Thursday March 7, 2024

10:30-12:00 am:

Persianate, Arabicate, and the Vernacular
Chair: Thibaut d’Hubert, SALC, University of Chicago

Reading the Persianate between Empires: Sultanate Social and Ecological Biases in the Pṛthvīrāja Rāso

Arjun Bhattacharya, University of Chicago

Fifteenth century northern India, for long, has been considered a period of political decline—an interstice between the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. Recent works, however, have shown that this period witnessed the rise of several new languages, literary genres, social identities and lexicons and forms of authority. One such development was the emergence of Rajput as a marker of status, localized power, and kin-kindred identity. For this paper, I propose to study some aspects of the Pṛthvīrāja Rāso, a text which demonstrates this process. The Rāso, by reimagining the historical figure of Pṛthvīrāja Cauhāna, conceives idealised norms of kingly and martial comportment, couched in the nascent concept of Rajput and articulates the growing ambitions of regional parvenus. An uncritical reading of this text has either reinforced the long-held view of the Rajputs as timeless warriors resisting ‘Muslim’ rule or more recently has identified it as an Akbarid text. I propose instead that the Rāso predates the Mughals and reproduces elite prejudices of the Persian chronicles previously written in the Delhi Sultanate courts. This is visible in its borrowing of the Persian word mawās, or “inner-frontiers”, from the Sultanate chronicles. This term, however, is not just a lexical borrowing as the Rāso also appropriates Sultanate biases towards this ecology and its people, sans its ‘Islamic’ undertones, and recalibrates it to its brahmanical framework. Thus, I argue that the Pṛthvīrāja Rāso, a vernacular text, inhabits a Persianate milieu and embodies elite Sultanate values and concepts in its shaping of an incipient Rajput identity.

Traveling Genres: The Trajectory of Ghazal and its (After) Life in Malayalam
Ibrahim Badshah, University of Houston

With a history of 15 centuries of active presence in literary fields across countries and languages, Ghazal is arguably the most popular poetic genre of all times. Emerging in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, Ghazal travelled to Africa, Spain, Persia and South Asia during the Middle Ages. Later, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also witnessed its adoption by various Western languages. Critical engagements from modern scholars have focused on the literary historiography as well as the formalism of the Persian-Turkic-Urdu traditions. However, the possibility of Ghazal’s capabilities to provide a theoretical framework to assist genre studies has not been well-explored. This paper attempts to trace the trajectory of Ghazal from Pre-Islamic Arabia to present day Kerala and its transformation through time and space. It seeks to assess the veracity of the definitions given to Ghazal by modern scholars, critics, and poets who belong to various scholarly and literary traditions in order to examine the essentialist attitudes in them. It is surprising how scholars attempt to essentialize the formal characteristics of Urdu Ghazal tradition, even while also acknowledging its genesis in Arabic Qasida, an attitude that has adverse effects in understanding the Ghazal tradition in Malayalam, majority of which is disqualified to be Ghazals. While the analysis of Ghazal writing in Malayalam will be at the center of this paper, it aims to provide a broader framework to study transnational genres as dynamic and adaptive rather than static and rigid.

Paper, Sult̤ānate, and the Textualization of Ṛīṣīs in Early Modern Kashmir
Shakir-ul Hassan, University of Delhi

This study is concerned with intersection of the formation of Sult̤ānate, paper technology, and ‘textual communities’ that conjointly gave vent to the subjectivity of Islamic community in Kashmir particularly Ṛīṣīs. Hemmed in by the Himalayas, route-region of Kashmir experienced vast transformation by the Šāhmīrid Sult̤ānate’s (c.1339-1556) extended cultural hospitality to heterogeneous ethnic communities of craftsman, scholars and mercenary warriors with varied transmissions of contested cultural system. So, to assuage tensions, the Sult̤ānate’s urban core, refashioned through textualized understanding of the Shari’a to cohere motley crew of Muslim immigrants, was dotted with congregational spaces of mosques, madrasa,  dāru’-shifā and ḵẖānaqāh by early fifteen-century as though mirroring an Islamic city. Besides patronizing Persian at his court, Zayn-al-‘Ābidīn (c.1420-70) materially facilitated transmission of papermaking and bookmaking technology from Samarqand. There sprang up hydraulic paper-mills in Sult̤ānate’s metropolis. Book-production gathered momentum as web of new reading public transpired, setting-off endless production of hagiographies and polemical texts.

Arabicate Deccan: Intellectual Lifeworlds of an Arab Literati in Seventeenth Century South Asia
Ansil Kanjirathinkal Muhammed, Jawaharlal Nehru University

In South Asia, Deccan has played a significant role in the production and circulation of Persian literary works. While most of the studies on the literary cultures of Deccan primarily are produced with a narrow focus on Persian sources, this paper examines the employment of Arabic as a language of expression with regard to the extensive production of repositories of religious and other knowledge. The development of Arabic as a literary language in Deccan resulted from the massive influx of immigrants, both elites and laymen, who migrated and travelled from West Asia to Deccan. These peripatetic scholars and writers shaped the transregional flows of Arabic literary works in the region, connecting them to the wider global Muslim intellectual networks. This paper explores two Arabic texts from seventeenth-century Hyderabad, Salwat al-Gharib wa-Uswat al-Arib and Sulafat al-ʿAsr fi Mahasini al- Su’rai bi kulli Misr by Ali Sadr al-Din Ibn Maʿsum al-Husayni al-Hasani (1642-1707). Salwat al-Gharib provides a detailed account of his journey from Macca to Deccan, narrating encounters with people, describing places, and observing flora and fauna. The second is a biographical dictionary, compiling fragments from various Arabic manuscripts and gathering over a hundred poets and scholars. This paper delves into the critical aspect of why Ibn Ma’sum chose to write in Arabic in a ‘vernacular cosmopolitan’ place like Hyderabad. I argue that Arabic served as a courtly and elite language, and the émigré composed these works to circulate transregionally to a broader audience. Furthermore, Ibn Ma’sum aimed to connect the Qutb Shahi kingdom to the West Asian Isna Ashriya discourse.

