Suchergebnisse

Islamic identities in colonial India -- Modernism and its ethical commitments -- The ʻulama and the state -- Islamism and the sovereignty of God -- Religious minorities and the anxieties of an Islamic identity -- The contested terrain of sufism -- Religion, violence, and the state

In his learned and stimulating article that helps frame the contributions to this roundtable while also outlining directions for future work in this area, Nile Green notes the striking fact that it has been nearly a hundred years since the last substantial English survey of the field was attempted. That was M. G. Zubaid Ahmad's "Contribution of India to Arabic Literature," completed as a PhD dissertation under the supervision of the noted Orientalist Sir Thomas Arnold (d. 1930) at the School of Oriental Studies (as it was then known), University of London, in 1929. It was subsequently published with a preface by another distinguished Orientalist, Sir Hamilton Gibb (d. 1971), and retains some scholarly interest to this day.1 That interest lies not only in the descriptions of the many Arabic-language works it lists—going well beyond Carl Brockelmann's classic Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur in this respect—but also, in hindsight, in the assumptions that guide Ahmad's work. Ahmad believed there was little in the Arabic literature surveyed that showed any originality, partly because there was not much remaining to be said in fields like Qur'anic exegesis, the reported teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), or law by the time Indian scholars began engaging seriously with these subjects. It was also partly to do with an intellectual decline well underway by the time relevant areas of inquiry had reached India. The intellectual landscape remained unrelieved whether one looked at religious or secular literature, or even at writings in Persian for that matter: "… in spite of the abundance of Persian literature produced in India, nothing original is found in these contributions."2

Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 490 pp.

In his review of my book Religion and Politics under the Early⊂Abbasids, Saleh Said Agha seriously misunderstands several of my arguments, then sets out to refute his versions of these arguments. The constraints of space do not permit me to take note of all his criticisms and misconstructions, though I should like to mention and clarify a few of them.

Islamicists have long been interested in the historiography of thesīraandmaghāzīliterature. Ibn Ishaq'sSīrahas been fruitfully compared with al-Waqidi'sMaghāzī, and both have been compared with sections in al-Bukhari'sṢaḥīḥor with other collections of hadith. It has often been observed that the materials constituting theSīraof Ibn Ishaq or theMaghāzīof al-Waqidi—works which may for convenience, but only with reservations, be designated "historical"—are often the same as those preserved in collections of hadith such as al-Bukhari's. It has also been observed that what distinguish these materials from one another are essentially the former's narrative and chronological structures and the motives and methods governing these structures. John Wansbrough, who has compared these texts, postulates as well a "development from loosely structured narrative to conciseexemplum& [which] illustrates perfectly the stylistic difference betweenSīraandsunna, between the mythic and normative preoccupations (Geistesbeschäftigungen) of early Muslim literature."