Over the past two hundred years, two great processes have shaped Muslim societies: Western domination and the industrial capitalism that came with it, and the Islamic revival that preceded the Western presence but came to interact significantly with it. In this book, Francis Robinson considers the challenges Western dominance has offered key aspects of Muslim civilization, particularly in the context of South Asia, which in the nineteenth century moved from being a receiver of influences from the rest of the Muslim world to being a transmitter of influences to it. Robinson also considers aspects of the Muslim revival and how they have come to shape, in various ways, Muslim responses to Western dominance. The role of the transmission of knowledge, both formal and spiritual, in forming Muslim societies is explored, and also the particular role of the transmitters in sustaining the Islamic dimensions of Muslim societies under Western dominance. Attention, too, is paid to the imposition of the modern state and the restriction of cosmopolitan spaces.

Ashraf Ali Thanawi (1863-1943) was one of the most prominent religious scholars in Islamic history. Author of over a thousand books on different aspects of Islam, he defended the Islamic scholarly tradition and articulated its authority in an age of momentous religious and political change. Muhammad Qasim Zaman offers a comprehensive and highly accessible account of Thanawi's multifaceted career and thought, whilst also providing a valuable introduction to Islam in modern South Asia.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state's authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.

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.

The Book in the Islamic World brings together serious studies on the book as an intellectual entity and as a vehicle of cultural development. Written by a group of distinguished scholars, it examines and reflects upon this unique tool of communication not as a physical artifact but as a manifestation of the aspirations, values, and wisdom of Arabs and Muslims in general. The Islamic system of book production differed from that of the West. This volume shows the peculiarities of book making and the intellectual principles that governed a book's inner structure, mysteries, and impact on culture. Investigated and explained are the issues involved in printing; the compilation of the Koran, the most important book in Islam; attitudes toward books; the oral versus the written tradition; metaphors of the book in literature; biographical dictionaries, an important genre of Islamic books; the grammatical tradition; women's contribution to calligraphy; scientific manuscripts; the transition from scribal to print culture; publishing in the modern Arab World; and the new electronic media, a non-book vehicle of communication, and its impact on education.

With clarity and concision, Juan Cole disentangles the key foreign policy issues that America is grappling with today--from our dependence on Middle East petroleum to the promotion of Islamophobia by the American right--and delivers his informed advice on the best way forward. Cole's unique ability to take the true Muslim perspective into account when looking at East-West relations make his insights well-rounded and prescient as he suggests a course of action on fundamental issues like religion, oil, war and peace. With substantive recommendations for the next administration on how to move forward in key countries such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, Engaging the Muslim World reveals how we can repair the damage of the disastrous foreign policy of the last eight years and forge ahead on a path of peace and prosperity. Cole argues: * Al-Qaeda is not a mass movement like fascism or communism but rather a small political cult like the American far right circles that produced Timothy McVeigh. * The Muslim world is not a new Soviet Bloc but rather is full of close allies or potential allies. * There can be no such thing as American energy independence, we will need Islamic oil to survive as a superpower into the next century. * Iran is not an implacable enemy of the U.S.--it can and should be fruitfully engaged, which is a necessary step for American energy security since Tehran can play the spoiler in the strategic Persian Gulf. * America's best hope in Iraq is careful, deliberate military disengagement, rather than either through immediate withdrawal or a century-long military presence--in other words, both the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates are wrong.

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.

"Islam in the Malay world of Southeast Asia or Islam Nusantara, as it has come to be known, had for a long time been seen as representing the more spiritual and Sufi dimension of Islam, thereby striking a balance between the exoteric and the esoteric. This image of 'the smiling face of Islam' has been disturbed during the last decades with increasing calls for the implementation of Shari’ah, conceived of in a narrow manner, intolerant discourse against non-Muslim communities, and hate speech against minority Muslims such as the Shi’ites. There has also been what some have referred to as the Salafization of Sunni Muslims in the region. The chapters of this volume are written by scholars and activists from the region who are very perceptive of such trends in Malay world Islam and promise to improve our understanding of developments that are sometimes difficult to grapple with." — Professor Syed Farid Alatas, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore

In an era when Islam ostensibly lies at the heart of a volatile nexus of a global campaign of war on terrorism, simplistic notions and dangerous misunderstandings about the cultures and nature of Southeast Asian Islam, in all its variants, are used to inform and justify policies.

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. To that end, this book surveys the modern Indian ‘public’ across multiple historical contexts and sites, with contributions from leading scholars of South Asia in anthropology, history, literary studies and religious studies. As a whole, this volume highlights the complex genealogies of the public in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing in particular how British notions of ‘the public’ intersected with South Asian forms of publicity. Two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. This book suggests, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the sub-continental history of political liberalism. Also discussed is how the studies collected in this volume challenge some of liberalism’s key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.