At a time when the Islamic world is searching for models of faith compatible with modernity, India’s experience—where Muslims live within a constitutional democracy and a multi-religious culture—has unmatched persuasive value.
When Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited the Darul Uloom Deoband on Saturday, the image was quietly historic: a representative of Afghanistan's Islamist regime paying homage to a seminary inside secular India. Two decades earlier, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, chief of Pakistan's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), had made a similar pilgrimage to the same campus. These encounters, separated by years and politics, converge on a single truth—Deoband still commands moral and theological authority across the Muslim world, and India has barely begun to recognise it as a tool of influence.
India has long used Buddhism as its signature soft-power brand, projecting the serenity of the Buddha and Ashoka's message of compassion to Southeast and East Asia. But the country that houses the world's third-largest Muslim population also possesses an untapped Islamic heritage with the potential to foster goodwill and shape narratives. Could Deoband do for South and Central Asia what Bodh Gaya and Nalanda have done for East Asia?
Deoband's global resonance
Founded in 1866 amid the trauma of colonial rule, Darul Uloom Deoband was conceived as an intellectual act of resistance—a bid to preserve faith, learning, and self-respect after the failed 1857 Revolt. It soon evolved into South Asia's pre-eminent seminary, marrying rigorous Hanafi jurisprudence with moral reform.
As historian Asad Mirza notes in Demystifying Madrasah and Deobandi Islam: Legacy and History of Darul Uloom Deoband (2024), Deoband "inspired and nurtured scores of such institutions across the globe, guiding millions of Muslims to embrace advancements in education while retaining the pristine form of Islam." The movement's transnationalism, Mirza argues, was "deeply inflected by India's ethos of diversity and pluralism."
From the late 19th century onward, Deoband's alumni fanned out to Afghanistan and beyond, founding satellite madrasas that became spiritual arteries of South Asian Islam. When Amir Khan Muttaqi bowed his head in Deoband, he acknowledged that Afghanistan's clerical identity was once shaped by this Indian school. Even Pakistan’s most powerful seminaries—Haqqania in Akora Khattak, Binori Town in Karachi—trace their lineage to Deoband.
Yet while Pakistan instrumentalised these networks for jihad, India's Deoband retained scholastic integrity, rejecting militancy and politics. It condemned terrorism in clear terms after 9/11, asserting Islam's ethical universalism. That credibility gives Deoband a rare moral halo: a theological bridge between Islam's heartlands and India's secular democracy.
Faith as diplomacy
Muttaqi's visit to Deoband was therefore more than symbolic. For the Taliban, it was a bid to rebrand themselves as heirs to a respected scholarly tradition rather than as religious militants. For India, it offered a low-cost, high-impact diplomatic channel—an opening to engage Afghanistan through faith and education without formal recognition of the regime. It offers the "four Ds" approach: Diplomacy, Development, Dialogue, and Deoband.
Likewise, Maulana Fazlur Rehman's earlier Deoband visits reveal a pattern of religious dialogue filling political vacuums. When official India-Pakistan talks freeze, seminar halls and spiritual lineages can sustain conversation. Quiet hospitality to foreign ulema—offering them access to archives, lectures, and intellectual exchanges—can create influence no embassy can replicate. This is soft power in its purest form: attraction through moral prestige and knowledge, not coercion. It works precisely because it is unofficial—a dialogue between traditions, not governments.
The Sunni spectrum
Deoband is not the whole of South Asian Islam. The Barelvi movement—founded by Ahmad Raza Khan of Bareilly around 1900—represents a more devotional, Sufi-oriented strand, now dominant among Pakistan's Sunnis. Barelvis emphasise love for the Prophet, shrine veneration, and local mystic traditions. Their madrasas have rarely been linked to militancy and often resist Taliban puritanism.
For India, engaging both Deobandi and Barelvi networks is crucial. The former provides scholarly gravitas; the latter, cultural warmth. India already showcased Sufi pluralism through the World Sufi Forum (2016), positioning Sufism as "the face of Islam in India". Expanding that outreach—joint conferences, scholar exchanges, heritage pilgrimages—can help India project a balanced Islamic voice that counters both Wahhabi rigidity and sectarian fragmentation.
