Introduction
Many scholars have noted that, despite the fact that Islamic teachings promote an egalitarian view of society, Muslims of South Asia are divided into a multitude of categories, or caste-like hereditary and endogamous groupings that “have their own unique matrix of interactions”.Footnote 1 On top of this hierarchy, not as much depending on occupation than on origin and lineage, are the ashrāf (literally, the nobles), a group that subdivides in South Asia into four groups according to their line of descent: the Sayyids (also sometimes referred to as ahl al-bayt), who trace their genealogies back to the Prophet, the Shaikhs, who descend from the Prophet's companions, the Pathans (from Afghanistan) and the Mughals (from Iran and Central Asia). Thus, contrary to the Middle East, for instance, where the ashrāf designates the Sayyids alone, in South Asia the term more broadly encompasses Muslims of foreign origin.Footnote 2 Sometimes, however, as Levy notes, converts from upper-caste Hindus could also find their way into these groups,Footnote 3 and, for some scholars, the importance of birth has to be nuanced. As Buehler reminds us, according to Ali himself, “nobility (sharaf) is derived only from knowledge and beautiful behaviour, not from inherited merit and lineage”.Footnote 4 Hence, in Mughal India, respectability sprang not only from birth but also from social status (hasbi),Footnote 5 from common tastes and behaviours—and a glorious genealogy could still be negotiated afterwards.
Beyond individual issues of forged ancestry, Sayyids constituted the most respected group of the Muslim South Asian hierarchy. They received material privileges during Mughal rule to the point that a special position (niqābat) was created to examine the authenticity of Sayyid claims.Footnote 6 They enjoyed a special status and assumed an important role in public, and particularly religious, life. They were (and are still to some extent) endowed with an aura of spiritual power, which led many of them to a career of religious learning and teaching. Sayyids, as Lukas Werth argues, were intimately associated with sainthood.Footnote 7 This was particularly the case for Shias, who emphasise reverence for the Prophet's daughter and son-in-law, Ali, and their offspring, Hasan and Husain. The sacredness of their bloodline prevented them to intermix and intermarry, as Ahmed Ali illustrated in his Twilight in Delhi,Footnote 8 except, perhaps, with the Shaikhs.Footnote 9 In pre- and colonial India, Sayyids continued to be respected and addressed with the highest deference. In some cases, as Zahir Dehlvi related about the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion, they could rely on a peculiar network of solidarity thanks to the “extremely good fortune” that the “progeny of Fatima” brought.Footnote 10 In other cases, they could benefit from particular leniency and reverence. As Francis Robinson exemplifies, Maulana Inayatullah (1888–1941), headmaster of the Farangi Mahalli madrasah, “showed especial respect for the Prophet's descendants, excusing one Saiyid several hundred rupees he owed in rent and always using the respectful ‘aap’ rather than the usual ‘tum’ when he addressed the Saiyids amongst his pupils”.Footnote 11
The relatively small number of Sayyids in Indian society also probably reinforced the singularity of the title. According to the 1891 Census of India, Sayyids represented around 0.05 per cent (1,430,329) of the overall British Indian population (287,223,431). They constituted about the same proportion in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (242,800 in a population of 47,697,576), amounting to around 10 per cent of the total number of Muslim ashrāf in that region.Footnote 12 However, while on one hand, the labelling and identifying of Indian Muslims and of their ‘caste’ was no easy task,Footnote 13 British officials also often looked with suspicion at sharīf, and particularly Sayyid, claims. In 1891, they remarked, for example, “in the West Panjab the title [of Sayyid] is given to any holy man of that faith, and means simply a religious teacher, supported by the alms of the believer. Elsewhere, the title is assumed on conversion, or, according to the proverb, on the acquisition of the proper amount of worldly goods”.Footnote 14 If the number of Sayyids was relatively low, the proportion of Muslim ashrāf, and of Muslims “bearing Foreign Titles”, was more important. The 1891 Census concluded that “the class of Musulman [sic] that returns a foreign title [hereby including a number of Baloch, Turk, and Arab immigrants] includes nearly 12 per cent of the population that it comes next to the Agricultural group in numerical strength”.Footnote 15 This was a particularly significant number, given that the Census identified approximately twenty per cent of the total population as Muslim.Footnote 16