1:00-2:30 pm:

Sectarian and Intra-Faith Polemics

Chair: Rajeev Kinra, Department of History, Northwestern University

Unveiling the Historic Mubahala of Kodiyathur, Calicut, Kerala (1989): A Confrontation of Faith Between Ahmadis and Non-Ahmadis
Soofiya Mahmood, University of Calicut

Mubahala is a cursing prayer in which two groups pray together invoking the curse of God on those who lie , when a major disagreement arises between the sections, especially regarding key concepts in theology. Kodiyathur Mubahala, the solitary mubahala eventuate in the history of Islam so far, took place at Kodiyathur in Calicut District, India, between Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis. Founded by Mirza Ahmad Qadiyani, who himself declared as prophet, Ahmadiyya Movement exhibits a different perspective of Islam with a belief of continuation of non-legislative prophethood after prophet Muhammed. Appearing extremely contrary to the basic theological perspectives of ordinary Islam on prophethood, the movement had to confront fierce resistance and hostility from traditional muslim scholarship resulting in heavy campaigns against Ahmadis. The movement managed to spread across Kerala amid all the challenges. The Kodiyathur Mubahala was an important chapter in the movement’s journey. The Episode emerged from the heavy ideological disagreement between the communities. The involvement of ‘Khalifa’[global leader] and Ameer [State leader] of Ahmadiyya sect in this manifest the importance they attributed to Mubahala. According to the study, it seems that theAhmadis who raised the challenge, perceived the act of Mubahala as a tool to assure their notions and theology while for the opposing group of Sunnis[ Anjuman Isahat-e-Islam] it is a matter of pride and to prove the credibility of traditional Islam. The event got limited attention to the domain of history and the purpose of the paper is to analyse and document this historical confrontation. The study analyses the theological basis of ‘Muhabala’ citing the Quranic verse[Chapter 3, Verse 61] and historical context in which prophet Muhammed invited a group to mutual cursing. The historical background of the event and the actual occurrence of Mubahala will be discussed. This is a qualitative study which follows descriptive as well as analytical methods and uses primary and secondary sources.

Bringing Reform and Building Authority: The Origin of the Tablīghī Jamā’at through the Life of Ilyās Kāndhlawī
Zainab Rashid, Princeton University

The Tablīghī Jamā’at (henceforth TJ) is arguably the largest movement of Muslims in present times with subscribers from all over the world amounting to approximately eighty million people. In simple terms, it is a party or a group that preaches the message of Islam with the objective of promoting an Islamic way of life. Despite its significance and impact in the contemporary global context, TJ has surprisingly not received much scholarly attention. For this paper, I study three texts of immense significance to reconstruct the initial ideas of the Jamā’at through the life and works of Muḥhammad Ilyās Kāndhlawī (d. 1944), the founder of the movement in 1920s North India. The first is his biography, Hazrat Mawlānā Muḥammad Ilyās awr Unki Dini Dawat (Life and Mission of Maulana Muhammad Ilyas) written by Syed Sayyīd Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwī (d. 1999), first published in 1945. The second text is his Malfūzat compiled by Muḥammad Manzūr Nu’māni (d. 1997) and finally, the Makātīb, a collection of Kāndhlawī’s letters compiled and published by Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwī in 1952.

The paper discusses the ways through which spiritual legitimacy and religious authority were constructed for the movement in a milieu surcharged with multiple claimants to such authority amongst Muslims. I show the techniques employed by Kāndhlawī’ to reconcile the Jamā’at’s ideology of democratizing the act of dā’wā (by allowing people of no knowledge to act as dā’i) whilst simultaneously trying to secure the approval and participation of the ‘ulamā who argued that dā’wā is reserved for people of knowledge. Kāndhlawī resolved this by reiterating his and his associates identity as ‘ālim themselves who support and espouse respect for ‘ulamā and their educational institutions, and also arguing that he is merely concerned with preaching the fundamental tenets of Islam to people en masse, a project which must be performed outside madāris of the ‘ulamā.

