ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two very different, yet complementary ways that scholars of the Deoband movement conceptualized India and Islam’s place within it. It does so by way of the two most influential scholars of that movement, Husain Ahmad Madani (1879–1957) and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (1863–1943). Madani saw India through the prism of the anticolonial struggles with which he was intimately involved. With reference to prophetic history, he defended Islam as a primordially “Indian” religion. Thanvi, by contrast, saw Islam’s place in India primarily as a site of reform, and was ambivalent towards features of Islam in India, especially in Sufi contexts, at once praising the saintly devotional traditions in which they originated and critiquing how those practices, in his view, muddied the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim. More broadly, in terms of the overall theme of this volume, the chapter shows how scholars of a traditionalist Muslim movement planted Indian roots even as they maintained deep, affective relations with the birthplace of Islam.
