Islamic Reformism in India between 1857 and 1947, by Carimo Mohomed

Description

Historians in the future, when all traces of Muslim presence in India have been erased, will have difficulty in accurately describing Muslim social relations with India’s non–Muslim majority during the nearly thousand years of Muslim presence in pre–colonial India. And, given the abiding popular association of South Asian Islam with certain genres of poetry and music (ghazal or qawwali), painting (miniatures), architecture (mosque and dargah, or the Taj Mahal), and even cuisine (for example, the samosa), they will have a hard time explaining Islam’s aesthetic legacies in the region and all the Indo-Muslim manuscripts in libraries outside India. But the most insurmountable task will be to explain the fact that the Indian government used an Islamicate, in this case Persian, word—Azadi (Free[dom])—to name its initiative to celebrate and commemorate seventy-five years of independence and the history of its people, culture, and achievements, and why they insist on calling themselves “Hindu”, another word with Persian roots and which Muslims outside India used to call the inhabitants of Bharat. The Muslims of South Asia are more than five hundred million people, distributed between Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and there are more Muslims in South Asia than in any other region in the world. After Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are the second, third, and fourth largest Muslim countries, respectively. Although the prevalent approach in the study of Islam is to consider its so-called Arab character as central, the Muslims in pre-Partition India constituted the largest body of Muslims in the world, and the vast political and intellectual influence exerted by South Asian Muslims on the wider Muslim world is often neglected. Many of the most important political, intellectual, and spiritual developments within Islam have had their origins, or have flourished, in South Asia, and Muslims from the region have played important roles in the global history of Islam, including during the colonial period, in resistance to colonial rule, and in intellectual responses to and dialogue with Western thought. This book explores issues such as secularism, modernity, and religion, and their impacts on the conception of the nation-state that was promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an expression of political modernity.

Paperback. 211 Pages

Published: July 2025

ISBN: 979-8992019438

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