SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The book is an intellectual biography of the renowned Indo-Muslim scholar Sayyid Abu l-Hasan ‛Ali Hasani Nadwi (d. 1999). The crucial question to be answered is why he emerged as a transnationally influential personality and remained such beyond his own death. The book works with an innovative analytical framework that combines social network analysis with discourse analysis, using theoretical approaches from Max Weber, Basil Bernstein, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. It sets out with the elaboration of four ideal-typical discourses in which Nadwī was involved: first, on the role and position of ratio in the process of cognition, second, on the role of Sufism, third on religio-political activism, and, finally, on communalism. This first part is followed by an investigation into Nadwī's personal networks, setting out from his family, then his teachers and Sufi shaykhs, shifting to religious and political movements and bodies in India, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, and elsewhere. The work demonstrates that, from his first contact with leading members of the South Asian missionary movement Tablīghī Jamā‛at, and by establishing institutionalised relations to one of the intellectual heads of the movement by way of becoming his disciple and, later, his spiritual successor, Nadwī's entire endeavours aimed at spreading the movement worldwide ('One Aim') by using his personal networks within different fields ('Many Ways'). All his various activities, despite their diversity at first glance, can be perceived as aiming at the same goal, but have nevertheless failed for a number of reasons.