Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Sana Haroon
> > Lhost: Alright, everyone, welcome to the February event in the Conversations on South Asia series here at Dartmouth college. It’s wonderful to have all of our guests and panelists today and to have so many friends and colleagues in the audience. I think we’re about to hear a really fantastic conversation calling on people’s different interests, educational backgrounds and experiences and bringing them to bear on Sana Haroon’s latest book—The Mosques of Colonial South Asia: A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship—which was published in the Library of Islamic South Asia series with I.B. Tauris.
For those of you who are new to the series or don’t know me, I’m Elizabeth Lhost, and I’m a Postdoctoral Fellow here in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College and one of the organizers of this, this year’s series, and it’s my great pleasure to be moderating the conversation today.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts the series, sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College. Without their support, this series really would not be possible. I would also like to thank Bruch Lehmann in History and Professor Douglas Haynes for his support and assistance for being such a strong champion of South Asia programming on and off campus.
And I’d also like to applaud and thank Sri Sathvik Rayala, who is our Bodas Family Fellow for the current academic year. And he does a lot of work, promoting and publicizing the series, in addition to hanging flyers up around campus, sending emails, and inviting many of you to attend our events, and managing our Instagram and other social media profiles. He has also been working behind the scenes to prepare the transcripts from some of our recorded events from earlier in the series and to write event summaries for those events that we haven’t recorded and posted. And several of those are already up or are about to be up on our website, and others will be up there soon. So thank you Sathvik and check out our website if you haven’t been there already and if you’ve missed earlier events.
Today we have with us three wonderful distinguished speakers, who each bring a unique set of skills, expertise and experiences to the conversation. I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say.
First, we will have Sana Haroon, who is the author of the book we will be discussing. Professor Haroon will spend about ten minutes introducing the book to all of us, followed by comments from each of our two panelists. Sana Haroon is a historian with interests in everyday Islam and Muslim social organization within the territorial and spatial configurations of modern South Asia. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she has been since 2012. She teaches courses on South Asia in the Indian Ocean World, and India Since 1857, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in Modern World History, and Faith and Politics in Islam. In addition to the Mosques of Colonial South Asia, Professor Haroon has also published Frontier of Faith, faith, excuse me, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland, which came out in the UK in 2007 and in the US in 2008 and then in paperback in 2012.
She’s written extensively on the northwest regions of South Asia, focusing especially on religious and cultural exchanges in the borderlands between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.
She’s written on the Durand Line in an essay titled “Intersections of Religious Revivalism,” published in the volume Alienated Nations, Fractured States. She has written on “Pakistan between Iran and Saudi Arabia”, for the volume Pakistan Today, has an essay called “Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands” in the volume Afghanistan’s Islam, and has contributed the essay “The Visibility of Women and the Rise of the Neo-Taliban Movement in the Pakistan North-West 2007-9” in the volume Beyond Swat: History, Society and Power along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier edited by Magnus Marsden and Benjamin Hopkins, who might actually be in our audience today.
After Professor Haroon has introduced the book, we will have comments from Mudit Trivedi and Adnan Zulfiqar. Mudit Trivedi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research interests include, excuse me, his research interests include archaeology, the anthropology of religion, conversion, tradition, archaeological theory, archaeometry, glass, Islam, and South Asia. Professor Trivedi completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2020 and has been doing what I think is really amazing and very fascinating work at the intersections of archeology, anthropology, and religious studies.
Some of his most recent scholarship includes the essay “Between Archaeography and Historiography: Unsettling the Medieval?” that was published in the Medieval History Journal in May 2021, and he also co-authored the introduction to that special issue on Archaeologies of the Medieval. Professor Trivedi is currently working on a book project called An Archeology of Virtue that explores the archaeology of conversion to Islam, based on archaeological work in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. The book will bring together what’s really an amazing set of material and analyses of architectural, spatial, and artifactual data sets to consider archeology’s secular, modern commitments and the nature of archeological traces, and I’ll add that I’ve had the chance to see Professor Trivedi present some of this work and it’s, it’s really truly remarkable.
Our second discussant will be Adnan Zulfiqar. Professor Zulfiqar is an Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where his courses include Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure: Investigations, Police, Prisons, and Protests, and he also teaches courses on Islamic Law.
Professor Zulfiqar’s CV is filled with an amazing range of activities and achievements. In addition to having a JD and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he also completed an MA at Georgetown, where he wrote on Frantz Fanon and jihad. And he holds additional certificates from institutes in universities in Pakistan, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen. In addition to producing scholarly publications on topics like “Revolutionary Islamic Jurisprudence” and “Jurisdiction over Jihad: Islamic Law and the Duty to Fight, Professors Zulfiqar has also written publicly on topics like “Islamic Jurisprudence for Revolution” and “Prisons, Abolition and Islamic Legal Thought.” Recently, he has also been engaged in a digital project on fatwas in the age of COVID, called “Mapping COVID-19 Fatwas,” which you can check out on the Islamic Law Blog. And I think we can put the link to that in the chat for those who might be interested.
