The Deoband movement—a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam that quickly spread from colonial India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and even the United Kingdom and South Africa—has been poorly understood and sometimes feared. Despite being one of the most influential Muslim revivalist movements of the last two centuries, Deoband’s connections to the Taliban have dominated the attention it has received from scholars and policy-makers alike. Revival from Below offers an important corrective, reorienting our understanding of Deoband around its global reach, which has profoundly shaped the movement’s history. In particular, the author tracks the origins of Deoband’s controversial critique of Sufism, how this critique travelled through Deobandi networks to South Africa, as well as the movement’s efforts to keep traditionally educated Islamic scholars (`ulama) at the center of Muslim public life. The result is a nuanced account of this global religious network that argues we cannot fully understand Deoband without understanding the complex modalities through which it spread beyond South Asia.
Brannon D. Ingram is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University.
"Revival from Below offers a convincing and powerful corrective to earlier scholarship on the Deobandi tradition. Using previously unexamined sources, Brannon Ingram brilliantly widens his analytical gaze to the complex global networks formed by Deobandi clerics and intellectuals and ultimately produces a book that affects our understanding of the trajectory of South Asian Islam from the late-19th century to the present."—Muzaffar Alam, George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
"This richly informed study puts front and center the ethical Sufism of the Deobandi reform movement. In doing this, Ingram convincingly demonstrates the value of understanding behavior in light of participants’ own interpretations and not against some presumed textual norm. Ranging widely over time and beyond India, the book notably enriches the study of modern Islamic movements."—Barbara Metcalf, editor of the anthology Islam in South Asia in Practice
“This book is an illuminating exploration of Deoband as a global phenomenon and of the contestations that have accompanied and shaped it, from India to South Africa, in its local contexts. Ingram’s combination of erudition, insight, breadth, and accessibility is remarkable. Students and scholars of Sufism, of modern Islam, and of contemporary revivalist movements will find this an enormously rewarding study.”—Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan: A History
322 pp.6 x 9
9780520297999$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Nov 2018