Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (By SherAli Tareen)
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Islam
Abstract
The subtitle of the book under review suggests that it deals with modern relationships between Hindus and Muslims in India, but the scope of the book is actually much wider. It deals with the general question of the various Muslim views of the relationship between Muslims and adherents of other civilizations and religions, ranging from the 9th century al-ʿĀmirī and the 11th century al-Bīrūnī, to the 18th century Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including such luminaries as Abū al-Kalām Āzād, Aḥmad Riźā Khān, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān and several Deobandī scholars.
One of the great virtues of the book is the author’s use of the sources, some of them rarely mentioned in scholarly literature and certainly not to this extent and in such detail. In an academic culture in which various “narratives” have taken the pride of place, it is most welcome to have a work which is replete with theory, but also surveys and analyzes a substantial amount of hitherto unknown source material. The book is also another proof of the great variety of Muslim tradition which enables Muslim scholars to find Islamic justification for their modern world views and policies, even if these are contradictory to each other. Because of its rich content – much of it unknown – the book deserves a detailed review.
References
1 See Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the
Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 23, 60.
2 “God forbids you not, as regards those who have not fought you in religion’s cause,
nor expelled you from you habitations, that you should be kindly to them and act
justly towards them; surely God loves the just...” Translation by Arthur J. Arberry,
The Koran interpreted.
3 See Yohanan Friedmann, “The attitude of the Jamʿiyyat al-ʿulamā-ʾi Hind to the
Indian national movement and to the establishment of Pakistan.” Asian and African
Studies 7 (1971), pp. 157-180, and Barbara D. Metcalf, Ḥusain Aḥmad Madanī: The
jihād for Islam and India’s Freedom. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009). More generally,
see Ali Usman Qasmi and Megan Eaton Robb, eds., Muslims against the Muslim
League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017).
4 See Qurʾān 5:51, “O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are
friends of each other. Whoever of you makes them his friends, is one of them...”
5 The classical material on the issue was surveyed and analyzed in M. J. Kister “Do
not assimilate yourselves…”: lā tashabbahū; with an Appendix by Menahem Kister.”
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 12 (1989), pp. 321-371 (reprinted in M.J. Kister,
Concepts and Ideas at the Dawn of Islam (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997 no. VI).
6 For a brief analysis of al-ʿĀmirī’s thought and a partial translation of the al-Iʿlām,
see Franz Rosenthal, “State and religion according to Abū al-Ḥasan al-Āmirī,” in
Islamic Quarterly 3 (1956), pp. 42-52.
7 The author translates this as “Proof of India,” but a more appropriate translation
would be “Refutation of India.” For this meaning of ḥujja, see Lane, Arabic-English
Lexicon, s.v.
8 See Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-religious Concepts in the Qurʾān (Montreal: McGill
University Press: 1966), pp. 119-155 and passim.
9 Albrecht Noth, “Abgrenzungsprobleme zwischen Muslimen und nicht-Muslimen:
Die “Bedingungen ʿUmars (aš-šurūṭ al-ʿumariyya)” unter einem anderen Aspekt
gelesen,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987), pp. 290-315. English translation
in Robert Hoyland, ed., Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004), pp. 103-124.
10 See Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion, pp. 38-39.
11 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan,
1963), pp. 75-108, especially pp. 75-77.
12 Jeffry R. Halverson, “Religion before the academy: Jonathan Z. Smith, Eurocentrism,
and Muslim demarcations of religion,” The Journal of Religion 104 (2024), pp. 26-44.
13 See André Wink, Akbar (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), pp. 97-99; Derryl N. MacLean, “Real men and false men at the court of Akbar: The Majālis of Shaykh Muṣṭafā Gujarātī,” in David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence, eds., Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 199-215.
14 Much information on this can be gleaned from Jacques Waardenburg, ed., Muslim Perceptions of other Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and from Camilla Adang and Sabine Schmidtke, Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible: Texts and Studies (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2019).
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