Perilous Intimacies

SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire is a textured account of debates on “the boundaries of Islam” (1) from the late 18^th to the early 20^th century. Through a survey of the works of South Asian Muslim scholars, particularly ulama, the larger question that Tareen raises is: How did intra-Muslim contestations on the boundaries of inter-religious friendship become the site of debates of Islam and its limits in the context of South Asia “marked by gradual yet decisive loss of political [Muslim] sovereignty”? (2). More specifically, the author studies debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship through intra-Muslim disputes about cow slaughter, friendship with Hindus, and adoption of rituals of non-Muslims; Muslim scholarly expositions of Hindu texts; and Hindu-Muslim polemics.

The theme of friendship is integral to the book’s conceptual architecture. Drawing on the eminent French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s understanding of friendship and hospitality, Tareen argues that friendship is inextricably tied with the question of sovereignty. While friendship, especially interreligious friendship in the context of colonial India, opens the door to collaboration with the Hindu other, it is laced with risks of “influence, corruption, or even erasure” of the self and the community (4).  The tussle between sovereignty and friendship is the tread connecting the various debates on inter-religious interactions throughout the book. The category in the Islamic tradition that maps onto the idea of friendship is muwalat from the root (wa-la-ya).  The terms that share its root with muwalat, such as wali (God’s intimate) and walaya (authority), index both intimacy and sovereignty.

The monograph’s central argument is that while the decline and eventual loss of Muslim political sovereignty was the immediate context of debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship in colonial India, the “logics and promise of an imperial Muslim political theology” was operational in these discussions (9). The concept of imperial Muslim political theology is a nod to the historical development of Islamic legal tradition that evolved under the presumption of Muslims’ political dominance over other faith communities as the underlying purpose of law. The concept was rooted in the assumption of theological superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims. Tareen contends that the incongruence between the commitment to an imperial political theology and the conditions of colonial rule that rendered Muslims a beleaguered minority meant that South Asian Muslim scholars came to locate sovereign power in the rhythms of rituals by “maintenance of embodied distinctions in everyday life” (11). The preservation of religious difference and identity is captured in discussions of shaʿa’ir-i Islam (markers of Muslim distinction) and tashabbuh (reprehensible imitation).

This volume is structured around debates and contestations animated by episodes of Hindu-Muslim interaction, engagement, and friendship. The book opens with a discussion of the 18^th-century Naqshbandi Sufi Mirza Mazhar Jan-i-Janan’s translation of Hinduism. Tareen notes that the purpose of his translation project was to render Hindu rituals and doctrine intelligible to his Muslim audience by recasting Hinduism as a monotheistic religion. In the following chapter, Tareen turns his attention to an interreligious polemical festival known as the Festival of Deciding the (True) God (Mailah-i Khuda Shinasi) in the North Indian district of Shahjahanpur in 1875 and 1876, with a focus on the thought of one of the founders of Deoband madrasa Qasim Nanutvi. Chapter 3 picks up the debate of the limits of inter-religious friendship in the context of the Khilafat movement, an anti-colonial movement to salvage the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, between Abu’l Kalam Azad and the 19^th-century Qadiri Sufi and the founder of Barelvi orientation Ahmad Raza Khan. The second half of the book introduces reader to intra-Muslim contestations on cow sacrifice (chapter 4) and imitation and adoption of customs and norms of other faith communities (chapter 5-6).

Through several episodes of inter-religious friendship, Tareen demonstrates the inadequacy of binaries like tolerant/intolerant, inclusive/exclusive, secular/religious, traditionalist/modernist, and liberal/fundamentalist to explain the complex discourses of Muslim scholars on inter-religious friendship. Tareen analyses Ahmed Raza Khan’s answer to the question of “nonobligatory status of cow sacrifice and beef consumption in Islamic law” (161). Ahmad Raza Khan simultaneously championed both a doctrine of moral and theological superiority of Muslims and a pragmatic approach to the British. Tareen argued that Khan’s normative ideal of Muslim moral superiority was rooted in the performance of rituals, such as cow sacrifice, emerged from the desire for “maintenance and preservation of Islam’s dominance and power” (163). Khan’s response drew on the conceptual grammar and assumptions of empire like the markers of Muslim distinction that populate medieval texts composed in the background of Islamdom. Tareen astutely notes that Khan was not an unhinged exclusivist. He was acutely aware of the dangers of opposing British rule and championed “superficial or masked friendship” (muwalat-i-suwariya) to protect the lives and property of Muslims (144).

Tareen’s focus on studying the Hindu-Muslim relations through the discourses of traditionally educated Muslim scholars opens a novel problem space for understanding inter-religious encounters in South Asia.  The book’s key contribution is raising urgent and important questions about the intelligibility of a pre-modern Muslim legal tradition in the context of colonial India, while challenging the claims of the modern state to adjudicate religious difference.

 Shaheer Ahmed is a PhD student in Islamic Civilizations Studies at Emory University.

Shaheer Ahmed

Date Of Review:

July 5, 2024