In this article, I will show through late nineteenth-century poems from the Aligarh movement, that, despite the eminence and aura of Sayyids in Muslim South Asian society, Aligarh leaders—who often bore the Sayyid title themselves—did not politically choose to play on their peculiar status but rather to unite Muslim ashrāf beyond individual sub-groups, through a common memory of past political glory. Ashrāf were, therefore, generally addressed as a collectivity—notably with the increasing use of the ambiguous and shifting term qaum (often rendered as ‘community’, or ‘nation’). The position of Sayyids itself was seldom mentioned. Some scholars have debated the social relevance of the division of Muslim society into ashrāf (nobles), ajlāf (low classes) and arzāl (excluded),Footnote 17 deploring the ‘over-simplification’ of these categories and encouraging scholars to consider sub-groups instead. However, I argue, through analyses of Altaf Husain Hali's nostalgic poems and of the rhetoric used in the poetic propaganda deployed against the Indian National Congress in 1888 that, in the political sphere, belonging to the sharīf class carried the greatest political weight. With the pressing need to safeguard Muslim interests in colonial India, to voice common claims and to construct a new political identity, being Sayyid—just as being Shaikh, Mughal or Pathan—was less politically relevant than belonging to the larger sharīf class. While this might appear as a paradox (i.e. the contrast between the seemingly eminence of Sayyids and their little importance in contemporary political elite discourses), this observation points to the significance of shaping a Muslim political identity that could both mobilise, and gain recognition from the British. For Aligarhians, it was the memory of Muslim political power, rather than the invocation of religious or spiritual prominence, that moulded the Muslim qaum and bolstered the argument of the Muslims’ ‘political importance’.
The Aligarh movement and the elaboration of a Muslim memory of power
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the new pressures of British rule, such as competitive recruitment, new mandatory qualifications, quotas and the gradual establishment of elective government—first through local committees—, as well as the Hindi-Urdu language controversy that started in the late 1860s and amplified in the following decades, put strain on the former elite. Public offices opened to new English-proficient graduates who directly competed with the Urdu-speaking elite,Footnote 18 and the anxiety of seeing other social groups accessing public service increased the latter's fears of inadequacy and sentiments of abasement. Numerous associations aiming to negotiate these pressures consequently emerged in North India.Footnote 19 Amongst these, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) founded in 1875 by Sayyid Ahmad Khan had the most enduring impact on Urdu-speaking groups and especially the Muslim ashrāf.Footnote 20
While the College was first announced to be in the name of all Indian Muslims, it rather trained “a considerable narrower group: the north Indian Muslims literate in Urdu who formed the reservoir of Muslim intelligentsia and government servants”,Footnote 21 in other words, the ashrāf. Hindu students from a similar background also entered the College, living in separate bungalows, and sometimes even outnumbering, until 1889, Muslim students.Footnote 22 Among the student population, Lelyveld tells us that in 1875, when the College first opened, “twenty-eight students were Sayyids, twenty-seven Shaikhs, twenty-two Pathans, seven Mughals, two Kamboh”.Footnote 23 Although that year the number of Sayyid students surpassed the number of other Muslim ashrāf pupils, the College certainly did not target Sayyids exclusively.
It is difficult to tell whether Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Sayyid title played any role in the way his ideas were perceived by Muslim elites, and whether it had an impact on the financial support he received. It seems that sometimes his Sayyid-ness might have reinforced representations of him as having an almost Prophet-like outlook. In the first preface to his famous Musaddas-e Madd-o Jazr-e Islām (1879), Altaf Husain Hali related his encounter with Sayyid Ahmad Khan as follows:
Suddenly, I beheld a servant of the Lord, a hero in that plain, who was travelling along a difficult path. Many of those who had set out with him had fallen behind in exhaustion. Many were still stumbling along with him, but with their lips caked with scales, their feet covered in blisters, their breath coming in gasps, and their faces now pale with fatigue, now red with exertion. […] So powerful was the magic in his glance that whoever he looked at would close his eyes and go along with him.Footnote 24
In an 1888 poem by an Aligarh partisan entitled “The Horn of Israfel” (Sūr-e Isrāfīl), which I will present below, the author similarly emphasised Sayyid Ahmad Khan's quasi-saintly status:
Such representations of Sayyid Ahmad Khan regularly appeared in poems and in contemporary texts, in which Aligarh's founder was often referred to simply by his title, or by the expressions “Sayyid sāhib” or “Pīr Nechar”, which may hint at his particular status within South Asian society.
