A tradition of nearly fourteen centuries

A sultanate ruled from Delhi from the early thirteenth century, but within two hundred years that authority had broken apart. Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, Jaunpur and Kashmir became courts in their own right, and in the south the Bahmani sultanate, founded in 1347, gave way to five successor states across the Deccan.

Each patronised its own building, its own scholarship and its own language of rule, which is why the architecture never resolves into a single style. The congregational mosque at Pandua in Bengal is brick and basalt because Bengal built in brick. The mosque at Kozhikode is timber under tiled roofs because Malabar built that way, and because the men who paid for it were merchants of the Arabian Sea rather than soldiers from the north.

The Mughals, from 1526, laid an imperial framework over this without erasing what lay beneath it. The Deccan sultanates held their own courts into the seventeenth century, and Kashmir, Bengal and the Malabar coast kept their own idioms of building, language and law for far longer.

There is, in other words, no single Indian Islam waiting to be described, because there was never a single centre producing one. That is a fact about the sources rather than a piece of rhetoric, and it sets the terms on which the Institute reads them.

Maritime routes linked Gujarat, Konkan and Malabar with the ports of Arabia, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and along them moved scholars, pilgrims, merchants and Sufis, carrying texts and ideas with them.

India also became a major centre of the Persianate world. Exchange with Iran and other Persian-speaking regions shaped Indian scholarship, literature, governance and religious life, and India in turn produced work that was read far beyond its shores. Amir Khusrau never left Delhi; the wider Persian-speaking world came to know him by the name he gave himself, Tuti-i Hind, the Parrot of India.

Indian scholars kept close connections with Mecca and Medina. Shah Waliullah of Delhi studied in the Hijaz, and that period shaped the scholarship he built on his return. Indian Sufi lodges operated across the Ottoman world, in Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus and Istanbul. The Nizam of Hyderabad established a charitable endowment in Mecca to house pilgrims from Hyderabad State, one of several Indian rulers who held property and funded religious and charitable work in the Mecca–Medina region.

Mughal authority was already a formality when the rising of 1857 ended it. The last emperor was tried and exiled, and rule passed to the British Crown. What followed was not the end of Islamic learning in India but its reorganisation, on new institutional lines and in a new language.

Two foundations of those years are routinely set against each other, and the opposition is largely false. A seminary opened at Deoband in 1866; a school opened at Aligarh in 1875 and became the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College two years later. Both answered the same problem, the collapse of the courtly patronage that had paid for Muslim learning, and both answered it with the same new machinery: classrooms and a timetable, a fixed and pruned curriculum, examinations and prizes, salaried teachers holding defined offices, a printing press. Deoband was funded by annual pledges from subscribers rather than by an endowment or a ruler’s grant — a form chosen precisely so that no government could withdraw it. Its bureaucratic shape resembled the colonial colleges of the day more than it resembled the older madrasa.

What divided them was a judgement about the colonial state and about English. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s project sought accommodation: English, the Western sciences, an education that led into government service. Deoband kept its distance from the state and taught a revised Dars-i Nizami, with Urdu as the language of instruction and of the fatwas and textbooks it printed. Neither was the religious party and neither the modern one. Sayyid Ahmad wrote his own commentary on the Qur’an; the madrasa at Deoband was an innovation rather than a survival. The political division now read backwards into their founding — Deoband’s scholars forming the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind in 1919 and arguing for a composite nationalism, Aligarh becoming associated with the Muslim League — belongs to the twentieth century and not to the 1860s.

The Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ, formed at Kanpur in 1893 and established at Lucknow in 1898, set out to hold both at once: the seminary’s learning with modern subjects, mathematics and an English department beside the classical syllabus. All three survive, and the disagreements between them are still live.

Print changed the scale more than any of them. Lithographic presses — Naval Kishore’s at Lucknow, from 1858, among the largest — put fatwas, textbooks, translations, commentaries and polemic into more hands than scholarly transmission ever had, and made a reading public out of an audience that had listened.

Partition in 1947 divided the community as it divided the territory.