The making of the modern maulvi — I

[Devil Soul]

The making of the modern maulvi — I
By Ajmal Kamal
Published: August 19, 2011

The writer edits a quarterly Urdu literary journal Aaj from Karachi, runs a bookshop and City Press, a small publishing house
Since Islam was first adopted and practiced by people speaking Arabic — the language of the Holy Quran — they did not need any intermediary between themselves and the religious text. However, there was a possibility of a group or class of people taking it upon themselves to give a specific interpretation to the divine word. Besides, many of the Islamic acts of worship and social rites were such that somebody was needed to lead them in congregations. Therefore, there certainly was a likelihood that some people might choose to make it a source of their living.
Syed Naseer Shah, a writer of an exceptional merit, born and based in Mianwali, in his classic 1962 essay titled Kya khidmat-e-deen ka muawza laina ja’iz hai?’ (‘Is it allowed to get paid in exchange of a religious service?’) lists in sufficient detail verses from the Holy Quran, clear and generally accepted Hadiths and the opinions of the Islamic legal experts through of the early centuries to show how they were unanimous in condemning, disallowing and declaring haram — absolutely forbidden — and said it was a grave sin to demand or accept any economic reward in exchange of teaching and explaining religious texts, leading and facilitating acts of worship and performing religious rites. This was done with an unambiguous purpose of discouraging people from making khidmat-e-deen their bread and butter.
The logic was that since all the major prophets quoted in the Holy Quran have shown their hatred for the idea of receiving economic benefit for performing the divine task of teaching religion to people, those carrying on with their task in the later period must also refrain from making it a source of economic benefit. Besides, when a member of a Muslim community assists another member in performing an act of worship, he is actually performing this religious duty for his own self, and not for the other person. Therefore, it is absurd to demand or accept any material, worldly reward for it.
However, according to Shah, by the end of the eighth century of the Hijra calendar (roughly corresponding to the fifteenth century of the Gregorian calendar) not only had getting paid in exchange of khidmat-e-deen been declared halal — allowed — by those who monopolised the interpreting of religious texts, but minimum wages for teaching the Quran had been fixed in cash and kind — 35 dirhams and a measure of halwa — and, what’s more, refusing to pay such wages had been made a crime punishable by imprisonment.
In this newspaper space, in the coming weeks, we intend to try and understand what form the profession of maulvi took in South Asia during the later part of the colonial era — from mid-nineteenth century onwards — and how it influenced the social and political life of the Muslim communities in the subcontinent in the decades that followed. This study seems meaningful in that this particular era could be seen as the beginning of a fundamental transformation of the role of religion in public life and that the new form of the profession was essentially shaped by the technologies of modern times — new means of communication, dissemination of knowledge and information, printing, public instruction and so on — along with specific skills and professions that emerged as a result of this huge change in technology and sociology. It is vital to see in proper perspective the part it has been playing in the politics of identity in our region.
However, before coming to this period, it would help to see what it was that the modern era replaced or transformed, meaning what the form, content and ways of dissemination of knowledge were before the introduction and prevalence of the new technologies of communication, which happened, in the event, during and under the colonial rule.
To quote from the 1978 paper titled “The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction” by Dale F Eickelman, then professor of anthropology and human relations at New York University (and currently at Dartmouth College): “Islamic education… was in some ways intermediate between oral and written systems of transmission of knowledge. Its key treatises existed in written form but were conveyed orally, to be written down and memorised by students.” He goes on to quote (and critique) Marshall Hodgson’s statement that education was “commonly conceived as the teaching of fixed and memorisable statements and formulas which could be learned without any process of thinking as such”.
According to Professor Eickelman, the “accurate memorisation” of the Holy Quran “in one or more of the seven conventional recitational forms”, and of the key religious texts, formed “the starting point for the mastery of religious sciences”. The generally accepted assumption was that “religious knowledge is fixed and knowable and that it is known by men of learning”. Furthermore: “The religious sciences… throughout the Islamic world are thought to be transmitted through a quasi-genealogical chain of authority which descends from master or teacher (shaykh) to student (talib) to insure that the knowledge of earlier generations is passed on intact. Knowledge of crafts is passed from master to apprentice in an analogous fashion, with any knowledge or skill acquired in a manner independent from such a tradition regarded as suspect.”
The system of religious education in South Asia followed the same general pattern as outlined above. Since the common means of transport were bullock carts and horses (and also boats where there were rivers), geographical mobility was highly limited. People of suitably high social status — based on their being born in the correct caste — travelled in search of knowledge in much the same way as other high-born individuals set out to kill, plunder, conquer, occupy and rule. Most of the common people, tied to the agricultural land, had no business travelling to other places, except mass-migrating in times of drought, famine or other such calamities. They were tied to their ancestral means of earning their living as firmly as they were to the land. The activity of acquiring and imparting religious knowledge was therefore something out of their world.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 20th, 2011.
The making of the modern maulvi