Twelver Shi’ism in North India: Uṣūlī vs. Ṣūfī Contestations in Awadh

Shabbir Agha Abbas, University of Arizona

When discussing the characteristics of Twelver Shi’ism, especially between the late middle ages through the modern period, ample focus is given to the debates between the Uṣūli and Akhbārī factions. Likewise, the geographies are largely limited to the Shī’ī shrine cities as well as imperial [Safavid/Qajar] centers of power; very little concern is given to the Islamic ‘peripheries.’ India too possesses a vibrant history concerning Twelver Shi’ism, a history not detached to the happenings of Iran and Iraq, yet distinct enough to merit its own separate analysis. Hence, this paper examines the personage of Sayyid Dildār ‘Alī Naqawī Naṣīrābādī (d. 1235 AH/1820 CE), a Najaf-trained Awadh-based mujtahid, regarded as the establisher of Uṣūlī Shi’ism in North India. Having studied in Iraq under the preeminent Uṣūlī polemic, Muḥammad Bāqir [Waḥīd] al-Bihbahānī (d. 1205 AH/1791 CE), Dildār ʿAlī’s anti-Akhbārī career is privileged over all else, restricting his legacy to the shadows of his teacher. Likewise his Asās al-Uṣūl overshadows his other literary contributions. However, when delving into his bibliography of corrective literature, his pen is found to not be limited to just antagonism against Akhbārīs, in fact he addressed Twelver communities outside the binary of the Uṣūlī-Akhbārī debates. His al-Shihāb al-Thāqib is aimed at an entirely different group of Twelvers, those who appear to come under the umbrella of Sufism. These Twelvers affiliated themselves with the Chishtī Sūfī order and adhered to the ideology of Sayyid Ḥaydar al-Āmulī (d. after 787/1385), espousing beliefs like waḥdat al-wujūd. By delving into Dildār ʿAlī’s al-Shihāb al-Thāqib and its Twelver Sūfī response (Radd-i al-Shihāb al-Thāqib), this paper aims to demonstrate that Twelver Shi’ism in North India historically possesses a rich intellectual tradition that exceeds the typical Iraq-Iran centered Uṣūlī-Akhbārī discourse; a tradition that remains neglected in the greater sphere of Shi’i academic studies.

2:45-4:15 pm:

Women and Gender
Chair: Maliha Chisthti, University of Chicago Divinity School

Mediating Tradition and Modernity: Twentieth Century Māppiḷa Muslim Women’s Short Stories
Ziyana Fazal, Northwestern University

By using the post-colonial (1950-1980) Malayalam short stories written by Māppiḷa Muslim women of Kerala, this paper asks—what did the passing of colonialism and newly emerging ideas of  Nehruvian science and progress in India mean to these writers at a time when science was  considered the highest form of ‘secular knowledge’? By way of doing it, this paper argues that Māppiḷa Muslim women fundamentally vernacularized the twentieth-century notions of tradition  and modernity as not always premised on Islam.

The paper shows how Māppiḷa Muslim women confronted ‘pāramparyaṁ ’ (tradition) and  ‘ādhunikata’ (modernity) in multiple and often contradictory ways—from their appraisals of social  predicaments like patriarchy, and matriliny, to their awe and admiration of the progress rendered by  science (with which they associated ‘modernity’). Thus, Māppiḷa Muslim women’s creative  elucidations of tradition and modernity trouble any understanding of modernity as a linear historical  progression from a traditional past to a modern present and future. The onset of modern life and  the debasement of an older tradition maintain no fixed stature in their writings. Māppiḷa Muslim  women’s stories imagine ‘tradition’ as fundamentally a renewed relationship with the ‘past’, a past  that is not always Islamic. In this paper, I consider two short stories written by Māppiḷa Muslim  women in the early twentieth century—the first one, “vaḻiyampalaṁ ” (1965) written by Rahila. K  appeared in Bur’oom. The second story, cāypukaḷuṭe lokaṁ ” (1960) was authored by Bheegum and  published in Chandrika.

Administering Secrecy and Silence: Gender, Power, and Conformity in the Bohra Community
Umme Hani Imani, University of Oxford

This paper focuses on a minority Muslim mercantile caste-community – the Bohras – to foreground how registers of secrecy, silence, and liminal belief structure gendered power on sites of religious and ‘cultural’ difference. Homing in on social and legal debates about khafz, an act of ‘ritual purification’, which is commonly classified as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ and typically done to Bohras who are assigned female at birth between ages six to twelve, I explore how notions of devotional sacrifice, respectability, and deviance have calcified in Bohra orthopraxy and constitutively shaped relations of attachment and estrangement within the jamaat (caste-organisation). Meditating on and with interlocutors from Karachi and the Bohra diaspora, I identify how the Dawat’s (clerical establishment’s) prevarications on khafz illuminate the protean nature of power and attendant orders of subject-formation. By reflecting on the creative and contested ways in which the Bohra jamaat’s kinship networks and ‘corporatized’ (O’Sullivan 2023) posture towards Islam buttress the Dawat’s interventions in everyday Bohra life, my interlocutors’ testimonies lend colour to the sites on which its sovereignty is asserted and negotiated. In thus instantiating the lived sociopolitics, history, and valence of orthopraxy and religious memory, I challenge assumptive framings of khafz as a cypher for ‘cultural violence’ and recognise how the practice remains fraught with debate—about and within the community. I aim, in so doing, to make a critical contribution to discourse about the subversive, opportunistic, and markedly contingent experiences of multiply minoritized Muslim women and queer subjects within ever-transforming matrices of modern power.

Hajj and the Hajji: Remembering a Peasant Woman’s Journey to Mecca                                                                                                                                                              Muhimin Wanchoo, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati

Hajj narratives in colonial India were written mostly by elites and aristocrats. Perspectives of the marginalized were relatively obscure. Nur Begum’s account affords a perfect opportunity to understand how non-elite individuals practiced and interpreted religious doctrines. A peasant woman from Punjab who traveled to Hijaz, wrote of her experiences of the Hajj in Punjabi verse as opposed to men who wrote in Urdu.

Dedicating her verses to Allah, Begum not only responds to men who question her intentions of travel: “Why should they be jealous that my Beloved has granted me a pilgrimage?” but also makes a passionate defense for women’s role in Islam and finds assurance in her identity as a Muslim woman. Therefore, Mazahir-i-Nur (Manifestations of Nur) (1933) offers a unique worldview of a Muslim woman as she perceives herself on this religious journey, negotiating the multiple identities of being a Muslim, Indian, female, and colonial subject.

