Introduction

In 1893, widespread acts of violence between Muslims and Hindus occurred during the Muslim holiday of ʿId al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice)¹ across various British Indian cities, from Bombay to Rangoon. These events resulted from the growing activism of Hindu Cow Protection Committees, which since the early 1880s strived to ban the slaughtering of cows throughout colonial India. Members of the Committees and supporters of Hindu reform organizations, most notably the Arya Samaj (est. 1875), mobilized around the figure of the cow to wage violent attacks against Muslims whom they condemned for slaughtering cows during the Islamic holidays. In response to these attacks, an increasing number of Muslims in South Asia began to view the slaughtering of cows as a form of symbolic resistance to the encroachment of these organizations upon Muslim ritual spaces. In 1893, the Budapest-born Jewish orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840–1899), himself an employee of the colonial administration in Punjab, commented on these instances of violence. He wrote:

In Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Persia where a cow might be sacrificed without causing the least offense to anyone, a sheep is preferred; why then should a cow be killed in India, where it is a most heinous crime in the eyes of the vast majority of the population, and when neither Scripture nor practice requires it throughout the Mohammeden [sic] world?²

This passage elucidates the pivotal change that occurred with regard to the relationship between Islam and sovereignty in the subcontinent during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Previously, Muslim rulers had governed large areas of the Indian subcontinent, irrespective of the number of their Muslim co-religionists. However, this condition changed with the gradual eradication of Mughal sovereignty since the late eighteenth century and its replacement with direct British rule in 1858. The colonial All-India censuses (1871–1941) institutionalized a majority–minority calculus across the subcontinent. Through policies and technologies of rule, British administrators reified “Muslim” as a bounded category while amplifying intracommunal fissures to undercut broader Muslim solidarities. As “numbers” were translated into political terms, Muslims were thus increasingly defined as a numerical minority in many parts of the subcontinent, with their political power tied ever more tightly to their population size. As Leitner observed, Muslims were forced to confront their numerical vulnerability and submit to the Hindu majority’s demand to refrain from cow slaughter.

However, Leitner’s statement was significant not only for its reflection on the emerging minority status of subcontinental Muslims. By echoing the claims of Hindu Cow-Protection Committees, his statement emphasized the mounting peril that a world devoid of “colonial impartiality” could pose for Muslims in the subcontinent. Here, I refer to “colonial impartiality” as the British colonial model of sovereignty over South Asia that emerged in full force in the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion. Impartiality, as envisioned by British colonial officials, was the ability of the sovereign to distance itself from the politics of communal difference, which they regarded as an inherent aspect of life in the subcontinent. By framing impartiality in this way, they presented colonial sovereignty as the only means of managing what they perceived as longstanding tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent.³

This British claim for impartiality was profoundly entangled with the emerging categories of “minority” and “majority.” As Anupama Rao has argued, the colonial state turned Hindus and Muslims into “quantitatively incommensurable” communities through the census. This condition paved the way to what became commonly known as communalism, the system under which the British colonial state positioned itself as a so-called neutral arbiter between religious “minority” and “majority” communities.⁴

The advent of these new political conditions radically transformed the Indian subcontinent. These conditions enabled the colonial state to arbitrate disputes pertaining to everyday matters, such as the slaughtering of cows, and the public arenas that facilitated them. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the everyday lives of Muslims in South Asia became subjected to a world defined by majoritarian claims, such as those put forth by Leitner and Hindu activists, on the one hand, and so-called colonial impartiality on the other. However, as I argue in the present essay, the everyday also served as a space for Muslims to envision alternative forms of sovereignty, challenging both the pervasive colonial policies and the majoritarian claims of Hindu reformists.

My focus on the everyday builds on a growing body of interdisciplinary approaches to sovereignty, which conceive of the concept not merely as “supreme rule over territory” but also as “social relations.”⁵ In his recent groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen has compellingly underscored the significance of this approach for historians, illustrating how the symbolic collapse of Mughal rule in the latter half of the nineteenth century led Muslim scholars to map sovereignty onto the very sites of everyday life. Tareen highlights that one such key site was the slaughtering of cows, noting that “In the absence of political sovereignty, the cow and its life and death … contained the promise of Muslim politics and sovereign power.”⁶ For Tareen, thus, regardless of whether the cow fostered Hindu–Muslim togetherness or strife, its main symbolic significance was to articulate Muslim visions of sovereignty and dominance in everyday life, even amidst direct British rule over the subcontinent.

Like Tareen’s study, this essay examines how sovereignty was reimagined in everyday life by Muslim thinkers in the aftermath of Mughal rule. However, my analysis extends beyond the question of Muslim domination. I argue that Muslim thinkers in colonial India conceptualized sovereignty in ways that transcended the discursive confines of Muslim dominance in everyday life. By exploring the potential for inter-communal engagement in everyday spaces, these thinkers envisioned a radical alternative to both the state’s regulation of communal relations and the efforts of both Muslim and Hindu activists to assert the dominance of one community over the other. In so doing, they did not advocate for the removal of religion from daily life in favor of a civil alignment, nor did they promote shared Hindu–Muslim rituals. Rather, these thinkers contended that the preservation of ritual differences between Muslims and Hindus could create space for meaningful interaction and even mutual love (muhabbat) in daily life between members of both communities. As they presented it, this vision of sovereignty was a return to Islam’s core teachings—one they believed could bridge, rather than exacerbate, the growing divide between Muslims and Hindus.

To illustrate this model of everyday sovereignty, the essay explores a defining arena in Hindu–Muslim relations over the past two centuries: halal consumption—especially meat—and its attendant practices. In the Mughal period, meat was not generally a subject that provoked mass religious violence.⁷ Yet, during the British colonial period, sensibilities regarding its consumption became a primary site of communal politics. On the one hand, these sensibilities prompted Hindus and Muslims to rise up together against the East India Company during the 1857 Rebellion, when Hindu and Muslim Sepoys suspected that their Enfield rifles’ cartridges were greased with cow and pork fat. Conversely, the consumption of meat also incited acts of inter-communal violence, such as the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century cow slaughtering riots that continue to this day to cast a shadow over Hindu–Muslim relations. These instances shared a common thread: meat and its consumption established boundaries and ways of excluding or marking exclusive identity.

Indeed, the formation and observation of dietary rules concerning meat reflect culturally specific conceptions of purity and pollution and thus tend to reinforce, regulate, and enshrine the segregation and autonomy of distinct cultural groups within a society.⁸ Accordingly, historians have accorded extensive attention to meat as a marker of identity in colonial South Asia, focusing on questions of violence and division, and on legal debates revolving around the figure of the cow, as well as on how these debates helped shape Muslim communal identities.⁹

In this article, I present an alternative perspective on the politics of halal food, specifically meat, and its role in reshaping Muslim political thought. I explore how these practices enabled Muslim thinkers to reconceptualize sovereignty and reimagine the position of their co-religionists in colonial India, extending their vision beyond the confines of their own community. I show that, far from being an obstacle for engaging non-Muslims, discourses and practices surrounding halal meat and food more broadly served to provide a potential avenue for inter-communal cooperation, ultimately seeking to remove the colonial state’s role as a mediator between religious communities in the subcontinent.

To demonstrate this argument, I primarily focus on the writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (henceforth Sayyid Ahmad; 1817–1898). Sayyid Ahmad is widely regarded as one of South Asia’s prominent Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Born into an elite Muslim (ashraf/shurafaʾ ; sg. sharif) family tied to the Mughal court,¹¹ he worked as a civil sub-judge for the East India Company. During the 1857 Rebellion, he saved the lives of British officials and their families, earning the honorary title of Sir. He later became known as the founder of the Aligarh Movement (1858). The latter provided the intellectual and social foundation for the establishment of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (M.A.O. College, est. 1875), through which he sought to cultivate a new generation of South Asian Muslim leaders. Central to this vision was the promotion of shurafaʾ culture and etiquette as a broader social ideal, alongside exposing the college’s students to a broad range of educational subjects to prepare them for the challenges of colonial modernity.¹²

Sayyid Ahmad’s vision also involved a sharp critique of the practice of taqlid (blind imitation) among Hanafi ʿulamaʾ (religious scholars), prompting historians to identify Sayyid Ahmad as a key figure in the development of Islamic modernism and reformism in South Asia.¹³ Indeed, his close ties with the colonial state and his promotion of European ideas and methods of education provoked criticism from ʿulamaʾ across South Asia, as well as from Muslim thinkers in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, who accused him of compromising Islam in favor with the British.¹⁴ Recent scholarship shows that Sayyid Ahmad shared several theological and legal concerns with some of his fiercest critics—including Deobandi scholars—even as they diverged sharply over how to confront colonial rule.¹⁵ Other studies reprise contemporaneous critiques, overlooking his sustained engagement with the Islamic discursive tradition and alleging that he participated in and reproduced colonial–orientalist discourses that led to the marginalization of Muslims in colonial South Asia.¹⁶ A further body of scholarship reads him chiefly through the lens of “Muslim separatism,” treating him as an early proponent of the idea that Muslims form a separate nation in South Asia.¹⁷ Historians have long challenged such readings of Sayyid Ahmad’s political thought,¹⁸ yet the role of everyday life in shaping his vision of sovereignty remains largely underexplored.¹⁹

Far from championing Muslim separatism or normalizing colonial power in everyday life, Sayyid Ahmad sought to redefine the boundaries of British rule and reorient the politicization of religious difference in the subcontinent. Through theological, jurisprudential, and historical reasoning, he transformed halal food and meat into a battleground for debating colonial, Muslim, and Hindu views on religious difference. For Sayyid Ahmad, this ground revealed sovereignty as not just institutional authority or coercive power—it was also a promise of mutual love in everyday life shared by Muslim and non-Muslim subjects alike.

