Dr. Matt Kuiper, Religious Studies Assistant Professor, has been attending a conference in Rome. Below are pictures from his presentation, Inter-Religious Relations: A Crucial Factor in the Emergence of Deobandi Reformism”. Here is the abstract from the presentation:
One of the most significant reform movements in modern Sunni Islam is that associated with themadrasa in Deoband, India. The madrasa itself was founded in 1867, ten years after the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, an event which consolidated British imperial rule over South Asia. From that time, the Deobandi movement has spread around the world, through a network of affiliated madrasas numbering in the tens of thousands. Deobandism has also been globalized through the Tablīghī Jamā‘at, a widespread lay-oriented da’wa (missionary) movement. Scholars have tended to explain the emergence of Deobandism primarily with reference to Muslim political decline and the rise of European colonialism over the course of the 19th century. When one studies the self-representations of Deoband, however, one sees that inter-religious issues and concerns were also prominent in the constitution of the movement. This paper seeks to recover the inter-religious as a crucial factor in the emergence of Deobandi reformism. After introducing the Deobandi movement, it will revisit the movement’s formative history, drawing attention to inter-religious factors as seen in a selection of the movement’s literature. The paper will conclude with comments on what this study suggests about the possibilities for inter-religious understanding among reform and missionary-minded believers across traditions.