Modern Islamic Historiography: A Global Perspective from South Asia

This dissertation examines how four prominent Muslim Indian religious scholars (ʿulamā’) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrote histories to construct authority and create communities. The four scholars are Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857-1914), ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī (1869-1923), Sulaymān Nadwī (1884-1953), and Abū Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī (1913-1999). All four shared institutional connections to Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ, a madrasa in north India, and Dār al-Muṣannifīn, a research and publishing house. Because of the centrality of historical writing in their scholarly career, the four scholars are referred to in the dissertation as ʿulamā’-historians.This dissertation tracks the rise of ʿulamā’-historians as a new specialist of religious scholars since the late nineteenth century. The religious authority of ʿulamā’-historians studied in this dissertation was largely built on their historical writings. History was their main scholarly endeavor, and it formed the bulk of their intellectual oeuvre. In accounting for the emergence of ʿulamā’-historians from the nineteenth century, the dissertation argues that they gained recognition as religious authorities by putting their scholarly learning to use in recovering Muslim pasts to address concerns of Muslims in the present. Recovering pasts entailed discovering new sources and/or approaches to write about moments from Muslim history that had been previously marginalized or forgotten. The ʿulamā’-historians, through their act of recovery, became mediators between the past and the present as they utilized history to give meaning to what it meant to be Muslim in colonial and post-colonial societies. By putting themselves in dialogue with the scholarly traditions of the ʿulamā’, even when they were critical of aspects of it, they enhanced the prestige of history as a scholarly endeavor for ʿulamā’