She travels because she wants to be one with the lord. As such, her journey goes beyond the motivations of other, more affluent Muslim women travelers. This devotion to her “Beloved” shaped by a Sufi outlook allows her account to transcend the expectations of hajj narratives in general. Considered a phenomenon in itself, Hajj has been studied from various perspectives – political, social, and economic. However, there is a lack of consideration for what the Hajji makes of the Hajj. A study of Nur Begum’s account will throw light on how a Hajji imagines and identifies oneself in relation to God.

The Nawab’s Wife: Gender and Power in Jaishankar Prasad’s Mahārāṇa kā Mahattva (1914)
Kanika Singh Sisodia, University of Chicago

In Jaishankar Prasad’s poem Mahārāṇa kā Mahattva, Khān-i-Khānan’s wife emerges as an important figure. The question arises: what specific role does she play in shaping the narrative of the poem? My paper will present a close reading of the six-page dialogue between the couple, after she is released from captivity by Pratap. After being captured by Maharana Pratap’s son, Amar Singh, and subsequently released by Maharana Pratap himself, the exchange between the couple not only serves as a moment of reunion but also accentuates the greatness of Maharana Pratap. The poem positions the Maharana’s virtues through the couple’s conversation, thereby emphasizing the significance of the Nawab’s wife not just as a character but as a vehicle for Prasad’s discourse on honor and nobility.

My paper will utilize Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric to delve into the poem’s formal characteristics and aesthetic resonance. Concurrently, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity will guide my analysis of the complex interplay of gender within the poem. Additionally, by invoking Louis Althusser’s ideological framework, I aim to deconstruct the underlying ideologies that inform the poem’s narrative, influencing character and gender dynamics and their perceived identities.

9:30-11:00 am:

Caste and Community
Chair: Whitney Cox, SALC, University of Chicago

Who are the Kamin Zaats? Caste among the ‘Muslims’ of Early Modern Kashmir

Zainab Wani, University of California, Berkeley

My paper will look at the interface between different forms and functions of caste, coerced labor, and control over disempowered local knowledge systems in the making of communities that we now know as “Kamin Zaat” Muslims in Kashmir. The category Kamin Zaat is used to refer to social-occupational groups of crafts and service castes among Muslims in the region of Kashmir, as opposed to Asal Zaat or real Muslims which correspond to a high-caste social group. The Kashmiri term literally translates to ‘mean lineage’ and the different groups that this category encompasses are identified by kram or family names which are most often used as derogatory slurs by caste-class Muslim elites and Pandits in modern-day Kashmir.

Even as Kashmir has undergone centuries of Islamization, beginning as early as the 13th Century, these Kram names were retained, most prominently by the Pandith converts of the valley. They endure now in the guise of culturalized and ethnicized groups and are sites where caste hierarchy keeps getting reproduced.

My paper’s focus will be the community of water dwellers or Hanji of Kashmir. It will explore how caste, compared to religion, was a major template through which difference was understood in a pre-colonial setting in Kashmir. The key feature of early modern Kashmir, as for the rest of South Asia, was its division along castes and occupational lines as well as the bonded state of several such social groups. My paper will explore how restrictions on fellowship to dominant religious groups, in this case Muslims, based on one’s caste, became a fundamental way to make possible structures of dominance, subordination, and exploitation.

Unveiling the Margins: A Subaltern Analysis of Dalit Muslim Identity in the Literature from South Asia
Badusha Peer Masthan, Vellore Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh

Dalit literature has served as a crucial forum for the writers, poets and scholars to challenge and combat the negative perceptions and discriminatory practices associated with a specific caste. However, the problems of Dalit Muslims have not received much attention so far in the Dalit discourse and it has been largely excluded from academic horizon. Therefore, the paper attempts to bring the Dalit Muslim discourse into the mainstream literature through the works of Shaik Yousuf Baba (Marfa (2000) & Vegetarian Only (2017), Shajahana (Laddafni (2015) and Kavi Yakoob (Avval Kalma (2000) & Conspiracy (2014). This exploration throw lights on the intersectional vulnerability of Dalit Muslims, owing to the social, cultural, religious and economic disparities. Primarily, the paper discusses the poets’ resistance towards caste-based discrimination and their cry for identity. There is an inherent identity crisis for Dalit Muslim in a dichotomous way. The dichotomy of being ‘Urdu Muslim’ or ‘Non-Urdu Muslim’ in India has always cross questioned by the other end, dragging them into a crisis. The sections and intersections of language entity and engagements with the languages act as a crucial determinant of discrimination. This endeavour close reads the chosen literary texts and is fitted within the ‘Experiences of Dalit’ (Limbale, 2004) and ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ (Spivak, 1988) frameworks. Thus, the paper adds to the broader discussion on the depiction of a marginalized group and explores how literature can function as an instrument for promoting advocacy and bringing about social change.

