Islam in History and Politics

Abstract

This collection of essays consists primarily of the output of Australia’s firstmajor conference on SouthAsian Islam, held in 1996.Most of the contributionsto this somewhat delayed volume, then, were written by scholars working in the Australian and New Zealand academe. Editor Asim Roy has triedto close the intervening decade with an at times polemical introductionfocusing on the Islamophobia that has been rising steadily since the conferencewas held.The book opens with Francis Robinson’s conference keynote address. Aprofessor at Royal Holloway in London and former president of the RoyalAsiatic Society, Robinson is one of the most prominent scholars on (early)modern Islam in South Asia. His presentation discusses the shift from an“other-worldly” to a “this-world Islam” and the consequences that thisinward turn had for the individual Muslim’s sense of responsibility. As theulama lost their monopoly on the interpretation of Islam in this process,reformists and modernists – and Muslim women in particular – were allthrown back on their own devices for re-evaluating the role of religion inwhat had become, to a large extent, a disenchanted world ...