Beyond Hindu And Muslim

Questioning the conventional depiction of India as a nation divided between religious communities, Gottschalk shows that individuals living in India have multiple identities, some of which cut across religious boundaries. The stories narrated by villagers living in the northern state of Bihar depict everyday social interactions that transcend the simple divide of Hindu and Muslim.

"[Sets] the stage for a rewriting of nearly a thousand years of history to create new understandings of the nature of cultural encounters. . . . The volume breaks free from the polemics of present-day politics and historicist distortions that have seeped into most standard texts."--David Lelyveld, Cornell University This collection challenges the popular presumption that Muslims and Hindus are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably conflicting with each other. Invoking a new vocabulary that depicts a neglected substratum of Muslim-Hindu commonality, the contributors demonstrate how Indic and Islamicate world views overlap and often converge in the premodern history of South Asia. Contents Part 1: Literary Genres, Architectural Forms, and Identities 1. Alternate Structures of Authority: Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal, by Tony K. Stewart 2. Beyond Turk and Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance, by Christopher Shackle 3. Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity: A Study of the Tamil Cirappuranam, by Vasudha Narayanan 4. Admiring the Works of the Ancients: The Ellora Temples as Viewed by Indo-Muslim Authors, by Carl W. Ernst 5. Mapping Hindu-Muslim Identities through the Architecture of Shahjahanabad and Jaipur, by Catherine B. Asher Part 2: Sufism, Biographies, and Religious Dissent 6. Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications, by Marcia K. Hermansen and Bruce B. Lawrence 7. The "Naqshbandi Reaction" Reconsidered, by David W. Damrel 8. Real Men and False Men at the Court of Akbar: The Majalis of Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati, by Derryl N. MacLean Part 3: The State, Patronage, and Political Order 9. Sharia and Governance in Indo-Islamic Context, by Muzaffar Alam 10. Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States, by Richard M. Eaton 11. The Story of Prataparudra: Hindu Historiography on the Deccan Frontier, by Cynthia Talbot 12. Harihara, Bukka, and the Sultan: The Delhi Sultanate in the Political Imagination of Vijayanagara, by Phillip B. Wagoner 13. Maratha Patronage of Muslim Institutions in Burhanpur and Khandesh, by Stewart Gordon David Gilmartin, professor of history at North Carolina State University, is the author of Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. Bruce B. Lawrence, Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of Religion at Duke University, is the author of Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence and Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age, which received the 1990 prize for excellence in religious studies awarded by the American Academy of Religion.

Disputed between India and Pakistan, Kashmir contains a large majority of Muslims subject to the laws of a predominantly Hindu and increasingly "Hinduized" India. How did religion and politics become so enmeshed in defining the protest of Kashmir's Muslims against Hindu rule? This book reaches beyond standard accounts that look to the 1947 partition of India for an explanation. Examining the 100-year period before that landmark event, during which Kashmir was ruled by Hindu Dogra kings under the aegis of the British, Mridu Rai highlights the collusion that shaped a decisively Hindu sovereignty over a subject Muslim populace. Focusing on authority, sovereignty, legitimacy, and community rights, she explains how Kashmir's modern Muslim identity emerged. Rai shows how the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was formed as the East India Company marched into India beginning in the late eighteenth century. After the 1857 rebellion, outright annexation was abandoned as the British Crown took over and princes were incorporated into the imperial framework as junior partners. But, Rai argues, scholarship on other regions of India has led to misconceptions about colonialism, not least that a "hollowing of the crown" occurred throughout as Brahman came to dominate over King. In Kashmir the Dogra kings maintained firm control. They rode roughshod over the interests of the vast majority of their Kashmiri Muslim subjects, planting the seeds of a political movement that remains in thrall to a religiosity thrust upon it for the past 150 years.

Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time: the effects of the Islamic conversion of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. It is not a book of opinion. It is - in the Naipaul way - a very rich and human book, full of people and stories. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith, and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of these converted countries? How do the converted peoples, non-Arabs, view their past - and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns after seventeen years to find out how and what the converted preach. In Indonesia he finds a pastoral people who have lost their history through a confluence of Islam and technology. In Iran he discovers a religious tyranny as oppressive as the secular one of the Shah, and he meets people weary of the religious rules that govern every aspect of their lives. Pakistan - in a tragic realization of a Muslim re-creation fantasy - inherited blood feuds, rotting palaces, antique cruelty; then President Zia installed religious terror with $100 million of Saudi money. In Malaysia, the Muslim Youth organization is alive and growing, and the people are mentally, physically, and geographically torn between two worlds, struggling to live the impossible dream of a true faith born out of a spiritual vacancy. A startling and revelatory addition to the Naipaul canon, Beyond Belief confirms the author's reputation as a masterly observer, a "finder-out" of stories, as well as a magnificent teller of them.

The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)

The question of identity and especially its formation among youth, has received significant academic attention as our worlds become intricately and unpredictably connected through satellite televisions, mobile telephones, Internet and social networking platforms. Marking a distinct addition to such scholarship, this volume is an ethnographic study of the under-investigated issue of Indian Muslim youth's emergent subjectivity in a media-saturated globalized Indian society. The author develops the idea of 'convoluted modernity' to explain Muslim youth's reactions to multifarious and divergent influences both from the East as well as the West shaping their everyday life. The concept illustrates how Muslim youths' ideas about self and community draw equally on MTV as on Peace TV to create a complex truck between consumerist hedonism and globalized Islam. Introducing a new perspective to studies on globalization, media and cultural politics, this book shows how interpolation of local and global in the accelerated virtual spheres and their contextual interpretation within an expanding economy, notwithstanding Muslim youth's disadvantaged position, shape alternate modernities rife with ambiguities and beyond binaries of progress and regression.