World Religions, World Literatures, and the Translation of Islam in South Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between Orientalist translations of Sufi poetry and the responses of South Asian Muslim scholars and reformers to those translations during the colonial era, with particular attention to how Sufi poetry becomes paradoxically identified poetry both with Islam and against Islam in terms of the challenges mystical poetic tradition posed to modernist and reformist projects. Scholarship on the historiography of “world religions” and of “world literatures” tends to talk past each other; this paper seeks to bring these areas into conversation and argue for their discursive co-constitution. How is Islam framed through Sufism, especially Sufi poetry, as an object of study in the Western academy through the colonial encounter in South Asia, and how is that understanding received and interpreted in turn in South Asia? Sufi poetry was a site of vexing cognitive dissonance for Orientalists and Muslim reformers alike; Sufism was praised by Orientalists in order to denigrate Islam and reformist movements denigrated Sufism in order to praise Islam. How were these translations received by those scholars whose traditions were being translated? How are Orientalist translations of Sufi poetry integrated in turn into modernist critiques of Sufism from South Asian Muslim reformers? Here, this paper turns to a reading of Muhammad Iqbal’s 1923 Payam-e Mashriq, or “Message of the East,” written explicitly in response to Goethe’s West-ostlicher Diwan. In this collection of Persian poetry, Iqbal stages conversations between the Hafiz of Orientalist imagination and the Hafiz of Sufi poetic inheritance, providing a textual site for the production of Islam itself through the convergence of translation, Orientalism, and Sufi poetry in South Asia.