The Limits of Progressive Politics: B.R. Ambedkar and the “Spiritually Alien” Muslim Subject
Ria Modak, Brown University

B.R. Ambedkar, the most resolute critic of the caste system in colonial India as well as the architect of the Indian Constitution, has long been considered the embodiment of “progressive politics” by scholars of modern South Asia. Yet his writings on Islam, which remain entirely understudied, reveal an unexpected adherence to exclusionary colonial assumptions about the innate foreignness of Indian Islam, often deploying anti-Muslim rhetoric virtually indistinguishable from the Hindu Right, of both his time and of ours. How do we reckon with this major icon of equality and inclusion championing troubling colonial frameworks about Indian Muslims, even as he attempts to articulate a truly revolutionary anti-colonial vision for the nation’s future? Analyzing this hitherto unexplored contradiction in Ambedkar’s political philosophy, this paper explores how the entrenched legacies of colonialism – both epistemological and political – severely restricted the emancipatory promises of even the most progressive strand of nationalist politics. Through a close reading of his groundbreaking 1941 book, Thoughts on Pakistan, one of the earliest works produced by a non-Muslim to advocate for the creation of Pakistan, I contrast his defense of Muslim self-determination with his denigration of Muslim statehood. I argue that Ambedkar’s attachment to colonial stereotypes about Islam structured his development of the “progressive” conceptual frames of self-determination and anti-colonial nationalism, thus complicating his own legacy as well as the limits of “progressive politics” in India in relation to the Muslim question.

Thinking alongside Islam and Indigeneity: Tracing Bio-Social Relations of Van Gujjar Pastoralists through their Dwelling within a Polarized Uttarakhand, India
Pranav Menon, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

The Van Gujjars, a semi-nomadic peoples, who practice Sunni Islam, with their indigenous Gojri buffaloes, graze around the sub-tropical deciduous forests and dry riverine valleys of the Siwaliks in winter and alpine meadows of the middle-upper Himalayas in summer.  This paper foregrounds the everyday access and land use of Van Gujjar pastoralists and their negotiation with a ‘politics’ of environmentalism, indigeneity and recognition in an increasingly polarized Himalayan region. Particularly, the developmentalist politics in Uttarakhand is driven by the impulse of Hindu caste elite, who possess large pockets of land as well as constitute the highest demographic group to dominate politics, unlike in any other state in India. Amidst this cacophony of majoritarian claim-making (Bhan and Govindarajan, 2023), the Van Gujjars find themselves contesting fortress conservation schemes, face criminalization of pastoral work as well as navigate casteist and Islamophobic slurs such as propagating ‘land jihad’ and ‘mazhar jihad’ in the state.

In this light, this paper hopes to animate discussions around pasmanda Islam (Ahmed, 1987, Ansari, 2009), indigeneity and the politics of recognition (Povinelli, 2003) for nomadic pastoralists such as Van Gujjars in South Asia today. Unlike doctrinal traditions of Islam, the Van Gujjars attach themselves closer to the sufi-barelvi silsila and beliefs of certain pirs followed by their ancestors. By building on human-non human ontologies of Himalayan landscapes (Govindrajan, 2019; Mathur, 2021), I hope to elaborate upon polyvocal and vernacular forms of religious practices that Van Gujjar pastoralists partake in during their labor and relational practice with their livestock and larger ecosystem where they reside. Through such kin-making and care practices in how spatial relations within their Mazhars and Idgah are practiced, I hope to articulate how their Islamic identity is also interwoven with their indigenous claim to access and use these lands.

11:00-12:15 pm:

Law and Reform
Chair: Ahmed El Shamsy, NELC, University of Chicago

Demarcating Islamic Legal Responsibility under British Colonial Rule: Abul Kalam Azad (d.1958)
Faiza Masood, Princeton University

In 1920, two years after the end of World War I, Indian Muslims gathered for the Provincial Khilafat Conference to discuss the pressing issue of the moment: the imminent fall of the Ottoman caliphate. The presidential address was given by Abu’l Azad Kalam (1888-1958), a prominent Muslim scholar, politician, and anti-colonial activist. Azad’s speech, published today under the title “Mas’ala-yi Khilafat” responds to the precarious political state of Muslims, as a result of the Ottoman losses of territory and impending loss of Caliphal power.  This paper will explore the way Azad demarcates Muslim legal responsibilities in this unprecedented political moment. I make the claim that while academic scholars have argued that it was the British colonizers who circumscribed the implementation and parameters of the Shari’a, Muslim scholars too, especially in light of political turmoil, had to reconstruct the parameters of the Shari’a and reconsider the pragmatism of its applicability, as Azad does in the areas of authority, ritual and jihad.  For instance, he believes the duty of jihad takes precedence over praying and fasting in this post-war moment. As such, this work goes beyond writing that presents the British as being the sole agents of legal transformation during colonial rule, by demonstrating how the work of ‘legal circumscribing’ was also practiced by Muslim scholars who were responding both to internal crisis, like the loss of political authority, as well as external conditions, like imperial subjugation. In this way, I highlight aspects of Islamic legal history which are often ignored, such as its inner reworkings by scholars during the colonial period and problematize the long-standing assumption that the applicability of Islamic law was limited to the realm of personal status.

The Story of Hasan Bey: Print Culture, Islamic Reform, and Colonial Modernity in the Indian Ocean world
Shrinidhi Narasimhan, University of Pennsylvania

The Story of Hasan Bey (Acanpeyutaiya katai or Acanpe carittiram, as it was titled in later editions) was an early Tamil novel written in Ceylon and published by the Muslim Friend Press in Colombo in 1885 during a period of definitive transformations in the Tamil intellectual sphere and a period of important reform movements in the wider Islamic world. The novel was written by a Muslim reformer, lawyer, and journalist named Cittilevvai Mukammatu Kacim Marraikar (1839-1899), who also edited and published a popular Tamil weekly called Muslim Necan (Muslim Friend) that circulated widely in south India, Ceylon, and the Straits Settlements. The novel, centered on the life of an Egyptian protagonist with a Turkic name, has received little attention in literary histories of Tamil and in social and cultural histories of south India and Sri Lanka even as it allows us to understand important historical junctures in the life of South Asian Muslim communities and their negotiation of colonial modernity.
To that end, my paper seeks to read and contextualise The Story of Hasan Bey in relation to the two main sociocultural worlds within which it was embedded: firstly, the Tamil intellectual and political sphere of colonial Ceylon and secondly, intellectual and political reform movements in the wider Islamic world (chiefly, the Nahda with its center in Cairo in the late nineteenth century). In doing so, my paper will trace a theoretical shift in the construction of modern religious subjectivity as a result of the singular opportunities produced by the printing press and the transnational intellectual and political networks of the nineteenth century Indian Ocean world.

