
Flag-waving near Wagah border crossing.
Photo: Flickr / Michael Foley
Faisal Devji and I went to graduate school together at the University of Chicago. We worked with Barney Cohn, a scholar with an adventurous sense of scholarship. Devji’s early studies were conducted at the feet of Fazlur Rahman, the intellectual of Islam (author of Islam, 1966 and 1979), who died in 1988, two years after Devji got to Chicago. Among our small cohort, Devji was the smart one – clear in his head that he wanted to uncover the intellectual foundations of Muslim nationalism in the Subcontinent. His was, however, the experience that haunts graduate students – having travelled the archives, making notes and photocopies, he returned to the US, where his bag with the research notes was stolen. Undaunted, Devji wrote a brilliant intellectual history – Muslim Nationalism: Founding Identity in Colonial India (1993). His study spanned the time from Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat al-arus (The Bride’s Mirror, 1869) to Mohammed Iqbal’s Pas Chih Bayad Kard ay Aqwam-i-Sharq (What Should Then Be Done, Oh People of East, 1936), from the era of post-Mutiny reform to the emergence of a new patriotic confidence. Lingering behind the close readings of Iqbal were his European interlocutors Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, enriching the dissertation to a level that was not common among people of our age.
The new Muslim nationalism that emerges in the second half of the 19th century in the Subcontinent is not identical with either the modular European form (or indeed its American ancestor) or the Indian freedom movement’s anti-colonial nationalism.
Over the years Devji has produced a body of work that strayed a little from his original work, but not far. Two of his three previous books reflect on the War on Terror through the looking glass: Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005); The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (2008); and The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence (2012). Reading these books reminds me of both Devji’s raw intelligence and wide reading, but also of a certain mischievousness reminiscent of Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), a book that was au courant for our graduate years. The most fascinating of the three is the first, where Devji argues that the al-Qaeda militant should not be simply placed in the historical lineage of the Egyptian scholar and Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb or Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi movement. It is not enough to make the jihadi intelligible by putting him in his historical place. To say that there is a straight line that links the current al-Qaeda jihadi to Sayyid Qutb would allow one to simply read the latter to understand the former. But such is not the case, as the jihadi resides in a world that requires scrupulous analysis – not just in terms of political beliefs but also the jihadi’s imagination (this is one of the points that Devji makes in his preface to a volume that collects the Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, 2012).
Devji is less interested in the operational world of al-Qaeda and more in its personnel department – what do its members feel and believe, and what are the social structures that provide them with these feelings and beliefs? It is not the tentacular militancy of al-Qaeda that draws Devji, but instead “its fragmentation of traditional structures of Muslim authority within new global landscapes.” No longer are Muslims forged only by traditional institutions (mosques, madrassas and maulvis) but they are now forging themselves through new frameworks – the wali, the one who has authority, could now be each and every individual. Al-Qaeda’s adherents see in each other the ability to endow themselves with authority (wilayah), thereby signalling “a democratisation of authority in the Muslim world.” These are the “new Muslims”, whose worldview is the focus of Devji’s previous books.
The latest study, Muslim Zion, and his earlier dissertation, Muslim Nationalism, are actually a part of this interest in tracing the ideological and intellectual worlds of Muslim politics. In the dissertation, Devji also tracked a shift from the “moral city” of the mosques, the school, the court and the market, to the “moral collectivity” of the public gatherings and meetings as well as of the array of print that included pamphlets and newspapers. The shift that took place from the world of the late Mughals and early British collectorates to the British Raj transformed the way in which Muslims lived in the world and how they saw themselves in that world. The shift was not negligible. In the world of the “moral city” Muslims were not estranged from the long history of moral guidance that linked them to the Quranic past – time folded upon itself and so did space, allowing human action to be adjudged alongside those of the events of the past. Once in the “moral collectivity”, however, the modern idea of time and space sundered Muslims from the experience of an unbroken connection to the sacred past (as it did to adherents of other religious traditions). Events took place in homogenous or empty time and in discrete places, allowing individuals to have to bear responsibility for morality (majmua haisiyat). Moral judgments, which might have been made in reference to Quranic examples, are now measured against discrete human actions that take place in certain times and in certain places. It was in this context that the old terms that denoted community (ummat and millat) but had a strong religious content were set aside by reformers such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in favour of qaum, which would take on the meaning of nation.