In addition to being a legal scholar, Professor Zulifqar has also used his expertise to help states like the Maldives and Somalia draft and implement criminal codes. And closer to home, he serves on the legal advisory committee of the ACLU Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia office and also serves as a social justice mentor at Rutgers Law School. He is currently working on a book project called Duties to the Collective, which explores how pre-modern jurors utilized collective obligations, fard Kifaya, in Islamic law to promote cohesion. So with that and without wanting to take any more time away from our discussion, I will hand the floor over to Professor Haroon.
> > Haroon: Thank you so much, and thank you for this invitation to present in this wonderful series. I’ve enjoyed the conversations here so far, and it’s a great format. And what a, what a real honor to have Professor Trivedi and Professor Zulifqar engage with my work, so thank you for the invitation to be here, and I’m delighted to present this book, which was long in the making, and I finished in the chaos of the last couple of years and haven’t had much of a chance to talk about or present.
So this, this project was an outcome of a long interest in really examining the spaces of the public in colonial South Asia. These are concepts that I had become interested in in grad school, and they seemed useful and to have a lot of facility for studying the organization of Muslims and Muslim political thought in South Asia, and I thought well what better place to go look for the Muslim public than the mosque. And the incredible outcome of this work, which took me far too long, was that I found that the mosque really wasn’t a public space of the sort that I expected it to be.
So I’m going to share a couple of slides with you just to give you a little bit of a sense of the sites that began to occupy my interest in the study that I took on. This book presents the histories of Muslim expectations in worship in six mosques across the territories of British India. They’re marked with the little dark icons there, along with the cities closer to them and the cities that sort of fueled religious participation and debate about those mosques.
In Tajpur, Bihar, in 1883, a congregation wished to follow the widely subscribed Hanafi style of prayer. In Rangoon, in 1909, worshipers of the Friday Mosque sought to influence the curriculum at the mosque school there. And in Kanpur and Aurangabad, worshipers expressed a belief in the sanctity of the perimeter of the mosque at the junction of the mosque and the road. Muslims in Lahore, in the 1930s, petitioned for the return of a site that had been classified as a gurdwara during the settlement of the Lahore District eight years earlier. And from 1911, local Muslims were accused, local Muslims accused the Hindu custodians of the mosque Imambargah at Kora Jahanabad of trying to cut off worshipers’ access to that endowment.
These cases are significant because each one rose through a system of appeals to the judicial committee of the Privy Council, the final court of colonial appeals. And each of these case files constitutes a rich archive of the mosque site that it pertains to. The decisions in these cases drew on colonial trust law to determine that rights in mosque management belong to the custodian. They upheld administrative practices that assigned the local magistrate the control of the mosque perimeter. And they used documentation, they asserted the inviolability of colonial land management practices that use documentation of the occupancy of land at the time of settlement to characterize sites as religious endowments.
The judgments in these suits reveal Muslim devotionalism in and around the mosques of colonial South Asia to have been subject to the authority of petty officers of the mosque, and the state under colonial law and statecraft. The case files and other historical sources related to these mosques provide evidence of the diversity of Muslim beliefs and religious practices across the region, and they also provide evidence of the rich and complex history of legal activism for worshipers’ rites in mosques.
Migrant Muslims from all over India and local Burmese Muslims worshiped together at this site, the Friday Mosque of Rangoon by the late 1800s. And they expressed different preferences for programming in the mosque. The suit for democratic management of a mosque here drew inspiration from the management style of a mainland mosque in Mauritius and also drew inspiration from procedures for registering, registering societies. In Lahore, the Muslims suit for the return of the Shaheed Ganj Mosque and waqf revealed both the history of Sikh and Muslim uses of this site and the conceptualization of the mosque as god’s land and not subject to proprietary claims.
And the Kora Jahanabad suit documented 200, a 200 year history of an endowment created by a Hindu courtier of the Awadh state, who converted to Islam, but named his Hindu nephews and their successors as custodians of this site. Muslims, seeking to establish Muslim custodianship of this site in the early 1900s, were faced with proprietary claims by these, as I go back to that slide, were faced with the proprietary claims of the Hindu custodians. And by the 20th century, these two competing claims produced entirely different representations of the character of this endowment. The decision in this final suit, which was issued in July 1947, just on the eve of independence and decolonization, was the outcome of two decades of work for new legislation that created provincial, regulatory bodies for Muslim endowments and established standards for financial management and custodial accountability. This new legislation enabled any Muslim and not just worshippers at the sites to sue custodians for management of mosques, and at the same time, courts began to admit expert Muslim testimony about what the devotional uses of mosques should be.
The case studies in this book, which span about 80 years of South Asian history and cover a variety of disputes, some of which we are quite familiar with and others which we may be know a little less about and have appeared less regularly in the literature on South Asia, allow us an opportunity to close the gap between two different assessments of what mosques were and what Muslim endowments, really the social function of Muslim endowments, in South Asia.
