South Asian Muslim Research Articles

The Gaza Crisis and the Indian Urdu Press

Urdu is widely spoken in India, and due to historical, demographic, and political reasons, it is commonly associated with the Indian Muslim population. India has a vibrant Urdu press represented in both electronic and print media that caters largely to the Muslim population and reflects their views. Issues related to Israel, Zionism, and Jews, in addition to other Middle Eastern developments, are widely covered in the Indian Urdu press due to religious and historical factors. The coverage also reflects the ignorance, biases, and prejudices that are widely held among South Asian Muslims regarding Jews, Zionism, and Israel, which at times acquire extremist and anti-Semitic overtones. The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and the Israeli military response have been widely covered and commented upon in the Indian Urdu press, reinforcing the established ideas of the oppressive Israeli state and the perpetual Palestinian victimhood. However, one witnesses certain nuances and a diversity of opinion within the Urdu press. A systematic content analysis of the Indian Urdu press and its coverage of the Gaza crisis provides an understanding of views held among a large section of the Muslim population in India toward the Israel–Hamas conflict, in particular, and toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in general.

South Asian Muslim individuals’ lived experiences of Type 2 Diabetes healthcare – ‘I just want someone to actually break it down for me’

Objective Type 2 Diabetes is highly prevalent across Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Asian people have a disproportionately high burden of disease. This research aimed to improve understanding of South Asian Muslim people’s experiences navigating New Zealand’s diabetes healthcare to promote cultural responsiveness and equitable outcomes. Method We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 South Asian Muslim individuals with Type 2 Diabetes. Interviews explored how participants made sense of their diabetes in relational and cultural contexts, and the healthcare barriers and facilitators they experienced. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to develop themes from the interview transcripts. Results Three key themes were developed: the feeling, managing, and reflecting on diabetes worry in relational contexts; the cultural and relational challenges of enacting self-control and discipline; and how diabetes is a family experience, for better or for worse. Conclusion These themes illustrated the multifaceted relational dynamics of navigating diabetes healthcare. Several avenues to consider for developing culturally sensitive diabetes care were suggested. This included: practitioners exploring dynamics of worry, shame and self-blame, building upon family supports, supporting reducing family-facilitated health barriers, addressing power dynamics which facilitate institutional distrust, and funding culturally appropriate, accessible community health interventions.

Mental health at the intersections: understanding South Asian Muslim youth mental health in Peel Region, Toronto, Canada

Purpose The purpose of this study was to understand the unique mental health concerns and access barriers experienced by South Asian Muslim youth populations living in the Peel Region of Toronto, Canada. Design/methodology/approach For this qualitative exploratory study, interviews (n = 15) were conducted with mental health professionals, educators and spiritual leaders (n = 11) who work with South Asian Muslim youth living in Peel Region, as well as with South Asian Muslim youth themselves (n = 4, aged 20–23). Interview transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings Four primary themes emerged from the data: challenges and stressors, barriers, facilitators and hope and recovery. South Asian Muslim youth navigate a number of unique stressors related to the domains of culture, religion and family dynamics, as well as the impact of migration. Practical implications The findings stress the necessity of creating culturally safe, multilevel strategies to meet the nuanced challenges and diverse needs of South Asian Muslim youth communities. Originality/value This is one of the few papers to the knowledge that addresses the mental health needs and service access barriers of youth populations at the intersections of South Asian diasporic community belonging and Muslim faith in Canada.

Muslim Diaspora in Britain: Identity and Transnationalism Among South Asian Muslim Communities, by Sabah Khan

Muslim Diaspora in Britain: Identity and Transnationalism Among South Asian Muslim Communities, by Sabah Khan

Collective vulnerability between the researcher and the researched: a reflection on researcher positionality and ‘safety’ in the study of Islamophobia in economic Muslim migrants

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on collective vulnerability shared between the researcher and the researched, specifically in relation to studying the impact of Islamophobia in South Asian Muslim women in Britain. I reflect on my PhD study, and explore the tensions within the research space vis-à-vis researcher positionality. Puwar’s ‘Space Invaders’ is employed to explore the possibilities of disrupting power within research. This paper, therefore, reflects on the role of ‘collective vulnerability’ as a key to creating and maintaining a ‘safe’/ ‘counterspace’ to dislodge the trappings of employing a vertical gaze on data.

