eastern Islamicate lands) in honor of their saints
(pirs) can attract hundreds of thousands from
across a wide spectrum of religious traditions.
The Shiis, for their part, have directed their piety
toward the imams and their descendants. They
hold large gatherings and processions during
ashUra, the annual commemoration of the mar-
tyrdom of Imam Husayn. Ismailis have similar
observances in honor of their Imams and pirs,
and in difficult times, they have employed Sufi
ideas and symbols to avoid persecution by liter-
ally minded Sunni jurists and judges.
When Muslim rule was declining and British
colonial control was increasing, Islamic reneWal
and reForm movements began to arise in India.
ahmad sirhindi (d. 1624) and Shah Wali Allah
(d. 1762) were among the early pioneers in these
reform movements. After the suppression of the
1857 Muslim-Hindu uprising (known in British
history as the Sepoy Mutiny) against the govern-
ment of the English East India Company, Sunni
Ulama at the deoband madrasa near Delhi sought
to bolster Islamic edUcation among Indian Mus-
lims in order to preserve their tradition. Deobandi
schools have since spread throughout South Asia,
and the ulama continue to be active in adapting
their religious traditions to the rapid changes
brought with modernity. Another consequence
of the 1857 uprising was the founding of the
Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh
by Sir sayyid ahmad khan (d. 1898), which was
designed to educate Muslims in the modern sci-
ences and prepare them for leadership in colonial
India. From 1919 to 1924, Muslims in northern
India participated in the khilaFat movement in an
unsuccessful effort to revive a pan-Islamic caliph-
ate. Other important movements that originated
in India that have since had global impact are the
Deobandi missionary movement known as the
tablighi Jamaat (founded in the late 1920s) and
Abu al-Ala Mawdudi’s Jamaat-i islami (founded in
1941), an Islamic political movement that became
an increasingly important political force in Paki-
stan after its creation in 1947.
ISlAM IN SOuTh ASIA:
A hISTOrICAl SKETCh
The conventional understanding found in modern
India and often outside India is that its history
consists of three phases: an ancient Hindu Vedic
golden age from around 1200 b.c.e. to 1000 c.e.,
an Islamic age of foreign conquest and despotism
from around 1000 to 1600, and a British colonial
age that laid the foundations for modern inde-
pendent India from 1600 to 1947. An assortment
of facts can be brought forth in support of this
view of history. Such a view, however, tends to
treat Islam in monolithic terms, exaggerating the
role of religion at the expense of social, politi-
cal, and economic processes in Indian history.
It relies on the misleading idea of irreconcilable
gaps between Muslims and Hindus as well as
between Muslims and the British. These per-
ceived gaps are the results of India’s experience
with colonialism and communal politics since
the 1930s and 1940s, rather than a reflection
of precolonial historical realities in South Asia.
In recent years, the three-phase model has been
given new life by Hindu nationalists and Mus-
lim radicals, as well as Western scholars such
as Samuel P. Huntington, who has proposed a
post–cold war world of civilizational “clashes”
based largely on religious identity. Now, however,
some scholars are questioning the validity of the
model, arguing that it is a gross oversimplifica-
tion and that nowhere is it more oversimplified
than in its conceptualization of the “Islamic age.”
It overlooks the variety of ways that Muslims
used to indigenize their religion in India during
the more than 1,000 years they have lived there,
the complex array of forms that Islam took there
(as described above), and how Indian Muslim
rulers and the English engaged in various sorts
of cooperation and power sharing even after the
1857 uprising. Conflicts and acts of violence did
occur and still do, but they were not confined
to the eras of Muslim rule, nor did they always
occur along religious or cultural “fault lines”
between Muslims and non-Muslims.India 351 J