 

[muse]

Syed Naseer Shah, a writer of an exceptional merit, born and based in Mianwali, in his classic 1962 essay titled Kya khidmat-e-deen ka muawza laina ja’iz hai?’ (‘Is it allowed to get paid in exchange of a religious service?&#8217 lists in sufficient detail verses from the Holy Quran, clear and generally accepted Hadiths and the opinions of the Islamic legal experts through of the early centuries to show how they were unanimous in condemning, disallowing and declaring haram — absolutely forbidden — and said it was a grave sin to demand or accept any economic reward in exchange of teaching and explaining religious texts, leading and facilitating acts of worship and performing religious rites.

This is not going to go down well with our Islamican/Arabian brigade - This would be like putting a stop to the Mullah's bread and butter.

Come to think of it - capital idea.

 

[TruthSeeker]

Whoa! Then how can the "righteous" Muslim teachers ever have a full belly??? Reminds me of the USA Mormon faith. All of their religious leaders and teachers are "unpaid". Truly. As a result, Mormon leaders (like George Romney) are usually very successful businessmen. That is, they first have to make their fortunes in the world of the flesh in order to support their inclination to be religious leaders and teachers. In a typical Mormon "stake house" in the USA, the leaders are all economically successful as small business owners, corporate officers, doctors, lawyers, etc.

 

[muse]

Mullah strikes back!

However, according to Shah, by the end of the eighth century of the Hijra calendar (roughly corresponding to the fifteenth century of the Gregorian calendar) not only had getting paid in exchange of khidmat-e-deen been declared halal — allowed — by those who monopolised the interpreting of religious texts, but minimum wages for teaching the Quran had been fixed in cash and kind — 35 dirhams and a measure of halwa — and, what’s more, refusing to pay such wages had been made a crime punishable by imprisonment

.

I like the halwa bit -Mullah does have a sweet tooth -

 

[muse]

The making of the modern maulvi — II
By Ajmal Kamal
Published: August 26, 2011

The writer edits a quarterly Urdu literary journal Aaj from Karachi, runs a bookshop and City Press, a small publishing house

Syed Manazir Ahsan Gilani’s book Musalmanon ka Nizam-e- Taleem-o-Tarbiat (The System of Education and Training under the Muslims) is a good source of information about how the business of acquiring and imparting religious education used to be conducted till the time when technological advancement — coinciding with the British rule — initiated fundamental change in the concept, practice and social character of education in the subcontinent.

Gilani was born in Bihar and at the time of writing this book, in 1942, was faithfully serving the state of Hyderabad which was faithful to the colonial masters, just like other princely states. His book is a passionate defence of the pre-colonial system of Muslim religious education against criticism that came not only from the recipients of the so-called ‘modern’ or ‘English’ education but, significantly, from some of the maulvis of the modern era as well. Gilani quotes in his preface a Deobandi maulvi — without mentioning his name — as follows:

“The fate handed over the task of interpreting Islam to such men (sufis and alims) in this country who did not properly know its teachings, and whatever little they knew they did not practice…. Allah’s book is in Arabic and these men wrote and spoke Persian and did not have even a distant inclination towards the Arabic language…. The result is obvious: the monotheistic religion which originated in Hijaz came to suffer a sorry fate in Bharat.” (The Urdu phrase used in the last sentence of this quotation is “mitti paleed ho gayi.&#8221

One could easily sense where the motivation of such views lay. The Deobandi movement sought (just as enthusiastically as the newly-surfaced Ahle Hadith sect but perhaps a little more tactfully) to undermine the local form the religion had taken in the course of centuries. Both were influenced, to different degrees, by the Salafis or Wahabis from Najd, which had become the ruling credo in what came to be called Saudi Arabia. Hence the harsh criticism of whatever happened earlier in this field in the subcontinent. (Gilani feels that the wholesale rejection of the past was meant to highlight the significance of Shah Waliullah and his school)

Highly incensed by this ‘unfair’ criticism, Gilani set out to write a brief article on the subject and ended up writing a 750-page tome, employing his near-encyclopaedic knowledge about the conventional system of religious education, in the course of 20 days. The book is full of information about how the old system worked. Those connected with that system belonged to the shurafa castes (mostly Syed) — who are termed as ‘ilmi gharanas’ (upper-caste clans who had the monopoly of knowledge) — aided and supported by big or small kings, nawabs, amirs and aristocrats. The madrasas were located either in mosques or more commonly in the havelis or deorhis of the amirs.nd his school[/COLOR].)Gilani mentions a number of maulvis who enjoyed the hospitality of the wealthy zamindars of respectable origin for decades in their divan-khanas[/B].

Students travelled to well-known madrasas in their regions of residence to stay and study. Their food came from the kitchens of generous, God-fearing shurafa households. Books used for educating the students were calligraphed by hand and used hand-made paper, ink and pens. In order to acquire a book, one had to first gain access to the personal collection of someone who owned it and then copy it (or have it copied by warraqs — calligraphers who made a living out of it ) word-by-word. Compared with printing which had become common by the end of the nineteenth century, this traditional system of hand-written books afforded more effective control of the written word, so that knowledge did not go astray and reach those who were supposed to have no connection with it. One great grievance of the progeny of the ilmi gharanas against the printing of books and the new system of universal education was precisely this: that it resulted in the ‘devaluation of knowledge’ (ilm ki na-qadri) by throwing it open to all, including those who were unsuitable as a result of their low-birth status to access it.

The curriculum was limited to manqoolat — the Holy Quran, the Hadith and commentaries thereon, i.e. the Tafseer and the Fiqh. Gilani is of the firm view that maqoolat — philosophy (actually ilm-e-kalam), logic and other non-religious disciplines — had no place in the syllabus of the Muslim education in the subcontinent until a few centuries previously. He feels that the inclusion of maqoolat in the curriculum was a harmful innovation and that it might have been a result of a conspiracy hatched by Shias during that period to bifurcate the madrasa syllabus.

Discussing what motivated upper-caste Muslim youths to study, Gilani quotes from the classic Akhbar-ul-Akhiar as follows: “Once some students were talking and trying to know each other’s circumstances as to how they described their aim in acquiring knowledge. A few of them, artificially, said that their ultimate wish was to know the divinity [ma’rifat-e Ilahi], while others simply spoke the truth and said that their aim in getting educated was to gain economic benefit.”

Gilani compares the ‘crisis’ of the so-called ilmi gharanas during the colonial era with the situation that prevailed two centuries earlier when the disintegration of the Mughal empire had disturbed the smooth lifestyle of the purveyors of knowledge. Faced with economic hardship, they had to abandon the profession of knowledge and take up that of soldiery and had joined different local armies fighting with each other to gain control of relatively smaller tracts of land. Fortunately for them, they were traditionally well versed in using both pen and sword. However, as a result of such economic crisis, the search for knowledge declined and the institutions that imparted religious education were badly affected.

It becomes abundantly clear that what concerns Gilani — and all the‘reform’ or ‘educational’ movements among Muslims of the subcontinent — is the economic interest of the shurafa who had monopolised knowledge, physical power and land, to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.

