What is Deoband?

“The name of Deoband came to represent a distinct style, a maslak, of Indian Islam that emphasized the diffusion of scripturalist practices and the cultivation of an inner spiritual life. By roughly 1880 there were over a dozen Deobandi schools, by the end of the century, at least three times that many, some in places as distant as Chittagong, Madras, and Peshawar. Deoband had pioneered a non-governmental style of formal organization for madrasa education in India. Thanks to that structure, the school succeeded in training a large number of ‘ulama’ in its reformist ideology and in establishing a network of ancillary schools further disseminating that teaching. Deoband thus offers a striking and successful example of the bureaucratization of traditional religious institutions that has made them effective in the modern world”.

[Metcalf, D. Barbara (2004), Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan, p51, Oxford University Press, New Delhi].