I explore this vision through key examples from Sayyid Ahmad’s writings, beginning with his treatise, Ahkam taʿam-i ahl-i kitab (1868, “Laws Regarding the Food of the People of the Book”), published by the Hindu-owned Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow.²⁰ Often overlooked by historians, the treatise is commonly viewed as addressing Muslim dietary concerns and dining with Britons. However, it also offers a bold vision of sovereignty, rooted in Sayyid Ahmad’s interpretations of Islamic legal regulations on halal food, particularly meat. This treatise reveals his vision for Hindu–Muslim relations beyond colonial mediation. Sayyid Ahmad sought to involve the British not as “mediators,” but as co-eaters alongside Muslims and Hindus. In essence, he envisioned everyday life as a space where non-violent coexistence could only thrive through equality, not the domination of either the Muslim or the non-Muslim “other.”

In the 1870s and 1880s, Sayyid Ahmad expanded his vision of unmediated Hindu–Muslim sovereignty, particularly amid rising Hindu–Muslim tensions over cow slaughter. However, in the 1890s, faced with Hindu violence over the cow issue, he retreated, seeking protection for his co-religionists. This shift revealed the vulnerabilities of his earlier model, as prioritizing everyday sovereignty over state protection inadvertently strengthened colonial power and paved the way for new forms of inter-communal violence. Even so, his model of Hindu–Muslim sovereignty persisted, shaping debates among Muslim scholars—including some of his staunchest critics.

Before delving into Sayyid Ahmad’s “meat talk,” I first examine how and why halal meat became a central issue in nineteenth-century colonial India, focusing on global dietary shifts and the evolving political-legal landscape.

1 Producing the “Indian Muslim Carnivore”

In the nineteenth century, meat turned into a pivotal instrument of British colonial power in South Asia. The colonial state strategically utilized the issue of meat consumption to both create and solidify distinctions between Hindus and Muslims—distinctions that were often internalized by colonial subjects themselves.

Historically, meat was not widely consumed in South Asia and other parts of the world until the early nineteenth century. During this period, its status began to shift, as its consumption became a subject of intense debate within the broader context of a global “nutrition transition.”²¹ This transition climaxed following the Industrial Revolution,²² when European and American scientists began designating meat an essential product for a healthy and strong body.²³ Bolstered by technological advances, most notably new refrigeration technologies that enabled the long-distance transport of Australian and North American cattle in the nineteenth century, meat thus turned into a global staple protein for humans.²⁴

Although some ahadith (sg. hadith; sayings and practices attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate circles) suggest that the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite dish was tharid—pieces of bread in a meat broth—other Islamic traditions advocate a variety of dietary regimes ranging from moderation in meat consumption (out of concern for health risks, addiction, cruelty to animals, and financial costs) to vegetarianism and even veganism.²⁵ While meat was nevertheless consumed by Muslims worldwide,²⁶ especially during ʿId al-Adha, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that its regular consumption became widespread among non-elites.²⁷ This indicates that the “nutrition transition” was, therefore, a key moment of dietary change for Muslims worldwide. This was all the more true on the subcontinent, where the colonial state began juxtaposing the so-called “carnivorous Muslims” with the so-called “vegetarian Hindus.”²⁸

The changing diet of indentured laborers between the early nineteenth century and the late 1860s reflects this dietary transformation. Whereas in 1801 lists of food rations and products pertaining to Muslim and Hindu indentured laborers and troops on ships departing from Calcutta make no mention of any meat products,²⁹ in the late 1860s we see a different picture. In June 1869, a shipping health officer in Trinidad criticized what he regarded as the inadequate rice-based diet of Hindu workers, contrasting this with the healthier omnivorous dietary habits of Trinidad’s Muslims, who included subcontinental emigrants. As he noted: “they [i.e. the Muslims] certainly eat meat and other forms of animal food, and cannot fail to suffer from a continuous rice diet.”³⁰

This identification of meat consumption with physical strength was indeed common among British officials who regarded meat as “a vital source of British power and stamina, a weapon of war and a tool of conquest.”³¹ In fact, there was a general assumption among colonial officials that Muslims were physically stronger than Hindus due to their greater meat consumption. Such views even preceded the post-1857 Rebellion theory of “martial races”—the idea that certain subcontinental groups, among them Muslim and Sikhs, possessed inherent racial and biological qualities that made them “ideal” soldiers.³²

While such policies often encountered suspicions from Hindus and Muslims alike,³³ they were nevertheless frequently internalized by Indians themselves. M.K. Gandhi, for example, recounted in his autobiography how his Gujarati-Muslim friend, Sheikh Mehtab, tried to convince him to abandon his family’s staunch Vaishnava vegetarianism and embrace meat-eating instead. As Mehtab explained to Gandhi:

The English are able to rule over us, because they are meat-eaters. You know how hardy I am, and how great a runner too. It is because I am a meat-eater. Meat-eaters do not have boils or tumours, and even if they sometimes happen to have any, these heal quickly. Our teachers and other distinguished people who eat meat are no fools.³⁴

In response to this speech, Gandhi identified Sheikh Mehtab’s carnivore argument as a result of British colonial modernity, which, according to the Mahatma, his Muslim friend embodied.³⁵ Such arguments reflected a growing Hindu activism that sought to radically reduce the slaughter of animals, especially cows, on the Indian subcontinent. In some instances, although not in Gandhi’s case, this activism extended to arguing that the slaughter of cows threatened to weaken and immiserate the Hindu population. For instance, an article published in the April 1890 edition of Godharm Prakash of Farukhabad argued that “the scarcity of cattle has led to the dearth of milk and clarified butter and has affected the fertility of the soil, and that consequently the Hindus have fallen off in physique and the agricultural classes have been reduced to a state of destitution.” Thus, to rescue Hindus from the resultant physical debility, the author of the piece called on British animal protection activists to pressure their government to prohibit such practices.³⁶

As part of such activism, Hindu intellectuals argued to Muslim audiences and colonial officials alike that Islamic law neither prescribed nor commended the slaughter of cows. For example, Mohana Mittra (1856–1925), a Bengali Hindu journalist, wrote in 1894 that neither the Qurʾan nor hadith mandated cow slaughter and thus no ritual obligation existed.³⁷ Still, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century such interventions drew consistent Muslim rebuttals defending meat eating in general and beef in particular. In fact, some Muslim scholars began to advance various justifications in support of the consumption of meat.

A case in point is a treatise published in 1878 by Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (1832–1880), a prominent Hanafi scholar and one of the founders of the Islamic seminary in Deoband. Nanautvi rejected the claims of Hindus that meat-eating was an uncivilized act akin to the bestiality of wild animals. He proposed that not only was meat-eating natural for humans, but it was also a practice observed across the globe, serving as a marker of advanced civilization. He further asserted that even within Hindu communities, there existed groups who not only consumed meat but also offered animal sacrifices to their deities.³⁸

Other Muslims scholars positioned the consumption of meat at the center of Muslim identity politics amidst the increasing activism of the Cow Protection Committees in the late nineteenth century. A treatise by Samiʿullah Khan, one of the founders of the M.A.O. College, reflected such emerging politics. Published in 1894, the treatise drew upon a range of evidence, inducing Hanafi jurisprudence, to argue that cows were God’s favorite animals for sacrifice. Cows, it claimed, were slaughtered by the Prophet Moses himself, as well as by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. For those who did not agree with his juridical argument, Samiʿullah offered an economic reasoning for why cow slaughter would benefit Muslims. He claimed that cow slaughtering was economically beneficial since an average cow could be considered as a sacrifice offered to God by seven people, in contrast to sheep, which were more expensive per unit of weight and shared by fewer individuals. He further observed that it was a form of Hindu hypocrisy to focus exclusively on the Muslim practice of slaughtering cows during the ʿId celebrations, at a time when Christians in the subcontinent were engaged in the same practice on a daily basis.³⁹

Admittedly, not all Muslim scholars accepted such arguments, rejecting the growing identification of their co-religionists in South Asia with meat-eating. There were even prominent Muslim members of the ashraf who supported vegetarianism for health and moral reasons.⁴⁰ Yet notwithstanding these exceptions, the binary of the “carnivorous Muslim” versus the “Hindu vegetarian” gradually solidified and became politicized across the subcontinent during the nineteenth century. This solidification not only made meat a focal point of Hindu–Muslim relations but also marked the broader shift from Mughal to British colonial sovereignty and the attendant redefinition of the subcontinental legal sphere.