The Legitimacy of Truth: Muslims in Travancore Courtrooms
Muhammed Shah Shajahan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

This paper is broadly interested in the questions of truth-telling, confession, and sovereignty in the early twentieth century in Travancore, a princely state in South India. Specifically looking at the issue of using Quran in courtrooms for swearing in and confession, which was raised by the Muslim representatives in the Travancore legislative assembly in the early twentieth century, I seek to understand the connection between Muslim courtroom confession, procedural legitimacy of truth, and sovereignty in Travancore. I work through the distinction between authority and sovereignty, which informed how the Muslims of Travancore approached court, and demonstrate the conflict found in this distinction concerning the question of truth. In other words, the category of truth produced under the princely sovereignty of Travancore and its institutional procedures presupposed the Quran as a logistical mediation for its own legitimation as far as Muslim citizens are concerned. However, Muslim contestation on using the Quran in the courtroom presupposed truth to be produced under the procedure of authority or authorizing power. To be precise, the debate on using the Quran in courtrooms demonstrates how Muslims approach truth as essentially produced within the temporality of procedure (i.e., hygiene). The paper is intended to contribute to the larger conversations on the questions of sovereignty, confession, law, and Islam in South Asia.

1:30-3:00 pm:

Material and Sensory Cultures
Chair: Alireza Doostdar, University of Chicago Divinity School

Demonic Deities and Virgin Sacrifices: Visualising the Pre-Islamic Past in “Noor Islam”
Herman Lim Bin Adam Lim, Columbia University and Aga Khan University

At a time when Malay-language films overwhelmingly focused on the plight of the Malays in the modern period and issues of Malay nationalism, Noor Islam (‘The Light of Islam’) was an anomaly during its 1960 release due to its focus on the religious past. Celebrated in the newspapers as the first Malay film to deal with the theme of Islam in Southeast Asia, the film depicted the Malay cultural memory of their conversion into the fold of Islam in a time gone by. This paper explores how this pre-Islamic past was reimagined on the silver screen in Noor Islam, at a time of intense decolonisation and the continued negotiations over identity and ‘race’ in Malaya and Singapore. Taking an art historical approach, I explore what visual metonyms were used to connote Muslimness—as opposed to non-Muslimness—and where these visual vocabularies might be coming from. Through the lens of ‘inter-ocularity’, I show how Noor Islam was embedded within a web of visual vocabularies, including circulating ephemeral art, theatrical traditions, and the popular films of India, Egypt, and Hollywood. These various visual media heavily influenced one another, simultaneously reinforcing the longevity of their image tropes. By replicating Orientalist tropes of the ‘problem Hindu’, Malayan film makers actively adapted such images to portray the pre-Islamic past as a time of demonic deities and virgin sacrifices, in contrast to Islam’s role as an illuminating force for good. I therefore emphasise the ways such images perpetuated essentialised ideas about racial and religious identities during this period, and discuss how their circulation was ultimately tied to the continued movement of peoples and ideas across the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond.

A Philosopher’s Tool: The Illustrated Book and the Art of Philosophy in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Mughal India
Sukaina Husain, University of Edinburgh

Producing the plastic and dextrous intellect (‘aql) needed to discern true from false with certainty in philosophical discourse and debate, the Mughal painted and calligraphed book (kitab) was neither, as art historians have assumed so far, an object of entertainment; nor was it, as others have recently argued, a means for spiritual gnosis. Rather, the kitab was, as Akbari philosophers such as Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak (d. 1602) noted, a powerful cognitive tool for ratiocination – an instrument for rational, philosophical learning (tahqiq) whose close observation (suratbini) refined the twin poles of vision and imagination in the ‘aql, psychologically and somatically cultivating the cognitive apparatus a philosopher needed to think and reason well.

Historically contextualising the relationship between art and philosophy in the Mughal world, this paper investigates the reception, and use of illustrated books among Akbari philosophical milieu and posits a new teleology of the kitab that completely resituates the value of the visual in sixteenth and seventeenth century Mughal intellectual culture. Using the thinker’s ‘A’in-i taswirkhane’ (‘On the Manuscript Workshop’) to reconstruct how painted and calligraphed books were ‘read’ by Mughal philosophers such as Abu’l Fazl, it overturns prevailing conceptions about the limited function of the visual in Mughal intellectual culture and positions the kitab as an instrument crucial to the pedagogy and practice of the rational sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Mughal world. While cognate with the growing taste for tahqiq among scholarly communities in the early modern Islamic world, Abu’l Fazl’s conceptual conflation of  ‘close observation’ of the visual form of the kitab with the ‘deep reading’ of logical proofs is however regionally unique, and marks, I argue, the efflorescence of a highly local, ocular, imagistic philosophical thought style whose active and passive elements must be differentiated as historically-epistemologically distinct from its more scholastic counterparts in the Islamic west. Framing the latter with reference to the rising epistemic value of the visual and visual experience in Mughal philosophical discourse, this paper fleshes out the epistemological contours of the Mughal thought style and shows how the visual form of the kitab tangibly shaped philosophical ideas about mind and self in sixteenth and seventeenth century Mughal India.