Becoming Modern and Secular: A Review Essay on Recent Work on Islam and South Asia

Abstract The Muslims of South Asia are more than five hundred million people, distributed between Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and there are more Muslims in South Asia than in any other region in the world. After Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are the second, third, and fourth largest Muslim countries, respectively. Although the prevalent approach in the study of Islam is to consider its so-called Arab character as central, the Muslims in pre-Partition India constituted the largest body of Muslims in the world, and the vast political and intellectual influence exerted by South Asian Muslims on the wider Muslim world is often neglected. Many of the most important political, intellectual, and spiritual developments within Islam have had their origins, or have flourished, in South Asia, and Muslims from the region have played important roles in the global history of Islam, including during the colonial period, in resistance to colonial rule, and in intellectual responses to and dialogue with Western thought. Pakistan was specifically created to provide a homeland for South Asia’s Muslim population and its trials and tribulations over the past seventy-five years have been carefully watched by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Muslims constitute India’s largest minority, with an often uneasy—to say the least—relationship to the majority. In the context of the three books under discussion, I explore issues, such as secularism, modernity, and religion, and their impacts on the conception of the nation-state that was promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an expression of political modernity.

The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia, written by Daniel Majchrowicz

The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia, written by Daniel Majchrowicz

The Othering of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Abstract The Ahmadiyya movement is one of the most controversial movements within the South Asian Islam from the late 19th and the 20th century. The movement from the beginning was instrumental in reinvigorating the debate on the Islamic orthodoxy and interpretation and re-interpretation of the Islamic texts among Muslims. These controversies and debates over the period of time have entered into the public consciousness particularly among Muslims of South Asia, which has enabled it to become an accepted feature of the contemporary South Asian Politics. As the movement became more public, the distinct identity of Ahmadi took shape and a notion of Ahmadiyyat as distinct expression of Islam became increasingly politicised. Similarly, the emergence of this Ahmadi identity was influenced by modern South Asian politics as much as South Asian Islam was influenced by the modernists. This influence has widened the dichotomy between Ahmadi Islam and the orthodox Islam. The current study focuses on how South Asian Islam’s narratives grew and developed to build and declare Ahmadis as a non-Muslim minority. It also demonstrates how these narratives were exploited over time by both Muslim groups and famous Muslims to malign and portray the Ahmadiyya community as ‘other’ in the eyes of Muslim and state structures. The study focuses primarily on the narratives of the 20th-century Muslim intellectuals such as Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Abul A’la Maududi, and other groups such as Majlis-i-Ahrar, as well as their role in building and constructing narratives that declared Ahmadis as ‘other’ while also changing their identity and status as Muslims.

Understanding lived experiences and perceptions of resilience in black and South Asian Muslim children living in East London: a qualitative study protocol

IntroductionIt is important to promote resilience in preadolescence; however, there is limited research on children’s understandings and experiences of resilience. Quantitative approaches may not capture dynamic and context-specific aspects of...

The theological foundations of Muslim modernism and traditionalism in South Asia

AbstractThis article examines the theological and hermeneutical foundations and fault lines of Muslim modernism and traditionalism in South Asia. It does so through a close reading of a massively consequential but thus far unstudied debate on the normative sources and interpretive parameters of religion in colonial modernity between the scholars Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1877), founders of arguably the most prominent bastions of modernism and traditionalism in Muslim South Asia: the Aligarh Muslim University and the Deoband Madrasa, both established in the late nineteenth century.

Exploring the experience of natural green space among South Asian Muslim people in the UK

ABSTRACT Visiting Natural Green Spaces (NGS) is an important lifestyle factor that contributes to quality of life. Whilst NGS can be used to combat health issues, many of which are experienced by South Asian Muslim communities in the UK, it is concerning that such communities face the largest disparities in access to NGS compared to other ethnic minority groups. This paper responds to the paucity in research of South Asian people’s experiences of NGS. Data were generated through individual semi-structured interviews with 20 South Asian Muslim men and women. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital, data underwent thematic analysis. This paper reports on the key findings of the study: defining the field of NGS; enhancing wellbeing in NGS; and challenges of accessing NGS. The study concludes that we understand NGS as fields in which capital is shaped by race, religion and gender, and provides suggestions for how policy and practice can consider NGS in health enhancing interventions.

