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Historical Background
ashraf is an Arabic
plural noun, those who are sharif, ‘eminent or exalted’. In
nineteenth century British India, this became a category of censuses
and ethnographic descriptions referring to a fixed, 'caste'-like set
meant to encompass higher status patrilineal groups of Muslims,
comparable to Hindu twice-born varna and the emerging concept of
'Aryan', Indians whose higher status could be attributed to
'foreign’ ancestry, often in the distant past. British social
surveys purported to locate and count the ‘ashraf' and attribute to
them a range of stereotypic characteristics. During the same period,
however, the usage of the adjective sharif and the alternative
plural noun shurafa took on an increasingly flexible usage of
genteel respectability that referred at least as much to comportment
and literary education as to descent and frequently applied to
non-Muslims as well as Muslims. As an indication of status
attributions, both words, ashraf and sharif, were matters of
controversy and negotiation, as in marriage arrangements, legal
jurisdiction, or access to government patronage.
More generally throughout the Muslim world, the term sharif is a
term of respect that Muslims attach to the names of sacred places,
texts or objects, such as Mecca and the Qur`an.
In the Arabic Middle East, sharif is an honorific for descendants of
the Prophet Muhammad (saws) or his family, though the criteria for
this designation differ according to place and religious
interpretation. In India, Iran and Central Asia, however, the word
sharif extended to wider categories of respectability; descendants
of the Prophet were called sayyid.
It was probably not until the nineteenth century that the
distinction between high status Muslims and those of lower status
emerged into a formal system of classification supposedly based on
whether a group could claim ancestry outside India. By this
definition the ashraf consisted of four birth-defined strata,
supposedly in descending order of status:-
1) Sayyid, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (saws), usually
claiming patrilinial descent from his daughter Fatima and her
husband Ali;
2) Shaikh, descendants of the companions of the prophet, that is,
also of Arab origin, but also used as a term for sufi religious
figures and extended more widely to people who have converted to
Islam, perhaps in association with their sufi preceptors;
3) Mughal, which might refer to Chagatay Turks or more broadly to
people of Central Asian and even Irani background who were
associated with the Timurid dynasty; and
4) Pathan, people descended from Afghan migrants to India.
Other Muslims were classified on the basis of indigenous Indian
origin, often sharing the caste designations of their Hindu
ancestors. Starting in 1847, British census operations set about
locating and counting the population according to these ranked
divisions.
The origins of this peculiarly South Asian construction of what it
means to be among the ashraf are unclear. Before the nineteenth
century there were various terms among Muslims in India to
distinguish people with aristocratic, religious or literary claims
to deference from the broader society of commoners. Al-Biruni,
writing in the earliest phase of Muslim rule in India in the early
eleventh century, noted the similarity between Indian concepts of
varna and the stratified social theory of Sassanian Iran. `We
Muslims, of course, stand entirely on the other side of the
question, considering all men as equal except in piety . . .' Far
more common, however, in the social theory associated with Muslim
rule was the sharp distinction between the ashraf, ‘respectable’,
and the arazil, ‘vulgar’. There were also numerous ethnic
designations that played a role in determining the composition of
military units, the distribution of administrative offices, and the
formation of factions. Muslims in the Mughal ruling class were often
categorized broadly as Turani, Irani, Afghan and Hindustani; Hindus
included Rajputs, Kayasths, Khatris, Marathas and others. Such
designations had, in turn, subdivisions based on geographical
origins, descent, religious affiliation and language.
Early in the nineteenth century, probably about 1815, Mirza Muhammad
Hassan Qatil wrote about the four firqa or classes of the ashraf,
Sayyids, Shaikhs, Mughals and Pathans, by way of pointing out just
how insecure such designations were. Those who pursued crafts or
businesses in the bazaars, making and selling perfume or bread,
caring for elephants, for example, could not be included among the
shurafa; whatever their ancestry, they were considered paji,
‘contemptible’, not worthy of social intercourse with people of
greater wealth and status. Qatil was himself a convert to Islam,
accepted at least by some as a Mughal, hence the title ’Mirza’. For
the poet Mirza Ghalib, however, he was just Dilvali Singh, the
khatri of Faridabad.
