Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on the relationship between nation-making and the emergence of Islamophobia in India. Studies on anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia in India either tend to dismiss the concept or limit its deployment by identifying it within the actions of Hindu nationalist groups situating their rise as an exception to India's secular and multicultural trajectory. Premising on the idea that Islamophobia should be understood as the negation of Muslim political subjectivity, this article argues that Hindutva is not an aberration rather it is a continuation of the Indian nation-making project with the Muslim placed as the other of this project. This argument would include factoring in the systemic nature of anti-Muslim violence and social inequality by looking at the Muslim community's lived socioeconomic experience, and analyzing the commentaries on them.

Framed in a Critical Muslim Studies approach, this essay will present a decolonial reconceptualisation of the concept of the Caliphate by analysing the narratives on the Khilafat movement and the Mappila rebellion (1921-1922) in India and presenting them as decolonial disruptive movements. Traditional formulations of the Caliphate privilege a view from the centre (Arab world) and contemporary discussions focus on the ontic manifestations such as structure and the requirements for the office of the Caliph rather than the what the Caliphate means. By looking at contemporary framings of the caliphate mobilisations and its methodological shortcomings, this essay will theorise how the leaders of the Khilafat movement, Mappilaulemaand leaders conceptualised the Caliphate based on an ontological understanding and their mobilisation of its range of possible meanings. The essay will also look at the appropriation of such meanings by Marxist ideologues and historians to lend legitimacy to the Marxist trajectory of violence and martyrdom, and the subsequent erasure of Muslim political subjectivity from these narratives by framing it using a class analytic. This essay will present a reading of the Caliphate mobilisations as way of decolonising the Islamicate past for 'clearing the ground' for dreaming a future.