While a good part of the students, professors and leaders of the college and of the community associations that stemmed from it were indeed Sayyids, they usually did not seem to emphasise their status. In fact, the elaboration of the discourse commemorating Muslim power, which became typical of the Aligarh movement, and which was later paramount in establishing the Indian Muslims’ ‘political importance’, aimed instead at presenting the ashrāf as one united community. Besides the elaboration of scholarly works and efforts to promote modern education, the Aligarh movement was famous for the poetic mourning of past glory and for the articulation of a distinctive Muslim memory of power. Almost every event organised by Sayyid Ahmad Khan was accompanied or inaugurated by the recitation of nostalgic verses on the former glory of Muslims and on their present decline.Footnote 26 Such poems inundated political meetings and assemblies, particularly community gatherings such as the Muhammadan Educational Conference established by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in 1886, through until the beginning of the twentieth century at least. As the Rafi-ul Akhbar illustrated in November 1897:
No civilised nation which has seen better days can forget its past glory, the memory of which sometimes prompts its members to exert themselves to regain their lost greatness, and sometimes to console themselves with boasting of their greatness in times gone by. The poets and authors of Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan's school were once in the habit of reciting marsias or dirges on the loss of the Muhammadan supremacy in India.Footnote 27
This evocation of glorious origins and of an imperial past was instrumental to Aligarh's educational and political endeavours, from the founding of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875 to the anti-Congress campaign in the late 1880s, and between 1900 and 1909 when Muslim leaders “were compelled, in order to remain in control, to demand more vigorously than ever before that government should protect their interests”.Footnote 28 This remembering of past glory was indeed a central feature for Muslim political associations like the All-India Muslim League in 1906,Footnote 29 and served many political purposes, from raising funds and mobilising groups to gaining advantages from colonial authorities.Footnote 30
The first Aligarh poem in this vein was Hali's Musaddas-e Madd-o Jazr-e Islām, which had an enduring influence on Urdu-speaking elites and Aligarh students, and set the mood of what would be a very successful rhetoric of the Aligarh movement. Indeed, the publication of the Musaddas in the pages of the Tahżīb ul-aḵẖlāq “took the public by storm”Footnote 31 and Hali himself, a Shaikh by birth, was quite critical of its “plain” style and surprised by its success.Footnote 32 When the time that he reworked the text in 1886, the Musaddas had already become an integral part of the Urdu-speaking elite's life.Footnote 33 It developed, on the example of al-Rundi's Lament for the Fall of Seville,Footnote 34 evocations of exotic glorious Islamic places coupled with a call for action. The Musaddas first narrated the powerful energy of Islam that emerged in Arabia and encompassed the whole world, before then going on to describe its decline in India, criticising contemporary torpor, hypocrisy and ignorance, and asking Muslims to educate themselves and to live with their times.
In the poem, Hali evokes a glorious Arab past, with an emphasis on extra-Indian Muslim glory in general. The Musaddas linked, in the manner of Andalusian elegies, the landscapes of Arabia, Sevilla, and Samarqand in a meta-historic narrative of past glory and present decline:
It was not a question of highlighting religious pedigree or boasting pure Sayyid lineage, something which Hali would have done with difficulty himself, but rather it displayed a desire to reinforce the status, the authority and the group identity of the Muslim ashrāf as a whole. Along with the sacred sands of Arabia were remembered the imposing domes of Al-Andalus and the lavish gardens of Shiraz. Through the evocation of lost Muslim powers, of past excellence in sciences and arts, and of the previous virtues of Muslim people everywhere in the world, Hali helped build a shared history of past glory, which also fed a call for empowerment and agency. He coupled nostalgia with shaming incentives to follow the example of forebears, even as the power now laid in the hands of others. Fellow co-religionists were urged to educate themselves and their sons, to regain the virtues that were said to have been lost. Although this particular narrative mainly aimed at promoting modern education and social reform, as well as at attracting new recruits and funds for the College, it also enduringly shaped the way Muslim memory was expressed and invoked.
In the Musaddas, Sayyids are occasionally mentioned: not when it comes to fantasising about Islam's earlier glory, but where the poem illustrates contemporary degradation. The terms “Sayyid”, “descendants” or “heirs of the Prophet”, “those whose ancestors were God's favourites” or “Pirs” only appear in the section of the poem that laments the present state of affairs of Indian Muslims, often in a context of religious charlatanism and deceitfulness. Almost systematically the Sayyids to whom Hali alludes are criticised as fake through his denunciation that they “make themselves out to be” (bankar) of that status, thus implying both that the attribution of Sayyid lineage was frequently considered suspicious and that it conferred local privileges (taking religious alms, being granted spiritual leadership roles in villages):
In each passage about Sayyids, Hali referred specifically to behaviour associated with religious authority—accusations of fraud, like robbing, deceiving disciples or wrongly extorting money from oblivious believers. This was probably because the local religious sphere was the one area of influence in which Sayyids could put their status to full use. The political and cultural spheres more generally, on the other hand, were dominated by a collective and more inclusive “we”, “people of Islam”, “community (qaum) of Islam”.
