South Asian Muslim Research Articles

Partition’s First Generation: Space, Place, and Identity in Muslim South Asia By Amber H. Abbas

Partition’s First Generation starts with the author’s family connections to the city of Aligarh in the western part of the largest and most populous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Her ancestral family home was located on Amjad Ali Road, named in honour of her great-great grandfather, a leading lawyer in Aligarh. The narrative starts in 2009 with her trying to locate the road and the ancestral home, where her grandmother and father were born, only to discover that Amjad Ali Road no longer existed. Following the destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, eastern UP, on 6 December 1992, many Muslims neighbourhoods across the state were targeted by emboldened Hindu nationalists, including this area. Despite this erasure, Abbas managed to locate the property, which now belonged to a Hindu family who had fled Lahore in 1947 and received this as refugee property. This personal opening to the book frames its broader institutional focus, which is to examine the history of the iconic Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), est. 1875, and situate this history in the ‘before, during and after’, of Partition (p. xiii). It highlights the continuum of violence straddling 1947, the ways in which it affected the people moved between places, and whether their movements had been voluntary or forced.

Review: Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, by Tahseen Shams

Review: <i>Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World</i>, by Tahseen Shams

DARUL ULUM DEOBAND: PRESERVING RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL INTEGRITY OF SOUTH ASIAN MUSLIMS THROUGH STRUCTURAL AND STRATEGIC INNOVATIONS

The end of Mughal Empire in the wake of War of Independence 1857 left the Muslim community of South Asia political orphans; desperately facing religious and cultural assaults, political as well as economic victimization and marginalization under British Raj. At this time of vulnerability of the Muslim society, it was the educational institutions established by Muslim ideologues which took up the task of strengthening, reforming and revitalizing the Muslim society to cope with the challenges pushing them down to the bottom, they also helped them regain the lost confidence and integrity. These institutions were not merely educational bodies but the movements endeavoring for Muslim renaissance in South Asia. Among them, one was Darul Ulum Deoband which, from its inception to date, played a historic role in confronting the politico-cultural challenges to the South Asian Muslims by adopting dynamic political strategies and accommodating modern structural innovative modifications in the institutions. This, indeed, helped it be a popular movement and achieve its objectives. The present paper goes into some of important historical developments such as: socio-political circumstances which led to the origination of madrasah Deoband, lofty vision and objectives envisaged by its founders, administration of educational-cum-institutional paraphernalia, nationalist stance and struggle for freedom carried out by the Deobandi veterans, strategies and policies it adopted to deal with political challenges faced by the Indian Muslims during British Raj and after partition of India. It explores and discusses the factors which helped this school of thought be popular and become one of the major sects of Islam. Moreover, it also brings in the much debated issue of its stance on jihad, militant struggle and terrorism. By bringing to light the historical developments, vision of its founders, objectives they determined to achieve and strategies they devised to tackle the challenges, the paper argues that the main concern of Darul Ulum Deoband’s activities was and has been to preserve the Muslim culture in South Asia and to restore the confidence of the Muslim community which they lost after the First War of Independence in 1857 and decline of Mughal Empire, and the modernist and innovative strategies it adopted to achieve its objectives, despite the criticism from within and outside, led to it emerging as one of the dominant sects of Islam.

Book review: Usha Sanyal, Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal, Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), xiv + 410 pp.

Theorizing arranged marriage: The case of South Asian Muslim immigrants in love marriage societies

AbstractIn this paper, I draw upon the empirical literatures on arranged marriages among South Asian Muslim immigrants in the U.S. and U.K. in order to (a) provide a multidimensional model of the marital formation process that challenges the binary between arranged and love marriage and to (b) propose how trust operates as a general mechanism to explain both micro‐level personal, interpersonal, and institutional motivations and negotiations around different marriage models as well as macro‐level shifts in marital practices over time.

