Author: Soumen Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107154081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity in late colonial South Asia.

Author: Soumen Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316870898
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity and crucial aspects of the historical forces that conditioned the development of the Muslim modern in late colonial South Asia. It traces the legal process that, since the 1860s, recast a Shia Imami identity for the Ismailis, and explicates the public career of Imam Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism since the late-nineteenth century, the age of 'religious internationals'. It sheds light and elaborates on the enduring legacies of questions such as the Aga's understanding of colonial modernity, his ideas of India, restructured modalities of community governance and the evolution of Imamate-sponsored institutions, key strands in scholarship that characterized the development of the Muslim and Shia Ismaili modern, and Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that often transcended the remits of the modular nation and state structure.

Author: Barbara D. Metcalf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831385
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
This volume of Princeton Readings in Religions brings together the work of more than thirty scholars of Islam and Muslim societies in South Asia to create a rich anthology of primary texts that contributes to a new appreciation of the lived religious and cultural experiences of the world's largest population of Muslims. The thirty-four selections--translated from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindavi, Dakhani, and other languages--highlight a wide variety of genres, many rarely found in standard accounts of Islamic practice, from oral narratives to elite guidance manuals, from devotional songs to secular judicial decisions arbitrating Islamic law, and from political posters to a discussion among college women affiliated with an "Islamist" organization. Drawn from premodern texts, modern pamphlets, government and organizational archives, new media, and contemporary fieldwork, the selections reflect the rich diversity of Islamic belief and practice in South Asia. Each reading is introduced with a brief contextual note from its scholar-translator, and Barbara Metcalf introduces the whole volume with a substantial historical overview.

Author: Jonah Steinberg
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834076
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
The Isma'ili Muslims, a major sect of Shi'i Islam, form a community that is intriguing in its deterritorialized social organization. Informed by the richness of Isma'ili history, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and firsthand ethnographic f

Author: Dominique-Sila Kahn
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Who is Hindu, who is Muslim? The answer, according to Dominique-Sila Khan, is not as simple as generally assumed. By analyzing documentary sources as well as original field data, she examines the shaping of religious identities in South Asia, particularly in North India. The author argues that the perception of Islam and Hinduism as two monolithic and perpetually antagonistic faiths coexisting uneasily in South Asia has become so deeply ingrained that the complexity of the historical fabric is often overlooked or ignored. She demonstrates how the emergence of clear-cut categories is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and shows how the past is characterized by a remarkable fluidity and diversity in the social and religious milieus of the two faiths. In exploring the historical mechanisms that have led to the emergence and crystallization of religious identities the author sheds light on the increasing number of conflicts which threaten the harmonious co-existence of South Asian communities today.

Author: Teena Purohit
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.

Author: Burjor Avari
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415580617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Muslims have been present in South Asia for 14 centuries. Nearly 40% of the people of this vast land mass follow the religion of Islam, and Muslim contribution to the cultural heritage of the sub-continent has been extensive. This textbook provides both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as the general reader, with a comprehensive account of the history of Islam in India, encompassing political, socio-economic, cultural and intellectual aspects. Using a chronological framework, the book discusses the main events in each period between c. 600 CE and the present day, along with the key social and cultural themes. It discusses a range of topics, including: How power was secured, and how was it exercised The crisis of confidence caused by the arrival of the West in the sub-continent How the Indo-Islamic synthesis in various facets of life and culture came about Excerpts at the end of each chapter allow for further discussion, and detailed maps alongside the text help visualise the changes through each time period. Introducing the reader to the issues concerning the Islamic past of South Asia, the book is a useful text for students and scholars of South Asian History and Religious Studies.

Author: Robin Jeffrey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198092063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
What experiences and practices characterize the lives of Muslims in South Asia today? This book examines the contests of ideas, begun 150 years ago, that have translated into political actions touching the lives of tens of millions. Equally, the book focuses on aspects of daily life to emphasize that there are diverse ways of being Muslim. The book is an essential tool for anyone interested in the lives and futures of South Asia's 500 million Muslims.

Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1849042764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Originally published: London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2013.

Author: Ali Sultaan Asani
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
ISBN: 9781860648281
Category : Islam
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The devotional and mystical literature of the Ismailis in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent is a little known but rich seam of creativity in the cultural heritage of Islam. The book focuses on the Ginans, a large corpus of hymns and poems composed in a variety of Indic languages and attributed to a series of preacher-saints who propagated the Ismaili form of Islam in the subcontinent over several centuries.