Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Religion, Culture, and Public Life)

Friendship―particularly interreligious friendship―offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority? In this groundbreaking book, SherAli Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly discourse and debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions and fissures over the place and meaning of Islam in the modern world. Perilous Intimacies considers a range of topics, including Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, the question of interreligious friendship in the Qur’an, intra-Muslim debates on cow sacrifice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book illuminates the depth, complexity, and profound divisions of the Muslim intellectual traditions of South Asia. Perilous Intimacies also provides timely perspective on the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations, considering how to overcome thorny legacies and open new horizons for interreligious friendship. "Perilous Intimacies explores the question of how traditionally educated South Asian Muslim scholars, known as the "ulama," imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam in relation to Hinduism from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Anchored in the theoretical framing of muwalat (loosely translated as "friendship" and encompassing relationships of intimacy, loyalty, and intellectual collaboration) as a moment of formation for religious identity and difference, this book charts multiple instances in which Islam's encounter with the Hindu "other" fermented critical debates about the limits of Muslim identity in South Asia during the region's transition from the late Mughal to the colonial and late colonial periods. In both eras the debates were inflected by the theme of Islamic sovereignty, while at the same time they also reflected fissures within Islam. The book considers such sites of engagement as Muslim scholarly expositions on Hindu thought, Hindu-Muslim doctrinal polemics, and adoption of the habits and customs of non-Muslims. The continuities and ruptures of Muslim identity demonstrated in this montage of microhistories reveal major fractures and tensions within this intellectual tradition as it sought to delineate its boundaries in a variety of venues such as interreligious politics and human-nonhuman animal relations, fractures and tensions that cannot be sorted along a single analytic binary such as liberal/conservative or traditional/modern. Based on close readings of a large archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu texts, correspondence, juridical opinions, narrative histories, newspapers, and interreligious translations, SherAli Tareen investigates how identity debates, rooted in a presumption of an imperial Muslim political theology, took shape within critical contexts including the gradual yet decisive loss of political sovereignty and the developing conditions of colonial modernity. The book's architecture is thematic rather than historical, each chapter uncovering less traversed theoretical registers within a particular moment and issue of encounter, collectively providing a conceptual framework for a Muslim humanities"-- Provided by publisher Table of Contents Foreword, by Faisal Devji Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Introduction: The Promise and Peril of Hindu-Muslim Friendship 1. Translating the “Other”: Early Modern Muslim Understandings of Hinduism 2. Deciding the “True” God: Miracle Wars and Interreligious Polemics 3. Friendship and Sovereign Fantasies 4. The Cow and the Caliphate 5. The Contagion of Imitation: A Select Genealogy 6. The Aligarh-Deoband Divide: Competing Rationalities of Reform in Muslim South Asia Epilogue Appendix: Suggestions and Discussion Questions for Teaching This Book Glossary Notes Select Bibliography Index