Islam in South Asia

The book is a significantly enlarged version of Tareen’s doctoral dissertation ‘The Limits of Tradition: Competing Logics of Authenticity in South Asian Islam’ at Duke University from 2012. Tareen focuses on key aspects of two 19th century debates in Northern India: i) during the first decades of the 19th century between Fazl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (1796-1861) and Shāh Ismāʿīl (1779-1831) on intercession, and ii) in the last decades of the 19th century between Ashraf ʿAlī Thānvī (1863-1943) and Aḥmad Razā Khān (1856-1921) on whether the Prophet had knowledge of the hidden.

Islam in World Cultures gathers the work of ten eminent scholars, each of whom has expertise in the Muslim culture of a particular country or geographical area. Individual chapters explore contemporary developments in the Islamic experience in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the United States. This broad treatment provides an introduction to the full range of issues relating to Islam in the context of globalization.

Highlights
Of use to the general reader seeking a broad introduction to modern Islam
More than just an examination of a set of religious beliefs, this work emphasizes the social dynamics of both majority and minority Islamic cultures
A glossary of key terms, with emphasis on comparative usage and how common terms differ in definition from place to place

Islam in Pakistan: A History by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University Press, 2018 Discursive strands evolve in a complex traditional structure, shaping and modifying the meaning of normativity itself. However, this evolution does not necessarily require a linear continuation, as Talal Asad observes in The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (1986), but instead an exhilarating tradition is shaped, altered, and adapted to the mounting unavoidable forces of the present, with relations to the past and future. Like the tradition itself, the process of change and adaptation is also too complex to understand. A scholar studying a religious or cultural tradition finds a variety in its discursiveness; some approaches are conservative or radical in their dealing with the past, present, and future, while others progressive. Furthermore, due to their not operating in a watertight compartment, these approaches at times overlap. Engaging in a conversation with the Islamic or Muslim traditions this way in an age of change, i.e. colonialism and post-colonialism, is a well-entertained exercise in modern scholarship, and the works of Muhammad Qasim Zaman published during the last two decades have been illustrative in this regard. Zaman's explorations in the religio-political history of Muslims in modern South Asia are expansive and ingenious in their conclusions. His recent publication Islam in Pakistan: A History can be considered a sequel to a series of his previous publications. The book's name seems deceptive if the word 'history' in its title is understood in its crudest sense. However, as the opening of the book clarifies, it is a history of how Islam along with its different traditions and understandings came into being in Pakistan. Zaman draws a sharp line between pre-colonial and colonial as the distinctive periods signifying the two different understandings of Islam: classical and modern, and it is the modern understanding of Islam that developed in the colonial period that made its way into the newly-established state of Pakistan. He argues, "All the key facets of modern Islam worldwide were well represented in colonial India and they have continued to be so in Pakistan: Sufism; traditionalist scholars, the úlama, and their institutions of learning, the madrasas; Islamism; and Islamic modernism." (1) He asserts that these facets formulated and developed into well-articulated forms in the colonial period. In fact, this period facilitated a number of contributing factors to this development that Zaman does not highlight. However, other recent researches on South Book Review

During and after the caliphate of the third Caliph, ‘UthmÉn ibn ‘AffÉn people from different backgrounds and persuasions with criminal mentality tried to corrupt the ×adÊth of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.). Muslim scholars, on the other hand, did not remain silent spectators of the alarming situation; they rose to the occasion and did all that they could to preserve the authenticity and sanctity of sayings of the Prophet (s.a.w.). This preservation and authentication were ensured from both angles, chain of the reporters, and text of the report. This paper represents a humble attempt to introduce contributions of some scholars in the past as well as today towards authentication of ×adÊth.

