Skip to main content

SCHOLARLY SANITY ON A MAJOR AREA OF INDIAN WORRY


IRFAN AHMAD
Islamism and Democracy in India
The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami


Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is the most influential Islamist organization in India today. Founded in 1941 by Syed Abul Ala Maududi with the aim of spreading Islamic values in the subcontinent, Jamaat and its offshoot, the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), has been watched closely by Indian security services since 9/11. In particular, SIMI has been accused of being behind terrorist bombings.

Islamism and Democracy in India is the first in-depth examination of India’s Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI. It explores political Islam’s complex relationship with democracy and gives us a rare window into one immensely significant Islamic trajectory in a Muslim-minority context.

Irfan Ahmad conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork at a school in Aligarh, among student activists at Aligarh Muslim University, at a madrasa in Azamgarh, and during Jamaat’s participation in elections in 2002. He deftly traces Jamaat’s changing position towards India's secular democracy and the group’s gradual ideological shift in the direction of religious pluralism and tolerance. He demonstrates how the rise of militant Hindu nationalism since the 1980s—evident in the destruction of the Babri mosque and widespread violence against Muslims—led to SIMI’s radicalization, its rejection of pluralism, and its call for jihad.

Islamism and Democracy in India argues that when secular democracy is responsive to the traditions and aspirations of its Muslim citizens, Muslims in turn embrace pluralism and democracy. But when democracy becomes majoritarian and exclusionary, Muslims turn radical.

IRFAN AHMAD is an anthropologist and assistant professor of politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University in Australia, where he helps lead the Centre for Islam and the Modern World.

THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED IN PERMANENT BLACK'S 'THE INDIAN CENTURY' SERIES, OF WHICH THE GENERAL EDITORS ARE RAMACHANDRA GUHA AND SUNIL KHILNANI

For an interview of the author in THE HINDU, copy-paste-click this link in your browser:
http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2010/02/08/stories/2010020850300100.htm

“This is an outstanding historical and ethnographic account of one of the most influential Islamist movements in South Asia. It is the result of courageous fieldwork at a time of increased Hindu-Muslim tension in India. The book's thesis that even a radically antisecular Islamist movement can be transformed into supporting secular democracy is an extremely important contribution to today's global discussions. It is essential reading for political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and students of Islam.”—Peter van der Veer

“Irfan Ahmad's book could not be more timely or important. At a time when clichés about ‘Islamists’ and ‘Islamic terrorists’ abound, he demonstrates the ideological transformation of one of the twentieth century’s most important Islamist movements, India’s Jamaat-e-Islami, in support of active participation in a secular, plural democracy. Ahmad’s work is essential reading not only for scholars, but for policymakers and concerned citizens alike.”—Barbara D. Metcalf

“This is the most important book written on Muslims in India in the last three decades. Ahmad traces the incremental shift of most adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami to moderation and participation in Indian democracy, showing that from its inception the movement has been thoroughly modern. He deals with an aspect of India that is frequently neglected and engages the main debates concerning the relation of Islam to democracy.”—Dale F. Eickelman

HARDBACK / 328PP / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-269-9 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / Publishing in January 2010 / Copublished with Princeton University Press

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay”   brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose  did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra   • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in E...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK       FROM THE REVIEWS   Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ff ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . .   Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...
Post a Comment
Read more

PARTHA CHATTERJEE: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF NATIONALISM as narrated by Charvak

"While the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging in the autumn of 2020, I found, one evening, placed outside the door of my home in Kolkata, a sealed packet. Apparently, it had been left there sometime during the day. It did not come by post or any of the courier services that usually deliver mail because, if it had, someone would have rung the bell and I was home all day. In fact, the parcel did not bear any seal or inscription except my name and address written in English script in a confident cursive style rarely seen these days. My curiosity was aroused because the package did not look like a piece of junk mail. The thought that it might contain something more sinister did strike my mind – after all, the times were not exactly normal. But something in the look of the packet persuaded me that it should be examined. After dutifully spraying the packet with a disinfectant, I unwrapped it and found, within cardboard covers and neatly tied in red string, what looked like a manuscript...
Post a Comment
Read more