Aligarh's anti-Congress propaganda (1888) and the uses of memory
One of the most obvious contexts in which this memory of power first became overtly political was during Aligarh's anti-Congress propaganda launched in 1888, less than a decade after the publication of Hali's Musaddas. As the newly-created Indian National Congress (INC), founded in 1885, was preparing its annual session in Allahabad, an anti-Congress propaganda intensified in North India. The INC—which has been described as a “coalition of ‘out’ factions […] reacting against specific administrative changes or official oppression”Footnote 39 and aimed at representing the interests of Indian subjects, without being restricted to any class, caste or religious communityFootnote 40—appealed to more and more Muslim ashrāf. At the moment of its creation, Sayyid Ahmad Khan had remained distant. But, and despite the fact that he did support the creation of “a new organization for voicing general political grievances”,Footnote 41 he soon founded a separate “rival” institution in 1886—the Muhammadan Educational Congress, later Conference—that started holding its sessions synchronously with those of the INC.
In the winter of 1887, the INC—which had until then held its annual sessions in East and South India—developed new centres in Lucknow and Allahabad. Congressite Madan Mohan Malaviya started touring the region to recruit new members.Footnote 42 That same year, as Badruddin Tyabji, leading Muslim member of the Congress, presided the second annual session in Madras, Sayyid Ahmad Khan decided to position himself clearly against the organisation that increasingly loomed over his claim to represent Indian Muslims.Footnote 43 The main objectives of the INC worked against Aligarh's aim to maintain the political influence of Muslim ashrāf in North India and worried Aligarh partisans who felt more and more helpless in the face of demands for elective government and competitive examinations.Footnote 44 As Hali explained in his biography of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, “he was in the opinion that if the real, fundamental aims of the Congress [Hali specially mentioned competitive examinations held in India and elections for the Legislative Council] were ever accomplished, a severe blow would be dealt to the political status of the Muslims”.Footnote 45 During the Muslim Educational Conference of 1887, after a year of campaigning, Sayyid Ahmad Khan opened fire against the INC in a speech at Qaiserbagh in Lucknow. In his speech, he insisted on the authority of famous ancestry and on the fact that the representatives in the government councils had to be appointed according to their social status.
It is very necessary that for the Viceroy's Council the members should be of high social position. I ask you—Will the Ra'ises [aristocracy] of our land like it if a man of low community [adna qaum] or low rank, even if he has taken a B.A. degree or an M.A., and even if he is also worthy, would sit and rule over them, would be master of their wealth, property, and honour? Never—nobody at all will like it. (Cheers) Footnote 46
The Aligarh founder clearly opposed both competitive examination for government office and universal suffrage (or qualification on income): “To such people”, Francis Robinson notes, “the idea of one-man-one-vote was anathema”.Footnote 47 Sayyid Ahmad Khan strove instead to maintain the privileges of the sharīf community, or qaum—that he contrasted with individuals of “low community” [adna qaum]—by emphasising the so-called natural fitness to rule that flowed in their blood and in their memories. As Malik summarises, Sayyid was indeed “an aristocratic democrat” whose “nationalism was essentially based upon an enlightened conception of noblesse oblige”.Footnote 48
Our nation [qaum] is of the blood of those who made not only Arabia, but Asia and Europe, to tremble. It is our nation which conquered with its sword the whole of India, although its peoples were all of one religion. (Cheers) The time is, however, coming when my brothers, Pathans, Syeds, Hashimi, and Koreishi, whose blood smells of the blood of Abraham, will appear in glittering uniform as Colonels and Majors in the army.Footnote 49
One Urdu term appears here that is decisive to understanding the rhetoric of Aligarhians and the audience toward which their memory narrative was directed to that of qaum. The word itself is difficult to translate and, as Ryan Perkins has remarked, “could mean different things in different contexts”: “qaum as a religious community of Muslims, qaum as encompassing all the inhabitants of Hindustan, qaum as tribe and qaum as nation”.Footnote 50 As Faisal Devji argues, this term, along with its many identity meanings, specifically emerged in British India from the nineteenth century, and did not have the same significance in princely courts such as Hyderabad or Bhopal where the aristocracy had remained unaffected by the shift of power.Footnote 51 While the term referred to different polities in the Mughal empire, like the Afghans, Iranis or Rajputs, “by the middle of the nineteenth century most of the Muslim ones [qawms] had been collapsed into a single qawm (classically made up of Sayyids, Shaykhs, Mughals and Pathans) […] a kind of hybrid that redefined the concept of nationhood altogether”.Footnote 52 Sayyid Ahmad Khan himself used the term differently at different points in time, sometimes alluding to one single Hindustani qaum, comprising Hindus and Muslims altogether, sometimes referring to one Muslim qaum, or even to different qaums, according to rank (sharīf qaum vs. adna qaum), as quoted above. The Muslim qaum appeared as an idea, which encompassed subdivisions of Muslims and united them as a political entity. But, as Devji rightly argues, “unless they specifically mention the umara or nobility, for instance, the Aligarhists invariably address themselves to a united Shurafa as a qawm—a habit which is soon taken up by non-Aligarhist groups like the ulama or clergy as well”.Footnote 53 The concept of qaum was first and foremost a product of the Muslim elites, and of North Indian (Hindustani) Urdu-speaking ashrāf in particular. This became clearly visible in the anti-Congress propaganda, when memory narratives more clearly addressed Muslim ashrāf as a whole and excluded lower castes.
