The Muslim World in Modern South Asia

Reviewed by: Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad Sikander – Srinagar, Kashmir

Published by: Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020, 158pp. ISBN: 978-1438483030.

The Muslim world is a complex entity. Most academic studies about Muslims confine themselves to the Middle East. It is true that Islam first emerged in that region, but most Muslims are based in South Asia. Likewise, most of the revivalist and reform movements in the Muslim world in the last four centuries have emerged from South Asia, particularly in the Indian subcontinent. Engaging academically with this regions is, therefore, inevitable for any serious scholar who wants to trace the contemporary roots of Muslim knowledge, revivalist efforts and networks of power and authority.

Francis Robinson, an academic based in London, has been engaging with South Asia and particularly with the Ulema of Firangi Mahal, Lucknow, for the last five decades and has written on numerous issues related to Indian Muslims. The book under review is a collection of papers and book reviews he published in various journals. In his scholarly Introduction, Robinson states, “This book addresses a series of themes central to Islamic societies over the past 200 years: the impact of Western dominance; the crisis of civilizational authority following from this dominance; the role of traditional education both in making Muslim societies and then in remaking them in an era of Western dominance; the relationship between Islamic reform and forms of Muslim modernity; and the relationship between the rise of the modern state, the decline of cosmopolitanism, the growth of globalization and the challenge of multiculturalism; the shift of leadership in the Muslim world to the lands east of the Hindu Kush; the rise of women as transmitters and interpreters of knowledge, and therefore sources of Islamic authority; and the significance of the memory of power, a memory which had a very specific resonance in British India, but one which has not completely disappeared from the Muslim world at large. The twenty-first century will see these themes elaborated; the process will be fascinating” (pp.20-21).