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Nationalist Spirits of Islamic Law after World War I: An Arab-Indian Battle of Fatwas over Alcohol, Purity, and Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2020

Leor Halevi
Leor Halevi*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
*
leor.halevi@vanderbilt.edu
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Abstract

In 1922, one of the most famous Muslim scholars of modern times, the Syrian-Egyptian reformer Rashīd Riḍā, published in his journal a detailed fatwa in defense of alcohol. He did so in reaction to an obscure Indian jurist's fatwa that had warned Muslims not to use alcoholic products. On the surface, the authors of the fatwas appeared to be principally concerned with the right way to interpret sacred laws of purity and pollution. However, this article reveals that their disagreement had much to do with differing approaches to the politics of independence. Their divergence is intriguing because the cities where they lived, Cairo and Bombay, had just experienced the convulsions of anti-British consumer boycotts. And it emerged at a time when anti-imperial Muslim activists from the Middle East and South Asia were rallying together for a pan-Islamic cause—to prevent the final collapse of the caliphate. These movements swayed both Riḍā and his rival, who may well be described as Muslim nationalists. Yet they embraced radically different strategies for independence. One aimed for national purity, the other for national power. This discrepancy led to the battle of fatwas—a forgotten battle that is worth remembering because it suggests some of the difficulties that Muslim jurists of Arab or Indian ancestry faced during the interwar period when they tried to turn Islamic law into an effective nationalist discourse.

Keywords

fatwasBombayCairoIslamic nationalismEgyptIndiaRashīd Riḍāal-Manār
Type
Legal Cultures
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 895 - 925
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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References

1 The set of fatwas appeared in two rounds: (1) Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, Fatāwā al-Imām, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid and Yūsuf Khūrī, eds. (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1970–), vol. 4, no. 607, 1609–34; al-Manār 23 (1922): 657–79; and (2) Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 5, nos. 633–38, 1726–48; al-Manār 24 (1923): 733–52. Shafīq al-Raḥmān signed his fatwa on 12 July 1922. Riḍā published his initial response four months later.

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41 I consulted with half-a-dozen leading authorities on Islam in India, but none had heard of him. Court records indicate that lawyers or judges bearing similar names participated in contemporary Indian trials. But their connection to the mufti visiting Bombay is unclear.

42 Bombay Chronicle: Rose's Lime Juice (22 July 1921); English Valour Hats (19 July 1921); Byla's French Remedy (8 July 1922); Asahi beer (8 July 1921); Shem-el-Nessim (24 Nov. 1921); cigarettes (10 Dec. 1921).

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62 Bombay Chronicle, 20 Aug. 1921: 6; 22 July 1921: 9; 5 Dec. 1921: 10.

63 See the ads for the Bombay Swadeshi Co-op and for Asoka Swadeshi Stores in the Bombay Chronicle, 8 Oct. 1921, 16 Nov. 1921, 17 Dec. 1921, 15 July 1922, and 21 July 1922.

64 Somerset Playne, compiler and Arnold Wright, ed., Southern India, Its History, People, Commerce, and Industrial Resources (London: Foreign and Colonial Compiling and Publishing Company, 1914), 170.

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66 Ibid., volume 4: Bombay, 59, 286.

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78 Al-Manār 4 (1901): 500–3, 821–27, 866–71.

79 Riḍā, Fatāwā , vol. 1, no. 6, pp. 31–32. On beer's medical uses, see Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 2, no. 214, pp. 560–61. These fatwas were published in 1903 and 1907, respectively.

80 Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 1, no. 97, pp. 227–28; al-Manār 7 (1904): 575. On the Punjabi personage who submitted these questions, see Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 159.

81 Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 1, no. 49, pp. 127–28; al-Manār 7 (1904): 238–39.

82 Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 4, no. 602, p. 1603; al-Manār 23 (1922): 588–89. While conceding that plain water was the best choice for ritual ablutions, Riḍā continued defending the purity of alcohol. See Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 6, no. 857, pp. 2324–25; al-Manār 31 (1930): 443–44.

83 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 663–64.

84 Ibid., 666–67, 670; Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid, vol. 2, 66. On the influence of al-Shawkānī's and Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān's approaches to ritual impurity, see Richard Gauvain, Salafi Ritual Purity: In the Presence of God (London: Routledge, 2013), 129, 131, 262.

85 Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid, vol. 4, 174, 182–83.

86 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 674. See also the clarification in Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 5, 1727–28.

87 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 666, 671.