Creating diversification through hybrid identities and educational encounters: the power of a third space

PurposeThis paper explores the contextual factors that support the necessity of a diversified curriculum. The author draws on the findings of the author's doctoral research to consider the complexities underpinning the educational narratives of South Asian Muslim women. The paper critically examines South Asian Muslim women's position as migrant daughters and how South Asian Muslim women navigated colonial systems and the practices and behaviours inherent in these. Situated in a racialised inner-city area with a framing by policymakers as one that creates spatial anxiety, participants shared empowered and agentic narratives. These demonstrated a resistance to the othering and stigma that often ensues through stereotyping.Design/methodology/approachThe project adopted a feminist participatory approach and made use of hauntology as both a theoretical and methodological framework. In keeping with this, four participants who had grown up in the area and still lived there were spoken in the form of research conversations, a walking tour and photographs of significant sites.FindingsThe paper provides empirical insights into how these four participants encountered education. By frequenting both formal and informal educational settings, these spaces became a crucial third space which alleviated unsettlement though allowing a more embodied occupation with learning. Teachers played a critical role in cultivating appropriate and supportive environments and were described and inferred to be moral agents and figures who assisted participants' navigation of a space, often embodying a more mentor-like disposition. Teachers proved to embody a practical wisdom, acting as anchors for offering spaces in and outside of the classroom that invited occupation and construction. Such spaces at school enabled the encountering of difference through recognising first the similarities with peers. Whether these commonalities were cultural or otherwise, those commonalities provided a firm foundation from which to imagine and push the parameters of the space and identity, and so school was likely another crucial space for hybridity.Research limitations/implicationsThe research approach is specific to the context(s), narratives and migratory moment of the participants, and although participants' accounts have been re-storied to honour participants' voices, the accounts may lack generalisability. The paper raises two key implications: first, by recognising educational settings as a third space for students to create a hybrid identity, and second, through familial, community and navigational capitals which have the potential to shift the pedagogical approaches underpinning the conditions created for students.Originality/valuePointing out that hybrid identities without the frequenting of space are hauntological is crucial, and hybrid identities cannot reconcile cultural differences because hybrid identities are out of place, and without location, hybrid identities remain troubled and alienated. This is a situation that the author describes as cultural hauntology – a condition which draws on both hybridity and hauntology to illuminate unsettlement long after colonisation. The native culture is never fully banished or forgotten. The native culture exists behind the closed doors of homes, within communities and perhaps even within the demarcation lines of a given geographical area. Cultural hauntology comes about as a deep-seated internal colonisation that appears as traces, marks and murmurs that cannot be deleted. Perhaps what alleviated the extent of what might have been more extreme in cultural hauntology's dissonance, were the teachers, mentors and role models that participants repeatedly referenced as agents that bridged and enabled the participants.

Race, Religion, and Geopolitics: Dating and Romance Among South Asian Muslim Immigrants in Canada

Abstract Using the “complex religion” framework, this article shows the importance of religion while recognizing how race, national origin, and geopolitics shape how Muslims navigate their romantic lives. Based on 50 in-depth interviews of South Asian Muslim immigrants in Canada on interfaith and interracial romance, I show that taken-for-granted labels “Muslim” and “South Asian” are ambiguous even for the participants as they navigate the search for compatible partners. Race and ethnicity are important components alongside religion and sect that together give meaning to negotiations about who is a “real” Muslim. And despite a sense of panethnic desi groupness, religion, sect, and nationality create fissures that challenge and limit notions of brown solidarity on the ground, even for children of immigrants. Finally, I identify how another important yet overlooked dimension of Muslimness—global geopolitics—shapes participants’ romantic pursuits. Overall, this article problematizes current approaches to studying Muslim immigrant experiences in the West.

Art and Violence in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced: Reading Western Domination over Muslim Representation in Amir and Emily’s Relationship

Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, <em>Disgraced</em>,<em> </em>grapples with Islamophobia, post-9/11 racialization of South Asians, and the possibilities of Muslim identity. The play recounts the tragic descent of Amir, a New York Lawyer and South Asian Muslim, from his precarious belonging in upper-class New York society to the devastating fulfillment of violent racial stereotypes about Muslim men. This paper considers Amir’s relationship with his wife Emily, a white artist, as a location of multifaceted and mutually inflicted violence that invites audiences to interrogate stereotypes about Muslim men and confront the harm of white domination over Muslim representation. Emily’s well-intentioned yet problematic control over her husband’s identity and appropriation of Islamic art traditions reflect Western domination over Muslim representation. By highlighting these tensions within Amir and Emily’s marriage, Akhtar deftly locates the impact of Islamophobia and post-9/11 racialization of South Asians in the realm of the personal, confronting audiences with their devastating consequences.

