Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan

by Barbara D. Metcalf

The essays in this volume, written over the course of the last quarter century, are intended to contribute to understanding the role that Islamic symbols and identities have come to play in Northern India and, since 1947, in Pakistan. Above all these essays offer a challenge to current
negative stereotypes of the Muslim faith, demonstrating that the religion is not characterised by political militancy nor dominated by static traditionalism.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

Hardcover

First published September 16, 2004

About the author

Barbara Daly Metcalf is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Davis. She is a specialist in the history of South Asia, especially the colonial period, and the history of the Muslim population of India and Pakistan. She previously served as the Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis, and as the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan (2003-2009). She was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1994 and the president of the American Historical Association in 2010-11.

Reviews

[Aarish Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book, which is a collection of essays written over a period of around 25 years about the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent (pre and post-partition), puts the current rise of religious conservatism and political Islam (the two being differentiated in the book) in the right historical context. The book does not try to dissect Islam through the prism of the perceived cultural superiority of the west, nor does it analyze the “contestations” within Islam at defining self as exclusivist and anti-modern. It rather constructs the journey of the various strands of Muslim efforts at identifying self through an analysis of the ideological and cultural stimuli from their communal, colonial, and post-colonial experiences; a process that has also involved a considerable adoption of aspects of modernity.

The author makes this important observation that the contestations within Islam are a lot more complex than the perceived and readily accepted Islamic fundamentalists (read anti-west) versus modernity (read the west) explanations. The book tells us that various Islamic movements of the day are more products of their own circumstances than dogmatic reactions to western modernity. The book is an excellent exposé of the complexities of the reality that are usually overlooked in the current polarized discourse shaped more by the use of violence to prove the authenticity of one’s understanding of reality than reason.

There is one aspect of the rise of Islamic “reactionism” that, if covered by the book, would have enriched it. It is the impact of the deliberate strengthening of the radical Islamic discourse against communism in Pakistan by the west, particularly the U.S.