Ms. Marvel’s South Asian Music Heritage: A Sonic Reconciliation of the Partitioned Past
Anuracti Sharma, University of Cincinnati

This paper uncovers the musical language of the 2022 Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) web series ‘Ms. Marvel,’ created by Bisha K. Ali, co-directed by Adil and Bilall, and music directed by Laura Karpman, particularly within the context of India’s partition and birthing of Pakistan in 1947. The mini-series, based on the life of Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American teenager, features culturally curated songs from India and Pakistan across decades, constituting some of the newer, unconventional South Asian independent musics to cinematic classics from legendary yesteryear artists. This radical assimilation of South Asian culture within the mainstream American comic- superhero universe is enriching and inclusive. I argue that the music of Ms. Marvel re- contextualizes the trauma of the Partition between the two nations for millennials, GenZ, and makes South Asian music accessible and aspirational to the global youth. The paper traces a shift in the millennial re-imagination of the post-Partition historical trajectory of India and Pakistan as distinctly separate from their ancestral counterparts. I build upon the unifying attribute of its music by borrowing from the existing scholarship of film music studies, South Asian studies, digital humanities, and partition studies through literary and historical contexts. This centers the cross- cultural musical adaptation of Ms. Marvel as a socio-politically charged tool, capable of reconfiguring Partition’s loss and retribution. It utilizes a mainstream American standpoint to cautiously represent a globally sound tale of resilience and reminiscence.

Thinking Shiʿism through things: Taʿziya Makers and Materiality in Contemporary Lucknow
Ankita Choudhary, University of Toronto

My paper examines the economies of taʿziya production in contemporary Lucknow. Taʿziyas outside the space of imambaras have interactive potency of both collective gathering and heightening community sensibilities. It plays an essential role in knitting the community together and, in some cases, get associated with the display of wealth, thereby indicating various economies at play. However, in the process of a taʿziyas living its life as an object of devotion the importance of its maker’s (karigars and arishwalas) livelihood and his craft gets overshadowed. The karigar (craftsman) uses his skills and imagination to make taʿziyas which according to Ghulam Abbas, a Pakistani scholar, displays the overwhelming power of love (ʿishq) as a motivating force for those who construct such microarchitectural forms. (Abbas 2017; Lambourn 2010)

Like the ʿalam, the taʿziya is a form of material devotion that indicates how the cultural memory of Karbala, the Imams, and Ahl‐e Bait is integrated into broader Shiʿi tradition (Ruffle 2021). Innovations in the materiality of Lakhnavitaʿziyas validates how makers are deluged with love and devotion towards the Ahl-e bait. The different types of materials used should not be analysed in the light of commerce or profit-making rather from the maker’s perspective it displays an act of veneration or an outlet of devotion. For instance, the jau ka taʿziya made with barley and wood indicates the care, love and dedication with which the makers grow jau in the shape of a taʿziya which also has a powerful symbolism of rebirth associated with it. In other words, the act of gazing while making and growing a taʿziya also becomes an act of love and loyalty towards the Imam.

3:15-5:10 pm:

Politics of Belonging
Chair: Eman Abdelhadi, Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago

Whose Ummah? Resettled Rohingya Refugees in Chicago and Religious World-Making Practices
Nursyazwani Jamaludin, University of Pennsylvania

Situated at the interface of anthropologies of sovereignty, migration, and religion, this project examines displaced and resettled Rohingya world-making practices within a fragmented ummah or global Muslim community. Through ethnographic research with resettled Rohingya in Chicago and the digital ethnography of Rohingya online communities, I attend to Rohingya engagements with concepts, narratives, practices, and relations that they characterize as affording new conditions for participating in an – though not necessarily the – ummah. Approaching the ummah as an object of ethnographic attention, the proposed research will track Rohingya encounters and connections across multiple spatio-temporal contexts. First, I explore resettled Rohingya encounters with U.S. publics and politics to examine how they navigate and reconcile the tensions between being good Muslim subjects and integrating into society as members of a liberal public sphere in the U.S. As resettled Rohingya come to inhabit their new socio-political environment, I explore how memories of their lived experiences as disavowed subjects in Myanmar and as refugees in Malaysia or other transit spaces, shape multidimensional experiences of Rohingyaness, Muslimness, and refugeeness. Third, I examine how transnational ideas of belonging expressed on digital platforms re/produce an imagined diasporic community that grounds and mediates Rohingya religiosities and aspirations. In attending to theological and experiential notions of the ummah, I show how Rohingya negotiate multiple cosmologies and shifting political and religious aspirations, as they evaluate new possibilities for belonging to an ummah.