The Muhammadan Educational Congress of 1887 had already highlighted divisions among Muslim elites as far as attitudes towards lower caste Muslims were concerned. Particularly concerned about the advancement of the ashrāf, Sayyid Ahmad Khan openly stood against English education for common Muslims and proposed a resolution against the establishment of small schools for underprivileged children.Footnote 54 This was vigorously debated (and eventually dismissed) by the opposition. Among them were Congress members like Munshi Sajjad Husain, Rais of Kakori,Footnote 55 the editor of the then ten-year-old Awadh Punch, which a year later, as we shall see, engaged in pro-Congress propaganda against Aligarh partisans.Footnote 56
In 1888, just after his Lucknow speech, Sayyid Ahmad Khan launched an anti-Congress campaign under the direction of Theodore Beck and founded the United Indian Patriotic Association. It regularly published pamphlets and “claimed a monopoly on loyalty to British rule and purported to represent the politically significant sections of the population”.Footnote 57 In mid-March 1888, Sayyid Ahmad Khan delivered a speech, in Meerut, asking fellow Muslims to stay aloof from the Congress. He warned them of the danger to their own interests that the INC represented, reminding them that “you have ruled nations, and have for centuries held different countries in your grasp. For seven hundred years in India you have had Imperial sway”.Footnote 58 In March, April and May 1888, both the anti-Congress and the Congress campaigns grew more intense: while Ajudhia Nath's touring in the region recruited new Congress members from among the province's elite, Aligarh partisans persuaded associations of landlords and government servants into making public declarations against the Congress. In March, Muslims in Allahabad declared themselves opposed to the INC;Footnote 59 on 4 April 1888, the British Indian Association of Oudh constituted of maharajas, rajas and taluqdārs, both Hindus and Muslims, declared the Congress movement “distinctly seditious”, “disclaiming all connection therewith”;Footnote 60 and in May between 1,200–2,000 Muslims assembled in Allahabad and again condemned the Congress.Footnote 61 As David Lelyveld concludes, “if the aim of Sayyid Ahmad's opposition was to bring Aligarh to the centre of the political stage, it was a consummate success”.Footnote 62
Part of the rhetoric used by Aligarhians during this period relied on the type of memory of power and representations of a united Muslim (sharīf) qaum that had been popularised by Hali's Musaddas. And, indeed, Hali himself published that same year a poem entitled Complaint to India (Shikwah-e Hind). It was filled with anguish and bitterness, and it further elaborated on the extra-Indian heritage of Indian Muslims. The thirty-four pages long poem, written in tarkīb band, consisted in a kind of love poem addressed by Muslim “lovers” to their unfaithful beloved India—although poetry on unrequited or disillusioned love was common in classical Urdu poetic traditions, it was quite novel to apply it to a country and it interestingly contrasted with contemporary nationalist imagery portraying India as the Mother Goddess of the nation (Bhārat Mātā).Footnote 63 In narrating Indian Muslim cultural death (equated with the loss of power), Hali emphasised Muslim glorious origins and genealogical ties with extra-Indian ancestors who belonged to different lands but were united “all under the banner of Islam”.Footnote 64 As a matter of fact the poem's very first couplet strikingly described Muslims as India's “foreign guests” (badesī mehmān).Footnote 65Complaint to India included lengthy passages on the qualities of ancestors of various origins, which Muslims would have inherited indiscriminately it could compare to the “virtues (manaqīb, fazāil) literature” associated with Sayyid/sharif pedigrees in other contexts.Footnote 66 The Muslim qualities highlighted by Hali (modesty, hospitality, compassion, learning or bravery) were indeed commonly attributed to Sayyids by the Persian historian Firishta, as Crooke underlined in his ethnography of the North-Western Provinces.Footnote 67
