Academic literature on the topic 'Islam and secularism South Asia'

This dissertation maps the emergence of a 'secularist ethics' in post-independence South Asian literature and film, an ethics which is a deeply felt poetic response to particular historical conjunctures marked by religio-nationalist conflict in the Indian subcontinent. It is my argument that literary and cultural productions, in striving to dream and envision a world free of violence, terror and religious intolerance, have some central contributions to make to contemporary intellectual and political debates on secularism. Through close readings of fictions by Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Jamila Hashmi, Jyotirmoyee Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam, as well as films by M. S. Sathyu, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Khalid Mohamed and Shyam Benegal, which are concerned to address the issue of peaceful co-existence between different religious communities and nations in the Indian subcontinent, I argue that literary and imaginative endeavors by way of their alternative secularist imaginaries enable us to begin to imagine the possibilities of more habitable futures. Significantly, the 'secularist' fictions and films I invite attention to in my project enable a revisioning of the secular in terms quite different from normative understandings of liberal secularism. Such a renewed secularism seeks to make visible the normalization and neutralization of majoritarian religious beliefs and practices as constitutive of the representative secular-nationalist self in post-Partition India; it also emerges, significantly, from a gendered critique of the deep-seated patriarchal norms underlying most religious communities. Responding to different moments of crisis, predominantly the Partition of India in 1947, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the radical secularist poetics of these works call attention to the fundamentalist agenda of Hindu nationalism, the limit

This thesis, based on 14 months of fieldwork, examines middle-class Lahore, a milieu that is not only anxious about the growing religious violence in the country but also feels disappointed by the state and its false promises of progress. The ethnography explores how such tensions shape ideas on personal and public piety which, in turn, influence conceptions of modernity and a ‘successful life’. I examine the growing presence of a form of religiosity that emphasises the personal study of the Quran and other Islamic texts. The rising popularity of Quran schools and study circles, talks by television-based Islamic scholars, and discussions in homes are indicative of a sensibility which encourages individuals to discover the ‘real’ and ‘rational’ Islam by understanding the Quran for themselves. Although this religiosity centres around the individual and the cultivation of personal ethics, it also has a significant public aspect. Many believe that acquired Islamic ethics will not only help attain success in this life and the hereafter but also solve societal problems such as corruption, nepotism and economic disorder. Although such ideas have developed alongside a belief that the state is incompetent, they nevertheless reproduce many state-produced discourses on religion, morality and modernity. At a broader level, my thesis is concerned with how middle-class Pakistan perceives itself and its position in the world. I argue that prevailing ideas on Islam have been shaped by increased communication with the South Asian diaspora abroad and have developed in response to two struggles. First, the emerging middle-class uses this religiosity to contest the moral and economic domination of the established old-money elite. Second, anxieties about the gaze of an abstracted outsider – usually the West on the Muslim world – shape middle-class representations of self.

This dissertation examines three contemporaneous religious philosophers active in early modern South Asia: Muhibb Allah Ilahabadi (d. 1648), Madhusudana Sarasvati (d. 1620-1647), and the Safavid philosopher, Mir Findiriski (d. 1640/1). These figures, two Muslim and one Hindu, were each prominent representatives of religious thought as it occurred in one of the three pan-imperial languages of the Mughal Empire: Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian. In this study, I re-trace the trans-regional scholarly networks in which each of the figures participated, and then examine the various ways in which their respective networks overlapped. The Chishti Sufi Muhibb Allah, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition of wahdat al-wujud, engaged in "international" networks of Arabic debate on questions of ontology and metaphysics. Madhusudana Sarasvati, meanwhile, writing in the Hindu Advaita-Vedanta tradition, was busy adjudicating competing interpretations of the well-known Sanskrit text, the Yoga-Vasistha. Mir Findiriski also took considerable interest in a shorter version of this same Yoga-Vasistha, composing his own commentary upon a Persian translation of the treatise that had been undertaken at the Mughal imperial court. In this Persian translation of the Yoga-Vasistha alongside Findiriski's commentary, I argue, we encounter a creative synthesis of the intellectual contributions occurring within Muhibb Allah's Arabic milieu, on the one hand, and the competing exegeses of the Yoga-Vasistha circulating in Madhusudana's Sanskrit intellectual circles, on the other. The result is a novel Persian treatise that represents an emerging "sub-discipline" of Persian Indian religious thought, still in the process of formulating its basic disciplinary vocabulary as drawn from these broader Muslim and Hindu traditions.

