Beyond Turk and Hindu Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamic South Asia by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds. (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000. 354 pages.)

Abstract

Beyond Turk and Hindu grew out of a collection of papers presented at a conference
on "Islam in South Asia," held at Duke University in April 1995. It
has 3 sections, 13 chapters, 8 photographs, 3 maps, 2 tables, a glossary, and
an index. The book deals with the broad subject of civilizational interfaces in
the South Asian context. It belongs to the category of interfaith relations and
is addressed to a general audience interested in the Hindu-Muslim dialectic.
The authors do not accept the premise that interreligious differences in
South Asia are set and irreconcilable. To quote the editor: "We vigorously
contend that there is a larger point to make, namely, that the constant interplay
and overlap between Islamic and Indic worldviews may be at least as
pervasive as the Muslim-Hindu conflict ... " This position is a challenge to
those scholars who view India and Pakistan as embodiments of two separate
religious identities.
Section One contains three essays on textual analysis to assess the sameness
and otherness of identity formation. The authors do not avoid the controversies
that are bound to emerge from the sometimes disparaging tenns
used by Hindus and Muslims to refer to each other, or the animosities that
have emerged from the desecration of mosques and temples:
Arabic and Persian use of the term Hindu had a range of meanings that
changed over time, sometimes denoting an ethnic or geographic referent
without religious content. Similarly, Indic texts referring to the invaders
from the northwest used a variety of terms in different contexts, including
yavanas, m/ecchas,farangis, musafmans, and Turks. These terms sometimes
carried a strong negative connotation, but they rarely denoted a distinct
religious community conceived in opposition to Hindus. In and of
themselves, however, such terms tell us little. To understand the usage of
these terms, one must move beyond the terminology itself- beyond Turk
and Hindu - to analyze the framing categories and generic contexts within
which these terms are used.
The authors illustrate the power of bidirectional cultural forces by offering
the example of the Punjab's Bulle Shah and Bengal's mystical Satya Pir.
Bulle Shah, a contemporary of Shah Waliullah of Delhi, lived in the late ...