2 Different Shades of Impartiality: the Shift from Mughal to Colonial Sovereignty

In November 1858, following the trial and forced exile to Burma of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Zafar Shah (1775–1862), Queen Victoria issued a proclamation declaring direct British sovereignty over the Indian subcontinent. The proclamation marked the dissolution of the East India Company (EIC; 1600–1858), which had governed Britain’s Indian possessions on its behalf. The proclamation constituted a symbolic moment at which British sovereignty formally replaced the former socio-political order of the Mughal Empire.⁴¹

Although the British portrayal of the subcontinent as a region divided by antagonistic religious communities can be traced back to the early period of EIC rule over Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Victoria’s 1858 proclamation did reflect a rhetorical shift. Withdrawing from the EIC’s policy of liberal and reformist interventionism,⁴² the post-1857 Rebellion rhetoric stressed a British colonial commitment to refrain from intervening in the affairs of any religious community or supporting any religion, including Christianity (which EIC officials had officially previously endorsed), at the expense of others. Positioning itself as a sovereign power committed to the so-called impartial governing of social and religious difference, the proclamation guaranteed to “disclaim the Right and the Desire to impose our Convictions on any of Our Subjects,” by implementing “reason” and “impartial protection of the law.” It also stressed that Britain would “abstain from all interference with the Religious Belief or Worship” of its Indian subjects, while taking into account the “ancient Rights, Usages, and Customs of India.”⁴³

At first glance—and as some historians have noted—this commitment to noninterference may have reflected Britain’s attempt to signal discursive continuity with the Mughal ethos of justice that preceded its rule.⁴⁴ The Mughal ethos of justice was centered around an early modern vision of impartiality—albeit quite different from the colonial one—that was prevalent amongst various polities across Asia, most notably the Ottoman and Qing empires.⁴⁵ This Mughal vision stressed the state’s commitment to securing justice and impartial governance (ʿadl or insaf; derived from the Arabic root nasf, i.e. “taking the half, reaching towards the middle”) for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.⁴⁶ Unlike post-Enlightenment theories of impersonal governance, this Mughal vision of impartiality was not based on distance between the state and its subjects.⁴⁷ Rather, the Mughal political order was sustained by a personified imagination that stressed mutual love (muhabbat) between the emperor and his subjects,⁴⁸ a love that was gradually constructed through and conditioned by the reciprocal actions of both sides.

Set against this Mughal vision, the Raj’s framework of “impartiality” signaled a deeper rupture from Mughal modes of governing difference. At its core was a new conception of justice: in place of a Mughal framework grounded in muhabbat, the colonial state recast sovereignty as a stance of detached mediation between religiously divided communities.⁴⁹ Such disinterest, Victoria’s proclamation stressed, was sustained by a commitment to non-interference in the ritual affairs of its subjects. This commitment very much served the colonial state’s goal of provincializing Islamic law, a process that had already commenced during the 1790s under the EIC’s rule.⁵⁰ By limiting the scope of the category of ‘religion’ to the domains of belief and worship, the colonial state further excluded the Shariʿa from the ostensibly “secular” realms of colonial Public Law, restricting it to “successions, inheritance, marriage, and caste, and all religious usages and institutions.”⁵¹ Although such restrictions neither eroded Islamic law’s place in Muslim life across South Asia nor foreclosed Muslim jurists’ efforts to reshape the legal sphere from within—including through state mechanisms⁵²—they nonetheless redefined the Shariʿa as a communal jurisdiction to which other religious communities, such as Hindus, no longer had access.⁵³

The legal transformations brought by colonial impartiality, however, encountered social (and dietary) realities that challenged the colonial claim of “non-interference.” Standing at the intersection of the so-called “traditional” and “secular,” the question of halal meat consumption offers a useful lens with which to comprehend this history. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial India saw persistent tensions between the colonial state’s aspiration to regulate hygiene on the one hand, and its purported policy of non-interference on the other. These tensions arose primarily due to the fact that animal slaughter (zabiha) was a matter of ritual worship and service to God (ʿibadat).⁵⁴ This meant that zabiha ought to be included within the domain of colonial Personal Law.

Yet, like its European counterparts, the British colonial state in India sought to centralize and regulate meat production, driven by concerns that unsupervised animal slaughter could lead to disease and public disorder.⁵⁵ While Europe saw its first public abattoirs in the 1820s, the subcontinent’s first public abattoir was established in Delhi in the early 1850s, with others rapidly following suit.⁵⁶ However, as the number of abattoirs expanded, so did British colonial complaints about their sanitary conditions. A 1864 report from the British Indian Home Department, for instance, singled out the Sudder Bazar in Poona, describing its “slaughter-yard” as a “pest in itself.” The report highlighted the unsanitary process of blood collection and disposal, noting that blood and waste “constantly dripped out” and saturated the ground.⁵⁷ In another example from 1873, the Sanitary Commissioner of Punjab expressed concern over Delhi’s slaughterhouses, recounting his observation of meat being cut on “old charpois” (woven beds), calling it a “very objectionable practice” that should be stopped.⁵⁸

Such reports indicated a growing interest on the part of the colonial state in matters of public health and regulation. This interest led to tensions between the colonial state and Muslim and Hindus alike. Illustrative of such tensions was the introduction of a bill for “the better regulation and supervision of public slaughterhouses in the suburbs of Calcutta” in the Bengal legislative council during 1866. When members of Calcutta’s British Indian Association (1851–1954)⁵⁹ discovered that Hindu temples and other places of worship, where ritual slaughtering of animals was conducted, were not exempted from the bill, they protested and called for the bill’s amendment. Eventually, the council agreed to add a clause that exempted both Muslim and Hindu places of worship from the stipulations of the bill.⁶⁰

But the crown government also benefited from such religious sensibilities. For example, in 1886 legislators in Bengal received complaints from Hindus and Muslims alike that ghee sold in Calcutta’s bazaars was adulterated with beef and lard—beef commonly avoided among Hindus and lard prohibited under Islamic law. Colonial legislators proposed amending a 1876 bill to comprehensively reform food hygiene in Bengal. The suggested reforms included more frequent inspections by colonial officials of businesses involved in the selling and production of food, as well as harsher punishments for code violators. By instrumentalizing their subjects’ fears of the impurity of animal flesh, British officials thus found justifications to conduct wide-ranging public health reforms.⁶¹

Although they produced varying outcomes, these examples highlight a fundamental tension in the theory and practice of colonial impartiality—rooted in the colonial state’s inability to establish a clear legal divide between what its officials deemed as the “private” and “public” spheres.⁶² On the one hand, the colonial state sought to regulate dietary and hygienic norms and commitments but, on the other, it pledged—while continuing to police the boundaries of communal identity—to refrain from intervening in the ritual practices of its Indian subjects. These colonial interventions were more than mere reflections of the tensions and paradoxes inherent in secular governance and its legal regimes.⁶³ While these interventions turned everyday ritual into an increasingly politicized domain during the second half of the nineteenth century, they also elicited diverse responses among colonial subjects. It is this context that gave rise to Sayyid Ahmad’s meat-centered politics in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Avadh), the epicenter of the 1857 Rebellion and its aftermath.

3 Beyond “Colonial Impartiality”: Sayyid Ahmad in the Aftermath of the Rebellion

Having allied with the British Empire after saving the lives of English officials and their families during the 1857 Rebellion, Sayyid Ahmad considered Victoria’s 1858 proclamation as a new era in the subcontinent. He was particularly appreciative of the proclamation’s guarantee of equal protection for the religious practices and beliefs of Victoria’s Indian subjects.⁶⁴ However, his interpretation of impartiality was starkly divergent from that of the colonial state. Rejecting the idea that impartiality could be based on the sovereign’s detachment from his/her subjects, he argued that an “Empire of Impartiality” could function only if there existed a close relationship between the state and the members of religious communities under its rule.

Instead of defining impartiality as “not being motivated by private considerations,”⁶⁵ Sayyid Ahmad emphasized the importance of proximity between sovereign and subjects. He rejected the classical liberal view, which regarded intimacy as a form of ‘partiality’ in which an individual “would further his best [friend’s] interests, manifest concern or respect for his autonomy, or help him to become a more excellent human being.”⁶⁶ Rather, he argued that the connection between impartiality (bi-tarafdari) and intimacy was what allowed a polity to foster positive partiality (tarafdari) among the state’s subjects toward its rule and institutions. Sayyid Ahmad did not see positive partiality as a zero-sum game, where one religious community triumphs over another. Instead, tarafdari had to be universal, reflecting the sovereign’s ability to balance the diverse beliefs and concerns of all subjects. Thus, it was intimacy and proximity, not distance, that would secure the subjects’ support for a particular model of sovereignty and its associated institutions.

This position resulted from his experiences during the 1857 Rebellion. Serving as a sadr amin (civil sub-judge) for the EIC in Bijnor district during the rebellion, he bore witness both to the colonial policies that led to this anti-colonial uprising against the EIC, as well as the rebellion’s brutal suppression by Britain.⁶⁷ On the basis of his experiences, he came to view the pervasive British colonial interventions in the ritual spheres of its subjects as a key cause of the rebellion. He discussed this position in his renowned work, Asbab-i sarkashi-i Hindustan (known in English as The Causes of the Indian Rebellion; 1859).

