In Good Company: Comments

Fareeha Khan

When I first walked into the living quarters of Begum Noor Jahan Za-
reef Thanawi (1931-2017) in Karachi, I was fatigued from jetlag and not 
expecting much to come of the meeting except polite verbal exchanges. 
But as I absorbed the functionality of every item in the sparsely furnished 
room, and the immense level of spiritual focus she carried within her frail 
(though still somehow strong!) physical frame, I realized I was sitting in the 
company of no ordinary woman. It was about Begum Zareef that Dr. ‘Abd 
al-Hayy ‘Arifi—one-time nāẓim of Dar al-‘Ulum Karachi and spiritual suc-
cessor to Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi—had remarked, “If we gave khilāfat (spiritual 
successorship) to women, we would have given it to her.” Though not given 
permission to take spiritual disciples, her sheikh had given her a general 
allowance to teach the religious sciences to women. She taught Qur’anic 
exegesis (tafsīr) for decades out of her home; wrote numerous pamphlets 
on spirituality and religious practice; and published a volume on the legal 
rulings of Hajj, with a special focus on related women’s issues.

If Begum Zareef were asked what was the secret that persuaded her 
sheikh to give her such a wide allowance to teach, I know her answer would 
be the pious company (of her sheikh and others) that she kept throughout 
her life. As Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi clarifies in Fawāʾid al-ṣuḥba, his famous 
lecture cited by Darakhshan Khan, it was the ṣuḥba (company) they’d kept 
that made the Companions (Ṣaḥāba) who they were. Were it not for the 
fact that they had sat with the Messenger of God, they would not have at-
tained their otherwise unattainable spiritual and religious rank, and they 
would not be seen as a necessary source of religious knowledge for all Mus-
lims who came after them. In my own book,1 I argue that ṣuḥba, in fact, 
lies at the spiritual center of Sunni Islam. For one to be a “real Sunni,” one 
does not merely have to accept the probity of every one of the Ṣaḥāba; one 
must also accept that the preservation and continuation of true religious 
Fareeha Khan is an independent scholar affiliated with Willamette University in 
Salem, Oregon.



 27

teaching happens through the same type of act that made them who they 
were—sitting with submission at the feet of those who know.

Darakhshan Khan’s article is a brilliant contribution because it high-
lights the concrete social reasons for how such a long-standing conception 
of religious attainment has subtly shifted, such that the only criteria that 
remains for gaining religious knowledge is one’s desire to spread it. For 
reformist movements like the Tablīghī Jamā‘at, which started off in early 
twentieth-century north India but has now become a major global phe-
nomenon, submitting oneself to the training of a master is no longer part 
of the program. One can improve oneself religiously simply by sitting with 
others who wish to do the same, regardless of one’s religious upbringing 
(tarbiya) or vocational background. The traditional scholar, in such con-
texts, has been dismissed and largely disposed of.

Among the many strengths of Dr. Khan’s essay, what stands out is 
her ability to examine at close range the social changes taking place in 
north India that led to the very possibility of the formation of a group like 
the Tablīghī Jamā‘at. She shows the gradual creation of a new social or-
der, where gender, family, and economic roles for both men and women 
changed in ways that caused the level of domestic stress needed to push 
people to creatively engage with their newfound situation. The author’s take 
on the role of famous texts like Beheshti Zewar as replacement for in-laws 
and extended family, on her use of letters and advertisements in Tahdhīb-i 
Niswān to demonstrate the same, as well as on the simultaneous attraction 
and anxiety created by the growing importance laid on men’s bureaucratic 
employment, all comprise a fascinating and refreshingly unique approach 
to examining the competing forms of religious authority that developed 
alongside that of traditional ulama in the modern period. Dr. Khan uses 
the proliferation of print in late colonial India to her advantage as a social 
and intellectual historian. She skillfully reads both major and minor texts 
of the day against the social backdrop of the time, such that she is able to 
clarify the human reality of the broad social roles occupied by Muslim men 
and women in early twentieth-century India, and how this reality affected 
notions of piety and religious service. 

Though Dr. Khan doesn’t say it this way, what stands out to me in her 
vivid descriptions of the itinerant family is loneliness. Being cut off from 
the “familial and familiar” leads any human being of sound nature to search 
to fill the void left behind. In late-colonial north Indian qasba society, so 
many hierarchical and codependent relations were in place that one per-

Khan: In Good Company: Comments



28 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:3

haps rarely felt the need to exert one’s own religious opinion. Scholars, 
saints, and elders occupied an intricate network of religiosity that amply 
fulfilled the requirement to keep good company for anyone who wished 
to seek it. Becoming cut off from this network and these figures must have 
been profoundly alienating—one can see a glimpse of the frustration both 
men and women felt in the Tahdhīb-i Niswān quote on page 11, where 
women could barely now manage a home, and men had no one to remind 
them to take the higher road.

