: Does "sovereignty" translate the political thought of 'ulama' such as the early nineteenth-century moral theologian Muhammad Isma'il (whose legacy has shadowed the question of Islam and politics in modern South Asia)? Brannon D. Ingram points out that "the distinctly modern neologism hakimiyya [sovereignty] does not appear at all" in Muhammad Isma'il's text, Taqwiyat-ul-iman.…”

Poetry as history: Maulana Muhammad Anwar Shopiani and the Ahl-i Hadith movement in Kashmir

“…Significant recent scholarship has pushed back against such dichotomies to emphasise a historical and intellectual contextualisation within an Islamic discursive tradition. 8 This article follows such intellectual directions through the example of the Ahl-i Hadith in Kashmir to decipher a transregional history of ideas, an intellectual geography spanning the north-western frontiers through directly ruled British India and the princely states to Kashmir, and historical continuities that draw upon wider Persianate literary and narrative traditions. 9 Sayyid Ahmad's death in the frontiers halted his plans for Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region which he intended to liberate and use as a permanent base for his jihad.…”