Decolonizing the Study of Sufism in India: An Examination of a British Colonial Text

This paper explores the position of Sufism in Qanoon-e-Islam, or the Customs of the Moosulmans of India, an 1832 text authored by Ja’far Sharif, an Indian Muslim, under the direction of G. A. Herklots, a Dutch Surgeon in the East India Company. The text was written in Hindustani and, in the same year, translated by Herklots into English. The Hindustani original is now extinct, and the English translation is the only available version. In 1921, a revised edition was published by William Crooke, in which significant changes were made to reflect the changing norms of the twentieth century.

The text is significant because it is one of the only colonial texts of its time to focus solely on Indian Muslim practices and ritual, rather than Islamic history, politics, or doctrine. Qanoon-e-Islam was widely cited as a reference for Muslim practices and is, in some cases, cited to this day. Qanoon-e-Islam was both an exceptional text in its focus on practices but also a widely read text, which is why it merits close study.

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Qanoon-e-Islam as a key node in a new process of knowledge production about Islamic practices in India. I analyze Qanoon-e-Islam not only as a colonial project that sought to extract and manage information about Islam but as a new mode of knowledge production in which  Islamic practices in India are constructed as a coherent, empirical object of study.

In this paper, I turn to the specific position of Sufism in the text. Firstly, the term “Sufi” is never used in the body of the original 1832 text, and there is only one reference to “tusuwwoof” (Sufism). However, the translator, Herklots, adds scattered references to “soofees” in the footnotes. Herklots cites Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, an English woman married to a Muslim Indian man in Lucknow. In 1832, she also published a similar project titled Observations on the Mussulmauns Of India, in which she uses the term “soofie” liberally and devotes an entire section to “the Soofies.” Thus, in contrast, the absence of an explicit conversation on Sufism in Sharif’s writing is noteworthy.

Sharif describes many practices that would ostensibly be categorized as Sufism, such as how to become a “moreed” (disciple), the two classes of “fuqeers” (ascetics) –  those with law and without law – and the importance of “durgah” (shrine) visitation, among many other topics. However, he not only never uses the term Sufi, but he also does not group these practices together in the organizational structure of the text. References to apparently Sufi practices are spread throughout and are not distinguished from any other form of Islamic practices.

This structure differs from the 1921 revised edition, in which the editor, Crooke, adds a chapter heading “Sufi Mysticism” and earmarks off practices that he considers part of Sufism. He also inserts historical context on Sufism, referencing its origins and development outside the Indian subcontinent.

I situate Qanoon-e-Islam within the emerging field of anthropology, which would become a fully professionalized discipline at the end of the twentieth century. Thus, I see the original 1832 edition of Qanoon-e-Islam as a proto-anthropological project, which is fully brought into the realm of anthropological discourse in the 1921 edition (with new references to anthropologists, such as James George Frazer and E. B. Tylor). Additionally, the concept of the “secular” was in the process of becoming under the British colonial project in the nineteenth century.

This paper evaluates Qanoon-e-Islam along two approaches. The first approach understands Qanoon-e-Islam as an exercise in bringing Islamic practice into the domain of this world, separated from theology, which is considered the realm of the imaginary. Thus, Islamic practices become a tangible object of study in the grid of homogenous space and time. They are something that can be empirically observed and recorded. In short, they are knowable. Secularity presumes that a third-party standpoint (i.e., the anthropological gaze) is capable of observing and interpreting Islamic rituals. What does this secular mode of knowledge about Islamic practice entail for Sufism, for which aspects are inherently unknowable outside of a Sufi order and which resist secular translation? 

The second approach leans into the absence of explicit Sufi terminology in the original edition. How does this choice made by an Indian Muslim writer, which seems counter to prevailing colonial knowledge about Islam at the time, encourage us to rethink lived understandings of Sufism in early nineteenth-century India? How does this absence point us to reconsider the relationship between Sufism and practice and how Sufism emerges as a category of anthropological study? How does Sufism come to be situated as a subcategory of Islam as Islam is developing in Western thought as a “World Religion”?

Overall, this paper seeks to provide a step towards decolonizing the study of Sufism. By analyzing colonial documents that were co-created by European Orientalists and Indian Muslims, we can understand what conditions of knowledge were being created about Muslims. Ultimately, the construction of Sufi practice as an anthropological object of study, as initiated through Qanoon-e-Islam, produces inherent contradictions as Sufism is forced to cohere in the secular grid of intelligibility. This has significant implications for understanding the role of Sufism within broader Islamic thought and practice.