Teasing apart the role of identity and help-seeking intentions among Arab/MENA and South Asian Muslim Americans

Culture's impact on health outcomes is understudied. While prior research explored how acculturation impacts the help-seeking intentions of Muslim immigrant populations, no research has teased apart the roles of ethnic, religious, and American identity centrality and their impact on help-seeking intent for Arab/MENA and South Asian Muslims. Utilizing a sample of 132 emerging adult Arab/MENA and South Asian Muslim Americans (n = 77 and n = 55, respectively), a hierarchical linear regression was conducted, testing for significant predictors and moderating effects of ethnic affiliation. Results indicated ethnic identity centrality and American identity centrality were significant predictors for both groups; the influence of religious identity centrality on help-seeking intention was moderated by ethnic affiliation. These results suggest the nuances of identity vary between groups within the American Muslim immigrant community. Researchers and clinicians should be cognizant of these identities when implementing interventions or conducting research among these populations.

Being a good Muslim man in Asia's world city: Performing youthful South Asian Muslim masculinities in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has long been home to immigrants and citizens of South Asian background, popularly known as ‘ethnic minorities’. Young Muslim men are both ethnically and religiously stigmatized in the contemporary conjuncture as the bearers of patriarchal masculinities and radical Islamism in Asia, as elsewhere. This paper looks at the ways in which young Muslim men of South Asian background perform their masculinities in Hong Kong. My analysis focuses on differentiated capacities for mobility, embodied practices of Muslim manhood as well as complex entanglements of desire, fear and safety to understand the ways in which ethno-religious difference of minority populations are produced, experienced and accommodated through embodied ethno-religious encounters in Asian cities. Through my ethnographic fieldwork with young Muslim South Asian men in Hong Kong, I explore how these youth draw from different cultural traditions and engage various discourses of pious subjectivity to negotiate an unstable politics of belonging in Hong Kong. My findings point to the importance of transnational moral geographies operating at multiple scales in regulating embodied encounters with, as well as constant (mis)recognition and negotiation of, cultural difference in ‘Asia's world city’.

Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction, Edited by Haris Qadeer and P.K. Yasser Arafath

Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction, Edited by Haris Qadeer and P.K. Yasser Arafath

When does a book launch become a meeting?

This is an account of a discussion between Sita Balani, Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Gail Lewis and Adam Elliott-Cooper on Sita Balani's book, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race, offered as a means of sharing its insights and exchanges among a wider community of activists and organisers. The origin of the book was Sita's observation of two dynamics at play at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. The first was the fracturing of British Asian identity in the early years of the 'War on Terror', as Muslim became a racialised category in and of itself. The second was the rapid rise in 'gay rights': until 2003, Section 28 had criminalised the teaching of homosexuality as a 'pretended family relationship'; in 2004, civil partnerships had been introduced. Sita recognised that the moving around of these categories of sexuality and race was not merely coincidental. To help understand this she has introduced the concept of 'sexual modernity', which also has two parts: the promise of self-realisation through the pursuit of romantic love, the nuclear family and sexual adventure, and then - what 'stalks' this possibility - all of the sexual conduct and sexual practice that is disavowed and excluded from this. The book charts the state's racial taxonomies alongside its mobilisation of categories of sexuality and gender, in both the historical colonial context and the contemporary imperial centre. Panellists discussed some of the contradictions of these developments. These included the inclusion of police officers in the Gay Pride parade; moral panics about - and violence against - asylum seekers and drag queens; the 'problem' of the Black boy being attributed to not-enough-patriarchy, while for South Asian Muslim women it is a question of too-much-patriarchy; in an historical context, sexual violence being the norm in Jamaica but a source of paranoia in the colony of India. Through showing us the field of battle and its character, Sita gives us a tool with which to help build aligned constituencies of opposition and vision

Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia By Asad Q. Ahmed

<i>Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia</i> By <scp>Asad Q. Ahmed</scp>

Migrancy and Liminal Identities: A Bhabha's Perspective on We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan

This qualitative study examines Zayyan’s novel, We Are All Birds of Uganda (2021), through the postcolonial critique using Bhabha’s concept of liminality, particularly viewing the diasporic identity of South Asian Muslims in Uganda. The study employs the method of textual analysis for the interpretation of the text. The critical analysis further emphasizes the varied immigrants’ experiences, their voluntary and involuntary migrations, and their struggle for identity in the host land. Voluntary migration has depicted present-day London, and in-voluntary migration has been represented as forcible migration or expulsion of South Asians, particularly Muslims from Uganda. The story reconciles the old and new identities through the representation of a split timeframe. The findings of the study reveal the major characters’ fractured and volatile identities that become harmonious after the acceptance of various aspects of identity, and their hybrid identities become liminal. The study further reveals that despite the challenges, individuals with multi-generational diasporic identities have the potential to bring a unique perspective and rich cultural heritage to the communities they belong to. By embracing and celebrating their diverse identities, they can contribute to a more inclusive and multicultural world.