88 Ibid., 672.

89 Ibid., 672–73; Sunan Abī Dāʾūd, vol. 2, p. 648, no. 3841; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, in Jamʿ jawāmiʿ al-aḥādīth, vol. 3, pp. 1144–48, nos. 5536, 5546, and 5554.

90 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 672. Riḍā based this argument on Qurʾān 5:5.

91 Michael Cook, “Magian Cheese: An Archaic Problem in Islamic Law,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47 (1984): 449–67.

92 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 672–74; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 3, 1146. The comment by Abū al-Dardāʾ appears under bāb 12 as a jurisprudential gloss on Qurʾān 5:96 that precedes a ḥadīth. Different editions diverge on the vocalization of m-r-y, the condiment.

93 Thus, Riḍā anticipated Kevin Reinhart's argument in his article “Impurity/No Danger,” History of Religions 30 (1990): 1–24. On Riḍā's toilet paper fatwa, see Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, ch. 1.

94 “It was established in the two Ṣaḥīḥs,” wrote Riḍā, “that the prophet performed a ritual ablution before prayer (wuḍūʾ) from a polytheistic woman's leather water-bag”; al-Manār 23 (1922): 673.

95 Ibid., 669, 677; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 1, p. 50, nos. 219–21; vol. 3, p. 1232, no. 6094; and p. 1249, no. 6196.

96 Ibid., 665.

97 Ibid., 666; Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 2, p. 632, no. 3261.

98 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 669, 675.

99 Ibid., 676–77. For context, see Macpherson, William Grant, Medical Services, General History, volume 3: Medical Services During the Operations on the Western Front in 1916, 1917 and 1918, in Italy, and in Egypt and Palestine (London: H.M.S.O., 1924), 380–81Google Scholar.

100 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 677. Riḍā's sanguine view of modern medicine played a role as well in his subsequent critique of Gandhi's anti-colonial philosophy of health. See Roy Bar Sadeh, “Debating Gandhi in al-Manar during the 1920s and 1930s,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, 3 (2018): 499–501.

101 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 676, 678; Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 5, 1737–38.

102 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 664.

103 Ibid., 678.

104 Al-Manār 24 (1923): 733ff.

105 Riḍā, Fatāwā, vol. 5, 1729–30.

106 Ibid., 1733.

107 Ibid., 1736–38, 1745–47.

108 On these constructs, see Lauzière, Henri, “The Construction of Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the Perspective of Conceptual History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 369–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elshakry, Marwa, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 164–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 9.

110 Hallaq, Wael B., A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunnī Uṣūl Al-Fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 214–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 231–54.

111 The term ijtihād appears at least a dozen times in the fatwa; Salaf appears at least six times. I refer to “post-madhhab” reasoning between quotation marks because Riḍā did not systematically try to move beyond the madhhab system. Elsewhere I have shown how, despite his Salafist perspective, he often worked in harmony with it, tailoring his fatwas to petitioners’ regional traditions. See Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 176; Halevi, Leor, “Is China a House of Islam? Chinese Questions, Arabic Answers, and the Translation of Salafism from Cairo to Canton, 1930–1932,” Die Welt des Islams 59, 1 (2019): 33–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 56, 62, 65–66.

112 For a summary of those debates, see Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid, vol. 2, 70–73.

113 Al-Manār 23 (1922): 661.

114 Al-Manār 4 (1902): 881–90; Nathan Fonder, “Pleasure, Leisure, or Vice? Public Morality in Imperial Cairo, 1882–1949” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013), 80.

115 See al-Manār 23 (1922): 713–14; and Haddad, “Arab Religious Nationalism,” 272.

116 The text in reference is Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā's al-Khilāfa aw al-imāma al-ʿuẓmā (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Manār, [ca. 1922]).

117 Note, however, Riḍā's disagreements with a prominent Indian pan-Islamist, which John Willis analyzed in “Debating the Caliphate.”

118 Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, ch. 7.

119 Reynolds, Nancy Y., A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 86–92Google Scholar.

120 Fonder, “Pleasure, Leisure, or Vice?” 142, 145, 162.

121 L. M. Iddings, Consul-General, “Foreign Pharmaceutical Trade: Egypt,” Daily Consular and Trade Reports 3717 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Manufactures, Department of Commerce and Labor, 21 Feb. 1910), 1–2; Ministry of Finance (Egypt), Annual Statement of the Foreign Trade of Egypt during 1920–1922 (Cairo: Government Press, 1922), 62, 126, 236.

122 Reynolds, A City Consumed, 89, 104, 124; Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 203, 220–24.

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124 Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 187.

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126 Thompson, “Rashid Rida.”

127 Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 184–86; and “Is China a House of Islam?” 63.