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The problem that I have been dealing with over the last few years is how it might be possible to create a historical context for the study of South Indian religion. Like a number of other South Indian historians I have been concentrating on the rise and development of new states and chiefdoms during the late pre-colonial period — that is in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of European expansion in the sub-continent which preceded the consolidation of British imperial rule. My own work has focused on the role of shrines and holy places within these pre-colonial domains and chiefdoms.

The foundation of a State in Afghanistan by the Pashtun tribesmen in 1747 posed the question of a religious policy. The issue was not that of proselytism. Most of the Afghans did adhere to one or another form of Islam and the followers of other creeds did not even constitute one percent of the population. But the Islam adhered to by the tribesmen did not have Shari'a (Islamic Law) as its judicial basis and no religious tradition enforced allegiance to monarchs.

Argues that patterns of administrative practice in the regulation of Islam are designed to produce a de-politicized and unthreatening interpretation of Islam; includes regulative practices to control mosque access, imams, preachers and the khutba (weekly religious sermon), and other issues.