Isna ‘Ashari and Isma‘ili Shi‘ism: from South Asia to the Indian Ocean, edited by Dr Justin Jones of Oxford University and Dr Ali Usman Qasmi of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, is our fifth special issue in recent years. Its articles, by scholars from a range of disciplines - history, religious studies, anthropology, political science - explore the historical and contemporary dynamics of various South Asian Shi’i communities living in, and moving between, places that border the Indian Ocean. Indeed, taken en masse, they demonstrate the enduring vitality of these communities, whose members have responded in a range of ways to the opportunities and challenges of the complex religious, social and political context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Shi‘i communities of South Asia, roughly 60 million people, represent, after those of Iran, the second largest grouping of Shi‘as in the Muslim world. Until recently our knowledge of them has not matched their numbers. Indeed, they, and here I refer to the Twelver Shi‘as rather than the Isma‘ilis, have suffered from the paradox of being both highly visible but in scholarly terms largely invisible. Where the Shi‘a live in South Asian towns and cities, arguably, no community has been more visible or more audible: visible because of their great processions at Muharram; and audible, certainly at Muharram, but also throughout the year in their majalis, as they recount the events of Karbala, often transmitting them by loudspeaker to the muhalla.

While Shiʿi Islam and its imperial expressions were known in the Deccan sultanates from the sixteenth century and expressed in court-sponsored production of theology, it was only in the eighteenth century that Shiʿi political theology emerged in North India in the new state of Awadh. In this paper, I argue that one can discern in the theology of Sayyid Dildar ʿAli Nasirabadi (d. 1820) a clear attempt at forging a new Shiʿi theological dispensation to bolster the state, based upon a tripartite attack on three rival approaches to faith and politics: Akhbarism, Sufism, and the Sunni rationalism of Farangi Mahall. A careful examination of these textual practices within the Awadhi context demonstrates one example of how Indian thinkers responded to the decline of Mughal power and articulated alternative epistemologies in vernacular contexts before the advent of the British Empire.

This paper explores the interaction between a religious leader, the Aga Khan, and a cluster of castes, the Khojas, in Colonial India. While scholars have usually investigated the Bombay judicial sources, claiming that the Aga Khan Case of 1866 put an end to dissent among the Khojas who rejected his authority, the Karachi judicial sources provide a new perspective on the issues. It will be argued that the so called dissenters were fighting for the autonomy of the Khojas as a caste that they were able to keep in turning to Isna ‘Ashari. Therefore, this paper deals with how the British colonials attempted to control the people of India through the courts, but also how Indian actors used the courts for reaching their goals. Furthermore, the religious discourse through which the claims were expressed was but a shell concealing economic pursuits as well as issues of social rank.

This article studies two generations of the Mahmudabad family, which was one of the largest Muslim landholding families in India: Maharaja Sir Muhammad ‘Ali Muhammad Khan and Raja Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan. The family were Twelver Shi‘as and hailed from Mahmudabad in Awadh. Specifically, it shows how intra-community links of marriage and kinship facilitated a flow of ideas, information and people and therefore created new networks. The article then explores these connections through the example of the Madrasa’t-ul Wa‘izeen, which was founded by the Maharaja and its two main publications, Al-Wa‘iz, an Urdu magazine and the English language The Muslim Review. The founding of the madrasa also demonstrates the importance of ideology, pilgrimage, preaching and their corresponding networks. These relationships are analysed keeping in mind local, national and transnational institutions and the role these played in creating ties between Mahmudabad, Lucknow and the wider Muslim world. This article thus presents a typology of a particular kind of Muslim transnationalism, showing how family, marriage, ideology and the importance of preaching mutually reinforced each other. The larger goal is to show how this family could be both ‘rooted’ in the local while also being part of the transnational Muslim community.

The story of Imam Husain's martyrdom at Karbala has been told with variant emphases and interpretations in different historical contexts. This article examines one of the most famous modern tellings of this narrative: that of ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, arguably South Asia's most influential Shi‘i mujtahid of the twentieth century. It argues that, from the 1930s–1940s, ‘Ali Naqi pioneered a novel perspective on Imam Husain, establishing him as a model for human comportment and a figure to be actively emulated, both by Shi‘as and by humanity at large. As well as having implications for transformation within Shi‘ism, this reorientation of Husain's significance pre-empted its politicisation: ‘Ali Naqi's message informed the incorporation of Shi‘i symbology within the 1942 Quit India agitation, and in some senses exhibited parallels with the later revolutionary rendering of the Karbala message in 1960s–1970s Iran. It is the range of the religious and political implications to be drawn from Ali Naqi's interpretation that have ensured both the durability, and ongoing controversy, of his Husainology.

Taking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

This article explores Islamic networks, as constituted by migration of people, movement of saints and philanthropic institutional links, across the Indian Ocean. Linking Bombay, Hyderabad and the Muslim diasporas of East Africa, these transnational Shi‘i networks forge a print-based public sphere and determine routes for the circulation of media technology. Moreover, this article argues, that they deploy this technology to enable Islamic reformism in ways that are distinct to the local urban cultures in which they are set. The article examines two initiatives that apply technology towards different conceptions of Shi‘i reformism: while one reform initiative attempts to situate itself within a secular liberal public, another seeks to interrogate secular liberal assumptions by establishing an authentic Islamic society; both then, are underpinned by different goals, internal contestations and diverse trajectories. This article seeks to emphasize the ongoing impact of historically shaped networks of community migration and organisation: both the use of technology in mediating Islamic reform, and attempts to articulate a moral Islamic universalism, which have in practice been determined by these existing transnational networks.

This article discusses the transformation that took place within the Chishtiya silsilah after its revival in the Punjab in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within this Chishtiya revival an exclusionary streak emerged, embedded within a shari‘a-centred orientation, leading to Shi‘a and Chishti Sunni antagonism in the Punjab. As a result, the composite and all-inclusive ethos epitomised by earlier Chishti Sufis of the thirteenth century was jettisoned. Underpinning these developments was the advent of the Usuli faction among the Shi‘a of Awadh, whose influence was resonating in the Punjab by the turn of the twentieth century. The khanaqah of Sial Sharif in Sargodha district illustrates this exclusionary trend, as reflected in the texts such as the Mazhab-i Shi‘a by Khawja Qammar ud Din Sialvi.

This paper seeks to illuminate the intellectual impact of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 among Pakistani Shiʻas by focusing on Sayyid ʻArif Husain al-Husaini, the dominating Shiʻi leader of the 1980s. In particular, I am interested in exploring how al-Husaini adapted hallmark themes of the Iranian revolutionary message, such as Muslim unity or political leadership of the religious scholars (ʻulama), to the specific circumstances of Pakistan. Crucial for such processes of translation was not only pressure from the Pakistani state but rather internal challenges and divisions among the Shiʻi community. While al-Husaini could draw on a strong, indigenous tradition of political mobilisation, his revolutionary ʻthird waveʼ of Shiʻi thought sat uncomfortably between Lucknow-educated traditionalists and Najaf-trained reformers who shied away from getting entangled in these novel forms of politics. By drawing on biographical accounts and al-Husaini's speeches in Urdu, I trace how his revolutionary rhetoric had to accommodate thorny local issues such as sectarianism, South Asian mourning traditions or the lack of an established Shiʻi clerical hierarchy in Pakistan.