 

[muse]

The making of the modern maulvi — III
By Ajmal Kamal
Published: September 2, 2011

The writer edits a quarterly Urdu literary journal Aaj from Karachi, runs a bookshop and City Press, a small publishing house

There are certain established biases underlining the world view of people like Syed Manazir Ahsan Gilani that we would do better to acknowledge and understand at the outset. The first assumption that they take as a settled, unquestionable affair, is the supremacy of Islam over all other religions. For example, while talking about the materials used for writing before the introduction of paper, Gilani mentions an old library which was acquired in his time by Osmania University and which had a large collection of ‘books’ written on toddy-leaves with iron pens and tied together with a string. The contents of such books could not be ascertained, he says, ‘because they are mostly in Kannada, Telugu and Marathi languages and some in Sanskrit’. He spoke to some ‘Hindu’ professors of the university and came to the conclusion that they contained nothing but qissa-kahanis of eras gone-by and mumbo-jumbo used for jhaar-phoonk. That some of those devoted to this other religion might have considered these writings a treasure of religious knowledge would break no ice with people like Gilani, because for them religious knowledge or ilm could only be in languages such as Arabic, Persian and well, Urdu, and could only deal with the single true faith in the world, professed incidentally, by a minority of humankind.

There was a long-held belief that each non-Muslim that ever existed in the world, no matter if he is pious according to his religion or good to people, was inevitably destined for hell while heaven was reserved for Muslims. The political power held by Muslims in the Islamic mainland and elsewhere, including the subcontinent, had generally caused this belief to be taken as something like as an established fact. In the new era of the colonial rule, when group identities became the basis for politics in the public sphere, the question whether all non-Muslims were to burn in hell after death came into sharp focus and became a constant topic of religious debates. As identities started to solidify, the maulvi of the modern era hardened his stance on this point, although the laws of the colonial government did not normally allow him to go further than propagating it as a mere religious belief.

There was another very active bias that worked within the collective Islamic community at large. The supremacy of the Sunni theology over Shia or other sects within Islam was and, still is, considered as much a settled affair as that of Muslims over all the rest. The Muslim body politic had broken into two groups at the beginning of the caliphate which later came to be known as Shias and Sunnis. The ascendance of the latter under the Banu Umayya and Banu Abbas dynasties politically subjugated the Shias except in places where they themselves were able to relegate Sunnis to a subject status. The proportion of Shias among Muslims as a whole is believed to be close to a quarter. In the Sunni power circles, Shias of various persuasions were considered as insurgent political groups, always scheming to dislodge and replace Sunnis from positions of authority.

The canonisation of Islamic learning — the compilation of six books of hadith (Sahah-e Sitta) and the establishment of four schools of interpretation and fiqh — was carried out in the time and places where Sunnis were in power. Men of learning who were Sunni, backed by men of authority who were also Sunni, did not treat the Sunni-Shia divide as a sign of diversity. They took a view under which Shia religious thought was nothing but a deviation from what they thought to be the true faith. The proponents of the four schools of fiqh, came together and declared that the work of interpreting the religious texts had been completed and since human life was not likely to throw up any new matters to resolve, therefore, the door of ijtehad was closed from then onwards. This was a political move meant, at least in part, to isolate the Shia minority.

Many of the preachers who came to the subcontinent and spread the message of Islam were Shias, which resulted not only in the conversion of a number of local castes into Shia biradris (such as Ismaili, Asna-Ashri) but also created a soft corner among the converted population of Sunnis for religious concepts associated with Shias as well as public feelings for them. This was unbearable for the orthodox Sunni clergy and the maulvi of modern times has tried to isolate and fight such trends which has created sorry results, as we all know. The political subjugation of Shias wherever they acquired power was also considered necessary. For example, Mahmud Ghaznavi in the 10th century, first invaded and destroyed the Fatimid Shia kingdom of Multan before turning his destructive attention towards Somnath.

