Islam In India Research Articles

Person in Place: Possession and Power at an Indian Islamic Saint Shrine

Person in Place: Possession and Power at an Indian Islamic Saint Shrine

A NEW WAVE OF INDIAN INSPIRATION: Translations from Urdu in Malay Traditional Literature and Theatre

In the late 19th century the Malay world experienced a new impact of artistic stimuli from Islamic India. This not only brought to life half a dozen literary works, translation-adaptations from Urdu (Hikayat Gul Bakawali, Syair Indra Sebaha, Hikayat Sultan Bustamam, Hikayat Ganja Mara and some others), but also considerably enriched histrionic culture of the region, in particular through the creation of the Wayang Bangsawan theatre. The influential Indo-Malay community, Jawi Peranakan, played the role of cultural brokers in this process; the Indian Parsi theatre was its major medium. By studying in detail the extant bio-data of translators from Urdu, prototypes and principles of their translations, the history of the Parsi theatre in the Malay world and literary-theatrical interactions within it, the article reveals the paradoxical nature of the new wave of Indian inspiration. On the one hand, this wave contributed a great number of innovations to Malay culture, thus stimulating its modernisation; on the other hand, together with the burgeoning number of lithographs, it marked the beginning of a new (if final) era of flowering of traditional Malay literature. Another issue discussed in the article is the significance of this relatively well-documented stage of the Indo-Malay cultural interface for a better understanding of its earlier stages (for instance in Malacca of the 15th to 16th century or in 17th century Aceh), information of which is still scarce and uncertain.

The majesty of Mughal decoration: the art and architecture of Islamic India

I. Introduction: The Mughals as Patrons * Artistic Sources and Influences Materials and Techniques * II. Themes: Colours * The Frame * Flowers Animals and Birds * Geometry * The Arabesque * Calligraphy * III. Documentation: Inventory of Key Monuments * Catalogue of Objects * Select Bibliography

Hazrat-I-Dehli

This article explores the significant linkages between the rise of Delhi as the foremost Sufi centre and the bastion of Islam as well as the seat of political power in the 13th and 14th centuries. Three out of the first five leading Chishti saints of the Sultanate period chose to live in Delhi, catapulting the city onto the map of the sacred geography of South Asian Islam. The Chishti Sufis also helped in shaping the cosmopolitan character of the city, even as they ensured that the interests of Islam and Muslims were safeguarded. Hence, though Delhi remained the centre of Muslim power for close to six centuries and its landscape is dotted with mosques, madrasas and dargahs of the Sufis, the exclusionist, juridical interpretation of Islam was sidelined in favour of a more inclusive approach to religion practised and propagated by the Chishtis. The essay charts this process and its significance for the early history of Islam in India.

Harlequin empire: race, ethnicity and the drama of the popular Enlightenment

1 The Theatrical Network 2 The Representation of Race on the Georgian Stage 3 James Hewlett, Ira Aldridge and The Death Of Christophe, King Of Hayti 4 Islamic India Restored: El Hyder and Tippoo Saib at the Royal Cobourg Theatre 5 The North African Islamic States on the British and American Stage 6 Pacific Pantomimes: Omai, Or, A Trip Round The World And The Death Of Captain Cook 7 Colonists, Convicts, Settlers And Natives: La Perouse, Pitcairn's Island and Van Diemen's Land!

In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India – By Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India – By Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India (review)

