1978/02/01 by Barbara Metcalf, Barbara D. Metcalf
Social Sciences · #Education and Islamic Studies #Religious Education and Schools #Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
paper · doi:10.1017/s0026749x00008179
A Recent conference of specialists on the study of Muslims in South Asia identified as one of the neglected areas of their field the study of traditional religious institutions in the modern period. Such institutions as the sufi orders, the religious schools, and the system of pious endowments have been treated, if at all, only in their relation to political developments. Thus the leading theological academy of modern India, the Dār ul-'Ulūm of Deoband, has been studied because many of its ulama played an important role in nationalist politics in India and opposed the foundation of Pakistan. That motive for study has seriously distorted the treatment of the nineteenth-century history of the school, endowing it with an anti-British and revolutionary character when, in fact, the school's concerns were totally a-political. An investigation of the early history of the school suggests many other significant historical themes, notably an important incipient trend toward a formal bureaucratization of the ulama and their institutions. Studies of religious institutions outside India such as Gilsenan's study of the Hamidiya Shadhiliya order in modern Egypt and Roff's study of the Majlis Ugama in Malaysia4 suggest that successful functioning in the modern period has required such a transformation in organizational structure. This article describes the organization of Deoband in its initial decades.