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Nationalist Muslims in British India: The Case of Hakim Ajmal Khan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Barbara D. Metcalf
Barbara D. Metcalf
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Islamic political rhetoric has had a wide variety of meanings in twentieth-century South Asia. This variety has often been obscured by observers who assume Islamic political symbols to have a single set of meanings as well as by contemporary political figures who attribute to earlier figures their own particular views. In Pakistan today, for example, all national heroes of the past are assumed to have used Islamic symbols exactly as does the current regime. In a recent contest—in which so far no winner has emerged—prizes were offered for portraits depicting Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, the urbane, westernized lawyer, in Islamic dress. Such re-interpretation can force resort to explanations of expedience to reconcile apparent inconsistencies, arguing, for example, that political figures spoke differently to different audiences. What else could one make of a Jinnah if he is clothed as a fundamentalist? But desire for legitimacy—here as everywhere—outweighs accurate history.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1985 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 See ‘Revolutionaries, Pan-Islamists and Bolsheviks: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the Political Underworld in Calcutta, 1905–1925,’ in Hasan, Mushirul (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (Delhi, 1981), pp. 85–108.Google Scholar

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4 See Lelyveld, David, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978).Google Scholar

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7 Excerpted in Khān, Ḥakīm Jamīl, SḤrat-i Ajmal (Delhi, n.d.), p. 11.Google Scholar

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9 Dihlawī, Muḥammad Ajmal [ḤakḤm Ajmal Khān], al-Tā'ūn (Delhi, 1897), pp. 2–3Google Scholar. One assumes that a legal term like this is used because the legal paradigm informs every approach to knowledge. Examples are many. More serious than the imputation of bid'a, opponents to Ajmal Khan's medical conference in 1892 are said to have called those who attended non-Muslim—kāfir and murtad (Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 24). In contrast, a supporter spoke of Ajmal Khan as a mujtahid (one able to exercise legal judgement) in an era of taqlīd (legal conformity) (Muḥammad Ḥasan Qarshī, Zubdatu'l-Ḥukma (ed.), Mashīru'l-attiba: Masīḥu'l-mulk nambar (Nov–Dec [1928], p. 12). Dr Zakir Husain after Ajmal Khan's death spoke of him as a mujtahid and a muqallid as well (Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 529).

10 The terms are again from Hodgson, cited above, note 5.

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13 This distinction is paraphrased from Kakar, Sudhir, Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions (New York, 1982), p. 31.Google Scholar

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20 B File #5 of 1930, Education, Delhi Archives Reading Room.

21 W. M. Hailey to Private Secretary to H.E. the Viceroy, 12.6.13, in B File #168 of Education 1913, in Delhi Archives Research Room.

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29 Ibid., p. 185.

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32 Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 38.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., p. 496.

34 Published after his death by Dr Zakir Husain at Jami'a Millia.

35 He went along on the hunt but never actually shot anything, arguing that a hakim ought not take but give life. Amrohawī, ḤakḤm Rashīd Aḥmad Khāṅ, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal (Delhi, 1938), p. 32.Google Scholar

36 Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 55.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., pp. 51–2.

38 The graveyard is now inhabited by squatters and most of the gravestones broken (April 1982).

39 Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 82.Google Scholar

40 Amrohawī, ḤakḤm RashḤd Aḥmad Khāṅ, Shifā'ul-Mulk, , Ḥayāt-i Ajmal (Delhi, 1938), pp. 34–5. This last comment is staunchly denied by Mufti Kifayatu'llah's son, Hafiz Rahman Wasif, who knew Ajmal Khan in his later years. (In private conversations in Delhi, July 1982.) His biographer explained the failure to keep the fast as a concession to his heart condition.Google Scholar

41 Ḥakīm Rashīd Aḥmad Khāṅ Amrohawī, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 17.Google Scholar

42 The school is now very modest and mostly teaches Qur'an to local boys. The teacher, fittingly, doubles as hakim at the shrine's clinic in the afternoon. (Interview with Hakim Muhyi'd-Din, the teacher, Dec. 22, 1981, Ajmer.) Information about the school's history is from Maulana Aijaz 'Ali, former accountant for the school, Feb. 17, 1982, Ajmer.

