In the summer of 2001 a major controversy eruptedfollowing a Jewish Chronicle report(18 May 2001) that the Honorary Officers andExecutive Committee of the Board of Deputies ofBritish Jews had decided to offer for sale, atMessrs Christie's auction rooms in London, ahitherto unpublished work by the nineteenth-centuryexplorer, writer and diplomat Sir Richard FrancisBurton. In the event, and in the glare of worldwidemedia attention, the reserve price of £150,000 wasnot reached (6 June 2001). The lot – one of the veryfew Burton manuscripts still in private hands – wastherefore withdrawn and returned, amidst yet furthercontroversy, to the safe-keeping of the Board. Inthis article we trace the history of this work fromits creation in the early 1870s, and offer somethoughts on its contemporary significance.

This article considers two well-known texts that dealwith questions of education and appropriate conductfor respectable Muslims in colonial India. The textsunder scrutiny are Mirat al-Arus(The Bride's Mirror), and theTaubat-al-Nasuh (Repentance ofNasuh), completed in 1867–68 and 1873 respectively.The author was a Muslim publicist and a prolificwriter who published numerous books in diversegenres. Nazir Ahmed (1830–1912) came from a familyof distinguished maulavis andmuftis of Bijnor (in the state ofUttar Pradesh) and Delhi. His father, a teacher in asmall town near Bijnor, taught him Persian andArabic. In 1846, Nazir Ahmad enrolled at the DelhiCollege and studied there till 1853. He began hiscareer as a maulavi in Arabic, butsoon (in 1856) became a deputy inspector of schoolsin the Department of Public Instruction. Later,after he had produced a superb translation of theIndian Penal Code in Urdu, he was nominated for theRevenue Service. He was posted as deputy collectorin what was then called the North-West Provinces(i.e. modern U.P.), whence the name ‘Diptee (Deputy)Nazir Ahmad’ by which he is popularly known.

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir WilliamSleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holymen who still formed an important part of Indiansociety in the nineteenth century. Reflecting hiswritings on the suppression of the Thugs that wouldmake him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There ishardly any species of crime that is not throughoutIndia perpetrated by men in the disguise of thesereligious mendicants; and almost all such mendicantsare really men in disguise”.1 None of these holymen were considered more dubious – moresuperstitious and reactionary – than the dervishesand faqīrs. In popular Indian usagethe terms darwīsh andfaqīr referred to a class ofMuslim holy men who were considered to possess arange of miraculous powers, powers which served todemonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turnto underwrite their considerable authority.2 Formany British officials, it was this authority thatstood at the heart of what they saw as thefaqīr problem. As the rumoursthat surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of thenineteenth century demonstrate,faqīr s were seen as theperpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition.Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than inthe circles of India's colonial armies, which morethan any other aspect of colonial society relied onloyalty to a formalised and rational chain ofcommand. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) ofthese fears, the commanders of the various armiesunder British command in India were anxious todemonstrate their respect for the autonomy of thereligious rights of the Indian soldier. Through thecourse of the nineteenth and early twentiethcentury, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indiansoldier fell in between this tension of covertsuspicion and official respect, and in differentways the careers of a series of Muslim holy menattached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by thistension. Over the following pages, this essayexamines the careers of three faqīrs connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the armyunder British command in the nominally independentprincely state of Hyderabad in South India, betterknown as the Nizam's State. Looking out from thisprincely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, theessay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts inUrdu to begin to reconstruct the religious historyof the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were,and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in thecolonial armies of the British Empire.3

The commitment of North-West Frontier Province Pakhtunreligious politics towards the quest for a societyand state governed by religious leaders was directedthrough the colonial period, and into the nationalperiod, predominantly by the ulamaknown as Deobandis. These ulamatook their title from the madrasaDarul Ulum Deoband in the United Provinces innorth-India and came to prominence throughchampioning Muslim interests in colonial NWFP. Afterthe partition of the Indian subcontinent and thecreation of Pakistan in 1947, the United Provincesremained in India, separating Pakistani scholarstrained in Deoband from Indian Deobandi theologians,and indeed from the school itself. But theseulama continued to callthemselves Deobandis and were central to thesuccessful demand for the constitutional declarationof Pakistan as an Islamic state; and brought Islamto bear on national and provincial legislation frompositions in parliament. Increasingly well-organisedand well-funded, NWFP Deobandiulama establishedmadrasas and mosques in theprovince, strengthening the preserve of religion andtheir own authority. When the Afghan resistance tothe Soviet occupation began in 1978, a section ofthe resistance organisation working in exile inPeshawar gravitated towards these Deobandiinstitutions, drawing the Deobandiulama of the NWFP into thejihad. Sustaining links to theAfghan fighters even after the withdrawal of theSoviets, the NWFP Deobandis contributed to andencouraged the emerging organisation of the Taliban,becoming champions of their reactionary brand ofIslam.

Since the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate underwent aform of apotheosis after his death, it is notsurprising that a hagiographic tradition was quickto establish itself. This tradition attributedsuperhuman qualities to Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616),and its lingering influence is still to be seen. Hisadmirers paid particular attention to his supposedbookishness, the object being to demonstrate thathis sinological learning rendered him fit to ruleaccording to the Chinese construction of the desiredattributes of a ruler. For those who came later,this bookishness served in retrospect to mark himout from his successors, but for his contemporariesit detached questions of legitimacy and fitness torule from his recent successes on the battlefieldand it defined fitness to rule in accordance withthe sinological leanings of the new samuraiélite.