Between Qaum and the nation

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.

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).