Mystical missionaries in Hyderabad State

Abstract

This article discusses the emergence of a Sufi-inspired movement of Muslim reform in the princely state of Hyderabad during the first half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which the movement arose, using archival material to discuss the activities of Christian missionaries in the city in which it first emerged. Located in Aurangabad, away from the capital of the Nizam's State, the history of the rise of Mu'īn Allāh Shāh's Sufi organisation shows the ways in which pan-Indian religious disputes and developments in Indian Islam were reflected in the provinces of princely India. The modernist character of Mu'īn Allāh's Sufi teachings is reconstructed and discussed in detail. Preaching a return to the core tenets of Islam in the villages of Hyderabad, Mu'īn Allāh and his successor Hamīd ‘Alī nonetheless envisioned this minimalism as central to the mystical rediscovery of the pure and unadulterated self. However, since the movement was closely connected to the expansion of the textile industry in Aurangabad, attention is also paid to its relationship with the social and religious effects of industrialisation in a provincial context.