Frontiers of Embedded Muslim Communities in India

Frontiers of Embedded Muslim Communities in India PDF Author: Vinod K. Jairath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136196803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This volume approaches the study of Muslim societies through an evolutionary lens, challenging Islamic traditions, identities, communities, beliefs, practices and ideologies as static, frozen or unchangeable. It assumes that there is neither a monolithic, essential or authentic Islam, nor a homogeneous Muslim community. Similarly, there are no fixed binary oppositions such as between the ulama and sufi saints or textual and lived Islam. The overarching perspective — that there is no fixity in the meanings of Islamic symbols and that the language of Islam can be used by individuals, organizations, movements and political parties variously in religious and non-religious contexts — underlies the ethnographically rich essays that comprise this volume. Divided in three parts, the volume cumulatively presents an initial framework for the study of Muslim communities in India embedded in different regional and local contexts. The first part focuses on ethnographies of three Muslim communities (Kuchchhi Jatt, Irani Shia and Sidis) and their relationships with others, with shifting borders and frontiers; part two examines the issue of ‘caste’ of certain Muslim communities; and the third part, containing chapters on Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Mumbai and Gujarat, looks at the varied responses of Muslims as Indian citizens in regional contexts at different historical moments. Although the volume focuses on Muslim communities in India, it is also meant to bridge an important gap in, and contribute to, the ‘sociology of India’ which has been organized and taught primarily as a sociology of Hindu society. The book will appeal to those in sociology, history, political science, education, modern South Asian Studies, and to the general reader interested in India & South Asia.

Frontiers of Embedded Muslim Communities in India

Frontiers of Embedded Muslim Communities in India PDF Author: Vinod K. Jairath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136196803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume approaches the study of Muslim societies through an evolutionary lens, challenging Islamic traditions, identities, communities, beliefs, practices and ideologies as static, frozen or unchangeable. It assumes that there is neither a monolithic, essential or authentic Islam, nor a homogeneous Muslim community. Similarly, there are no fixed binary oppositions such as between the ulama and sufi saints or textual and lived Islam. The overarching perspective — that there is no fixity in the meanings of Islamic symbols and that the language of Islam can be used by individuals, organizations, movements and political parties variously in religious and non-religious contexts — underlies the ethnographically rich essays that comprise this volume. Divided in three parts, the volume cumulatively presents an initial framework for the study of Muslim communities in India embedded in different regional and local contexts. The first part focuses on ethnographies of three Muslim communities (Kuchchhi Jatt, Irani Shia and Sidis) and their relationships with others, with shifting borders and frontiers; part two examines the issue of ‘caste’ of certain Muslim communities; and the third part, containing chapters on Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Mumbai and Gujarat, looks at the varied responses of Muslims as Indian citizens in regional contexts at different historical moments. Although the volume focuses on Muslim communities in India, it is also meant to bridge an important gap in, and contribute to, the ‘sociology of India’ which has been organized and taught primarily as a sociology of Hindu society. The book will appeal to those in sociology, history, political science, education, modern South Asian Studies, and to the general reader interested in India & South Asia.

Muslims In Indian Cities

Muslims In Indian Cities PDF Author: Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9350295555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
'[This] substantial volume at once illuminates empirical conditions and tests theories about ghettoization, integration, and the political attitudes of India's urban Muslims' - Sunil Khilnani 'Christophe Jaffrelot's range of scholarship is amazing, and his new book ... co-edited with Laurent Gayer, illustrates well his wide-ranging interests. The contributions are instructive and insightful and cover a much-neglected theme in contemporary South Asia' - Mushirul Hasan Numbering more than 150 million, Muslims constitute the largest minority in India, yet suffer the most politically and socio-economically. Forced to contend with severe and persistent prejudice, India's Muslims are often targets of violence. In India's cities, these developments find contrasting expressions. While the quality of Muslim life may lag behind that of Hindus nationally, local and inclusive cultures have been resilient in the south and the east. In the Hindi belt and in the north, Muslims have known less peace, especially in the riot-prone areas of Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur and Aligarh, and in the capitals of former Muslim states - Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Lucknow. These cities are rife with Muslim ghettos and slums. However, self-segregation has also played a part in forming Muslim enclaves, such as in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and a new Muslim middle class have regrouped for physical and cultural protection. Combining first-hand testimony with sound critical analysis, this volume follows urban Muslim life in eleven Indian cities, providing uncommon insight into a litde-known subject of immense importance and consequence.

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India PDF Author: Kalyani Devaki Menon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501760602
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.

Born a Muslim

Born a Muslim PDF Author: Ghazala Wahab
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789390652167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Population Myth

The Population Myth PDF Author: S.Y. Quraishi
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9390351502
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Population Myth reveals how the right-wing spin to population data has given rise to myths about the 'Muslim rate of growth', often used to stoke majoritarian fears of a demographic skew. The author, S.Y. Quraishi, uses facts to demolish these, and demonstrates how a planned population is in the interest of all communities. The book delves into the Quran and the Hadith to show how Islam might have been one of the first religions in the world to actually advocate smaller families, which is why several Islamic nations today have population policies in place. This busts the other myth - that Muslims shun family planning on religious grounds. Based on impeccable research, this is an important book from a credible voice about the politicization of demographics in India today.

Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion PDF Author: Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786732378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
While jihad has been the subject of countless studies in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, scholarship on the topic has so far paid little attention to South Asian Islam and, more specifically, its place in South Asian history. Seeking to fill some gaps in the historiography, Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst examines the effects of the 1857 Rebellion (long taught in Britain as the 'Indian Mutiny') on debates about the issue of jihad during the British Raj. Morgenstein Fuerst shows that the Rebellion had lasting, pronounced effects on the understanding by their Indian subjects (whether Muslim, Hindu or Sikh) of imperial rule by distant outsiders. For India's Muslims their interpretation of the Rebellion as jihad shaped subsequent discourses, definitions and codifications of Islam in the region. Morgenstein Fuerst concludes by demonstrating how these perceptions of jihad, contextualised within the framework of the 19th century Rebellion, continue to influence contemporary rhetoric about Islam and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent.Drawing on extensive primary source analysis, this unique take on Islamic identities in South Asia will be invaluable to scholars working on British colonial history, India and the Raj, as well as to those studying Islam in the region and beyond.

Mappila Muslim Culture

Mappila Muslim Culture PDF Author: Roland E. Miller
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438456018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
Thorough exploration of the distinct culture of the Mappila Muslims of Kerala, India. This book provides a comprehensive account of the distinct culture of the Mappila Muslims, a large community from the southern Indian state of Kerala. Although they were the first Muslim community in South Asia, the Mappilas are little-known in the West. Roland E. Miller explores the Mappilas’ fourteen-century-long history of social adaptation and their current status as a successful example of Muslim interaction with modernity. Once feared, now admired, Kerala’s Mappilas have produced an intellectual renaissance and renewed their ancient status as a model of social harmony. Miller provides an account of Mappila history and looks at the formation of Mappila culture, which has developed through the interaction of Islamic and Malayali influences. Descriptions of current day life cycles, religion, ritual, work life, education, and leadership are included.

Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ Predicament in Singapore

Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ Predicament in Singapore PDF Author: Torsten Tschacher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131530337X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Indian Muslims form the largest ethnic minority within Singapore’s otherwise largely Malay Muslim community. Despite its size and historic importance, however, Singaporean Indian Muslims have received little attention by scholarship and have also felt side-lined by Singapore’s Malay-dominated Muslim institutions. Since the 1980s, demands for a better representation of Indian Muslims and access to religious services have intensified, while there has been a concomitant debate over who has the right to speak for Indian Muslims. This book traces the negotiations and contestations over Indian Muslim difference in Singapore and examines the conditions that have given rise to these debates. Despite considerable differences existing within the putative Indian Muslim community, the way this community is imagined is surprisingly uniform. Through discussions of the importance of ethnic difference for social and religious divisions among Singaporean Indian Muslims, the role of ‘culture’ and ‘race’ in debates about popular religion, the invocation of language and history in negotiations with the wider Malay-Muslim context, and the institutional setting in which contestations of Indian Muslim difference take place, this book argues that these debates emerge from the structural tensions resulting from the intersection of race and religion in the public organization of Islam in Singapore.

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans PDF Author: Thomas Chambers
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787354539
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness. By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.

Da'wa and Other Religions

Da'wa and Other Religions PDF Author: Matthew J. Kuiper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351681702
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
Da‘wa, a concept rooted in the scriptural and classical tradition of Islam, has been dramatically re-appropriated in modern times across the Muslim world. Championed by a variety of actors in diverse contexts, da‘wa –"inviting" to Islam, or Islamic missionary activity – has become central to the vocabulary of contemporary Islamic activism. Da‘wa and Other Religions explores the modern resurgence of da‘wa through the lens of inter-religious relations and within the two horizons of Islamic history and modernity. Part I provides an account of da‘wa from the Qur’an to the present. It demonstrates the close relationship that has existed between da‘wa and inter-religious relations throughout Islamic history and sheds light on the diversity of da‘wa over time. The book also argues that Muslim communities in colonial and post-colonial India shed light on these themes with particular clarity. Part II, therefore, analyzes and juxtaposes two prominent da‘wa organizations to emerge from the Indian subcontinent in the past century: the Tablīghī Jamā‘at and the Islamic Research Foundation of Zakir Naik. By investigating the formative histories and inter-religious discourses of these movements, Part II elucidates the influential roles Indian Muslims have played in modern da‘wa. This book makes important contributions to the study of da‘wa in general and to the study of the Tablīghī Jamā‘at, one of the world’s largest da‘wa movements. It also provides the first major scholarly study of Zakir Naik and the Islamic Research Foundation. Further, it challenges common assumptions and enriches our understanding of modern Islam. It will have a broad appeal for students and scholars of Islamic Studies, Indian religious history and anyone interested in da‘wa and inter-religious relations throughout Islamic history.