In 1832, the Qanoon-i Islam or the Customs of the Mussalmans of
India, written by Jaffur Shurreef in Dakhani Urdu at the behest of a
British physician, G.A. Hercklots, but only published in English,
presented all Muslims within the framework of this four-fold
division, indicated in honorifics attached to their names, while
noting that there were marriages that crossed such boundaries. In
Rasum-i Hind, a popular text book compiled by Master Pyare Lal for
the Punjab Department of Public Instruction and published in 1862,
there is an elaborate explication of the four fold division and
further subdivisions, referred to as nasl, ‘lineage or pedigree’:
Mughals are said to be descendants of the Biblical Noah; ancestors
of the Pathans were Israelites from the time of Solomon. Frequently
reprinted for use in the schools, this text was also part of the
vernacular training in Urdu for British military and administrators.
Left out of this categorization were patrilineal descendants of
converts to Islam, even prominent Rajput families who otherwise
commanded high social status. More clearly excluded were the large
majority of Muslim peasants and artisans that British social
analysis lumped into the pejorative category, ajlaf, from jalaf or
jilf, meaning ‘base or vile’: 'the low Muhammadan rabble', and 'the
bigoted julaha', ‘weaver’, who the British associated with rebellion
and
disorder. It was noted in Rasum-i Hind and the census reports that
the term shaikh was commonly extended to male converts and their
descendants who could claim no Arab ancestry. Among Muslims, descent
was only one criterion among others in claims and attributions of
social status. Nor did the concept of sharafat, respectability,
create a single unit of social solidarity that could override other
sorts of social division based on kinship, locality, religious
affiliation, ideology or economic interest.
Distinctions between high and low status Muslims were too variable
to fit these census demarcations. Sayyid and Shaikh, as well as
Mirza for Mughal, and Khan for Pathan, could be attached to a
person's name as a title of address, but these were imperfect
indications of social status. Although social status and previous
kinship ties were serious considerations, among others, in
matrimonial alliances, Muslim social groups were not sufficiently
endogamous or socially exclusive for most British definitions of
caste, particularly within the framework of a four-fold concept of
ashraf and its differentiation from ajlaf.
Writing about pre-colonial Bengal, Richard Eaton claims that ashraf
status based on 'Arab, Central Asian or Afghan origin' is not merely
a colonial construction but has deeper historical roots.
More important than descent was the quality of
sharafat, respectability, which was a matter of cultural style
associated with the heritage of the Mughal court, in dress, manners,
aesthetics, and above all, language and literature. Elaborate
politeness formulas, familiarity with Persian and Urdu literary
conventions, the art of elegant conversation, all of these marked a
person as sharif. Though rooted in Islamicate ethical traditions,
akhlaq, the quality of sharafat included many Hindus, Sikhs and even
Europeans who were in a position to partake of courtly
society or to emulate it and excluded the overwhelming majority of
Muslims. In the course of the eighteenth century it came to
characterize a particular linguistic register of Urdu, which took on
the literary heritage of Mughal Persian as the mark of cosmopolitan
cultivation. But sharafat could continue into later times and carry
over into other languages, including Bengali. By the late nineteenth
century, British census and ethnographic surveys turned the
concept of ashraf status into a matter of public controversy and
stimulated new forms of social identity. Particularly in Bengal,
there emerged among Muslims a demand to be counted as Sayyid, Shaikh,
Mughal or Pathan, the numbers increasing dramatically from census to
census. The 1872 Bengal Census counted about a quarter of a million
Muslims who claimed ashraf status out of a total Muslim population
of over 17 and a half million. By 1901, 19 and a half million
Muslims were counted as Shaikhs, out of a total Bengali Muslim
population of twenty-one and a half million. Claiming high status
for virtually all Muslims served as a means to assert full
recognition and enfranchisement as Muslims in the face of the
challenges of colonial rule and the rise of nationalist movements.
Addressing the Muslim world at large, the poet Shaikh Muhammad Iqbal,
descendant of Kashmiri pandits, declared in 1913, 'You may be
a Sayyid, you may be a Mirza, you may be an Afghan, whatever you may
be, speak out: are you also a Muslim?'
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