Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst’s Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad explores how revolts in 1857 and 1858 in India profoundly shaped the conceptualization of Muslims as a distinct minority community in India and the broader conflation of Islam with violence in the British Empire. The events of 1857 and 1858, which British officials referred to as the Mutiny and which the author glosses as the Great Rebellion, constituted a series of revolts against East India Company rule across much of northern and central India. They involved a wide range of actors from sepoys in the Company’s armies and Hindu and Muslim peasants and merchants to regional princes and the remnants of the Mughal elite in Delhi.
“Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst’s Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad explores how revolts in 1857 and 1858 in India profoundly shaped the conceptualization of Muslims as a distinct minority community in India and the broader conflation of Islam with violence in the British Empire.”The brutal British suppression of the revolt ushered in the official establishment of Crown rule in India. Historians have examined the revolt’s transformative impact on the institutional forms of imperial rule and the ways its popular commemoration in British culture contributed to colonial hierarchies of race and gender. Morgenstein Fuerst moves in a new direction by analyzing how memories of the Great Rebellion, especially discussions over whether revolt against British rule was a religious obligation for Muslims, directly informed “the minoritization and racialization of Muslims” (5.) She concludes that in order to understand the contemporary “oft-repeated (and deeply problematic) formulation that Islam and Muslims are inherently tied to ideas of violence,” we must turn to the memory of 1857 in India (3.) She makes a strong case for the importance of the Great Rebellion of 1857 to the history of the study of religion, broadly, and Islam, specifically.
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion consists of four chapters, along with an introduction, conclusion, and thought-provoking epilogue. Chapter One, “The Company, Religion, and Islam,” tracks developing British colonial understandings of religion in South Asia before 1857. Morgenstein Fuerst begins with the Charter Act of 1813, which allowed for expanded parliamentary involvement in India and more Christian missionary activity there, which shaped the narrative of religious interference in subsequent explanations for the revolt. She also grapples with the gradual transition of Muslim elites in northern India from centers of power into a marginalized religious minority during the long nineteenth century. She demonstrates that from the first British reports in 1857 to the prominent role of rumors of greased cartridges, “religion, religiosity, and fanatic adherence to religious law” were dominant themes in understanding its causes and significance (30.)
“The middle chapters of the book investigate British and Indian Muslims writings about the Great Rebellion in the 1870s. These chapters center on the publications of William Wilson Hunter and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.”The middle chapters of the book investigate British and Indian Muslims writings about the Great Rebellion in the 1870s. These chapters center on the publications of William Wilson Hunter and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. W. W. Hunter was an influential statistician and historian in the Indian Civil Service, whose work formed the foundation of The Imperial Gazetteer of India. Sir Syed was a Muslim reformer who founded the influential Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh. The author’s detailed and careful readings of the writings of these two figures in the 1870s constitute the archival heart of the book. The second chapter, “Suspect Subjects,” explores the first of Morgenstein Fuerst’s interlocutors, Hunter, who in 1871, published an influential tract, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? The author reveals how The Indian Musalmans played a crucial role in rendering Indian Muslims a distinctive community, “one with an imagined center somewhere outside the Indian subcontinent and with an imagined legal loyalty to pan-Islamic ideals” (62.) Much of the scholarship on the marginalization of Muslims has focused on the imperial census, the Hindi-Urdu language controversy, and the gradual expansion of limited forms of local participation in government. While the author certainly acknowledges these factors, she emphasizes how “the reign of information on its own contributes to minoritization” through the circulation of influential books, such as The Indian Musalmans (83.) Although Morgenstein Fuerst does discuss Hunter’s work in the imperial service, it would have been helpful to hear more about the interplay between Hunter’s career as a statistician and bureaucrat and the discursive power of his writings on Islam.
The third chapter, “‘God Save me from my friends!’,” examines the response of the Indian Muslim reformer, Sir Syed, to Hunter in the Review on Dr. Hunter’s Indian Musalmans in 1872. Despite his robust disagreement with Hunter, Sir Syed “reinscribed religion- and specifically Islam- as an interpretive framework for the Great Rebellion” (90.) Furthermore, Sir Syed did not challenge many of Hunter’s implicit assumptions about Islam, including the centrality of Islamic law to understanding Muslim social and political actions and the need for religious reform in India. The fourth chapter, “Rebellion as Jihad, Jihad as Rebellion,” brings the different elements of Morgenstein Fuerst’s argument together with an account of how certain understandings of jihad were central to the racialization and minoritization of Muslims. In her own words, after the Great Rebellion, jihad became “a conceptual metric by which to measure the loyalty of Muslims” (124.)
“In each of these chapters, the author makes use of contextual Urdu and English sources, such as the Urdu poet Ghalib’s letters and an influential fatwa published by the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta to situate Hunter and Khan’s writings and to give a sense of the arguments to which they responded.”In each of these chapters, the author makes use of contextual Urdu and English sources, such as the Urdu poet Ghalib’s letters and an influential fatwa published by the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta to situate Hunter and Khan’s writings and to give a sense of the arguments to which they responded. Given her attention to the literary and social contexts that generated these two central texts, it would have been helpful to hear more about the reception of Hunter and Khan’s writings on jihad.
The author makes a compelling case that the intertwined racialization and minoritization of Muslims by the British Empire was the precursor to “the production of jihad as the preeminent identifier of Islam” (125.) However, there were a few areas that could have been further elucidated. In general, while the author provides insightful accounts of Hunter and Khan’s writings about 1857, it would have been helpful to situate those writings more fully in their larger careers as prolific authors (and public servants.) In particular, it would have been interesting to hear more about how Sir Syed’s developing understanding of Muslims as a ‘minority’ in his 1872 Review shaped his later concerns about Muslim linguistic and professional marginalization. Although many Muslims were marginalized after 1857, the Great Rebellion did not completely erase older forms of Indo-Muslim cultural capital, as illustrated by the importance of the Hyderabad State and Urdu-speaking Muslim civil servants in the colonial bureaucracy. Given her effective analysis of competing understandings of Islam in India before 1857, it would have been helpful to include more on the interplay between the elite status of some Muslims and their simultaneous marginalization in the decades after 1857.
“Given her effective analysis of competing understandings of Islam in India before 1857, it would have been helpful to include more on the interplay between the elite status of some Muslims and their simultaneous marginalization in the decades after 1857.”This is not a criticism of this strong book, but one of the many fruitful avenues of future research that it opens up for scholars.
This book makes a number of significant contributions to the history of the study of religions, the history of modern South Asia, and studies of Islam in modern India. It reveals the important role of debates about the revolt of 1857 to the development of Muslim religious and political identity in modern South Asia. In addition, the author makes a valuable contribution to studies of competing understandings of Islamic law in the global nineteenth century and to a growing body of work re-evaluating the impact of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Muslim reform movements in British India. Although not an explicit theme, this book also can be read as part of a growing vein of scholarship on commemoration in modern South Asia. More broadly, Morgenstein Fuerst makes a compelling case that we must further examine the interplay between the British empire and Muslim communities in South Asia to better understand popular (and problematic) assumptions about Islam in the present.