The Limits of Imperial Political Theology
Supriya Gandhi
Part of Perilous Intimacies: A Forum
The recent global rise in authoritarianism and hyper-nationalism underscores the need for complex, nuanced histories that help us understand how communities and their boundaries have been constructed over time. SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies, which focuses on colonial-era South Asia, is a welcome step in this regard. In many ways the book is a companion to Tareen’s earlier Defending Muhammad and develops some of its ideas. Both books do a brilliant job of examining complex theological debates among Muslim scholars of the subcontinent and also reflecting upon their wider significance.
My comments here focus on a key argument of Perilous Intimacies, and the related concepts invoked therein. This argument traces what happens to a certain “imperial Muslim political theology” after the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in the subcontinent resulting from British colonial rule. In Tareen’s account, this political theology comes to be “translat(ed) and “transport(ed)...in the radically transformed conditions of modern colonial power.” Instead of upholding an imperial political formation, it finds a new location in the “the performance of every-day ritual life” and in “the desire for and attachment to supremacy over the religious other through the maintenance of embodied distinction in everyday life.” Here, as in his previous book, Tareen engages Carl Schmitt’s idea of political theology. Another potential interlocutor on political theology, though not invoked in Perilous Intimacies, is Ernst Kantorowicz, whose work is relevant when thinking about the transference of ideas of kingship to the modern state.
Perilous Intimacies excels at plumbing a range of overlooked sources to examine the ways in which several nineteenth and early twentieth-century Muslim scholars and public figures debated practices of distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims as well as among Muslims. In this essay, I raise four lines of inquiry arising from Tareen's argument. I explore the first in some detail and the remaining three more briefly. The first pertains to the concept of “imperial political theology.” How might we best characterize this political theology without projecting back into the past the ideas and concerns of colonial-era ulama?
Concepts like “imperial political theology” are heuristic tools that both reveal and elide; they necessarily generalize in order to make a larger point. But by widening the concept of the “imperial” well beyond the specificities of Muslim empires in South Asia, I wonder if Perilous Intimacies does not inadvertently flatten the complex range of discourses prevalent in premodern Muslim societies. For Tareen, “imperial political theology” is characterized by the “conjoining of the aspiration for Muslim sovereign power over other faith communities with the assumption of theological superiority over them.” It is pertinent to ask what kind of Muslim rule is meant here. The rule of premodern Muslim sultans and emperors carries a different significance from the rule of the ulama, or of a caliph.
Tareen further elaborates that the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence “presumed the establishment and maintenance of Muslims’ political dominance over non-Muslims as an underlying purpose of law.” The primacy accorded to jurisprudence here would certainly resonate with many of the colonial-era ulama discussed in this book. Premodern Muslim scholars, nobles, or rulers undoubtedly professed the truth of Islam. Yet, they also operated in an intellectual and social world that was far removed from that of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), Nazir Ahmad (d. 1912), or Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1958), who feature prominently in Tareen’s book.
Take, for instance, the example that Tareen provides to illustrate his discussion of imperial political theology –– that of the tenth-century philosopher al-ʿAmiri, author of al-Iʿlam bi-Manaqib al-Islam. Al-ʿAmiri (d. 992) was associated with the school of al-Kindi (d. ca. 870), in whose circle was produced an Arabic redaction of Plotinus’s Enneads attributed to Aristotle. This Arabic work proved to have a significant impact on Islamic thought; it provided an emanationist paradigm that Muslim philosophers built upon and restated in different ways. A key element of emanationist thought was a universalist belief in ancient, perennial wisdom.
Accordingly, a major concern for al-ʿAmiri was the reconciliation of religion and rational philosophy. His use of Islam in the title of his book does not indicate a reified world religion as it would in the nineteenth century. Rather, ʿAmiri’s view is shaped by a discourse of emanationist philosophy already operative in late antiquity. He regards Islam as an expression of divine design and natural order, confirmed through prophecy. It is notable that al-ʿAmiri’s preferred term for Islam is al-milla al-hanifiyya, which connotes a universalistic idea of pure ancient monotheism. I think Tareen and I would both agree that this “imperial political theology” has a capacity to recognize truth in other traditions even if it assigns them an inferior status. However, in my opinion, privileging discourses of superiority could lead to overlooking the other potentials of these universalistic discourses.
