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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2024
This short article introduces the Forum on Muslim modernity in South Asia, placing its four articles—by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, SherAli Tareen, Julia Stephens, and Justin Jones—in the context of existing scholarship. I highlight the authors’ contributions to the study of Islamic reform and of women’s agency, in particular, in understandings of Muslim modernity in South Asia. Each of the contributions is on a discrete topic; this introduction therefore endeavours to pull at the threads within each that underscores their interventions in the study of Muslim modernity and that tie them together in this Forum.
1 The relevant scholarship is vast; these are the more important monographs, in chronological order: Metcalf, Barbara D., Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sanyal, Usha, Devotional Islam and politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his movement, 1870–1920 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Minault, Gail, Secluded scholars: Women’s education and Muslim social reform in colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Qasmi, Ali Usman, Questioning the authority of the past: The Ahl al-Qur’an movements in the Punjab (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Ingram, Brannon, Revival from below: The Deoband movement and global Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018)Google Scholar; and Tareen, SherAli, Defending Muhammad in modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).Google Scholar
2 Robinson, Francis, The ‘ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic culture in South Asia (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2001)Google Scholar; Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, The ulama in contemporary Islam: Custodians of change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
3 On Aligarh, David Lelyveld’s study remains seminal: Lelyveld, David, Aligarh’s first generation: Muslim solidarity in British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. On Deoband, Metcalf, Islamic revival; and Ingram, Revival from below. On the Muslim League, Jalal, Ayesha, The sole spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Robinson, Francis, ‘Technology and religious change: Islam and the impact of print’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 229–251CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robb, Megan Eaton, Print and the Urdu public: Muslims, newspapers, and urban life in colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaidi, S. Akbar, Making a Muslim: Reading publics and contesting identities in nineteenth-century North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Sobers-Khan, Nur, Uddin, Layli and Basu, Priyanka (eds), ‘Beyond colonial rupture: Print culture and the emergence of Muslim modernity in nineteenth-century South Asia’, Special issue, International Journal of Islam in Asia, vol. 3, no. 1–2, 2022Google Scholar. C. Ryan Perkins explores a late-colonial ‘Islami pablik’ in Ryan Perkins, C., ‘A new pablik: Abdul Halim Sharar, volunteerism, and the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam in late nineteenth-century India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 49, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1049–1090.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 As a seminal figure in South Asian Islam, there is much scholarship on Shah Wali Allah. For an overview, see Hermansen, Marcia, ‘The current state of Shah Wali Allah Studies’, in Shah Waliullah (1703–1762): His religious and political thought, (ed.) Ikram Chaghatai, M. (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2005), pp. 683–693.Google Scholar Barbara Metcalf underscores Wali Allah’s foundational role in Deobandi Islam in Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India, pp. 16–45.
6 On Nanautvi, see Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India, pp. 75–80. Studies of Sayyid Ahmad Khan abound. In addition to Lelyveld, Aligarh’s first generation, an important recent contribution is Hussain, Khurram, Islam as critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the challenge of modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).Google Scholar
7 See Troll, Christian, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A reinterpretation of Muslim theology (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978).Google Scholar More recently, see David Lelyveld, ‘Naicari nature: Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the reconciliation of science, technology, and religion’, and Charles M. Ramsey, ‘Religion, science, and the coherence of prophetic and natural revelation: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s religious writings’, both in The Cambridge companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, (eds) Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 69–85 and 138–158, respectively.
8 A key revivalist voice was that of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. See Friedmann, Yohanan, Prophecy continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi religious thought and its medieval background (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar On the significance of Sayyid Ahmad Khan in broader narratives of modern South Asian history, see, for example, Metcalf, Barbara D. and Metcalf, Thomas R., A concise history of modern India, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Gail Minault, for example, shows how reform erased many women’s cultural practices in her landmark study, Minault, Secluded scholars. She does not, however, explore the implications of this point.
10 ‘Muslim modernity in South Asia’, organized by Farina Mir and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, University of Michigan, May 2022. The workshop was supported with funding from the University of Michigan’s Center for South Asian Studies and its National Resource Center grant from the US Department of Education.