In Pakistan, one of the most significant celebrations on the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Azha (Feast of the Sacrifice), is marked by two major rituals. At the center of the festival is the animal slaughter remembering the prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. The second, dating to Pakistan’s earliest days as a nation, is the collection of animal hides from the sacrifice. NGOs, political parties, and madrasas annually compete to collect and auction the sacrificial skins. This paper examines how Alkhidmat Foundation–the social welfare branch of the Islamist party Jama’at-e-Islami–invests in a risky fundraising ritual that animates the value of sacrifice in their humanitarian work. While historically the auction of animal hides has been lucrative, over the last decade, the income has come under threat due to the rise of synthetic leathers on the global market, inflation, and climate change, which have left Pakistan’s leather commodity in peril and, with it, the fate of a major source of income for the country’s social services. Pakistan’s skins collection offers insight into a fundraising practice that instantiates sacrifice writ large: of time, safety, and resources, and sometimes, of intimate relations. Sacrifice is the motivating value that underpins dedication to the annual hide collection and articulates Alkhidmat’s humanitarianism through the human capability of sacrifice.

Intendiamo aprire, con questo studio, una discussione sulla poetica e sulla filosofia della natura nell’opera di Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (1644- 1720), il maggiore poeta di lingua persiana dell’India mughal, e nella sua scuola. Riprendendo alcune suggestioni di Alessandro Bausani, ormai risalenti a quasi sessant’anni fa, ci concentriamo qui in modo particolare sull’ecologia testuale e metaforica della nuvola (abr) e di alcune realtà fisiche a questa connessa, in modo particolare la bolla (ḥabāb), che si trasformano, nella lettura bideliana, in veri e propri specchi per una riflessione concettuale fondata sul metodo del taḥqīq, insieme “indagine” e “realizzazione”. Il principale testo di nostro inte- resse è un mathnawī relativamente breve, il Ṭūr-i maʿrifat (Sinai della conoscen- za), recentemente tradotto in italiano e tra le opere meno note del maestro di Patna: un vero e proprio safarnāma, o resoconto di viaggio, focalizzato esclusi- vamente sull’osservazione e la narrazione del paesaggio naturale dell’India del nord nel momento del monsone. A questo poema si affiancano, nell’analisi, al- cuni versi tratti dai ghazal di Bīdil e, soprattutto, dall’opera di due suoi discepoli krishnaiti, Amānat Rāy e Shivrām Dās Ḥayā (entrambi attivi nella prima metà del Settecento), che riprendono, nei loro versi persiani, la tematica naturale del maestro declinandola in chiave vedantica e devozionale.

An in-depth analysis on how Islam arrived in three different regions of the Asian continent and is now perceived and lived by the local populations, with a common denominator being the purity of their belief and the strong identification they have towards Islam.

This chapter deals with the spread of Islam in Asia from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. In order to restrict somewhat the huge geographical area and timeframe covered here, we have decided to exclude the places where Islam spread through military conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries, i.e. the Middle East, Iran, Sindh and the southwestern regions of Central Asia. 1 We thus focus on three broad regions where the spread of Islam mainly followed major trade routes: Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. In these three regions, Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, figured prominently in the early diffusion of the new religion and was almost universally practiced by local Muslims until the late nineteenth century. As opposed to the central lands of Islam, in these eastern regions, Islam generally spread peacefully through trade rather than through military conquest and these shared Islamisation patterns form the main thread of this chapter. First, we deal with the general trends common to the three regions. Second, we detail the particular political and social chronology of Islamisation along the continental and maritime branches of the Silk Road.

This article presents an annotated translation of "The Equivalence between Giving and Receiving" (al-Taswiya bayna al-ifāda wa-l-qabūl), a short Arabic treatise on essence (dhāt) and existence (wujūd) composed by the South Asian philosopher-Sufi, Shaykh Muḥibb Allāh Ilāhābādī (996–1058/1587–1648). Although modern scholarship has habitually referred to Muḥibb Allāh as an ardent defender of the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd (“unity of existence”) associated with the figure of Ibn al-ʿArabī, such generalized formulations fail to do justice to the uniqueness of Muḥibb Allāh’s intellectual contributions. Most authors who had set out to provide a philosophical defense of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings – including the well-known likes of Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, Dāwud al-Qayṣarī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Mullā Ṣadrā, and so on – had tended to prioritize a philosophically utilizable formulation of wujūd or “existence.” Muḥibb Allāh, in notable contrast, favors a presentation of the divine Reality in terms of “pure essence/quiddity” (dhāt/māhiyya maḥḍa), at times going to considerable lengths to uphold his alternative formulation. Such a strategy of argumentation is uncommon amongst philosophical defenders of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the distinctiveness of which is further enhanced by Muḥibb Allāh’s peculiar mode of disputation, which straddles the line between metaphysics and natural philosophy/physics. The Taswiya occasioned at least sixteen commentaries and refutations; this translation benefits from consulting the earliest of these, composed by Mullā Maḥmūd al-Jawnpūrī (d. 1062/1652) and Khwāja Khwurd (d. 1073/1663), as well as three later commentaries by Ḥabīb Allāh Paṭnaʾī (d. 1140/1728). Most significantly, this translation makes extensive use of Muḥibb Allāh’s own Persian auto-commentary, the Sharḥ-i taswiya, which is a critical aid for deciphering the author’s at times opaque manner of expression and argumentation.

