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The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian “Urdusphere”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2011

Nile Green
Nile Green*
Affiliation:
Department of History, UCLA
*
[email protected]
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Extract

In October 1933, two motorcars drove out of Peshawar towards the Khyber Pass carrying a small delegation of Indian Muslims summoned to meet the Afghan ruler Nadir Shah in Kabul. While Nadir Shah had officially invited the travelers to discuss the expansion of the fledgling university founded a year earlier in Kabul, the Indians brought with them a wealth of experience of the wider world and a vision of the leading role within it of Muslim modernists freed of Western dominance. Small as it was, the delegation could hardly have been more distinguished: it comprised Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the celebrated philosopher and poet; Sir Ross Mas‘ud (1889–1937), the former director of public instruction in Hyderabad and vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University; and Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (1884–1953), the distinguished biographer and director of the Dar al-Musannifin academy at Azamgarh. The three were traveling to Kabul at the peak of their fame; they were not only famous in individual terms but also represented India's major Muslim movements and institutions of the previous and present generations. Ross Mas‘ud, grandson of the great Muslim modernist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), had fifteen years earlier been the impresario behind the foundation of Osmania University in the princely state of Hyderabad. A decade earlier, Sulayman Nadwi, the heir of the reformist principal of the North Indian Nadwat al-‘Ulama madrasa Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914), had been among the leading figures of the pan-Islamist, Khilafat struggle to save the Ottoman caliphate. And eighteen months earlier, Muhammad Iqbal had represented India's Muslims at the Round Table Conference in London that would shape India's route to independence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 479 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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References

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17 Examples of such Urdu gazetteer and historical texts on Afghanistan include the anonymously authored Afghānistān kē Tab‘ī, Jughrāfīyā’ī, Tārīkhī aur Tamadunī Hālāt (Lahore: Khādim al-Ta‘līm Stīm Prēs, 1909)Google Scholar; and Husayn, Mawlwī Sayyid Muhammad, Nayrang-e Afghān (Lucknow: Matba‘ā-e Shām-e Awadh, 1904)Google Scholar.

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25 A short version of the travelogue was first published in volume 10 of the Urdu journal Ma‘ārif (Dec. 1933); and reprinted in Nadwī, Shāh Mu‘īn al-Dīn Ahmad, Hayāt-e Sulaymān: ya‘nī Dāktar ‘Alāma Sayyid Sulaymān Nadwī (rahmatullāh ‘alai-hi) kē Sawānih Hayāt aur ‘Ilmī Kārnāma (Azamgarh: Matba‘a-e Ma‘ārif, 1393/1973), 407–23Google Scholar; and Nawāz, Siyāhat-e Iqbāl, 207–34. Revised in 1944, the complete 140-page travelogue has been republished as: Nadwī, Sayyid Sulaymān, Sayr-e Afghānistān (Lahore: Sang-e Mīl, 2008)Google Scholar. The following discussions draw on this complete edition.

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33 Ibid., 21.

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35 Ibid., 21. On these figures, see Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs, 124–25, 234–35.

36 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 41–43.

37 Ibid., 42.

38 On the factories, see Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 4. On other imported machinery, see Rafī‘, Habībullāh, Armaghān-e Tamaddun: Tārīkhcha-ye Wurūd-e Wasā’i-e ‘Asrī bih Afghānistān (Peshawar: Siyār Arīk, 1378/1999)Google Scholar. Thanks to James Caron for supplying me with this text.

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71 Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 43–47.

72 Ibid., 79–87, 97–98, 99–100, 104–7.

73 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 37.

74 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 64–66; Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 38–43. The school was also known as the Dar al-‘Ulum-e Islami.

75 Nawid, Religious Response, 62–69.

76 The ruling was outlined in the royal proclamation, Beh Millat-e ‘Azīzam (Kabul, n.d. [1928]), 7.

77 Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 41.

78 Nadwi did not name the authors or full titles, simply referring to Mishkat and Hidāyat, though the identifications seem clear enough. On the Indian situation, see Kugle, Scott, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35, 2 (2001): 257–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 65.

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81 Ibid., 68.

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86 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 55.

87 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 68–69.

88 Ibid., 69–70; and Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 55. The Massachusetts-born Daniel Treadwell (1791–1872) was a pioneer of industrialized printing: see Green, Ralph, “Early American Power Printing Presses,” Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951/1952): 143–53Google Scholar. However, Nadwi and Nizami seem to have used his name for the generic type of electrically powered press they saw rather than any particular brand. On the role of imported presses in the beginnings of printing in Iran, see Green, Nile, “Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution: Industrialization, Evangelicalism and the Birth of Printing in Early Qajar Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, 2 (2010): 473–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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97 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 55.

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99 Ibid., 70–73.

100 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 34, 54.

101 Ibid., 36, 38.

102 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 72.

103 Chand, Attar, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan: A Study of Freedom Struggle and Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 1989), 32–40Google Scholar.

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105 Ibid., 56.

106 Ibid., 73.

107 Ibid., 41.

108 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 51.

109 Jewett, An American Engineer, 25.

110 Kābul (Dec. 1933); Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 43–49.

111 Introduction, in Green and Arbabzadah, Afghanistan in Ink.

112 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 43; Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 34.

113 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 78.

114 Ibid., 47–48; also Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs, 62.

115 Ibid., 49–50.

116 Ibid., 50–54.

117 Ibid., 54–56.

118 Iqbāl, Muhammad, Maykada-ye Lāhūr: Kulliyāt-e Fārsī-ye ‘Allāma Iqbāl, Baqā’ī, Muhammad, ed. (Tehran: Iqbāl, 1382/2003), 129–234Google Scholar, 489–504.

119 Mahmūd Tarzī, Āyā Chī Bāyad Kard (Kabul: Government Press, 1330/1913)Google Scholar.

120 Vahid, Syed Abdul, Glimpses of Iqbal (Karachi: Iqbal Academy, 1974)Google Scholar, 133.

121 Nawāz, Siyāhat-e Iqbāl, 148–49.

122 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 41.

123 Ibid., 41.