The darbar politics during the Mughal era and in the states away from the centre also sharpened the Sunni-Shia political tussle. In an interesting, revealing footnote, Gilani mentions that Tabatabai, the author of the history Seerul Muta’akhhereen, calls the Nizam Asif Jah a dunyadar and a zamana-shanas, not because the Nizam deserved these epithets as a collaborator of the East India Company, but because Tabatabai was writing under a heavy, incorrigible Shia bias! The fact was only that Gilani was in the service of the Hyderabad state and felt that he had to defend his masters.

The third strong bias that we can sense in Gilani and his likes is against the local coverts. He mentions a great Muslim preacher and sufi-saint who was taught the Quran by a “Hindu”, and later clarifies that the Quran teacher was actually a respected Muslim and was called a Hindu only because he was a convert. He insists that this very atypical, isolated incident of a person of a low status being allowed to teach the Quran should be taken as proof that in matters of knowledge, Muslims treated everyone equally! The fact is that the growing caste-consciousness among the lower-caste Muslims as a result of social change had made it difficult by the 1930s and 1940s to treat them as incapable of accessing religious and other knowledge.

 

[muse]

The making of the modern maulvi — IV
By Ajmal Kamal
Published: September 9, 2011

The writer edits a quarterly Urdu literary journal Aaj from Karachi, runs a bookshop and City Press, a small publishing house

While listing the three traditional biases strongly held by mainstream religious decision-makers and inherited by the maulvis of the modern times — against non-Muslims; minority sects; and local converts of the lower castes — I did not mention the gender bias, because the prejudice against the socially weaker sex cuts all religious, sectarian and caste boundaries and could be considered as common to all. When the process of socio-economic change began during the colonial era, all these biases started becoming the basis of the politics of identity.

After the Bengal Army’s mutiny of 1857, the subcontinent came directly under the crown and a new — third, according to Hamza Alavi — phase of the colonial administration began. While the previous phase was characterised by a transfer of wealth in terms of cash — used to build the textile and other industries of Britain — it was decided in the latter half of the nineteenth century by the colonial rulers to turn the subcontinent into a supplier of raw material for the British industry, grain for its populace and soldiers for its colonial army.

These decisions were to have a deep and lasting impact on the individual and collective lives of the inhabitants of this region. A huge canal network was constructed in the northern plains of Punjab and UP to make the land capable of growing cotton, sugarcane, wheat and other important crops. New mandi-towns and port cities were developed and railways and road networks were built to transport agricultural produce and industrial products, and to move troops. These public works brought into being an institution called the thekedar, or contractor, which ensured the supply of labour and materials of all kinds for a commission. Modern civic and administrative services of water supply, sewerage, transport, law courts, policing etc. were developed in urban centres. Important changes were made in the recruitment policy of the British Indian Army and a ‘theory’ of the so-called ‘martial races’ was invented to support it.

All these changes were taking place side-by-side with developments in technology that changed the way people communicated with each other. While modern post and telegraph transformed communication between individuals and families, the currency of the printing technology changed the way knowledge was disseminated and shared. Since all these developments needed new skills and forms of knowledge at every level, a large system of public education was put in place, the like of which had never existed in previous eras. People from some of the lower castes who were considered unfit to get education under the traditional system of hereditary occupations, were now allowed to acquire skills needed for the modern systems and to change the way they earned their livelihood.

Among the mainstream Muslim communities of North India, there were two significant elite reactions to this. The MAO College at Aligarh (later to be called Aligarh Muslim University) and the religious madrassa at Deoband (later to be known as Darul Uloom of Deoband) could be taken as expressions of these two reactions. There has been a tendency among social analysts and critics of making much of the differences in the approach of Aligarh and Deoband. However, their commonalities could be much more significant and revealing from another perspective. While the two elite points of view had some differences with respect to the rationality of the biases against non-Muslims and against minority Muslim sects, they displayed an identical repugnance towards people of low birth whose aspirations to acquire education, change their profession and improve their lives turns them into ‘upstarts’. Both these ‘educational’ movements and their leaders were clear about the class they were meant to serve and benefit. It was the well-defined class of Muslims who considered themselves of high birth and called themselves shurafa. While the phenomenon called Aligarh, with its impact on the politics of Muslim identity in the subcontinent, deserves to be studied from this angle separately, just now I would like to focus on Deoband which produced the quintessential character I have chosen to call ‘the modern maulvi’.