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular in South India. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006. 320 pp. In 1989 Flueckiger met Amma, a middle-aged woman, who identified herself as a pimnima (wife of a pir, a Sufi teacher) who meets patients in the healing room and writes taviz (amulets with Quranic verses) for them. Amma describes her healing practice as one that is based on the Quran, and its success guaranteed for illness caused by spiritual forces. Amma's patients and clients come from many different religious traditions. Despite critiques of Amma's practice as heretical, Amma sees herself and her practices not as peripheral but at the very center, a location through which multiple axes of religious identities meet and cross at what Flueckiger calls crossroads, caurâstâ in Hindi and Urdu. Taking seriously Amma's self-identification as Muslim, Flueckiger seeks to understand how and when this identity is shaped, enacted, and articulated at this site of what she marks as Islam. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger's In Amma's Healing Room is an exemplary ethnography focusing on one Muslim female spiritual healer in Hyderabad, South India. Following the genre of autobiographical ethnographic model of Shostak's Misa, the significance of Amma's work and life is marked by the space and contents of human interactions that unfold in her healing room (that is an extension of her private home). This is a space and place that represents a level of popular, non-institutionally based Islamic practice that has been underrepresented in religious studies on in South Asia (2). Through Amma's philosophical perspective, that is richly narrated in Amma's own voice, about the and contents of religions, genders, and the in-distinctions of the human heart and condition across these differences; we are introduced to the vernacular Islam of one Hyderabad! location. Amma's Sufi Islamic inspired and embedded healing practice and philosophical outlook on life, relationships, and humanity welcomes Hindu, Christian, and Muslims across different sects seeking healing, guidance, and teaching from her. The healing-room discourse, in addition to holding a and permeable religious boundaries between Hindu and Muslim traditions, highlights Amma's conceptions of the human heart that is reflected in the complex and historical relationship between Shii and Sunni traditions of in Hyderabad (194). For example, Amma who is considered Sunni claims the Shii Muslim festival of Muharram as Ours and speaks proudly of the Hyderabad! tradition of Muslims and Hindus always getting along (195). With the contemporary politicization of religious identities in India, Hindus are participating less in the Muharram processions explains Flueckiger. Yet, despite this trend, Amma's healing room attracts equal numbers of Muslims and Hindus. Amma's healing work, among other approaches, centers on communication/counseling the clients and provision of written and non-written herbal medicinal prescriptions. Flueckiger illustrates how the ritual grammar of many of Amma's prescriptions is shared across religious boundaries. For example, utara is a prescription that Amma orders for forms of what Amma calls heavy evil eye. The that involves the circling of an attractive physical object around the head of a person in order to draw away the evil eye is one commonly practiced in numerous contexts in South Asia-Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Both Hindus and Muslims visiting Amma accept the possibility that social and physical illnesses can be transferred through material substance such as through food. Herbal prescriptions to be buried and burned for healing is another material substance shared across religious identities. Amma explains that, There's great sakti [spiritual power] in jan-butT (herbs) and goes on to narrate a story of Hanuman (from the Ramayana) who had flown to a special mountain to find similar healing herbs in order to bring the dying hero Lakshman back to life. …

Making Sense of the Languages of Islam in Medieval North India1

An extensive review of Muzaffar Alam's The Languages of Political Islam in India c 1200-1800 in which the reviewer concludes that 'despite the author's adherence to liberal/progressive values within Islam and commitment to secular politics in contemporary India, which have restrained him in a large measure, this work has almost everything in it to become a classic.'

The destruction of memory: architecture at war

In times of conflict, buildings are inevitably damaged or destroyed. But there has always been another war against architecture: the destruction of the built artefacts of a people or nation as a means of cultural cleansing or division. In this war, architecture takes on a totemic quality: a mosque is not simply a mosque but represents the presence of a community. A library or an art gallery is a cache of cultural memory ? evidence of the reality of that community?s history that extends and legitimizes it in the present. Even office buildings may acquire powerful symbolic value: this was brought home with singular force by the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. In The Destruction of Memory, Robert Bevan examines both the effects of conflict on architecture over the last century and also examples throughout history: from the conflict between Islam and Hinduism in India and the razing of Aztec cities by Cortez to the Holocaust and the Chinese destruction of Tibetan Lhasa. A notable example from more recent times is the terrorist activities in the former Yugoslavia. Incidents discussed include the bombing of Dubrovnik; the destruction of the iconic bridge at Mostar; and the blackened leaves of priceless books floating down over Sarajevo after the National Library was shelled. Robert Bevan argues that these were not ?collateral damage?, as some might claim: they were deliberate acts of destruction, an attack not only on the architecture, but also the cultural memory of a nation.

In Amma's healing room: gender and vernacular Islam in South India

Introduction: Called to Amma's Courtyard 1. Setting the Stage: The Healing Room, Its Actors, and Its Rhythms 2. The Healing System 3. Patient Narratives in the Healing Room 4. Negotiating Gender in the Healing Room 5. Religious Identities at the Crossroads 6. Immersed in Remembrance and Song: Religious Identities, Authority, and Gender at the Sam? Conclusion: Vernacular Islam Embedded in Relationships Epilogue

Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. By James W. Laine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 127. $45.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsShivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. By James W. Laine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 127. $45.00 (cloth).Arshia SattarArshia Sattar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 46, Number 2November 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/511451 Views: 11Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India ? James W. Laine

Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India ? James W. Laine

Introduction: Bodily Transformations Across Indian Religions

The three articles included in this collection are diverse in nature as detailed explorations of the distinctive traditions of Hindu bhakti (Karen Pechilis' article), Hindu Tantra (Lorillai Biernacki's article), and Indian Islam (Carla Bellamy's article). In the Indian context these traditions each have their own sacred texts, beliefs, and practices; yet, at the same time, there is considerable interaction and mutual influence among them. As Selva Raj has cogently argued with respect to Indian religions in a paper presented at the Drew University Interfaith Forum, in the Indian milieu religious traditions have an impetus to maintain difference on the level of ecclesiastical or orthodox institutional authority, yet there are considerable opportunities for "popular inculturation" on the level of practice, especially through pilgrimage, life-cycle ceremonies, and devotional exercises.1 Significantly, these popular practices foreground the body. The traditions discussed in this volume share these popular categories of religious practice and their attention to bodily