There are some who treat the mosque as a space of unrestricted social participation and on the other hand, we have Gregory, Gregory Kozlowski’s argument, that Muslim endowments were sites of social influence by benefactors. Mosques were indeed sites of social influence, but the influence of a series of very unlikely characters. District magistrates and revenue department officials evaluated and adjudicated Muslim claims on public and private land for mosques. Custodians prayer leaders and eventually Muslim associations managed the programs of activities in mosques. Muslims relentlessly organized for more rights in mosques, which was limited in success until the very end of the colonial period.
I hope that this, the contribution that this book makes within the field is to allow a much more localized and located treatment of mosque sites as places of Muslim organization. Hopefully, the, my effort to use micro-histories in engaging and, and thoughtful ways will also do something for that approach to history writing. And, moreover I, I hope that this book sort of opens up more of a conversation about some of the purposes of Muslim organization in South Asia and the shape that, that took the sites on which that occurred.
> > Lhost: Alright, thanks. Mudit.
> > Trivedi: Thank you. Um, I have to start by thanking Elizabeth for picking me out of the legions of many more qualified commentators, so many of them in the audience today for this conversation. And I must thank Professor Haroon, Sana, if I may, for such a rich, engaging, and definitely argued book. The book’s many contentions spoke to me to such an extent that I could talk to an hour and still say very little of all that I find [inaudible] in it.
But to keep to time, I will first try and characterize what I understand that Sana’s significant achievement in a few ways. Then I’ll offer a few very partial, selective reading responses framed as first as lessons for a few lessons from the book for material histories of the mosque, and how those are framed. I have a few comments on legal aspects, but I will reserve them and differ to Adnan’s wisdom. Next, I’ll try and think about the books arguments about secular colonial rule and its implications and close with a few thoughts about the implications for the study of Muslim worship itself.
Now, the Mosques of Colonial South Asia definitely opens new historiographical space via a series of quick maneuvers. The research that the historiography, especially since Kozlowski’s book, has been focused on private waqfs. Assimilating all into that, all histories to that history of waqfs’, as Sana just said, as assertions of social influence.
Be that as it may, I understand Sana is telling us the colonial treatment of mosques, congregations, and disputes, amongst them is another story. This story that we are here to discuss and a story, which is shaped profoundly on one hand by the loss of older order of [inaudible] Mughal imperium and also by the loss of the abolition of the qazis office as a framework for resolving disputes. To tell this story, then, Sana calls into question another historiographical assumption that mosques were in any transparent [inaudible] way a public arena. And against this assumption, she asserts that secular colonial rule fractured the expectations of the post-Mughal namazi, shoring up mutawallis, securing custodianship in an understanding of waqf trusts, and then colonial rule then resolved disputes by recourse, to be or recourse to the originally act of the founder or by ever expanding realm of discretionary powers handed out first to magistrates, then revenue officers, who rented the mosque a fragment of land, the legal subject of urban and revenue governance.
Now, Sana has also forever widened the cast of characters who must be included in any [inaudible] of the mosque. Alongside with mutawallis, she reminds us of the place of the khatib, the imam, the muezzin, and the [inaudible]. And there is much archival [inaudible] to be admired in this text around these figures, from fragments of homework that were assigned to students in the maqtab in Rangoon to the story of the activist construction of the Lahore Shab Bhar Masjid. I have profound admiration for the kinds of sources and the histories motivated here. As if this is not enough of an achievement, then the book participates in a wider historiographic movement of new histories from legal archives, which is at once, social, legal and critical. Sana tracks the differentiated recourse to law by particular Muslim communities, their field arguments, the countersuits, and the post-1919 recourse to legislative changes as all one arch of rethinking rights, individual and collective, in the masjid and modernity, of recovering consensus from the fractured spaces of colonial authority.
Now, one quick, unfair way of summarizing the five cases the book charts is by the Joint Committee of the Privy Council, the judicial committee of the Privy Council decisions that Sana tracks. These are, first, that the individuals have no rights in the mosque beyond prayer and access. Second, that they have no innate right in management of waqf, of waqfs. Third, that more broadly, rights when spaces around the mosque cannot be derived from custom, that they must, they enjoyed only at the magistrates’ discretion. And forth, that mosques are ultimately land, vulnerable to adverse possession. And this arc of the book changes until in our fifth case study of Kora Jahanabad, settled as, she points out, only a few days before partition, when Muslim litigious associations win back collective rights. And I want to think about how they win them back.
The appellants, the mosque defenders in this case, do so, ultimately, as very litigious [inaudible]. As Sana says, they have to recast themselves as experts in very telling ways. And what I find fascinating is that they present forms of knowledge that had been admissible by the state, who, because these are subjects who survey, who document, who even map a waqf to the standards of colonial evidence and land, and that has implications for people like me who also map these places. And I’ll say more about that, but most tellingly, they ultimately write a historical reconstruction, not of worship, but of the ruins of the waqf which the state made. This is a story, then, which has implications for all of us and other forms of knowledge we produce about a mosque. Following this victory, this victory comes from pushing aside worship at some level.