The ulama are important figures within Muslim societies. In the Indian sub-continent, their influence has transcended the socio-religious realm to include the political realm as well. This paper is an attempt to examine the role of the ulama in Pakistani politics. It also seeks to build a trajectory of their future influence in Pakistani politics. There are four parts to the paper. The first part will examine the historical role of the ulama in the Indian sub-continent. The second part will examine their politics in the period between 1947 and 1979. The third part will highlight how the rise to power of General Zia-ul-Haq and the Afghanistan War of 1979 emboldened the ulama to start seriously contesting for political power. Lastly, the paper will look at how the ulama were again empowered by the military regime of General Musharraf to play an important role in Pakistani politics.

South Asia’s encounter with Western colonialism preceded that of the Arab world, arguably rendering it more sensitive to the intellectual challenges implicit in political subjugation. Consequently, scholars of South Asian Islam, such as Francis Robinson, have highlighted its role historically more as an exporter than as an importer of reformist ideas, particularly during the decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The subject of this book, Shaykh Abu al-Hasan Ali Nadwi (1915–99), exemplifies both these tendencies through his life and works. First, he confronts head-on the challenges posed to Muslim civilization by Western cultural and political hegemony. Second, through a corpus of eloquent and passionate Arabic publications and frequent lecture tours abroad, he speaks to the trauma of a post-colonial Arab world still reeling with the shock of its inglorious place in the new global political order.

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يتناول هذا الكتاب موضوعًا مهمًّا لم توفِّه الأكاديمية الغربية حقَّه من الدَّرْس والنظر، وهو موضوع "شرح الحديث النبوي"، ويسلك في مقاربته منهجًا مغايرًا للمعهود في الدراسات العربية الحديثة التي طرقت هذا الموضوع؛ إذ يروم تحقيق الصِّلة بين شروح الحديث والسياق السياسي والاجتماعي والفكري الذي عاش في كَنَفِهِ أصحابُ هذه الشروح وكان تأثُّرهم به أمرًا حتميًّا لا سبيل إلى الفكاك منه. 
وترتكز المقاربة التي يقدِّمها على دراسة ما وُضِعَ على "صحيح البخاري" من شروح في ثلاثة أقاليم مختلفة، وخلال ثلاثة أطوار تاريخية متباينة، مع استعراض ما أولته جماعاتُ الإسلام السياسي لشروح الحديث من اهتمامٍ في الزمن الحاضر، وتعقَّب في خلال ذلك أوجهَ الاستمرار ونواحيَ التغيير التي طرأت على هذه الشروح، بعد أن انتقل تقليدُ الشرح من عصر المخطوطات إلى عصر الطباعة ثم عصر الفيديو، ومن العصور التي كان شُرَّاحُ الحديث خلالها موصولةً أسبابُهم بالنُّخبة الحاكمة إلى العصور التي نأوا فيها بجانبهم عن السُّلطة السياسية، ومن العصور التي انتظمت بعض المرجعيات النصيَّة والمؤسسيَّة التي لا سبيل إلى منازعتها في الواقع إلى العصور التي بدا فيها من الممكن تحدِّي هذه المرجعيات نفسها.

