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Purohit's essay discusses the polemical writings of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) against Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), the founder of the Ahmadi movement. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's vision of Islam was in many ways similar to Iqbal's: both figures were modernist and promoted renewal and reform through the idea of Muslim unity. However, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's religious authority was charismatic: he was not only recognized as a mujaddid (renewer) but also claimed to be the masih-i-mawud (promised messiah). This article analyzes the arguments through which Iqbal denounced Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's religious authority and branded his teachings heretical. Using the work of sociologists such as Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, this piece reflects on the idea of heresy as a sociological rather than theological phenomenon—thereby calling into question entrenched theological critiques of the Ahmadis. The intra-Muslim criticisms against the Ahmadis that continue today must be examined, Purohit argues, in light of the modernist polemic against Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, exemplified in the writings of Iqbal.

Prehistories of the Ismaili sect in nineteenth-century Bombay -- Sectarian showdown in the Aga Khan case of 1866 -- Reading Satpanth against the judicial archive -- Comparative formations of the Hindu Swami Narayan sect -- Sect and secularism in the early nationalist period

An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West's understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court's ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge's decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.

AbstractThis paper analyzes the political project of secular Islam as outlined by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah—also known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957). As first president of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah facilitated the installation of separate electorates for Muslims as well as the call for Partition. The reformist notion of Islam he invoked for this separatist programme was informed by the secular and modernizing projects of the colonial public sphere. Simultaneously, however, Muhammad Shah claimed a divine role as Imam of the Ismaili Muslim community—a position validated by Ismaili beliefs and teachings of messianic Islam. The paper engages Muhammad Shah's writings and the devotional texts of the Ismailis to illustrate how the heterogeneous forms of practices peculiar to the vernacular history of Islam in early modern South Asia were displaced by the discourse of religious identity in the colonial period.