And now in the time that remains, I just want to start talking about the implications of what I think we could most broadly learn from this incredible book. One response would be, I think that Sana is asking us to learn to ask ourselves a few questions. First of these might be, what do we think is the temporality of the mosque. What do we think it’s spatial extent is? As we examine our preconceptions, our chronotopes for the mosques, I think Sana is encouraging us also to ask what understandings of dispute, authority, and agreement, what scene of congregation and consensus do, do we allow in our histories of it. Well, in other words what assumptions do we make of haq or hud upon mosque and it’s, all persons within it. Now, to specify what I mean by some of this, in historical terms, all of us are [inaudible] by our best intentions, by the best [inaudible] of history writing to identify, when we introduce, a mosque by its patron. Now this foundationalism in our account guides our evaluation, especially for architectural historians, and it’s typification in style and period, its historical eminence. But I think Sana is asking us to attend to all that follows from the tamam shud of the Mughal dedications and inscriptions. And archeologists and art historians participate in these discourses, which extract the mosque from the city, from them mohalla, from its neighborhoods, from it’s lived communities. Our representations certainly lie between those of the Revenue Board and the All India Shia Conference Activists, which Sana had just put on the screen.
So, I want to pause and think about how few plans we draw ever wonder where is the maqtab, where did the students live, where did the katib sleep. Do we pause to puzzle whether the tazias might have been kept? Most of our plans, and this is important, if there are any surviving arrangements for wudu, they get edited out by the time we get to publication. Now this matters because it matters as all of these accounts ultimately come to stand as evidence in that future where almost all mosques of some parts of South Asia might indeed need to be defended someday in court. Continuity, occupation, adverse possession all have material traces. And a much needed shift is in approach is a first step for an archeology and art history responsive to its own complicites in the history that Sana tells. We will do well to heed these minute traces. They open out material archives of how mosques endure, how they how they witness mortal time.
Now, from these we could state, one of the questions I had throughout with Sana gives us a very concise account of the precolonial moral world of the mosque and a relational sociology of haq and had in that world. I’d ask, I’d like to ask Sana to say more later about what she would like, for us, for those of us who work in the preview to her story. She says a lot about what she expects of us to do for the period post-47, but I would love to hear that. A few comments follow just on how Sana characterizes secularism. Now, the secular strait, in her words, creates the waqf crisis, abolishes the qazi, then it ignores what she calls values arising from devotion in judicial reasoning. And the colonial state declares its commitments to non-interference, neutrality, to try to unburden, in Sana’s words, whatever responsibilities for dispute resolution of managing mosques that come its own way. But as Sana says, it’s critical that the state admits cases and then dismisses religious reasons. It refuses to admit arguments from taqlid, she says, it says it cannot adjudicate this, but then goes on to read all manner of religious practice, text, and testimony as evidence anyway.
Now, in each case, a chain of reasoning emerges from state practice. Is vocalized amin an essential aspect of prayer, is it essentially a prohibited action, the state is asking. Is the mosque out of the [inaudible]? The area for wudu, is it essentially a part of the mosque? And the key then is that even as the colonial state professes neutrality, admission of any claim to waqf involves the indeterminacy produced by the state’s purported lack of authority to rule on religious reason. This space was used, this indeterminate space, was used to build an understanding of what is essential, what’s customary, what was permitted, what’s injurious, and what categories the colonial order will not change, such as property and possessions. Now this remaking of a realm of practices of waqf, the reduction [inaudible] tradition into a vision of religion that fit the secular presumptions of the state occurs through what Hussein Agrama calls the questioning powers of secularism, operating through this indeterminacy and so fuels the ambition of the law and what Sana characterizes as its discretionary, non-statutory powers.
And I wanted to pause and just see a couple of things about how Sana so powerfully asked us to think about the post-1920s era when native elected officials and associations create essentially an extra bureaucratic waqf board, which allow the state to continue to have its moral fiction of neutrality, and I find that fascinating and a move of great relevance for the studies of secularism in South Asia. So my question is really at this point, where do we place the litigious middle-class subject with a liberal vigilance against corruptions of power and where do we behold Omed Ali, the julaha who conscientiously cast himself out of the mosque for his silent passions, to recall just two memorable historical reconstructions from the book.
Now building on Sana’s insight, we could also say how do we complicate the story of secular passion so loudly speaking in a for law in a world so given to mistaking silent prayer. And on that point, I just want to add one historical question, amongst the many insights for the history of worship that emerged from the book. Now, the masjid is not just the scene for the material conditions of possibility and impossibility for worship, but it is the site of salat, it is the place of not just rehearsed spontaneity and [inaudible], but, but where niyat itself is forged. And we come to have a very interesting insight into what Sana casts, in some ways, as unmarked Hanafi or unmarked Sunni rights, to what she calls, a right to silence as it comes up against the [inaudible], the vocalized amin, as it comes up against Shia processions and their vocal marsiya. And it made me think about how this emphatic silence, which people would willingly litigate for, is itself a production of a world where silence and audition were held in a different and particular relation, perhaps arising out of 18th century debates over silence and the wide arc and influence of Naqshbandi and [inaudible] practice.
