Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

402 Pages·2020·13.449 MB·English

by  Usha Sanyal

SCHOLARS OF FAITH

SCHOLARS OF FAITH
South Asian Muslim Women and
the Embodiment of Religious
Knowledge
USHA SANYAL
1
1

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ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-012080-1
ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-012080-0
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909989-4
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Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020
To
my mother, Vina Sanyal,
in loving memory
and to
all the Muslim girls and women
who are the subjects of this book
FIGURES AND TABLES
Figures
1.1 Female literacy in UP versus the rest of India 62
1.2 Male literacy in UP versus the rest of India 63
1.3 Girls’ hostel built around an open square,
Jami‘at al-Salehat 66
1.4 New classroom building, Jami‘at al-Salehat 66
1.5 Kindergarten students, Jami‘at al-Salehat 67
2.1 Shahjahanpur district map 101
2.2 Abbreviated genealogical tree of Ahmad Raza Khan
and his descendants 106
3.1 Inside of the madrasa (old location), showing
classrooms leading off a courtyard and stairs
(June 2012) 131
3.2 Students in one of the classrooms of the old building,
reviewing their lessons for exams 134
3.3 Students listening to a senior student relate a Hadith
during morning assembly 136
4.1 Madrasa students performing morning exercises 176
4.2 Day students park their bicycles in the school
courtyard during school hours 190
x Figures and Tables
4.3 Computer lab at the Islamic public school 195
8.1 Entrance to Al-Huda Institute, Mississauga, Canada 321
8.2 Classroom in Al-Huda Institute, Mississauga, Canada 322
Tables
A1.1a Syllabus of Madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur,
‘Alima Level (June 2013) 81
A1.1b Syllabus of Madrasa Jami‘at al-Salehat, Rampur,
Fazila Level (June 2013) 85
A1.2 Madrasatul Niswan, Delhi (2003) 87
A3.1 List of classes and subjects taught at Jami‘a Nur
al-Shari‘at (June 2012) 163
A8.1 Al-Huda online courses, 2011–13 335
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project has been many years in the making. It began modestly
when, in 2009, I fi rst heard of Al-Huda online classes and decided
to register as a student. I was not teaching at the time, had a high
schooler and a middle schooler at home, and relished the idea of
reading and studying the Qur’an with knowledgeable teachers. Thus
began my four-year association as a student with Al-Huda. Many years
later, in 2015, I published a paper about my ‘virtual ethnography’, a
modifi ed version of which appears as Chapter 6 in this volume. *
The project grew thanks in large part to the encouragement
of Sandria Freitag and David Gilmartin of North Carolina State
University, USA. At their invitation, I attended a monthly South Asia
colloquium in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina from 2010
to 2017. Simultaneously, my receipt of an American Institute of Indian
Studies (AIIS) Senior Short-Term Research Fellowship in 2012–13
gave my project its current comparative character. My warm thanks to
Sandy and David for their intellectual inspiration and support, to the
many participants of the colloquia for feedback on individual papers
and chapters, and to the AIIS for the grant that allowed me to begin
fi eldwork at the madrasa in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India, in
* Republished with permission of Brill Academic Publishers from:
Usha Sanyal. 2015. ‘Al-Huda International: How Muslim Women Empower
Themselves through Online Study of the Qur’an’. Hawwa: Journal of Women
of the Middle East and the Islamic World 13(3): 440–60. Permission conveyed
through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
xii Acknowledgements
2012. Since then, I have made return visits to the madrasa once a year
for short periods of a week or a few days each time. These have given
me a longitudinal picture of its growth and expansion over time, and
deepened my relationships with the director, his core network of
administrators, and a small number of teachers.
In India, I must thank the students, administrators, and teachers
of the madrasa for their willingness to talk to me and allow me to
ask probing questions. Without their cooperation, the research for
the fi rst part of this book would not have been possible. I have pro-
tected the teachers’ and students’ identities by using pseudonyms. My
