"Letters to Zebunnisa" by Gulraj Singh Bedi is a poignant collection of poetry that delves into the depths of love, longing, and resilience. Through lyrical verses, Bedi captures the raw emotions of his journey, weaving together themes of love, hope, and the human experience. With each poem, he invites readers into a world of heartfelt introspection, where the pain of separation and the power of connection intertwine. From tender moments of affection to the struggles of distance and the strength found in adversity, Bedi's words resonate with sincerity and passion. This book is a tribute to the enduring spirit of love and the unwavering courage it inspires. Through its pages, readers will find solace, inspiration, and a reminder of the beauty found in the intricacies of the heart.

Offers an annotated source for the study of the public and private lives of South Asian Muslim women.

Based on a critical study of a large number of contemporary Persian texts, court chronicles, epistolary collections, and biographies of sufi mystics, The Mughals and the Sufis examines the complexities in the relationship between Mughal political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam's Sufi traditions in South Asia: one centered around orthodoxy, the other focusing on a more accommodating and mystical spirituality. Muzaffar Alam analyses the interplay of these elements, their negotiation and struggle for resolution via conflict and coordination, and their longer-term outcomes as the empire followed its own political and cultural trajectory as it shifted from the more liberal outlook of Emperor Akbar "The Great" (r. 1556–1605) to the more rigid attitudes of his great-grandson, Aurangzeb 'Alamgir (r. 1658–1701). Alam brings to light many new and underutilized sources relevant to the religious and cultural history of the Mughals and reinterprets well-known sources from a new perspective to provide one of the most detailed and nuanced portraits of Indian Islam under the Mughal Empire available today.

A biography using the early version of Dr. Ghani as a framework. The author has often said that the brevity of this work was obligatory in view of the scarcity of reliable data. An Afghan Pathan by blood, Hazrat Babajan (d. 1931) was an unorthodox Sufi who lived under a tree at Poona, India, in the days of the British Raj. Some have viewed her as a second Rabia. Her case history is a significant addition to the meagre data on female Sufis. She gained an inter-religious following, reflecting her tolerant attitude. She was reputed to be over a century old at her death. This monograph is annotated, with reference to the work of scholars like Schimmel, and has an introduction defending aspects of traditional mystical psychology.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book traces the development of philology (the study of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth-century was Sirāj al-Dīn 'Alī Khān, (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose Intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-go'ī [literally, fresh-speaking] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native-speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative fresh-speaking poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early modern Europe. Ārzū used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation or be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. Ārzū also shaped attitudes about reokhtah, the Persianized form of vernacular poetry that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, helping the vernacular to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India. This study puts to rest the persistent misconception that Indians started writing the vernacular because they were ashamed of their poor grasp of Persian at the twilight of the Mughal Empire.

A bibliography of books and index of articles in periodicals on Islam and the Muslim world. Also includes reviews.