The Deoband Universe: What Makes a Transcultural and Transnational Educational Movement of Islam?

When the inspiration of Deobandi thought for purist Islamic groups and radical militants across a number of countries in Asia and Africa became sensational news in the wake of 11 September 2001,¹ it was felt that both the forms and objectives of the Deobandi educational movement as well as its potential and weakness needed to be ascertained and reassessed in a more factual and realistic manner. This article explores how the influence of the Daru'l-'ulum, the Islamic school of higher learning in Deoband, North India, radiates across the countries of South Asia and beyond. It seeks to understand the ingredients of its religious school of thought, how it functions across cultural and political boundaries, and what institutions it has spawned. It looks at various forms of interaction, which extend from foreign students and teachers at Deoband, to Deobandi institutions abroad, and to the eternally expanding network of Deobandi graduates and the manifestation of their local and translocal influence in other Islamic groups and organizations. In this it focuses on the functional aspect. The historical evolution is treated in passing only where it is necessary to understand the functioning of the Deobandi network.

The higher Islamic seminary, the Daru'l-'ulum of Deoband, was founded in 1866 in north India by Muhammad Qasim Nanaotawi (1832–79) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829–1905). Teaching first started at the local mosque, which is still preserved today (fig. 1). The initiative was meant to rectify the perceived lack of religious education among Muslims of British India, as religious scholars feared a loss of identity in the wake of the spread of English-language education and Western values in society. After the defeat of the anticolonial uprising of 1857–58 in which many Muslim princes and scholars participated, Islamic institutions faced suspicion of disloyalty and sedition on the part of British rulers. Religious scholars decided to concentrate on the reconstruction of religious knowledge and religiosity and preferred to prove their loyalty to British rule. A more radical section of the seminary's teachers formed after the turn of the century. The new head teacher, Mahmud al-Hasan (1851–1921), and scholars such as Husain Ahmad Madani (1879–1957) and 'Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872–1944) represented a highly politicized thinking that wanted to challenge British rule, which they saw as a major impediment to the profession of true Islam not only in India but in the Islamic world at large. They particularly identified with Ottoman rule and mobilized against its defeat after World War I together with Mahatma Gandhi in the broad-based but unsuccessful Khilafat movement.

Figure 1.

Inscription in Chhatta Mosque, where teaching started in 1866

At the same time the school championed religious discourse in the reformist fashion of islah, where its founders and generations of students were seeking to spread the true Islam. Its views were characterized by a marked orthodoxy but also by puritanism and asceticism. Its relations with other Islamic schools of thought, what they called maslak, were troubled by controversy. Deobandis attacked dissenting views in Islam, particularly the Barelvis, representing the culture of the shrine-based Sufi Islam. Yet most Deobandi divines were themselves active Sufi sheikhs, following the path, or tariqa, where they saw it in consonance with the law and word of God, or Sharia. Being staunch followers of the Hanafi school (mazhab) they were wrongly labeled Wahhabis, with whom they shared only a certain bent for the radical and puritan interpretation of Islamic tenets. They anxiously marked themselves off from other sects, notably the Shia and especially the Ahmadiyya, which was considered as heterodox. Over time the school became the head seminary of an elaborate network of schools and activities inspired by the thought of the Deobandi teaching and interpretation of Islam. They introduced religious mass education within their own seminary through the innovative approach of hostel-based study and through a large number of branches and madrassas across South Asia and beyond.

The Deoband curriculum consists of a normally eight-year course conferring on students the degree...