8 - Debating Authority and Authenticity in Modern South Asian Hadith Commentaries: Muḥammad Zakariyyā Kāndhalawī’s Awjaz al-masālik

Summary

Introduction

In colonial India the hadith commentary genre saw a considerable rise in popularity among Muslim scholars, some of whom produced multivolume works as a demonstration of their religious authority and authenticity. This textual production coincided with a growing pedagogical investment in hadith in Indo-Muslim madrasas and the formation of new sectarian identities that continue to inform creedal distinctions and ritual differences among South Asian Muslims in the subcontinent but also in the diaspora. The sectarian orientations (masālik) of late nineteenthcentury India – the Ahl-i Ḥadīth, Deobandīs and Barelvīs – have deep historical roots. The Deobandī and Barelvī division over the meaning of divine sovereignty and the theological status of the Prophet Muhammad arguably crystallised competing Indian responses to the classical mystical theologian Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). Likewise, the colonial-era conflicts between the Deobandīs and Barelvīs (both Ḥanafīs) on the one hand, and Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholars (South Asia's ‘indigenous Salafī community’) on the other hand, evoke earlier debates between ‘reason-based jurists’ and ‘transmission-based jurists’.

These intra-Muslim sectarian orientations also reflected the political and social realities of British India. The use of modern technologies (print and steam) allowed scholars to project their religious authority and the authenticity of their interpretive communities in unprecedented ways. Ḥanafīs and Salafīs also responded to the colonial division of social life into the private sphere of religious and domestic life versus the public order of secular reason and governance. This meant that many religious authorities concentrated their revivalist and reformist efforts in certain seemingly depoliticised textual and institutional spaces (communal magazines and newspapers, the home, mosques, madrasas and Sufi lodges). This partitioning process had its own critics among colonial-era Muslims who called for unity and labelled jurisprudential differences the cause of Muslim political decay. This diagnosis in turn reflected the reformist and revivalist trends of the twelfth/eighteenth century across Muslim-majority societies. Some scholars, however, resisted this diagnosis. For example, the Indo-Muslim historian Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857–1914) argued that jurisprudential differences arise out of various legitimate reasons, such as changing social circumstances and competing approaches to legal hermeneutics.