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This overview of American Muslim politics surveys the major communities and organizations of Muslims in the USA and their discourses before and after 11 September 2001. African Americans, Arab Americans and South Asian Americans are the three largest groups, and, after setting out their differences, the political discourses and practices drawing them together in American politics are analyzed. The important conflict between the many new, western-educated professional leaders of the Muslim political coalitions in the US, whose knowledge of classical Islamic civilization and law is not great, and the fewer numbers of classically-trained legal scholars is discussed, leading to a review of personal issues that are also intensely political, particularly those concerning gender roles. 11 September produced challenges to the new professional leadership from the mainstream American media and government officials, opening up the field of discourse about Muslims in America. This has led to a greater focus on US domestic issues and perhaps a larger role for the young generation of American Muslims. The overall trajectory is that of an evolving and distinctively American set of Muslim discourses and practices.

Those of us who work on the Indian princely states sometimes seem to share a certain marginalization, a certain distance from the debates shaping the writing of South Asian history today. We also share, more positively, views of that history that do not focus on British colonial rule and are not based on colonial sources, views that arguably offer more continuity with pre-British history and alternative visions of the South Asian past, present, and future.

Those of us who work on the Indian princely states sometimes seem to share a certain marginalization, a certain
distance from the debates shaping the writing of South Asian history today. We also share, more positively, views
of that history that do not focus on British colonial rule and are not based on colonial sources, views that arguably
offer more continuity with pre-British history and alternative visions of the South Asian past, present, and future.

In what ways, other than through aesthetics, is the "politics of diaspora" constituted? Pnina Werbner has suggested that, in the formation of diasporas, "real" politics might consist of "transnational moral gestures of philanthropy and political lobbying … grounded in ideas about a shared past and future." Thus she urges us to interrogate the relationship between politics and art, or "real" politics and aesthetics, in diasporas and/or transnational communities (concepts not the same, but increasingly conflated in the literature: Vertovec 277).

Despite religious differences among Indian & Pakistani immigrants (Hindus, Sikhs, & Muslims), they are in most ways a single diasporic population with shared aesthetic, linguistic, & cultural traditions & memories of British colonialism. The separate forces at work to weaken disaporic engagement with the mother countries for the three religious groups are discussed. Canada & US contexts support different kinds of intellectual, aesthetic, & political coalitions. However, in both places, hybrid cultural arenas that are intentional & transnational, but not necessarily diasporic in nature, exist. It is argued that the diasporic nature of the Pakistani & Indian communities in North America dissolves as a result of Asian American & Muslim American politics, & that their aesthetic representations & their political activities are mutually constitutive, not coincidental. 73 References. M. Pflum

The relationship between business and politics in preindustrial societies has seldom been clear from historical records. I have argued elsewhere that the major banking firms of Mughal India were central to the imperial system. These 'great firms' were not parasites, passively supportive of the state because it preserved the law and order necessary for trade; they were not self-contained caste communities interacting with the government through the leaders of panchayats or guilds. Their functions were as important to the government as those of its official treasurers, and their desertion of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century helped bring about its collapse.