Indian Muslim Theologians’ Response to British Colonization of India and Introduction of Modernization: A Study of Deoband School of Thought

During the nineteenth century, the Muslims of India suffered from severe political decline, as the Mughal Empire was abolished in the wake of Great Revolt 1857. The British started a process of modernization of institutions as well as that of social setup. The Muslim theologians realizing it a serious threat to their religio-cultural values and norms resisted it through militant struggle, setting up educational institutions, making political parties and participating in democratic process, and forming missionary and reformist organizations. This paper explores and evaluates the contribution of the Muslim theologians who founded Darul Ulum Deoband movement and advocated for the orthodox religious educations by adhering to the religious and educational philosophy of Shah Wali Allah. It attempts at evaluating the socio-political circumstance of South Asia which became the rationale of this movement and identifies the major historical landmarks of this movement during the British Raj in India. It examines the factors which helped Deoband school of thought emerge to be one of the dominant sect of Islam. The paper however argues that although the Deoband theologians were severe critics of British imperialism and its initiatives towards modernization of Indian society and culture, yet they adopted British bureaucratic setup for the educational advancements, and gradually got convinced to be the part of democratic process demonstrate the political strength of South Asian Muslims. The methodology employed in the discourse is descriptive, analytical, and normative.

New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims ed. by Kazim Ali

Reviewed by: New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims ed. by Kazim Ali Lopamudra Basu New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Ed. Kazim Ali Pasadena, California. Red Hen. 2021. 368 pages. IN HIS INTRODUCTION to New Moons, a collection of poetry, fiction, and lyrical memoirs by Muslims in North America, Kazim Ali confesses the difficulty of embarking on an anthology that seeks to represent collective Muslim identity. He declares "it is hard to say what a 'Muslim' is," because there is such an enormous diversity of Muslim religious and cultural practices, ranging not only in fidelity to religious observances but also variations stemming from geographic locations, cultural and linguistic formations, as well as branches within the religion. Ali shares his own heritage as Shia Muslim, a sect that traces its origins from the Prophet's daughter Fatima, his son-in-law, and the imams rather than the more majoritarian Sunni sect that follows the caliphs. For Ali, the heterogeneity of Islam is not a modern phenomenon but something that has co-existed with Islam's very inception. The writings showcased in the anthology bear testimony to this vitality and variety of Muslim life. Although writers come from distinctive geographic areas, they share the experiences of immigration to North America, the loss of their homeland, and feelings of continuing cultural dislocation in their new homeland. Samina Hadi-Tabassum's short story "Maqbool" and Naazish Yar Khan's "Lost in Translation between Delhi and Chicago" represent South Asian Muslim families seeking to belong not only in their new neighborhoods in North America but also struggling to establish intimacy among spouses who have grown up in different milieus. Marital conflict, exacerbated by the pressures of immigration, is at the heart of several narratives, including Nour Naas's "Mother(land)" and Leila Christine Nadir's "Cold War." While many of the works in the anthology highlight tensions arising from the collision of old traditions with the new landscape of North America, many authors recapture earlier mid-twentieth-century movements of partition, violence, and ensuing statelessness. Palestine is a recurrent traumatic wound in the Arab world, and it finds expression in Mandy Fessenden Brauer's essay "Memories of Palestine During the First Intifada" as well as Noor Hindi's "On Language and Mourning." The devastation of the Indian Partition and the Muslim refugees who poured into the newly formed state of Pakistan is a generational trauma that echoes in Faisal Mohyuddin's poems "Ghazal for the Diaspora" and "Song of Myself as a Tomorrow" and in Sham-E-Ali Nayeem's "Partition Story." While the end of British colonial rule in the Middle East and India created cataclysmic impacts on the lives and dislocations of Muslim subjects, a more recent catastrophe that undergirds this volume is 9/11 and its continuing effects on North American Muslim identity. Hilal Isler's "Never Forget," Haroon Moghul's "Quebec Was the Semi-Colon," and Tanzila Ahmed's "Muslimah Fight Club" emphasize the profound shift in Muslim life and identity after the towers fell and the new surveillance mechanisms cast all Muslims as potential terrorists. This regime of surveillance is exacerbated in the Trump era with the Muslim ban prompting protests as depicted in Serena W. Lin's "People Here Love You." Islamophobia and systemic racialization of religion find a parallel in the transformation of secular India into an authoritarian Hindu state with the erosion of protections for minorities. This is poignantly evoked in Zara Chowdhary's "Slow Violence," in the portrayal of the destruction of her father's career in a rapidly Hindu fundamentalist regime of Gujarat. In the face of these geopolitical realities of Islamophobia, the War on Terror in North America, and a resurgent Hindu nationalism in India, this volume also documents the campaigns of ordinary Muslims in North America to claim more personal rights, whether it is the expression of their sexualities in Lamya H's "How to De-queer Your Apartment" or Uzma Aslam Khan's memoir "Stealth Christian, Stealth Muslim," which explores young women's friendships across religious barriers in a Pakistan rapidly losing its secular ethos. The act of drinking vodka in a cathedral becomes a protest against the...