Bhashani on Politics, State and the Ethic of Everyday Life
Md Mizanur Rahman, University of California, Santa Cruz

The paper is about Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani’s (1880–1976) critique of politics, of which his ambivalence towards representative democracy and skepticism regarding the modern state’s bureaucratic machinery were essential parts. It suggests that for Bhashani, the ground of politics is to reclaim people’s sovereignty in its true sense, where people are not abstracted and alienated by the bureaucratic apparatuses of the modern state and the pseudo-representation of its democracy. Creatively reconstructing Islam’s divine sovereignty—individuals as the representative of God under His ultimate sovereignty—Bhashani tends to make a radical departure from the modern state’s politics of governmentality while remaining within it by participating in the politics of parliamentary democracy. Theorizing such political ambivalence that remains at the heart of many anticolonial and postcolonial political actors and thinkers, the paper shows how Bhashani’s left-oriented, anti-imperial, peasant politics gives birth to a new domain of political thinking going beyond liberal self-interested, rights-based, state-centric politics. The paper argues that Bhashani, drawing on the ethics of everyday peasant life, offers a political imaginary calling for radical courage, collective actions, duties, and fraternity patronized and performed within embedded relationships within which individuals live in the community. In contrast to modern political thought, Bhashani does not think religion-inspired ethical values should be excluded from politics; rather, he assumes that ethics may be a part of politics without being disrupted or co-opted by the modern state. By claiming the true sovereignty of politics for people, his political thinking envisions a political subjectivity that contests and, to some extent, defies the individualized and exclusively rationalized political subjectivity of the modern state.

Sufi, Coffee and Routes: Contradictions in Memory in the Post-colonial Western Ghats
Junaid Rehman, Columbia University

In this paper, I compare two texts memorializing an enshrined wandering Sufi saint Dada Hayat Qalandar remembered to have rested in the coffee growing landscape of southern Western Ghats: one, belongs to a genre of Tazkira produced in 1942, and two, that which claims to be ‘empirical’ and ‘true’ Tarikh version produced in 1992. Though both the narratives aim to create a saintly affinity with the surrounding landscape, the descriptions textualized on his wandering routes taken to reach his cave-shrine contradict with one another. If the former situates Dada within the grander refractive routes by inculcating the surrounding major and minor Sufis (including his travel companions, brothers, and tamed non-human friends such as cats, butterflies, and trees), the latter claims to weave an independent character of him by authoritatively dismissing the interred minor Sufi figures. Why does this change in the narratives of memory-making of a Sufi saint and his routes occur in the post-colonial Western Ghats? I argue that this change corresponds directly with the shift in (a) the social relationship between the coffee owner and the labor and (b) the insecurity arising from the loss of Muslim political power over the industrialized coffee plantations between 1940s and 1990s. By bringing together the environmental concerns alongside the Islamic memory-making, I attempt here for a methodological possibility towards recognizing how the religio-environmental sensibilities operate in the nationalized, post-colonial and technological time. This, I do so, by carefully sifting through not only the Sufi textual world brought forth in Kannada, Urdu, Dakhni and Persian, but also complementing them with the studies of the material landscape arranged upon the coffee geography to expand on how the cultural seductions in origin-stories hangs awkwardly upon the notion of contradiction.

“The Centre Where Diameters Meet”: Solidarity at the Global Crossroads of Pan-Islamic, Leftist, and Anti-Colonial Thought, 1912-1924.
Poorvi Bellur, Princeton University

This paper examines the ways in which solidarity was conceptualized, mobilized, coopted, and countered, as it emerged within communities of pan-Islamic anticolonial organizing placing South Asian Muslims within a global network of Islamic thinkers in the early twentieth century. It is part of a larger dissertation project titled “Worlds beyond empire: Towards a history of anticolonial solidarity, 1880-1961.” Though anticolonial actors from across the British empire had been engaging with socialist thought far prior to that fateful October, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution was a watershed moment for revolutionary aspirants across the empire. Even as the revolution signaled to many the beginning of an international leftist solidarity against empire and capital, another mode of global anticolonial solidarity was being simultaneously mobilized and tested. The rallying call issued by pan-Islamic organizers, revolutionaries, and institutions from the Hejaz to Bombay, from Cairo to Kabul, rang out in demand for a unified Muslim resistance to British incursions against the dar al-Islam.

In this paper, I argue that these modes of solidarity cannot be studied in isolation from one another, and that the emergence of Islamic socialism was an intellectual product of this point of convergence. To this point, the paper first examines the thought of figures including Mushir Husain Kidwai (1878-1937) and Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali (1854 –1927). These were not isolated intellectual trends, as the second section of the paper delves into how these modes of solidarity were mobilized and contested during the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924) and the 1920 Hijrat movement. Finally, while these modes of solidarity certainly interacted and influenced one another, it is crucial to contextualize this intellectual synergy within the political geographies they inhabited; the paper ends with an exploration of the ways in which the Comintern and British Indian intelligence services perceived and aimed to control this crossroads of Islamic and socialist solidarity.

Navigating Nisbat: Articulations of Belonging in Shia Muslim Literary Texts
Arslan Jafri, Ahmedabad University

The Islamic month of Muharram holds a pivotal position within the Shia Muslim worldview, as Azadari, or the mourning of the massacre that took place in Karbala during Muharram in which the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hussain was killed is one of the central rituals in Shia Islam. Azadari is performed to a large extent in the form of poetry and other related art forms, specifically through literary genres like Nauha, and Marsiya. Not only are these peripheral genres much less studied as compared to the more mainstream secular ghazal, which almost has a hegemonic status in Urdu literature. Even when they have been studied, the focus has mostly been on the literary and aesthetic qualities of these genres, while larger themes like belonging have not been paid attention to.

This paper aims to look at a few literary texts in these genres mainly composed within the last 200 years and attempts to highlight how these pieces articulate a sense of Nisbat, or belonging with the land of India. Their Nisbat is articulated through multiple modalities; through an explicit call to Imam Hussain to come to India, through the usage of an idiom that is marked by an Indic register, and through the usage of cultural symbols only comprehensible to someone steeped in the Indian cultural milieu. These modalities become a means for the composers and consumers of these texts to inhabit multiple plains of belonging simultaneously, without one being threatened by the other.