تهدف تلك الورقة في الأساس إلى دراسة مفهوم العلاقات التجارية والدينية والثقافية بين الهند والعرب قبل البعثة النبوية وبعدها. و تظهر إشكالية الورقة في البحث عن الآليات والطرق التي أسهمت في تقوية تلك العلاقات بين الطرفين إبان تلك الفترة التاريخية. وفي ذلك الصدد ركزت الورقة في دراسة وجود النشاطات التجارية المتبادلة بين الطرفين مع ذكر الطرق البحرية التي كانوا يسلكونها، والسلع التجارية الهندية التي كانت تجلب من الهند إلى الجزيرة العربية وإلى المناطق الغربية الأخرى، وذلك لتبيان حجم التجارة والتعاون الاقتصادي بين الأطراف المعنية. وكذلك سلطت الورقة الضوء على العوامل التي دفعت الخلفاء الراشدين إلى الاهتمام بالفتوحات الإسلامية للهند، فضلًا عن التطرق إلى أي مدى قام الصحابة بدور في تقوية تلك العلاقات المتبادلة وترسيخها من خلال مشاركتهم في الفتوحات الإسلامية الأولى للهند برًا وبحرًا. وانتهت الورقة بدراسة النشاطات العسكرية التي ساعدتهم على الوصول إلى المناطق الهندية الساحلية مثل گجرات والسند مع دراسة دور تلك النشاطات العسكرية في تمهيد الأرضية للفتوحات الكبيرة التي تمت في عصر الدولة الأموية مع التأكيد على أن تلك الفتوحات الأولية كانت بمثابة الخيط الأول لربط المناطق الهندية بالخلافة الراشدة، ثم بالدولة الأموية والعباسية. وقد اتبعت الدراسة المنهج الاستنتاجي والاستقرائي والتحليلي، والقائم عل استخراج المواد من بطون أمهات الكتب التاريخية، ومن ثم العكوف على دراستها وتحليلها، لاستنباط فرائضها واستخلاص نتائجها، دون إفراط،أو تفريط بما يخدم موضوعات البحث ومضامينه.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the commercial, religious and cultural dimensions of the relations between India and the Arabian Peninsula before and after the prophetic mission of Muhammad (SAW). It looks into the mechanism and channels that contributed to strengthening those relations. The paper focuses on investigating the mutual commercial activities between the two parties, describing the maritime routes they used, and the Indian commercial goods that were brought from India to the Arabian Peninsula and other western regions. These accounts show the volume of trade and the extent of economic cooperation between the parties under study. The paper also highlights the factors that led the caliphs to pay attention to the Islamic conquests of India. Furthermore, it deals with the extent to which the companions played a role in strengthening those ties and consolidating them through their participation in the first Islamic conquests of India by land and sea routes. The paper concludes with a study of the military activities that helped them to reach Indian coastal areas such as Gujarat, Bombay and Sind. Moreover, it touches upon the role of the military activities in paving the way for the great conquests which took place in the Umayyad era. It further emphasizes that those conquests were the first thread to connect the Indian regions with Al-Khilafat Al-Rashida, then the Umayyad and Abbasid states later on. The study followed the inductive, deductive and analytical methods of extracting data from the primary Arabic and Indian historical sources and reviewing and analyzing them in order to draw conclusions from those data.

Wafi Momin, ‘On the Cusp of “Islamic” and “Hindu” Worldviews? The Ginān Literature and the Dialectics of Self and Other’, in Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (ed.), Intellectual Interactions in the Islamic World: The Ismaili Thread (London, 2020), pp. 427-451.

