Introduction: Creative Minorities

Abstract

ABSTRACT The calcification of permanent minorities during and after the colonial period continues to haunt the modern nation-state. Islamist thinkers in the twentieth century tended to accept this status, often giving up sovereignty to God and making Muslim subjects legible only in terms of their religion. By contrast, this special issue focuses on those Muslims who endeavoured to escape or refuse their minority status and in doing so claimed sovereignty for themselves. Rather than track their persecution by the state, this issue presents a global intellectual history of engagement, contestation, and departure by following the question of minorities and Islam in India, China, and East Africa. The issue traces how Muslim political thinkers in those contexts rejected their minority status either by withdrawing to a form of regionalism or, conversely, by escaping the region altogether to find solace in a renewed idea of the universal, recasting Islam in the process.