For some Muslims in India and beyond, this void was filled through 
participation in reformist groups like the Tablīghī Jamā‘at. In a globalized 
world that has taken the Weberian workplace to the extreme, the Tablīghī 
Jamā‘at provides a new network within which one can plug in. As Dr. Khan 
shows, this network is broad enough that men and women can join in sim-
ilar ways, unlike in previous times where more clear gender differentia-
tion existed. But one has to consider quality along with quantity. Perhaps 
women (and more secularly educated men) are able to participate in these 
non-localized networks. But what void is actually being filled? Does one 
really feel as if one has come home when they attend gasht or go on khu-
ruj with the Tablīghī Jamā‘at? Or does one simply feel better about being a 
somehow contributing member to an increasingly secularizing and frag-
mented society?

For Begum Zareef, the memory of playing as a child at the feet of 
Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi in Thana Bhawan was as sustaining as it was orienting. 
Even in bustling Karachi after a span of many miles and years, she knew 
where she could find home. I always was surprised to see how she would 
ask after every family member and distant relation, and how she would find 
ways to do service for loved ones even outside of her focus on teaching. 
Her audio tafsīr lessons are peppered with a female-oriented commentary, 
reminding women to maintain not just their worship and ritual obligations 
but also the ties that bond strong, loving, God-centered families together. 
Many contemporary South Asian ulama of various stripes tolerate the work 
of the Tablīghī Jamā‘at, because they realize that social conditions no longer 
encourage women and men to maintain the bonds (familial, spiritual, and 
otherwise) that are required by religion and that would have allowed indi-
viduals to feel nurtured and supported in their everyday practice of Islam. 
But these same ulama realize that a level of islām—submission—has been 
compromised. In the famous hadith of the Prophet, the work of the scholar, 
almsgiver, and martyr is rejected by God in the Afterlife due to their lack of 
pure intention. The common trope of the Tablīghī Jamā‘at cited by Dr. Khan 



 29

Endnotes

1. Fareeha Khan, The Ethical Contours of a Fatwa: Women, Sufism and the 
Emergence of a Modern Muslim Minority (forthcoming).

2. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Qawiyy, Ṣaḥāba ke faḍā’il awr ṣuḥbat ke fawā’id [tashῑl 
wa‘dh Faḍā’il al-ṣuḥba] (Hyderabad: Barakath Book Depot, n.d.), 74.

offers a perverted rearticulation of this hadith—one need not focus at all on 
one’s inner self (as the hadith requires), and instead divert all one’s energy 
externally to saving the rest of the world.

The problem in this schema for ulama like Thanawi is not the unfitness 
of the poor nor the democratization of religious teaching. His book Behesh-
ti Zewar is itself a type of democratization and “empowerment” of the lay 
woman to learn and teach the religion. The issue instead is the need for the 
Muslim to be cognizant of who is fit for one to take one’s religion from, who 
it is that one should submit oneself pedagogically to (islām) on one’s jour-
ney to submit to Allah (Islam). According to Thanawi, if one simply learns 
the religion to be able to teach for a livelihood (or to acquire a sense of so-
cial belonging!), one will find one’s discourses being of little impact on the 
hearts of those listening, and one’s fatwas being deemed largely unreliable.2

In my own work, I search for the role that the concept of submission 
plays in the religion of Islam as a whole. Submission is not limited to simply 
the body, mind, and soul, where one consciously applies fiqh, ‘aqīda, and 
taṣawwuf such that each of these faculties submit to God according to pat-
terns inherited from the Prophet. I argue that the very mode of knowledge 
inheritance itself is a type of submission that is required of the true Mus-
lim, and that if one probes historically and even contemporarily the Islamic 
tradition of religious learning, one finds that submission to a master is of 
fundamental importance. Submission in Islam extends to social relations 
as well; one cannot faithfully reject the rights of one’s spouse, parents and 
extended social relations (which often happens with the itinerant, even if 
s/he becomes a loyal member of the Tablīghī Jamā‘at), and still consider 
oneself a Muslim fully submitted to God. 

Dr. Khan’s piece offers insightful and complex sociohistorical perspec-
tive on how the idea of submission to masters was surreptitiously removed 
from much of modern Muslim consciousness. Such Muslims, without real-
izing it, now subscribe to a form of Islam that has been drastically changed 
from within, just as it manifests differently in its social applications without.

Khan: In Good Company: Comments