Lives Of Muslims In India

The fast-consolidating identities along religious and ethnic lines in recent years have considerably ‘minoritised’ Muslims in India. The wide-ranging essays in this volume focus on the intensified exclusionary practices against Indian Muslims, highlighting how, amidst a politics of violence, confusing policy frameworks on caste and class lines, and institutionalised riot systems, the community has also suffered from the lack of leadership from within. At the same time, Indian Muslims have emerged as a ‘mass’ around which the politics of ‘vote bank’, ‘appeasement’, ‘foreigners’, ‘Pakistanis within the country’, and so on are innovated and played upon, making them further apprehensive about asserting their legitimate right to development. The important issues of the double marginalisation of Muslim women and attempts to reform the Muslim Personal Law by some civil society groups is also discussed. Contributed by academics, activists and journalists, the articles discuss issues of integration, exclusion and violence, and attempt to understand categories such as ‘identity’, ‘minority’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘nationalism’ with regard to and in the context of Indian Muslims. This second edition, with a new introduction, will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in sociology, politics, history, cultural studies, minority studies, Islamic studies, policy studies and development studies, as well as policymakers, civil society activists and those in media and journalism.

This book is a collection of essays on various aspects of lived Islam and Muslim social reality in contemporary India. Moving away from the normative discourse that characterises much discussion and debate about Muslims, it seeks to highlight the complex interactions between religion and a host of economic, social and political factors that help shape Indian Muslim identities. It draws attention to the multiple expressions of Islam and Muslim identity and challenges the notion of a Muslim monolith. This it does by looking at the ways in which various Indian Muslim organisations, activists and intellectuals are seeking to respond to various challenges that Muslims in India are today faced with, such as growing demands for gender justice, the imperative to dialogue with people of other faiths and the need to respond to Hindutva, Islamist and Islamophobic discourses and politics.

"This is an attempt to portray the life of Indian Muslims in all its aspects, beginning with the advent of the Muslim and ending with the present day. In it Indian Muslim history has been divided into three phases - early, middle and modern - and the vario"

Through the creation of post-colonial citizenship, India adopted a hybridisation of specific secular and western conception of citizenship. In this democratic framework, Indian Muslims are observed on how they make use of the spaces and channels to accommodate their Islamic identity within a secular one. This book analyses how the socio-political context shapes citizens’ perceptions of multiple variables, such as their sense of political efficacy, agency, conception of citizenship rights and belief in democracy. Based on extensive surveys and interviews and through presenting and investigating the various meanings of jihād, the author explores the usage of non-Eurocentric conceptual approaches to the study of postcolonial and Muslim societies, in particular the meaning it carries in the psyche of the Muslim community. She argues that through means of argumentative and spiritual jihād, Indian Muslims fight their battle towards a realisation of citizenship ideals despite the unfavourable conditions of intra and inter community conflicts. Presenting new examinations of Islamic identity and citizenship in contemporary India, this book will be a useful contribution to the study of South Asian Studies, Religion, Islam, and Race and Ethnicity.

With more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms - not to say anything about the communal waves of violence that have affected them over the last 25 years. In India's cities, these developments find contrasted expressions. While Muslims are everywhere lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow). These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping. This book supplements an ethnographic approach of Muslims in 11 Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first hand account of an untold story.

This Book Originally Appeared In 1951 Under The Title Makers Of Pakistan And Modern Muslim India(By A.H. Albiruni), And Has Been An Important Source Book For The History Of The Period It Deals With.The Earlier Book, As Its Title Indicat¬Ed, Was An Account Of The Lives And Activities Of The Leaders Who Enabled Muslim India To Recover From The Loss Of Political Power Culminating In The Exile Of The Last Mughul Emperor In 1858, And Who So Guided Its Affairs As To Lead To The Establishment Of The Independent State Of Pakistan.The Original Book Has Been Greatly Enlarged And, Although The Approach Remains Basically Biographical, Many New Chapters Giving The Background Of The Period And Various Historical Developments Have Been Added. Out Of The Fifteen Chapters, Five Are Entirely New, Including A Long Chapter On The Developments In The Areas Which Now Constitute Pakistan With Considerable Additions In Others. Personalities From Muslim Bengal Have Been Fully Dealt With, And Advantage Has Been Taken Of The Publication Of Considerable New Material Relating To Partition To Make The Account Comprehensive. An Im¬Portant New Section Relates To Jinnah, The Man And The Statesman.

In order to broaden the lens through which Muslim women are typically seen, a group of researchers in India carried out a large and unprecedented study of one of the most disadvantaged sections of Indian society. The editors of The Diversity of Muslim Women's Lives in India bring together this research in a comprehensive collection of informative and revealing case studies.