Islamicate

Islamicate is obfuscating and contentious in its usage in South Asian media studies. The term is an invitation for debate, as observed in an exchange between two film historians – one from India where Muslims are the largest minority and the other from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Pakistani historian conveyed her discomfort at the term used by Indian film scholars, taking the example of the film Mughal-e-Azam (1960): ‘Mughal-e-Azam is “Islamicate” ? I’d say it is Hinduicate’. Made over 1945-1960, the iconic Indian film carries the burden of a partition-induced alienation from Pakistan. ¹ Neither capturing the nuance nor the rigour of the polemic around the conceptualisation, yet the instance suggests that Islamicate’s relationship to the Islamic is as constitutive as its relationship with the non-Islamic. It was this spirit that guided Indian film scholars to borrow Marshal Hodgson’s neologism of the Islamicate as a ‘social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims’ (Hodgson, 1974), for what they saw as the Muslim ethos of Hindustani cinema. But one must recognise that Hodgson himself explicated Islamicate consequentially to Islamdom (Hodgson, 1974, p. 56): a complex of social relations where Muslims and their faith are recognised as socially dominant, and where non-Muslims have formed an integral, if subordinate, element. Thus, it is no wonder that the tribulations produced by the concept in Muslim dominant contexts are contrary to those in non-dominant ones.

The debate for South Asian screen studies was sparked by the publication of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009), which pursued the Islamicate culture by ‘focus(ing) on the expressive and social forms associated and identified with Muslim culture and their impact on the Hindustani cinema produced by the Bombay film industry’ (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009, p. 3). However, in the genres identified, Muslim as an adjective became the guiding basis of the taxonomy of Islamicate – the Muslim historical, the Muslim courtesan film, the classic Muslim social and the new wave Muslim social. There have been three interrelated objections to this explication of the Islamicate culture. The first is a matter of usage and knowledge production in that the work essentialises a form as syncretic as the Hindi cinema, by stereotyping and exoticising Muslims (Saeed, 2009; Taneja, 2010). The second was more specifically to do with Islamicate Culture’s insistence on complete genres where arguably any distinction between Islamicate and Islamic collapses thus missing out ‘on the nuances and range of the Islamicate’ (Taneja, 2010, p. 30). Finally, there is the inadequacy in terms of the disawoval of the political force of an Islamicate sensibility (Siddique, 2015; Taneja, 2010).

All these objections arise from the epistemic demands that the usage of Islamicate makes on the Islamic and to a lesser degree, the Muslim. The forerunner of Islamicate Cultures was an essay ‘Urdu, Awadh, the Tawaif: The Islamicate roots of Bombay cinema’, which acknowledged the slippery slope of the term but remained convincing in one claim: the Islamicate seems to correspond to the ‘association that producers and consumers of Hindi films might make between Urdu, ghazals, qawwalis, nawabs, tawaifs, begums on the one hand and some notion of Muslim culture on the other’ (Kesavan, 1994, p. 256). But it is also worth understanding the way Islamicate has been used in other national contexts, especially in Muslim-dominant ones. Writing of post-revolutionary cinema in Iran, where alignment with Khomeini’s theological vision was a prerequisite to make films, Hamid Naficy characterises the new filmmaking style as Islamicate. Here he distinguishes Islamic cinema – which is about the religion of Islam and its tenets, characters and stories – from an Islamicate cinema that is made in a predominantly Muslim country such as Iran. For Naficy, Islamicate captures the cultural confluence that underlay the Islamic state promulgations after the 1978 revolution and the political modernity of Iran. The carefully engineered purification of Iranian cinema was based on the specific traditions of Persia, associated not only with Islam but with other ethnoreligious people on the plateau (Naficy, 2012, p. 8). In neighbouring Pakistan, 30 years prior to the Iranian revolution, in the absence of a state-led imagination of what a Pakistani cinema might look like, filmmakers turned to pre-colonial vernacular and literary traditions, which spoke of religious syncretism in films such as Heer (1955), Sehti (1957), Sassi (1954), Dulla Bhatti (1956) and Nooran (1957). If we wish to closely follow the spirit in which Hodgson proposes this term and Naficy applies it, post-Partition cinema in Lahore is Islamicate.

