Prophetic Humor: Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī’s Jokes and Puns

Abstract This article contributes to the scholarship on the Islamic tradition and Urdu culture in modern South Asia through an analysis of comic genres in the writings of the colonial-era Sufi theologian and social reformer Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī (1863–1943). Jokes, humorous anecdotes, and puns are found in sources such as transcripts of sermons and Sufi counsel sessions ( mavāʿiz̤ and malfūz̤āt ). These sources document an imaginative use of narrative and wordplay to produce senses of pleasure that facilitate the transmission of moral lessons and through this transmission the creation of community (this combination of comedy, counsel, and collectivity is here called prophetic humor). We analyze prophetic humor and build an argument about how it operates in tradition as form of life through three analytical movements. First, we explore how tradition becomes a site of play and pleasure but also anxiety and ambivalence. Second, the turn to comic genres allows us to appreciate tradition as a site of textuality and translation, that is, tradition names a framework for cultivating literary and ethical sensibilities ( adab ). Finally, we consider the question: Is humor necessarily subversive and secular? The article attends to this question by complicating Alenka Zupančič’s secularist psychoanalytic theory of comedy vis-à-vis an engagement with Talal Asad’s critical anthropological study of tradition (especially what he says about ritualization and secularization). We show how Maulānā Thānavī’s use of humor largely reflects the protocols of ritualization but also responds to the demands of secularization. These various argumentative strands come together to illuminate how prophetic humor displaces the reigning epistemological and methodological imperatives of colonial modernity, such as secularism, rationalism, and historicism.