In this treatise, he placed particular emphasis on the EIC’s disrespect towards its subjects’ religious rituals, arguing that “there was no doubt that our government was not informed about the conditions that caused suffering to its subjects” and that it “did not create love (muhabbat) and friendship during its hundred-year reign.” He urged the British government to learn from the subcontinent’s history, invoking the example of the Mughal Empire between the reigns of Akbar I and Shah Jahan (1556–1658), who, he claimed, made this region into their home and produced friendly relations (mil-jul) with their subjects through religious tolerance.⁶⁸

In invoking muhabbat, Sayyid Ahmad conceptualized love not as an insatiable, passionate love (ʿishq), but rather as a temperate one, one which is constructed gradually by both the sovereign and subjects.⁶⁹ Such a conceptualization was rooted in the early modern idea that rulers had to foster a sense of mutual love with their subjects solely on the basis of reason (ʿaql). By tempering love, the rulers would be able to refrain from favoritism or excessive attachment to any particular community under their sovereignty, “… just as a husband needed to be careful in dividing his affection among his wives, concubines and slaves.”⁷⁰ Offering his own take on the Mughal period, Sayyid Ahmad argued that the acquisition of muhabbat was not a matter of chance, but rather a result of the Mughal rulers’ ability to become an integral part of the subcontinent, despite initial perceptions of them as being foreign interlopers from Central Asia.

For Sayyid Ahmad, however, the maintenance of love was not solely dependent on the sovereign’s refraining from favoritism. Rather, he contended that the sovereign power was required to maintain ritual boundaries between the various religious communities under its reign, viewing this maintenance as a key aspect of sovereignty and the prerequisite for the implementation of impartiality. In his Asbab-i sarkashi-i Hindustan, Sayyid Ahmad placed particular emphasis on what he viewed as the EIC’s disruption of marked ritual boundaries between casted Hindus and Muslims. Some of these acts of disruption, he highlighted, were connected to ritual concerns over the purity of food. For example, he referred to the EIC’s implementation of the prison messing system, initially introduced in jails across Bengal in the 1840s. To punish its prisoners, the EIC forced Hindus to consume meals prepared by cooks who did not belong to their caste and eat alongside other prisoners.⁷¹ As he claimed, whereas Muslims were not directly affected by this messing system, they supported the Hindu protests since they saw this policy as a sign of British interference in its subjects’ ritual domains.⁷²

Adhering to this position, Sayyid Ahmad himself implemented clear ritual boundaries between Hindus and Muslims during the relief efforts of the 1860 famine in the Moradabad district in North India. Acting as a sub-judge in the British Indian civil service, he did not distinguish between the famine’s Hindu and Muslim victims, except in one respect: he segregated between the kitchens of different Hindu castes and those of Muslims. By segregating these cooking spaces, Sayyid Ahmad adhered to dietary rules that reflected the prevalent social order in North India, arguing that the crown government ought to avoid any interference in the ritual autonomy of its subjects.⁷³

Sayyid Ahmad’s attempt to maintain strict demarcations in matters of ritual appears to align with the self-perception of the colonial state as an “impartial sovereign” governing a clearly demarcated domain of religious communities. Yet, in contrast with the self-image of the colonial state, Sayyid Ahmad did not view ritual separation as an end in itself. Rather, he suggested, it served three main goals. First, it would ease the internal-Muslim debates between members of Muslim firqe (schools of belief), which steadily grew in the aftermath of the rebellion.⁷⁴ Second, ritual separation would enable Muslims to ‘cleanse’ themselves of what he deemed the segregationist influence of upper-caste Hindu dietary customs, which, he believed, had led Muslims to mistakenly think that engaging with non-Muslims over food was prohibited under Islamic law. Third, ritual separation was a prerequisite for the formation of unmediated inter-communal relationships, a condition that would, in turn, deprive the colonial state of its role as an alleged impartial mediator in the everyday interactions of its subjects, while fostering a form of political devolution in which Hindus and Muslims could negotiate their relations independently and according to their own volition.

In the following sections, I examine how Sayyid Ahmad conceptualized these ideas in practice, particularly through debates related to the consumption of halal food and meat, beginning with his treatise, Ahkam ta‘am-i ahl-i kitab.

4 Negotiating Ritual and Inter-Communal Sociability: Ahkam ta‘am-i ahl-i kitab

Published in 1868 in Urdu, with sections in Arabic and Persian, Sayyid Ahmad’s treatise was a response to the growing criticism he faced for his close ties with the British government.⁷⁵ Fellow Muslims criticized him for dining with British officials and consuming meat not slaughtered by Muslim butchers. In defense, Sayyid Ahmad drew on Islamic law and theology to justify such practices.⁷⁶ In other words, he employed various tools in his legal repertoire to create a body of rulings that would open the door to shared dining, first with “People of the Book” (in this case, Britons), and later with other non-Muslims (most notably Hindus) more broadly.

Sayyid Ahmad’s decision to center his treatise around Islamic legal rulings on the food consumed by the People of the Book (ahl al-kitab) warrants further exploration. The term, ahl al-kitab, which primarily refers to Jews and Christians, is a topic of discussion in longstanding debates between various Islamic schools of jurisprudence. Throughout history, Muslim jurists have grappled with how to reconcile the various Qurʾanic verses regarding Muslim interactions with kitabis (Jews and Christians). Qurʾan 5:5 states: “The food of the People of the Book is lawful for you, as your food is lawful for them.” However, Muslim scholars have also had to balance this verse with other Qurʾanic statements about the purity of kitabis and the conditions under which their food can be deemed halal.⁷⁷

Nevertheless, the title of Sayyid Ahmad’s treatise is somewhat deceptive, as it engages with a multitude of subjects, most notably the broader question of inter-religious interactions—particularly Hindu–Muslim relations—and intra-Muslim differences in everyday life. Structured as a series of responses to the commonly held doubts (shube in Urdu) of his fellow believers regarding dietary matters, it includes a diverse array of references, most notably verses from the Qurʾan and selected ahadith, as well as works of tafsir (exegesis of the Qurʾan) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), and selected fatwas written in Arabic and Persian (from the early Islamic period to the nineteenth century) as secondary sources.

In his introduction, Sayyid Ahmad lamented what he considered as the common practice of his time—namely, the tendency of some of his South Asian Muslim co-religionists to ostracize and excommunicate other subcontinental Muslims, including himself, for engaging in social interactions with non-Muslims and consuming their food.⁷⁸ He argued that such actions resulted from Muslims’ espousal of segregative dietary practices that were common among members of various Hindu castes. By imitating these practices, he explained, South Asian Muslims set themselves apart from their co-religionists elsewhere—for example, Muslims in Eastern Turkestan—who, he claimed, routinely shared meals with non-Muslims.⁷⁹

For Sayyid Ahmad, the refusal of some of his fellow Muslims to engage in culinary interactions with non-Muslims was a consequence of their lack of knowledge of their own religion. As he posited, the Qurʾan permitted the consumption of the food of kitabis—with the exceptions of forbidden (muharramat) foods such as pork and alcohol—and dining with them. He lamented that many of his co-religionists were unaware of this Qurʾanic permissibility and branded those who acted upon it—including himself—as unbelievers (a practice known as takfir). Rejecting the practice of takfir, he argued that all Muslims, regardless of their sectarian affiliation, should be regarded as a unified community characterized by its diversity:

Amongst us, the Muslims, there are many schools of belief (firqe) to the extent that we call one another infidels. All of these schools of belief consider themselves the umma of the Prophet Muhammad. Therefore, all those schools of beliefs are the people of the Qurʾan, which was revealed to them. Their differences in matters of practice and belief notwithstanding, these people cannot be considered as not belonging to the people of the Qurʾan. In the same manner, all of the Jews and Christians, whatever their own beliefs are, cannot be ostracized [from their own religion].⁸⁰

Sayyid Ahmad lamented that the diverse and inclusive category of Muslim had been narrowed by members of different firqe who rejected the Muslimness of their co-religionists over differences in practice. Instead of solely promoting a singular form of Islam, he advocated a vision of an umma unified in its diversity. Such principle of unity of difference, he noted, was shared by Jews and Christians as well, notwithstanding their existing denominational differences. As we can see, for Sayyid Ahmad the figure of the kitabi served as a useful point of rhetorical comparison, facilitating his argument for Muslim unity in difference.

Similarly, Sayyid Ahmad utilized the topic of the legality of zabiha by kitabis to present his perspective on the doctrinal divergences among the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence. To do so, he responded to the prevalent doubts among some of his co-religionists about whether the British slaughtered animals in accordance with the Shariʿa, which, in most cases, required “invocation of the name of God (tasmiyya) [and the] cutting of windpipe, carotid arteries and gullet of the animal.”⁸¹ Rejecting such doubts, Sayyid Ahmad called upon Muslims to follow the verse (Qurʾan 5:5): “The food of the People of the Book is lawful for you as your food is lawful for them.” Drawing on this verse, he stated that even if the British had slaughtered their animals in a way that did not accord with Islamic law and invoked the name of Jesus instead of the tasmiyya during the act of slaughtering itself, such meat should still be considered halal.⁸²

As this position suggests, Sayyid Ahmad stressed that the rules for lawful slaughtering were solely incumbent upon Muslims and not upon kitabis. To support this view, he avoided the position of Hanafi madhhab (the dominant school of jurisprudence in South Asia), arguing that its corpora did not have many materials on this question. Instead, Sayyid Ahmad chose to consult the Maliki madhhab, referring to the tafsir (commentary of the Qurʾan) of the North African scholar Abu Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabi al-Maliki (1076–1148). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this text would become of central importance to Muslim thinkers beyond the subcontinent, who advanced similar claims to those put forth by Sayyid Ahmad regarding the lawfulness of kitabi zabiha.⁸³ Al-Maliki claimed in his commentary that even if an animal had been slaughtered by Christians without following the conditions prescribed by the Shariʿa, such meat was still lawful for Muslims.⁸⁴ Seeking to justify the reference to Maliki rather than Hanafi jurisprudence, Sayyid Ahmad explained that:

Even if a person is a follower of one of the four Sunni imams [or] if he follows in some matter another imam, then it is [considered] lawful. Particularly, it is lawful in such a situation in which the [required] text is not available in one’s school of jurisprudence. Therefore, in such tradition, the followers can act upon any of the four schools of jurisprudence.⁸⁵

By invoking Maliki jurisprudence, Sayyid Ahmad strategically circumvented taqlid—the hermeneutical approach that emphasizes adherence to a single school of jurisprudence, a subject of ongoing and contentious debate among Muslim scholars across a range of contexts, including South Asia, since the fourteenth century.⁸⁶ Rather than adhering to this constraint, he used an alternative legal method that resembled to the eleventh- and twelfth-century approach of takhayyur (“legal eclecticism”). The latter allowed for temporarily adopting a Sunni madhhab different from one’s usual affiliation to address specific legal issues.⁸⁷ This approach, though central to Sayyid Ahmad’s thought, was also embraced—though not exclusively—by reformist movements and Muslim constitutionalists across British India, the Ottoman Empire, and Khedival Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While, in some contexts, Muslin thinkers and jurists practiced takhayyur to justify the adaptation of European constitutional models in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states,⁸⁸ for Sayyid Ahmad, it remained firmly anchored in the long-standing legal traditions of the four Sunni schools, underscoring his commitment to engaging with the broader Islamic legal discourse rather than dismissing it entirely.

In the following year, Sayyid Ahmad took his position toward zabiha to the extreme. Traveling to Britain from Bombay in 1869 in the first-class cabin of a British steamer, he discovered that the ship’s butcher and cook on board were European Christians.⁸⁹ As he noted, the butchers wrung the necks of the chickens and did not slit their throats, which made them haram (prohibited) according to the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence. Sayyid Ahmad nevertheless ate the chicken, arguing that consuming such meat was permissible based on what he called the “discerning Shariʿa.”⁹⁰

Here, Sayyid Ahmad also introduced a new argument (which he later abandoned). Drawing on conversations with European passengers on board the steamer, he claimed that birds, like fish and locusts, did not have the same amount of blood as four-legged creatures.⁹¹ While there is a consensus among the four Sunni madhahib that birds are land animals,⁹² he advanced the idea that chickens were like sea animals—i.e. animals for which Sunni fiqh, in most cases, does not have strict slaughtering regulations⁹³—and that therefore there was no need to cut their throats.⁹⁴ The implication of such an argument for Sayyid Ahmad was not only the extension of the variety of halal food for Muslim passengers on European steamships. Rather, it enabled him to demonstrate that the fiqh classification of animals into particular categories was malleable in accordance with scientific discoveries.

Many of Sayyid Ahmad’s contemporaries, however, did not agree with his arguments about zabiha. A key example is the critique invoked by Deputy Collector, Sayyid Imdad ʿAli of Kanpur. Like Sayyid Ahmad, Imdad ʿAli received colonial honors and pensions for his showing loyalty to the British crown during the 1857 rebellion.⁹⁵ Unlike Sayyid Ahmad, however, he was a staunch opponent of any deviation from Hanafi fiqh, which he viewed as central to regulating the daily practices of Muslims in British India.

In 1868, Imdad ʿAli published a treatise, The Support for the condemnation of the Rulings Concerning the People of the Book (Imdad al-ihtisab ʿala ahkam-i taʿam-i ahl-i kitab), in which he largely based his claims on longstanding corpuses of Hanafi fiqh, as well as ahadith and tafasir. He opined that Sayyid Ahmad’s dietary theory did not conform to the logic of Islamic law, and accused him of adjusting scriptural prescriptions, which prohibited eating the food of kitabis and dining with them. According to Imdad ʿAli, Sayyid Ahmad had abused Islamic Law to promote his own selfish interests rather than truly adhere to its prescriptions.⁹⁶

Sayyid Ahmad’s decision to eat the chicken on the steamer provoked further criticism from Imdad ʿAli in 1870. He denounced Sayyid Ahmad’s interpretation of the Qurʾanic verse 5:5, through which he justified the permissibility of kitabi food. As he argued, this verse did not refer to meat and thus contradicted Sayyid Ahmad’s argument that the twisted-neck chicken was lawful. He then added that even if zabiha was included in the category of ta‘am (food), the Qurʾan still prohibited eating the meat of strangled animals (in his opinion, this category also concerned animals slaughtered by wringing their necks). By overlooking how Jews and Christians have slaughtered their animals, Sayyid Ahmad’s logic, he argued, would lead to the consumption of pork and other prohibited foods.⁹⁷

Such criticism toward Sayyid Ahmad was not unique during the period in question, even amongst some of his closest associates. A case in point was Mahdi ʿAli Khan, better known as Muhsin al-Mulk (1837–1907), Sayyid Ahmad’s close associate at Aligarh. A Shiʿi convert to Sunni Islam, in 1872 al-Mulk published an article in Tahzib al-Akhlaq where he compared the dietary views of Sayyid Ahmad and Imdad ʿAli.⁹⁸

Like Sayyid Ahmad, al-Mulk too was critical of Imdad ʿAli’s sole reliance on Hanafi taqlid, accusing him of ignoring God’s commands about the lawfulness of kitabi food as a result of misunderstanding the hadith and fiqh sources he had used.⁹⁹ Nevertheless, al-Mulk had certain reservations about Sayyid Ahmad’s dietary views, referring to the example of the chicken.¹⁰⁰ As al-Mulk explained, even if there was no prohibition on eating kitabis’ food, its preparation still had to conform to the rulings of the Qurʾan. As there was no proof that rules governing zabiha prescribed different slaughtering methods for Muslims and kitabis, Muslims could only consume the meat of animals slaughtered in one way, i.e. by slitting the animal’s throat, esophagus, and two jugular veins. Lamenting in 1869 to Muhsin al-Mulk about the backlash his positions had received, Sayyid Ahmad gloomily noted that such objections, like those of Imdad ʿAli, demonstrated how far Indian Muslims had departed from the practices of their coreligionists outside of the subcontinent, noting Khedival Egypt as a main example.¹⁰¹

Sayyid Ahmad’s focus on the question of zabiha, however, was not only a matter of Muslim-kitabi or inter-Muslim relations and Islamic reform. He engaged with the question of zabiha to think through the socialization between Hindus and Muslims via food. While takhayyur offered a solution for cases in which a Christian or Jew was the butcher, the solution did not apply in the case of Hindus. But these latter were also part of the story of zabiha, given that British officials in the subcontinent frequently hired non-kitabi cooks, most notably Hindus, to work in their kitchens.

Sayyid Ahmad indeed followed the common consensus among Sunni Muslim scholars, who considered meat slaughtered by Hindus as unlawful. Simultaneously however, he claimed that even if Hindus touched and prepared food for their British employers, then the consumption of such food was lawful until proven otherwise. Arguing that Britishers functioned as purifying agents by virtue of their custodial authority, Sayyid Ahmad stated that even if outcast Chamaars (a caste of hereditary leather-workers) prepared food that would be served to Muslims, such food should not be prohibited if a British—i.e., a kitabi—were to be present during the food preparation.¹⁰²

At first glance, the British presence here might seem to confirm the inevitability of colonial mediation. Sayyid Ahmad’s argument does the opposite: it transforms the British from external arbiters into usable ritual instruments. While he accepted the Sunni consensus that meat slaughtered by Hindus is unlawful, he also contended that food prepared by Hindus for British employers remains lawful unless proven otherwise; the British, as kitabis, can supply a purifying presence—even when the cooks are Hindus. Read this way, Sayyid Ahmad’s position did not concede control to the colonial state. Rather, by instrumentalizing the British kitabi presence, it sought to return practical agency to Hindus and Muslims, widening Hindu–Muslim commensality and blunting caste segregation. In so doing, Sayyid Ahmad considered the British in such instances not as impartial arbiters but as participants whose presence in animal slaughter and preparation of food further enables—rather than forecloses—direct inter-communal engagement.

At the same time, however, for Sayyid Ahmad, the restriction on Muslim consumption of meat slaughtered by Hindus—and the need to find creative solutions to address this limitation—was an isolated case. In fact, as he argued, there was no prohibition on eating food prepared by Hindus, except for meat. Sayyid Ahmad specifically emphasized that consuming foods that did not require special slaughtering—such as fish, bread, rice, eggs, sweets, and the like—was permissible, regardless of whether they were prepared by kitabis or non-kitabis. In limiting dietary restrictions to animal flesh, he aimed to avoid unnecessary debates over the purity of other foods and to encourage new forms of Hindu–Muslim engagement centered around non-carnivorous foods.¹⁰³

By claiming that Hindus were not bodily impure, Sayyid Ahmad operated within a longer tradition of Islamic scholarship, referring to a fatwa issued by Shah ʿAbdul ʿAziz (1745–1823) of Delhi, the son of the renowned subcontinental Muslim scholar Shah Waliullah. ʿAbdul ʿAziz considered it permissible for Muslims to drink from Hindu wells and wear Hindu clothes, conceding that such conduct was allowed since it did not concern matters of din.¹⁰⁴ Sayyid Ahmad made a similar call for Muslims to adopt non-din practices of food consumption that benefited the Muslim umma.

