Deobandi Movement: Theological Strands and Socio-Political Offshoots

India has always been a melting pot of antithetical extremes. Even at the elementary levels of spiritual and intellectual consciousness, it has shown a remarkable capacity to harmonise even the most irreconcilable of quiddities, be it monism and monotheism, spiritualism and dogma, eclecticism and puritanism or nationalism vis-à-vis religious fundamentalism.

The nation has a primaeval ethos of fusing discordant elements into a single unified whole, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as ‘the esemplasticFootnote1 power of imagination’.Footnote2 (Coleridge Citation1817). It is not only deeply imbued in its great Hindu darshanas (schools of philosophy) and its profound Buddhist and Jain legacy, but is also manifest in its indigenous Islamic movements, of which, perhaps, Deobandism is the best example.