Hali undoubtedly aimed at creating a sense of shared identity, of belonging to a same, and united qaum, which he further highlighted by the constant use of the personal pronoun at the first person plural. Hali's Complaint to India, thus, built on the same literary devices used in the Musaddas: it emphasised the foreign heritage of Muslims through a kind of genealogy that encompassed all possible subdivisions, whether they were ethnic, social or religious. Sunnis and Shias, for instance, were not differentiated but included alike as members of the Muslim qaum. Whereas earlier genealogies and pre-modern histories tended to highlight family and small group inheritance, as Faisal Devji has shown, the past in Hali's verses was not “filiative” but still “conceived of temporal succession and historical transmission in genealogical terms”.Footnote 69 It offered a meta-narrative of Muslim history that encouraged Muslim self-awareness and promoted the shaping of a unified, Muslim sharīf identity, which was conceived as “more Islamic than Indian”.Footnote 70 This rhetoric estranged Indian converts, and hints at the fact that the qaum evoked by Hali did not include others than ashrāf, not the least because, in Complaint to India, contrary to the Musaddas, India was seen as the prime culprit behind Muslim decline:
This particular memory of Muslim power and the construction of a Muslim community that exclusively included the Muslim ashrāf, and especially those from Hindustan (or North India, the term used by Hali in his poem), have to be situated in the particular context of Aligarh's anti-Congress propaganda. Hali's inspiration was most likely influenced, if not commanded, by the tense political atmosphere, which worried many of these former elites. The Aligarh Institute Gazette of 1888 was indeed obsessed with the campaign and, week after week, condemned the disloyalty and dangerousness of Congress leaders, who were described, in Urdu as in English, as “worthless and self-seeking”,Footnote 72 and “infatuated dogmatists who believe that under all circumstances representative government is bound to be a success”.Footnote 73 The powerful images in Hali's poem of India devouring or reducing Muslims to ashes, mirrored fears that Muslim political influence would disappear in the shadow of elective government and make the Muslim ashrāf into a subordinate group, crushed by the Hindu majority.
Like the Musaddas, Complaint to India generated enthusiasm among Muslim ashrāf and was copied by Urdu poets, who sometimes even borrowed its title.Footnote 74 It led to the writing of similar poems by Aligarh partisans, to fiery opposite responses from Congress recruits, and to poetic-political debates that we can trace in the Awadh Punch of that year. Although Sayyid Ahmad Khan's modernist reform and Hali's powerful poems on a glorious Islamic past were widely praised by Urdu-speaking elites, they also became objects of controversy and ridicule. The satirical Lucknow magazine Awadh Punch in particular frequently indulged in caricaturing Sayyid Ahmad Khan and in mocking the Aligarh movement. From April to May 1888, the magazine published a series of three poems that replied to each other in what increasingly became smear tactics—The Drum of Islam (Naqqārah-e Islām) composed by Congress partisan Munshi Abdul Basir ‘Huzur’ (5 April issue), The Horn of Israfel (Sūr-e Isrāfīl) written by an Aligarhian reader from Mirzapur (3 May issue), and The Sun of Doomsday (Aftāb-e Qiyāmat) by pro-Congress poet Mirza Muhammad Murtaza ‘Ashiq’ (31 May). The first poem had initially been published in reply to one anti-Congress pamphlet-poem published in another Urdu newspaper (and not reproduced in the Awadh Punch), the Aḵẖbār ʿAlam-e Taswīr of Cawnpore, and entitled “Community Warning” (Qaumī ʿibrat). The dispute, introduced and contextualised by Munshi Sajjad Husain, editor of the Awadh Punch, was deemed worthy of publication as it was necessary for the readers to “consider both views” and “establish their own opinion” on the matter.Footnote 75
The dispute built on the same kind of genealogy rhetoric and nostalgic poetry put forward by the Aligarh movement. This was not only visible through the themes and titles of the poems themselves, but also by the meter unanimously adopted— the musaddas—which Hali had popularised and was now being put to political propaganda ends. The pro-Aligarh poem, The Horn of Israfel, even directly mentioned Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Lucknow speech. The dispute displayed both the Aligarh leaders’ fears of losing influence and growing tensions between Aligarh's definitions of respectability and the Congress’ attempts at securing leadership. Remembering lost glory, the poems all addressed the question of equality in Islam, and hinted at the fact that, in Aligarhian discourse, ashrāf unity was partly created by enforcing a strong distinction from lower caste Muslims. While Congress writers emphasised the need to go back to the equality preached by the Prophet, Aligarh poets clearly demonstrated their reluctance to be associated with lower castes:
