This panel examines the intellectual, devotional, and political dimensions of the Barelvi maslak (orientation) through case studies from colonial India and contemporary India and Pakistan using historical and anthropological approaches. It offers a fresh perspective on the legal thought of Ahmad Raza Khan (1856-1921) while tracing the trajectories Barelvism has taken in postcolonial South Asia. Taken together, the papers challenge binary frameworks often used to describe intra-Sunni debates in the region. Approaches that frame these debates as conflicts between law and Sufism, elite and popular religion, doctrine and ritual practice, or orthodox and heterodox Islam are analytically limiting and risk reproducing broader moral binaries of good and bad Muslims (Tareen 2020; Mamdani 2004). Such frameworks obscure the historical depth of the Barelvi tradition. Instead, this panel reads legal and theological discourses alongside affective and sensorial dimensions of piety, demonstrating that these domains are mutually constitutive rather than opposed.
Scholarship on Sufism in South Asia often oscillates between analyses of metaphysics and studies of lived devotional practices. This paper aims to merge the two approaches by looking at theoretical and practical Sufism through a close analysis of four legal treatises written by Ahmad Raza Khan (1856-1921), the founder of the Barelvi movement in colonial India. I argue that this portrays Sufism as a legally regulated theological tradition capable of engaging with modern debates.
In these texts, Khan not only justifies theoretical Sufism when it was challenged by Muslim reformists and modernists alike. He also draws legal boundaries around impermissible Sufi practices, such as women’s visitation to shrines and the usage of musical instruments in Sufi gatherings under the pretext of Sufi reform. By engaging with scholarly and ordinary publics simultaneously, Khan’s Urdu fatwas and their Arabic and Persian citations show his scholarly mastery in addition to their vernacular accessibility.
This paper studies contemporary Eid-i Milad celebrations in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. Focusing on public processions and domestic gatherings, it examines how Prophetic devotion is performed, embodied, and collectively authorized beyond scholarly, textual arenas.
The commemoration of the Prophet’s birth has long been a site of intra-Muslim polemic among competing Sunni maslak (orientations). Situating contemporary celebrations against this history, it argues that Eid-i Milad in Bareilly materializes the theological and legal reasoning articulated by Ahmad Raza Khan and his followers in defence of the practice. For practitioners, the city is a “fortress” of Prophetic devotion, marked by the legacy of the Barelvi tradition. Ritual practice here does not merely express doctrine but renders it sensorial, affective, and spatial. At the same time, devotees also contend with a crackdown on Muslim public devotion by an increasingly majoritarian state.
In Bareilly, devotion is not only theorised but claimed and contested in public space.
This paper examines how a century-old hagiographic tradition centered on the figure of the Ghazi, an ordinary man who achieves extraordinary fame as a slayer of blasphemers, has been revitalized by the Tehrik Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a new Barelvi movement that calls on ordinary people to reclaim their dignity by taking violent action against those deemed blasphemers. It argues that Ghazi narratives provide an ideological medium through which ordinary believers can imagine achieving recognition as protectors of the Prophet’s honor. The paper traces the collective production of these narratives from the 1920s to the present following the killing of a Hindu publisher accused of blasphemy by a young Muslim man named Ilmuddin. In reconstructing him as a saint, Ilmuddin’s hagiographers created a narrative template in which an otherwise unremarkable man attains the highest form of social and divine recognition by being chosen, almost randomly, as God’s instrument for avenging blasphemers.
| Nauman Faizi | nauman.faizi@lums.edu.pk | View |