‘There is an increasing number of ulema today who are writing on such social issues, but the problem is that few of them can write in any language other than Urdu. Yet, the Maulana laments that few middle-class Muslims take any interest in doing so, leaving this task largely to the ulema.
In this regard, Muslim writers have a major role to play in reaching out to non-Muslims to explain their position’. ‘Today, there is so much propaganda against Islam and Muslims in the media. The Hindutva propaganda against Muslims needs to be effectively countered by Muslim writers’, the Maulana explains.
‘Our Hindu countrymen need to be reminded of this important role of Muslims in the freedom of the country. To highlight this I’ve published a book recounting the numerous ulema who participated in the uprising of 1857 against the British, and another one on a charismatic alim, Maulana Fazl Haq Khairabadi, who was deported to the Andaman islands by the British for his role in the 1857 revolt’. ‘Many non-Muslims and even many Muslims’, Misbahi goes on, ‘do not know anything about the role of the Muslims in India’s freedom struggle. A third deals with the history of the Babri Masjid, countering Hindutva arguments about the case’. Another book deals with the history and ideology of Hindutva, there being an extreme paucity of writings in Urdu on the subject. ‘One book of mine, published in both Hindi and Urdu, deals with certain verses of the Quran which Hindutva ideologues misinterpret to argue that Islam calls for war against all non-Muslims. Indicating the shift to a more socially engaged and relevant form of literature that the Dar ul-Qalam sees itself as promoting, some of these books aim to promote better relations between Muslims and Hindus. Till date, Dar ul-Qalam has produced 15 books, all written by Maulana Misbahi himself. ‘Dar ul-Qalam aims at engaging in new forms of research and producing socially relevant literature that departs from the petty squabbling and nit-picking so characteristic of much of the existing literature’, Misbahi explains. In 1991, he established the Dar ul-Qalam in New Delhi, a research centre that aims at producing a genre of literature in marked contrast to the standard Barelvi polemical writings. In 1984, he shifted to Delhi, where he launched a monthly magazine, Kanzul Iman, and wrote several books and articles for various Indian and Pakistani Urdu papers. After completing a course in Arabic literature at the Nadwa, Misbahi returned to the Jamiat ul-Ashrafia, where he taught Arabic for a little less than a decade. He is one of the very few Barelvis to have taken admission in the Nadwat ul-Ulama madrasa in Lucknow, which traditional Barelvis see as representing a ‘Wahhabi’ form of Islam that it shares with the major rivals of the Barelvis, the Deobandis. From then on, his career has been quite atypical of most Barelvi ulema. Born in 1953 in a village in Azamgarh district in eastern Uttar Pradesh, he received a traditional religious education at the apex Barelvi madrasa in India, the Jamiat ul-Ashrafiya in Azamgarh, graduating in 1970. For their part, few scholars writing on the Indian Muslims have cared to seriously explore the Barelvi tradition, seeing it as a rapidly declining trend in the face of the apparent decline of the Sufi cults.įifty-five year old Maulana Yasin Akhtar Misbahi is a leading Indian Barelvi scholar. Consequently, many other Muslims see the Barelvis as ‘backward’, ‘sectarian’, ‘superstitious’ and ‘quarrelsome’.
Much Barelvi scholarship is devoted to rebutting the claims of other Muslim groups, dismissing them as ‘deviant’ and ‘un-Islamic’. Barelvi ulema have, by and large, been loath to work with ulema of other Muslim groups, seeing many of these as ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘anti-Islam’. In contrast to various South Asian reformist Islamic groups and movements, the Barelvi tradition is loosely organized, lacking the strong network of institutions of other Muslim groupings.
A significant number of South Asian Muslims are associated with what can be loosely defined as the Barelvi tradition, named after the late nineteenth century defender of the cults of the Sufi shrines Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi.
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