Background

In 1857, the British East India Company put down with a heavy hand the independence movement begun by disparate north Indian forces, conducted in the name of the otherwise powerless Bahadur Shah Zafar Gurakani. Emperor Zafar became the last Mughal Emperor, for he was deposed the following year and exiled to Burma, with many of his sons put to death. This marked a seminal moment for Indo-Islamic consciousness, specifically for the established Muslim elites of north India, who tended to view the defeat of 1857 as the end of their political pre-eminence and the beginning of what could be a dark period of Muslim history in India.

In this situation, a group of learned theologians, led by Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi, established the Darul Uloom Seminary in the town of Deoband, in order to preserve Indo-Islamic culture and train the youth in Islamic knowledge. The foundation of Darul Uloom Deoband was laid down in 1283 A.H. (21st of May 1866 A.D.) beneath a pomegranate tree. Nanautawi claimed he had been inspired to do so by a dream in which Mohammed spoke to him.^[3] The pedagogical philosophy of Deoband was focused on teaching revealed Islamic sciences, known as manqūlāt, to the Indian Muslim population, according to the Hanafi tradition. In this seminary, Nanautawi instituted modern methods of learning: Teaching in classrooms, a fixed and carefully selected curriculum, lectures by different faculties recognised as leaders in their fields, exam periods, merit prizes, a publishing press and so on. The faculty instructed its students primarily in Urdu, the lingua franca of the urbanised section of the region, and supplemented it with study of Arabic (for theological reasons) and Persian (for cultural and literary reasons. In due course, it also unwittingly cemented the growing association of the Urdu language with the north Indian Muslim community. The founders consciously decided to divorce the seminary from political or governmental participation. Instead, it was to run as an autonomous institution, supported by voluntary financial contributions from the Muslims at large.

Its over 15,000 graduates have gone on to found many similar madrassas (schools) across South Asia and further afield; the followers of this school of theology are often described as followers of the Deobandi school of thought.