InshaAllah, I will be wrapping up the few more select excerpts from this book and then provide my thoughts and rationale in sharing these snippets.

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‘Of bigoted Mussalman’, Bara Banki’s settlement officer conceded, “I have little personal knowledge; these men either stay at their own houses or keep their bigotry to themselves in government service’ [1] This simple observation says a lot about Awadh’s qasba life in the second half of the nineteenth century.

A devout Muslim told Meer Hasan Ali about the strong similarities between his community and the Hindu population: “the out-of-door celebrations of marriage festivals, for instance, which are so nearly resembling each other, in the same classes of society, that scarcely any difference can be discovered by the common observer” More than a century later, a leading scholar at Lucknow’s Nadwat al-ulama opined that social life of India’s Muslims did not present any marked difference from the cultural norms and pattern around them. Distinctive features, customs, and manners, too, like those of their local compatriots, marked their culture [2]

In other words, besides differences and distinctions there were also relationships and interactions.

Today, the history of Islam in South Asia – the writing of which has always been peculiarly susceptible to the climate of current politics – demands a serious intellectual reassessment. The historian Aziz Ahmed (1913-1978) refers to ‘the alternating and simultaneous process of mutual attraction and repulsions’ in medieval Indian society. Steering clear of such generalizations, I suggest that the qasbas predisposed ashraf or families comprising the gentry to the rational and ethical dimensions of Islam, to the virtues of charity, tolerance, generosity, good neighbourly conduct, and to those elements of piety that go into the making of the Perfect Man or Insan -e Kamil. Without denying the existence of negative critiques or the wide gap between ideals and reality, I draw attention to one Weltanschauung of significance, the rationalist and humanist construction of Islam. To be educated in the second half of the nineteenth century meant to be steeped in those values, and promised signity and advancement in life. Hence the comment that, presumably, alludes to such people, especially the aspiring intellectuals: “The Mussalamans of Oudh cannot, as a body, be accused of bigotry or intolerance” [3] This is corroborated by Meer Hasan Ali’s experience in Lucknow, of being received without prejudice, and allowed to observe her European habits and Christian faith. [4] Some, if not all, the men who figure in her narrative thus became typical carriers of moral and ethical piety or akhuwat, in the qasbas.

Excerpted from “Pluralism to Seperatism Qasbas in Colonial Awadh”
Mushirul Hasan – Oxford University Press

[1] Chamier, Report, p51
[2] S.A.H.A Nadwi The Masalman (Luikcnow 1977) p41
[3] Irwin Garden of India, p 38
[4] Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India Vol 2. p 424