Written more than a decade after his
“prize-winning,” reformist works, Mir`āt
al-‘Arūs, Banāt al-N‘āsh, and Taubat al-Nașūĥ, Nazir Ahmad’s Ibn ul-Vaqt, or the “Son of the Moment,”
leaves behind the resolution of its predecessors, entering a realm of cultural
ambivalence and inherent instability. Partially autobiographical, for its
protagonist, the eponymous Ibn ul-Vaqt, has attended Delhi College and served
in the colonial administration, this late work concludes in anti-climax,
debate, and divided sympathies rather than the final narrative pronouncement
that was so visible in Nazir Ahmad’s earlier fiction writings. But more than a
treatise on the author’s own state of being, Ibn ul-Vaqt is often read as a satire of sorts on Syed Ahmad Khan,
Nazir Ahmad’s mentor and friend, who endured much censure from the Indian Muslims
for his conciliatory measures with the British in the years following 1857.[1] Beginning around the time of the Mutiny and
concluding a few years after, Ibn ul-Vaqt
captures in no uncertain way the crisis—social, political, and cultural—that
overtook the emergent Muslim bourgeoisie in the final decades of the nineteenth
century.
The story of a man from a distinguished
and sharīf household, living at a
time when “studying English was considered tantamount to blasphemy” (angrēzī
paŗhnā kufr samjħā jātā tħā), Ibn ul-Vaqt
details its protagonist’s changed fortunes after he mercifully saves an
Englishman, “Noble Sahib,” from a cruel death during the Mutiny.[2]
Though Ibn ul-Vaqt had blindly idolized the colonial government even before
this incident, a newfound friendship with Noble Sahib allows him entry into the
world of his rulers. Before long Ibn ul-Vaqt is attending and throwing dinner
parties for the English, dressing like them, and furnishing his house in their
style with the wealth he has acquired as a reward for loyalty to the
colonizers. But jealousies, specially on the part of the Eurasians, and the
departure of Noble Sahib for England leave him somewhat isolated and abandoned,
belonging, finally, to neither native nor colonial society. Even as Ibn ul-Vaqt
styles himself as an Englishman, he moves further and further away from his own
religion, stopping just short of drinking alcohol. The text concludes with a
debate on Islamic practice between him and his brother-in-law Hujjat ul-Islam,
his name literally meaning the “the one who intervenes on behalf of Islam,”
newly returned from pilgrimage, who makes it his job to redeem Ibn ul-Vaqt.
The question of how Nazir Ahmad intended
for such a text to be read is a difficult one—more so than any of his other writings,
Ibn ul-Vaqt is marked by the
“conflicting impulses and ideas” that Oesterheld broadly argues were produced
by “contact with the colonial administration and the new education system.”[3]
Historically speaking, Ahmad made his views on Muslims of Ibn ul-Vaqt’s ilk
quite explicit in later lectures: “We can assume that a Muslim who abandons
Islam will never become a Christian or a Jew, or anything. He will just be a
heretic and an atheist. And thus if English-loving Muslims had not been
restrained, the prevailing thought was that they would long have become
heretics and atheists” (y‘ānī musalmān jō islām sē bħāgā bas samajħ lō kēh vōh
nā ‘īsā`ī hō gā nā yahūd nā kučħ nā kučħ. vōh hō gā tō mulĥid aur dehrīā hō gā
aur bas. ġarź angrēzī dān musalmānōñ kī agar rōk tħām nā kī ga`ī hōtī tō żin-e
ġālib tħā kēh vōh kab kē mulĥid aur dehrīyē hō gay`ē hōtē). Likewise, though he
was happy to praise Syed Ahmad Khan’s contribution to the education of Muslims,
he also warned his audiences that when the young men from Aligarh College
emerged from under the “magic spells” (jantriōñ) of reform and English
education, it would be the duty of the “old-fashioned Muslims” (purānī faishan
kē musalmānōñ) to bring them back to the fold.[4] Though he “lavished
praise on Western civilization and celebrated British rule,” Nazir Ahmad
“disgraced and humiliated” Ibn ul-Vaqt when he chose to mimic the English
completely, raising the character of Hujjat ul-Islam to enact his spiritual
salvation.[5]
I suggest we read Ibn ul-Vaqt as continuous with Taubat
al-Nașūĥ in many ways, shifting from the private realm of the home to the
public sphere in the colonial Delhi. Ibn ul-Vaqt, like the vagrant Kalim, tests
an alternative existence to that made possible for him by way of religion,
wandering into a cultural space that initially eludes, and finally rejects him.
We encounter, towards the conclusion of the text, a protagonist who is
essentially made homeless by his own transgressions; neither properly a Muslim,
nor English, the solitary figure of Ibn ul-Vaqt becomes a final symptom of
British Orientalism in the Indian subcontinent. That is to say, we can locate
the narrative surrounding Ibn ul-Vaqt as emerging from within the literary
conditions of the colony. Though ostensibly he resembles the displaced Muslim
of Oriental tales such as Vathek and Nourjahad, and at times even the
familiarized Friday from Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, Ibn ul-Vaqt is the ironically final response to the series of
wandering Muslims that have populated English and imperially patronized
fictions over the course of almost two centuries.
When I refer to him as ironic and final, I
am pointing to the irreversibility of his condition, one that has formed in the
wake of a series of fictional and scholarly representations that become imbricated
within the narratives of a native elite. His decline, both as a Muslim and as a
resource to the colonial government, is followed by the rise of Hujjat
ul-Islam, a servant simultaneously faithful to Islam and to the English,
interestingly, an adherent of a return to traditional Oriental learning, a
native Orientalist of sorts. Compared to Ibn ul-Vaqt who echoes edicts learnt
from Western histories about India, Hujjat ul-Islam advocates a return to
classical Arabic, and servility to the English. What both of these figures
represent, very powerfully and poignantly, however, is the compromise and
subjugation of Islam outside of an empire-formation that it is not its own. In
other words, Ibn ul-Vaqt stages the
relocation of the Muslim from the Islamic Empire into the British Empire, and
the subsequent moral and social degradation he is forced to endure.
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