Now, well, there is much anthropological work on audition, I must thank Sana for her attentiveness and for her directing us to histories of silence. On that point, I think I’m out of time, so I will, I will look forward to learning from Adnan’s comments and only to say that five chapters, five mosques, five accounts of how the adhan constituted publics in the world of mutawallis and magistrates. Thank you Sana for the pleasure of working with you and traveling with you, and this peripatetic account.
> > Lhost: Thanks Mudit, Adnan.
> > Zulfiqar: Okay. So, I want to also begin by thanking Elizabeth, thanking Sana for this wonderful book and and, and right now, after listening to Mudit, you know, I am almost thinking, well, that I kind of just want to hear him comment more and listen to his conversation with Sana because that was, that was an excellent capturing of this book. So, I’m going to do a couple things in the time because I do want to make sure that we have enough time for the audience.
I want to first say, I come to this as probably the least of, having the least expertise in this particular arena than my colleagues here, someone who works on medieval Islamic law and modern but really sort of doesn’t touch too much on colonial South Asia, except for in the cases of kind of jihad resistance. So for me, this was an incredibly rich book in terms of me learning much more about the literature in this field, but the sort of extent of detail, the, the range of sources, and, and kind of the range of context that you covered. I would say that you know as anyone who comes to a book, you come to it, and there are questions in your head that you are exploring for your own research, reasons that, that inevitably start kind of popping out, and you start seeing things in the book that you find more deeply relevant to what you’re doing, and so, in some respects that’s where I want to take this because I found this book especially fascinating in the way that it examined stories and or a story or the stories of Muslim life in the absence of its historic governing authority or its traditional governing authority and parts of that story have been told by others in the context of law and the context of the creation of codes, the participation in, you know, whether one participates in the colonial states, these sort of debates around that and, and the context of jihad or peace or that relationship that should exist.
But the mosque is a space, the masjid is a space to examine the challenges, the opportunities, the contestations of Muslim life under colonial rule in the absence of traditional sort of governing authority. And this adds, oh, I think a wonderful layer to our understanding of this particular period, and I would say, in many respects to our understanding of or opportunities and avenues for the understanding of Islamic history in the post or in the colonial period and on. In particular, this move from sort of a state controlled space in the precolonial period where there’s kind of an oversight function over Friday prayers and the masjid and all of this kind of traditionally articulated in much of the fiqh and sort of substantive law literature to a space of communal authority or more communal authority with these other actors that Mudit mentioned as well kind of rising up raises some very interesting questions for me.
Partly, you know, where is this impetus for communal control coming from within sort of the communities? It’’s simply a desire not to have colonial control in these spaces over the masjid. Why isn’t there kind of recreation of kind of traditional hierarchies in this space as well that you kind of see happening in the jihad context and others where there’s an absence of the traditional state and so that that raised a lot of interesting questions for me that ceding of control to the community then also seems like this very interesting gateway into sectarianism and sort of the growth of sects having now this immense power because essentially ceding control of the masjid means ceding control of the pulpit which and the minbar and which, which, from a legal standpoint means that now the, the Hanafi, Deobandi, or Ahl i-Hadith, then can say that no you, you are required by Islamic law to come, listen to me, and what I have to say something, which you know, is a real, in many respectsm a departure from what we see in kind of the early centuries of Islam. And so that, that raises some interesting questions.
Another interesting concept that Sana used and that kept appearing. and which was honestly, it was new for me, is this idea of Islamic normativity, which seemed to be a more expanded and possibly gentler notion of Islamic orthodoxy, maybe, or you know that’s kind of where I see, so this idea of Islamic normativity was really fascinating to me and what’s fascinating was kind of the idea of it being based on this notion of expectations or societal, you know, expectation as opposed to text or even tradition and, and obviously they’re linked, because you know expectations can arise from text and tradition, often do. But, but you know this, this raises some very fascinating questions, right. In, in the prayer context in Bihar, is the objection to the certain practices, particularly when they’re done by the prayer leader, you know the kind of vocalization of amin, etcetera, is it arising out of kind of deviation from the expectations that existed because of Mughal, Mughal statecraft or whatever else or, or is there also this idea that your prayer will not count if the amin is vocalized or if, if prayer is conducted in a particular way will it not count? And so part of my question, that, that I felt I was curious about is, where is kind of religiosity factoring in here? Where’s the sacred kind of factoring in and how does the sacred figure into these disputes, and is it, are there things that end up becoming hidden when the sacred is being argued in secular space, right? And, and so from that standpoint, as it was very curious to me as to how that exists.
So last couple points. In and, and one thing with regard to orthodoxy or normativity based on expectation or practice expectation, it’s, it’s interesting you know the challenges that that potentially creates within the context of Islam, which seems as though it’s structured to give the text primacy in certain ways. And so, you know, and its Bihar example, of course which, which I found very fascinating because it, it tapped into many of the areas that, that I think about, you know. It’s, it’s interesting because it’s the Ahl i-Hadiths who are kind of these textualists in many respects that are, that are the, the antagonists in this situation and so really puts to the fore this kind of notion of where normativity is based upon.