The issue of the political status of Muslim elites led pro-Congress poets to suggest the establishment of a “circular” that would “make everyone equal to those nobles”.Footnote 78 They especially criticised claims to authority by denouncing deceitful genealogies and self-granted nobility (“many are born out of prostitutes’ bellies, their genealogy (nasab) is not evident to you”).Footnote 79 They expressed their discontent at the Aligarhian desire to redefine respectability in the colonial world through the acquisition of Western knowledge and customs, and through the rejection of Islamic traditions. Since the early 1870s, Aligarhians had been accused of not following the proper Islamic way by giving up traditional Islamic dress, standing while urinating or eating unacceptable food, at tables, with Westerners.Footnote 80 Pro-Congress poets made use of these critiques and also more generally expressed pity for the Muslim poor and uneducated, who could never access the elite culture of the Aligarh movement:
Again, nowhere in these poems, were sub-groups of ashrāf such as Sayyids mentioned, and the only use of the term Sayyid appeared in reference to Sayyid Ahmad Khan:Footnote 82 for Aligarh poets, as well as for their opponents, ashrāf were here considered as a whole, and in clear opposition to lower castes.
From a memory of temporal power to claims of “political importance”
Such romanticised recollections of Muslim rule continued to appear throughout the end of the nineteenth century and to be used regularly in community meetings. The claims of Sayyid Ahmad Khan that the ashrāf, given their history of imperial rule, were naturally fit to lead and to sit in government councils continued to make progress within the political sphere. They spontaneously crystallised in overt claims for Muslim representation according to their so-called political importance. When in October 1906 a deputation of Muslim ashrāf, jagirdars, taluqdārs and lawyers presented a memorial to Lord Minto in Shimla, the rhetoric was the same. The Muslim document had been drafted by two Sayyids, Sayyid Husain Bilgrami Imad ul-Mulk and Sayyid Mahdi Ali Mohsin ul-Mulk. Invoking “past traditions” and the still fresh memory of the position that Muslim elites occupied in India “a little more than a hundred years ago”, they impressed upon the government that:
the position accorded to the Mahommedan community in any kind of representation, direct or indirect, and in all other ways affecting their status and influence should be commensurate, not merely with their numerical strength, but also with their political importance and the value of the contributions which they make to the defence of the empire.Footnote 83
In the following years, the argument of political importance, which stemmed from the construction of this memory of power and the intertwined concept of the Muslim qaum, continued to influence Muslim politics. Even as Sayyid leaders formed a sizeable proportion of the Muslim League founding members, such as Mohsin ul-Mulk (a Barha Sayyid who was Sayyid Ahmad Khan's successor at Aligarh and Secretary of the All-India Muslim League), Sayyid Ameer Ali, Sayyid Nabiullah and Sir Aga Khan III (who read the Simla Deputation address). In December 1908 in Amritsar, Sayyid Ali Imam recalled that “Muslim domination of the country [had] remained in a more or less unbroken chain”Footnote 84 until British conquest. At the third session of the Muslim League held in January 1910, the Aga Khan invoked “the community that carried culture to the Pyrenees and to Central Asia, the community that can still recall with emotional pride the greatness of Cordova and Damascus”.Footnote 85 The memory of power thus became ingrained in the ashrāf's group identity.
As Zaidi rightly notes, however, in the early twentieth century the Muslim qaum started to become “far more representational, both in terms of region, as well as in terms of class”.Footnote 86 For the political representation of Muslims, numbers counted too, although leadership was still understood as restricted to members of the elite. It is interesting to note that around the same time memories of glorious origins and laments on present decline sometimes coincided with feelings of the Muslim urban poor, who were faced with a mounting lack of opportunities and the emergence of competitive Hindu commercial classes who “were also aggressive in their religious and cultural expression”.Footnote 87 Nandini Gooptu has accordingly remarked that, increasingly, the Muslim poor “conceptualised and made sense of their plight in dialogue with a projected history of decline of the Indian Muslims and of Islam worldwide”,Footnote 88 a narrative to which Aligarh poets had very much given birth.