The object of this thesis is to explain why Pakistan which Muslim nationalist historians claim was created in the name of Islam failed to sustain a democratic political system. This question is explored by examining the politics of South Asian Muslims as a continuity from the colonial to the post-partition period, focusing on the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. The thesis begins by investigating the factors which helped politicize Muslim identity during the inter-war years. The interplay of nationalism, constitutional reforms and common identity based on confessional faith forged political identities which determined the course of subsequent events. Dyarchy set in motion processes which the Government of India Act of 1935 reinforced,- the emergence of political solidarities based on religion and region and alienation from nationalist politics. The Congress was able to neutralize the centrifugal developments among its Hindu constituency. It was not so successful among Muslims partly due to the impact of the Reforms and partly due to the activity of Hindu revivalists in the party. Simultaneously Muslim politics was moving away from the Congress, not towards the Muslim League but to the All-India Muslim Conference, around which most Muslims had gathered in opposition to the Nehru Report. However most regional and communitarian parties were not simply antagonistic to the Congress. They rejected centralist politics as a whole. This was amply demonstrated by the 1937 election results which underlined Jinnah's irrelevance to Muslim politics. Hence Muslims were in their political loyalties divided between strong currents focused on provincial interests and weak ones emphasizing sub-continental unity, national or Muslim. This configuration, the opposition between centrifugal and centripetal forces defined the basic parameters of Muslim politics. The second chapter describes how the political divisions between Muslims was partially overcome. The 1937 elections initiated a major political shift among the Muslim regional parties and caused great unease among the urban groupings. The Muslim regional partie's feared that the Congress Party's control over provincial ministries through a centralized structure and its rejection of the federal basis of the 1935 Act, would lead to their being roped into a Hindu-dominated unitary state. To fight this threat, an alternative political focus at the all-India level came to be considered necessary for the protection of their interests. The Muslim League's revival was indirectly facilitated by the Quit India Movement which temporarily removed the Congress from the arena of open politics and by the encouragement Jinnah received from the Raj. The League was able to gradually pull Muslim groups, particularly those in the Muslim-minority provinces, into its ranks through the use of anti-Congress propaganda. But among the urban masses of UP Jinnah was eclipsed by Mashriqi until the mid-1940s when the Khaksars became a spent force. This development combined with the increasing influence of the Pakistan slogan, vague yet immensely attractive, provided the ideological cutting edge of the League's agenda for Muslim unity. The ideological hegemony allowed the League to focus the forces of community consciousness as a battering ram to breakdown the regional parties resistance. The Pakistan slogan spread from the urban areas and Muslim-minority provinces into the rural areas of the Muslim-majority provinces. But in Bengal the regionalist had taken over the party, in the Punjab Khizr continued to resist and in the NWFP and Sind the Muslim League was a peripheral influence. Hence by the mid-1940s the League was only able to achieve partial unity under the Pakistan banner. The third chapter deals with the brief moment of political unity achieved through the combined impact of mass nationalism and communal riots. After the constitutional deadlock following the breakdown of the Simla Conference the League was able to make major advances by positing a clear choice between their and the Congress's plans for India's future. Muslim nationalism now centred on the League capitalized on the political uncertainties caused by the negotiations and won over many adherents from the provincial parties. An important factor which widened the League's area of influence was the increased significance of economic nationalism. It opened channels of communication between the elites and the masses, drew in groups previously unaffected by the Muslim League and turned the agitation for Pakistan into a mass movement. These factors combined with the weakness of the Congress due to their incarceration during the war resulted in the widespread shift away from the regional parties to the Muslim League. Jinnah was able to achieve for a brief moment political unity and used this as the basis to extract the maximum constitutional concessions from the British and the Congress. However the centralization process was weak and its frailty was at the root of ideological confusion. The confusion was manifest in the changing definition of Pakistan in this crucial period. The problem was compounded by the League's lack of strong party structure to control and enforce discipline over the regional supporters. Jinnah's interventions in the provinces were the exception and not the rule and limited to disciplining local leaders. For expanding the party's influence he was completely dependent on the provincial leaders. The regionalist forces were not genuine converts to Muslim nationalism. They used the League as a stalking horse for their provincial interests. Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan due to the strong pressures from the Muslim-majority provinces who were not interested in a separate homeland for Muslims and later he supported Suhrawardy's attempt to avoid partition of Bengal. Jinnah had to be responsive to these different currents within the party in order to avoid a revolt against his leadership. Besides the internal pressure, pro-Congress opposition was still strong in Sarhad and Sind and they used regional ethnicity as a counter against the League. However the opposition collapsed when the civil disobedience movement mounted by the League at this extremely tense moment triggered off the communal explosion which engulfed northern India and as a result the Congress accepted partition. The fourth chapter deals with the Muslim League's effort to consolidate its position in Pakistan through the construction of a strong state and the potent anti-centre backlash it produced. Pakistan came into existence through the contingent circumstances attending the transfer of power and the League's leadership was ill-prepared to establishing itself in Pakistan. The perceived threat from India and the internal opposition to the leadership convinced them that the country and they themselves could survive politically only if a strong centre was established. However the ethnic composition of the ruling group was a source of tension which bedeviled the centralizing process. The Muslim League leadership was mainly Muhajirs who had no social base in Pakistan. They along with the Punjabis also dominated the military and the bureaucracy. Hence the push for a unitary structure alienated others such as the Bengalis, who were not represented in the upper echelons of the state. The political instability was aggravated by the ruling group's efforts to establish a strong centre not on the basis of a broad consensus but through strong arm tactics. As a result internal and external opposition to the League leadership was suppressed in an authoritarian manner. Karachi used the state apparatus to crush the emerging opposition and interfered in the provinces attempting to put its supporters into power.

This dissertation analyzes how governance and community-based politics of claims in marginalized Muslim neighborhoods of Mumbai are continually reconfigured in relation to one another. By tracing this relationship, I problematize conceptualizations of governmental forms and community that don't adequately attend to their co-constitution in practice. More specifically, I examine the intersections between state practices and claims of belonging in Mumbai neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims who, impelled by regional economic inequalities, immigrated to the city from North India and other parts of the country. A large number of them traditionally belong to artisanal communities and are today engaged in the informal sector of the economy. I am interested in understanding how competing and converging claims are made to locality, urban space, labor, and caste in the interactions between these working-class Muslim communities and the state in a city that has become highly segregated along religious and regional lines. I argue that state and marginalized community in minoritized areas are not defined by independence and isolation, but by a relationship of co-generation marked by convergence and contradiction. My analysis of the interactions between community forms and state practices explores modes of laying claim to localizing forms of belonging with respect to urban space, public religiosity, histories of labor, kinship, and 'backward' caste politics.<br>Anthropology