KAFKASYA, BALKANLAR, ASYA DEVLETLERİ & BÖLGESEL İSLAM TEŞKİLATLARI KURULMASI
Ahmet  ÖVEN(Müh.)                                                                                                                                                        Stratejik Makale Yazarı
Güney Kafkasya coğrafyasından yer alan Azerbaycan ve Gürcistan’a bağlı otonom bir bölgedeki Abhazya Cumhuriyeti ; Kuzey Kafkasya’da bulunan Rusya Federasyonu’na bağlı Çeçenistan ,Dağıstan, Adigey(Çerkez),  oblast(eyalet/bölge) statüdeki Astrahan; Balkanlar’daki Arnavutluk, Bosna-Hersek, Kosova, Bulgaristan ve Yunanistan’daki Türk Azınlıklar; Orta Asya Türk Coğrafyasında yer alan Türkmenistan,Özbekistan ,Kırgızistan, Kazakistan, Tacikistan; Güney Asya’daki Afganistan, Pakistan, Bangladeş; Türkistan Coğrafyası’ndaki Uygur Türklerinin yaşadığı Doğu Türkistan ve Osmanlı İmparatorluğu Coğrafyasında yer  alan Kırım ve muhtelif lokasyonlarda bölgesel siyasi coğrafyalar baz alınmak suretiyle  başta din işleri olmak üzere Müslümanların haklarının korunması ve İslamiyet’in Peygamber Efendimiz Hz. Muhammed (SAV)’in dönemindeki esaslara ilişkin yaşanması ve  Kur-an’ı Kerim hükümlerinin doğru anlaşılmasına yönelik faaliyetler bütünü, etnik mezhep kültür gibi demografik yapı baz  alınarak Sultan 2. AbdülHamid’in ittihad-ı islam politikaları ile de sentezlenip stratejiler geliştirerek teşkilatlanmalar kurulması elzem önemli bir konudur.
Bu teşkilatlanmaların ana amacı; ilgili siyasi coğrafyalarda İslamiyet’in esas hükümlerine göre yaşanması, yabancı misyonerlik faaliyetlerine karşı pan-islamist hedefler ortaya konulması, Müslüman devletler ve azınlıkların haklarının korunması, irşad ve tebliğ adı altında farklı dini zümre ve cemaatlerin faaliyetlerinin takibi ve lobi çalışmalarının icra edilerek her coğrafyada bir merkez kurulup bu teşkilat merkezlerinin ana merkezinin TC&Anadolu Coğrafyasında  vücut bulmasıdır.
Vatikan’daki Papalık makamı, Rus veya Fener Rum Patrikliği gibi dini-siyasi bir pozisyona kavuşması ana amaçlardan biri olmayıp daha öncede bir makalede bahsettiğimiz üzere ‘’Türk ve İslam Devletleri Uluslararası Strateji  ve İstihbarat Merkezi Kurulması’’ gibi stratejik bir hedef ortaya konulmuştur.
İslam İşbirliği Teşkilatını(İİT) kuran Kral Faysal bin Abdülaziz El-Suud’un İstanbul doğumlu bir Hanımefendi ile evlenmesi, Kudüs’teki Mescid-i Aksa için 1969’da ‘’Cihat’’ çağrısında bulunması Suud Hanedanındaki en karakterli  ve düzgün bir idareci olduğunun göstergesidir. Balkanlar, Kafkasya ve Asya Devletleri arasındaki dini unsurları baz alacak bu bölgesel teşkilatlanmalar ilk etapta İİT’ye rakip olarak görülebilir lakin arap coğrafyasından bağımsız olacak şekilde siyasi misilleme yahut stratejik lobi çalışması yapacak irredentist bir politika  söz konusudur.
Osmanlı’nın yaptığı en büyük hatalardan biri de haritada da görüldüğü üzere Hicaz topraklarını fethedip Suud Hanedanın da kalan Necid Bölgesini fethetmemesi neticesinde  Arabistan’ın tamamen Suud egemenliğine geçmesidir. Dolayısı ile Suudi yönetiminden kısmen ayrı olarak Mekke Medine Cidde Taif ve Yanbu’da Otonom Cumhuriyet kurulması, mukaddes toprakları onurlandırıcı bir plandır.