Parallels with the Buddhist playbook
India's success with Buddhism offers a revealing contrast. Over the past decade, New Delhi has woven Buddhist symbolism into foreign policy: international Vesak celebrations, the "Buddhist Circuit" of pilgrimage sites, and global conferences linking India with Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Japan, and Vietnam. The message is simple and effective—India as the cradle of the Buddha and of peace.
Buddhist diplomacy works because it is non-contentious domestically and universally appealing abroad. It reinforces India's image as a benign, spiritual civilisation. The challenge with Islam, by contrast, lies in domestic politics. Promoting Islamic heritage abroad while communal tensions simmer at home risks appearing contradictory. Unlike Buddhism, Islam in India is a living, politically charged faith, not an archaeological relic.
Still, the structural parallels are clear. Buddhism gave India a cultural bridge to East Asia; Islam can provide one to South and Central Asia. Both traditions originated or flourished on Indian soil, and both carry ethical vocabularies—compassion and justice—that can enrich India's diplomatic story.
Just as India rebuilt Nalanda as a global university, it could help modernise Deoband and other seminaries, equipping them for inter-civilisational dialogue.
A credible Islamic soft-power policy must begin at home. India's pluralist constitution gives it a moral base, but the message must align with domestic reality. A nation that aspires to speak for moderation abroad cannot allow intolerance to fester within. Upholding Muslim citizens' dignity, supporting Islamic studies, and protecting heritage sites such as Ajmer Sharif or Nizamuddin Auliya would lend authenticity to any external outreach.
Internationally, India can curate a heritage circuit paralleling the Buddhist one—linking Sufi shrines, Mughal monuments, and seminaries like Deoband, Nadwa, and Aligarh. Restored mosques and manuscript libraries could anchor tourism from Southeast Asia and the Gulf. Similarly, sponsoring translations of Indian Muslim scholarship—from Shah Waliullah to Wahiduddin Khan—would demonstrate intellectual generosity.
Academic diplomacy is another avenue: endowed chairs in Islamic and interfaith studies abroad, or scholarships for students from Afghanistan and Africa to study India’s plural Islam. Such initiatives would cast India not as a rival to Muslim nations but as a civilisational host—the land where Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have coexisted for centuries.
Why Deoband matters
If Buddhism projects India's serenity, Deoband can project its moral seriousness. At a time when the Islamic world is searching for models of faith compatible with modernity, India's experience—where Muslims live within a constitutional democracy and a multi-religious culture—has unmatched persuasive value. Deoband's quiet insistence on scholarship over militancy, and its refusal to politicise religion, make it an ideal emblem of that synthesis.
Engagement through Deoband also speaks a language that theocratic regimes understand: legitimacy derived from learning. When Taliban ministers seek blessings there, or Pakistani clerics debate its curriculum, they implicitly recognise India's Islamic authority. Harnessing that recognition through education, dialogue, and cultural diplomacy could gradually soften perceptions of India in the broader Muslim world.
A cautious path forward
The road is delicate. The Indian state must not appear to instrumentalise religion, lest it violate secular principles or alienate domestic audiences. Any initiative should be framed as cultural and academic cooperation, led by autonomous institutions rather than ministries. Government support can be discreet—funding libraries, facilitating visas, or restoring heritage—but credibility must rest with scholars and civil society.
Above all, India should avoid sectarian favouritism. Its strength lies in showing the total mosaic of its Islamic traditions: Deobandi scholarship, Barelvi mysticism, Bohra enterprise, and Kashmiri Sufi verse. By presenting Islam in India as internally diverse yet peacefully coexistent, New Delhi can offer a moral counter-narrative to both Wahhabi purism and Islamophobic populism.
Deoband and the Dharma
The legacies of Buddhism and Islam in India need not compete. They can complement each other: the monk and the mullah as twin ambassadors of Indian wisdom. Buddhism connects India eastward; Islam connects it westward. Together, they complete the civilisational compass. To revive Nalanda was to reclaim one face of India's soul. To engage Deoband is to reclaim the other. As the world grows weary of polarisation, India's greatest export may once again be its capacity to hold contradictions—faith and reason, devotion and dialogue—within a single civilisation.
If New Delhi can invest as much imagination in Deoband as it has in Bodh Gaya, India's soft power could stretch seamlessly from Tokyo's monasteries to Kabul's madrasas—a cultural arc of enlightenment and empathy. That, more than any weapon or treaty, would embody the quiet power of a plural republic.
(Faisal CK is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal.)