It can be offered that an Islamicate cultural complex aspires to proximity to Islamic history and social practices in their regional and demographic variations and is the antithesis of any purified essence. The Islamicate form manifests the non-Muslims and Muslims living together. The tawaif (courtesan), on- and off-screen, was one such figure that stood for this confluence and compatibility. In India, this living together has a nostalgic, normative force despite the onslaught of religious majoritarianism in the last decade. What does the Hindi–Urdu screen offer us during this time? It offered us a North Indic sharif (upper-class) masculinity in the form of the Pakistani actor Fawad Khan on TV screens and in cinema between 2014 and 2016. But it also offered the brightly burning aspirations of the Indic ajlaf (lower-class) woman in the fluctuating old towns and inner bazaars of urban India – Bhopal (Lipstick under my Burkha, 2016), Moghalpora (Bobby Jasoos, 2015), Dharavi (Gully Boy, 2019), Chandni Chowk (Delhi-6, 2009), Araah (Anaarkali of Araah, 2017) and Haryana (Sultan, 2016). Eliciting equal parts admiration and equal parts unease among their diegetic affiliates as danger apa (‘dangerous elder sister’, Gully Boy, 2019) and shaitan ki khala (‘the devil’s aunt’, Bobby Jasoos, 2015), these characters defamiliarise the Islamicate ethos as only the proclivities and aesthetic remnants of the ruling elite. The idioms have moved away from the Lucknawi Urdu and towards Daccani, Bambaiya, Bhojpuri and Haryanavi inflections. Not solely a matter of princely arches and dilapidated havelis, but of co-existence in cramped neighbourhoods with shared walls and rooftops, often overlooking incandescent bazaars, these are the new tropes of a pushback against an invisibility and legislative exclusions mandated by the new political order in India. Conceivably the cinematic forerunners of the Shaheen Bagh women, ² I read these images on the Indian screen as an ethical project. Bruce Lawrence’s reminder that the Muslim presence reflected in Islamicate is both aesthetic taste and ethical project (Lawrence, 2015), allows us to better understand what separates the Islamicate lens as a gesture of postcolonial knowledge from an orientalising impulse.

If the term Islamicate, used in the spirit that Marshall Hodgson stipulated (1974), must remain at some distance from Islam for its double adjectival to function, then how distant should it be from Islamic? Shahab Ahmed characterises this dilemma as the unresolvable litmus test of identifying an Islam-concentrate present in undetermined quantities in the Islamic and the Islamicate (Ahmed, 2017). But what if we were to ask, how distant must Islamicate be to Islamdom? Can Islamicate function despite considerable spatial and temporal distance from Islamdom (Ahmed quibbles little with ‘Islamdom’ itself), as is the case with India? By way of answer, one could turn to the intangible proximity and aesthetic imagination available in the verses of the Kashmiri–American poet Fatima Asghar’s Halal (2018), who writes of an Uber ride involving two Muslim immigrants in the occident.

Is it possible that Islamicate lies in the eyes of the beholder? Ahmed’s refusal of the distinction between Islamic/Islamicate would suggest so. The danger, he suggests, lies in falling back on our preconceptions and predilections instead of a universally accepted criterion (Ahmed, 2017). ³ I see the very value of Islamicate in its indeterminacy but one involving an ethical commitment to absence or recessivity. Islamicate is a creative resource, a convivial claim and an associative cultural capacity, the kind that allows the Uber rider to summon up a minaret and recall a ritual. It is connected to Muslims, past and present, those that flourished and those that floundered. In its double adjectival, Islamicate is the cultural confluence and association of the non-Muslim with the Muslim across time and space. It is the relative prevalence and social power of Muslims, the state of Islamdom, that will determine the Islamicate in each context.