Since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, many Muslim postcolonial countries have established and empowered constitutional courts to declare laws conflicting with shariʿa as unconstitutional. The central question explored in this dissertation is whether and to what extent constitutional doctrine developed in shariʿa review is contingent on the ruling regime or represents lasting trends in interpretations of shariʿa. Using the case of Pakistan, this dissertation contends that the long-term discursive trends in shariʿa are determined in the religio-political space and only reflected in state law through the interaction of shariʿa politics, regime politics, and judicial politics. The research is based on primary sources in Urdu, Arabic and English gathered during fieldwork in Pakistan and datasets of Federal Shariat Court and Supreme Court cases and judges compiled by the author.
        In particular, the dissertation offers a political-institutional framework to study shariʿa review in a British postcolonial court system through exploring the role of professional and scholar judges, the discretion of the chief justice, the system of judicial appointments and tenure, and the political structure of appeal that combine to make courts agents of the political regime. Using this framework, the dissertation undertakes historical-interpretive case studies involving two puzzles. First, why the Federal Shariat Court declared the (largely symbolic) punishment of stoning for unlawful sex as un-Islamic in 1981, and why the Court reversed its ruling upon review in 1982. Second, why the Federal Shariat Court declared interest in banking, finance, and fiscal laws as un-Islamic in 1991, and why the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 1999 but then overturned its ruling and remanded the case back to the Federal Shariat Court in 2002.
        The project shows how competing approaches to shariʿa interact with the evolving judicial politics and regime politics in authoritarian and democratic periods. While the institutional structure of constitutional courts gives the ruling regime considerable control over the direction of shariʿa review, ruling regimes often depend on religio-political forces for legitimacy. When the regime draws upon conservative religio-political movements, representatives of such movements are appointed to courts and allowed to assert traditional doctrines of shariʿa. But when the regime draws its legitimacy from a broader group of religio-political and intellectual forces, a more diverse set of judges is appointed and enabled to rethink the tradition. The study questions approaches that consider shariʿa review in post-colonial states either as a liberal or as a conservative phenomenon. In contrast, the project shows how courts are agents of the political regime and judicial outcomes are products of authoritarian and democratic political processes. The dissertation also invites scholars of shariʿa review in Arab constitutional courts to study courts as political institutions and judges as political actors.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-abstract/41/3/370/286533/Thinking-the-Question-of-Religious-Minorities-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext

This conceptual essay pivots on the following problem: Tethered to a context of Muslim empire, how is the legacy of the premodern Islamic legal tradition engaged and negotiated in the modern colonial moment in South Asia, marked by the loss of Muslim political sovereignty and the emergence of South Asian Muslims as a minority community? It engages this question through the example of intra-Muslim debates and contestations on the boundaries of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims in modern South Asia, with a focus on the thought of certain prominent traditionalist ‘ulama’.

This essay makes two arguments. First,there is a hidden politics that the name ‘riot’ performs. It institutes a false equalization that flattens the gigantic power inequality between Hindus and Muslims, and in a single stroke makes them both equally capable and responsible for riot, itself wrongly viewed as between two communities. This false equalization stands on a pervasive but incorrect idea that a ‘balanced’ approach entails condemning both minority and majority communalism, which supposedly mirror each other. Given this notion of resemblance, in The Algebra of Warfare–Welfare, I call this received wisdom the ‘ditto theory. Second, there is a prior theory of violence rooted in the composition and history ofnationalism and almost independent of incidents of violence. An academic theory about ‘communal’ or ‘Hindu–Muslim’ violence presupposes and partakesin that epistemology rather than simply collect ‘data’ about specific cases of violence as an ‘objective’ scholar or analyst. This essay explores the crucial subject of the politics of naming over longue durée. In so doing, it puts forward an original argument that seldom has much of social science made. This argument is derived from as well as extends my larger monographic work on political violence. It is not feasible to lay bare full detail of my claim here. In part, this is because the regnant doxa my argument is positioned against is not limited to a specific field of inquiry, discipline, or a set of authors. My contention instead pertains to the very ubiquitous nationalist epistemology to which almost every discipline, field, or most authors pledge their affiliation. This nationalist epistemology as a knowledge/power matrix with Hindu Orientalism as its lynchpin is, moreover, international.

This MPhil degree Thesis focuses on the historical, social and political changes of Shia and Sunni identity in Pakistan. It discusses the construction of identities within the context of Pakistan and other regions that have a great influence on Pakistan. Since the 1980s, conflict emerged as dominant relation between Shia and Sunni militants previously Sunnis had accommodated Shias to some extent but competition always existed between them. Shias and Sunnis have to negotiate their conceptions of religion with the state.  The state's accommodation of one sect alienates the other. Sunnis and Shias dispute the definitions and categories of religion.