Central to this argument were the longstanding debates over how to interpret the saying by the Prophet Muhammad: “Whoever resembles a people is one of them” (man tashabbaha bi-qawm fa huwa minhum).¹⁰⁵ Unlike many of his contemporaries who invoked this hadith to prohibit any interaction with Britons and Hindus, Sayyid Ahmad argued that as long as Muslims did not adopt the din of others, then there was no harm in resembling non-Muslims in daily practices. He claimed that this hadith referred solely to a state of war with non-Muslims. In such an environment, Muslims had to wear particular clothes in order to be properly identified for burial according to Islamic law. Such circumstances of war, he argued, were not applicable to the present time.¹⁰⁶

Thus, for Sayyid Ahmad, as SherAli Tareen has forcefully argued, the objection of Muslim scholars in the subcontinent to the imitation of non-Muslim non-ritual practices in everyday life was “… symptomatic of a petty and regressive vision of religion that impeded rather than facilitated the political and spiritual growth and prosperity of South Asian Muslims.”¹⁰⁷ In Sayyid Ahmad’s view, such objections reflected an “unholy alliance” between the common people (ʿawamm), Sufi pirs, and the ʿulamaʾ.¹⁰⁸ He observed that the ʿulamaʾ class bore a distinctive responsibility in forging this alliance, as they opted to align themselves with the masses by endorsing their abstention from dining with non-Muslims.¹⁰⁹

Here, Sayyid Ahmad polemicized against a primary rationale employed by Muslim scholars in South Asia to justify such prohibitions, alluding to the common view that shared meals with non-Muslims would have a pernicious potential since they could enable sentiments of mutual love between Muslims and non-Muslims.¹¹⁰ The concept of love (muhabbat) was central to this objection.¹¹¹ Muslim scholars throughout history interpreted the abovementioned hadith of resemblance (tashabbuh) by building on the rich corpora of Sufi and legal thought concerning the discourse of love. In the modern period, the utilization of such discourse served to highlight Muslim distinction and superiority in their everyday life.¹¹²

For Sayyid Ahmad, too, love served to emphasize the distinction between Muslims and Hindus in matters of ritual. However, this distinction did not preclude the possibility of love between Muslims and Hindus (or any other non-Muslim community) in other spheres. Distinguishing between love (muhabbat) grounded in religion and love in all other domains, he wrote:

We Muslims love our religion’s ancient scholars, the pious [people] and those who love God. We do not love them for any kind of worldly desires or cunning and artful [reasons], nor for any reason of worldly favors, neither do we love them in relation to [the rest of the] society. The love that we have toward each other is only in [matters] of religion, since they were the scholars of our religion, the pious [people] of our school of jurisprudence, or the friends of the umma upon which there is mercy and in which we are found. Therefore, such a form of love with anyone apart from Muslims is undoubtedly not only forbidden (haram), but also an act of unbelief (kufr). [However], there is no harm in other kinds of love [toward non-Muslims], apart from the love [in matters of religion] …. As mercy and kindness are common in the Muhammadan religion (din-i Muhammadi), it is our duty to show such mercy and kindness toward all the people, whether they are People of the Book or unbelievers, making ourselves into the example of the Muhammadan religion’s mercy and affection in order to convince all people in the truthfulness of our religion after looking at our example.¹¹³

Invoking love as a political lexicon, Sayyid Ahmad cultivated two forms of affiliation: ritual distinction for Muslims, and a shared, non-ritual civic bond extending to Hindus and Britons alike. His selection of terminology is also of significant importance. While there were numerous terms that he could have employed to describe the sentiments of Muslims towards non-Muslims (e.g., mawaddat, tawaddud, mawalat, dusti, which he used interchangeably in the text to describe “friendship”), he chose the word muhabbat to underscore the notion that love, at least in some spheres, could also be directed towards non-Muslims, irrespective of whether they were kitabis or non-kitabis.

Like the muhabbat between sovereign and subjects, which was built upon mutual actions and responsibilities for mutual love to be attained in everyday life, so too were Muslims and non-Muslims also obliged to assume certain responsibilities. As Sayyid Ahmad argued, gatherings involving Muslims and non-Muslims were the space within which such mutual-love can be attained. While Muslims had to show love toward their non-Muslim neighbors, he claimed, the latter had to be mindful of the religious sensibilities of Muslims in such gatherings, noting that Muslims were prohibited from attending Hindu or any other non-Muslim public gatherings that involved anti-Muslim rhetoric.¹¹⁴ He justified this stance by referring to the hostility between Muhammad and the unbelievers of the Quraysh tribe, who openly denied and mocked the Prophet’s beliefs during their gatherings.¹¹⁵ Sayyid Ahmad thus envisioned the attainment of inter-communal muhabbat as centrally dependent on the reciprocal actions of both Muslims and non-Muslims.

He further emphasized this point in his conclusion, which he chose to write in Arabic. Although he did not explain his shift from Urdu, this choice likely aimed to assert his intellectual authority, given that Arabic was a central language of religious scholarship across the Muslim world. It suggested his intent to engage not only with his Muslim contemporaries and British officials but also with Islamic scholars more broadly. The wide-reaching topic of the conclusion, relevant to Muslims within and beyond the subcontinent, likely justified the switch to Arabic, as he addressed the legality of Muslims living under non-Muslim rule. Reflecting on colonial sovereignty in South Asia and its perceived sources of legitimacy, he wrote:

The polytheists [i.e. Hindus] and the Christians in our land are not people under our communal protection (ahl dhimmatina); rather, we, the community of Muslims, are their subjects and neighbors, living under their security. We spread through their lands and they do good to us in numerous ways because they reign over us with justice and they do not prefer one community over the other. Among their rules is the complete equality in rights of worshipers, whether they are Jews, Christians, polytheists, or Muslims. Moreover, they do not prevent the performance of Islamic religious obligations, such as prayer, fasting, charity, and the hajj. They do not meddle in [the matters] of carrying out the Friday and holiday prayers, but only [involve themselves in matters] of oppression, corruption, and anything uglier than these. They cast their legal verdict in issues relating to a specific school of Islamic law, such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and so forth according to what has been transmitted to us in our Islamic law. And hence, it is logical that we would prefer them in comparison to ourselves and that we shall choose them [as rulers] as they protect us, take care of our wealth and guard our life in the best possible way as we have explained. Therefore, it has already been obliged upon us to obey the ruler’s rulings concerning worldly life.¹¹⁶

While his reference to British rule over Muslims is clear, it remains uncertain whether Sayyid Ahmad’s remarks about Hindus were concerned with sovereignty over Muslims—for example, in Hindu-ruled princely states—or merely relations with Hindu neighbors. Either way, his claim that non-Muslims may govern Muslims so long as the latter can freely fulfill their religious obligations was not novel; it engaged longstanding juristic debates, traceable to the early Islamic period, over the definition of dar al-Islam (abode of Islam).¹¹⁷ What was distinctive in Sayyid Ahmad’s formulation, however, was his insistence that impartiality—not confessional identity—is a central attribute of sovereign authority. He argued that colonial rule was acceptable only insofar as it upheld impartiality in everyday life, especially in matters of ritual. More importantly, he contended that the legitimacy of the state rested on its absence from the daily lives of its subjects. He understood this absence not as detachment but proximity—an acknowledgment that unmediated interactions between religious communities were crucial for fostering a non-violent everyday life and, ultimately, for the flourishing of the polity.

While sympathetic to colonial sovereignty, Sayyid Ahmad’s treatise was more than an effort to legitimize British rule. It represented a nuanced stance on inter-religious social engagement and the theorization of social difference. At the heart of his argument was the preservation of Muslim distinctness in ritual. He asserted that maintaining Islamic practices as a distinct space, separate from other communities, would not obstruct but rather empower Muslims to engage more fully with the wider world—fostering meaningful, everyday interactions with Hindus and other non-Muslims.

Strikingly, Sayyid Ahmad’s insistence on everyday Muslim distinction echoed Deobandi scholars’ claims that ritual separation functioned as a modality of Islamic quotidian sovereignty.¹¹⁸ His objective, however, diverged from those of his Deobandi rivals: by delineating Hindu and Muslim ritual domains, he sought to open space for inter-communal engagement beyond ritual practice. Muslim Distinction, not domination, was the point—an affirmation that Islam encourages, rather than prohibits, ordinary relations of friendship and affection with non-Muslims.