And, finally, I wanted to talk about the idea of, it, towards the end there’s this discussion of the ulema and their physical absence from the mosque space and from the prayer space, except in these limited ways, you know, where they come in to give a hukm, or maybe a talk and that, in some respects, you know, it seemed to me there was, Sana was making the implication that now their influence was diminished as a result of their absence, the physical absence and, and the presence of these other actors and their physical presence, giving them more influential roles and, and, to some degree, just disaligns with sort of this enhanced role of the community and its control of the masjid space, but I wonder, you know if the ulema has always been absent from the prayer space, right. They’ve never really been in that space. They’re limited sort of engagements, they teach there, they might you know, give a hukm, but they’re very absent, and, and, yet, you know, their influence seems to stem from other places and sort of as these arbitrators of the role of, you know, what is permissible and impermissible, etc. So, I’m curious as to whether, did the ulemas role really changed, like is, and, you know, and can we comment as to their influence being sort of changing as a result of this kind of physical absence. So you know those were things that came to mind.
But I’m going to end it there, and give the audience and Sana the rest of the space, but this was a really a delight to read, and I encourage everyone who has not had a chance to read it to really sit down with it for a few days and enjoy it. Thank you.
> > Lhost: Fantastic, thanks so much Adnan. Sana, would you like to respond to some of those comments and questions while we gather questions from the audience. We have about 20 minutes for discussion, so you should be in good shape to have.
> > Haroon: Great, thank you! Oh, my goodness, thank you so much Mudit and Adnan, if I may, for such meaningful engagement with some of the ideas that I present in this book. So, I’m going to take up just two of the many wonderful points that you raised. The first being and what I really enjoyed was how much you engaged with the arc of the argument that I present. And so I’m going to take up that question that you both raised about the precolonial period and what we do with an, and how I treated that precolonial period.
So, that’s not my area of expertise. I am not fully equipped to work with those records or that history and, and so I purposefully chose not to. But I needed a start point for the study, and I really, I do believe that colonial law fundamentally changed the way in which Muslims worshiped in mosques in South Asia and so the evidence I gathered related to the very late precolonial period, so about 1800 onwards, and I worked with printed texts. And what I was looking for were, and I worked with some maps, and I worked with some oral accounts of and memoirs, which related to that very late precolonial period. And the argument that I put forward in the introduction, and that I am confident holding to is that the expectation, the widely accepted expectation of Muslims in under the late Mughal state and under many pre-colonial states, Muslim precolonial states, was that they in worshiping in mosques were submitting to the authority of the temporal ruler of the sovereignty of the state, of the state ruler. And that is validated in, I validate that in a couple of different ways.
I believe that it’s also true for non-Muslim states for the late, for the Sikh states as well, for the reason that disputes that took place in mosques, even in the Punjab, in late precolonial Punjab, would often find their way to the durbar for resolution, and they were resolved in, it seems from some anecdotal accounts, in creative ways, not necessarily through reference to sharia, but they were certainly resolved by the judicial authorities of those who rulers.
And that is what fundamentally changes in the colonial period. The state no longer wants to be involved. The state no longer has officers who will be designated or deputed to resolve disputes that arise in places of worship and so that’s the shift that takes place is the, is the Muslims as to worshiping, but there’s nobody to solve the problems that arise in moments of conflict and disagreement.
And so, in terms of how do we treat the precolonial sacred, there’s precolonial, there’s so much work to be done, of course, and I’m, all I can say is that there is evidence there, and if we just, possibly some creative approaches that evidence might elicit more substantial understandings of that [inaudible] than what I have offered here.
But what I, the other question that, that came up was relating to the, the arc of change that takes place in South Asia. And in here, finally, by the end of the colonial period, we have Muslims, who very clearly perceive, and I believe do perceive their distancing from the patronage of rulers and from the direct paternalistic, perhaps, care of rulers in their capacity as Muslims in those States. They are, much later on, then come back to organize and, and push back against their lack of control over their mosques, and their lack, the sets, state’s lack of attention to their perceived rights in their mosques, and they come to organize through these associations which you already know a lot about. In, in tandem with the responses to and Muslim interest in their rights in mosques, there’s a vibrant and powerful conversation going on about how Muslims can come together in organizations and societies and associations to assert rights in all sorts of ways and to forge a more collective identity. And it is those associations which take center stage in claiming back rights in mosques.
I think, Adnan, you had asked how it is that happens. That happens in tandem, and in, in conversation with Hindu and Sikh and other sorts of associations, Parsi associations, which are doing exactly the same thing. There’s a lot of cross fertilization of ideas and strategies. And of course the post-1920 period of Muslim reorganization for mosque, of Muslim organization for rights in mosques is, is exactly, is happening the same time as Sikh organization for rights in gurdwaras.
So, and just very finely about the ulema, do I imply that they, their influence declined, not so much. What I’m hoping to force a consideration or visit there are forms of authority in and among Muslims, aside from the ulema, and that we can attend to them in different ways, and so caveat is thinking about the authority of the ulema over Muslim society.