thanks as well to the late Dr Sartaj Razvi and his family, especially
Aiman, of Bareilly and Delhi, who helped me in innumerable ways
throughout this research. Dr Sartaj and his wife fi rst hosted me in
Bareilly in the 1980s when I was researching the history of the Ahl-i
Sunnat/Barelwi movement for my PhD. Years later, they hosted
me on numerous occasions in connection with the current project.
Furthermore, it was thanks to Dr Sartaj that I was able to visit Jami‘at
al-Salehat, the Jama‘at-i Islami girls’ madrasa in Rampur, in 2013.
Sadly, Dr Sartaj passed away on 31 March 2019, after the manuscript
had been submitted for publication.
In Delhi, I have also received invaluable help from Sumbul Farah,
who completed her PhD thesis while I was working on this book and,
in 2014, collaborated with me on the research that forms the basis for
Chapter 5. She and I have published our fi ndings in M odern Asian
Studies (2019). I also owe a great debt to my friend and mentor, Roma
Chatterji of the Delhi School of Economics, for her advice on new
ways of thinking about the issues raised by the study. It was her idea
that I do the ‘classroom ethnography’ that forms part of Chapter 4. In
Delhi, I must thank Rajib and Kummi Sen, who provided me with a
home away from home during my annual visits there. In Bengaluru, I
thank my hosts Madhulika and Anil Malpani for their warm hospital-
ity and generosity in 2013. In the US, Rupa Bose has helped me with
my website and given me invaluable hands-on advice of a practical
kind from one who is a published science-fi ction writer and a poet.
I thank Al-Huda International for their permission to do the virtual
ethnography that constitutes the second part of this work. I was in
periodic touch with Ms Taimiyyah Zubair, who coordinates much of
the teaching at the Al-Huda Institute in Mississauga, Canada. She
Acknowledgements xiii
and I met one-on-one on two occasions (in 2012 and 2014), and I sat
in on a few of her and other Al-Huda teachers’ classes at Mississauga.
It was her taped lectures on ‘word-for-word’ translation and analysis
that online students like myself listened to during the four years of
the course we took. I regard her, thus, as my teacher. As she is one
of Dr Farhat Hashmi’s daughters, her willingness to speak with me
and read draft chapters that I sent her in the interests of complete
transparency, have been invaluable. In addition, I learned much from
Ms Shazia Nawaz of the Testing Center outside Dallas, Texas, during
a visit there in 2014. Two onsite visits to Bengaluru, India, in 2012 and
2013, gave me a better sense of the variety and vibrancy of Al-Huda
classes which are run by former Al-Huda students, using Dr Hashmi’s
taped lectures as a centrepiece. Finally, I thank fellow students of the
class I was in, especially Fauzia Qureshi, who answered a lengthy
questionnaire and was willing to answer other questions at all times.
I have presented diff erent parts of this work at the South Asia
Conference in Madison, the Association of Asian Studies Conference
in Seattle, as well as in smaller conferences in Philadelphia, Paris,
Princeton, Toronto, and elsewhere. The feedback from participants
of these conferences has been of immense help to me, especially as I
have been an ‘independent’ scholar for many years. I am also grateful
to my colleague Paige Rawson at Wingate University, North Carolina,
USA, for intellectually stimulating conversations and help with femi-
nist theory. Most of all, I would like to thank those who read parts of the
manuscript at various points along the way: Sumbul Farah, Sandria
Freitag, David Gilmartin, Barbara Metcalf, Ramya Sreenivasan, Laurel
Steele, Sylvia Vatuk, and Pnina Werbner. Muhammad Qasim Zaman
read the fi nal draft in its entirety with great attention to detail. My
heartfelt thanks to him for his generosity of time and for making sug-
gestions which guided me in my revisions of the manuscript. I am
also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript who
responded to the request by Oxford University Press, India, for peer
reviews. I have tried to the best of my ability to respond to their sug-
gestions. My sincere thanks to the editorial team at Oxford University
Press, who edited the manuscript with scrupulous attention to detail
and raised questions which have made for a much better book.
At home, I have to thank my dear friends Suzanne, Nelly, Jane,
Lucie, and Helen for moral support and questions about my project at