Smoking is Good for You: Absence, Presence, and the Ecumenical Appeal of Indian Islamic Healing Centers

Fans of the 1977 Indian film Amar Akbar Anthony will perhaps recall the scene in which the blind mother of the three separated-in-childhood sons miraculously regains her vision in a S?? B?b? shrine while her Muslim son, Akbar, leads a remarkably unanimated crowd in a song in praise of the B?b?.2 While the devotees' general lack of interest in the miracle is a bit surprising, it is not surprising that this healing happened in an ambiguously Muslim space. Ambiguously Muslim places of healing?darg?hs, rauz?s, and im?mb?r?s?are ubiquitous features of the Indian landscape, and they attract pilgrims from every major religious tradition of the subcontinent. The ambiguously Muslim space of healing analyzed in this article is a place named Husain Tekr?, which commands a fairly wide-ranging reputation in the healing circuit of northern India, attracting Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Jain pilgrims from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, and Maharashtra,

Population Movements, Islam and the Interaction of Indian and African Identity Strategies in South Africa During and After Apartheid

Colonialist segregation and, subsequently, apartheid in South Africa were centrally focused on the control of population movement, and a central prerogative of the state was the authority to delimit the boundaries between populations and to codify the characteristics of their difference. Against this power of the colonial and the apartheid state were poised the energies of people depending for their livelihoods on movement and capacity to circumvent and demobilise the obstacles placed in their way by geographical restrictions and state authorised definitions of identity. At the same time, the groups of population subjected to such forms of power also sought the recognition of the state, and interacted with it around attempts to fixate boundaries and identities in order to consolidate their own strategic position and situation within the hegemony of cultures, on which the legitimation of state power depended. Following the demise of apartheid and its deconstruction into constitutional democracy after 1994, such confrontations, struggles and manoeuvres have continued, and new types of battles around citizenship and entitlements have emerged in the context of both immigration and affirmative action for greater social justice. This article sets out to examine some of the institutional frameworks and discourses through which African and Indian identities have been articulated, confronted and negotiated in South Africa – and in what is now KwaZulu-Natal in particular – from colonialism and the apartheid era to the “New South Africa.” It discusses some of the ambiguities inherent in Islamic identity formation, and looks at ways in which it has interacted with other strands of identification, with Indian as well as African nationalism in South Africa. In what is now KwaZulu-Natal, Islam has quite predominantly belonged to people of Indian origin– though from very different backgrounds – and has provided an important register of discourse and organisation for both the unification and delimitation of Indian identities against others as well as for the articulation and debate of cultural and political differences within the Indian “community.” African Islam in KwaZulu-Natal has been of much more limited dimensions and – until recently – has been kept carefully apart and segregated from the world of Indian Islam. With the onset of new programmes and mobilisations for dawah among Africans (starting with the work of Achmet Deedat and the Islamic Propagation Centre International from 1957 onwards), with a new political playing field opening up after 1994, and the waves of transnational migration following it, the relationship between Indian and African Islam has begun to change, and new varieties of Islamic discourse and institution building have come about. The paper argues that the impact of these new energies of islamisation is in itself ambivalent: On the one hand it offers possibilities for new dialogue and elaboration of ideas of citizenship across historical divides of racial segregation and discrimination. On the other hand, it also provides the possibility for new hardenings of identity and of new types of confrontation between groups keen to exploit and monopolise the cultural capital represented by Islam.

Making Sense of the Languages of Islam in Medieval North India

An extensive review of Muzaffar Alam's The Languages of Political Islam in India c 1200-1800 in which the reviewer concludes that 'despite the author's adherence to liberal/progressive values within Islam and commitment to secular politics in contemporary India, which have restrained him in a large measure, this work has almost everything in it to become a classic.'

Mystical missionaries in Hyderabad State

This article discusses the emergence of a Sufi-inspired movement of Muslim reform in the princely state of Hyderabad during the first half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which the movement arose, using archival material to discuss the activities of Christian missionaries in the city in which it first emerged. Located in Aurangabad, away from the capital of the Nizam's State, the history of the rise of Mu'īn Allāh Shāh's Sufi organisation shows the ways in which pan-Indian religious disputes and developments in Indian Islam were reflected in the provinces of princely India. The modernist character of Mu'īn Allāh's Sufi teachings is reconstructed and discussed in detail. Preaching a return to the core tenets of Islam in the villages of Hyderabad, Mu'īn Allāh and his successor Hamīd ‘Alī nonetheless envisioned this minimalism as central to the mystical rediscovery of the pure and unadulterated self. However, since the movement was closely connected to the expansion of the textile industry in Aurangabad, attention is also paid to its relationship with the social and religious effects of industrialisation in a provincial context.

Review: Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India

Review: Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India

Review: Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India

Review: Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India

Islam and Muslims in India. Problems of Identi1y and Existence

Islam and Muslims in India. Problems of Identi1y and Existence