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Becoming Modern and Secular: A Review Essay on Recent Work on Islam and South Asia
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Discussed: Defending Muḥammad in Modernity. By TareenSherAli. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Pp. 506. $125.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper); $27.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780268106706.
Governance of Islam in Pakistan: An Institutional Study of the Council of Islamic Ideology. By HolzSarah. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. Pp. 240. $70.00 (paper). ISBN: 9781789761665.
Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia. By NairNeeti. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023. Pp. 352. $45.00 (cloth); $45.00 (digital). ISBN: 9780674238275.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2024
Abstract
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. Pakistan was specifically created to provide a homeland for South Asia’s Muslim population and its trials and tribulations over the past seventy-five years have been carefully watched by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Muslims constitute India’s largest minority, with an often uneasy—to say the least—relationship to the majority. In the context of the three books under discussion, I explore 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.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
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