The Ulama and Contestations on Religious Authority 219guidance of Muslim women and that has enjoyed very considerable popularity
in South Asia since its publication. To take another example, Mufti Muhammad
Shafi (d. 1976), a disciple of Thanawi and the founder of a major Deobandi
madrasa in Karachi, Pakistan, had collaborated with Zafar Ahmad Uthmani
on the aforementioned Ahkam al-Quran. But, apart from numerous other works,
he is also the author of a commentary on the Quran in the Urdu language,
which had originated in a long-running radio programme in which he regularly
offered an explication of Quranic verses. The Saudi scholar al-Uthaymin also
answered juridical and religious questions on a radio programme; and his dis-
courses on medieval theological and juridical texts were not only preserved on
audiocassette and subsequently transcribed and published, but have often been
widely disseminated through audiocassette itself (al-Husayn 2002: 32, 154–64;
on his radio programme, see ibid.: 69). These examples can be multiplied.
But they should suffi ce to indicate that – even as they empower many others
hitherto largely excluded from the articulation of religious discourses – modern
technologies do not necessarily diminish the infl uence of the ulama. They have
enabled them to continue producing works for a specialised audience, and to
do so specifi cally with a transnational audience of fellow scholars in view; but
they have also made it possible for them to compete with the new intellectuals in
addressing larger audiences of ordinary believers.
Modern education likewise creates new opportunities for the ulama, and
this in at least two ways. For one thing, new audiences have emerged with mass
higher education, not just for the new religious intellectuals – themselves the
products of such education – but also for the ulama. As noted, the latter, too,
increasingly address themselves to ordinary believers. And, while the authority
the ulama claim for themselves derives primarily from their grounding in the
Islamic scholarly tradition, it has also come to be based on an ability to address
people educated in modern institutions and to do so in an idiom they would fi nd
familiar and persuasive. Secondly, increasing numbers of the ulama have them-
selves begun to acquire some sort of modern education. For instance, in March
2005, Pakistan’s minister for religious affairs claimed that ‘more than 4,700
[madrasas]... were already imparting modern education alongside religious
education’ (Dawn, 13 March 2005), by which he presumably meant that this was
the number of madrasas that included the public-school curriculum in some
form. In Egypt, the wide-ranging reforms of al-Azhar – the most prestigious seat
of Islamic learning in the Sunni Muslim world – undertaken by the government
in 1961, led to the establishment of several new faculties for the teaching of the
modern sciences. As Malika Zeghal has demonstrated in her detailed study
of al-Azhar and the transformations it has undergone in recent decades, their
increasing exposure to the modern sciences has not necessarily marginalised
the ulama. Instead, this has often fostered a new ability among the graduates of
al-Azhar to forge closer ties than had hitherto been possible with the Islamists,