5 Cows and the Hindu–Muslim Sovereignty of Everyday Life

Sayyid Ahmad’s vision of sovereignty in everyday life cannot be disconnected from the much better-known story of Hindu–Muslim strife over cow slaughtering across the northern parts of the subcontinent. Historical evidence shows that the issue of cow slaughtering did become invested with political meaning at certain junctures in the pre-colonial period. Illustrative precedents include Akbar’s (r. 1556–1605) prohibition of cow slaughter, as well as the ban instituted by the Marathas upon their occupation of Delhi in 1757.¹¹⁹ But it was only in the nineteenth century that this topic gradually became a central theme of Hindu–Muslim relations when the EIC, in the name of the Mughal emperor, lifted the Maratha ban on this practice in Delhi in 1803.¹²⁰

The colonial intervention in the cow question continued to intensify throughout the following decades, with policies that differed from province to province. In some cases, colonial officials across the northern parts of British India sought to regulate and control cow slaughtering by prohibiting or sanctioning it in accordance with principles of minority-majority difference—that is, in view of the respective numbers of Hindus and Muslims in each province. In others cases, however, the colonial state decided over such matters in accordance with what its officials believed was the “common custom” that preceded colonial rule.¹²¹

Such policies prompted a range of responses such as the Hindu and Sikh Namdhari movement (est. 1867) in Punjab, which aimed to reinstate the ban on cow slaughter. In 1871, Namdhari followers murdered several Muslim butchers whom they blamed for cow slaughter.¹²² The emergence of Hindu reform movements, most notably the Arya Samaj (est. 1875),¹²³ and their members’ establishment of Cow Protection Committees throughout the central and northern parts of the subcontinent in the early 1880s, led to an escalation of anti-Muslim propaganda. Utilizing improved forms of transportation, railroads in particular, and print media, members of these committees traveled across various parts of the subcontinent to propagate their views, creating increased tension between Hindus and Muslims.¹²⁴

Even before these anti–cow-slaughter campaigns of the 1870s–80s, Sayyid Ahmad recognized the issue’s potential to inflame Hindu–Muslim relations; he first addressed it in an Urdu essay published in October 1869. There, he situated cow slaughtering as part of a broader question of how Hindus and Muslims could attain mutual love and sympathy (ba-ham muhabbat va ham-dardi). For Sayyid Ahmad, the rising tensions among Hindus and Muslims over ritual were a result of people’s failure to discern between “two kinds of zealotry (ta‘assub)”:

The first kind [of zealotry] would stay within the limits of moderation, creating in the heart respect for one’s religion while facing others and inspiring people to abide with the fundamental principles of one’s religion. The second one, by transgressing the limits of moderation, would cause conflict between members of two religions, and by doing so it would create this situation which provokes unjustified disorder. Therefore, the first kind of zealotry is allowed by Islamic Law, which all of its practitioners regard as necessary, and the second one is the basis of disorder which spoils the religion of everyone. Even if it became permissible, we see that the religious zealotry found among Indians is one that turns them for no reason into each other’s enemies and denies the fact that they are fellow-countryman. Apart from chaos and animosity it would not bring anything.¹²⁵

Sayyid Ahmad posited that the first kind of zealotry did not possess malevolent qualities and that it could serve a constructive purpose, namely the establishment of discrete ritual spaces for both Hindus and Muslims, “the majority population” of the subcontinent, as he termed both communities. This separation in matters of ritual, he explained, would allow each community to practice their religion without any external interference, while creating an environment that ensured respect toward their beliefs on the part of those who did not share their religious identity. Yet, as he lamented, it was the second type of zealotry—one that triggered tumult (fasad)—that most Muslims and Hindus adopted. He stated:

Hindus regard the eating or slaughtering of cows as very bad practices. Some Muslims, for the mere purpose of committing mischief whenever they have an opportunity, provoke them by slaughtering cows in front of Hindus’ houses and alleys, as well as throwing [cows’] meat to vultures and ravens in front of them. But somebody should ask these Muslims if this kind of mischief is in conformity with [Islam’s] religious customs, or if such unreasonable mischief would make them worthy of a divine reward. In my opinion such practices lead only to riots. If Hindus were to look at the blood or meat of cows, this would never weaken their religion, but it would merely invoke in their hearts animosity toward Muslims due to this mischief.¹²⁶

Such ta‘assub, Sayyid Ahmad opined, was a further proof that some of his co-religionists had abandoned the teachings of Islam, for, he claimed, the Shariʿa did not support such acts against Hindus. This ta‘assub, he noted, was also prevalent among Hindus, leading to anti-Muslim acts of violence, even though they were not prescribed by the teachings of Hinduism.¹²⁷ Calling upon Hindus and Muslims to avoid turning the issue of meat into an object of religious violence, Sayyid Ahmad articulated an argument that stressed how such behavior ran contrary to the religious rulings (ahkam) of both Hinduism and Islam. Here, Sayyid Ahmad restated his vision of Islamic reform. This vision was not centered around the acceptance of external influence but rather about the non-obvious juxtaposition of greater sociability between religious communities and greater “purity” of ritual inside one’s community.

Once again, as in the preceding section, we see how Sayyid Ahmad’s argument was based on the premise that the attainment of mutual love is contingent upon actions that are in accordance with the mutual avoidance of wrongdoing and the non-infringement upon the rituals of members of other communities. Such mutual love, as this argument suggests, could only be a consequence of direct interaction between Hindus and Muslims, rather than a result of colonial duress or mediation.

For Sayyid Ahmad, the focus of some Muslims on their right to slaughter cow was again a result of Muslims’ misunderstanding of their own religious commands, leading them to imagine cow slaughter as a religious question. In fact, the keeping of ritual boundaries segregating Muslims from Hindus were the only way, he believed, to prevent Muslims from conceptualizing the slaughter of cows as a core Muslim principle. He articulated this view in another essay he published in October 1887. Expressing his satisfaction with reports that Muslims in the UP town of Meerut had refrained from sacrificing cows during the ʿId al-Adha,¹²⁸ he stressed that indeed there was no ritual hindrance against sacrificing sheep and goats instead of cows during the holiday. At the same time, however, Sayyid Ahmad emphasized that Muslims’ choice as to whether or not to slaughter cows had nothing to do with religious commands. As he argued, ending the practice of slaughtering cows was solely dependent on the good intentions of his co-religionists:

We say that if by giving up their insignificant right to slaughter cows there could be a Hindu–Muslim unity, then Muslims should abandon this right. For the blessing of unity (dawlat-i ittifaq) [between Hindus and Muslims] is of much worthier value than this insignificant [legal] right.¹²⁹

Sayyid Ahmad offered a vision of equal Hindu–Muslim legal subjecthood which sought to transcend religion as a basis for civil cooperation, one which resembled—albeit with a different terminology of dawlat-i ittifaq—the Mughal imperial principle of sulh-i kull (universal conciliation/universal peace; lit. “peace with all”).¹³⁰ Originating in the period of Akbar, Mughal officials, according to Rajeev Kinra, deployed sulh-i kull for “encouraging (indeed enforcing) norms of civility and convivencia, not just between conflicting sectarian groups but also among the entire gamut of social classes, ethnic groups, and other types of community.”¹³¹ The distinctiveness of sulh-i kull in the context of the Mughal Empire was not merely an acknowledgment that a Muslim polity could accommodate religious diversity, a prevalent practice among Muslim states since the advent of Islam. Rather, as A. Azfar Moin posits, sulh-i kull marked a pivotal shift in the political history of Islam as it transformed the impartial accommodation of religious differences between Muslims and non-Muslims from a mere practice of governance into a fundamental duty of the Muslim sovereign.¹³²

For Sayyid Ahmad, however, in the political context of British India, sovereignty in everyday life did not entail the state’s supervision. His idea of sovereignty departed from Sulh-i Kull as it lacked any idea of the state serving as arbiter. Instead, his vision of sovereignty was premised mainly on the idea of direct Hindu–Muslim engagement. In fact, he believed, if Hindu organizations would cease to polemicize against the right of Muslims to practice cow slaughtering through religious propagation and the British Indian judicial system, then Muslims could voluntarily abandon cow slaughtering to advance the attainment of mutual love with Hindus.¹³³

By the late 1880s, however, the political context had radically changed. Amidst the changing political landscape in South Asia, Sayyid Ahmad retreated from his vision of everyday sovereignty. One major reason was the rise of the Indian National Congress (INC; est. 1885). Even if it claimed to represent all Indians, Sayyid Ahmad identified the INC as a party governed first and foremost by Bengali Hindus that sought to promote Hindu majoritarian politics. Moreover, the increasing intervention of the colonial judicial mechanisms in the cow question only further exacerbated Hindu–Muslim violence. In 1888, the Northwestern Provincial High Court in Allahabad ruled that the cow was not a sacred object according to section 295 of the Indian Penal Code. The ruling permitted Muslims to slaughter cows without concern for potential legal consequences resulting from any perceived offense to Hindus’ religious sensibilities. British officials faced growing suspicion among Hindus, but it was above all Indian Muslims who became the subject of violence and disgust for the proponents of Hindu reform movements.¹³⁴ As the politics of the street initiated by supporters of the cow protection committees increased, Muslims also began to seek the assistance of the colonial state to protect their communal right to slaughter cows.¹³⁵

Amidst these changing political conditions, Sayyid Ahmad was drawn to seek the protection of the colonial state. In a petition that he sent in 1890 on behalf of thousands of signatories from across the subcontinent to the British Parliament, he argued that although Muslims constituted “only one-fifth of the inhabitants of India, they are the largest single community and number not less than 50,000,000 souls.” Using this enumerative claim alongside the questionable idea that only Muslims constituted a unified religious community, the petition noted that notwithstanding the large numbers of Muslims, some colonial municipalities discriminated against their practices and prohibit cow-killing. As the petition stated, this prohibition was “a measure that would deprive the poor Mohammedans [sic] of their most important articles of food.” The signatories thus called upon the British government to refrain from such prohibitions and protect the Muslim minorities in these provinces.¹³⁶

Although he still framed his stance in civil and economic terms, Sayyid Ahmad relinquished his earlier vision of sovereignty in everyday life. He now relied on the colonial state and its so-called “impartial legal mechanisms” for the protection of his co-religionists. But such reliance did not prevent the violence surrounding the figure of the cow. In 1893, South Asia witnessed the eruption of cow slaughter riots across the subcontinent, marking a further significant shift towards the violent politicization of everyday life.

