Book review: Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal focuses on the new institutions of religious learning for Muslim girls and women in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora to engage her readers with the contentious issues related to scriptural orientation of Muslim women’s lives. Her study of the madrasa education for Muslim women brings fresh perspectives to the existing debate on Muslim women’s position in the patriarchal ambit of Islam and possibilities of agency in the pious ethical training of Muslim women. It also raises new questions on the status of women’s religious education vis- à-vis the binary between tradition and modernity, the secular state and the privacy of religion, modern knowledge systems and the exclusivity of theological training. By emphasising on women’s madrasa education as responding to the multiple contexts relating to the state and the public in South Asia and South Asian diaspora, Sanyal posits herself in the existing scholarship on women’s madrasa education in different parts of South Asia, namely India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

By mapping the functioning of two madrasas, the Barelwi Jami’a Nur al-Shari’at in the small town of Shahjahanpur of West UP (Uttar Pradesh) and the online Al-Huda of Ahl-i Hadith orientation headquartered in Toronto, Canada, in a comparative framework, Sanyal broadens the scope of questions integral to this kind of research. That is: why South Asian Muslim girls and women choose religious education today and what they expect to accomplish by it. What familial, communitarian and societal changes can be marked as an effect of such choices and accomplishments? What kind of refashioning of the self as pious can be discerned from these processes? How can one relate the institutional preparation of the Muslim women’s pious self with the discourse of agency? While she focuses on the differences in religious teachings and the cultivation of adab (etiquette, proper behaviour sanctioned by the scriptures) based on different theological positions of Barelwi and Ahl-i Hadith schools, she indeed exposes a common gendered ‘capacity to aspire’ (p. 12) as she marks a common eschatological grounding of faith along with individual capacities for religious and social bearings among Muslim girls and women.

Sanyal’s work adds a very important chapter to the study of authority in Islamic reformist education and pedagogy (pp. 57, 125–126) by looking at women’s religious training as integral to the Muslim public sphere. She envisages a comparative framework by bringing the Indian and South Asian diasporic experiences together in the multiple contexts of theological orientations and spatial locations (Delhi, small towns in UP, Pakistan) and reorients the ideas of region and South Asia as spatial categories. By facilitating ethnographic work in India and virtual ethnography for Al-Huda, Sanyal opens up new methodological possibilities for the feminist ethnographer to engage with new ideas of the public that emerged online in connection to the in-person practices.

Here, Sanyal takes the goal of personal transformation of Muslim girls and women by adopting Islamic ethical ideal voluntarily as the central thread that unites her case studies otherwise disparate in their theological and also social orientations. She invokes the relevance of everyday lives of the ordinary people as expounded in cultural studies to engage with religious training and ethical life as the deliberative choice of women. Here, in the struggles inherent in the everyday life of women, Sanyal affirms the scholars who worked on the interface between everyday life and Muslim ethical self (pp. 19, 126) and brought the nuances of everyday in the processes of ethical formation.

Sanyal looks at agency as multiple-structured and realised in response to the multiple contexts that Muslim women experience in terms of laws, socio-religious sanctions, class and economic rungs. Sanyal adds the charge of the everyday to the existing feminist scholarship (pp. 18–19), putting layers and nuances to the studies that affirm the liberatory role of piety for Muslim women.

Drawing upon an impressive amount of ethnographic data, Sanyal not only discusses classroom pedagogy, but encompasses peer learning sessions, morning assembly, leadership and spiritual network, and performance of ritual rites both in the institutional and subjective realms. To contextualise the processes of pedagogy, she discusses the location and history of the Jami’a Nur madrasa and places it in the web of familial and Sufi connections, and reads the contemporary genealogical history and politics of Ahmad Raza Khan, the founder of the Barelwi order. She explores the life stories of individual students to see how the madrasa becomes a new locus of affective ties reformulating the ideas of kinship where new kinds of exchanges and deliberations with respect to the familial ties in the heterosexual family structures are marked.

While women’s religious experiences in Sanyal’s study are varied across social class, rural–urban placement, and local–global positions, she emphasises on the shared moral universe around the concepts of iman (faith), ahkam (Islamic legal rulings), adab and da’wa (Islamic mission) across the theologically competitive Barelwi and Ahl-i Hadith positions. Significantly, she highlights the commonalities between Barelwis and Deobandis/Tablighis by comparing their respective madrasa syllabi. Sanyal places the logic of such commonalities across inter- and intra-Islamic theological differences, so overtly articulated in the realisation and enactment of adab, within the larger context of minority discourse that she defines, following Butler, as a condition of precarity.

She comprehends the precarity in the Indian context in the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party to form a government at the Centre in 2014 and winning recent state elections, including that of UP, that translated into anxieties across the Muslim groups in India. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2011 ushered in many newer forms of precarity in the national and the global level that Sanyal marks to discuss women’s madrasa education as the site of women’s ‘willingness to be taught’ (p. 357).

On a transnational level, in the context of eruption of extremist Islamicist groups, the functioning of Al-Huda requires an alternative study to validate diasporic women’s everyday pious life as a domain of choice to separate such moral trainings from the radical interpretations of Islam.