Spiritual Care Competences among Health Care Professionals in Pakistan: Findings from a Cross-Sectional Survey

Introduction: There is a gap in healthcare literature related to the spiritual competence of physicians and nurses practicing in South Asian Muslim communities. To fill that gap, the Spiritual Care Competence Questionnaire (SCCQ) was applied which was developed to address multi-professional spiritual care competences. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study among 294 health professionals (61% physicians, 17% nurses, and 22% other professions) in 10 hospitals in Punjab, Pakistan. Results: The highest scoring competences were “Dealing with patients/Communication competences”, while “Team Spirit” scored lowest. There were no gender related differences, but there were effects related to professions. “Team Spirit”, “Dealing with patients/Communication competences”, and “Empowerment competences” scored significantly higher in nurses as compared to physicians and other health care professionals, while there were no significant differences for their “Perception/Documentation competences”. These competences were not relevantly related to the intensity of their prayer/meditation activity. Conclusions: Health care professional from Punjab were preferred to tolerate the pain and the suffering of patients and their relatives rather than to talk about spiritual care issues. Their spiritual care competences were less developed. Thus, there is a clear need for further specific education and training of health professionals.

Intersectionality as personal: the science identity of two young immigrant Muslim women

ABSTRACT This paper studies intersectional multiplicity by encompassing the ways individuals shape relationships between social structures and their science identity. We discuss the science lives of two sixteen-year-old British South-Asian Muslim women studying in a single-sex independent school in London, both of whom aspire to science careers. Adapting McCall’s ‘intracategorical complexity’ in favouring a case study approach, we present the multiplicity of our participants’ relationships with exclusion and inequality, discrimination and privilege within their lived social settings, and how these relationships shape their identities and ambitions to become scientists. Our findings reveal that despite their similarities in their societally ascribed intersectional makeup, Ayesha and Hanya differ in viewing their intersections as challenges and/or opportunities. They both portray agentic control towards ‘going against the grain’ as future women scientists by negotiating their intersections as they develop their science identity.

Misunderstanding Jamaluddin Afghani by Muslims of South Asia: the Radical Interpretation

Sayyid Jamaluddin Afghani is one of the great features of Islamic reformism, Pan Islamism, and anti-colonialism in the nineteenth century who with the great and revolutionary thoughts has overshadowed all the intellectual and political groups in the Muslim world. This revivalist of the time with numerous trips to distant lands and nearly everywhere sought to awaken Muslims and the Eastern nations to eradicate roots of the Western colonial powers. Indian sub-continent was the primary goal for Jamaluddin Afghani. In his first trip to the sub-continent and the major cities of British India, he tirelessly sought to awaken the Muslim population in that country. He had also dealings with Indian people at the time when he was living outside the sub-continent. Jamaluddin had awakened the generations of his own time and the next. Allama Muhammad Iqbal, Ubaidullah Sindhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Abul A’la Maududi, respectively, the prominent figures of pan Islamism, radical Islam, and Islamic modernity, in South Asia are impressed by Afghani’s thoughts. But the above-mentioned generations failed to transfer his original ideas of to the present Muslim generation of the Indian sub-continent. This paper attempts to discuss the relationship of Jamaluddin Afghani with the Indian sub-continent and the influence of his thought on the generations from the past to the present.

