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In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.
The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions presents critical research, overviews, and case studies on religion in historical South Asia, in the seven nation states of contemporary South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and in the South Asian diaspora. Chapters by an international set of experts analyse formative developments, roots, changes and transformations, religious practices and ideas, identities, relations, territorialisation, and globalisation in historical and contemporary South Asia. The Handbook is divided into two parts which first analyse historical South Asian religions and their developments and second contemporary South Asia religions that are influenced by both religious pluralism and their close connection to nation states and their ideological power. Contributors argue that religion has been used as a tool for creating nations as well as majorities within those nations in South Asia, despite their enormous diversity, in particular religious diversity. The Handbook explores these diversities and tensions, historical developments, and the present situation across religious traditions by utilising an array of approaches and from the point of view of various academic disciplines. Drawing together a remarkable collection of leading and emerging scholars, this handbook is an invaluable research tool and will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions.
Jews and Muslims in South Asia examines how Jews and Muslims relate to each other in a place where, in contrast to Europe, their perceived attitudes towards one another do not often make headlines. In the European imagination, Jews and Muslims have both been seen as the ultimate "other." At the same time, Western politics and media construct Jews and Muslims in opposition to each other and see their relationship as unavoidably polarized due to the conflict in the Middle East. In this book, Yulia Egorova explores how South Asian Jews and Muslims relate to each other outside of a Western and Christian context, and reveals that despite some important differences this relationship is still intrinsically connected to global narratives about Jews and Muslims. She also shows that the Hindu right have turned South Asian Jewish experiences into a rhetorical tool to deny the existence of discrimination against religious minorities, and that this ostensible celebration of Jewishness masks not only anti-Muslim, but also anti-Jewish prejudice. She argues that South Asia inherited these notions of racial and religious difference from the British during the colonial period, which continue to cause stigmatization and oppression to this day. Jews and Muslims in South Asia is a fascinating new contribution to the academic discussion on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and their overlapping histories.
The population of the South Asian Diaspora in the US is over 2.5 million people. Yet in a post 9/11 climate of opinion, little is known about this group beyond images of Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists and terrorists. This is particularly true of women where simplistic assumptions about veils and subordination obscure the voices of the women themselves. Rarely are Hindu and Muslim American women—many of whom are social workers, physicians, lawyers, academics, students, homemakers—asked about their everyday lives and religious beliefs. Living our Religions brings out these hidden stories from South Asian American women of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian and Nepali origin. Their accounts show how diverse and culturally dynamic religious practices emerge within the intersection of histories and politics of specific locales. The authors describe the race, gender, and ethnic boundaries they encounter; they also document how they resist and challenge these boundaries. Living our Religions cuts through the myths and ethnocentrism of popular portrayals to reveal the vibrancy, courage and agency of an invisible minority. Other Contributors: Shobha Hamal Gurung, Selina Jamil, Salma Kamal, Shweta Majumdar, Bidya Ranjeet, Shanthi Rao, Aysha Saeed, Monoswita Saha, Neela, Bhattacharya Saxena, Parveen Talpur, Elora Halim Chowdhury and Rafia Zakaria
In Purifying the Land of the Pure, Farahnaz Ispahani analyzes Pakistan's policies towards its religious minority populations, both Muslim and non-Muslim, since independence in 1947.
The work of twenty-two scholars is brought together in this comparative study of the emerging relationships between religion and politics in India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. Part I, "South Asia: Unity and Diversity," presents a comparative analysis of religio-political patterns in the three countries. Part II, “India: The Politics of Religious Pluralism,” emphasizes the rich diversity of Indian religious life and its political consequences. Part III, “Pakistan: The Politics of Islamic Identity,” is chiefly concerned with the political, ideological, and legal problems which Pakistan has faced. Part IV, “Ceylon: The Politics of Buddhist Resurgence,” emphasizes the dramatic developments by which Buddhists have become deeply involved in politics. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This book explores religion in various spatial constellations in South Asian cities, including religious centres such as Varanasi, Madurai and Nanded, and cities not readily associated with religion, such as Mumbai and Delhi. Contributors from different disciplines discuss a large variety of urban spaces: physical and imagined, institutional and residential, built and landscaped, virtual and mediatised, historical and contemporary. In doing so, the book addresses a wide range of issues concerning the role of religion in the dynamic interplay of factors which characterise complex urban social spaces. Chapters incorporate varying degrees and forms of the religious/spiritual, ranging from invisible and incorporeal to material and explicit, embedded in and expressed as spatial politics, works of fiction, mission, pilgrimage, festivals and everyday life. Topics examined include conflictual situations involving places of worship in Delhi, inclusive religious practices in Kanpur, American Protestant mission in Madurai, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday in Lahore, gardens as imaginative spaces, the politics of religion in Varanasi and many others. Illustrating and analysing ways and forms in which religion persists in South Asian urban contexts, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, the study of religions, urban studies and South Asian studies.
Religion and religio-political forces have become potent influences in the domestic politics of many countries irrespective of geographical location, stages of economic growth, and systems of governance. The growing importance of religion as a marker of identity and a tool of political mobilization is reshaping the political landscape in an unprecedented manner, and South Asia, which contains the world’s largest populations of Muslims and Hindus with significant number of Buddhists, is no exception to this fact. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of religion and politics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Although the specific circumstances of each country are different, in recent decades, religion, religio-political parties, and religious rhetoric have become dominant features of the political scenes in all six countries. The contributors offer a thorough examination of these developments by presenting each country's political system and the socio-economic environment within which the interactions are taking place. The analysis of the various factors influencing the process of the interactions between religion and politics, and their impact on the lives of the people of the region and global politics constitute the core of the chapters.
South and Southeast Asia continue to be extremely critical regions, deeply intertwined and bound in many ways by centuries of intersecting histories. As the recent experiences of rapid and transformative political and economic changes in several countries in these two regions illustrate, these changes have significant bearing on and are simultaneously affected by the legacy and continued dynamic of dominant-minority group relations. To be sure, while the dynamics of dominant-minority relations in each country are distinct and often mitigated by distinct historical conditions, the phenomenon of these dominant-minority relations, especially along ethnic and religious fault lines, are deeply consequential to many of the nations in these regions. This book, featuring eight case studies, provides a multidisciplinary and multi-layered assessment of the salience of the ethnic and religious realities in shaping various South and Southeast Asian nations. Featuring chapters on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, this volume provides a deep appreciation of the challenges that these societies confront in integrating and/or responding to specific ethnic and/or religious based conflicts and tensions.
South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with nationalisms of various kinds - religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural and exclusivist. In all the region’s major states, officially promulgated nationalism at various times has been fiercely contested by minority groups intent on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their own cultural inheritance. This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the ‘nation state’ in South Asia. It examines three different kinds of minority articulations – cultural conclaves with real or fictitious attachments to an imaginary homeland, the identity problems of dispersed minorities with no territorial claims and the aspirations of indigenous communities, tribes or ethnicities. The essays in this volume offer a rich menu: the evolution of Naga nationalism, the construction of the territory-less Sylheti identity, the debates over Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan, the evolution of Muslim nationalism in Sri Lanka, the politics of religious minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the making of minority politics in India, and questions of Islam and nationalism in colonial India. It is an eclectic mix for students of nationalism, politics, modern history and anyone interested in the evolution of South Asia. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.