Negotiating Islamic print : Ṣalāḥ-al-Ikhwān and the representation of public and community in colonial Malabār

Abstract

The expansion of modern communication technologies in Islam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in South Asia marked a fundamental transformation in religious authority, public debate, and community identity. Existing scholarship on Islamic public discourse and community formation has often emphasized how modern technologies made Islamic tradition stagnant while simultaneously modernizing Muslim societies. While such studies are useful for understanding broad structural transformations, they tend to remain confined within a Western model of “progressive time,” which obscures the productive capacities of tradition under conditions of colonial modernity and socioeconomic constraint, as well as the ways of Muslims, who, actively negotiated modern communication technologies and institutions. This study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to unsettle binaries such as tradition versus modernity and religion versus secularism by examining Islam’s discursive practices through printed periodicals in colonial Malabar. It focuses on the Arabimalayālam newspaper Ṣalāḥ al-Ikhwān (1899-1907) as a historical example of how Muslims in colonial Malabar negotiated with and resignified modern print technology through authoritative and normatively grounded practices. The newspaper’s editorials, fatwā columns, transregional reports, and advertisements reveal alternative moral imaginaries that operated alongside colonial governance and caste-inflected social conditions. Through a close reading of its published articles and reports, I show how the newspaper articulated the idea of publicness and community. I argue that Ṣalāḥ-al-Ikhwān successfully negotiated modern print technology by resignifying the newspaper itself and reconfiguring both public and communal life among Muslims in Malabar and beyond according to Islamic epistemic sensibilities and ethics. Ṣalāḥ al-Ikhwān selectively affirmed certain Islamic practices and beliefs while devaluing others, all within the ethical framework of striving to “set things right between your brothers” (fa-aṣliḥū bayna akhawaykum). This study also highlights the competitive field of print culture in colonial Malabar, including interreligious and intercommunal dialogues in beyond the pages of the newspaper, as well as intracommunal critiques published within it. These exchanges collectively shaped the vocabularies and discursive strategies of Ṣalāḥ-al-Ikhwān, revealing print culture as a dynamic arena of negotiation, contestation, and moral articulation.