> > Lhost: Fantastic, we have some questions that are coming in here. I think, I’ll try to place these in order so that they make sense for the way that you, that you answer them, seeing some of the ones that have come in, but I’m going to start with one from Benjamin Hopkins who asks about your case studies. Can you say more about why you chose these cases, why are these sites the ones that you focus on the book, and why not other ones?
> > Haroon: Absolutely, thanks, thank you for that question. The sites I chose were the cases which made their way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and the reason why those cases are so important is partly, and this is from not a sophisticated enough understanding of colonial law but, but, I think I do believe that these cases were significant because their judgments became sort of, their judgments tended to guide other judgments related to mosques and set precedents. But, even more importantly, the Judicial Committeeof the Privy Council case files often run into three or 400 pages, and they’re very nuanced, and they are rich veins of evidence related to the sites that were being contested. And actually, this reminds me of another question that Adnan had raised that how, how, how is it that we can discern an Islamic normativity from these or a sense of an Islamic normativity from these cases. It’s because these case files contained depositions from the Muslims who were contesting, often mosque management or principles of mosque governance. And their depositions express their beliefs and their feelings about mosques. I think that this is how Muslims should pray. I believe that that is how Muslims should pray. And, and, often when they’re probed further and, and asked, well, why do you believe this, and they will sit, express, well, because the khatib of the mosque told me so or because it’s written in the book of the Ahl i-Hadiths. And so you can see that the, this belief in, in Islamic norms is not quite the same as an orthodoxy, but it expresses both the firmly held nature of beliefs about mosques, but also often demonstrates their non-scholarly nature. They’re there, these are lay people expressing their beliefs about mosques.
And so, why these particular case studies, because there is the most evidence about them, and I have been engaged other sources like India documents in the India Office Library, political department documents, and published Urdu texts and Persian texts that comment, maybe a little further, on some of these sites or other similar sites. And I used, I’ve aggregated other evidence around the central case studies, which, which sort of stand on their own and are, in the conclusions that I reach about these sites, are much easier to defend the cause of the evidence that exists for them.
> > Lhost: Yeah, I think what’s a really interesting thing about, and we have a question that’s come in asking you to say more about your sources, but one of the things that I note looking at published reported cases that is that often you get a sense of what the British judges or sometimes the Indian Muslim judges were thinking about various concepts, but so often those decisions don’t include any of the witness testimony, and they don’t include any of the depositions even in translation. So, if you can get to what people are actually saying through other sources, that adds just a completely different layer of information and material. I don’t know if you’d like to say more about sources. We have a number of other questions coming in, as well about.
> > Haroon: Well, I’ll just add very briefly that, in addition to those witness depositions and the published, in the some of the published texts and fatwas even that appear in this case files, there are often a detail site maps, like the one which I showed you right at the end of my presentation and those, these, what’s so wonderful about these cases is that the colonial courts are always evaluating mosque site as land and as features of the built environment, as well as evaluating with some claims in them and some devotional claims within them. And so, it’s, you can, I can, I could really use these case files to constitute the mosque in a variety of ways in this to some of the wonderful points that Mudit had raised earlier about the materiality of the mosque and what’s happening within it.
> > Lhost: Yes, I have one question that’s come in from Irfanullah Farooqi, who asks if you could say more about the chronology, in particular what changes the post 1920s landscape and maybe like to say a bit about how the Tablighi Jamaat or other organizations might have changed, change the way organizations and associations worked with in and through mosques.
> > Haroon: It’s a great question. So the chronology, it begins with the very first mosque case, the first, the first case that goes to the Privy Council. Actually, not the first thing, I might be able to say more if anybody’s interested in how many of these cases did go to the Privy Council, but one of the early ones, the Tajpur Mosque case, which in fact is, I’m certainly not, and I notice this question comes up somewhere else, I’m not the first person to have talked about this case. It appears in Barbara Metcalf’s book many years ago, and a few other people, recently Julia Stevens has also talked about this case.
I take a different, I take a different approach to that evidence. I’m interested in people’s interest in the mosque itself rather than the broader legal arguments pertaining to that site, and I, and it’s the first, it’s the first case, that is adjudicated after the laws of trust and the laws relating to charitable endowment substantially changed. As it was the first case in which the court not only clearly articulates its inability to adjudicate a case and to evaluate Muslim legal claims, fiqh and taqlid, and other approaches to Islamic law, it is also the first case in which the court clearly designates a different authority within the mosque to, to the officials of the state, and it does so by allowing the Ahl i-Hadiths’ argument that the prayer leader can lead prayer within the mosque how so ever he chooses it as long as it is not in a manner that is impermissible under Islamic law. And, of course, that allows the Ahl i-Hadiths a lot of latitude to express, to pray in the ways in which they prefer to do.
But the court’s acceptance that the prayer leader leads within the mosque hall, within the prayer hall, is an important one, and so that is the first of the cases that I look at and the six, the cases that, that up until the very last case that I evaluate, there’s no particular ordering to the decisions that that are issued. The second case that I consider points to the significance of the custodian over the mosque. The third one points to the significance of the magistrate over the mosque perimeter. But there’s a lot of evidence that the custodian was important in 1891 as well, and the magistrate was also important in 1891. So, there’s no particular chronology to those first three cases, but those first few judgments allow us to stagger our attention to them. But those who, perhaps in a sense, those first three really work together in a, in a, to show us the landscape of emerging authority in and around mosques.
