In this episode, we talked to Professor SherAli Tareen about his two books: Defending Muhammad ﷺ in Modernity and Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire. Professor Tareen talked about the reformist project of Shah Muhammad Ismail and the reformist movement of Deoband that appeared on the scene in late colonial India after the failed mutiny of 1857 where Muslims were brutally defeated by the British, and how did the Barelvi orientation headed by Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi responded to the reform project of Deoband. He also touched upon how and why the polemical debates and religious tensions increased in the colonial era when the colonial state defined -- and therefore limit and separate -- the domain of religion from politics. What is political theology? What are competing rationalities of Islamic tradition which were articulated by the ulama in the colonial era from 18th to 20th centuries? Why is it important to engage te Islamic tradition of South Asia closely? These and other similar Questions were addressed in this session.
Author's Biography
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University in 2012. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. He has also written extensively on the interaction of Islam and secularism. His book "Defending Muhammad in Modernity" (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. He is currently completing his second book called “The Promise and Peril of Hindu-Muslim Friendship.” His other academic publications and talks are available here. Tareen also co-hosts the popular scholarly podcast New Books in Islamic Studies.
Time Stamp:
00:00 - Introduction
2:00 - Political Theology
16:05 - The rise of middle-class ulama & religious public in the colonial era
18:40 - Why was there a rise in religious polemical debates in South Asia in the colonial era?
28:12 - Why did the polemical debates not emerge in Mughal India?
33:27 - Political and Epistemic intervention
38:20 - Competing Normativities of Deoband and Barelvi orientation
51:22 - Perilous Intimacies will be available in Pakistan by the end of this year
54:00 - The Shahjahanpur debate
59:04 - Who are the 'Modernists' and 'Traditionalists'?
1:07:55 - Why is it important to understand the Deoband-Barelvi polemic closely?
1:10:04 - No possibility of decolonizing identity that does not include the critique of the secular
1:15:08 - QnA
1:31:23 - Last words