POLITICAL POLARIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON MENTAL HEALTH: WHERE DO WE STAND?

POLITICAL POLARIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON MENTAL HEALTH: WHERE DO WE STAND?

Translating scholars: Theorizing modern South Asian ‘Ulama’ studies

AbstractWe 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?

Digital Subaltern Counterpublics and Muslim Women’s Resistance in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Samira Ahmed’s Internment

This article examines the gendered racialization of Muslim women in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Samira Ahmed’s Internment (2019) and argues that their young South Asian Muslim women protagonists navigate physical and digital spaces to claim their rights as citizens. The article first explores the ways in which the public sphere operates transnationally and has shaped perceptions of Muslims in the United Kingdom and United States since 9/11, and analyzes the role of transnational subaltern counterpublics to resist Islamophobia and state repression. The article then examines the ways in which the young Muslim women in Shamsie’s and Ahmed’s works fight the xenophobic state, its surveillance regime, and the curtailment of the ability of Muslims to move freely. In both novels, resistance emerges as a transnational subaltern counterpublic in traditional and digital media. The novels underscore the young women’s agency in overcoming constraints on their mobility and freedom of speech to claim their rights as citizens and engage in an oppositional public sphere that counters their exclusion.

Entanglements in the colony: Jewish–Muslim connected histories in colonial India

AbstractThis article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

KlingMuslims in Sixteenth-Century Ayutthaya: Towards Aggregating the Fragments

AbstractThis article reconstructs the history ofKlingMuslims’ contribution to the religious and ethnic cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century Ayutthaya. This study's argument is constructed based on an aggregate of written fragments about theKlingin both Portuguese primary sources and the wider academic literature. We reveal that, amongst the many ways in which Siam benefited from the Iberian invasion of Melaka in 1511, the dramatic geopolitical rupture of the invasion re-routed trade across the Bay of Bengal. As a result,Klingmerchants began arriving in Ayutthaya in greater numbers via the new network of Siamese-controlled ports and portages. Moreover, this study demonstrates the utility of greater synergy among South Asian, Southeast Asian, Thai, and Malay Studies through focusing on the exonyms employed in primary and secondary sources. Finally, this article contends that Ayutthaya's ethnic and religious cosmopolitanism was impacted by the arrival of South Asian Muslims, referred to asKlingin the Malay World andKhaekin Siam, approximately one century before Persians arrived in greater numbers. This, among others, was an unintended result of Portugal's sixteenth-century interventions into, and alliances with, the Siamese.

State containment and closure of gendered possibilities among a millennial generation: On not knowing Muslim young men

Within a British context, the South Asian Muslim community is currently a significant media spectacle with a millennial generation of British-born young men inhabiting public personae that officially are perceived as being a ‘suspect community’. An epistemological assumption of this perception appears to be that religion is the dominant and exclusive social category shaping their behaviour. Using qualitative research that synthesizes postcolonial and critical men’s studies, this article explores how Muslim millennial men are ‘categorically’ contained with accompanying forms of (de)gendering. The article is based upon research with Birmingham-born millennial young men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, aged 18–25. The research found that a major effect over the last few years of establishing a securitized regime involving ascribed values, reviled violent bodies and designated locations has been to circumscribe the spaces within which Muslim young men are able to perform masculinities in public spheres. The ‘no-go’ spaces of hard physical borders and the increasing complexity of imagined (post-Brexit) borders have imposed racially intensified patterns of stratification in austerity Britain. We conclude by arguing that young men are subjectively negotiating the discursive construction of Muslim identities. This negotiation engages with dynamic dissonances that are (re)constituting their remembering of the past and the living and doing of the present and their imagined futures.

Book review: Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge

Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiv + 395 pp. Figures, tables, glossary, bibliography, index. ₹1495 (hardback)