Masood Alam Falahi, a young graduate of a madrassa in Bihar who went on to do his M Phil and PhD in Delhi, has written a book called Hindustan Mein Zaat-Paat Aur Muslman in 2007 (reissued in a revised and enlarged form in 2009 and available in English translation on the internet at newageislam.com). This book is a treasure trove of revealing quotations from the Muslim religious and historical literature of the subcontinent on the subject. Among other things, Falahi quotes an interesting anecdote about Aligarh written by the famous Deobandi Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi (1863–1943) in his collection of responses to religious queries called Ashraful Jawab, which shows how the firm policy of segregating and differentiating between people of higher and lower castes was a common factor between Aligarh and Deoband. The learned maulana apparently respected the deep, though misplaced, concern of the questioner about the dangers of mixing people of higher and lower origins at places like Aligarh. In his response, Thanvi writes: “An Englishman went to visit Aligarh College. He saw that while the sons of aristocrats (raeeson ke larke) studied, the servants accompanying them stood and waited at a distance; they could not even think of sitting next to their masters. But at the time of the namaz, the servants and masters stood next to each other. He asked the raees-zadas if standing shoulder to shoulder during the prayers did not make these servants bold and impudent. He was told that they could not dare to consider themselves equal in any way to their masters after the namaz.”

He then goes on to state: “The haq during namaz is that everybody should be equal, and the hukm for other times is different.”

In the remaining parts of the current series, I am going to comment on the life and thoughts of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi who, in my view, perfectly fits the bill of the modern maulvi.

 

[Martian]

Whoa! Then how can the "righteous" Muslim teachers ever have a full belly??? Reminds me of the USA Mormon faith. All of their religious leaders and teachers are "unpaid". Truly. As a result, Mormon leaders (like George Romney) are usually very successful businessmen. That is, they first have to make their fortunes in the world of the flesh in order to support their inclination to be religious leaders and teachers. In a typical Mormon "stake house" in the USA, the leaders are all economically successful as small business owners, corporate officers, doctors, lawyers, etc.

This was also case with classical religious leaders in Islam.

For example: Imam Abu Hanifa, the greatest jurisprudential thinker of Sunni Islam, was a cloth trader.

Only, during last few centuries, Muslim religious leaders started to depend on their mosque/madressa for their livelihood.

 

[muse]

The making of the modern maulvi — V
By Ajmal Kamal
Published: September 16, 2011

The writer edits a quarterly Urdu literary journal Aaj from Karachi, runs a bookshop and City Press, a small publishing house

Although the positions he took — regarding important religious, social and political questions of his time — were clearly orthodox, Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi can be studied as a product of the modern, colonial times. For a professional maulvi, he came from a non-traditional background, received his higher education in the newly commissioned madrasa at Deoband and throughout his busy life, used most of the modern means of communication for his purposes. He wrote and published books and risalas (religious booklets or pamphlets) using the new printing technology, which had become quite popular by the time he became active, traveled to places near and far, using the brand-new railways, to offer waaz on the invitation of big urban raoosa, and helped create a sect-based community of followers communicating with them through the great institution of the post office. In fact, as we are told innumerable times in his official three-volume biography, Ashraf-us Sawaneh, and other sources, the activity of reading and replying to letters took a considerable part of his time. Also, he received donations from his mureeds and others by money order, although one of his teachers at Deoband had once declared it un-Islamic.

