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Sunni chauvinism and the roots of Muslim modernism

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Sunni chauvinism and the roots of Muslim modernism

"Modernist Islamic thought was an intellectual movement active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that aimed at redefining the relationship between Islam and western modernity. The movement took off at a pivotal time in Muslim history, when Muslim empires were either in serious decline or vanquished, and when the British and French were asserting their power as new colonial rulers in majority Muslim societies the world over. Muslim modernists sought to define how Muslims should orient themselves in this new world. And in particular, how their Islamic beliefs and practices should be reconciled with western ideas such as secularism, women's rights, democratic representation, and western forms of education. Teena Purohit's new account of Muslim modernism is distinctive in that she seeks to highlight something that has gone unnoticed in previous accounts of the Muslim modernist story: it has had a decided Sunni bias and has been linked to calls for suppression of minority Muslim communities. Such communities, including the Shi'a, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Bahai's, have often been disparaged in Muslim modernist thought as sectarian or deviant and thus as not fully or authentically Muslim. In this book, Purohit reveals how a succession of key Muslim modernist thinker-activists from the colonial, anti-colonial/nationalist, and post-colonial/Islamist eras shared an obsession with Muslim "unity" that implicitly relied on a Sunni majoritarian perspective. Not coincidentally, this perspective was also held by European orientalist scholars of Islam who, like the Muslim modernists, were deeply influenced by notions of sect and heresy that had their origin in Christianity. This obsession with unity and the privileging of Sunnism that went with it was found in all forms of Muslim modernism. As Purohit shows via her close examination of a series of key modernist thinkers from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, repeated calls for "reform" or "reformation" of Islam or for a rediscovery of Islam's supposedly "lost unity" inclined the Muslim modernist project as a whole towards intolerance of Muslim minorities"--"Muslim intellectuals who sought to establish the boundaries of modern Muslim identity. Muslim modernism was a political and intellectual movement that sought to redefine the relationship between Islam and the colonial West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spearheaded by Muslim leaders in Asia and the Middle East, the modernist project arose from a desire to reconcile Islamic beliefs and practices with European ideas of secularism, scientific progress, women's rights, and democratic representation. Teena Purohit provides innovative readings of the foundational thinkers of Muslim modernism, showing how their calls for unity and reform led to the marginalization of Muslim minority communities that is still with us today.Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism offers fresh perspectives on figures such as Jamal al din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Iqbal, and Abul A'la Maududi. It sheds light on the exclusionary impulses and Sunni normative biases of modernist Muslim writers, and explores how their aim to unite the global Muslim community-which was stagnant and fragmented in their eyes-also created lasting divisions. While modernists claimed to represent all Muslims when they asserted the centrality and significance of unity, they questioned the status of groups such as Ahmadis, Bahais, and the Shia more broadly.Addressing timely questions about religious authority and reform in modern Islam, this incisive book reveals how modernist notions of Islam as a single homogeneous tradition gave rise to enduring debates about who belongs to the Muslim community and who should be excluded"--

The Aga Khan case : religion and identity in colonial India

"An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West's understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court's ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge's decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion"--Provided by publisher.An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West's understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court's ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge's decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.An Arab-centric perspective dominates the West's understanding of Islam. Purohit presses for a view of Islam as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts. The Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe.

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