Printing Islamic Modernism: Arabic Texts for Arab and South Asian Muslims in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract This article examines the relationship between Islamic modernism and Arabic print between the Mashriq and Indian subcontinent in the early twentieth century. Seeking to understand how Islamic modernists modified their message as they targeted new audiences, even as they promoted a unilingual program, this article explores the two printed publications in Arabic that emerged from the 1912 journey of Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), the founder of the Cairo-based journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse, 1898–1935), to British India. The first publication is “ʿUjala min rihlat al-Hind” (A Brief Report from the Journey to India), which Rida serially published in Cairo in 1912. The second publication is the summary of Rida’s subcontinental travels by his Iraqi-born Urdu translator, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Haqq Haqqi al-Aʿzami al-Baghdadi al-Azhari (1873–1924), which he wrote in the United Provinces town of Aligarh during 1912. Examining these two texts together, this article argues that their publication reflected the two separate concerns of their authors. While Rida sought to convey to al-Manar’s readership his experiences in British India by depicting them as analogous to the realities of the Ottoman Arab provinces and Egypt, al-Azhari sought to integrate al-Manar’s Islamic modernist enterprise into North Indian spheres of Islamic thought, practice, and print aesthetics. In so doing, this article shows how different audiences and modes of circulation enabled Islamic modernist enterprises to operate on both regional and transregional scales, reflecting the malleability of, and interconnectedness between, the worlds of Arabic and Urdu print during the period in question.

Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia

Abstract Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; Osella &amp; Osella, 2008) This special issue instead offers fine-grained investigations on technology and labour; print landscapes, networks and actors; subaltern languages; and popular Islam. We critique the idea of an “epistemic rupture” brought about by colonial modernity, providing a more systematic analysis of continuities and changes in Islamic knowledge economy. Examining two centuries of print authored by South Asian Muslims, the articles in the issue provide new ways of thinking about questions of knowledge production, distribution, circulation and reception. The issue broadens the scope of earlier scholarship, examining genres such as cosmology, divination, devotional poems, salacious songs, romances and tales of war in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, dobhāṣī do Bangla, Arabic Malayalam, Sindhi, Balochi and Brahui. The articles show the different ways that pre-colonial practices and cultures of writing and reading persisted in the print landscape, in terms of copying, adaptation, translation and circulation of texts. They inquire into new technologies, labour and networks that evolved, and how it provided fertile ground for both new and traditional forms of religious activities and authorities. The articles present new Muslim publics, geographies, and imaginaries forged through the vernacularisation of Islam, and their relationship to the transnational or global community.

The Health Implications of Perceived Anti-Muslim Discrimination Among South Asian Muslim Americans

Anti-Muslim discrimination in the U.S. has increased exponentially since 2001, but the impact of anti-Muslim discrimination has yet to be fully examined because of limited data available on this topic and population. The objectives of this study were to (1) examine the association between perceived anti-Muslim discrimination and health risk behaviors, with depressive symptoms as a potential mediator, among South Asian Muslim Americans and (2) examine the association between other forms of perceived discrimination and health risk behaviors, with depressive symptoms as a potential mediator, among South Asian Muslim Americans. Data were collected using an online survey, which was disseminated on subscriber e-mail lists for organizations that serve South Asian or Muslim communities. Participants were asked about perceived discrimination, depressive symptoms, diet, physical activity, tobacco use, and alcohol consumption. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8. Societal anti-Muslim discrimination had a positive association with depressive symptoms (0.19, p<0.05), as did interpersonal anti-Muslim discrimination (0.20, p<0.05) and other forms of discrimination (0.22, p<0.05). None of the discrimination scales were associated with dietary patterns, tobacco use, or alcohol consumption. Study results demonstrated a link between discrimination and depressive symptoms. Further research is needed to examine associations with other adverse health outcomes and potential buffers against discrimination.