Ashraf-us Sawaneh falls into the category of hagiographies of men of God that became current in Urdu after the introduction of printing, with the difference that it was an authorised biography written during the lifetime of its subject and actually supervised and occasionally corrected by him. The writer, Khwaja Azizul Hasan Ghouri, was among Thanvi’s akabir khulafa (prominent khalifas who were allowed to make mureeds on the maulana’s behalf). Besides, Ghouri was a graduate from Aligarh (he is particular in writing ‘Alig’ in brackets after his name) and had served the colonial administration as a deputy-collector and an inspector of schools in UP. Not only is his name adorned by a curious title ‘Khusrav-e-bargah-e-Ashrafia’ (meaning he was to Thanvi what Amir Khusrau was to Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia), one is amused by the strangest combination of his official title of ‘Khan Bahadur’ with what appears to be his takhallus (or poetic pen-name) ‘Majzoob’. A Sufi term derived from the Arabic ‘jazb’, which means to be absorbed in or fatally attracted to the Almighty, a majzoob would perhaps be looked at as a rare bird among the worldly wise men who managed to earn titles such as ‘Khan Bahadur’ from the British colonial masters.

This particular brand of biographies is characterised, among other things, by the prominent place enjoyed in them by predictions and dreams of apparently semi-divine personalities that one would doubt or question at one’s peril. According to Ghouri, who quotes Thanvi on this, the latter’s maternal grandmother complained to a majzoob that her daugther’s male children did not survive infancy. He enigmatically replied that they died because of a tug of war between Hazrat Umar (RA) and Hazrat Ali (RA), and advised, “Ab ki bar Ali ke supurd kar dena, zinda rahe ga”, (“this time hand over the newborn to Ali and he’ll survive”). It was taken to mean that since the paternal side of Thanvi was Farooqi and the maternal side was Alavi, and the male infants were named in the former’s tradition (such as Fazl-e-Haq), hence, the male infant mortality. The next time the newborn was to be given a name with ‘Ali’ in it.

The majzoob laughed at the correct interpretation of his utterance and predicted that the mother would give birth to two sons in succession, both of whom would survive, and instructed that they were to be named Ashraf Ali and Akbar Ali, respectively. The prediction came true and the sons were named as advised. The paternal side, however, insisted on giving a name of their own to Ashraf Ali, and named him Abdul Ghani, though the latter did not gain currency. It was, incidentally, used much later by Thanvi himself as a cover in one of his risalas (titled Khutoob-ul Muziba) that he wrote as a reply to his younger brother Akbar Ali, who had objected to Ashraf Ali taking a second wife (much younger to him) while his first, older wife was still alive. It appears that under the influence of the Protestant ethics, made current by the colonial rule, polygamy had begun to be openly objected to.

Ashraf Ali was born in Thana Bhavan (hence his adopted surname ‘Thanvi&#8217, a UP qasbah or small town some 150 kilometre from Delhi, in 1863, i.e., a mere five years after the last Mughal lost his nominal place in the Red Fort. By that time, the traditional system of the Shahi or Nawabi patronage of the maulvis (and others calling themselves ahl-e-kamal) had been all but dismantled. The primary occupation of Thanvi’s father, Abdul Haq, was to serve a tiny state in Meruth (Meerut) as its Mukhtar-e-Aam, but with the permission of his employer he used to take contracts of the commiserate from which he had earned considerable amount of wealth and social status and bought a lot of semi-urban property. Abdul Haq, therefore, belonged to the profession of thekedar, or contractor, which became the source of ‘new money’, especially from the later part of the 19th century onwards.

Ghouri quotes Thanvi while speaking about the Firasat-e-Khudadad or the God-gifted wisdom of Abdul Haq. In that, he decided very early in their childhood, what course the lives of his two sons were going to take. Ashraf Ali was chosen for taleem-e-arabi (‘Arabic education&#8217, while Akbar Ali was to acquire taleem-e-angrezi (‘English education&#8217. An old aunt of Thanvi took it as discrimination against the elder son that he was being deprived of the modern education, as she thought the ‘Arbaic education’ would limit his chances of earning money. Abdul Haq got enraged and said, “Bhabi sahiba, tum kehti ho ko yeh arabi parrh kar khayega kahan se. Khuda ki qasam, jis ko tum kamane-wala samajhti ho, aise aise is ki jutiyon se lage lage phirain ge.”