43 Ḥakīm Jamīl Khāṅ, Sīrat-i Ajmal, pp. 100–1.Google Scholar

44 These comments are collected in Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, pp. 467–532. See also Ḥakīm Rashīd Aḥmad Khāṅ Amrohawī, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, pp. 27–9, the sections headed kasr-i nafsī and zaht-i nafs aur matānat.

45 Ḥakīm Rashīd Aḥmad Amrohawī, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 30.Google Scholar

46 Quoted in B File #179 of 1919, Home, Delhi Administration Research Room.

47 Ḥakīm Jamīl Khāṅ, Sīrat-i Ajmal, p. 119.Google Scholar

48 Ibid., pp. ‘132–3’. This edition is defective; quotation marks indicate the second set of pages.

49 Ibid., p. ‘134’.

50 Government of India, Legislative Department, Proceedings of the Indian Legislative Council, Delhi 10.3.20, Delhi Administration Research Room.

51 Medicine, music, and Sufism cluster in the programs of the Indian Institute of Islamic Studies, an institution supported by the Hamdard Foundation (which markets yūnānī medicines). On one recent occasion, they offered ghazals sung by Muslim members of the Rampur gharana and by a Hindu woman who had studied at Shantiniketan, each presenting, among other numbers, works by Ghalib; this was for an audience of archivists from the whole sub-continent (Oct. 15, 1981). On the occasion of an international conference on the great philosopher and contributor to yūnānī medicine, Ibn Sina, they presented the devotional singers (qawwāl) of the shrine of Hazrat Nizamu'd-Din, thus combining medicine, music and Sufism (Nov. 4, 1981).

52 Hardy, Peter, Partner in Freedom—and True Muslims: The Political Thought of Some Muslim Scholars in British India 1912–1947 (Lund, 1971).Google Scholar

53 Minault, Gail, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York, 1982), p. 82Google Scholar. He also apparently encouraged the formation of a parallel association among Hindu religious leaders, a Jami'at-i Panditan. Noted in Bipan Chandra, ‘Communalism and the National Movement,’ in Mushirul Hasan, Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends, p. 196n.

54 The phrase is Peter Hardy's in The Muslims of British India, p. 195.

55 This argument has been developed by Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement.

56 Ḥakīm Jamīl Khāṅ, Sīrat-i Ajmal, pp. 108–9.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., pp. 161–2.

58 Ibid., p. 169.

59 In his speech as president of the Muslim League, Amritsar, 1919, Ibid., p. ‘137’.

60 The proportion is based on the 35 page extract given in A. M. Zaidi, Evolution of Muslim Political Thought in India, II: Sectarian Nationalism and Khilafat, pp. 173–214.

61 Ibid., p. 192.

62 Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 251.

63 Ibid., p. 214.

64 In his speech at the first graduation ceremony of the school, held in 1922. Madhūlī, ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Jāmi'a kī kahānī (New Delhi, 1965), p. 38.Google Scholar

65 Muḥammad ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār, Ḥayāt-i Ajmal, p. 287.

66 ‘Abdu’l-Ghaffār Madhūlī, Jami'a kī kahānī, p. 73. The Tibbia College was torn with dissensions, many surrounding Ajmal Khan's son and successor, from the beginning. After Partition it was closed for five years. Currently administered by the Delhi Municipality, few are hopeful of its future as it struggles on in the buildings and with the equipment it had at its inception. Jami'a Millia has had many distinguished faculty and distinctive achievements but has recently been troubled by student strikes.

67 N. C. Saxena has reviewed the historiography of writing on India to argue the extent to which religiously-defined community action has always been regarded as wrong; the word ‘communal’ is invariably pejorative whereas culturally plural societies have and can exist on such a basis. ‘Historiography of Communalism in India.’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, pp. 302–25.