بسم الله الرحمٰن الرحيم
والصلاة والسلام على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله واصحابه اجمعين
In the autobiography of his student days, Maulana Sayyid Manāẓir Aḥsan Gilāni discusses the diversity of the student body at Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and ends with a humorously ironic thought.
“…I have already mentioned that I spent the early part of my life in a small village, and even when I left my village I settled in Rajasthan, a relatively rural place. The town I lived in, Tonk, was not so small that it could rightly be called a village, but the noise and excitement that tend to characterize urban localities were nowhere to be found.
When I arrived at Dār al-ʿUlūm, however, I suddenly found myself part of a student body that numbered in the hundreds. Neither were the students all from the same province, nor, indeed, even from the same country. Wherever I saw students from the United Provinces or Bihar – with whose culture I was somewhat familiar – I would also see a large number from Bengal, Punjab, and Sarhad. Then there were a fair number from Central Asia, especially Kabul, Bukhara, Samarqand, Kokand. Once in a while, amidst this hodgepodge, I even caught sight of students from the Arab world, Ethiopia, and Iraq.
If that wasn’t all, the first time heard the azan coming from the mosque of Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband, the voice of the muezzin sounded to me unusually powerful and riveting. I asked who had given this azan, and I found that it was Maulvi Muḥammad Jān who was actually an Eastern European. He hailed from Kazan, a city in Russia. Moreover, I found out that the imam who led the prayer was Maulvi Ḥurmatullāh, also from Kazan. I thought to myself that Europe’s domination over us is truly complete – the very azan and imamship of the Deoband Mosque has also fallen into Europe’s clutches!”
– Sayyid Manāẓir Aḥsan Gilāni, Iḥāṭah-e Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband Mein Bītē Huwē Din, Maktabah-e ʿUmar Fārūq: Shah Faisal Colony Karachi, 2011, p. 38
Besides challenging the notion that the educational environment at Deoband was monolithic and restricting of diversity, Maulana Gilāni’s experience resonates with many students I myself met at college. They were born and raised in small towns with homogeneous cultures, and then suddenly found themselves in Ann Arbor, MI in the middle of a colossal campus with students from all over the world. The transitions they face and the feeling of culture shock they experience are very similar to Maulana Gilāni’s in this excerpt. Even later on in his autobiography, the reader gets the sense that the author felt like a fish out of water both physically and emotionally, as a result of being in a big city for the first time, as well as intellectually, since (as he mentions in another place in the book), Maulana Gilāni was originally trained in the rational sciences (maʿqūliyāt), and the intellectual transition he was forced to make at Deoband, which tended to place the revealed sciences (manqūliyāt) in the position of primacy, truly led him to challenge his mind and broaden his horizons.
NOTE
Ḥaḍrat Maulana Sayyid Manāẓir Aḥsan Gilāni (1892-1956) was a renowned Indian researcher, writer, and intellectual. He served as the dean of the faculty of theology at Osmania University in Hyderabad for twenty-five years. Among the students he taught was Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah, the celebrated historian and Hadith researcher.
The Silent Admirer 