The task of studying sectarianism in Pakistan is further complicated by as Shia and Sunni identities are not monolithic. Within each category there are mystical and fundamentalist inclinations and some that that are intermediate. The Iranian Revolution, the Afghan Jihad, the strained relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Zia military regime, the rivalry with India have all contributed in strengthening the role of religion in Pakistan especially sectarianism.

Pakistani society and politics are complex as there so many alliances and counter alliances, between partners seeking expedience over ideological concerns. Debates between secular and religious, and the place of religious and regional minorities are dominant.  The role of unequal power relations between the majority Punjab and most of the other provinces is another cause for violence in Pakistan. The State's use of religion to bind diverse ethnic groups has had the opposite result of its intentions. Society is now further divided on several lines. Pakistan has increasingly drifted towards extremism.

We are witnessing an exciting renaissance in scholarship on modern South Asian Muslim religious scholars (‘ulama’). This article examines how this new scholarship repositions earlier academic conversations in distinctive ways to make several signal moves: (a) centering the political (particularly the theme of sovereignty); (b) complexifying the study of religious authority by attention to textuality, embodiment, and internal criticism; and finally (c) taking the transnational turn and tracing ‘ulama’ communities in the South Asian diaspora. The article also considers the public scholarship of three academics who have begun asking the question: What are the ethics and politics of translating ‘ulama’ life-worlds beyond the etic-emic and secular-religious frameworks?

Dr. Sikandar Hayat is a renowned historian of Pakistan and he has been researching and writing on the Pakistan Movement for a long time. This time he has tackled the most difficult task of reconstructing the story of Pakistan by highlighting the six main leaders of the Pakistan Movement as it evolved beginning with the Muslim revival by Syed Ahmad Khan. The leaders, besides Syed Ahmad Khan, are, the Aga Khan, Syed Ameer Ali, Maulana Mohamed Ali, Allama Muhammad Iqbal, and Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. These leaders were committed to preserving and protecting the interests of Indian Muslims. Some of them coped with the contemporary socio-economic and political challenges not only of these Muslims but also of the broad Muslim Umma.

This article contributes to scholarship on Muslim humanities, Islam in modern South Asia, and the Urdu literary tradition in colonial India. It does so by contextualizing and closely reading Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī's (1863-1943) commentary on the Dīvān of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfiz̤. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, Ashraf ʿAlī does not read Ḥāfiz̤ through the prisms of social reform or anti-colonial nationalist struggle. Rather, in his capacity as a Sufi master, he approaches Ḥāfiz̤ 's Dīvān as a mystical text in order to generate insights through which he counsels his disciples. He uses the commentary genre to explore Sufi themes such as consolation, contraction, annihilation, subsistence, and the master-disciple relational dynamic. His engagement with Ḥāfiz̤ 's ġhazals enables him to elaborate a practical mystical theology and to eroticize normative devotional rituals. Yet the affirmation of an analogical correspondence between sensual and divine love on the part of Ashraf ʿAlī also implies the survival of Ḥāfiz̤ 's emphases on the disposability of the world and intoxicated longing for the beloved despite the demands of colonial modernity.

It is something of a truism that the Quran’s narrative defies modern texts’ linear chronology demarcated by definitive beginnings, middles, and ends. Quranic studies specialists have expended considerable effort investigating its narratology, foreign vocabulary, conception of ethics, and transmission history.  However, an exploration of time and temporality within the Quran remains a minor concern in the field. To address this lacuna, I investigate how one twentieth-century South Asian religious scholar (alim) Manazir Ahsan Gilani (d.1956) grappled with time and temporality in the Companions of the Cave (Ashab al-Kahf) story of Chapter 18 of the Quran, “The Cave” (Surat al-Kahf).
I make a modest contribution to Quranic studies, South Asian Islamic intellectual history, and post-colonial studies by comparing Gilani’s Quranic exegesis (Tafsir) on this chapter (surah) with his classical and modern Middle Eastern counterparts.

Feb. 2018. Introduction to one of the world's largest da'wa/tabligh movements, with annotated citations to scholarly work on the TJ. Published in Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0250.xml?rskey=Ny5Arc&result=182

Scholars of the TJ and of South Asian Islam: Please send me any citations I might have missed! Oxford Bibliographies will allow me to update this article from time to time.