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Abstract
This dissertation explores the significance of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi’s poetic magnum opus, the Masnavi, in the constitution of South Asian Islamic selves and societies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Beginning with the Mughal scholar and bureaucrat Abd al-Latif Abbasi to the twentieth century Persian-Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal, the dissertation provides a detailed account of the locales, reading and commentarial practices, networks, and affective registers that characterize the vast South Asian Republic of Masnavi Commentators. I thus draw out the material and practical contours of South Asian Muslims’ engagement with the Masnavi, contributing with the mapping of a major Persian poetic work’s reception in South Asia. In doing so, I also explore the role played by Persian poetry in the constitution of Islamic selves and societies, but in interaction with other modalities of being Muslim, such as adherence to fiqh and sharia. I thus contribute and revise existing scholarship on the place of the poetic in the constitution of Islamic selves and societies, which has tended to see the poetic as a separate domain, only tenuously connected with “prescriptive” discourses such as that of the law. The second half of my dissertation looks at the role Rumi’s Masnavi plays in the Muslim navigation of colonial modernity in nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia, arguing that South Asian engagement with Persian poetry in general and Rumi’s Masnavi in particular enables—in the form of Iqbal’s Persian and Urdu poetry—one of the most unique, effective and historic responses to the spiritual and metaphysical challenges of colonial modernity to emerge from the Muslim world. I thus contribute to existing scholarly understandings of South Asian modernities and Islamic modernity in general, opening up new perspectives by shifting focus away from prose writings of reformist figures towards poetry.