Campaigning for a community: Urdu literature of mobilisation and identity

After the defeat of the rebellion of 1857–58, and the final loss of the last semblance of political power in the subcontinent, Muslims attempted to analyse the reason for their ‘descent, decay or degradation’ ( tanazzul ). Inspired by Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s reformist movement, Urdu prose writers and poets started to create a new kind of literature with the aim to ‘awaken’, revitalise and mobilise the Muslim community. As a means to this end, they evoked images of the glorious Islamic past, but also warned about the negative impact of the schisms within Islam. As perfect examples for the new role of writers and literary texts in the public sphere, I have used the works by Nazir Ahmad, Altaf Husain Hali, Muhammad Iqbal and Nasim Hijazi to demonstrate what rhetorical devices they employed to achieve the desired effects; how they extended the more general concept of compassion ( hamdardī ) to denote political solidarity; and how they modified emotion concepts such as honour and shame and passionate love and hatred to define the community and to further the emotional commitment to the ‘imagined community’ and active involvement in political activism.