Journey
Islamic learning — Deoband, Farangi Mahal, Nadwa, Aligarh
Six institutions and six different answers to the same question after 1857: what should a Muslim be taught, in which language, and how much of the coloniser's knowledge should be let in. Deoband, Aligarh and Nadwa were founded within thirty years of each other and disagreed with each other completely.
Stops (6)
- Madrasa-i Rahimiyya, Delhi · Madrasa-i Rahīmiyya — the eighteenth-century seed
Shah Waliullah's father founded it in Delhi, and Waliullah himself translated the Qur'an into Persian there against considerable objection, on the argument that people should be able to read it. The ulama it trained launched the 1857 resistance in north India, and both Deoband and the reformist movements descend from its teaching.
- Farangi Mahal, Lucknow · Farangi Mahal — a house, not a college
A Lucknow mansion confiscated from a French merchant and granted to a scholarly family by Aurangzeb in 1695. What came out of it was the Dars-i Nizāmi, the curriculum that has shaped South Asian madrasa teaching ever since — heavy on logic, grammar and jurisprudence, taught by a household rather than an institution.
- Darul Uloom Deoband · Deoband — separation, 1866
Founded nine years after the revolt by ulama from the Rahīmiyya tradition, deliberately without state funding, on a subscription model copied from British colleges and a curriculum that excluded English and modern science. It became the most influential seminary in the Muslim world after al-Azhar, with thousands of affiliates.
- Aligarh · Aligarh — engagement, 1875
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College on the exactly opposite premise to Deoband's: that Indian Muslims had to take up English and modern science or be left behind, without abandoning Islam. It became Aligarh Muslim University, and the political class of Muslim India came out of it.
- Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama · Nadwatul Ulama — the attempt to reconcile, 1898
Founded in Lucknow expressly to bridge Deoband and Aligarh: classical Islamic learning with modern subjects and Arabic taught as a living language rather than only for texts. It has produced major Arabic scholars and has never fully escaped the argument it was created to settle.
- Rampur Raza Library · Rampur Raza Library — what was kept
The Nawab of Rampur's collection: some seventeen thousand manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Turkish and Urdu, including a Qur'an attributed to the seventh century and Mughal albums. Rampur took in Delhi's scholars and books after 1857, so the library is partly the wreckage of the old capital reassembled in a small state.