Islam in   India: Stories of Conflict and Assimilation

Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict Delhi: The essays are largely anthropological and are focused primarily — as those studies focused on presenting a gentle and Indic Islam typically are — on Sufism, devotionalism, and shrines. These are deemed to partake of sacred spaces and styles of religiosity shared across religious boundaries.

The authors not only want to show what they take to be a softer side of Islam than that often portrayed, but they also share a liberal preoccupation to assert that Muslims have a place in India. This approach poses two problems. Surely any study of historical Islam in India needs to engage the treasured texts, the great learned tradition, the quest to live by moral guidelines, the rituals of everyday life, the life cycle ceremonies, and the sacred events of the calendrical year that thread through, and may even structure, many individual Muslim Indian lives.

It is also the conviction that the symbol of Muslim personal law must stand, so that the largest demonstration of Muslims since Independence focused on that issue. Thus court cases on such issues as marriage, divorce, and inheritance engage the most intimate dimensions of personal life, and, notably in cases on waqf property, legislate fundamental practices and hallmarks of identity. Fatwas, letters, pamphlets, and today television programs, invoke sacred texts to provide everyday guidance on every aspect of daily life.

Texts do not exist apart from the contexts that utilize them, and they are not only the purview of the elites. This mentality, I believe, implicitly underlies the attempt to find an alternative Islam. It more clearly risks the assumption, evident especially in the introduction, that Muslims who preserve the scholarly tradition stand outside what is Indian. Such assumptions need to be treated not as a fact but as a stance that needs to be historicized and contextualized. But as Falasch cogently argues, these descriptions must in themselves be historicized as produced by colonialists, modern reformers — and academics who followed their lead.

In the pre-colonial period, she demonstrates, the Islamic intelligentsia criticized the Madari not as Hindu, not even as deviant — simply as less cultivated be-adab. A false dichotomy imputes a distinction between Sufis and those learned in texts. Falasch also signals the importance of a method: In this case, she brings fresh insights to field work by her study of Persian Sufi texts, colonial documents, and contemporary contestations about truth.

I might begin with my own study of Deoband, published almost a quarter of a century back. I came to the topic of a new kind of modern organization for transmitting Islamic learning in the colonial period out of a desire to challenge the notion that only the Westernized who knew a metropolitan language were engaged, in the colonial period, in projects of intellectual and social reform. But in the course of my study of the scholarly leadership, I learned two things relevant to the issue of syncretism. One, made real through reading letters, notebooks, volumes of charms, and records of dreams of these Islamic scholars, was the extent to which they were immersed in the initiatory chains, disciplinary practices, and traditions generally of the Sufi orders.

They were holy men as well as scholars, and their influence derived from both these roles. They were, to be sure, reformers, and part of that reform extended to issues surrounding the Sufi tomb shrines. Their targets were internal: Moreover, to the extent they were devoted to the elders, traveled to their tombs, invoked stories of their holiness, and so forth, they themselves cherished the tombs. As my former student Warren Fusfeld pointed out, moreover, in relation to the l9th century Delhi Naqshbandis, they did so on the grounds that this was their tradition, never with the argument that such practices were conducive to harmony with Hindus.

They followed these practices because they were continuous with a sanctified past It continues to fascinate me that so much of colonial-period Islamic reform is intra-Muslim — yet the scholarly common sense that it must be anti-Hindu, drawing lines between Hindus and Muslims, always prevails. One point of the Bijapur book is that Sufis, like Yogis, may well be warriors. Another is that, mesmerized as outsiders may be by saying what is Hindu and what is Muslim, people themselves may not be. For Saiyid Sultan and his readers, his was a profoundly Islamic book Even in countries where they are the majority, Muslims are often doctrinally flexible, allowing a great deal of give-and-take with other religions and sharing their festivals and sacred spaces Saudi Arabia and other countries where Islam is the sole religion are a different story.

For example, he notes, the Coptic festivals in Egypt attract thousands of Muslims as do many Christian shrines in Syria, such as the pilgrimage church of Our Lady of Seidnaya outside Damascus, which attracts many Muslim couples seeking children.

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TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. India portal Islam portal. The Times of India. Al-Hind, the making of the Indo-Islamic world 2. Retrieved 29 January Up to about the tenth century the largest settlement of Arabs and Persian Muslim traders are not found in Malabar however but rather more to the north in coastal towns of the Konkan and Gujarat, where in pre-Islamic times the Persians dominated the trade with the west.

Here the main impetus to Muslim settlement came from the merchants of the Persian Gulf and Oman, with a minority from Hadramaut.

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