Furthermore, the identification of jurisprudence as the central expression of Islamic political theologies risks reinscribing the binary of Sufi/jurist, which is one of a set of modern binaries that Tareen rightly critiques in both his books. It is hard to speak of law in Islamic history without also speaking of Sufism.The late Shahab Ahmed wrote of an Islamic “sufi-philosophical amalgam.” But as far as the premodern context is concerned, it might be more apposite to extend this concept to also include law. Not only were many ulama also Sufis, but one could well argue that this Sufi-philosophical complex was also legal in orientation and promoted an idea of existence and cosmic order as entirely in accordance with divine revelation. In some cases, the Sufi himself becomes the arbiter of law, like the charismatic Sufi Ahmad-i Jam (d. 1141), who insisted, while also performing miracles, on enforcing the legal injunction of forbidding wrong and commanding right. Or like the famed Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240), who holds that God’s friends could through divine realization establish the authenticity of prophetic hadith as law. Rather than view such instances as aberrations from a normative legalistic order, we might more profitably consider them as being very much a part of divine law in Muslim societies.
One of the reasons why this Sufi-philosophical-legal complex is relevant to discussions of political theology is because it came to play a prominent role in Muslim empires. For instance, as Azfar Moin, Matthew Melvin-Koushki and others have observed, a form of sacred kingship developed that appropriated and also competed with the charismatic authority of Sufi shaykhs. The elevated status of emperors in such discourses draws from diverse intellectual currents, including the philosopher Suhrawardi's idea of taʾalluh, or self-deification, as well as Ibn ʿArabi's idea of the perfect man. These concepts were enfolded within a broader framework of ethical and political theory that affirmed a universal idea of the human along with a hierarchical cosmic order. From such a context in Mughal India emerged a range of Persian engagements with Indic learning. A key feature of Mughal political theology under Akbar (r. 1555-1605) and Jahangir (r. 1605-1628) was the phenomenon of ruler-led inquiries into comparative religion, a project that had far-reaching effects beyond the court.
The concept of “imperial Muslim political theology” can thus encompass a range of ideas, stances, and possibilities. Indeed, one could argue if Mughal imperial discourses did transfer diachronically, prominent among them would be the universalistic ideas of religion fostered at the court. One example of such a downstream effect of Mughal engagements with Hindu thought is found in the first chapter of Perilous Intimacies. Here, Tareen sensitively adumbrates the engagements with Hindu ideas and practices by Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d. 1781), a Sufi who came from a family associated with the Mughal state. In one of his letters, Jan-i Janan provides a highly sympathetic account of Hindu thought and practices, drawing equivalences with Islamic concepts wherever possible. For instance, he refers to what appear to be the six schools of Indian philosophy and views the four stages of life for different castes (varnasrama-dharma) through the lens of Sufi liberation. He also found a way to justify Hindu image worship and prostration before images by drawing an analogy to the Muslim practice of greeting by saying ‘Salam.’
Some Mughal rulers supported projects of comparative religion to bolster their own status as sacred sovereigns who could guide their subjects to the truth. The case of Jan-i Janan shows that such imperial discourses took on a new life beyond the court as the empire weakened and decentralized. Although Tareen acknowledges Jan-i Janan’s hospitality to Hindus, he also observes, “The friendship accorded to the Hindu Other through a sympathetic translation was preconditioned on the assumption that the sovereign authority and privilege of Islam above Hinduism was kept in place.” While this might well be the case, Jan-i Janan was also drawing on an earlier model of interreligious comparison familiar to Mughal royals such as Jahangir and Dara Shukoh. This comparative practice, sometimes referred to as tatbiq, in Mughal India often connoted a method of reconciling difference by identifying a shared ontology at the core of the systems of thought examined. Such interpretive gestures presumed a notion of universal truth underpinning the different traditions in their purview, be they various schools of Islamic jurisprudence, or the religion of the Hindus juxtaposed with Islam. As Tareen notes, acts of comparison like those of Jan-i Janan are different in scope from the later attempts to classify religions under British colonial rule.
