Chapter 6 Religions of South Asia 225commemorated Muharram with “illuminations and processions... brilliant
and costly” (Hasan 1996:545). Thousands of Hindus chanted mourning songs
along with the Shias and Sunnis. In the North Indian town of Amroha,
“accounts of Muharram... describe all religious communities attending
Muharram sermons and parading effigies of Husain’s tomb, while the most
ardent of Shias came out onto the town’s streets to engage in matamdari, self-
flagellation as a form of penitence” (Jones 2009:879).
Several things are striking about this collective participation in the annual
Shia commemorations. First, these accounts come from late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century observers. At that time, the sectarian rift between Sunni
and Shia was not as severe as it later became. Wajid Ali Shah, the nineteenth-
century nawab of Awadh, said: “Of my two eyes, one is a Shia and the other is
a Sunni” (Jones 2009:545). Second, the story of the assassination of Husain at
the hand of the tyrant Yazid is understood as the beginning of Sunni persecu-
tion of Shias in the Middle East. In British India, however, there were reso-
nances with colonial dominance and the destruction of the Mughal dynasty.
Husain was the perfect man who becomes a martyr for God against the rulers
of the world. Finally, the wide sharing of Muharram is evidence that Islam in
South Asia only slowly pulled away from a cultural matrix in which Hindu,
Sufi, Sunni, and Shia ideas and practices were widely availed; identities were
not entirely fixed and bounded as religious categories. However, by the end of
the nineteenth century, this was no longer true. Muharram ceased to be a com-
mon symbol but became an exclusively Shia concern as Sunni–Shia conflicts
became commonplace in North India.
These changes began in the mid-eighteenth century, when Indian Islam
was influenced by the movement to purify the faith that came out of Arabia,
where Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, whose movement became
known as Wahhabism, urged stripping Islam of “un-Islamic” practices, many
of them associated with Sufism. This movement was more extreme in Arabia,
a more isolated and homogeneous place than India with all its ethnic, linguis-
tic, political, and religious diversity. But there were similar reform efforts in
India against Sufi practices like the concept of baraka, the worship of saints and
veneration of tombs. All the Sufi innovations of the previous centuries were
repudiated; the sole basis of the faith should be the Quran and the Sunna
(hadith); that is, the text of the actual Quran transmitted to the Prophet (in Ara-
bic), and the collected accounts of the early centuries of the believers. In Ara-
bia, anyone resisting these reforms was considered apostate; Indian reformists
such as Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) urged Muslims to focus on the teachings of
the Quran and the hadith, to discipline their lives according to sharia (Ibrahim
2006), and model one’s life on that of the Prophet. These were above all Sunni
reforms. Into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they intensified.
Islamic schools, madrasas, which carefully differentiated between Shia, Sunni,
and other sects, were established to educate youths in textual Islam. Sunnis
tried to suppress mention of Ali and Husain; Shias complained they were