6 Epilogue: the Politics of Meat between Colonial Impartiality and Anti-Colonialism

As evidenced by Sayyid Ahmad’s shift to colonial mediation, his meat-centric vision of sovereignty did not yield any tangible outcomes. The practice of meat consumption in general and cow slaughter in particular continued to be a pivotal locus of Hindu–Muslim conflict and the perpetuation of communal differences. Moreover, Sayyid Ahmad’s decision to seek recourse within the colonial legal system so as to protect his co-religionists from the growing Hindu anti-cow slaughter activism can be viewed as an initial step towards Muslim activism for the purpose of attaining “minority rights” via the colonial legal system. This approach was exemplified by the activism of the All-India Muslim League and its advocacy for separate electorates after its establishment in 1906, an approach that challenged the Indian National Congress’s claim to speak for a single, unified Indian nation. The Muslim League’s activism resulted in 1909 in the allotment of seats in the British Indian Councils exclusively for Muslims, regardless of their actual numbers. Muslims in South Asia thus gradually came to rely on “minority safeguards” provided by the colonial state, rather than on a direct Hindu–Muslim agreement.

At the same time, however, this course of events did not result in a single outcome. In the following decades, increasing numbers of Muslims were adopting a similar anti-cow slaughtering stance that was similar to that which Sayyid Ahmad had previously invoked. Some of these cases also involved Muslim thinkers who held views on various theological and legal positions that differed from those held by Sayyid Ahmad. The scholars affiliated with Lucknow’s Nadwat al-ʿUlama (est. 1894) represent a case in point.¹³⁷

Though critical of Sayyid Ahmad’s over-reliance on British educational models, some Nadwat-affiliated scholars did share a distinct similarity to Sayyid Ahmad’s vision of sovereignty in everyday life. One of the Nadwat’s founding figures, the Azamgarh-born Shibli Nuʿmani (1857–1914), Sayyid Ahmad’s former colleague at the M.A.O. College, is an illustrative example. While his role in establishing the Nadwat signified his rejection of the Aligarh Movement’s Anglicized educational project, Nuʿmani was in agreement with Sayyid Ahmad’s earlier views on the question of cow slaughtering. This is demonstrated by an incident that took place during one of Nuʿmani’s classes at the Nadwat in the 1910s. As ʿAbdur Razzaq Malihabadi, one of Nuʿmani’s students, recounted in his memoirs:

One day I was sitting at [the lesson] next to my respected lecturer [Shibli Nuʿmani] and also another student was there. A student declared that a Hindu–Muslim riot had erupted. The reason for this [riot] was that Muslims wanted to slaughter a cow and Hindus snatched the animal and attacked them. I became very enraged after hearing this. I said that “Hindus are very mischievous people, what right do they have to interfere in the religious affairs of the Muslims? Muslims have the right to slaughter cows. After all, why do Hindus want to snatch this right away from Muslims? The cow, in the opinion of Hindus, is indeed sacred, but Muslims do not accept her sanctity. Therefore, Muslims have a full right to slaughter cows.”¹³⁸

Responding to Malihabadi, Nuʿmani calmingly inquired, “what would you say if a Shiʿa were to curse the honorable sahaba [the Prophet Muhammad’s companions]?” Considering the practice of cursing as a direct attack on Islam, Malihabadi angrily replied: “if Shiʿas were to curse [the sahaba] then we would eat them alive.” Upon hearing Malihabadi’s reply, Nuʿmani asked “But why? You regard the sahaba as good, but the Shiʿas consider a lot of them as bad. Therefore, they should be free to express their dislike for those they dislike.”¹³⁹ Perplexed by the answer, Malihabadi answered that Sunni Muslims “… cannot hear bad words about the sahaba. If the Shiʿas would like to say bad words in their houses then they may say them. However, the consequence of speaking badly on the sahaba in front of us is such that they hurt our religious feelings and they provoke us.” At this point, Nuʿmani replied:

Hindus take a similar position against Muslims in regards to the matter of the cow. Muslims do not consider the cow as sacred but Hindus do. Therefore, if you demand from Shiʿas respect for your feelings then, on the basis of which argument could you deny the fact that Hindus demand from you respect for their feelings?¹⁴⁰

As this dialogue highlights, Nuʿmani outlined to Malihabadi that it was necessary to remove religious rituals that caused distress to non-Muslims from shared spaces in which Hindus, Muslims, and Shiʿi and Sunni Muslims interacted. In other words, Nuʿmani emphasized that maintaining ritual distance between [missing] could facilitate rather than impede inter-communal coexistence. Impacted by his teacher’s words, Malihabadi ultimately espoused Nuʿmani’s perspective, describing it as his “first enlightenment” (pehli raushni).¹⁴¹

Such a position was not only articulated in the theories of Sayyid Ahmad and some of the proponents of the Nadwat, but also across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt—for example, by the Ottoman Syrian-born scholar, Muhammad Rashid Rida, the editor of the renowned Cairean periodical, al-Manar (“The Lighthouse”, 1865–1935). Himself a close associate of Nuʿmani, Rida visited British India in 1912. Speaking in the North-Indian Hanafi seminary of Deoband, he criticized Muslims who advocated cow slaughtering:

I have heard with great sadness that there are many such Muslims in India who consider themselves as distinguished from pagans only by dint of their eating cow meat. Is there no other mark of Islam among these Muslims apart from eating cow meat?¹⁴²

Such positions demonstrate well that Islamic solidarities or the call for “purifying” ritual practices did not necessarily entail the emergence of “communalism,” and, in fact, in various instances they instead served to diminish and prevent Hindu–Muslim conflicts. In later years, Malihabadi continued to encounter similar views in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, where he had spent several years during the 1910s. Visiting Istanbul just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he described how he was mocked by Ottoman Turkish subjects he had met in one of the city’s coffeeshops:

When I was in Istanbul a few Turks in a coffee house extremely contemptuously asked me, after finding out that I was Indian, “why are you Indians enslaved?” I said that “the reason for our enslavement is that Hindus and Muslims fight one another, and a main reason for the conflict is the cow. Muslims insist on eating cows and Hindus insist on preventing the slaughter.” After hearing this, the Turks mocked me with hostility and began saying that “this conflict is so shameful. Hindus are so contemptible and so are the Muslims when they are sacrificing the freedom and honor of their country for such a mundane matter.”¹⁴³

Malihabadi eventually drew upon such encounters by espousing a trans-communal position through the anti-colonial politics of the All-India Khilafat Committee (est. 1919) and the Gandhian Noncooperation Movement (1919–1922), in which he played a notable, though often overlooked, role.

This essay has examined the pivotal role of meat in shaping new conceptions of sovereignty where ritual and daily life intersected, following the 1857 Rebellion and the dismantling of Mughal rule. Colonial policies and global dietary shifts forged the notion of the Muslim carnivore, transforming meat consumption into a key marker of Hindu–Muslim distinction. Yet, these conditions also offered Muslim thinkers an opportunity to reframe religious difference and put into question the colonial control over their everyday life.

Amidst these political upheavals, Sayyid Ahmad engaged in new ways with the question of halal food in general and meat consumption in particular. Sayyid Ahmad’s writings offered his fellow Muslims a range of historical, theological, and jurisprudential examples in support of his view that Muslims were permitted—with specific limitations—to eat with and consume the food of the British (and kitabis in general), and, with the exception of meat, that of Hindus as well.

Sayyid Ahmad argued that Muslims must reject what he perceived as non-Muslim influences in their rituals to succeed in this endeavor. By maintaining clear distinctions in their practices, he believed Muslims could cultivate relationships of muhabbat with their non-Muslim neighbors. For Sayyid Ahmed, Islamic reform was defined not only by “Western influence” or the “abandonment of taqlid,” but by a nuanced balance: fostering sociability between religious communities while preserving a distinct sense of “purity” in Muslim rituals. Though unstated, and despite strong opposition within and beyond his Aligarh circles, Sayyid Ahmad’s position had significant political potential—namely, to help Muslims and Hindus overcome the British-imposed colonial barrier between them.

Challenging as it was to realize under colonial modernity, this potential was likewise central to how Sayyid Ahmad framed his position on the cow slaughter debate. Instead of relying on colonial protections, census data, or Islamic theological arguments, he argued that the solution hinged on the good intentions of both Hindus and Muslims. This stance directly opposed that of Gandhi, for example, who also condemned cow slaughter as a pretext for communal violence but grounded his call for non-violence in Hindu religious terms, rather than addressing the issue in civil terms.

By framing halal food and its production as a point of commonality between Muslims and other inhabitants of the subcontinent, Sayyid Ahmad proposed a model of sovereignty that sought to regulate interactions with non-Muslims in colonial India. This model both upheld Muslims’ ritual autonomy and encouraged inter-communal cooperation. At its core was the replacement of “colonial mediation” with a Hindu–Muslim relationship of muhabbat founded on reciprocal good intentions—in short, the sovereignty of everyday life. In so doing, Sayyid Ahmad sketched a profound, albeit unrealized, alternative to the politics of meat and to the broader dynamics of inter-communal and majoritarian violence in colonial South Asia.