Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. xxi, 276 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0963-1.
For God or Empire is at once an impressively scholarly, highly imaginative, and hugely challenging book. Sayyid Fadl Alawi, the subject of this historical biography, lived through major historical transformations throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the way the world came to be governed in the Middle East, South Asia, and across the Indian Ocean with the rise of British imperial dominance and the gradual decline of the Mogul and Ottoman empires. Born in the Mappila Hills of Malabar, Kerala, to a regionally venerated Sayyid Sufi saint originating from Hadhramawt in Yemen, Sayyid Fadl was a Sufi, a scholar, and a political actor who lived peripatetically between India, Egypt, the Hijaz (Mecca and Dhofar), and Istanbul, often travelling with a large entourage of family and followers. He died in Istanbul. A key question the author addresses is that of sovereignty as it came to be transformed in the modern era of state (and imperial) governance and bounded territories. Sayyid Fadl and his father before him insisted on the sovereignty of Sufi saints as separate and autonomous—beyond temporal authority—and refused to bow to the edicts of the East India Company, and even more so, the British Raj that replaced it. Though not remarked upon by the author, in South Asia, Brahmins are ranked above Rajputs in the caste hierarchy, which implies that purity is placed above secular power. In line with this, the resistive encounter of Sufi saints with temporal authority is a distinctive feature of South Asian Sufism, as I argue elsewhere (Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: the Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). In the Punjab, it seems that the British respected the separate religious sovereignty of Sufi saints. In Malabar, however, Sayyid Fadl and his entombed revered father were alleged to have fomented the Mappila uprisings. Following these, Sayyid Fadl was exiled by the British as a fanatic and despite later repeated attempts he was never allowed to return to his place of birth and continued to be a British colonial bête noire who was alleged (falsely) to have encouraged uprisings elsewhere. The book documents Sayyid Fadl’s scholarly writings in detail and his publicly expressed, trenchant opinions about the decline of Muslim power in the face of European expansion, mainly directed at the Ottoman rulers. A major achievement by the author is the gathering, and in many cases, translating of correspondence by the British regarding Fadl—by Fadl himself both to the British and to the Ottomans.
At one point in his long career Fadl becomes ruler of Dhofar, mediating between rivalrous tribes and instituting a peaceful rule of law. But this did not last long and he was forced to leave, reluctantly, since he regarded Dhofar as an earthly paradise with a clement climate and fertile lands. He lived a transnational life, both at home and yet suspect in many different localities across the Indian Ocean. The author draws inspiration from Enseng Ho’s study of the Alawi Hadhramawti diaspora and from others who have written about this remarkable family’s movement along the African coast and all the way to Indonesia over several generations. What is unique about this book is that it is a study in depth of the consciousness of an illustrious scion of a scattered family regarding his mission as a Sufi and a guardian of the faith. This includes a lengthy treaty about his own views on Sufism, translated by the author.
In addition to the issue of sovereignty, the author stresses the “unity of life,” a mystical notion that seems to encompass and conjoin sacred intimacy with God with a temporal capacity to rule in the world. As a Muslim, Sayyid Fadl was a reformist without rejecting saintly veneration or the mystical dimensions of Islam, thus parting with modernist and wahhabi interpretations. While the book is impressive in its textual analysis and its range of scholarly references to contemporary historical accounts of Islam in the nineteenth century, both in the Middle East and South Asia, it also ventures into trendy postcolonial and radical feminist writings. These often overlay the Sufi mystical evocations with a conceptually tortuous postmodern language drawing on luminaries such as Agamben or Butler, in a palimpsest which is at times quite impenetrable. Nonetheless, in the final word, this is a very fine analysis, presenting an in-depth account of a remarkable man living through a turbulent historical era. Fadl died in 1900. The book takes us all the way up to the present, describing the visitations by the author to the various graves of Sayyid Fadl in Istanbul, a key Muslim antecedent in Dhofar and finally, the grave of Fadl’s father, still venerated in the Mappila hills of Malabar.
Pnina Werbner
Keele University, Keele