Strikingly, as Robinson further noted, British rulers—who governed according to their recognition of different castes, races and religions in Indian society and shared a similar the principles of hereditary power and “aristocracy of birth”—readily acknowledged the argument of the Indian Muslims’ political importance as early as 1906.Footnote 89 As he has argued, several elements motivated their acknowledgment of the political importance of the Muslim community: on one hand, the idea that the Muslims of India formed a separate community and that they were strong and potentially dangerous for the Raj (and thus to be conciliated), and, on the other hand, the contemporary pro-Muslim stance of British opinion and of the Conservative majority at the House of Lords, which eventually forced Lord Morley, Secretary of State, to raise “the number of Muslim reserved seats on the Imperial Legislative Council” in the Indian Councils Act of 1909,Footnote 90 thereby exceeding their representative proportion in Indian society. The concept of the Muslim qaum, the memory of its extra-Indian and noble origins, and its claims to political importance that had been constructed by Aligarh scholars since the second half of the nineteenth century seem to have interestingly converged with contemporary British representations of Indian Muslims.
Of course, the argument of Muslims’ political importance or their genealogical claims to political authority did not remain unchallenged by Indian Muslims themselves, and even by “Young Party” Muslim leaders such as Mohamed Ali Jauhar, who had been educated at Aligarh. While an article in The Tribune in February 1909 claimed that the argument was grotesque, given that “a vast majority of them [the ashrāf] are descendants of Hindu converts”,Footnote 91 another that appeared in Mohamed Ali's Comrade in 1911 also expressed doubts about the principle, criticising the “padaram sultan bud (my father was a king)” logic and displaying instead a desire for self-realisation and self-help.Footnote 92 Increasingly in the early 1920s, with the Khilafat movement and satyāgraha agitations, and then the particular politics of 1920s-1930s United Provinces, Bengal and Punjab, dominated by landlords and by ambitions to be acknowledged as Muslim-majority regions, the argument of Muslims’ political importance was less appropriate and less invoked.Footnote 93
Conclusion
While Sayyids certainly played a role in the politics of the North Western Provinces and later in the United Provinces, notably by occupying leadership roles at the head of the Aligarh movement and the All-India Muslim League, their authority within the larger sharīf class was limited. As I have argued here, Aligarh's political rhetoric and endeavours, which the All-India Muslim League inherited in its early years, strove to enhance a memory of power that could unite a sharīf qaum. At the time, the main objective was to present a unified sharīf class worthy of political leadership. Therefore, Sayyids, who only represented a small element within the wider Muslim population but a fair proportion of Muslim political leaders, chose not play on their particular superior status in South Asian society. Rather they built on the pride of belonging to a section of society that had previously played a role in governance and that claimed foreign descent, deliberately seeking to create a “unified pan-ethnic religious polity”.Footnote 94
Aligarh poets combined memories of worldwide Muslim power with ideas of belonging to a distinct community, which had been endowed with the kinds of special virtues (bravery, modesty, hospitality, learning) that had usually been associated with Sayyids. They constructed memories that appealed to and mobilised many Muslim ashrāf, regardless of their individual sub-groups and sectarian divisions, and which had an enduring influence on Indian Muslim politics and representations. While this already appeared in Hali's Musaddas, it took wider and more obvious concrete form during the 1888 anti-Congress campaign, with the memory of extra-Indian origins clearly estranging Muslim lower castes, or the “adna qaum”, to borrow Sayyid Ahmad Khan's words. The term qaum itself could assume different meanings at different points in time however, and, by the early twentieth century, the Muslim qaum also included lower castes, although leadership was still retained by the ashrāf. These nostalgic recollections of former glory and genealogical claims of belonging to a ruling class by then directly fed the arguments of Muslim Leaguers and were acknowledged by the British. Indian Muslims were consequently not only represented according to their numerical strength, but also to their “political importance”.
As such, the situation in the North-Western Provinces of the late nineteenth century and in the United Provinces of the twentieth century seems to have been quite different from what Sarah Ansari has shown for the region of Sindh in the late 1930s. There, the Muslim League did build on the Sayyids’ spiritual aura and prestige to influence and secure voters.Footnote 95 The League had come relatively late in that region and was looking for timesaving strategies—as in the Punjab—to implement a strong base, hence the resort to local pir families who tended to play on their Sayyid-ness. In the North-Western Provinces and in the United Provinces, Sayyids did not rely on their religious aura to secure political leadership. Instead belonging to the Muslim ashrāf and sustaining a powerful memory of centuries of Muslim rule was of the greatest political significance.