And then the last two chapters which look at the case relating to the Shaheed Ganj, and finally, the case relating to the Kora Jahanabad Mosque, they both, both those judgments in a, in a, are, first of all, those cases are taken forward by Muslim associations, and they are influenced by the evidence gathered by Muslim associations. And they both in different ways take into account the testimonies of Muslim experts and who speak to the importance of the mosque. So, I think I addressed the question of chronology.
> > Lhost: Yeah, I’m gonna try to bring two questions together here. They both have to do with space, authority, secularism. And so the first is from [inaudible] Khan, who asks, asks about other Muslim spaces as sites of secular activities of secular politics, whether it’s a Jama Masjid filling in as a place for political activity during anti-CAA protests or mosques in Kashmir being subject to shutdowns by the current Indian government. And then so that’s looking sort of into the present to talk about the way that spaces are functioning, functioning as, as political and secular spaces.
And then the other question is from Ali Imran and asks to, to look to the past, to the precolonial, to think about other places, other sites where the, the power of imperial authority was employed in the sense that durbars were also a space where people would give, would submit to authority. How do those sites kind of map on two sites of worship given that they’re both embedded within these relationships of power between the community and the ruler?
> > Haroon: Yeah, those, those are really important questions, and both, I see evidence of both even in the mosque, some of the mosques [inaudible] that I studied. So, the Shaheed Ganj site, through the 1920s, at in a couple of different instances, actually served as a space for Sikh and Muslim collaboration in an anti-colonial politics. And the same is true of the, the Friday Mosque or the Imperial Mosque of Lahore. Abul Kalam Azad wrote a treatise on how mosques should actually function in precisely this manner of sites of colonial, anti-colonial organization.
So, and so, there is this potential for mosques to serve in this manner, but even the Rangoon Mosque, some of the people who advocated for reform of the management of the Rangoon Mosque really saw the mosque to function as a political space. And, I suppose what I’m saying is that, in many instances, it did, in, but those instances were not sanctioned by colonial law, they could not be defended under colonial law. And so, if a custodian of a mosque sought to close off access of that, to that space for Muslims, who wanted to perhaps hold a political meeting there, they could do so, and they could do so, they were entirely within their rights to do so. And so, the, while mosques may serve many other functions and maybe even capture and reproduce some of those elements of other sorts of spaces or social organization or authority like a durbar, that is, I haven’t looked for that evidence, and I haven’t systematically evaluated how that might happen. I think it’s entirely possible that it happened systematically, but I cannot speak to that, but what I can speak to is that this one structure of our schematization of mosque use did emerge under colonial law, and you can see it functioning in a variety of mosques across Asia.
> > Lhost: Thanks, we have just two minutes, and I’m afraid there are going to be some questions that we don’t quite get to, so I think I’ll end with this one from [inaudible], who asks, asks about whether we might be working toward the emergence of a new paradigm that moves away from understandings of Islam as being sort of bifurcated between scripturalist Islam and Sufi silsilas where we’re sort of seeing more emphasis on and more evidence of grassroots practices and trajectories cohering.
> > Haroon: Yeah, that’s, it’s a wonderful field for study, and I think that we should attempt to look for other sorts, other sorts of patterns of Muslim organization, so I fully acknowledge and agree with the sentiment behind that question and do hope to see other methods presented.
And if I have the last minute, actually, I remember that I didn’t fully address an earlier question about the Tablighi Jamaat and mosques. And I caught a little bit of an earlier question about more contemporary issues related to mosques.
There are a number of possible offshoots of the arguments that I have presented, and one set of offshoots relates to what Muslim organizations, I focus more in Deobandis, but the Tablighi Jamaat would be implicated in this, the Barelvi school would be implicated in this, what any organization has been able to do with the laws pertaining to mosque use and authority within mosques and I believe that the bifurcation, the growth of specifically Deobandi, Barelvi, Tablighi mosques is an outcome of the, the changes that happened in the colonial period where custodians and prayer leaders could defend particular ritual practices by specific ritual practices within mosques. So the, this factionalism that emerges around mosques is, is part of the story that I have told.
And I, and I think that there are other contemporary sites which also capture many of the tensions that we can see from the colonial period.
> > Lhost: Yeah, thanks. So we’re just one minute over time, but on that note, I would like to thank all of our, thanks Professor Haroon for writing this book, giving us the opportunity and a chance to get together today, and thank Professors Zulfiqar and Trivedi for joining us in this discussion, even though both of them seem to think that others would have been better suited. It was great to have both of you here. It was nice to see all of you. And thanks to all of you for coming out today.
Our next event will be on Tuesday, March 8 and which will feature Kyle Gardner’s book The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962, and you can already register for that event at the link https://dartgo.org/conversations-gardner, which is in the chat. Thanks everyone!