How, then, can we account for the highly fractious religious publics in colonial India that Tareen goes on to describe? For example, between the first and second chapters we jump roughly a century to encounter Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1880), a founder of the Deoband Madrasa, debating the Arya Samaj founder Dayanand Saraswati (d. 1883) at a festival of interreligious polemics in Shahjahanpur in 1876. Accordingly, my second line of inquiry here takes up the mechanisms through which transformations in Muslim political thought occurred from precolonial to colonial contexts. Tareen understandably wishes to avoid rehashing the longstanding scholarly debates about whether colonialism constituted a rupture from or a continuity with existing discourses and institutions. Nonetheless, it is hard to talk about colonial India without assessing what carried over from before and what was new. Indeed, Tareen too emphasizes the “radically transformed conditions” of secular colonial modernity and highlights certain colonial discourses such as scientism that had an influential impact on religious debates.
I am sympathetic to the broad contours of Tareen’s argument about the relocation of imperial discourses during the colonial era and their reappearance in new guises. My own ongoing research investigates the afterlives of Mughal and Persianate discourses of religious unity in later Hindu thought. However, I wonder if, as explanations, the disruptions of colonial modernity and the transference of political theologies “after empire” sufficiently account for the phenomena that Tareen's work explores. It is hard to neatly separate the eras of empire and empire’s end. Indeed, the end of the Mughal empire seems to be not so much a singular event as a process marked by significant turning points, including the turbulence and decentralization of power following the rule of Alamgir (d. 1707), the East India Company’s victory at the Battle of Plassey (1757), and the quashing of the 1857 Revolt. Do we see during this process cases of what Abhishek Kaicker terms Islam becoming the “language of politics” in opposition to the reigning Mughal emperor? When and how does, say, Mughal rule, get framed as Muslim rule? Can we track the emerging idea of a Muslim community in South Asia prior to colonial practices of census taking and enumeration? This is not to refute Tareen’s argument, but to highlight areas in which more specificity would illuminate “Muslim sovereignty” as itself a complex, changing and historically contingent concept.
As I read Tareen’s rich and fascinating book, a third and related line of inquiry cropped up. Tareen suggests at the beginning that as an alternative to interpretive paradigms centering colonial interventions, we interrogate “the discourses and debates among indigenous scholars—for instance, South Asian Muslim scholars—on the boundaries of religion and religious identity.” In this regard, I wonder, to what extent is this account of political theology and its transference to debates about sovereignty also the story of these scholars’ evolution as a social group and their new priorities and roles at the turn of the nineteenth century? The ulama in South Asia certainly did not invent themselves out of thin air. But the idea that they constituted a class of religious authorities distinct from say, military officers, reclusive mystics, or bureaucrats, gained shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the boundaries between religion and science were being reconstituted. Biographical compendia, such as Rahman Ali’s Tazkira-yi Ulama-yi Hind and Abd al-Hayy al-Hassani’s mammoth Nuzhat al-Khawatir fi Hindustan, reflect this retrospective tendency to present the ulama as a stable trans-historic class. But even through these compendia, one can see that the ulama in South Asia were fairly diverse in terms of the natures and degrees of their intellectual activities, their Sufi affiliations, or their affinity to the state. Attention to the socio-economic context of the colonial-era ulama, their self-fashioning, as well as the continuities and changes in how they imagined their political roles could enrich and complicate our understanding of the transference of political theologies that Tareen identifies.
My last set of questions has to do with the politics of scholarship. Scholars of South Asian religious history carry out their work today in a very politically charged atmosphere. While throughout much of the book Tareen refrains from voicing his own political position, he offers this remark at the conclusion: “the analysis presented in this book presses the importance of imagining a horizon of interreligious and Hindu-Muslim friendship that is not imperiled by pathological inheritances of imperial political theologies, nor leavened by the seductive yet frequently sour promises of modern secular power and state sovereignty.” This hope for a better future is poignantly tempered by the book’s dedication to and mention of Sharjeel Imam, one of the many intellectuals held as political prisoners in India today. What might such a post-secular, non-majoritarian vision look like? Does Tareen see the practice of history as both dismantling past inheritances and offering a glimpse of new possibilities? Would this not also be a secular form of critique, and is it even possible to step out from the secular frame? I recognize that the questions I have posed are not easy to answer, let alone in the course of a single book. It is to Tareen’s credit that Perilous Intimacies tackles this difficult terrain in such a thoughtful way.
Supriya Gandhi is Assistant Professor of Religion at Yale University and the author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Harvard University Press, 2020).
